Above is a talk by Victor Davis Hanson on the reasons behind Donald Trump’s unexpected US presidential election triumph in 2016. Hanson, a classicist and not so much a Trump supporter as a critic of leftist-liberal visions and versions of American history and destiny, employs Demosthenes, Aristotle and Euripides to explain why he thinks Trump – a repugnant figure to Hanson in many ways – was able to win the White House.
In the case of Euripides, Hanson uses the quote from the Bacchae, in which the playwright states, via the chorus, τὸ σοφὸν δ᾽ οὐ σοφία, to demonstrate that while Trump and his supporters were often castigated for being stupid – a basket of deplorables, in Hillary Clinton’s infamous phrase – and those who opposed Trumpism were regarded – or regarded themselves – as possessors of superior knowledge or education, wisdom, in fact, comes in many forms and does not always equate to intellect. Sometimes, according to Hanson, it can come in the form of ‘animal cunning’ – which Hanson attributes to Trump; what is most useful to a society – such as workmanship, physical expertise and manual skills; and, ultimately, the recognition by society of the boundaries that cannot be crossed and by humans of their limitations.
Τὸ σοφὸν δ᾽ οὐ σοφία has been translated into English as ‘that which is wise is not wisdom’ or here as ‘wisdom is not cleverness’. In his talk above, Hanson suggests Euripides is making a distinction between ‘who is wise and who is a wise-ass’ and, in this article, he translates the playwright as saying, ‘cleverness is not wisdom’. The latter – ‘cleverness is not wisdom’ – is the translation I prefer.
Hanson begins his piece:
‘At the height of the sophistic age in classical Athens, the playwright Euripides asked an eternal question in his masterpiece, the Bacchae: “What is wisdom?”
‘Was wisdom defined as clever wordplay, or as the urban sophistication of the robed philosophers in the agora and rhetoricians in the assembly?
‘Or instead was true wisdom a deeper and more modest appreciation of unchanging human nature throughout the ages, which reminds us to avoid hubris, tread carefully, always expect the unlikely, and distrust the self-acclaimed wise who eventually prove clever fools? At the end of the play, a savage, merciless nemesis is unleashed on the hubristic wise of the establishment.
‘Euripides would have appreciated the ironies of the 2016 election.’
A final word, for the time being, on Pericles, his funeral oration and Athenian democracy.
Having taken into account Robin Lane Fox’s lecture on Why Pericles Matters, which wants to rescue Athenian democracy from modern critics – determined to subject it to their anti-colonial, anti-imperialist fixations – and assert the radical and unique nature of Periclean Athens; and Cornelius Castoriadis’ insistence that we transform Pericles’ famous dictum, of loving beauty and loving wisdom, into loving and livingwith beauty and loving and livingwith wisdom; it is important to note that when Pericles speaks of Athens and the Athenians in the funeral oration, he is speaking of a vision for Athens and Athenians. Not that Pericles is conjuring up a utopia, because Pericles with his democratic reforms, his revival of the city’s monuments and subsidisation of the arts, put flesh and bones on his vision, but a vision is what his exhortations in the funeral oration amounts to.
Thus, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing that Athens was a pristine society that lived up to Pericles’ hopes for it. Indeed, although there is a chronological justification for including Pericles’ funeral oration so early in Thucydides’ account of the conflict between Athens and Sparta, its early mention also allows us to see how, through the next 27 years of the Peloponnesian war, Athens and the Athenians fell catastrophically short of Pericles’ advice to love and live with wisdom and love and live with beauty.
We also note that Pericles’ vision of an entwined city and citizenry was hotly contested and deeply resented by significant sections of the Athenian body politic.
In particular, Athens’ aristocratic class – to which the blue-blooded Pericles belonged – loathed Pericles and his innovations, and this hostility to Periclean democracy was shared by Plato, Thucydides, Aristotle, Aristophanes and so on, who all regarded it as inclined to demagoguery, mob rule and recklessness. (Indeed, Plato was not only antipathetic to Pericles’ democratic ideals but also his
promotion of the arts, with the philosopher notoriously proposing the banning of poets from his Republic).
Thus, Athens’ surrender to Sparta after the Battle of Aegospotami (404 BC) was put down to a succession of disastrous decisions taken by the Athenian assembly, while other decisions in the course of the conflict – such as the slaughter of the Melians and the execution of the six generals (one of whom was Pericles’ son) following the Battle of Arginusae (406 BC, for failing, after victory, to rescue stranded sailors) – reveal the limits of loving and living with wisdom and loving and living with beauty. (And, of course, loving and living with wisdom didn’t stop the Athenians condemning Socrates to death in 399 BC).
Castoriadis would also have us believe two things about Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian war. First, that it signified the end of Athenian democracy and the extraordinary flourishing of culture that accompanied it; and, second, that the gravediggers of that democracy were Alcibiades and Cleon.
On whether Alcibiades was a gravedigger of Athenian democracy: you could, in fact, make a stronger case that it was the vagaries of Athenian democracy that destroyed the life and career of the brilliant general – by bringing trumped up charges of sacrilege against him, prompting him to abandon his command in the Sicilian expedition (perhaps, the defining episode in the Peloponnesian war) and go into exile and, worse still, seek sanctuary in Sparta – and that, therefore, it was the fickle, myopic Athenians, who dug their own graves, not Alcibiades.
Nor is it clear that the Peloponnesian war did end, as Castoriadis says it did, Athenian democracy or terminate that remarkable period of creativity in the arts that characterised Periclean Athens.
John R. Hale in his book, Lords of the Sea, makes a case for an Athenian recovery after the defeat at Aegospotami, the pulling down of Athens’ walls and Sparta’s occupation of the city. Spartan leadership of the Hellencic world soon became detested and Athens’ military prowess, particularly its sea power, revived, as did Athens’ cultural invention, with Plato teaching at the Academy and Isocrates at the Lyceum, while the sculptor Praxiteles was adorning Athens with his masterpieces. Thus, it was Alexander the Great and the Macedonians who buried Athens and its unique society, not Sparta and certainly not Alcibiades.
Ultimately, then, we note that living with wisdom and living with beauty does not preclude – and did not preclude in the Athenian case, as Thucydides demonstrates – living with sickening violence, injustice and rank stupidity.
*The video above is a reading of Plutarch’s life of Pericles. It’s an old-fashioned rendering – and it even refers to the goddess Athena as Minerva, which is unacceptable – but Plutarch is an essential source for our knowledge of Pericles.
In the two years between leaving Plato’s Academy – where, following Plato’s death, he had been overlooked for the top job in favour of Plato’s nephew Speusippus – and being employed by King Philip the Great of Macedon to tutor his son, Alexander, Aristotle lived on the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos, studying and categorising the island’s fauna and in the process inventing biology and zoology. Above is a BBC documentary, Aristotle’s Lagoon, in which Professor Armand Leroi looks at Aristotle’s Mytilenean sojourn and his methods and discoveries. It’s well worth watching.
