FROM CHILE TO GREECE
An Intellectual Odyssey

Many of you will surely have been surprised to hear that on the feast honoring the three great Cappadocians a barbarian would be addressing an assembly of Greeks.

It is therefore proper for me to defend myself, to present my apologia, if you will, as if you were to judge my claims to Greek spiritual ancestry.

Let me begin, as the ancients would say, ex archis. It all began on December 6, 1958 when I arrived in the Piraeus. Like many Romans, I had boarded a ship in Brindisi full of anxiety and expectation, looking forward to the crossing, first to Kerkyra and then, through the Corinthian canal, to Athens, the city that in my dreams I had already come to regard as my Ithaka, my true fatherland.

The journey had been a long one. I had set out from Santiago late in September, a few weeks after I received news that the Greek consulate had selected me for the award of a scholarship offered to a Chilean student by a Greek ship owner, Mr. Spyros Typaldos. Travel by plane was then rather expensive (and my parents had only moderate means) so I took a train over the Andes, a slow but exhilarating route over snow and high mountains, and then in about two days I crossed the monotonous Argentine flatlands, the pampas, bound for Buenos Aires. From there an Italian ship took me in 18 days to Genoa, in Northern Italy, and then again taking an assortment of railroad combinations, I arrived at the port of Brindisi.

The Greece I was expecting to encounter was a nebulous place inhabited by the remnants of an age long past that would be lying about the landscape, like the imaginary ruins in the etchings of Piranesi or in the illustrations of editions of Lord Byron. That image of Hellas had been imprinted in my mind by my previous readings of Romantic poetry, such as the Canti of the Italian Giacomo Leopardi and the poems and prose of the great German poet Friedrich Hšlderlin, whose book Hyperion I had had with me throughout my journey. This book consists of nostalgic letters depicting an almost deserted Hellas, longing vaguely for its independence.

Given my expectations, I trust you will believe me if I tell you that my sailing into in the Piraeus was... a total shock!

Unknowingly, I had arrived on the feast of St. Nicholas. The port was a far cry from the gray and nebulous picture drawn by writers from Northern Europe who had never had the privilege of being where I was.

The day was clear and crisp, the ships were adorned with colorful flags of all sorts and you could hear everywhere the bells and hymns of bishops, priests, cantors and the faithful celebrating the patron saint of sailors. It was a day of joy, of present joy, not of nostalgia for the past, something that became even clearer to me as I landed and could smell the food being prepared at the entrance of restaurants and virtually in the streets.

This was, I realized, a celebration of the Christian heritage of Greece, of the wealth of traditions inherited from Byzantium and more remotely from the earlier Fathers of the Church, all the way back to St. Paul, that remarkably energetic little man who had proclaimed the Gospel in Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens and Corinth and who had thus left his imprint throughout Greece. This Greece I learned to love intensely, but my primary vocation kept urging me on, to an even more remote past.

After greeting Mr. Typaldos at his office in the Piraeus I took a taxi up to Athens and slowly, but surely, the older strata of Greek life began to appear. First, as an interlude, I saw the columns of the Roman temple of Zeus (ta stili tou Olympiou Dios) and then, finally, between two buildings I had a glimpse of the acropolis.

As soon as I was settled in my hotel, I ascended the citadel of Pallas and, although I have been there many times, the deep emotion of awe and admiration for the beauty of the place does not seem to fade from my heart. Those were the days when few people, especially in December, visited the acropolis and those were also the days when you could visit it once a month, by night, under a full moon, something I did many times. I can assure you that the Parthenon in a clear night displays its grace and sense of proportion with even greater splendor than by day.

I had a long way to go. Having been raised in the small city of Vi–a del Mar, thousands of miles away, I felt quite lost in Athens. I would walk along the streets trying to make sense of what I read. I knew the Greek alphabet because I had already had two years of Ancient Greek. My first teacher, incidentally, was a Greek, Mr. Fotios Malleros, but I must honestly admit that his classes were quite puzzling to me. I just couldn't make sense of the way he taught the grammar we were supposed to learn. After some months in Greece I discovered that Mr. Malleros had been constantly confusing his Modern and Ancient Greek grammatical rules and the result was, naturally enough, quite disastrous!

During those first days, then, as I wandered all alone, I struggled to understand the signs I saw. I asked myself,for example, what "trapeza pisteos" meant. My Ancient Greek told me that it had to mean "table of faith", but the place itself didn't quite have the aspect of a church. Quite the contrary. A Credit Bank is not exactly where you go to worship! I also thought it was strange to look into an artopiion, only to see that the housewives, most of them dressed in black, demanded psomi instead of artos.

I was eager to attend classes at the University so I enrolled as soon as the semester started in January of 1959. Understanding what the professors were saying came slowly but surely due to the private lessons of katharevousa I had every morning thanks to the support of Mr. Typaldos. At the university I had no fear of ever being called to answer a question, as students often are at Georgetown. The reason for this is that Greek universities still retained much of the structure of the German model that was followed when they were founded in the 19th century.

The centerpiece of the German model is not the pluralistic community known here in the US as the department, but rather the omnipotent professor, a single individual who determines virtually everything happening in his discipline. This in turn meant, that anyone studying philosophy, for example, had to flock to him. I remember classes with no less that 500 students, and the seminar, the so called frontisterion, originally conceived as a small group discussion had in my days no less than 100 students in it.

Luckily the professor of philosophy at the time was professor Ioannis Theodorakopoulos, a truly outstanding man who was not just a Plato scholar but actually something of a Platonist or Neoplatonist himself, a true believer in the Platonic Ideas or Forms. I remember visiting him at his home with a fellow student and being treated by him with warmth and kindness.

I also attended lectures by other remarkable teachers, among them by professor Spyridon Marinatos, the great archaeologist who discovered Akrotiri on the island of Santorini, the so-called Greek Pompey because of the marvelous frescoes now at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Prof. Marinatos, as many of you may know, died a noble death for an archeologist. He fell backwards during digging operations, hurt himself fatally and now lies buried in the midst of the ruins of a city that was destroyed by an eruption 3500 years ago and was brought to light by him.

Greece however was for me not only the university and the books. It was also the people and the landscape. Thanks to free fares on Mr. Typaldos ships and to the inexpensive public bus system, I traveled virtually every week-end to different destinations. You have to remember that those were the days before massive tourism had been launched. World War II had ended in the previous decade, most Greeks were poor, there few hotels and in lesser known places, none at all. So I developed a little trick or panourgia to get lodgings.

The first time I used it was on the island of Skyros. I landed at the port and made my way up to the town or chora. I soon found the cafe, kafenio, and took a seat. I sat there in front of my kafedaki and within a few minutes came the question the Greeks have been posing to foreigners since the days of Homer: Apo pou isthe, kyrie? Where are you from? The trick was to ask them to guess. German? French? Italian? By the time they had exhausted the obvious answers that came to their minds maybe a dozen dopii, locals had gathered around me, so when I finally said: Ime apo ti Chili, there were cheers around the table. And more than one invitation to stay at someone's home!

This panourgia worked invariably and it allowed me to enter the houses of peasants and fishermen, to know their virtues and their vices. Among the latter was the extreme parochialism I often encountered. I remember once on the island of Samos asking an old man about a village a few miles away and easily visible on the slopes of a mountain. He pointed to it and said in earnest: "You donot want to go there. They are all bad people!" Ine oli kaki anthropi. What a firm but devastating collective judgment on one's neighbors!

In many ways, my patron, Mr. Typaldos was a typical Greek. He and his brother Charalambos, (or Babis, as we all called him) were from the port of Lixouri in Cephallonia and had built their fleet from scratch. Mr. Spyros did not have any children of his own but one day, toward the end of my scholarship, he approached me and in good old fashion Greek style told me he wanted to talk to my parents so that I would... marry his niece! I had barely seen the girl once or twice, but this did not seem to be a problem because he immediately sketched out some of the provisions for a dowry: an apartment in Athens, an exochik— outside the city, and other fabulous things that would be too long to enumerate. An amazing prika, indeed. I was quite astonished, I must say, but he must have been even more astonished when I replied that I had already made a commitment to a woman back home (a wonderful woman, incidentally, who has now been my wife of 36 years).

Apart from learning the art of guarding oneself from unexpected dowry offerings (it never happened again, I can assure you), what else did I bring back from the journey to my spiritual Ithaka? I could make a long list, perhaps long enough for you to regret having come to St. Georges tonight.

I shall thus concentrate on three domains which have proved to be important for me basically because they have been important to Western civilization at large. Those domains are: the Greek language, the idea of Greek democracy and, closer to my heart, Greek thought.

(1) I still consider it some kind of a miracle that I had the privilege to learn both Ancient and Modern Greek, both katharevousa and kathomiloumeni. But in reality this is a wrong account. These are not different languages, but rather different stages and different families of the very same language. And this is truly unique. Latin, for example, is a dead language. No one speaks it, for Spanish, Italian, French or Rumanian are not really later stages of the same language. They are, due to massive linguistic influx from other quarters and drastic changes, new languages altogether. The continuity of Hellenika is, by contrast, quite unique.

As you know too well, English is full of vivid Greek terms and it is enjoyable to be able to recognize them and use them in full awareness of their etymology. Think about the implications of calling someone idiosyncratic. When you say that about a person, you know that you are pointing to the idia synkrasis, the peculiar or personal mixture of elements in her character.

Even simple words such as bicycle or telephone become transparent, and one can easily detect errors, for example, calling the Bible "The Book." You and I know that biblia is a plural, that the Bible is a collection of very different books, that it is really a library. Along this line it is also rewarding to realize that even a word that pretends to be Hebraic or aramaic, such as sanhedrin is really the Greek word synedrion in disguise. Needless to say, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the famous LXX, Septuaginta, played a decisive role not only in the dissemination of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire but in the composition of the New Testament itself. The overwhelming majority of the references to the Old Testament by the writers of the Gospels and the Epistles are not to the Hebrew text but to the aforementioned Greek translation.

Much of what I have just said about the precision Greek affords one in English is also true of Spanish, my mother tongue. In fact, we are sometimes closer to the origins than other languages, for example, our word for church is "iglesia", clearly a granddaughter of the word ekklessia, the community one has been called to attend or to join.

The study of ancient Greek is unfortunately in decline even in those countries where it had stood its ground. I was shocked to discover that a visiting professor from Berlin who is now at Georgetown did not learn Greek either at the Gymnasium nor as part of his university studies in philosophy. But he does know a lot about logic and computers. And this is the general tendency in Europe today.

On the other hand, the analysis of the language itself employing new methods such as generative grammar, has advanced our understanding of Greek tremendously. It is fair to say that specialists today have a much better grasp of certain syntactic and semantic features of Greek than the one available to linguists only a few decades ago. In this context I would like to mention the research of professor Charles Kahn of the University of Pennsylvania on the Greek verb "to be." It is quite remarkable how thanks to his work we can now have an accurate understanding, say, of the existential, predicative, and veridical uses of this rich and central verb.

It would be enjoyable to further pursue this lead, but I am afraid it might take us too far afield. Let us turn for a moment to the idea of democracy.

(2) When I was a student in Athens, Greece was a monarchy. King Paul was the Head of State and his son, Prince Constantine, who was about my age, was expected to succeed him. But of course, the kingdom of Greece was not like the kingdom of Macedonia at the time of Philip II or Alexander the Great. Greece was a constitutional monarchy which was later transformed rather smoothly into a republic with a clear separation of the roles of the Head of State and the Head of the Government.

What made Greece a constitutional monarchy, of course, was the existence of the boulefterion or parliament, the organ of the state that carried into the present the old ideal of democracy.

About ancient democratic regimes we know surprisingly little, with one exception: the Athenian democracy. This is due to the fact that Aristotle had the good sense of having some of his students make compilations of 158 constitutions of different city-states and of this collection one document has survived. It was discovered by chance in Egypt in 1890 and it turned out to be the document that traced the constitutional development of Athens from the 6th down to the 4th century BC. And, to make us feel even more lucky, this constitutional history, scholars think, was probably written by none other than Aristotle himself.

Athenian democracy was, on all counts, a surprising institution. Not only every citizen was expected to sit in the assembly and the juries, and thus contribute to collective decisions of great complexity, but he could also be appointed BY LOT to take over, for a year, some highly specialized task, such as managing the water supply for the city or collecting taxes. Women, as we know too well, did not have political rights nor did foreigners (metics, i.e. resident aliens, green card holders ) or slaves.

Athenian democracy was thus something like a large, all male club of amateurs who would flip a coin, so to speak, in deciding who would be a magistrate for the next year and for the next year only. After the man had learned how to do his job during that year, he would have to vacate the position and hand it over to someone who was as inexperienced as he was when he took it over.

If you think of it, Athenian democracy was a recipe for disaster. It was indeed a miracle that it could function fairly well for a century down to the year 404 BC when it was overthrown by the Spartans. It was restored within a year and lived on as an effective political system until Athens lost its autonomy under the Macedonians about half a century later.

What made Athenian democracy work? The chief explanation, in my opinion, is that it called upon every Athenian citizen to become a quick learner, a flexible thinker, acting at the same time with an enormous devotion for the polis itself and placing it over his own immediate good at all times. The miracle is that literally thousands of Athenians answered this call and shaped their lives deliberately according to these ideals. In the sources we hear a lot, of course, about demagogues, about party strife, dishonesty and incompetence, but these phenomena must have been the exception. If they had been the rule, the system as such would not have survived as long as it did.

The deeper thought sustaining Athenian democracy was formulated by Aristotle, who was not himself an Athenian citizen. It is the idea that no one is endowed with a natural disposition that allows him to claim that he should always exercise power. Citizens have to learn to govern and be governed (archin kai archesthe), to fight as a general in this battle and as a foot soldier in the next one. There is therefore a deep acknowledgement of the basic equality of human beings. It is this realization, when extended to every one, to women, resident aliens, former slaves, indeed to every human being that constitutes the modern ideal of a democratic society. The ancient Greeks were not fully egalitarian, but they planted the seed that has come to flourish in our days.

We should also add that Jeffersonian representative democracy helps resolve in principle one of the main vices of Athenian direct democracy: the fact that ignorant men had to make life and death decisions on issues about which they were ill informed. The modern senator or representative supported by a large and competent staff is in a much better position to acquire the necessary information to cast a reasonable vote. No one can guarantee, of course, that no foolish decisions will be made, but at least there is a better chance that wisdom can prevail on Capitol Hill than on the Pnyx when demagogues such as Cleon were in full swing persuading the people, for example, that the whole male population of Mytilene, guilty and innocent alike, should be put to the sword, and women and children sold into slavery.

Present day technology, some futurologists assure us, will allow us to go back to direct democracy because of the possibility of voting via our computers. But from my familiarity with Athenian democracy in the 5th and 4th century BC I must admit I would be against it. Clever demagogues could easily induce millions of people to vote in favor of emotionally charged, but unwise or outright immoral decisions, such as the proposed genocide in Mytilene, which fortunately did not take place because the Athenians had a bad conscience that night, changed their minds on the next morning, convened the assembly again, voted against the deed, and sent a ship full speed to prevent the massacre. As American college students demonstrated some years ago when they sat as rowers in a trirreme built according to ancient specifications, Greek ships could be amazingly swift, provided they had enough fuel on board: namely, drinking water.

Let me take a further step in our examination of the Greek heritage.

(3) What have we learned, what can we still learn from Greek thought? The danger here is to steer towards the vast ocean of exaggeration and idealization. Since the Renaissance, that inebriating rediscovery of antiquity, falling into this temptation has been the standard European attitude so that it becomes difficult to keep one's cool and admit that superb Greek accomplishments were often accompanied by quite dreadful realities.

By inviting you to take from the outset a critical stance I am not looking at the ancient Greeks from the outside. I am simply following the lead of one of the sharpest minds of all times, I am following in the steps of Thucydides.

Thucydides was an Athenian who came from a wealthy family and lived during the second half of the 5th century BC. He saw the Parthenon being built, he doubtless attended the performances of the great dramas by Sophocles, Euripides and many others, he surely laughed at the dirty jokes of Aristophanes' characters and perceived the comedians politically conservative agenda. But he also sensed the steady downfall of Athens.

When the war with Sparta was declared in the year 431 Thucydides was old enough to be in the ranks and to be later put in command of a small fleet in northern Greece. He was expected to stop the Spartans from taking over a port in that region, but due to no fault of his own (he tells us) he arrived too late. Eion had already been taken over by Brasidas, the swift and dashing Spartan commander.

The Athenians, always quick to judge, punished Thucydides by sending him into exile. They lost perhaps a good soldier, but they gave us one of the greatest historians of all times. In the leisure and freedom afforded by exile Thucydides wrote the history of the war then going on.

People sometimes say that history is written by the victors, with the implication that impartial history is impossible. Thucydides shows that that is simply false. Not only was he in the losing side, but his work shows a remarkable search for the truth, and thus for objectivity. Even the deeds of Brasidas, the man who doomed him, are examined by Thucydides with an uncanny detachment. And the ugly decision of his fellow countrymen on Mytilene that I just mentioned also comes from his hand

What does the thinker Thucydides convey to us? The best known section of his work is beyond doubt the funeral oration delivered by Pericles on the occasion of the burial of those fallen in the first year of the war. The speech deflects the attention of the hearers from the dead to the reason why they died. They fell for the sake of Athens and its democracy. Democracy is praised and Athens is declared to be an "education" for the whole of Greece, among other reasons, because we, her citizens, are "free and tolerant in our private lives and in public affairs we keep to the law . This is because it commands our deep respect." (II.37).

Many readers have taken these words at face value. Indeed, apart from a certain air of pride verging on arrogance, the praise of Athens is forceful and seems to represent the aspiration of the best minds of the time. How could one not become a lover of Athens if that is what Athens is?

But is it? The funeral oration, one should never forget, is immediately followed by the terrible plague that afflicted Athens shortly after its delivery. Thucydides describes the symptoms with accuracy and almost cruel precision. Articles on it have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. To the description Thucydides adds that "the sufferings of individuals seemed almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure. ...Dead bodies were lying about unburied, people would throw bodies on top of funeral pyres made by others and walk away. Funeral rites ceased to be observed and Thucydides sadly adds "in other respects also Athens owed to the plague the beginnings of a state of unprecedented lawlessness. No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence.

The optimistic picture put in the mouth of Pericles is totally shattered. The famous respect for the law is gone. A-nomia reigns. Thucydides does not draw any explicitly religious conclusion from this events (in this he is quite unlike Herodotus), but he does hint at the moral evil at the basis of Athenian life.

Athens had embarked upon a policy of imperialism a few decades before these events. Empire, disguised originally as an alliance, meant subjugation of smaller Greek cities, forcing them to pay tribute and reducing them to a form of slavery. It was this arrangement that made Athens wealthy and thus able to pay for the great works of the Periclean period.

We should realize that the acropolis with its unsurpassable monuments was made possible by a policy which is justified in a famous passage in Thucydides by Athenians who claim simply that the strong, always and everywhere, dominate the weak. The Athenians do not claim that they have a right to do so. It is not a might-makes-right theory. It is a totally amoral claim about the nature of the world.

These are the arrogant Athenians that vote in favor of an invasion of Sicily being for the most part ignorant of the size of the island and of the numbers of its inhabitants, and not realizing that they were taking on a war of almost the same magnitude as their war against the Spartans (VI.1) The outcome was a complete disaster for Athens. About 30.000 Athenians lost their lives. It was this catastrophe that inspired Thucydides to give us one of the saddest narratives of defeat in Greek literature, perhaps in world literature.

In modern times there has been a tendency to think that the lessons to be drawn from Thucydides are to be found in his analysis of the confrontation between two superpowers. I have been told that on the eve of World War I, the British saw themselves as the Athenians and regarded the Prussians and their military state as a modern version of Sparta. Likewise during the cold war there was plenty of speculation that by assimilating the US to Athens and the Soviet Union to Sparta one could extract valuable insights from Thucydides. But this is all wrong headed, I submit, because history does not repeat itself. There is no parallel in antiquity to the defeat of Germany in 1918 or the demise of the Soviet Empire a few years ago.

To learn from Thucydides we have to go much deeper. The main causes of the downfall of Athens, he has shown us, lay buried in the innermost layers of human nature. The will to power and wealth, the illusion that oneÕs own good and success lies in the possession of wealth and power had led the Athenians to set aside elementary principles of morality and justice. Thucydides never mentions divine retribution, but those of his readers that still held on to the faith of Aeschylus and Herodotus, to the faith in cosmic justice of the archaic Greeks, must have certainly sensed that Athenian hubris had received due punishment from the divine forces that mysteriously govern the universe.

Thucydides' world, however, like our own world, was a post-enlightenment world. His fellow citizens could not go back to the naive faith of their ancestors. This, I think, was the deep insight of another Athenian, an Athenian who was a strict contemporary of Thucydides. He is my friend Socrates, the odd, fat little man who used to spend the day walking barefoot in the agora and the gymnasia, unwilling to leave the city. (I allow myself to call him "my friend" because I have spent the last decade or so doing research on him and his thought.)

Socrates, from day one, has been a subject of vigorous controversy. Aristophanes viewed him as one more intellectual bent on destroying the most cherished values of the Athenians, and his fellow citizens seem to have been persuaded: they duly executed him on charges of not honoring the gods of the city and corrupting the young. These may have been excuses in that perhaps their real motive was to get rid of someone who was perceived as having been on friendly terms with such enemies of democracy as Plato's relatives Critias and Charmides and that dangerous super-traitor, the wealthy, handsome and seductive Alcibiades, the man who had twice crossed over to the Spartans during the war (but had been elected general by the very same Athenian democrats when he came home).

Plato, one of the greatest writers of all times, set out to defend Socrates in the eyes of his fellow citizens and of posterity. Needless to say, the works of Plato, which have survived in their entirety, have been in the forefront of Western culture since their rediscovery, thanks for the most part to Greek scholars emigrating from Byzantium to Italy, during the second half of the 15th century. Since then, the Platonic dialogues have been studied by every major thinker that I can think of and have been translated into a myriad of modern languages.

I should mention that one of the best translations ever is the German one done in the last century by the great theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, the founder of modern hermeneutics, and that at present there is a new English translation by a team of scholars headed by Professor John Cooper of Princeton University. It is a version that I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who does not read ancient Greek. On a more modest note I can tell you that my main project for the next decade is to translate Plato into the Spanish of Latinamerica. There is a strong reason for this and it is that the Spanish of Spain and that of South America have deviated quite a bit in the past century so that the older Spanish versions sound strange and remote to Latinamerican readers, especially to young ones.

I should also mention that the field of Classics and the study of Plato in particular have welcomed with open arms the introduction of computers to assist in the study of the ancient texts. In the case of Plato it has allowed us to make progress in determining the chronological order in which the dialogues were written. Much is still to be done, but there is a broad consensus at present that the dialogues can be divided into three groups and that those in the first of them, or early dialogues, are the ones that bring us closest to the historical Socrates.

What can we learn from the Platonic Socrates with regard to the problems that Thucydides seems to have diagnosed in the Athens of his days?

As you recall, Thucydides describes the ideology prevalent in Athens during the last years of the war as one according to which there is, on the one hand, one's own benefit and interests and, on the other, the claims of morality and justice. One's own good and the good of Athens consists in power and wealth. A wealthy Athens meant wealthy citizens, for in those days the citizens were the equivalent of modern shareholders in a company. The better off the company is, the more valuable the shares become.

Plutarch has a fascinating depiction of the trickle down of wealth at the height of the Periclean period. I cannot resist the temptation to quote it in full:

Wishing the vulgar throng neither to be without a share in the profits [of empire] nor to be paid for doing nothing, Pericles proposed great building enterprises and projects for the employment of skill, so that those at home, no less than those on naval or garrison or active military service, might have an excuse for being paid out of the public funds. For the materials included stone, bronze, ivory, gold, ebony, cypress-wood, and the relevant trades, carpenters, sculptors, copper-smiths, stone-masons, dyers, gold-smiths, ivory-workers, painters, embroiders, workers in relief; and then there were the transport services; merchants, oarsmen, and helmsmen at sea, and on land wagon-builders, keepers of oxen, drivers, rope-makers, weavers, leather-workers, road-makers and quarrymen; and every trade had under its command as it were a disciplined army of the unskilled laboring class to be the tools and muscles of its service; and so the demands set up distributed and disseminated prosperity to men of all ages and conditions.

Thus, the average voting Athenian had a stake in the growth of empire and its revenues.

It is at this juncture that Socrates steps in to spoil the party. He went around confronting any Athenian, rich or poor, who was willing to talk to him, with questions about his moral standards. What is piety? Is it true piety to attempt to bribe the gods by offering them an abundance of sacrifices and building expensive temples? What is justice? Is it fair to take from others what is not one's own?

These are dangerous questions. They are an invitation to examine one's own life and to try to discern how one fares in judging one's own piety and justice. And Socrates knew that these questions could be brushed aside as the Athenians do in Thucydides' pages. Justice? Justice only makes sense when the parties are equal in power, they had said. Only then do you have something to fear from acting unjustly: the injured party can get back at you. Look at what happens instead when there is wide disparity in power: the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they must. The strong act guided by the drive of their very nature and there is nothing the weak can do about it.

Socrates sternly rejected this view of justice and human nature. He argued that it is both true and commendable that human beings pursue their own good. But the pursuit of the good for us is not a matter of the blind impulses of nature, of a drive that takes over our decisions. We should command our drives and it can be done insofar as we have a rational view of our goals. The urge to drink can be tamed by the realization, say, that the liquid in front of us may be poisoned. The urge to subject another city to our power and whim may be tamed by the realization that it may not be good for us to do so. Why not?

Here we get the supreme Socratic paradox: because acting unjustly harms us, because being unjust is bad for us. This is a paradox for it seemed then as it seems now to be clearly false. How can it hurt us to violate the principles of justice? Surely this will be the case if we get caught and are

punished, but we are here talking about great power and consequently about assured impunity.

Plato spent most of his mature life deploying his literary skills in defense of the Socratic thesis that the true human good is not wealth and power but morality and justice. The Republic, a key work in Western thought, and in spite of its drastic antidemocratic bias, argues step by step that justice or moral uprightness is akin to health in the body. Health even today is thought of as the correct balance among the many elements that play a role in our physical constitution. Too few red blood cells in the blood or too much pressure in one's blood vessels are forms of ataxia o akosmia, of disorder. Likewise, greed generates imbalance and disorder in the soul. And just as it is not worthwhile to live with a sick body, it is also not worthwhile to live with a sick soul. It is better for us to be just and poor than to be rich but dishonest.

Although the ultimate reasons to be moral are different for Socrates and for a Christian, the attitudes they generate are not mutually incompatible. In fact, I think the best values in Greece today are a mixture of the two, as I shall try to illustrate by means of a simple (perhaps simple-minded) anecdote.

Some years ago, I was traveling with a group of students and some adults, and our last stop was Santorini. That day we had lunch in a simple taverna at Perissa and then drove back to Kamari, where we were staying. When we got there a woman in my group panicked because she suddenly realized that she had lost her sophisticated photographic camera. I suggested we take a taxi and drive back to Perissa.

As we approached the taverna the waiter with the big mustache came out and said with a smile on his face: "Oh! You are here to get that very expensive camera. He knew we were leaving for the US on the next day, he knew he would never see us again, he knew how valuable the camera was. It was easy for him to suggest that some foreign tourists might have taken it. But he did not. Nor did he accept a tip or reward.

I assume that our proud man from Perissa had perhaps never read Plato (you never know!), but it struck me that the best of the Greek heritage was alive in his heart for he consciously chose to forsake an immediate advantage in order remain a kalokagathos, an upright and noble Greek.