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stand out by themselves, free and alone . And there is an inner line
that leads from this artistic revolution to the figure of Socrates, obey–
ing hi s inner voice even against the collective wisdom of the com–
munity . Reason usurped the rule of the fates, and in following the
voice of reason , men (at first , very few men indeed) began to be
autonomous in the literal sense of the Greek word - to live by one's
own law . The same understanding of autonomy was at the core of
Greek democracy (still limited to the few), and it inspired the Greeks
in defending themselves against the might of the Persian empire.
Marathon is an ever-recurring battle , as long as the idea of auton–
omy survives in human minds .
Nor can we know with any certainty just what happened,
somewhere in the semidesert of the ancient Near East, as a strag–
gling tribe of Semites discovered a strange divinity, who was not
bound to them by blood and whose law (a divine autonomy this
time , not the autonomy of human reason) severed the archaic links
between man and the gods. Here too the fates were abolished, albeit
in a very different way ; Israel was forbidden all the consoling rituals
by which its neighbors remained in communion with an all-embrac–
ing living cosmos. The Israelites were not much given to the graphic
arts, so there are no solitary figures stepping out of friezes . Yet we
can see a profound parallel to this symbolic liberation in the in–
dividual figures of the Hebrew Bible - who stood alone before God.
Think of the dramatic encounter between King David and Nathan,
the prophet of this God, and of Nathan's words in condemning
David for the murder of Bathsheba's husband : "You are the man!"
It
is not a violation of the text to paraphrase: "You are
a
man." For
what Nathan was saying, in total opposition to the entire religious
and political culture of the ancient Near East, was that David, just
like any other man , was fully responsible for his actions and could
not escape his responsibility by draping himself in the magical man–
tle of kingship . Once again, in a context different from and yet
strangely analogous to the Hellenic one, a solitary individual is pre–
sented to us in his freedom.
It
is important to stress that, in bringing up the roots of West–
ern individuality in these ancient soils, there is no implication that
Socrates or David, or any of their contemporaries, were modern in–
dividuals. We must never project the present into the past, and
much of the discipline of historical scholarship consists in resisting
this ever-present temptation. In this particular case, compared with
modern Westerners, the people in classical Athens or Biblical
J
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