Salon

For a while, very little will interest the world's press apart from the U.S. presidential election -- its outcome, significance and implications. Literary critics will have little to add to the choir of political reviewers and analysts. And yet, it would be arrogant of us to forget that the institutions of elections and democracy have come down to us from literary sources; that if not for the people who preferred the art of the word to the world of politics the modern democratic tradition simply would not have existed.

The idea of choosing the best was one of the main gifts of the Greek civilization to the modern world. Even when the competition was decided by the merits of the competitors irrespective of any popular vote, as during the Olympic Games, the idea was still that the winner was chosen by the gods. One of the most epic stories of all Greek mythology, that of the Trojan War, begins with Prince Paris choosing the most beautiful among the three goddesses; as in most election stories, every candidate made an attempt to bribe the electorate, and the bribe that seemed the most attractive to Paris -- the love of the most beautiful woman in the world -- led to disastrous consequences. The Greeks knew perfectly well both the power of the vote and its potential for abuse.

Herodotus, "the father of history," tells us of an Athenian democratic tradition: Every once in a while, all free people of the community expelled one of their prominent politicians lest he became too influential and get the wrong idea, like becoming a tyrant. One such politician was Aristides the Just, respected even by his enemies. When an illiterate stranger asked Aristides for help writing in his vote for who should be exiled, the stranger chose Aristide. When asked why he was voting for him, he said "I'm just sick of everyone calling him 'the Just.'" Aristides was duly exiled.

The Roman political system was much closer to ours today; they even had two political parties very much along the lines of any bipartisan system. The election policies were the main reason for the downfall of the Roman republic: Julius Caesar could not afford a brief window between holding one office and another because his enemies would have immediately used his loss of immunity. So, he decided to act illegally through his legions. The results, again, were disastrous.

Russia, in the absence of a stable democratic tradition, did not contribute much to world literature on electoral subtleties. There is a delightfully absurdist episode in Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" when the characters have to elect a local official. The result is well-known in advance, but they still need to go through the motions, and no one understands why.