Greeks and austerity go way back: see Epicurus and Aristophanes

The Greeks have always been good with ideas and it was inevitable that thinkers, both Greek and non-Greek, would rifle through the Hellenic legacy for ­solutions, or at least salves, to the nation’s agonies.

When the Tsipras government called a national referendum on the austerity question, it was invoking the classical ideal of people (demos) power (kratia) — demo­cracy. Stiff-upper-lip Stoicism, hammered out in the shade of an Athenian porch, or stoa, is another antique idea with a new lease of life. But the ancient philosophy most relevant to the Greek crisis so far has been ignored, perhaps because it is so little understood.

Epicureanism, to contemporary people, is little more than a form of gastronomic fetishism. An Epicurean is attuned to the bouquet of single-origin coffee, the “minerality” of fine chablis and the star power of the latest celebrity chef.

When first articulated by Epicurus of Samos, in the late 4th century BC, Epicureanism meant something very different. Epicurus declared himself happy with water, bread, weak wine and a “pot of cheese”. The message is strikingly apposite, millennia later, to a nation prescribed a strict diet ­following a period of unbridled ­excess.

Epicurus, who is depicted in ancient statuary with a long rabbinical beard and a fierce gaze, was the first eco-prophet. He was green when the world was young. Retreating from the city of Athens with a group of communards to a famed garden beyond its walls, he celebrated frugality — or voluntary austerity. An inscription placed outside the Epicurean ­garden conveyed something of its presiding spirit: “The host and keeper of this place, where you will find the pleasure of the highest good, will offer you freely cakes of barley and fresh spring water. This garden will not tease your appetite with the dainties of art but satisfy it with the bounties of nature. Will you not be a happy guest?”

As far back as the first century a Roman Epicurean poet named Lucretius diagnosed the disease of insatiability in his didactic poem, On the Nature of Things. “That thing we want and can’t get seems — of all things — the most desirable,” he wrote. “But once we have it, we must have something else.”

In their 2012 book How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life, British economist Robert Skidelsky and sociologist Edward Skidelsky home in on the same target. They define insatiability as “that psychological disposition that prevents us, as individuals and as ­societies, from saying ‘enough is enough’ ”. The book, not surprisingly, begins with a quote from ­Epicurus.

The Epicurean philosophy casts a penetrating light on the Greek conundrum. It makes a moral imperative of the strict diet, a virtue of austerity. But then an austere lifestyle in a garden among friends — one of whom in Epicurus’s day was reputedly named Mammarion, or big breasts — is a lot more attractive than unemployment in a modern city such as Athens, Thessaloniki or Patras.

On the other hand, if contemporary Greece had been listening to Epicurus it might not have got itself into this mess.

In 2010, the American PBS NewsHour program went searching for the roots of the Greek economic crisis and found in the evolution of Greek cuisine a useful metaphor. The show found Greek-American chef and food writer Diane Kochilas, who told how she returned to the country in 1992 to find traditional Greek food “wasn’t enough any more … At that time, these huge, cavernous restaurants were opening, you know, over-designed, with a lot of expensive food, without much substance.”

She ordered a piece of fish at one of these places and it was served with a huge inedible rock as a garnish. The humble Greek salad had been deconstructed. “You had things like freeze-dried feta cheese, one of the worst things, if not the worst thing, I have ever tasted. You had Greek salad in the Jell-O cubes, Greek salad with feta cheese foam, Greek salad with kalamata olive foam.” The nouveau riche — rich on northern European money — had forgotten an old idea. Plain dishes, Epicurus maintained, “offer the same pleasure as a luxurious table”.

What’s the message for Greece from Epicurus the anti-foodie? There are several. That only the fool is forever chasing pleasure, whereas the wise know how to take pleasure in simple things. You don’t get more pleasure by amplifying it with more stuff, or by elaborating a simple dish into a work of speculative culinary art. There’s no need to reinvent the Greek salad. Be wary of Greek waiters bearing foam.

So maybe — just sayin’ — a ­period of sober austerity may do Greece no end of good.

An elaboration on this theme comes from Aristophanes’s spirited satire, The Clouds. The play is famed for its depiction of a dipsy Socrates. The character at its heart is Strepsiades, a rustic who has married a high-class Athenian wife, produced a wastrel of a son who spends big on horses, and exchanged a life of simple pleasures — “abounding in honey bees, sheep and olive cakes” — for “new wine, figs, fleeces, and abundance”. The nature of his trouble, and his proposed solution, echoes uncannily down the ages:

Socrates: “And how was it you did not see that you were getting so much into debt?’’

Strepsiades: “My ruin has been the madness for horses, a most rapacious evil; but teach me one of your two methods of reasoning, the one whose object is not to repay anything …”