Broadcast February 24, 2001
Prince Charming can sometimes appear from the most unlikely places. Devlin, Ontario, in this case. Homer Armstrong Thompson, who died in May of last year, would discover and awaken the sleeping Agora that had lain for centuries beneath Athenian ground. It wasn’t fast and it wasn’t easy, but archaeologists train themselves to look beyond days, weeks, months, and years.
Today, when magazine covers warn of the perils of human cloning, it’s easy to forget that there are other, subtler, less scientific methods of influencing a new human life. Thompson’s father, a dairy farmer who moved to British Columbia sometime after his son’s birth, had a great love for the Classics. Which explains the choice of the name Homer. Whatever he hoped to gain from the choice, things couldn’t have turned out more to his liking. Homer received his B.A. and M.A. in classics at the University of British Columbia in the mid-twenties and went on for a Ph.D from the University of Michigan, where he learned of a project sponsored by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, to excavate the general area of the city’s ancient agora. He applied for and received a fellowship and found his life’s work. And a wife, Dorothy Burr, who would become the first female fellow on the project and partner with Homer through the years.
On May 28, 1931, a field notebook reported, “In the afternoon, H.A. Thompson commenced the supervision of Section A." H.A. Thompson had his work cut out for him. First it was necessary to relocate the people of a whole crowded neighborhood of houses and shops dating back to the previous century and then to raze the buildings and begin carefully digging and sifting through over thirty feet and dozens of centuries of rubble. Their only clues to the precise location of the agora had been written several millennia previously. It wasn’t until 1938, during the excavation of the shop of one Simon the cobbler, that they would uncover a stone with the word ‘agora’ on it and know they were on the right tract. The second such stone would not be found for another 30 years. In the meantime, two wars would interrupt the work. No sooner had World War II ended, than a Greek civil war broke out. Thompson was said to have worked for allied intelligence during both conflicts. One account has him raising a white flag over the agora site and convincing both Greek factions that their common heritage was at stake and that they should go and fight somewhere else.
Gradually the work began to pay off. Artifacts appeared. Such as ballots cast by jurors during a trial, medicine vials of the kind that probably held the hemlock used to kill the condemned, such as Socrates, hobnails used by our friend Simon, pieces of pottery, known as ostracon, used to vote to exile (or ostracize) other felons. A puzzle was uncovered in the form of a building with a foundation newer than the walls. It turned out the Romans had been engaging in some historic re-creation of their own. Thompson helped raise funds from the Rockefellers and others to establish a museum in one of the restored buildings. By the time of his retirement in 1988, he could have the satisfaction of knowing he’d rescued one small, important piece of the past.
Showing posts with label Democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Democracy. Show all posts
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
208. Agoraphilia I -Let’s Get Together
Broadcast February 17, 2001
In his recent book The Right to Vote, Alexander Keyssar includes a brief summary of the Australian ballot, introduced there in 1856. What made this voting mechanism unique was the fact it was a secret vote. No one but yourself would know who you had voted for, unless you chose to tell them. England adopted the method in 1872; it was introduced into the U. S. in 1888, in Louisville, Kentucky, and soon became the standard for the rest of the United States. The idea, of course, was to prevent intimidation and corruption. The origins of the idea however, go back to a time long before the first British convict set foot on the shores of Australia.
Voting day! Our chance to make our voices heard. There are no chads or punch holes. We are handed two ballots, shaped like a child’s top. Each has a shaft protruding from it. One shaft is hollow; the other is solid. Each one has it’s own assigned meaning. Yes or No. Candidate A or Candidate B. Life or Death. We step up to a container and drop one of the ballots in, holding it by the shaft so no one can see whether it’s solid or hollow. We are in the agora, or gathering place, in Athens. It’s the 4th century B. C. Democracy is taking its first toddling steps - and we are there.
If we stand at the Alter of the Twelve Gods, at the exact center of the agora, and face to the southeast, we see the Acropolis towering overhead. A straight race track stretches off to our right. Low single-story buildings surround the perimeter of the area, the civic center of the city - law courts, a mint, assembly halls for the executive committee and for the senate, a military headquarters. There are taverns and shops, one of the latter belonging to - I’m not making this up - Simon the Cobbler. After you’ve voted and then picked up your mended sandals from Simon, the rest of the day stretches out before you like that nearby racetrack, long and sun-baked. If you’re feeling lucky and there’s a race on, you can watch as the chariots roar past and their riders jump on and off while wearing full body armor. A religious procession might be passing through, headed for the temples up near the Parthenon. Perhaps you’d just lie to sit in front of the tavern, a half-drained wine cup in your hand. Or saunter over to the public notice board and get all the latest news. This is the place to meet and greet, wine and dine, see and be seen, a Classical chat room. And there’s often more than just idle gossip, especially when that gadfly Socrates is around, which is most of the time. He practically lives here. And one day he will die here, when the ballot shafts are against him.
And the time will come when the agora itself will die. Athens will grow, her center will shift, waves of conquerors will sweep over her. Plundering men and nations such as Sparta, Alexander the Great, Rome, and Lord Elgin, will change her face. The public buildings will crumble and one day the agora will become a trash-strewn field of rubble. It will heap up, layer upon layer, until Greece forgets just exactly where it was. Tenement houses will be built on the site and fill with swarms of the city’s poor. No more races will be run here, no philosophers will stroll the pathways, no more votes will be cast. The agora sleeps, buried beneath centuries of history. It will be a long, long sleep. But not an endless one.
In his recent book The Right to Vote, Alexander Keyssar includes a brief summary of the Australian ballot, introduced there in 1856. What made this voting mechanism unique was the fact it was a secret vote. No one but yourself would know who you had voted for, unless you chose to tell them. England adopted the method in 1872; it was introduced into the U. S. in 1888, in Louisville, Kentucky, and soon became the standard for the rest of the United States. The idea, of course, was to prevent intimidation and corruption. The origins of the idea however, go back to a time long before the first British convict set foot on the shores of Australia.
Voting day! Our chance to make our voices heard. There are no chads or punch holes. We are handed two ballots, shaped like a child’s top. Each has a shaft protruding from it. One shaft is hollow; the other is solid. Each one has it’s own assigned meaning. Yes or No. Candidate A or Candidate B. Life or Death. We step up to a container and drop one of the ballots in, holding it by the shaft so no one can see whether it’s solid or hollow. We are in the agora, or gathering place, in Athens. It’s the 4th century B. C. Democracy is taking its first toddling steps - and we are there.
If we stand at the Alter of the Twelve Gods, at the exact center of the agora, and face to the southeast, we see the Acropolis towering overhead. A straight race track stretches off to our right. Low single-story buildings surround the perimeter of the area, the civic center of the city - law courts, a mint, assembly halls for the executive committee and for the senate, a military headquarters. There are taverns and shops, one of the latter belonging to - I’m not making this up - Simon the Cobbler. After you’ve voted and then picked up your mended sandals from Simon, the rest of the day stretches out before you like that nearby racetrack, long and sun-baked. If you’re feeling lucky and there’s a race on, you can watch as the chariots roar past and their riders jump on and off while wearing full body armor. A religious procession might be passing through, headed for the temples up near the Parthenon. Perhaps you’d just lie to sit in front of the tavern, a half-drained wine cup in your hand. Or saunter over to the public notice board and get all the latest news. This is the place to meet and greet, wine and dine, see and be seen, a Classical chat room. And there’s often more than just idle gossip, especially when that gadfly Socrates is around, which is most of the time. He practically lives here. And one day he will die here, when the ballot shafts are against him.
And the time will come when the agora itself will die. Athens will grow, her center will shift, waves of conquerors will sweep over her. Plundering men and nations such as Sparta, Alexander the Great, Rome, and Lord Elgin, will change her face. The public buildings will crumble and one day the agora will become a trash-strewn field of rubble. It will heap up, layer upon layer, until Greece forgets just exactly where it was. Tenement houses will be built on the site and fill with swarms of the city’s poor. No more races will be run here, no philosophers will stroll the pathways, no more votes will be cast. The agora sleeps, buried beneath centuries of history. It will be a long, long sleep. But not an endless one.
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