Athens as Imaginary

Place as aspiration

Athens is an imaginary place. It’s something we have constructed.

We don’t know the details of the lives of Plato, Socrates, Pericles. What we are given comes hundreds of years later. Their home is in ruins.

So we sketch in the details.

Romans and Greeks alike get the same treatment. Tom Holland’s Dynasty draws heavily on the ancient historian Suetonius – who was happy to include lurid details about the lives of the Roman emperors. Modern classicists, like Emily Wilson, accused Tom Holland of the same indulgence. Historians then and now fill gaps with drama.

But where the Roman emperors are tabloid protagonists, the Athenians are the ideal.

Bring to mind the thinkers, artists, politicians, and others who have yearned to emulate the Athenians for hundreds of years. Our image of them is of individuals in the best sense: philosophers, artists, citizens.

They are imaginary in an aspirational way. We want to imitate the world of Zeno of Citium’s Athens. There Athenians would discuss Stoic ethics, logic, and physics and delight in the intellectual agon of the time.

The Athenians embodied aspiration themselves. You can, of course, see it in Plato’s philosophy, but think also of the architecture and sculpture and the obsession with form.

Athens is to the polis what the sage is to the individual. The force of the Greeks is unavoidable.