After all, it is certainly true that the Athenians—like present-day Americans—had their many problems. They had been led astray by war. There had been a coup, and then a restoration of the old polis, or democracy. But Athenians seemed exhausted, and they seemed to have lost sight of their founding ideals, why those ideals were so important, or what might replace them. They seemed not to grasp that Philip posed a dire threat to what was, at that point, the greatest experiment in self-government ever—the same experiment that, a century before, had bequeathed to the world Socrates and Plato and, more recently, Aristotle, among countless other writers, poets, tragedians, historians, astronomers, mathematicians, and so forth, the people who had literally led the world out of Plato’s allegorical cave of darkness.

It is important to think about this for just a moment: for tens of thousands of years, human beings had lived under kingdoms and despots, and then, for a variety of historical, political, and cultural reasons, along came Athens—and the birth of Western civilization. The whole story of how we came to be is obviously more complicated than that, but the starkness of that divide—before and after Athens—is truly remarkable. Indisputably so.