Occupation

Politics could become a profession, but the Greeks had an even better profession: ordinary people could go watch plays and receive theater allowances. I was so jealous of them.

When I went to watch a play, they even paid me. The government paid to support me—sorry, organization. That was why Greek drama flourished, and their theaters were built magnificently. Beside the Acropolis of Athens, there was a very important open-air theater built into a mountainside. It is still in use today. We went to see it back then.

There was no amplification equipment at all, yet in that theater, even standard stage-play dialogue could be heard clearly.

So the design was excellent.

As I stood by the Acropolis of Athens and looked at that theater, I imagined it filled, two thousand or twenty-five hundred years ago, with people receiving allowances.

It made me feel rather indignant.

You had to work hard to pay the actors. As for our evaluation of Athenian democracy, we characterized it as a form of direct democracy. We knew its scope of application was limited to small states with small populations—the city-states. The greatest advantage of direct democracy was that everyone could participate, right? Its greatest problem was that it could not expand to large countries. Second, everyone had to pay attention to a Western issue: the average caliber of ordinary people—the majority of the population—would certainly not be low, right? This raised the question of whether the decision made by everyone was necessarily the final decision, the decision best for the future development of the state or city-state. Sometimes, we knew that truth was often held by a minority. If you believed that too strongly, you would see yourself as part of a small elite and oppress the masses, regarding them as people who needed