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THE PEASANT, THE PIONEER, AND THE JUST LIFE.
Gillian Bouras*
Some people are born to greatness, others achieve it, and still others, like Dolly
Parton, have greatness thrust upon them. Instead of greatness, I had Greekness
thrust upon me, and I have still not achieved it, even after decades, although I
believe that in a sense we in the Western world are all Greek, in that we have had
very basic and noble ideas and ideals formed by the emphases and values of ancient
Greek society. Justice is one of these.
As this conference is taking place in the Ancient World, I wish to mention ancient
history, albeit in another context:
Perhaps some people here raised their children in the gentle ambience of TV’s
Sesame Street, and thus can recall Kermit the frog’s plaint: It’s not easy being
green. (Which now, thirty years later, has taken on another layer of significance.) But
my own plaint is that it’s not easy being Greek - particularly when you have not
been born or bred to the condition.
I can see now, however, that my early life was ever preparing me for the 25 Greek
years I notched up on the 23rd of July this year. At the age of 8 (more Ancient History)
I became a member of the ABC Radio’s Argonauts’ Club. Hippoclides 35, my young
self, usually received a resounding omega for the feeble watercolours sent to an
Australian Pheidias, while merciful time has drawn a heavy veil over my attempts to
write. My novel petered out after ten laborious pages of longhand; the fact that it was
set in the Highlands of Scotland while I was living in the Wimmera district of Victoria,
Australia, just might have had something to do with its abject failure.
While the little I knew about Greece came from the ABC, my only knowledge of
Scotland came from a yearning grandmother and from the music played by the local
pipe band.
Fast forward a decade to English 1 and Philosophy 1 at that august institution, the
University of Melbourne.
Maggie Tomlinson, hibiscus bloom behind one ear, lectured on the complexities of
the Oresteian Trilogy, and Professor Boyce Gibson, second of that name, ritually
apologised for being unable to give an exact translation of key concepts such as
virtue and honour.
These concepts always lost something in the translation from Ancient Greek, the
Professor maintained, while adding the suggestion that we were seriously
underprivileged and deprived because we had no knowledge of that marvellous
language.
Of course he was right: a few Catholic schoolboys were the only exceptions to this
ignorance. Philosophy tutor Mrs Jackson, steering totally unaware seventeen-year-olds
through the mysteries of Plato’s Republic, upgraded my first essay with the very
apt comment: I fear I have not been quite just.
We live, sad to say, in very troubled times. Yet times have always been troubled, and
humankind has always attempted to find a way through them. And that same
humankind has always tried to tackle the questions of freedom, justice and equality.
We are still doing it; hence the title and the theme of this conference. But there
always seems to be a seesaw movement between freedom, justice and equality, and
the repression of such concepts, such repression, often very hastily made legal,
being one of the great dangers of the current and so-called ‘war on terror.’
I am of pioneering stock.
The first branch of my family having migrated from Cornwall to the Burra copper field
of South Australia in 1849. Gold-hungry people soon followed from Norfolk and
Scotland, while the Irish ancestor was an illegal immigrant, having jumped ship when
said vessel was conveniently close to the port of Adelaide.
I took my background for granted, despite the fact that I studied Australian history at
university. Even though I was the first woman in my family to attend university, I was
either a sleepwalker or an ostrich when it came to the weighty matters of life, and
tended to assume that all over the world people are much alike.
Of course now I know that some people are more equal than others, and that some
have more freedom; those ancestors of mine were at least free enough to exercise
some kind of choice.
It took a very unexpected migration to a Greek village to provide a rude awakening,
to get me to engage my brain, as it were. This migration made me understand,
eventually, that pioneer and peasant went about the business of survival in very
different ways.
The pioneer is an individual who invents the day, while the peasant is one of a tightlyknit
group and as such is bound to follow age-old prescriptions, for these have stood
the test of time and have kept that particular group going.
I now think of the old yiayathes (grannies) crossing themselves and saying, If God
wills it, and of my Nonconformist grandmothers not crossing themselves, and
announcing at regular intervals that God helps those who help themselves.
While the very short history of white Australia is one of a huge split which involved
the transplantation of a mighty civilisation from one end of the earth to another,
Greek history has a remarkable continuity, even if that continuity consists of two
threads: ancient pagan Greece and Christian Byzantium, both complicated by the
various knots of invasion and occupation.
In Homer's epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, we read of the collapse of a
natural and divinely sanctioned moral order, which is then restored: it is no accident
that Odysseus wants to go home (that repository of security and affirmation, that
bulwark against the Other) and finally does so. In these narratives the Greeks
thought of the Trojan War as a just one: in the matter of the seduction and the
defection of Helen, honour was at stake and shame the result if Paris and the
Trojans were not punished, and in the Homeric world, honour was the greatest
good, and shame the greatest evil. Not a lot has changed in the basics of Greek
society over the many centuries. In Modern Greek society there exists also the very
important concept of philotimo, a practically untranslatable term meaning as well as
honour, both dignity and face.
But in both Homer’s mighty works we also see that Force (very definitely with a
capital F), in the shape of the gods and powerful men, reduced ordinary mortals to
the level of chattels: there is a great deal of gory death and hopeless enslavement in
the Iliad and in the Odyssey, all because of so-called justice. My second son, who
is in the Greek Special Forces, would explain all this very matter-of-factly: collateral
damage.
In considering the conference topic, it is necessary to get down to brass tacks, as it
were, and ask: What makes a just society? It is not an easy question, and has only
complex answers. But surely such answers must include basic considerations such
as equality of opportunity and freedom from want, and also freedom from oppression.
The conference has added and explored further and specific nuances, such as the
practical issues of confidentiality and privacy.
I think it is fair to say that in our Western lifetimes we have seen some progress
made towards a just society, for we are now very much aware of the rights of women,
children and minority groups, and of the iniquity of racism. The problem, of course, is
that there is often a gap between theory and practice, so that such rights are nearly
always under threat.
Once survival is assured and brings the benefit of even a little leisure time, the arts
blossom. When that happens, those who practise the arts ask the vital question: How
should we live? This is a fundamental question, and one that all too often has the
extreme negative answer in the act of suicide. If I cannot live the life I want to live,
some people reason, why should I live at all? (If more societies were more just, there
would, I suggest, be fewer deaths from suicide of both the personal and political
sort.)
When I came to live in my Greek mother-in-law’s house in 1980, I soon realised that
such questions were irrelevant in a life such as hers.
Aphrodite (her name and her marital status link the chains of Greek history) had had
children to rear in the security of a centuries-old tradition, with an extended family as
support, so that she simply added a repetitive thread to the pattern that had already
been woven for her, and thus knew exactly what she had to do every day. I drove
her mad with my questions, in particular ones involving the word why?
Whenever I asked those questions (and I asked them often, being inquisitive by
nature and also quite a slow learner) she would fix me with her basilisk gaze and say,
loftily: Etsi einai. That’s the way it is.
Aphrodite was a living continuum concept, with the seasons being more significant
than years in her life: she did everything her mother and grandmothers had done.
She kept animals and a vegetable garden; at appointed times she made tomato
paste, cherry cordial, noodles, cheese, and smoked pork. Once a year she made
soap. Like Homer’s sashed and lovely women, she was an expert weaver. She was
also a singer of the miroloyoi, the songs of fate sung before funerals, and this
tradition, too, can be traced back to Homeric Andromache’s lament over the body of
Hector.
Every Sunday Aphrodite went to church, where she had her appointed place, and
where people kissed her hand, because she was the widow of a priest. Nobody ever
called her by her name; she always went by her title of Papathia, Priest’s Wife. Her
status was her power.
My achievements and my education were my power, I felt, although rather dimly in
that world, cut off as I was from the language and from the received life, and so on
this score alone, the illiterate Aphrodite and I were chalk and cheese. We each
found it virtually impossible to comprehend the other’s mindset.
But I eventually had to acknowledge the fact that she could have crawled out from a
nuclear fall-out shelter and started again, whereas I would have had absolutely no
hope of doing so. I used to mutter to myself that the unexamined life is not worth
living, and she used to ask me why I did not sell some, if not all, of my books.
Possibly the most memorably tense moment between us occurred when she asked
me to help her plant garlic bulbs. Er, um, which end goes in the ground? I asked,
and she gazed at me in incredulous horror. I could almost see her thinking: What
has my favourite son been and gone and done?
Said favourite son and I had many an argument about his mother’s life. He
maintained that she was secure and happy enough in her ancestral place, and that
she had done what she set out to do, while I used to fume and fulminate about the
limitations of such an existence, and the waste of potentiality. I see now (I always
see patterns far too late) that we were really arguing about the just life, while
approaching the notion from entirely opposite directions.
Favourite son’s idea of the just life was one of following or tracing the template. Of
course it goes without saying that this notion was for women only, and that he
certainly didn’t follow or trace any particular template himself. He saw his mother’s
life as one of gain on the life led by her mother, while I saw lack: lack of choice,
opportunity, equality, freedom. If Aphrodite had ever asked herself the artist’s
question, How should we live? there would have been only one answer. And that
answer rigidly prescribed.
Aphrodite’s marriage to her third cousin was an arranged one, and her husband
received a respectable dowry. (The fickle finger of Fate: the reason for my husband’s
migration to Australia was an extremely practical one, for he had to earn the money
for his youngest sister’s dowry.)
In practice women of Aphrodite’s generation and preceding ones had no hope of
marriage unless they had a sizeable dowry, but upon marriage the dowry became the
property of the husband; and there is many a case of deserted wives being left
destitute because of this custom.
When Andreas Papandreou’s PASOK party came to power in 1982, Greek women
finally achieved some protection under the law: a woman’s dowry remained her own,
and the whole system was declared illegal for subsequent generations. (In the
conservative countryside, however, the custom will take a long time to die out.)
Because Aphrodite and her priest-husband had no knowledge of contraception,
which was, in any case, against the law of the Orthodox Church, she was
continuously pregnant for thirteen years, and she lost children (one to measles)
because medical help was simply not available.
She struggled to keep her six surviving children fed, and having survived the Axis
occupation, she lived in fear during the civil war when her husband, who had
preached against the Communists, was absent in a seminary near Corinth for two
years. Cave-dwelling Communist guerrillas habitually raided village houses at night,
demanding supplies; on at least one occasion Aphrodite shamed them into leaving.
It seems to me now that it was only at the end of her life that Aphrodite had freedom
from want and the freedom of some sort of choice: after her husband’s death, for
example, she had a holiday in Australia.
In her old age, she had the freedom from financial worry that modest State and
Church pensions gave her, although she could never throw off the habits of extreme
frugality, and she had the satisfaction of being in constant touch with her evergrowing
family, living very close to many of them: she was extremely proud of being
a great-grandmother.
Aphrodite always gave me the impression that she could not imagine any other life.
Yet hers was a very hard one: she lived through the Balkan Wars, the First World
War, the Great Depression, the Second World War (which included occupation), the
Greek Civil War and the military dictatorship: and that was just politics, let alone the
realities of everyday life.
Which thought brings me to the point: if injustice is not perceived, does it exist? (This
question may lead some of you along the dark and thorny paths of Berkeleian
philosophy, all of which I forgot about a hundred years ago.) Think, for example, of
the millions of women who accepted without question the Chinese custom of foot
binding, and the millions who still accept and conform to the custom of female
circumcision.
There often seems to be a conflation between justice and tradition, as if tradition is
always just. Strange to relate, it is often women who are the bearers of traditions that
seem to many people to be absolutely unjust. But that is another very complex story.
Then there is the relevant point to be made on this occasion: ancient Greece is
credited with inventing the notion of democracy, yet this concept was a very limited
one, from which both women and slaves were excluded.
The fact that I am neither an academic nor a classical scholar gives me the freedom
to compose a paper that, in comparison with rigorous medical and legal ones,
resembles nothing so much as a madwoman’s breakfast. But from among the
scattered bits of scrambled egg and toast you might pick up the thought that justice
can be a very slanted concept.
There is not merely one just society, and much predictable difficulty arises from the
fact that there are a great many societies, which all have their individual notion of
what a just society is, and their own separate ways of moving towards it. If they can,
in fact, manage to do so.
_____________
*Gillian Bouras.
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