Today, let's walk the Agora with Socrates. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
The Agora in ancient Athens
was a 30-acre marketplace sitting below the
Acropolis. Today it's a pretty landscaped park with
some old stone embedded in it. Few of the visitors
who climb the hill to see the Parthenon give it
much attention. Yet, 2400 years ago, it was the
intellectual center of the world.
Socrates originally trained near here as a stone
mason. He called himself a private person --
uninterested in politics. But like so many creative
people, he found his solitude in this very public
place -- chatting, teaching, and moving through the
swirl of people, wreathed in thought. Just outside
the Agora lie the ruins of Simon the Cobbler's
shop. Socrates taught his younger pupils there
because only adults could enter the Agora.
Before WW-I no one was sure where the old Agora
was. Athens had built up over it. In the '20s,
American archeologists, with Rockefeller and
Packard money, began probing. When they located the
site, they cut a deal with the authorities. If
Athens would relocate 5000 people, the Americans
would finance the excavation.
That was a big undertaking. It's gone on for 60
years, and it isn't done yet. As archeologists have
dug downward, they've unearthed over 5000 years of
In Socrates's time, in the late 5th century BC, the
Agora was girdled with great stoas -- open
porchlike buildings. Below the temple of
Hephaestus, god of the forge, lay the first
buildings to house the processes of democratic
The digs yield the machinery of those times. Here's
a random lot generator used to select magistrates
and representatives. Random selection was how the
Greeks avoided corruption in government! We find
voting machines and ballot spindles. We find
hemlock cups used to administer the sentence of
death by poisoning.
In 406 BC Socrates was chosen by lot to chair the
citizen's assembly. He was soon in trouble. Nine
generals had been accused of cowardice. The
assembly wanted to condemn them en masse.
Socrates infuriated the assembly by demanding
separate trials. Seven years later, his enemies got
even. They convicted him of corrupting Athenian
youth and made him drink hemlock. He walked about
the Agora until paralysis began in his legs. Today
we can point to the spot where he finally lay down
High on the hill are the grand buildings we know so
well. But below was the new and still imperfect
machinery of democracy and of everyday life. Down
here was the marketplace where Socrates and others
like him carried on a traffic of ideas -- some
abstract, some very tangible -- the same ideas that
echo through our own still imperfect, still
evolving, world, 2400 years later.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Camp, J.M., The Athenian Agora: Excavations in
the Heart of Athens. London: Thames and Hudson
Fleishman, J., In classical Athens, a Market
Trading in the Currency of Ideas.
Smithsonian, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 38-47.
Coulton, J.J., The Architectural Development
of the Greek Stoa. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
Travlos, J., Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient
Athens. New York: Praeger Publishers,
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
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