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A serious warning with respect to Donald Trump from 5th century BCE Athens.
The November 10th issue of the New York Review of Books has 4 sections on the election. The first section has short essays by Russell Baker, G W Bowersock, and David Bromwich. An excerpt from the essay by G W Bowersock:
...
Athens in the fifth century BC produced its own Donald Trump in the person of Cleon, whose wealth, bluster, ignorance, and polemic are well known to us from the historian Thucydides as well as from the comic playwright Aristophanes, who mercilessly derided him. Thucydides reports that Cleon’s fiery rhetoric made him exceptionally persuasive to the people. This nearly led Athens to commit an atrocity when the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos rebelled against Athens’s empire.
Cleon proposed that all the city’s male citizens should be killed and all its women and children enslaved. Although he initially persuaded the Athenians to vote for this appalling punishment, a reconsideration of the vote, even after the order to carry it out had already been issued, led to a passionate debate, of which Thucydides gives a vivid account. In a speech that he ascribes to Cleon, we read, “The most ordinary people run cities much better than the most intelligent.” Fortunately Diodotus, Cleon’s antagonist in this debate, persuaded the Athenians to reverse their savage decision, and a ship was hastily dispatched to the commander in Lesbos to revoke the previous order. The oarsmen rowed night and day to reach the island in time, and they did.
But a demagogue like Cleon, even if he fails, poisons the polity by breeding other politicians like him, and this is a sobering lesson. Just over a decade after Mytilene was saved, the Athenians slaughtered the male population of Melos, another rebellious island, and enslaved its women and children. A vicious xenophobe cannot be considered a onetime menace, but a harbinger of fanaticism to come. The world’s first democracy still has something to teach us about where danger lies in trying to rely upon the will of the people. It lies precisely with a demagogue who has the ability to make a connection with those who respond to his pernicious views.
Athens in the fifth century BC produced its own Donald Trump in the person of Cleon, whose wealth, bluster, ignorance, and polemic are well known to us from the historian Thucydides as well as from the comic playwright Aristophanes, who mercilessly derided him. Thucydides reports that Cleon’s fiery rhetoric made him exceptionally persuasive to the people. This nearly led Athens to commit an atrocity when the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos rebelled against Athens’s empire.
Cleon proposed that all the city’s male citizens should be killed and all its women and children enslaved. Although he initially persuaded the Athenians to vote for this appalling punishment, a reconsideration of the vote, even after the order to carry it out had already been issued, led to a passionate debate, of which Thucydides gives a vivid account. In a speech that he ascribes to Cleon, we read, “The most ordinary people run cities much better than the most intelligent.” Fortunately Diodotus, Cleon’s antagonist in this debate, persuaded the Athenians to reverse their savage decision, and a ship was hastily dispatched to the commander in Lesbos to revoke the previous order. The oarsmen rowed night and day to reach the island in time, and they did.
But a demagogue like Cleon, even if he fails, poisons the polity by breeding other politicians like him, and this is a sobering lesson. Just over a decade after Mytilene was saved, the Athenians slaughtered the male population of Melos, another rebellious island, and enslaved its women and children. A vicious xenophobe cannot be considered a onetime menace, but a harbinger of fanaticism to come. The world’s first democracy still has something to teach us about where danger lies in trying to rely upon the will of the people. It lies precisely with a demagogue who has the ability to make a connection with those who respond to his pernicious views.
And we all know that Trump has already called for killing the families of terrorists.
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