The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [99]
Here the workings of the world’s first democracy were inscribed. Two jigsaw-puzzle pieces of marble, each half a foot square, discovered near the Agora and dating from c.500 BC, have just been reunited in the National Epigraphical Museum in Athens. Although the remains are very battered, the precise wording is just about visible. The fragment ‘DE’ has been joined with ‘MOS’ to give us the earliest extant hard evidence of DEMOS, ‘the people’, as an active political body.4
Democratric Athens strove for transparency. Decisions from the sublime to the ridiculous were published on stele noticeboards. Chipped out of stone and then emphasised with red paint, these could deal with issues as lofty as the state of public finances (newly restored inscriptions have just been installed in the new Acropolis Museum, covered in carefully calculated lines, these aimed to prevent backhanders, political sweeteners, and to name and shame those suspected of sequestering public funds).5 Elsewhere the correct pricing for offal for sale to citizens and foreigners has been immortalised. In the Piraeus Museum a 3-foot-high block declares that the market inspectors have passed the quality of tripe on a particular stall down by the harbour; the feet, head, brains, womb, breast, liver and lungs of pork and goat-meat have all been diligently listed: the stone inventory then was matter-of-factly, democratically put on public display.6
Athens’ word-fetish was unusual. In a democracy ideas have to be shared, outcomes agreed, and that consensus then made public. A dictatorship has little need for written confirmation, no taste for the brouhaha of village squares. And whereas earlier cultures – the Hittites, for example, the superpower of the Bronze Age who controlled much of modern-day Turkey, Palestine, the southern Black Sea shore and northern Iraq – wrote everything down on tablets so numerous they were stored in a central temple-archive the size of four football pitches, and in Lower Egypt Ramesses II built his power into the very cliff-face at Abu Simbel, in Athens the decisions of the democracy were declared, but in order to communicate the will of the demos, not simply as a means of control.
The walls of Athenian houses and public buildings would also be daubed with painted letters, white and red.7 Scraps of papyri notices rolled off hawkers’ stalls. Books were coming to be objects of desire. A biblion (a papyrus sheet, typically the length of an armspan and coiled around a central dowl, the omphalos) was designed to be portable and user-friendly. Some of these books were small enough for the ancients to fold them up in their fists, or tuck them into their clothes. When Socrates bumps into one colleague, Phaedrus, the Athenian has a suspicious bulge in his tunic – as it turns out, a book.8 Twenty years later, we hear of bundles of papyrus rolls stacked up on book stalls and in the Agora’s warehouses.9 In the Metroon, a stocky public library, scores of scribes bent over papyrus sheets and wax tablets, day in, day out, recording the ‘office’ copies of democratic business. Here too the ‘personal effects’ of Athenians – letters, contracts, writs – were stored. Because of systematic military activity in the Agora area, not to mention a climate that rots papyrus within a matter of weeks, this fund of knowledge is no longer available to us. The majority of the rich papyri of Athens represent portable history that, sadly, will never make the journey down time, although one recent discovery in an Oxford University collection of Egyptian papyri from the Greek-run town of Oxyrhynchus can go some way to help us to visualise Athens as a city of words: a place where notices