Free The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley by Eric Weiner

means. Go to enough extremes, they figured, and eventually they cancel each other out and you find yourself in perfect de facto moderation. (That is the theory, at least.) They were closet extremists—“adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgment,” as Thucydides put it. Perhaps every place of genius is equally overzealous. Perhaps that is why they never last long.
    Did people, I wonder, appreciate the goldenness of the age? Did they know they were living in special times, or is such a verdict only possible in hindsight? Digging through the ancient texts, I’ve stumbled across evidence that the Athenians knew they were hot stuff. Witness this bit of swagger from the comic poet Lysippus: “If you haven’t seen Athens, you’re a fool; if you have seen it and are not struck by it, you’re an ass; if you are pleased to go away, you’re a packhorse.”
    That statement is highly revealing. For starters, it tells us that inancient Athens, the worst thing you could be, the absolute worst, was a packhorse. Second, it exposes a confidence that borders on the arrogant. Pericles laid it on even thicker when he famously called Athens “the school of Greece.” Presumably this relegated the Spartans and Corinthians and all the other Greeks to the status of pupil and goes a long way toward explaining why the Athenians were so widely despised. Yet this confidence rarely veered into outright arrogance. Why?
    “Hubris,” says Brady, who had until now been listening, stone-faced, like Socrates.
    Ah, yes, hubris, excessive pride.
    “Yes, but be careful with hubris ,” he says, as if speaking of some particularly dangerous species of rodent, or maybe a bad stock pick. “The Greeks didn’t mean it the way we do. Hubris wasn’t only a matter of excessive pride. It was an insult against the gods.” And if ancient Greece teaches us anything, it is that we anger the gods at our own peril.
    The particular god charged with punishing the hubristic was Nemesis. His name, Brady explains, means literally “going beyond one’s allotment.” This makes sense. Hubris is a form of greed. You’re not content with the lot the gods have given you, so you grab more. That it was a crime against the gods (not a sin, mind you; sin—a Christian concept—wouldn’t be invented for another five hundred years) ensured that Greek self-confidence didn’t balloon into arrogance, at least not too often.
    For the Greeks, Brady explains, virtue and genius were inseparable. You could be the greatest poet or architect in the world, but no one would consider you so if you were an arrogant jerk. I marvel at how that differs from our modern view of genius. Not only are we willing to overlook character flaws if the character in question produces brilliance, we have come to expect them from our geniuses. Think of Steve Jobs and his famously peevish personality. Only a true genius, we conclude, could get away with that. That’s not how the Greeks saw it. A man was judged not only by the quality of his work but also the content of his character.
    Two more Mythos beers arrive, courtesy of the management. These threaten to upset our hard-earned moderation, but we’re willing to take that chance. I fear, though, that we’re nibbling around the edges ofmy question, so I blurt it out: “Why Athens? How did a small, dirty, crowded city, surrounded by enemies and swathed in olive oil, manage to change the world?”
    The answer, Brady suggests, lies in expertise, or rather the lack of it. Ancient Athens had no professional politicians, or judges or even priests. Everyone did everything. Soldiers wrote poetry. Poets went to battle. It was strictly amateur hour, and that, as far as the Greeks were concerned, was a good thing. They viewed expertise with suspicion, for theirs was the genius of simplicity.
    All intellectual breakthroughs, says Brady, from Darwin’s theory of evolution to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, made the world a