Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy.

Gardner writes frequently about art for NR and Commentary.

GIBBON conceived of "civilization" not merely as any stable system of beliefs, powers, and artifacts, but as a very specific order of institutionalized ideas and amenities embracing all features of life. Taking that definition of civilization, we cannot go further back in history than Athens in the Age of Pericles, the subject of Donald Kagan's latest work.

It is customary to enumerate the many debts we owe to the Athenians, the traditions of free enquiry and democratic rule, the scientific and historical method, not to mention a visual culture that has lost little of its relevance today. At the same time, this admiration is usually tempered by our awareness of other institutions for which we have no use, like slavery and an often brutal pagan cosmology, as well as by our sense of indebtedness to that other great source of our culture, the Judaeo-Christian Near East.

Nevertheless, to suppose that our relation to the Greeks in general and the Athenians in specific is a series of debits and credits is to fail to appreciate a far profounder kinship. The enduring importance and appeal of Periclean Athens consists not so much in its having been a summit of civilization, as in its being the earliest moment in which we can recognize ourselves. The Athenians did not merely cause us: they were, for all the disparities, an earlier version of us, and we are a later edition of them. This sense of correspondence, of interchangeability, will be found at no earlier moment in human history.

The wonder we should feel at the spectacle of fifth-century Attica is evident in virtually every page of Professor Kagan's Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy. Kagan, who is Sterling Professor of History and Classics at Yale, as well as dean of Yale College, is clearly an apologist for the Athenian empire, and an admirer of Pericles, who brought Athens to its zenith. Although in our time, democracy is taken for granted," he writes, "it is in fact one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience.... Only in ancient Athens and in the United States so far has democracy lasted for as much as two hundred years."

Nevertheless, Kagan is conspicuously fair and candid in his discussion of the weaknesses of the Athenian state and society, and for this reason, his book provides a very useful introduction to its subject. Kagan is writing for the layman. In simple, uncluttered language, he has new things to say about the culture and the government of the Athenian state, and he is especially revealing in his discussion of such things as Athens's superb navy. He discusses how Athenian democracy, in the late sixth century, supplanted the authoritarian rule of the tyrant Pesistratus and his sons, and how, after the Persian War, Athens was paramount in Greece. Most of the book is devoted to that fifty-year period, the pentacontaetia," between the retreat of the Persian threat and the inception of the Peloponnesian War, in which Pericles practiced his brilliant statesmanship.

Because Kagan is writing for a more general audience, he flavors his discussion with numerous parallels with modern history, especially the postwar years up to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. And indeed, an irresistible parallel suggests itself-between he antagonism of Athens and Sparta and the cold war between America and the Soviet Union. By using propaganda and sometimes by resorting to open conflict, Athens vied with Sparta for preeminence in the shattered world that was being rebuilt after the Persian Wars, much as Russia and the United States struggled for supremacy after World War II. As in the battle between capitalism and Communism, there were the same cycles of tension and dotente between Democratic Athens and Oligarchic Sparta, the same network of alliances and the same ideological non-negotiability.

Periclean Athens was not, perhaps could not be, a model democracy in the modern sense. Of the 250,000 souls in Athens and its environs, only about thirty thousand had a say in determining policy. Women were excluded from it, as were slaves, of course. Furthermore, it was a fickle institution that, for even a minor reversal of fortune, could turn upon its champions with swift and remorseless ingratitude. It was not the smallest achievement of Pericles himself to have escaped the fate of ostracism, or ten-year exile, that befell other eminent Athenians like Themistocles and Cimon. The citizens who did have the vote were often impulsive in their shifts of allegiance, and more apt to be swayed by men like Gorgias, the arch-sophist and anti-rationalist, than by Socrates. Even when they appreciated the inspired policies of a man like Pericles, their democratic impulse was often littie more than an eagerness to acquiesce in the will of any man strong enough to rule them by word, if not by force.

And yet, as a political experiment, Athens is far greater for what it aspired to be than for what in fact it was. For most of human history, surely throughout the ancient Mediterranean, peoples were subject to one form or other of authoritarian control. And then suddenly there was a city that almost absurdly aspired to be, and became, a zone of freedom. Within generous restraints, men could argue and act as they wished. This was not merely a great step forward for civilization, it was, in a very real sense, the beginning of civilization. It needed only a bill of rights and a more prudent delegation of powers, as America's Founders realized when they brought government a little closer to its final perfection.