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Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, warned us that there is nothing new under the sun. At least in terms of the current crisis in Greece, Solomon was dead right. As I look on aghast at the sense of entitlement, the lack of discipline, and the refusal to accept austerity measures that are driving Greece to the edge of ruin, I am reminded of similar attitudes that brought down the Golden Age of Greece over 2400 years ago.

Plato witnessed the late fifth century BC implosion of Athenian democracy, even as we are seeing its impending implosion in the early twenty-first century AD, and he diagnosed its causes in his most famous dialogue, the Republic.

Plato kicked the poets out of his ideal state, an ironic decision since Plato was himself a poet at heart. That is made evident in Book VIII of the Republic when Plato turns to political science. Like Aristotle after him, Plato maps out a political cycle by which one type of government gives way to another. However whereas Aristotle’s overview is dry and prosaic, Plato spices his up by wrapping it in the guise of a Greek tragedy.

Just as the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides often dramatized the fall of a great house (that of Atreus or Oedipus or Theseus), so Plato’s non-dramatic prose tragedy illustrates the natural cycle of political decay from aristocracy to timocracy to oligarchy to democracy to tyranny in terms of a five-generation royal family. In Plato’s telling, an aristocratic father is followed by a timocratic son, who is himself succeeded in turn by an oligarch, a democrat, and a tyrant.

Plato presents a clinical, yet vivid analysis of the corruption of the democratic state, citizen, and prince that sounds uncannily—and disturbingly—like Greece today. In a radical democracy, Plato argues, excessive freedom encourages citizens to overindulge their appetites. In time, such citizens become incapable of moral self-regulation; all discipline is lost and all resources squandered.

This moral, spiritual, economic, and political anarchy leads to two outcomes that might at first seem contradictory. First, the citizens “chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority and at length . . . they cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten; they will have no one over them” (563e).

plato-head-shotIn time, however, their lack of personal discipline—of self-imposed austerity—compels them to put a tyrant over themselves so that they will be assured, so they think, of a steady stream of pleasures and delights. Thus, Plato concludes, an “excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery” (564a).

As it is with the democratic masses, so it is with the democratic prince. In reaction against what he perceives as the “money-grubbing” of his oligarchic father, he adopts an undisciplined, self-indulgent lifestyle that causes him to reject his earlier training and surrender to “insolence and anarchy and waste and impudence” (560e).

This internal imbalance leads to chaos in his daily life:

he lives from day to day indulging the appetite of the hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he becomes a water-drinker, and tries to get thin; then he takes a turn at gymnastics. . . . His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom. (561c-d)

It’s not just that the prince becomes lazy; his capacity for reason and virtue becomes exhausted and overwhelmed by a disordered life that swings violently from joyless hedonism to amoral asceticism. His life, Plato writes, “is motley and manifold” (561e); there is in him no stability, no sense of proper order, value, or hierarchy.

Though the democratic prince may be able to resist a complete slide into anarchy, his son will not. Without reason or virtue to guide him, the son’s appetites will eventually grow perverse, paving the way for tyranny. In the opening of Book IX, Plato, with the same clinical precision, shows the kind of behavior that the democratic king will breed in his tyrannical prince:


As far back as Homer, the Greeks understood that an internal sense of shame (aidos in Greek) was one of our chief safeguards against chaos and cruelty. One of the clearest markers that democracy is morphing into tyranny is when our political leaders see nothing wrong in indulging their lusts. This loss of aidos at the top quickly passes down to the masses, who increasingly refuse, with great pride, any measure that might injure their self-esteem.

This refusal manifests itself in a kind of social topsy-turvydom that Plato, yet again, dissects and defines exactly:


An admirable quality of the Greeks, both then and now, is their commitment to university education. Unfortunately, when such education breeds arrogance in the young and a craven sense of inferiority in the old, it hastens the collapse of democratic society.

Ancient Athens lost her sense of respect, shame, decorum, and proportion, and it led to her dissolution. She became her own worst enemy, her own executioner. The parallels between Plato’s analysis in Book VIII of the Republic and what has been playing out in Greece today are disturbing indeed.

What is more disturbing is that we can see the beginning of the same process of social-political decay in our own country.


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3 replies to this post
  1. It appears that the author of this article knows more about Plato than about Greece today. As with the last bailout, almost all of the money will go to pay off lenders while, according to the IMF, the austerity measures not only hurt those who are vulnerable, it prevents Greece’s economy from recovering. In addition, while the vulnerable are paying the price, many of those who were behind the corruption and who were avoiding taxes escape the penalty of their sins.

    In the meantime, some who want the world’s problems to fit neatly into their worldview take a deductive approach to identifying what has happened in Greece rather than an inductive approach.

  2. The direct comparison to modern Greece for finding a way to understand the underying principles as brilliantly conveyed in story of ancient Greece in the recounting of Plato was well done here. Of coursr a topic like this is always more nuanced and complex than a short analysis can project but Greece’s issues truly are very symbolic and even a microcism of the whole Euro and western modern movements trajectories away from the permanent things that built and sustained a proper society..smell the coffee we have sodomite marriage as a ruling of the high courts best and brightest minds….the authors linking of the exact points of Plato in overall analysis may have more complexity and nuance than he shows but in general hes on to something very important here ….whats involved in modern Greece with a cultural collapse we witness before our very eyes admittedly is a complex situation that ideas from the riches of Plato have a lot to help us understand it and maybe even prevent it fom spreading like the collapse of ancient Greece and Rome. Dont get bogged down in the particularities of this article comparison the principles and foundations of western civilization are being washed out by the exact political forces Plato observed for us in his treatises right before our very eyes on an almost daily basis. RALLY around the permanent things as this author has begun to point out!

  3. Book VIII’s portrait of democracy in it’s pure, unmediated form, whether in city or in soul, is a most relevant and frightening one for us today. It rewards close and repeated study. It can be interestingly compared to certain key passages on “democratic character” in Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and Delsol; also can be used to think about the “60s.”

    For a taste of my theorizing on this, here’s “The 60s in Plato’s Eyes”

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