But, then, did we -not theorize his need to be and stay with others, rejecting the joys of silent solitude? Such is the essence of so-called democracy, whose first commandment seems to be: Do as others do and
4 Cf. “Λα φωνδουτα ψιχικα,” Κωρριερη δηλλα Σηρα, 24 ΙII 63.
5 Protagoras XV (Modern Library ed. , p. 2 1 3).
obey the law of the greatest number. Anyone is
worthy of holding any office, provided he collects enough people to elect him. For the less important posts trust in luck, as mass-man’s logic is by nature aleatory. «Cities must truly be made up of elements that are equal, as far as possible, and homogeneous: a condition found especially in the middle class . . . Thus Phocylides properly expresses this wish: ‘The best condition is the mean, and that is the place I want to occupy in the city.’6 Such is the view of Aristotle, to whom, vox clamantis in deserto, Ortegaygassetos replied in vain, denouncing the fact that «since the second half of the last century there has been in Europe a noticeable exteriorization of life . . . Private existence, hidden and solitary, closed to the public, to the crowd, to others, becomes increasingly difficult . . . The street has become stentorian.» 7 We would say, the agora has become stentorian, but the agora is mass-man’s ideology, it is what he has always wanted and what he deserves. It is only right that Plato should stroll there and converse with his adherents: that is his realm, and mass-man cannot live alone, for he must know everything that is happening and must speak about it everywhere.
And nowadays he can know everything. You see what happened at Thermopylae. Only a day after the event a messenger brought the news, and someone had already thought to package it, simplifying and
6 Politics, IV, 9, 1295b.
7 “Σοχιαλιθαθιονε δελλ θομω,» Λο Σπεττατορη.
reducing it to an advertising slogan: «Our arrows will hide the sun. Good! We will fight in the shade!» The echolalic Herodotus had done his duty to that tyrant, the crowd with a hundred ears.
And thus the so-called historians, who are nothing but eager reporters of the present, seem to be exactly where they belong. Efficient chief PR man for Pericles, Herodotus can find nothing better to write about than the Persian wars. (A pure and simple news report, in other words. We could hardly hope, these days, for a Homer, one who possesses the poetic lucidity required to write about things he has neither seen nor heard, endowing them with the dimension of fable.) Herodotus only has to read three or four Ionic logographs and he can claim to know everything.
He talks about everything. And, as if that were not enough, he then begat an even more pompous and arid Thucydides, who, after the shameful debacle of the fall of Amphipolis (which he failed to prevent, a failure both of arms and of administration), forgot his Peloponnesian misadventures and created a nw persona as a chronicler, agreeing to describe the events of the war as they were occurring. Had we thus finally scoured the lowest depths of gutter journalism? No, because after him came Xenophon, master of an- art capable of making even a laundry list a historical document; Xenophon, who whimpers over a commonplace eye ailment. (Characteristic of the cultural industry is its vulgarity, the insistence on the coarse but striking detail. Is a river crossed? Then the crosser will be «wet to the navel.» Do the men eat rotten food? They will «flow from behind.»)8
But in Thucydides there is more than this; we find in him the desire, common, to write literature, to become a candidate for the literary prizes the culture industry provides for those able to follow the fashion. Thucydides does not hesitate to dot his prose with naturalistic decorations, imitating the nouveau roman: «The surface of the body did not reveal excessive warmth to the touch, nor pallor to the sight; it was reddish, livid, covered with little sores and ulcers . . . «9 Subject? The plague in Athens.
Thus, having reduced the human dimension to the objective styleme, up-to-date reporting and the avantgarde dominate our new literature. For anyone with a glimmer of intelligence the only reply to the distress of Bobtoweridas, who complains that the language of the younger writers is incomprehensible, must be: There is nothing to comprehend, nor does mass-man wish it otherwise. The eclipse of Attic man is now total.
But if there is a decline of the West, mass-man does not let it bother him. Does he not live in the best of all possible worlds? Read again the speech of Pericles to a content and enthusiastic Athenian crowd: We live in a meritocratic society, where the dialectic of status is exalted with blithe optimism («If a man is useful to the city, neither poverty nor an obscure social position will be any hindrance to him»), and
8 Anabasis, passim.
9 Peloponnesian War, II, 48 -54.
so the criterion of discrimination, whereby the aristos was precisely that, the best, is submerged in the leveling frenzy. Attic man is now happy to live as a face in the crowd, a white-chlamys worker, slave to conformist behavior («We have an incredible fear of falling into illegality: we are obedient to those who follow one another in the government, obsequious to the laws, particularly those laws that arouse the universal scorn of those who fail to follow them»).
Attic man now lives happily as the representative of a leisure class («To refresh us after our toil we have found many diversions for our spirit, celebrating according to ancient custom games and feasts that continue throughout the year, while we live in houses supplied with every comfort, where daily pleasure dispels all sadness»). In other words, Attic man is the inhabitant of a prosperous state, an affluent society («Goods of every kind flow into our city, and so we can enjoy not only all the fruits and products of this country, but with equal pleasure and ease those of other countries, as if they were ours»).10
Can we stir this mass-man, content in his Attic village, from his mindless, smug sloth? No, for he is held there by , those very games that Pericles mentions. Consider the crowds that flock to Olympia and argue about the 1ast meta as if their very souls were at stake; or that the Olympic Games now serve for numbering the years! Life seems to be measured by the feats of a victor in the throwing of the javelin, or by him who runs a certain course ten times.
10 Peloponnesian War, II, 37 -41.
The outcome of the pentathlon is the gauge of arete. Some will commission a poet to compose an anthem for such «heroes,» and the crown they receive enhances the glory of the city. Pericles’s oratory has truly given us the idea of a civilization in which everything is beautiful. Provided you have renounced your own humanity. As Montalides warned, «the universal human community will be an aggregate of cellular aggregates, a bank of madrepores in which each individual will be inserted and catalogued not according to his mind but according to his productive possibilities or his greater or lesser integration into the pattern of total leveling.»11
We look back at the Pharaoh’s solitude and isolation as a lost paradise, but Attic man feels no nostalgia for it, because he has never tasted its flavor: on the ramparts of Olympia he celebrates his melancholy apocalypse unawares. Decision is not expected of him, in any case. The culture industry has provided him now with the virtually electronic contortions of Pythia of Delphi, who in epileptic spasms gives him advice about future action. All in sentence fragments deliberately incomprehensible, language regressed to the irrational, for the consumption of the awed and democratic crowds.
In the past, culture could be asked to offer a word of salvation; today salvation has been reduced to a game of words. Attic man is possessed by an appetite for public debate, as if it were necessary to discuss every problem and obtain general agreement. But sophistry has debased truth to public consensus, and public debate seems the ultimate refuge for this mass of talkers.
We can only underline the bitter reflections of Bloomides, which cleverly reproduce the conversation that preceded the unseemly rush to debate. «Hey, would you come to the agora tomorrow for a roundtable discussion of truth?» «No, but why not ask Gorgias?· He’d be ideal for a eulogy of Helen, too. And you might try Protagoras, his theory of man as the measure of all things is the latest fashion, you know?» But Bloomides’ appeal against debate remains unheard, and the polemicist labors in vain to refute the pernicious ideology that lies behind the impassioned wranglings before a lazy, corrupted public.
Instead, the culture industry will offer Attic massman, if debate does not satisfy him, a wisdom even more immediate, diluted, moreover, in attractive digests, as his taste demands. And the master of that art is the abovementioned Plato, who has a real gift for presenting the harshest truth of ancient philosophy in the most digestible form: dialogue. Plato doesn’t hesitate to turn concepts into pleasant and superficial examples (the white horse and the black horse, the shadows in the cave, and so on), bowing to the demands of mass-culture.
So what was deep (and what Heraclitus was careful not
