‘For the sake of a single Lacedaemonian girl’… or the insults that caused the Greco-Persian wars

In a previous post, I mentioned that the mechanism of revenge is a key concept helping us understand the causes and conduct of the Peloponnesian war and Greek culture generally. Conflicts and enmities often began as a result of perceived insults, affronts to honour, which could only be redeemed or expiated through vengeance.

In fact, if we read Herodotus, we can see how, for the Greek mind, this mechanism of revenge didn’t just apply to recent events, but could stretch far back into history, and even into myth.

Thus, Herodotus begins his Histories by stating his intention to reveal the aetiology of the wars between Greece and Persia in the fifth century BC and suggesting that they were the culmination of a series of insults and reprisals between Europeans and Asiatics going back centuries and, indeed, into the mists of time.

Herodotus says that the ‘feud’ between Greece and Persia, or Europe and Asia, was initiated by the Phoenicians. These quintessential Mediterranean traders had come on their ships to Argos, hawking goods from Egypt and Assyria, and at the end of their mission, having sold most of their wares, they kidnapped a number of Greek women, including Io (daughter of the Argive king, Inachus) who had come to the beach to make purchases.

Responding to this outrage, Greeks sailed to Phoenician Tyre and abducted King Agenor’s daughter, Europa, taking her to Crete with them. Now, whereas Herodotus asserts that this kidnapping of Europa could be regarded as legitimate retaliation for Io’s abduction, the next offense in this cycle – the kidnapping by Greeks of Medea, the daughter of the king of Colchis – amounted to an unjustified and disproportionate escalation of this Greek-Asian vendetta, particularly when Colchian pleas to return Medea or at least compensate the king for his humiliation were rejected by the Greeks (on the grounds that Io had not been returned and no compensation paid for her abduction).

Thus, in the next generation, Paris, the Trojan prince, as revenge for Greek outrages against Tyre and Colchis, seized Helen, queen of Sparta, and carried her off to Asia. When the Greeks demanded her return and the payment of reparations for the insult Paris had committed, the Trojans said that since Medea had not been returned to her native land and no reparations offered for her kidnap, then the Greeks would receive none for the abduction of Helen.

The events that followed Helen’s kidnap and the refusal of the Trojans to give her up, i.e. the Greek invasion and sacking of Troy, informed, according to Herodotus, abiding Persian hostility towards the Greeks. Not only, for the Persians, did Greek ire at the abduction of Helen amount to a gross over-reaction – more often than not, according to the Persians, these ‘abducted’ women willingly went with their ‘kidnappers’ – but by crossing with an army from Europe into Asia, the Greeks had turned a ridiculous dispute over a woman into an unforgivable violation of the symbolic boundary separating the Greek (and European) from the Persian (and Asian) worlds; the Persians regarding Asia as inherently their domain.

Or, as Herodotus’ puts it:

‘The Asiatics, when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single Lacedaemonian girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam. Henceforth they [the Persians] ever looked upon the Greeks as their open enemies. For Asia, with all the various tribes of barbarians that inhabit it, is regarded by the Persians as their own; but Europe and the Greek race they look on as distinct and separate.’

Victor Davis Hanson, Thucydides, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey: what causes wars, what prevents wars?

 

‘A general who desires peace must be prepared for war, for the barbarians become very nervous when they face an adversary all set to fight.’ (Emperor Mavrikios, 582-602 AD, Strategikon)

The American classicist Victor Davis Hanson has written a piece for American Greatness asking the question: what causes wars? 

Hanson, whose approach to these matters derives from Thucydides, offers several reasons why violent conflicts break out. These include: ‘Innately aggressive cultures and governments, megalomania, the desire for power, resources, and empire prompt nations to bully or attack others. Less rational Thucydidean motives such as fear and honor and perceptions of self-interest are not to be discounted either.’

Hanson goes on by proposing that we shouldn’t just be asking what causes war, but perhaps more importantly, what prevents war? The answer to this, Hanson says, is a policy of deterrence, echoing the Roman adage ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’ and Byzantine Emperor Mavrikios (582-602 AD), in his Strategikon: ‘A general who desires peace must be prepared for war, for the barbarians become very nervous when they face an adversary all set to fight.’

Hanson asks:  ‘What allows these preemptive or aggressive agendas to reify, to take shape, and to leave tens of thousands dead? The less culpable target (and wars are rarely a matter of 50/50 culpability) also has a say in what causes wars. The invaded and assaulted sometimes overlooked or contextualized serial and mounting aggression. They displayed real military weakness or simple political ineptness that eroded deterrence. They failed to make defensive alliances with stronger nations or slashed defense investments that made the use of deterrent force impossible.’

We’re now in a position to move beyond modern analyses of conflict, heavily influenced by Marxist approaches and other readings of how Western empires expanded from the 15th century, in which we have become used to seeing aggressive human endeavour explained by economic imperatives and not by more tragic, Homeric and Thucydidean values such as rank, prestige, honour, competitiveness, vengeance and shaming. 

Using this ancient Greek paradigm, we can interpret, for example, the Iraq war (2003), perhaps the most significant recent conflict, which overthrew the dictator Saddam Hussein and resulted in any number of dire national, regional and global side effects, not as a war about energy resources, as has become the dominant discourse, but about America’s attempt to reassert its prestige and honour, lost after the New York City terror attacks in 2001.

Now, let’s look at how this expanded understanding of the origins of wars can be applied to the recent history and current confrontations involving Greece and Cyprus and Turkey.

To begin with, we note that Turkey considered invading Cyprus twice in the 1960s – in 1964 and 1967. On both occasions, it was deterred not only by its lack of military capacity to carry out a successful assault on Cyprus, but also by its diplomatic isolation.

Cyprus since 1964 had successfully induced the USSR to take an interest in the course of the Cyprus question, prompting the Soviet Union to understand that the Western plan to partition Cyprus and turn Cyprus into a NATO protectorate was a direct threat to USSR interests in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Turkey’s threat of invasion also faced diplomatic opprobrium from the USA, concerned that a Turkish attack would provoke a war between Greece and Turkey and alienate whoever lost, potentially drawing that country into the Soviet orbit and seriously weakening NATO’s south-eastern flank. America’s preference was for a negotiated partition of Cyprus, a deal between Greece and Turkey as to how to share the Cypriot spoils, arrived at in a similar way to the London/Zurich agreements (1959) that established Cyprus’ ‘independence’, agreements done behind the back of the island’s communities and presented to them as a fait accompli.

Following its failure to invade Cyprus in 1967, Turkey set about boosting its military preparedness for a landing on Cyprus; improving relations with the USSR – which harboured deep antipathy to Greece and Greek anti-communism and then, as now, keen to detach Turkey from the Western sphere of influence – so that it would not object when Turkey attacked Cyprus, as it did not in 1974; and convincing the superpower it was most obliged to, the USA, that Turkey was more important to it than Greece and that its interests had to be taken more into account than Greece’s. 

Turkey’s calculation in this last instance was entirely correct. When Greece did indeed leave the military wing of NATO in August 1974 to protest Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus, it returned six years later with its tail between its legs. And when the Pasok government of Andreas Papandreou, elected in 1981, attempted a foreign policy more independent of NATO, this proved superficial, mere rhetoric, and it wasn’t long before Greece decided to abandon any pretence that its long-term security interests could be served outside of Western security apparatuses.

But why did Turkey want a chunk of Cyprus in the first place, why were its ears pricked when the UK in the 1950s, aiming to frighten the Greek Cypriots into submitting to British colonial rule, encouraged it to revive interest in the future of Cyprus, in the prospect of the island uniting with Greece? 

Of course, Turkish strategists said it was to do with Cyprus pointing at Turkey’s underbelly, fear of Turkey being surrounded by Greek islands and that there was concern for the fate of the island’s Turkish minority; but the truth was that Turkey always regarded Cyprus as having been unjustly taken from it by the British in 1878 and that restoring Cyprus to it would be righting a historic wrong. In other words, Cyprus became a matter of repairing Turkish national prestige as well as an opportunity for the latest generation of Turks to prove their patriotic credentials in the ongoing war against a perennial ethnic and civilisational rival and nemesis.

Another question worth asking is what prevents Turkey from imposing its will on Cyprus in today’s conditions, i.e. in which Turkey’s ultra-nationalist Islamist regime sends research vessels and warships to Cyprus’ territorial waters not only to challenge Cypriot sovereignty but to assert Turkish claims on the island’s energy resources.

What deterrence does Cyprus have to prevent further Turkish aggression, to stop them finishing the job of 1974? The fact that we are even asking this question suggests that Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and its subsequent occupation of the northern third of the island did not fulfil its long-term aim  – of abolishing the Republic of Cyprus and turning the whole of Cyprus into a Turkish satellite. The Republic of Cyprus survived Turkey’s attack, the free areas of the island flourished economically, retained international recognition as sole representative of the island, even joined the EU in 2004. Not one country – not even those closest to Turkey diplomatically, such as Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Somalia, have recognised the pseudo-state Turkey established in occupied Cyprus in 1983.

Certainly, Cyprus has no significant defence force to deter Turkey. It is not a member of any mutual defence pact – Turkey stands in the way of Cyprus joining NATO and even objects to Cyprus participating in the alliance's Partnership for Peace programme. 

Cyprus has a vague military agreement with Greece and Greece used to assert that any Turkish moves against Cyprus would be regarded as a casus belli; but, as Turkey’s manoeuvrings in Cyprus’ EEZ over the last few years have shown, Greece is not going to get involved militarily to protect Cyprus. Historically, Greece’s Cyprus policy, from Constantine Karamanlis, through George Papandreou, to both versions of the junta and back again to Constantine Karamanlis, was to prevent the island’s politics from dragging Greece into a war with Turkey, detaching Greece from the Atlanticist orbit and distracting the winners of the Greek civil war from their continuing fight against communism, which meant, after the military phase of the internecine conflict concluded in 1949, crushing anything that hinted at leftism or suggested accommodation with the Eastern bloc. President Makarios of Cyprus fell foul of successive governments in Athens for not showing sufficient hostility to the communist menace, which was why Cyprus in Greek politics was always a left-wing and not a right-wing – not a traditional nationalist – cause.

Cyprus has been, of course, since 2004, a member of the EU; but this is a free trade zone serving the economic interests of Germany and to a lesser extent France. If Turkey were to attack Cyprus, the EU, as a formality, might impose some sanctions on the aggressor, but the lessons of the last few years of Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus’ EEZ , are that these sanctions would be limited and unlikely to deter a determined Turkey. 

Cyprus has made itself useful to Israel – and hence the USA – but there can be no illusions that if there were any chance of reconciliation with Turkey, the Israelis would drop Cyprus like a hot potato and gladly resume the relations it used to enjoy with Ankara. 

Turning to Greece and how it deters Turkey, for decades after the invasion of Cyprus Greece thought it was a core EU country and that this afforded it bulletproof diplomatic cover against Turkish aggression. 

This was exposed as a grotesque fallacy not only by the 2010 economic crisis – when Greece was served up as a sacrificial victim to preserve the integrity of French and German banks – but also by the 2015 refugee crisis, which Greece was left to deal with on its own; and, even more startlingly, by Turkey’s first manoeuvrings to implement its Blue Homeland policy, an explicit challenge not only to Greece’s sovereignty but to its very existence, which left the EU indifferent. 

Again, we would assert, following Hanson, that Turkey’s Blue Homeland policy is not about grabbing the energy resources of the Eastern Mediterranean, the gas finds discovered off Cyprus and which potentially exist in the Aegean, but about prestige, honour, history, the longing to relive the conflicts of the past – whether it's Manzikert, the fall of Constantinople or the wars in Anatolia and Asia Minor that led to the creation of modern Turkish republic. All these factors crystallise in Turkish nationalist and Islamist fantasies of a revived Turkish-Islamic superpower to rival the pre-eminence of the unjustly maligned and betrayed Ottoman empire, the last 200 years of which saw it steadily and increasingly humiliated by aggressive Western powers and rebellious subjects, especially the Greeks.

Since the EU has proved woefully inadequate in deterring Turkish belligerence, Greece has responded to Turkey’s threats by a concerted effort not only to build its military capabilities, but to prove to others in the region  equally weary of Turkish expansionism – Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Syria – that Greece is a serious military power, willing to defend itself militarily against Turkey, which means willing to make the necessary economic, social, cultural and human sacrifices and hence a useful and reliable partner.

So, to conclude with Hanson: ‘Wars begin when aggressive powers believe that their targets are weaker, or give the false impression that they are weaker, or at least stay inert in the face of provocation… [and]… wars are deterred when all the potential players know the relative strengths of each and the relative willingness to use such power in defense of a nation’s interests. Lack of such knowledge leads to dangerous misjudgments. And war then becomes a grotesque foreordained laboratory experiment to confirm what should have been known in advance.’

Strategy, the Byzantine Empire, Socrates and Thucydides

In this interesting video Edward Luttwak discusses his book, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire.

Luttwak makes some fascinating insights into the nature of Byzantium; the many reasons for its longevity – which, for him, comes down to a culture of strategy; and the policy lessons contemporary strategists could learn from the Eastern Roman Empire, asserting, for example, that America should become more like Byzantium.

Coincidentally, I've been thinking quite a bit about 'strategy' recently, how the philosophy of strategy is far more effective in describing and navigating the intricacies of human affairs than traditional moral and ethical philosophy.

These thoughts have come to me as I've been reading Pierre Hadot's book, What is Ancient Philosophy? which asserts that philosophy is no more and no less than a way of life, a means, through permanent struggle, criticism and self-criticism, to find some kind of spiritual peace, involving a pursuit of 'wisdom without ever achieving it'.

Hadot's book is interesting and focuses a great deal on the figure of Socrates.

Now, Socrates, and his methodology, is someone I've always had trouble with: I've never been convinced, for example, that you can cure ignorance by merely pointing out to an ignorant person that they are, in fact, deluded, deranged, ill-informed or misguided. Ignorant people have a habit of insisting on their ignorance, otherwise they would not be ignorant in the first place. Anyway, my point is really this: reading Hadot's book has confirmed my feeling that when it comes to describing and navigating the intricacies of human affairs, I find Thucydides – the greatest theorist of Grand Strategy – far more illuminating than Socrates.

Thoughts on Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War

Some points emerging from reading Donald Kagan's Thucydides: The Reinvention of History, particularly in relation to the war between the Athenian empire and the Peloponnesians as it transpired in Sicily.

I’m sure I’m not the first one to point out that the disastrous Sicilian expedition, which significantly contributed to the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, evokes striking similarities to the Asia Minor catastrophe: an enthusiastic and capable expeditionary force has initial success but, mostly due to poor leadership and increasing loss of morale and self-belief, fails to consolidate its advantages and finish the job, allowing for a revival of the enemy and leading to calamitous defeat. Indeed, I’m sure the similar fates suffered by the Athenians in Sicily and Greeks in Ionia was not lost on Eleftherios Venizelos, a student and translator of Thucydides.

We note the bitterness and savagery with which Greek fought Greek throughout the Peloponnesian War, but particularly in Sicily. Kagan writes on the treatment of Athenian and Sicilian allied prisoners by the victorious Syracusans and Corinthians:

‘The triumphant Syracusans took their prisoners and booty [from the Athenian expedition] and stripped the armor from the dead enemy, hanging it from the finest and tallest trees along the [Assinarus] river. On returning to Syracuse they held an assembly where they voted to enslave the servants of the Athenians and their imperial allies and to place Athenian citizens and their Sicilian Greek allies into the city’s stone quarries. A proposal to put Nicias and Demosthenes to death provoked more debate… [and] the assembly voted to execute both [the Athenian] generals.

‘The Syracusans held over seven thousand prisoners in their quarries, crowded together in inhuman conditions, burned by the sun during the day and chilled by the autumn cold at night. They were given about a half-pint of water and a pint of food each day… and they suffered terribly from hunger and thirst. Men died from their wounds, from illness and from exposure and the dead bodies were thrown on top of one another, creating an unbearable stench.’

Thus, what the ‘inhumanity’ of the Peloponnesian War – and not just this war, but the virtually continual state of internecine Greek wars – reminds us is that, in practice, in this period, there was as much an Athenian, Corinthian, Syracusan or Spartan ‘nation’ as a Hellenic one and that the pan-Hellenic consciousness that existed did so side by side and, more often than not, competed with ‘national’ identities derived from belonging to a particular city state.

Following on from this, a word on Athenian arrogance and Athenian nationalism. With the advent of the Athenian empire, the Athenians ascribed to themselves the right to decide what it was and what it was not to be a Hellene. Indeed, the Athenians came to believe their way of life was the epitome of Greekness – Pericles’ funeral oration being the clearest expression of this, with his assertion that Athens was ‘an education to Greece’.

Thus, those Athenians who initially argued against the Sicilian expedition did so on the grounds that the Segastans – who had asked the Athenians for assistance in their conflict with Selinus and Syracuse in western Sicily – were not Greeks but ‘an alien race’ and a ‘barbaric people’, even though the Segastans were, in fact, a mixture of Ionian Greek colonists and Hellenised Elymian Sicilians.

We note that Demosthenes the orator in the fourth century BC deployed the same Athenian conceit against the Macedonians, asserting that they had to be resisted and could not claim leadership of Hellas because Philip and his people were not Greeks but barbarians.

The remarkable Salaethus and the siege of Mytilene

I mentioned in a previous post how, three years into the Peloponnesian war (i.e. in 428 BC), taking advantage of Athenian setbacks – plague, the death of Pericles, diminishing resources – the oligarchic regime in Mytilene saw an opportunity to fulfill its long-held aims of expanding its authority over the whole of Lesvos and removing the island from the Athenian empire.

In this revolt, Sparta, inevitably, offered backing and encouragement, while the Mytileneans promised that a united Lesvos under their hegemony would attach itself to the Peloponnesian alliance.

Outraged by Mytilenean duplicity and impudence, and defying the repeated blows it had recently endured, the Athenians summoned all their fiscal and materiel resources to despatch a task force to put down the Mytilene rebellion. After skirmishing and an inconclusive battle, the Mytileneans retreated behind their city walls and prepared to hold out against Athens until Spartan relief arrived.

JE Lendon, in his Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins, describes the increasing desperation of the Mytileneans after six months of siege:

‘A winter’s day in embattled Mytilene. The hungry guards looked out from the walls at the Athenian stockade surrounding the city; the cold Athenians on the stockade gazed resentfully at the city walls topped with cozy towers. All the long winter, Mytilene has been blockaded by darting ships upon the deep and by soldiers from the landward side: food was running short, and once again there was talk of begging Athens for terms. But suddenly a knock on a postern or a low cry from no-man’s land revealed the impossible: someone wanted to get into the city.

‘Opening a gate in the city wall, the astonished guards admitted a drenched figure whose long hair and red cloak – and no doubt his chilly equanimity at having crept through the Athenian lines – revealed him as a Spartan. Salaethus was his name, and in a trireme he had crossed the stormful February Aegean to land at one of Mytilene’s small allies on Lesvos; then on foot to Mytilene he had come, slipping under the Athenian fortifications by crawling up the bed of a torrent. Now, having rattled the ice out of his beard, he spoke his message to the besieged. The Peloponnesians were coming!’

Despite the heroic Salaethus’ confidence, the Spartans and their Peloponnesian allies, encumbered by hesitation and misjudgment, did not come and the demoralised Mytileneans were soon compelled to surrender their city to Athens. Then there follows one of the most celebrated episodes in Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian war, in which the Athenian assembly debates what punishment to mete out to defeated Mytilene.

Mytilenean ambassadors pled their city’s case, only for the appalling (to Thucydides) Cleon to demand that Mytilene be made an example of to deter any other potential defectors from the Athenian empire. And, indeed, his proposal for the wholesale destruction of Mytilene, the slaughter of its male population and the selling into slavery of the city’s women and children, is passed and a ship with the grim order is despatched to the Athenian garrison stationed on the island.

However, the following day, having reflected on the harsh punishment they had decided to inflict on the Mytileneans, the Athenians conduct a new debate and vote, which rescinds the original order in favour of a more moderate one, targetting only the rebellion’s ringleaders.

Now, in a race against time, to prevent the first order from being carried out, a second ship is sent to Lesvos. It arrives in the nick of time, just as the Athenian commander Paches is preparing Mytilene’s annihilation.

As for the remarkable Salaethus, having failed to convince the Mytileneans to attempt a break out rather than surrender and having escaped from Mytilene before the Athenians entered the city, finding sanctuary in an allied town on Lesvos, he is eventually captured, sent to Athens and executed, along with 1,000 Mytileneans, supporters of the rebellion.

For more discussion on issues emanating from JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins, see here.

Once Again for Thucydides

Some Thucydides resources I’ve come across.

First, I’ve been having another look at Peter Handke’s Once Again for Thucydides, which consists of a series of ‘micro-epics’ in which the Austrian writer (following the technique of Thucydides) with painstaking precision, anchored to time and place, observes the minutiae of human and natural life and ascribes epic meaning to them. These are intense pieces, parts of a travel journal taking in the Balkans, Spain and Japan, which invite you to (literally) see the world differently, more vividly, with the eyes of a painter, a good painter dedicated to detail and the pursuit of essence. (Read some of the 17 pieces here).

The classical historian Neville Morley has written this essay on the influence of Thucydides on Handke, which I haven’t been able to access fully, but the abstract reads:

‘Noch einmal für Thukydides, a collection of prose pieces by the Austrian writer Peter Handke, invites reflection on the history of his engagement with this classical author. In Kindergeschichte [Child Story], he draws on a reading of Thucydides as a war narrative in order to solve the problems he experienced in telling the story of the relationship between a father and daughter, interpreting the History of the Peloponnesian War as an account not of violence but of decisive moments and the developing characters of two peoples. In this book as elsewhere, Handke is commonly read as repudiating all history in favour of myth and mysticism, but in fact he draws upon Thucydides’ approach to history as a means of describing, understanding and exorcizing the past. This theme is pursued further in Noch einmal, where he also combines critique and homage in an exploration of Thucydides’ style and the theme of ‘realism’ (and its limits) in the depiction of events. His reading of Thucydides differs significantly from the prevailing modern traditions of reception; and, unlike those who revere the ancient author solely as an analyst and critic, Handke explores what it might mean to write as a modern Thucydides.’

On the unveiling of a monument in London to RAF Bomber Command, Morley also had this piece published on Thucydides. It pays particular attention to Pericles’ funeral speech (i.e. the speech the Athenian statesman gave on the internment of those Athenian soldiers who fell in the early part of the war against Sparta). Morley describes the funeral speech as a ‘masterpiece of rhetoric’ deployed down the years to justify the sacrifices demanded of a population at war. It is striking, Morley says ‘how far the oration subordinates individuals to the collective good’ and how Pericles’ sentiments ‘reflect a thoroughly un-modern conception of the relationship between the citizen and his community. One might suppose that, at least within the portion of the ideological spectrum that is suspicious of state power, they would raise doubts about Pericles’ political tendencies.’

Morley adds:

‘the oration is extremely (and deliberately) vague about the actual machinery of the Athenian state. Its grand statements about the power of the people, equality before the law, and emphasis on ability rather than class can be co-opted by any nation that chooses to call itself a democracy.’

Now, anyone who’s read my post on Robin Lane Fox’s analysis of Pericles’ funeral speech – which Lane Fox says projects a laudable balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility – and my presentation (and critique) of the even more penetrating interpretation of the oration put forward by Cornelius Castoriadis – in which the Greek philosopher portrays Pericles as describing an entwined city and citizenry that aims to create human beings living with beauty, living with wisdom and loving the common good – will realise that Morley’s depiction of the speech as patriotic tub-thumping or a rationale for totalitarianism is banal, superficial and inept, utterly failing to grasp the power of Pericles’ oration and what it reveals about Athens, its state, citizens and democracy.

Finally, the video above is a BBC production from 1991 of John Barton’s The War that Never Ends, an adaptation/dramatisation of Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, with some Plato thrown in. It is quite good.

Athens as America

‘Contemporary America is often now seen through the lens of ancient Athens, both as a center of culture and as an unpredictable imperial power that can arbitrarily impose democracy on friends and enemies alike. Thomas Paine long ago spelled this natural affinity out: “What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude.” Like ancient Athenians, present-day Americans are often said to believe that “they can be opposed in nothing,” and abroad can “equally achieve what was easy and what was hard.”

‘Although Americans offer the world a radically egalitarian popular culture and, more recently, in a very Athenian mood, have sought to remove oligarchs and impose democracy – in Grenada, Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq – enemies, allies, and neutrals alike are not so impressed. They understandably fear American power and intentions while our successive governments, in the manner of confident and proud Athenians, assure them of our morality and selflessness. Military power and idealism about bringing perceived civilization to others are a prescription for frequent conflict in any age – and no ancient state made war more often than did fifth-century imperial Athens.

‘So great were the dividends of envy, fear, and legitimate grievance against the ancient world’s first democracy that the victorious Peloponnesians who oversaw the destruction of the Long Walls of Athens – the fortifications to the sea symbolic of the power of the poor and their desire to spread democracy throughout the Aegean – did so to music and applause. Again, most Greeks concluded that, as Xenophon wrote, Athens’ defeat “marked the beginning of freedom for Greece” – without a clue that the victorious Sparta would move immediately to create its own overseas empire in the vacuum. Blinkered idealists in America who believe that the world wishes to join our democratic culture might reflect that at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, “the general good intentions of people leaned clearly in favor of the “Spartans” and that “the majority of Greeks were deeply hostile toward the Athenians.

‘The wealth and very liberality of Athens also encouraged dissent and hyper-criticism at home and abroad. The Athenians’ detractors expected a much higher level of fairness from them than they ever would have from the Spartans. Not until fourth-century Sparta incurred commensurate jealousy and envy as the Hellenic world’s only superpower, following its victory in the war, would the Greeks at last cease their distrust of imperial Athens.

‘This paradox was an exasperating experience for Athenians. And it perhaps presages the dilemma faced by generations of subsequent powerful Western liberal and imperial republics that were singularly chastised to match their idealistic and high utopian rhetoric with deeds. Just as states reprimanded Athens but preferred to visit the Acropolis rather than the unimpressive national Spartan shrine to Menelaus, so too the West’s Cold War detractors roundly condemned its realist foreign policy but usually preferred to accept a visiting professorship at Oxford, the Sorbonne, or the University of California, Berkeley, rather than a teaching slot in Moscow, Havana, or Cairo.

‘Sparta counted on these inconsistencies in its upcoming war with “Athens: the rest of the Greek world would subject Athens to a standard of behavior that it would never apply to illiberal Sparta. The privileged citizens of a consensual and affluent Athens would purportedly have a much lower tolerance for a drawn-out war’s pain and sacrifice than the militarists at Sparta, whose society was on a constant war footing and reflective of the barracks. And the volatile assembly would vote for and then reject military operations in a way unheard of at oligarchic Sparta.

‘Consequently, many have carefully read Thucydides in just that historicist context. Our leaders and pundits are eager to learn from the Athenians’ mistakes and successes. They are unsure whether the fate of Athens is to be our own, or whether Americans can yet match the Athenians’ civilization and influence while avoiding their hubris. Perhaps never has the Peloponnesian War been more relevant to Americans than to us of the present age. We, like the Athenians, are all-powerful, but insecure, professedly pacifist yet nearly always in some sort of conflict, often more desirous of being liked than being respected, and proud of our arts and letters even as we are more adept at war.’ (Victor Davis Hanson: A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War).

Homer against realpolitik. On JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins

JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins is an excellent account, elegantly written, of the first 10 years of the Peloponnesian war (431-421 BC), which questions Thucydides’ renowned assertion that the ‘truest cause of the war between Athens and Sparta was the growing greatness of the Athenians and the fear that this inspired, which compelled the Lacedaemonians to go to war’.

Thucydides’ ‘realpolitik’ Lendon points out, has informed analyses of conflict for centuries and has held particular sway over modern American strategists and international relations gurus.

However, Lendon believes that in order to understand the causes and conduct of the Peloponnesian war it is necessary to go beyond ‘realist’ doctrines and insist on the centrality of Homeric values to the motivations of fifth century Greeks – with the emphasis on rank, honour, prestige, competitiveness, vengeance and shaming.

Reasserting Homer not only presents us with a more compelling portrait of classical Greek culture, self-perception and psychology, but also provides us with a valuable paradigm for appreciating the motivations behind all wars and conflict.

Wars are often fought, if we follow Lendon (and Homer), not for pragmatic reasons, in struggles over power, resources or conflicting interests, but for the sake of reputation, national self-esteem, pride and out of wrath and revenge, the latter for perceived injustices that may have been inflicted decades or even centuries ago.

Furthermore, by rescuing the Peloponnesian war from ‘realist’American scholars, who regard the conflict as a ‘power struggle’ between democratic Athens and totalitarian Sparta – and want, in the process, to identify dynamic, open American society with Athens and depict its enemies as embodying grim and stolid Sparta – Lendon asks us to reconsider the modern tendency to extol the virtues of Athens and denigrate or caricature the Lacedaemonian way of life.

For Lendon, the Peloponnesian war was a conflict the Spartans were reluctant to fight and sought to resolve at every opportunity, while charges of war-mongering, brutality, hubris and arrogance stick more to Athens. The noblest and most sympathetic character of the period was not the paradigmatically democratic Athenian leader Pericles but the moderate king of Sparta, Archidamus.

Above is a podcast of JE Lendon in conversation with Bill Buschel (http://billbuschel.wordpress.com/) regarding Song of Wrath. The show was first broadcast on Hellenic Public Radio in New York in 2011.

And for more discussion emanating from Song of Wrath, go here.

Werner Herzog talks Kos, Crete, Homer, Thucydides, Linear B and Wrestlemania

Werner Herzog in conversation with Paul Holdengräber at the Onassis Cultural Center NY, 16 June 2015.

Socrates on how to reverse the decline of Athens

I mentioned in a previous post how, for classical Greeks, identity, self-perception and psychology were significantly configured by a mix of history and myth.

In fact, I came across a good illustration of this when reading Xenophon’s account of a conversation between Socrates and Pericles the Younger, on the subject of how to revive a declining Athens.

The dialogue would have taken place towards the end of the Peloponnesian war, when Athens was staring defeat in the face, and, obviously, before 406 BC when the aforementioned Pericles the Younger (son of Aspasia and the outstanding statesman of Athens’ Golden Age, Pericles) was tried and executed, along with five other generals in charge of Athenian forces at the naval Battle of Arginusae (406 BC).

The battle was brilliantly and surprisingly won by Athens, but the commanders, after they had allegedly neglected to rescue shipwrecked Athenian sailors and retrieve the Athenian dead from the sea, were charged with dereliction of duty. The kangaroo court and subsequent execution of the six amounted to another in a long line of shameful and self-destructive decisions by the Athenian citizenry during the Peloponnesian war, (a decision which, again, in true Athenian style, the Athenians were to repent… at leisure. Indeed, both men in Xenophon’s dialogue – Socrates and Pericles the Younger – were unjustly executed, via hemlock, victims of the degenerative tendency of Athenian democracy).

Anyway, as I said, what interested me in the exchange is that Socrates’ remedy for reversing Athenian decline – which is, essentially, a conservative, nationalist remedy (let’s assume it’s not the ultra-conservative Xenophon putting words into the philosopher’s mouth) – is based on an appeal to Athenians’ historical and mythical past. Socrates not only stresses the lessons to be learned from Athenian heroism in the Persian wars, fought only two to three generations previously; but also recommends for mimesis the great deeds of legendary figures such as Erechtheus and Theseus. The conversation, an extract of which is below, gives us a strong sense of the discourses at work in formulating Greek identity.

SOCRATES: Since we wish them [the Athenians] to strive to be the first in virtue, we must then show them that it is their special inheritance from olden days, and that by striving for this they may become superior to all men.

PERICLES: How can we teach them this?

SOCRATES: By reminding them, I think, that their earliest ancestors of whom tradition tells, were really as great as they have heard.

PERICLES: Do you refer to the judgment of the gods which Cecrops and his men pronounced because of their virtue?

SOCRATES: I mean also the birth and childhood of Erecthheus, and the war he waged against the men from all the adjacent lands, and the war of the sons of Heracles against the inhabitants of the Peloponnese. I refer, also, to all the wars waged in Theseus’ time, in all of which our ancestors proved clearly that they were better than their enemies. If you wish, I mean what their descendants did later, a little before our time: by themselves, they fought against the masters of all Asia and Europe as far as Macedonia, against men who possessed the greatest power and wealth the world had ever seen and who had performed the most daring deeds…

For more discussion emanating from JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins, go here.

Insult, wrath and retribution in the Peloponnesian war: yet more thoughts on JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath

As I’ve said in my last two posts on Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins, JE Lendon is keen to stress the role that revenge plays in that conflict and, indeed, in all conflicts.

The mechanism of revenge, Lendon says, starts with an insult (ὕβρις/hybris) – amounting to a calculated attempt to demean and cause an affront to honour (τιμή, timē) – which induces an ‘overpowering wrath’ and necessitates vengeance.

Only when revenge is accomplished is wrath ameliorated and honour restored. But, as Lendon points out, and demonstrates with examples from Homer and tragedy, this pattern – from humiliating insult to wrath to revenge to restoration of honour – is not a redemptive process. Rather, it is a process (directed by the Furies) involving chaos, frenzy and self-destruction. Such a process – of chaos, frenzy and self-destruction – is what ultimately characterises the Peloponnesian war.

Revenge not only defines the conduct of the Peloponnesian war but also goes to the heart of the dispute between Athens and Sparta, which is a dispute, according to Lendon (stressing the importance of Homeric ethics in classical Greece) about rank – about Sparta’s determination to retain its ascendant position in Hellas and Athens’ attempt to compel Sparta to accept its burgeoning status.

Shaming is the weapon of choice to undermine, reinforce or elevate rank in the classical Greek world and, as such, the Peloponnesian war begins with punitive Spartan raids into Attica, looting, ravaging and wasting of land, which are reciprocated not by full-scale hostilities but by similarly pernicious Athenian raids into Laconia and against Sparta’s Peloponnesian allies.

Attacking your enemy’s allies is a crucial tactic in this war of reputation, retribution and shaming because it aims to prove that you are incapable of defending your subordinate confederates and are unworthy of your hegemonic position.

Thus, in the first years of the war, Athens moves on from raids against Elis and Messinea in the Peloponnese and expands its theatre of operations to Halkidiki in northeastern Greece where, in an attempt to prove the limitations of Sparta’s reach and power, Athens attacks and seizes pro-Spartan Potidaea.

Sparta responds to this humiliation by attacking an Athenian protectorate, Plataea, in Boeotia; but when Plataea holds out, Sparta seeks to undermine Athenian prestige and restore its own by encouraging the Mytelineans to break free from the Athenian sphere of influence (and fulfill Myteline’s long-term ambition to exert authority over the whole of Lesvos). Athens crushes the Mytelinean revolt, prompting the Peloponnesians to try a similar shaming maneuver in Corcyra. Here, they sponsor a pro-Spartan oligarchic coup, triggering years of strife and carnage on the island, which comes to epitomise the loathing and vindictiveness of this Greek civil war.

For all posts discussing issues emanating from JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian begins, see here.

History, myth and self-destruction among the Greeks: more thoughts on JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath

More reflections emerging from reading Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins, in which JE Lendon stresses the role of status and prestige in that particular conflict and, indeed, in all conflicts.

Lendon makes clear that for the classical Greeks, imbued with Homeric culture, identity and rank were shaped not only by the historical but also the mythical past. Thus, we note that at the conclusion of the Peloponnesian war and the defeat of Athens (404 BC) – and despite the urgings of its allies – Sparta declined to destroy Athens because of the city’s role decades earlier in the service of Hellas during the Persian wars.

For the same reasons, Alexander the Great was lenient towards Athens despite its overt hostility towards Macedonia – its part in the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC) and the revolt of Thebes (335 BC) – although the Macedonians had no such compunction when it came to Thebes itself, which was razed and its population sold into slavery, and not just because in resisting Macedonia, the Thebans had lobbied for assistance from the Persian king, but because this treachery was part of an inherited pattern of betrayal, in Alexander’s eyes, in which Thebes had also sided with the Persian invaders more than a century before.

More illustrative, perhaps, of the way the past informed Greek self-perception, we note that Sparta’s perennial Peloponnesian rival Argos, after being defeated in the Battle of Champions (546 BC) and the Battle of Sepeia (494 BC), never reconciled itself to its diminished status and Sparta's hegemony in the peninsular and in Hellas; the Argives justifying their obsessive enmity towards Sparta on the grounds that in the legendary war that, essentially, established the Greeks as a nation, i.e. the Trojan war (1250 BC), it was Argos (under King Agamemnon) that led the pan-Hellenic expedition in Asia, while Sparta (and its cuckolded king, Menelaus) was a bit-part player.

 As Lendon puts it:

‘On the basis of Argos’ standing in myth, Argos could claim the highest rank of any Greek state. And the Argives were anxious to vindicate their rank in every succeeding generation.’

This vicious irreconcilable rivalry meant that from the fifth century onwards, Argos’ main foreign policy objective was to undermine Sparta and this it did by allying itself with whichever state happened to be fighting the Lacedaemonians – with Athens during the Peloponnesian war; with Thebes, Athens and Corinth in the Corinthian war; with Thebes, under Epaminondas, who took on and dealt a shattering blow to Spartan leadership and power, most notably at the Battle of Leuctra (371 BC); with Macedonia, as it sought to establish and maintain hegemony in Greece; and, finally, with Greece’s Roman overlords.

Indeed, Argos’ interminable feud with Sparta is typical of inter-Greek state relations – in fact, such abiding antipathies could be found as much within Greek states as between them – in which destroying yourself seemed a price worth paying so long as you took your rival down with you. No surprise, therefore, that Greeks inspired the concepts of the Cadmean as well as the Pyrrhic victory.

For more discussion emanating from Song of Wrath, go here.

The limits of Pericles’ living with beauty and living with wisdom

A final word, for the time being, on Pericles, his funeral oration and Athenian democracy.

Having taken into account Robin Lane Fox’s lecture on Why Pericles Matters, which wants to rescue Athenian democracy from modern critics – determined to subject it to their anti-colonial, anti-imperialist fixations – and assert the radical and unique nature of Periclean Athens; and Cornelius Castoriadis’ insistence that we transform Pericles’ famous dictum, of loving beauty and loving wisdom, into loving and living with beauty and loving and living with wisdom; it is important to note that when Pericles speaks of Athens and the Athenians in the funeral oration, he is speaking of a vision for Athens and Athenians. Not that Pericles is conjuring up a utopia, because Pericles with his democratic reforms, his revival of the city’s monuments and subsidisation of the arts, put flesh and bones on his vision, but a vision is what his exhortations in the funeral oration amounts to.

Thus, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing that Athens was a pristine society that lived up to Pericles’ hopes for it. Indeed, although there is a chronological justification for including Pericles’ funeral oration so early in Thucydides’ account of the conflict between Athens and Sparta, its early mention also allows us to see how, through the next 27 years of the Peloponnesian war, Athens and the Athenians fell catastrophically short of Pericles’ advice to love and live with wisdom and love and live with beauty.

We also note that Pericles’ vision of an entwined city and citizenry was hotly contested and deeply resented by significant sections of the Athenian body politic.

In particular, Athens’ aristocratic class – to which the blue-blooded Pericles belonged – loathed Pericles and his innovations, and this hostility to Periclean democracy was shared by Plato, Thucydides, Aristotle, Aristophanes and so on, who all regarded it as inclined to demagoguery, mob rule and recklessness. (Indeed, Plato was not only antipathetic to Pericles’ democratic ideals but also his promotion of the arts, with the philosopher notoriously proposing the banning of poets from his Republic).

Thus, Athens’ surrender to Sparta after the Battle of Aegospotami (404 BC) was put down to a succession of disastrous decisions taken by the Athenian assembly, while other decisions in the course of the conflict – such as the slaughter of the Melians and the execution of the six generals (one of whom was Pericles’ son) following the Battle of Arginusae (406 BC, for failing, after victory, to rescue stranded sailors) – reveal the limits of loving and living with wisdom and loving and living with beauty. (And, of course, loving and living with wisdom didn’t stop the Athenians condemning Socrates to death in 399 BC).

Castoriadis would also have us believe two things about Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian war. First, that it signified the end of Athenian democracy and the extraordinary flourishing of culture that accompanied it; and, second, that the gravediggers of that democracy were Alcibiades and Cleon.

On whether Alcibiades was a gravedigger of Athenian democracy: you could, in fact, make a stronger case that it was the vagaries of Athenian democracy that destroyed the life and career of the brilliant general – by bringing trumped up charges of sacrilege against him, prompting him to abandon his command in the Sicilian expedition (perhaps, the defining episode in the Peloponnesian war) and go into exile and, worse still, seek sanctuary in Sparta – and that, therefore, it was the fickle, myopic Athenians, who dug their own graves, not Alcibiades.

Nor is it clear that the Peloponnesian war did end, as Castoriadis says it did, Athenian democracy or terminate that remarkable period of creativity in the arts that characterised Periclean Athens.

John R. Hale in his book, Lords of the Sea, makes a case for an Athenian recovery after the defeat at Aegospotami, the pulling down of Athens’ walls and Sparta’s occupation of the city. Spartan leadership of the Hellencic world soon became detested and Athens’ military prowess, particularly its sea power, revived, as did Athens’ cultural invention, with Plato teaching at the Academy and Isocrates at the Lyceum, while the sculptor Praxiteles was adorning Athens with his masterpieces. Thus, it was Alexander the Great and the Macedonians who buried Athens and its unique society, not Sparta and certainly not Alcibiades.

Ultimately, then, we note that living with wisdom and living with beauty does not preclude – and did not preclude in the Athenian case, as Thucydides demonstrates – living with sickening violence, injustice and rank stupidity.

*The video above is a reading of Plutarch’s life of Pericles. It’s an old-fashioned rendering – and it even refers to the goddess Athena as Minerva, which is unacceptable – but Plutarch is an essential source for our knowledge of Pericles.

Robin Lane Fox: Why Pericles Matters

Thanks to the reader who pointed me in the direction of Robin Lane Fox’s lecture Why Pericles Matters, which was recently given at Royal Holloway College, here in London. (You can see the lecture here if your computer is up to it but, if like mine, it’s not, I did manage to extract the audio and you can listen to it above).

In his lecture, Lane Fox tells us why the life, deeds and ideas of Pericles, the great Athenian statesman – or ‘the Zeus of the human pantheon of Athens’, according to Hegel – continue to matter to modern societies. Naturally, Lane Fox pays closest attention to Pericles’ funeral oration, as recalled by Thucydides, in which Pericles, on the occasion of the internment of those Athenian soldiers who fell in the early skirmishes of the war against Sparta, presents his idealised view of Athens and its citizens. It’s an oration that, for Cornelius Castoriadis is ‘the most important political monument of political thought I have ever read’, though for its detractors is an odious expression of collectivism, nationalism, militarism and totalitarianism. And, indeed, it is to these critics that Lane Fox addresses his defence of Pericles.

Lane Fox starts by telling us that Pericles’ funeral oration matters because Pericles attaches no religious meaning or connotations to the Athenian war dead being commemorated. There is no mention of gods, martyrdom or paradise. These battlefield deaths are afforded no sacred significance and there is no religious comfort – of an afterlife, for example – that Pericles can offer to the grieving relatives.

Pericles and his funeral oration also matter, Lane Fox says, because of the radical democratic ethos represented. When Pericles speaks to the gathered citizenry, he speaks not as a monarch or president might, not as the leader of an elite or vanguard, not as a general or commander-in-chief, not even as a representative, but as one citizen to another, as an equal. Indeed, Athens is its citizens; and its citizens are Athens. The relationship is symbiotic. One does not dominate or exist separately from the other.

For Athenians to be so enamoured and engaged with their city – and for Athenians to make the best decisions on issues that ranged from the mundane to the momentous – required an unceasing dedication to education and culture – to paideia; and in his funeral oration, Pericles indicates that, in Athens, paideia is intended to prepare its citizens for civic life and public duty by inculcating in them a love of beauty – without this implying ostentation; and a love of wisdom – without this implying softness, or neglect of martial skills.

As such, for Pericles, according to Lane Fox, Athens and the Athenian way of life promoted arts, festivals and athletic games; championed thought and debate, enquiry and innovation; expected versatility not uniformity from its citizens; and, though adorned with resplendent civic buildings, recommended modesty at home and in the display of private wealth. In short, Lane Fox says, Periclean Athens matters because it promotes individual freedom but, at the same time, is vigourously communitarian. The individual who wanted to live outside the community, or disparaged civic life, was not the epitome of freedom, as he is in some modern ideologies, but an idiot (ἰδιώτης), a useless and inept character, with nothing worthwhile to offer or say.

For further discussion on Why Pericles Matters, go here and here.