Michael McQuillan

I stroll from front door’s evening light to where a cloudless sky shows stars. They model how we could live in peace as do they in constellations.

A Tetradrachm coin from Athens’ Golden Age (478-404 BC) becomes my modern ring, a lodestar that kindles strivings toward political deals as if a modern iteration of the North Star that illuminated freedom’s path for those whom the antebellum South enslaved.

The ring for decades has adorned an index finger.

 Pericles of Athens called himself First Citizen, not King. The coin suitably shows social value symbols of the ancient city-state, not its leader’s face or profile. The patron goddess Athena’s wise and sacred owl plus the olive branch of peace suitably appear.

Pericles’ iteration of the traditional Funeral Oration for the city’s Peloponnesian War dead surprises with its praise for the Athenian democracy’s pursuit of common good, in place of customary paeans to bravery in battle.

“That part of our history which tells of the military achievements which gave us our several possessions, or of the ready valor with which either we or our fathers stemmed the tide of Hellenic or foreign aggression, is a theme too familiar to my hearers for me to dilate on, and I shall therefore pass it by. But what was the road by which we reached our position, what the form of government under which our greatness grew, what the national habits out of which it sprang; these are questions which I may try to solve,” he asserts in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.

One advances in society by merit, not by favor, and the municipal constitution confers equal justice through the application of its laws by a government that favors the many, not the few. That makes Athens a democracy, the First Citizen asserts. Public service is a duty in which all citizens engage, he adds. That is why officials pay the poor, ensuring that the discussions and debates of civic councils incorporate all voices, enhancing the decisions.

Our nation’s Founders were aware of this, but history’s cycles of advance and regression abetted by society’s amnesia, have cost us our representative democracy’s demise.

Though retirement divides me from career podiums and platforms the Athens legacy which drove my work in government and education lives in the “lodestar ring” to fuel my writing “conscience calls” about the issues of our time.