Athens on Trial by Jennifer Tolbert Roberts

Author:Jennifer Tolbert Roberts [Jennifer Tolbert Roberts]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

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By the close of the eighteenth century, the longing to resurrect ancient virtue had by and large been replaced by a more forward-thinking mentality that saw the solution to society’s problems in the future rather than in the past. Abandoning the search for a route by which to return to the prelapsarian world of antiquity, monarchists and republicans alike sought governments that would best protect the bustling and diverse commercial world of the present. Though the more democratically inclined focused their energies on protecting the aspirations of the little man while more conservative thinkers devoted theirs to protecting the acquisitions of the big one, they shared a fundamental interest in serving the needs of the present. The new concerns that agitated citizens of the nineteenth century, however—and of the late eighteenth century in Germany—were to raise new questions about the relationship of the modern world to the ancient.

What Desmoulins cherished about Athens was the life-style of democracy, where graciousness, prosperity, and freedom of the press were important building blocks of a comfortable existence. Where the ponderous search for stability that exercised the framers of the American constitution had led to a negative valuation of Athens that looked back to the preoccupations of the Renaissance, an interest in how people were to live projected Desmoulins into the intellectual universe of the next century, when Hegel would point to Athenian festivals as emblematic of the vitality of the civilization and Macaulay would identify the life of the city as the best education in civics. Wrapped up in their cherished science of politics, the framers of the American constitution paid scant attention to the extraconstitutional structures that made a civilization what it was. Already before the revolutions in America and France, Winckelmann had published the study of Greek art in which he identified a connection between democracy at Athens and the extraordinary flowering of Athenian culture, and nineteenth-century thinkers in Germany and Britain would soon articulate these ideas at some length. Asking new questions of precisely the same evidence was to produce radically new constructs that differed sharply from what had gone before.

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