"By giving its support to these series, the Onassis Foundation wished to explore the links existing between the culture of ancient Greece and the world today." "It was never in it intention to associate itself to any opinion concerning the history and the political life of modern Greece." "The Onassis Foundation insists in clarfying that the choice of the themes as well as the selection of the interviewed persons are the sole responsibility of the director." "THE OWL'S LEGACY" "3 DEMOCRACY or the City of Dreams" "Some images contain memory beyond of those made to represent." "This a film made in secret by left-wing Greek militants under the dictatorship of Colonel of the funeral of" "George Papandreou in November 1968." "The death of a moderate politician for the first time opened the way to open demonstration and the film circulated throughout Europe as the pamphlet, the first visible signal of underground resistance." "May its blurred images be a remainder that in the year students of Paris and Berkeley were dreaming of revolution which would be a mere two-hour flight from London." "They did it to see who must be banished for 10 years." "But in case of errors in judgement they could be called back." "These errors happened often even with important people." "Where is Aristides?" "There he is" " Aristides the Just." "These fragments were those used to banish Aristides." "Aristides, son of Lysimachus." "So we have a democratic process, this is essential for a republic but even republics make mistakes and condemn innocent citizens." "This other fragment is from a vase." "Is all this from one vase?" "It comes from many broken vases." "What are these pieces called?" "Yes, ostracon." "And what is the word for banishing an undesirable?" "Right, ostracism." "We must bear this in mind:" "Modern and ancient democracy have no genetic relationship." "From the end of ancient democracy to the American revolution and the French revolution two thousand years went by." "So there is no such relationship but the outcome is the same, esentially the same, anyway." "First, there is the word itself, democracy - demos cratos." "Cratos means power, demos means the people." "Democracy is power of the people." "So Greek is already clear, the power is not oligarchic" "It is direct democracy." "How do they exercise it in Athens?" "They make up their own laws." "Laws are voted in the Ecclesia, Church for the Christians, here" " Assembly of the people." "These laws contain a clause once they have been voted in." "'It seemed right to the Demos and to the Boule'" "(to the people and the council)." "They don't call it God-given truth." "These aren't God's Tablets of Law." "They simply say 'we want this law, we'll vote it in for now, we can always change it later'." "The Greek City is a state of sorts, a very special and unique state." "It must not be confused with our modern city which was a later occurrence." "Polis is a special kind of state in that it is indistinguishable from its population, which has an older historical role much older than the polis'." "This community develops around a cluster of dwellings." "It's a town, in fact." "What distinguishes it is its close connection with its host town." "So it's quite evident, the ancient polis, the city-states, weren't known as Athens or Sparta but the Athenians or the Laconians." "The Athenians' constitution was found on a papyrus in 1880, in Greek 'athenaion politeia'." "All the best philologists translated this as:" "'The Constitution of Athens'." "When Aristotle and the Greeks, in the writings of Thucydides, talk about a political body, which we would call 'Athens', they would never say 'Athens'." "Athens is a geographical statement." "'Alcibiades left Athens...'" "But 'the Athenians decided...' or 'the Lacedaemonians decided...'." "The people are the state." "The people are the political power." "Whereas in modern politics we still hold onto the idea created by the absolute monarchy" "that 'power' lurks about somewhere, power is a monster." "Hobbes would call it 'The Leviathan'." "It sometimes leaves its grotto and demands 10000 children or 40000 young girls, it will kill or eat them, or demand money." "And we can do nothing about it except to barricade it's grotto with papers called 'constitution', which limits the state's authority." "Greeks didn't have representation but they didn't vote on everything." "They did have specialists." "They had magistrates" "who were not representatives, they weren't given delegated powers like present-day representatives." "Polis is a gathering of citizens." "It isn't set above the citizen." "It's just a citizens' assembly." "A citizen in Ancient Greece had to take part in public affairs." "The abstract expression for it is 'Republic'." "It must have been very violent and also very vulgar with kicking and fighting, I'm sure of this." "But this makes them more human, it fleshes them out." "White statues were once colourful." "At the Agora it was a free-for-all." "It must have been..." "They were men of flesh and blood with strong emotions, strong ideas, and their own interests at heart." "That probably hasn't changed much." "They were all a bunch of rogues why should they have been virtuous just because they took the floor?" "They knew all the tricks and all the excesses too." "Athens had an extraordinary creed" "The Graphe Paranomon." "It was an accusation of illegality." "The people weren't omniscient." "A law would be voted in but any citizen at any time could bring his advocate before the tribunal if that citizen thought that the law contravened the fundamental laws of the polis or the spirit of the constitution." "The Demos wasn't omniscient, there was no separation of power." "Using this procedure, if some of the people disagreed they could bring the advocate before a court of his peers." "Imagine, one day at the ecclesia a shrew orator talks to the Demos." "He persuades them with his passion to vote for something." "This then becomes law." "That's the risk with democracy." "It's no different nowadays in parliament or congress." "In Greece the law could be changed the next day or a month later any citizen could go to a tribunal made up of 1501 Athenians." "They pass judgement and say:" "'Marker or Castoriadis induced us to vote for an illegitimate law'." "If condemned, the law is annulled." "Imagine their commitment!" "A man would leave his work, travel from the provinces." "They received compensations but they still weren't very keen to go to the People's assembly." "We know that the Scyths stained the last to arrive with a rope soaked in vermillion a red mineral extract from kea." "The Athenians had the monopoly over this mineral." "So the last ones were marked red but the other texts may say otherwise." "Man can never be as perfect as systems and ideas." "We can assume that some went to the assembly simply to avoid the red cord and the penalty that went with it." "And yet these same men were passionate about their polis." "Apart from the regular assemblies taking place at Pnyx and elsewhere apart from these official meetings" "men discussed politics everywhere on street corners in the squares at the barber's or the theatre." "They showed their passion this way." "Maybe by discussing it in private they didn't need public meetings." "It'd be foolish to say that the Athenians' polis," "their constitution, city-state, is a model." "Physical size rules that out." "as do many other things." "But it is the germ of an idea." "Something to inspire us encourage us to reassess our relationship with the law, the community and with power." "What does this germ of an idea signfy for us in this discussion?" "The people of Ancient Greece got involved in their community." "They were passionate about it." "But in our modern world, there's the rub, we aren't passionate." "That explains our modern world." "We have long periods of collective apathy." "When professional politicians rule then things come to a head." "A crisis or revolution occurs because the governing politicians have gone too far." "They don't do what society wants." "Society can't express its will so a revolution ensues or a similar crisis." "Modern politics can only develop in this crisis-to-crisis way." "They occur at regular intervals." "The span of Athenian history is three centuries." "I'm leaving out the 4th century after the defeat of 404 when democracy crumbled." "So, three definitive centuries distinguished by the fact" "that people participated in all political affairs." "Maybe no all the people, but Finely's latest studies show that if the subject was important" "15 or 20 thousand people turned up out of a population of 30 thousand..." "We must understand what that means." "They must have left home at 2AM, from Sounion or Marathon, to reach the meeting point" " Pnyx as the sun came up which is when the meeting began." "And they did it for nothing." "Ecclesiastic wages came much later." "They lost sleep and a day's work in order to be there to which Benjamin Constant answers in his comparative study of ancient and modern democracy," "he said more or less that, Constant was a moderate, he wanted representative democracy, he felt that the working classes were too busy for politics and that things should be run by 'cultured' people" "and that we are not interested in running public affairs." "All we want from the state is to 'guarantee our pleasure'." "He wrote this phrase 160 years ago early in the French Restoration." "It typifies modern man." "All he wants is 'his pleasure'." "This law proves that the Athenians wanted to protect - what?" "Their democratic system, right." "This is why they drew this picture of a woman crowning the people." "The man represents the people?" "Yes, she is crowning him which means she's honouring him." "The law is written underneath so that all Athenians will know it and respect and uphold democracy and oppose tyrannical regimes." "The fifth century was the apogee." "Then came the Peloponnesian Wars in 431BC." "The outbreak of war was a tragedy." "Thucydides put it succinctly" "The Lacedaemonians made excuses for declaring war but the real reason was that they were incensed" "by Athens' increasing power." "They had to stop it." "Thucydides explained beatuifully how words lose meaning during war." "The Peloponnesian War was also a civil war." "Democrats supported Athens, aristocrats supported Sparta, democracy against aristocracy, represented by the two powers." "Whenever the Athenians took a city they installed democracy." "When the Spartians took over they installed oligarchy." "Rule by the minority - aristocracy." "According to Thucydides even language was corrupted." "The same words were being used by each opposing side which seemed to say the same thing but in fact meant the opposite." "Sound familiar, doesn't it?" "Isn't Mr Mengistu a democrat?" "Everyone supports socialism, democracy and the common good." "The words no longer mean anything." "Our language is being worn out by the civil war in the West." "Coming back to the Athenians..." "After the start of the wars the Athenian demos degenerated." "There was an oligarchic revolution." "The Athenians kept winning battles but what the demos lost" "was the art of making decisions." "Then came the disaster of 404." "The Athenians made mistakes, not miscalculations, but serious political mistakes committed during the final phase." "This was all due to hubris, not restricting themselves, not knowing when to say 'when', not knowing when to stop." "They never knew it after 404, and that was the end of democracy." "The demonstrations of November the 3rd 1968 were started by chanting Papandreou's name then 'freedom', but the language finally exploited on the streets was the one exampled in the episode - 'democratia'." "If only it could be caught the image of democracy people create when depraved of it and if it could be projected back to them like a slide once they have recaptured it." "Or can we say of democracy - it happens, that it's a thing which does not exist and yet which one day is no more?"