That, plus the early-empire cultural output of Athens
What are you thinking of here?
The most lasting cultural impacts of Athens are works of Plato and Aristotle and the methods of inquiry / intellectual traditions that they started. But those were post-Athenian-empire.
And I’m generally not very convinced that their military success is indicative of a healthy, rational, polity that is openly trying to understand and solve shared problems. Notably, the Spartans ultimately defeated the Athenians, and they do not have a reputation for active and open discourse.
plus the discussion in Socrates’s time of higher standards in fairly recent memory
Aeschylus and Herodotus[1] seem like they’re trying to contribute to some sort of live conversation about where current norms and institutions came from and what problems they were invented to solve; Aeschylus by trying to imagine e.g. the origins of the jury trial in Oresteia, Herodotus by literally going around asking people in different places questions about the origins of their institutions, and comparing this with the stories he’s heard about Greek origins.
On this particular desideratum I think Sparta is underrated; at the time it was clearly understood to have a deliberative culture (public assemblies, the sort of mixed constitution that prevents unipolar power from accreting), just one with unusually strictly regulated personal conduct, and of course limited to a fairly small class. Spartans weren’t very talkative to foreigners (whence we get the term “laconic”), but I get the impression there was a language barrier because they spoke a very different dialect of Greek. Herodotus reports that they were capable of coherent enough action to be relevant at all to the king of Persia long before Thermopylae, and Thucydides’ testimony seems to imply some level of live collective problem solving as late as the Pelloponesian War, which he compares favorably with Athens’s contemporary discourse.
Xenophon’s Anabasis demonstrates these capacities in a military expedition contemporaneous with Socrates’s trial, which is some evidence against my claims in the essay. Greek soldiers stranded in Mesopotamia defaulted to assemblies, voting, and elected leadership, which suggests deliberative culture was deeply embedded enough to reproduce itself under pressure. Sometimes colonies and military expeditions retain capacities that are already in advanced decay in the imperial core; Imperial Rome documented that pattern pretty well.
What are you thinking of here?
The most lasting cultural impacts of Athens are works of Plato and Aristotle and the methods of inquiry / intellectual traditions that they started. But those were post-Athenian-empire.
And I’m generally not very convinced that their military success is indicative of a healthy, rational, polity that is openly trying to understand and solve shared problems. Notably, the Spartans ultimately defeated the Athenians, and they do not have a reputation for active and open discourse.
This seems seems like relevant evidence.
Aeschylus and Herodotus [1] seem like they’re trying to contribute to some sort of live conversation about where current norms and institutions came from and what problems they were invented to solve; Aeschylus by trying to imagine e.g. the origins of the jury trial in Oresteia, Herodotus by literally going around asking people in different places questions about the origins of their institutions, and comparing this with the stories he’s heard about Greek origins.
On this particular desideratum I think Sparta is underrated; at the time it was clearly understood to have a deliberative culture (public assemblies, the sort of mixed constitution that prevents unipolar power from accreting), just one with unusually strictly regulated personal conduct, and of course limited to a fairly small class. Spartans weren’t very talkative to foreigners (whence we get the term “laconic”), but I get the impression there was a language barrier because they spoke a very different dialect of Greek. Herodotus reports that they were capable of coherent enough action to be relevant at all to the king of Persia long before Thermopylae, and Thucydides’ testimony seems to imply some level of live collective problem solving as late as the Pelloponesian War, which he compares favorably with Athens’s contemporary discourse.
Xenophon’s Anabasis demonstrates these capacities in a military expedition contemporaneous with Socrates’s trial, which is some evidence against my claims in the essay. Greek soldiers stranded in Mesopotamia defaulted to assemblies, voting, and elected leadership, which suggests deliberative culture was deeply embedded enough to reproduce itself under pressure. Sometimes colonies and military expeditions retain capacities that are already in advanced decay in the imperial core; Imperial Rome documented that pattern pretty well.
Herodotus was not from Athens originally but went there to publish.