One last news item on Pericles and Athenian democracy: this interview with Boris Johnson, now mayor of London, ever the rambunctious student of the Classics...
Do you identify with Pericles?
It would be absurd to say that I identify with Pericles. But I have had a spooky veneration for him, ever since I read the funeral oration at the age of about 12 — the bit where he bangs on about Athenian democracy, and equality under the law, and a society based on merit. I remember my skin crawling with excitement because it was so obvious to me, back then in the Cold War, that Athens was like America — open, generous, democratic — and Sparta was like the Soviet Union — nasty, closed, militaristic, totalitarian.
Even though I later learned that it was all really propaganda cooked up by Thucydides, that speech still seems to me so fresh and modern, and far better than any speech I ever heard in the Commons.
Thirty years later I was in the British Museum shop, and in an ecstasy of pretentiousness I bought the last plaster bust they made of Pericles. The hat he is wearing is from some American mayor.
What would Pericles do to make London the school of the world?
But London already is the school of the world. We have more of the world’s top 100 higher education institutions than any other capital, a constellation of universities that draws more students from around the planet than any of our rivals. London is the Athens of the global economy. I am afraid poor old Pericles would be quite stunned by the number of Greeks who feel it necessary to complete their education in London.
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