Was Today’s Poverty Determined in 1000 B.C.? (yes, partially)

New York Times ^ | August 2, 2010 | CATHERINE RAMPELL

[SunkenCiv]

The Greeks were free insofar as there was a *class* of free men. Athens’ democracy in the so-called Age of Pericles was not unlike FDR’s New Deal years. FDR’s gigantic war was won, while Pericles’ was lost. And FDR didn’t start the war, while Pericles basically did.

Perhaps the way the Athenians should have handled the situation was to *not* declare war, but rather wall off their zone of control in the Pelopponese, to keep the Spartans out (that might have taken the hiatus between war seasons), and *then* maybe attacked Sparta by loosening its grip on the non-Spartan Greeks held by the Spartans as slaves. Sparta would have been fatally weakened economically, and Athens would have had the undying affection of (and alliance with) the new (walled) cities of freed Greeks. Also, Sparta would not have been able to hurt Athens at all. And give or take the Athenians picking off the Spartan stormtroopers by bow and arrow from the top of the wall, the Spartan army might have ceased to exist without any land engagements at all.

The Spartans wanted to expand their control over their rivals, and were so blinkered that they didn’t regard non-Greeks as any real threat to their own hegemony over the Pelopponese. And they looked down on all non-Spartans. The Persians may have had in mind an eventual conquest of the entire Greek peninsula, but at the least wanted that Athenian fleet eliminated to protect their dominion in Anatolia.

Thebes was pretty smart in that it always took Sparta’s part against the Athenians, but didn’t do much fighting during the decades of that war. After the defeat of Athens, the Thebans suggested the whole city be burned to the ground and never be allowed to be rebuilt. The Spartans didn’t go for that. Also, the Spartans didn’t trust Thebes, which had grown in population, wealth, and influence during that war. Agesilaus, last king of the Spartans, made war on Thebes incessantly, for no apparent reason.

What turned out to be the final significant campaign of classical Sparta (compulsory pederasty, gender separation, among other hideous cultural characteristics) was against Thebes, but led by Agesilaus’ co-ruler (Sparta always had two kings) and not surprisingly this was at Agesilaus’ suggestion. Most of what remained of the Spartan warrior population (less than a thosand) along with a trained auxiliary of helots (slaves, perhaps another couple of thousand) promised their freedom if they fought in this action, marched out. At Leuctra the Thebans outnumbered and outfought the Spartans, and after action insisted that they be first to gather their dead. The net effect of this was that the few surviving Spartans could see the death toll, which was terrible.

The Theban general who brainstormed the entire operation then avoided attacking the unwalled Sparta proper, instead marching throughout the Spartan slave territories and freeing their fellow Greeks, including the Messenians to the west. All these Greeks wound up building walled towns, which was enough by itself to prevent Spartan reconquest. But the Spartan population had cratered anyway. It became a backwater, and even more backward than in its notorious heyday.

Plato’s “Republic” describes the classical Spartan state to a ‘t’ but treats it as a theoretical imaginary utopia. This isn’t surprising, what with his being a big fan of Sparta, and not liking or trusting the Athenian democracy. The Athenians after all had basically murdered Socrates, who had been Plato’s butt-buddy and mentor. Plato even had some power over postwar Athens, power granted by the Spartan overlords. This overlordship became too much to manage even before the final crisis with Thebes. Athens threw out the Spartan stooges and reasserted democratic control.

Agesilaus left town, renting out his services as a mercenary and military advisor, and apparently dying abroad, perhaps of old age.

“Was Alcibiades one of the players behind the disastrous Syracuse expedition? My history time-line is not clear. One thing that amazes me about that venture is that the Athenians were supposed to have lost 50,000 men. Or so I have imbibed from some source. But Athens had only about 10,000 free citizens. Can you clear me up on this?”

Athens had a larger population than that, even after the plague (maybe typhus, just a guess here) swept through the besieged city. Pericles and his consort (who was a foreign prostitute) both succumbed. A good bit of the population was made up of people heading to Athens to find their fortunes, make names for themselves, and/or to be where the action was. Also the Athenian fleet was powered by rowers who were employees of the state (not slaves), and the fleet was so large that these employees were hired from all over the place, not just Athens. Athens wouldn’t have been able to supply all the rowers when the Athenian Empire was at its pinnacle.

Athens had used its fleet to basically dominate all the seaport towns on the Greek mainland and in the Aegean, and thereby extract taxes (protection money, in gangster parlance) which were used primarily to support the fleet itself. Athens tried to establish a sort of economic monopoly, the same way that Napoleon did much later, but with the difference that Athens had the navy to do it.

Alcibiades was the demagogue and con man who convinced the apparently ever-gullible Athenians to finance an expedition of conquest all the way to Sicily to conquer Syracuse. Practically on the eve of the expedition Alcibiades wound up accused of some vandalism and atheism, and realized what could very easily happen to him if he stuck around.

So he fled.

To Sparta.

He had the entire Athenian scheme in detail, and the Spartans (at that time still in the long truce in the middle of the P War) sent one of their very best generals to Syracuse to organize the resistance. The Athenians must have been total idiots to follow through with Alcibiades’ plan after he fell out of favor, and, well, JMHO, they were idiots. And they followed through. And it was a disaster.

Alcibiades returned to Athens with the victorious Spartans, and expected a plump job as a reward. Instead, Agesilaus had him killed on the QT. One of Agesilaus’ earliest supporters (and to whom Agesilaus probably owed his kingship) was a schemer (and great commander) who also wound up getting killed in the immediate postwar years. Agesilaus regarded him as an enemy, which was likely how Agesilaus regarded pretty much everyone.

The great Greek playwrites flourished during this whole interval spanning the Persian Wars and the Pelopponesian War, and the latter is referenced in many of the surviving plays, both the tragedies and the comedies. Aeschylus was actually a rower on a bench in a trireme during the Battle of Salamis.

Greek society even in Athens was a hierarchical affair. The closest analogy would be that of ancient Rome, particularly what is still referred to as the Roman Republic. There were families and tribes, and the households were ruled by the dads. They were also the ones who gathered to discuss and vote on the laws, and those laws were necessarily local (since these were all city-states).

This isn’t to say that it wasn’t a form of democracy, or that it wasn’t a necessary step. Consensus isn’t a form of democracy, because when the consensus is dictatorship, one is ruled by a dictator whether one wants to be or not. Dictators are not mindreaders, so they rely both on random acts of violence (which are always blamed on the victims, based on some ad hoc accusations) which we might call terrorism, as well as on vast networks of secret police, spies, informants, and torturers.

The Roman Republic started the Roman Empire, by conquering and annexing neighboring towns, including Ostia. By the time of the generally regarded beginning of the empire, Rome already had overseas territories, and had reduced the Etruscan rival city-states, suffered through sixteen years of Hannibal’s expeditionary force and then defeated him and Carthage itself, and conquered the scheming ally of Hannibal, the Macedonian Kingdom, Greece, and parts of Anatolia.

The office of emperor was an evolved response to the need for a chief executive, and provided the model for our own Framers when they came up with the office of POTUS. A sitting emperor could basically all but pass the throne to his chosen heir via his own last will and testament, and despite the occasional coup d’etat, a good many of these inheritances were honored by the Senate.

The difference in the Senate between the republic period and what we call the imperial period was that who was eligible to serve was transformed, making the Roman Senate more representative and more democratic. About three dozen families in the Roman republic had owned most of the land in Italy, and held all the political power. The grip of those families on the reins of power started to disintegrate during the most famous of the civil wars (Caesar vs Pompey) and was gone by the time Vespasian seized the purple. The last of the Julio-Flavians, Nero, had committed suicide when he was told that his anointed successor was on the way with an army. His successor was from one of the old families. That old dude was killed by rebellious troops.

The non-Italian emperors were (like the Italian ones) a mixed bag, but of the five Julio-Flavians, only three were any good (Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius). Trajan was born in Africa I think, and under his battle standard the Empire hit its all-time high economically and geographically. One of my favorites was Aurelian (born in Dacia, one of Trajan’s conquests), who only ruled for five years, but managed to reconquer most of the rebellious parts of the empire, build the city wall to protect Rome, and lay the groundwork (and indeed, buy time) for Diocletian. Aurelian was murdered by one of his aides who was embezzling or taking bribes or something.

Probably the way to hold the empire together (and I’m sure it wouldn’t have worked; Diocletian’s system barely lasted long enough for his colleague to renege, emerge from retirement, and try to retake the throne) would have been to learn to live with the independent provinces that had arisen in the 3rd c AD, and hammer out a ruling council, and try things like Latin instruction throughout the population, freeing the millions of slaves (some of whom were literate from decent families but down on their luck) after employing them in state projects (clearing land for settlement, rerouting some rivers to clear swamps and so on), and clearing Rome of idlers and bread dole layabouts. But, that’s merely one of those “what-if” scenarios. :’)

[ARepublicanForAllReasons]

Thanks for your reply, SunkCiv.

Alcibiades was the demagogue and con man who convinced the apparently ever-gullible Athenians to finance an expedition of conquest all the way to Sicily to conquer Syracuse.

So... it WAS Alcibiades who was behind the Syracuse disaster. I know what the vandalism consisted of. He smashed the genitalia of the statues of Greek heroes that lined a prominent boulevard in Athens. But I had thought that he fled eventually to one of the Greek cities in Asia, where he was trapped by his enemies in the house of a wealthy friend. They burned it to the ground. That must have been a different character in the great drama that was ancient Greece.

That Agesilaus sounds like a real classical paranoid tyrant, Hitler, Stalin, Hussein come to mind. And the compulsory pederasty of Sparta makes their demise all the more satisfactory. I am glad the enslaved greeks of the Spartan empire were finally freed.

I am aware that the famous Athenian 'democracy' was in fact an elitist system based on slavery and general equality among the landed and wealthy. I recall in Plato's Apology that the vote on the fate of Socrates was only a few hundred on each side. This implies a really tiny ruling elite. And they had no Bill of Rights, though they seem to have voted on everything. But they could, and did, often vote away their popular control by electing a Stratego.

The Athenians must have been total idiots to follow through with Alcibiades’ plan after he fell out of favor, and, well, JMHO, they were idiots. And they followed through. And it was a disaster.

Athenian foolishness is indeed astounding and perplexing. How could a people who achieved such remarkable cultural, material and military progress, whose motto was "Nothing in Excess", be so short-sighted?
I know the quote is usually rendered "All Things in Moderation", but that would, if taken literally, imply that one should practice everything, just in moderation. I like my rendering, or the alternative "Moderation in All Things."

I would like to comment on the Roman history you so generously share, but time constraints and the ungainly length of my posts dissuade me, at this time. We will have plenty of time to discuss this and much more, as long as my computer doesn't fail and terrorists don't shut down FreeRepublic!

Kind regards,
ARFAR

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks ARFAR!