Ancient Glory

Professor Jared Diamond of UCLA asks (among other things) in his book Guns, Germs and Steel why the Spanish conquered Mexico instead of Montezuma leading a navy to Spain and conquering it? I also heard a comedian doing a routine a few years ago asking what happened to Greece? It made this amazing, outsized contribution to thought and human advancement only to practically vanish from the world stage and become extremely chill… to be kind. 

The answers are somewhat intertwined. Mesoamerica had one domesticable animal – the dog. It had one domesticable grain – corn. This did not lend itself well to a thriving agrarian society. Meanwhile, the Spanish were one of many heirs to the "Middle East Agricultural Package" as Professor Diamond calls it – a group of grains, vegetables, fruits and animals indigenous to the Fertile Crescent that were all domesticated early by humans and then spread throughout most of Europe, North Africa and large swaths of Asia because of the wide range of similar climate bands. The Middle East Agricultural Package allowed many peoples to move from hunter-gatherer to agrarian stages of development, which in turn is one major reason Europe began to get ahead of much of the world. 

How does that work? Well, hunter-gatherers spend the vast majority of their time subsisting. It takes everyone's work to keep everyone fed. Food supplies are highly unstable and people have to remain largely nomadic to follow the food. Having enough domesticable plants and animals turns things upside down. Agrarian societies don't need everyone to raise food because there's scalable efficiency. People can also settle in one place. Once a significant portion of the population is not involved in food production and preparation, humans turn to other pursuits like written language, education, science, philosophy, organized religion, metal working, mathematics, medicine, weaving, trading… a massive set of breakthroughs. Any society with a system of writing has at minimum reached the agrarian stage.

Two terrible side effects of reaching the agrarian stage are diseases and at least initially, shorter lifespans. Why? As we all know from 2020, germs sometimes jump from animals to humans and agrarian societies spend a lot more time in close proximity to animals than hunter-gatherers. This also worked against Montezuma as his people had no resistance to the germs the Spanish carried. But now we're sidetracking.

Ancient Greece was a successful agrarian society. Blessed with proximity to the Middle East from whence the agricultural package came, a Mediterranean climate, an abundance of natural resources and the sea – the recipe for success was there. Of course there's the X factor. Not every society is forward-looking or experimental. Some are more conservative and regressive. Jared Diamond believes there's a ratio of how many cultures are forward-thinking. Some at random just have that spark. When more cultures cluster in a smaller space, the creative ones can cause competition – driving others to innovate and change to keep up. Perhaps because Greece was really a series of city-states sharing a common language and cultural base, the creativity of one may have driven others to stay sharper. The flame spread and Ancient Greece got ahead of the world around it.

While certainly not the only great Greek city-state, for a period, Athens became the most enlightened. The Acropolis, Agora and surrounding temples were and remain testaments to the level of civility and progress Athens achieved. Its architecture was not only wondrous to behold but existed because of an advanced understanding of mathematics and science which were in turn supported by craftsmanship and administrative effectiveness. Even further, the people who inhabited these wonders were creating the first enduring sphere of academia in which philosophy, mathematics, science and literature were not only being discussed and learned – but recorded for posterity. Discourse, proof and essentially peer-review were features of higher-education that began on a hill in Athens.

The Acropolis remains one of Greece's most visited and inspiring sites. 

It's when you look down the hill where things become a little less inspired. 

Modern Athens is not one of the great cities of Europe or the world. It's not a total dump, but it doesn't live in the same sphere as Paris, London, Vienna, Prague, Rome or Amsterdam. It doesn't even really live in the same sphere as Madrid or Lisbon. And it certainly doesn't belong with powerhouse cities like Tokyo, New York or Hong Kong. It's not even in the same league as – dare I say the unthinkable – Istanbul.

I think there are two ways to look at what happened to Athens. The simple, short-answer version is that after World War II and the communist insurgencies that followed, those Greeks who didn't leave the country flocked into Athens to find political and economic stability. Athens was not at all ready for them. So it did something similar to neighboring Istanbul, only with a slightly different outcome – it threw up lots of cheap, cement block housing. In many cases, older buildings were razed to make room for landowners to create multi-family dwellings. Athenians were incentivized to not only uglify their city, but to destroy centuries if not millennia of history in a vacuum of urban planning.

The legacy of those times isn't over either. Roughly a third of Greece's 10.5 million people live in the capitol – an insanely high proportion if you compare it to other major cities. As big as New York City is – almost three times the population of Athens – it represents roughly 2.5 percent of the US population. At roughly 12 million people, Bangkok represents about one sixth of the Thai population – which is fairly high. And Istanbul – which had a very similar post-war influx from the countryside holds a surprising 18 percent of Turkey's population. But Athens out-proportions them all.

As Los Angeles can tell you, once urban planning gets away from you, it's hard to come back around and fix it.

Yet there's another way to look at Athens – and Greece in general. Getting back to Jared Diamond and the mystery comedian whose name I can't remember, Greece somehow slipped off the world stage as Rome came to power – and it never really found its way back. The people who brought us the Socratic Method and Pythagorean Theorem (he came from Samos) now enjoy spearing octopi, long summer dinners and have an economy largely powered by tourism, shipping and olive oil. 

I believe that's in no small part due to the Ottoman Empire's general resistance to capitalism. The Dutch and British were first to the idea of pooling risk economic resources to take on larger ventures – with the Dutch and British East India companies being two of the earliest corporations in existence. Their little spice trade experiment was the real shot heard round the world – changing not only economics and the fate of humanity forever – but literally opening the door to a new stage of human development that came with Industrialism. 

Certainly, not every society was eligible to quickly move into capitalism and industrialization. Australian Aborigines and the Mende of Sierra Leone hadn't yet become agrarian (they lacked an appropriate agricultural package given to them only later by Britain), so there was no jumping ahead to industrialization. Still, going with Jared Diamond's idea that a certain percentage of societies are forward-looking and conservative cultures that live in proximity to successful forward-looking ones tend to shift and compete in response to the successes of their forward-looking neighbors – it becomes easier to see why France and Germany might have decided to buy into capitalism and join the Industrial Revolution faster than the more distant, large and comfortable Ottoman Empire – of which Greece was a part. 

That meant for a European country, Greece was way behind the curve on industrializing and really only got into the game in any meaningful way around 1920 – after World War I. Still, Greece wasn't fully unified until the end of World War II – with Italy keeping much of the Dodecanese in the interwar years. Mix that with a culture that had long stopped being the creative force it once was along with weak leadership and turbulent politics  - and Greece no longer has the serendipitous recipe Athens had 2,500 years prior.

Athens does, however have great gyros and gelato.

For a city its size, Athens does have a surprisingly chill vibe. Greek culture is still Greek and the city has a certain slowness out of sync with its size – something that reminds me a little bit of Santa Monica or Tel Aviv. Only with less urban planning.

All of this to say Michelle and I had a very pleasant overnight ferry trip to Athens and enjoyed a day looking at some of the city's most ancient sites. 

Although in fairness, it wasn't all so smooth. I didn't research the Acropolis ticketing methodology nor did I pre-purchase. The Acropolis sells tickets for specific entrance times in order to ensure the site isn't overrun at any given hour – much as the Louvre now does. By the time Michelle and I made it to the front of the ticket-line, the next available entrance was 1:45 and we needed to leave for the airport around 2:00. So that was not only no good, but extremely disappointing for Michelle. 

Luckily we found nearby Areopagus Hill – the site of the ancient Supreme Court – which has incredible views of the Acropolis, Agora, Temple of Hephaestus and the city stretched out below. Climbing up the slippery crags seemed to mitigate our problem as Michelle was thrilled with the views and photo ops. When done, we walked around the area and managed to get Michelle one last gelato before picking up her stored luggage and heading to the airport where she took off for New York (to visit cousins) at 5:35.

And me? Well, I took the train from the airport back into the city until my 11:55 pm ferry back to Patmos. That gave me PLENTY of time to sit at a touristy cafe in a nice enough neighborhood to write this blog. Lucky for me, I'll be back on Patmos by morning HOPEFULLY with the hole in my bathroom wall filled in.

I may be without Michelle, which will be sad given how great the last three-and-a-half weeks have been, but some paradise is still better than no paradise at all….