A shining city on a hill: The Periclean Golden Age and liberal education
The second in a two-part series of essays for Project Pericles, a consortium for civic engagement and liberal arts in higher education.
Ancient Greece produced many works of art and literature that have an ability to make us think. It’s one of the reasons that ancient Greek works still feature prominently in the canon of liberal arts education–and that Christopher Nolan’s latest film version of The Odyssey is getting such traction. The Periclean Golden Age, in particular, was a time of innovation in democratic self-government (as I wrote in my first essay in this series) as well as in the arts. These two things weren’t separate or unrelated. Democracy itself, and related questions about how to live well in community with each other, were a key subject for the city’s poets, playwrights, historians, and philosophers. The legacy of ancient Greece reminds us that literature and art can be powerful vehicles for civic learning.
Twenty five years ago, Eugene Lang named his new organization “Project Pericles” in order to connect the civic mission of colleges and universities to a Periclean vision of democracy where “every citizen has both a duty to serve and the potential to lead.” A liberal arts education, he believed, should include education for active, socially responsible citizenship. In other words, an American education across disciplines and fields of study should always keep civic learning on the horizon as a guiding star throughout, in addition to other learning goals. Periclean Athens offers inspiration as well as curricular material for educators committed to this vision today, with recognition that the reality of Athenian democracy and education strayed from the ideals they sometimes espoused. As both our democracy and our liberal arts tradition face authoritarian threats, this moment challenges us to recommit to rebuilding both together.
Pericles himself could be said to have been a product of liberal arts education, in the sense of an education that ranges across multiple disciplines, intellectual skills, and ways of understanding the world. According to the ancient biographer Plutarch, Pericles received a superior education in poetry and rhetoric as well as music and logic, as did the other men in the Athenian social and political elite. He studied with the great philosopher Anaxagoras, an astronomer and scholar of natural philosophy (what we might call theoretical physics today). Pericles’ wife Aspasia, an immigrant to Athens from Miletus, a Greek-speaking cultural capital in what is now Turkey, is cited by Socrates as one of his and Pericles’ most influential teachers. We can imagine the liberal arts tradition alive and well in their household.
As a result of his education (and his inborn talents and inherited social status), Pericles became Athens’ leading statesman. He could compose and deliver elegant, compelling speeches about affairs of state that persuaded others that his way of thinking was correct. He could lead armies in a way that won the loyalty and respect of his soldiers. And he had a reputation for leading ethically, not manipulating or pandering to the citizenry in search of power, glory, or wealth.
Pericles (and Anaxagoras and Aspasia) would have been astonished to learn how widely available a liberal arts education is today in the United States. We’re educating for broad-based literacy on a vastly different scale than the Athenians ever imagined. We’ve taken Aristotle’s advice about educating for democracy to build a mass public education system where anyone can gain a broad base of knowledge and skills, from science and math to physical education to art and music to literature and history.
That said, we’ve never fully succeeded in this enterprise, and now it’s under threat of being dismantled. Liberal arts education is the education that enables us to thrive as free people. Democracy is the system of government that enables us to thrive as free people. Today, liberal arts education and democracy are simultaneously and jointly under attack along with the arts and humanities. Authoritarians and oligarchs (from the Greek for rule, archê, by a wealthy few, oligoi—or if you prefer, kleptocrats, from the Greek for rule, krateia, by thieves, kleptai) aim to reserve liberal arts education for the elite again, as in Pericles’ day.
