G. Listening to voices rather than to footsteps

One day of the year 480 B.C., a clear voice could be heard ringing through the air swept clean by the wind coming off the sea: "children, slowly, slowly, now one at a time". Women and children were leaving Athens behind. Such an order prevailed because Themistocles saw to it, that all Athenians and 'foreigners' living there at the time, had left the city before Xerxes and his Persian troops could come and burn them to death. The order was carried out, but with some hesitation while others took fright once they became witnesses what the Persians were capable of. They wanted to flee immediately, that is set sail and seek some safe distance. But while deliberations were going on as to what move to make next, there arose a dangerous moment as far as the implementation of the overall strategy of Themistocles was concerned. For by having abandoned the city of Athens after having interpreted rightly the oracle of Delphi counselling 'to seek safety behind wooden walls', meaning not behind the wooden fortification itself but on ships, he had risked to have no 'voice', that is an opinion that counted in the counsel. As Robert Payne accounts so accurately, "The commander of the Corinthian fleet pointed out bitterly that a man with no city behind him could have no vote and should not be permitted to take part in the deliberations" (Robert Payne, Ancient Greece, p.202). This reflects the democratic self-understanding prevailing at that time: franchise, the right to vote, did not depend upon having land or some aristocratic rights, but a voice in the Polis, that is a right to let others know one's opinion and to be heard by others as such.

Interestingly enough Themistocles "pointed out that the 200 Athenian ships formed a floating city which could be anchored anywhere, off the coast of Italy or elsewhere, but they had chosen to fight where they had the greatest advantage over the enemy - here in the narrow straits, not in the open sea - and reason demanded that they should persue the most reasonable course, 'for when men abandon reason, the gods do not choose to follow the blind wanderings of men's minds'". (Robert Payne, Ancient Greece, p.201-2)

Now, the connection between a 'voice' giving instructions, or rather orientations, and one which counts in the Polis, when it comes to making wise decisions, this underlines the aspirations of Ancient Greece. Men were eager to seek both the 'human voice' and the 'voice of reason' in the Polis. By bringing the two together, they wanted to ensure that life in the Polis means really the freedom to live, that is discuss all things existing under the sun, and even more so, if it need to be, also what is outside of light, hidden in the deeper corners of the world suspected to be Hades as Homer would describe it. This is were Greek tragedy and comedy contributed the most. It was an indication that the human voice counted most, and not what distance the feet could put behind when fleeing the wrath and wit of other men. If anything could give contour to the Polis, then resounding voices there to be heard as signs of life.

Indeed, 'who speaks' as opposed to 'who goes'th there?' marks a difference between stages of development in the making of the community of man. The two questions reflect the priority that before language being understood, and hence a differentiation to life linked to nature, everyone, and in particular the stranger had to identify himself at the gate. Trust could be given if he spoke in an honest manner.

Even if other things are relevant, the Ancient Greeks did things in the knowledge that the point of entry mattered the most. As if convinced by the Persian wisdom, this dependence upon 'information' reveals that listening to footsteps meant something else to listening to what the voices have to say. To them the voice was closer to the fast moving mind than any feet often covered by the dust of the streets. Listening to the human voice, that is pure knowledge about the human being, and as Kant would remark later about sound and music, the closest to the memory track, they could discover themselves. People could remember, therefore, what was said. It was a kind of approximation of knowing what was going on in the Polis.

The voices were not yet recognizable as 'human' ones, but to make them as such, that was perhaps one of the greatest achievements of Ancient Greece. For to bring together thoughts and ideas about man within language is related to how people address each other. Human self-consciousness cannot be achieved under command; the freedom of the word must be spoken before death parts all men. It is not a matter of control, but a basis of understanding and of agreement. Only then promises made, are kept in the spirit of the true spirit of the community, namely to ensure that all do their possible to fulfil the aims set forth.

In vivid terms, Robert Payne gives a very beautiful, equally perceptive description of the importance of voices during especially those times, when Athens was enjoying the 'Golden Age':

"The Athenians, endlessly discussing the nature of the polis, never

succeeded in building a city where men could live comfortably, and

indeed they attached very little significance to comfort. They were to

build glorious palaces for their gods, but in the Golden Age it never

occurred to them to build palaces for themselves.

........

(But) what the visitor to Athens would notice above everything else was the

astonishing uproar which went on all day and most of the night. There was the

continual neighing of horses and donkeys, the squealing of pigs, the chirping of

song birds, and the deafening chorus of cicadas, and there was also the

incessant, high-pitched, nervous shouting of the Athenians themselves. They

were forever shouting and quarrelling and caring on conversations at a distance.

They loved the sound of their own voices, and they deplored all silences. To

these sounds there was added in the years following the Persian Wars the

characteristic hammering noises of the new factories. Swordsmiths and

ironsmiths, stonemasons, armorers, wheelwrights, carriage makers, carpenters,

all were contributing their proper share to the pandemonium.

By common consent there was one place louder than all the rest. This was

the Agora, where every morning until midday the Athenians did their marketing.

Here, beside their small stalls and booths constructed out of matting,

wickerwork, and a few boards, the merchants vied with one another in producing

the largest volume of sound. We are told that the fishmongers were the loudest,

the most obscene, the most quarrelsome, and the most adept at giving short

weight, but the shrill voices of the myrtle sellers were nearly as loud. Sprays

of myrtle were plaited into wreaths and coronets, to be laid on graves or

presented to the gods. Pricked out with flowers they were worn on the brow

or hung on the doors of houses. The myrtle sellers were the loudest and

coarsest of the women in the market place, and for a suitable fee they could

be induced to serve as flute girls or prostitutes. Even louder than the

fishmongers and the myrtle sellers was the terrible voice of the herald who

would order the market place cleared so that everyone could attend the

Assembly. Then the great rope painted with fresh scarlet paint would be

swept across the market place, and anyone seen wandering around the

streets of Athens with a smear of red paint on him would be fined, for not

being in attendance at the Assembly.

The ugly voice of the herald was deliberately cultivated: it was intended to

have an explosive, frightening effect, sending people scurrying away to listen to

the orators. But the Athenians liked their own voices best. Long after the herald

had uttered his bloodcurdling cries, there would be knots of people arguing and

shouting themselves hoarse in the market place. Then the Scythian police would

be summoned, and they would herd the people away with their staves.

The orators at the Assembly cultivated voices which were loud and piercing,

capable of drowning out all opposition. Though one observer speaks of the

people 'listening open-mouthed and gaping like roasting shellfish on the coals',

there is a good deal of evidence to show that the people were rarely spellbound,

but continually muttered, shouted, cursed, and roared their approval or

disapproval of the orators. Even when Socrates was on trial for his life

and making his last appeal for justice, he was constantly interrupted.

Heckling was developed as a fine art among the Athenians: interruptions

were carefully stage-managed on behalf of one or other of the political

parties; and the paid claque often interfered with the processes of democracy.

The Athenians were connoisseurs of voices, endlessly comparing them and

remarking their finer points, debating eagerly on thier qualities of resonance

and subtlety and musicality, as though the human voice possessed a life of

its own, dissociated from what it conveyed; and they especially respected men

like Pericles who carried 'a thunderbolt in the tongue'. Cleon, a fiery and

effective speaker, complained that the Athenians were 'helplessly at the

mercy of the pleasures of the ear, and they attend political meetings as though

attending a performance by Sophists, and in this respect they are far from

being councillors of the state." A comic poet called the Athenians 'eared owls,

they alone among the Greeks'. In this matter of the voice every Athenian

claimed to be a professional.

For the Athenians the human voice acted as a kind of drug, and they were

only too easily seduced by it. A fine presence counted less than oratorical skill.

If the speaker was honest, so much the better. If he was dishonest but

presented a clever case, so much the worse for his opponent; the Athenians

preferred cleverness to honesty, subtlety to forthrightness. Odysseus was a

man after their own hearts. He was sly, treacherous, and persuasive speaker,

and could talk himself out of any difficulty.

Nowhere else in the ancient world did there exist this cult of the human voice

and of the arts of persuasion. Almost the Greeks invented argument. When

Aristotle gathered together a library of these books in preparation for writing

his own Rhetoric, he was amused or appalled to discover how many of them

were concerned with the specious tricks of oratory and the art of playing on

the weakness of the human heart, and how little they were concerned with the

logical presentation of a case. They codified fraud, down to its last minute

particulars. Sophistry was the invention not of the Sophists, who were usually

philosophers eagerly debating the nature of the universe, but of the rhetoricians

and especially the teachers of rhetoric.

In speech the Athenians found themselves as individuals....."

Robert Payne, Ancient Greece, p.254-7

Fish market in modern Athens

This amazing account of Athens during the period of the 'Golden Age' underlines why the voice, in particular the 'human' one was by far more important than what feet could carry forward. As if life as a measure is no longer the fleeting moment, but one of purpose: to speak out and to hear oneself in-between other voices. Later the Byzantine tradition would continue that obligation to the human voice, for not instruments were to be played, only voices to be heard.

There was not as of yet the split between poetry and philosophy, as later proposed by Plato. At that early stage of development, many things were still possible and not all matters clarified since first the scenes upon which to act had to be painted. There was still a long way to go until the human voices could be heard, that is the 'self' found within the Polis of men arguing and shouting. Still, whether on the Agora or else in the Assembly, there as a kind of resonance, a vibration of thought, that made it conducive to develop ideas which stand out still today very much like the pillars of the ancient temples when the sun is setting over the sea. No one could believe in such a freedom of living in the present, except those who dared to experience things directly in the broad day light of the sun and of the Goddess watching over Athens.

The task to find such a human voice was not at all easy. Many tongues were forked and other devious, while still others believed they had the power when they had none. The biggest problem of all was not easily resolved, for only few could distinguish a lie from someone telling the truth. Again it was a matter of judgement, and finding the measures of truth, that was not at all easy. For what resonates in a voice was more difficult than perhaps any other feat man had attempted to judge and to understand previously, and even thereafter, that is after Socrates had drunk the hemlock and only traces of his dialogues, this search for truth in a spoken manner, were retained in written form by his followers, foremostly by Plato. The dialogue as highest form of listening to what the voice has to say, while being analytical, was there to be practiced, because the Greeks believed this would bring them closer to reason. Such orientation left human affairs under positive considerations as long as the sharpness of the mind was moderated by kindness and a good sense of humour. Socrates embodied both the human voice and the voice of reason.

This search for truth marked the difference between scenes yet to be painted, and poetry to be set apart from other forms of argumentations. It prompted the peace maker amongst the poets to speak of a special relationship to silence and to speech:

"Painting is silent poetry; poetry is painting that speaks."

Simonides of Cos

Yet what is the nature of written poetry, that is something to be set apart from verses of Homer handed on verbally? Interestingly enough, Socrates would be depicted by Plato as someone who upheld the audible voice, and did not trust so much the written form of communication. If anything, this attitude needs refinement, but it was already an indication of the split to come between poetry and philosophy:

"Writing has a very strange quality indeed, which it shares with painting; for the creations of

an artist appear to be alive, but if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.

So it is with written words: you imagine they would give an intelligible account of

themselves, but should you question them about their meaning, they invariably come up

with the same answer. Every word, once it is written down, is at the mercy of those who

understand it and those who have not the least inkling of what it is about: and it doesn't

know whom to speak to, and whom not to speak to, and when it is ill-treated and reviled, it

cannot run to its father for help, and it can neither protect or defend itself."

- taken from Phaedrus, 275 D Robert Payne, Ancient Greece, p. 379-80

The dissociation from poetry had deeper reasons in a community of man struggling towards democracy, and hence there were many sceptics, especially after the friends saw what the polis did to Socrates. A possible explanation of not considering poetry to be a part of knowledge, hence to be kept outside the Academia, was that it was not convincing enough in a logical, that is set manner. Without understanding much about poetry, it was seen overtly more as an outcry against injustices, or else a paid tribute to someone having won the athletic games. Schematically speaking, it meant emphasizing a different kind of painting with words, and in letting in sounds, reflect upon 'resonance's' whose interpretations depended more often upon 'intuitive guesses', rather than on logical deductions. The tension between reason and living reality 'emotionally' was a given. But because a kind of confusion reigned as to which pictures could be used to represent categorical purposes, there was no understanding of the need to act in accordance with the others. Society was not seen as of yet like a powerful puzzle magnifying individual pieces in need of being drawn together. This meant leaving aside really the language of poetry as being an inner most reflection of very powerful metaphors linking man to the 'cosmos'. By excluding poetry, the very measures of things, that anticipation of things to come, was excluded, and not heeded to, a most tragic flaw of Ancient Greece as it turned out to be.

Plato understood that every man wishes to be engaged in a guessing game and hence the cave analogy, by which he made it plain that no one cared to listen to the voice of truth coming from the true world existing outside the cave. As if people prefer the world of mere images, this pre-phenomenological disposition means entering perception from man's reluctance to know the full truth or to face reality. Again it is footsteps which resound, the last thing to be heard once a conversation has ended and final decision made. As an anecdote, it is more than fateful.

With the developments of the Polis, it becomes more important to seek both the voices of the others in the light that is a given in the real world. It is not portrayed as the kind of paradise that has been lost due to man's sin as it became the point of entry in the Christian world. Rather it is to mean a practical world with an oasis: the temples standing on 'poetic', equally prophetic grounds. Their locations were chosen according to where it is possible to listen to the 'inner voice', while their tasks was to give to the human spirits some calmness despite Ancient Greece fermenting in thoughts due to wars and conquests, dictatorships and tyrannies, that is when revenge and tutelage went hand in hand with betrayals and new forms of agreements all subjugated to the more daring leader who did not hesitate to attack. It was a far outcry from what human reasoning would have meant, had the dialogue form established itself equally as a way to reach political decisions, and stay not alone only within philosophical fields shunning to hear the poetic voices about just 'footsteps', the most dreaded time of war:

Often we seek the astonishment of the poem,

as we need the birds in the trees to tell us

what time it is, morning no longer asleep

and a day as of yet not gone with the winds,

forever a sign of doubt the sign in the pillar

against which would lean the Goddess

contemplating what to do next in her universe

of flowing dresses and fields filled with flowers

while animals and men would scurry over hills

to face their foe, and behold their woes, for fight

they did until no one had any rest, freedom there,

but what price it took, and flowers mourn

while graves are still, bells ringing so often

like silent tear drops remembering the past,

the day when courage was shown on fields

not meant for voices to be heard.

How many died in the sudden shifts of power like winds sending boats and ships against the rocks. That was no longer just fate, nor the anchor of hubris, namely to set some limits if man had gone too far. For aside of the longing for freedom, the wish to hear a man speak out, there continued suppression, violence and war. It was as if again footsteps resounded when the soldiers left the Polis to defend it.

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G. Listening to voices rather than to footsteps