Not at all.
I love productive give and take discussions. For example, I learn from you that Persia was actually technologically and militarily more advanced than I realized. Of course, the very long supply lines were a big problem. Salamis was the decisive battle, because Athens was occupied and burned.
When I say 'free Greeks', I mean that they were a rational people, not beholden to the autocratic whims of a God-Emperor as in Egypt, Persia and China. Even the monarchies hated a despot. Knowing this, it is a puzzle to me why Sparta made alliance with Persia. What did they expect the final result to be?
What little is known in their own words of Mycenaean Greece has been translated from a fairly small body of Linear B tablets. These contain details of local economic activity, which was apparently at least minutely inventoried by, and probably controlled by, the state.
I have heard that the earliest known examples of writing were inventory lists of goods and monetary accounts. Who would guess that the need for record keeping would lead to sonnets and novels? I think the ancients preferred to keep their mythologies in the oral tradition. This gave great status to those elders with good memories who were living tomes of their civilization's history. And it allowed for creative embellishment.
Hegel wrote that the ancient empires showed that "One could be free" (the Emperor), and the caste system states of Greece showed that "Some could be free." And finally, the emerging republics of his own time showed that "All could be free." This is about the only sensible thing I have read from Hegel.
The some free men of the Hellenic city-states started a trend in freedom of thought and action that continues to unfold. One man can make a monumental difference. One man can change history. The value of creative thought was proven. And the dangers of one man given too much power was also demonstrated. I am thinking of the egomaniac Alcibiades, whose treasonous and destructive acts forced him to take refuge in a Greek city in Asia. Unlike Themistocles, he didn't make it to old age, as you know.
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?
The Roman Empire tore itself apart because it didn't have any kind of unifying national identity, and those who did identify with the Roman civ wound up fighting each other for power. It never had any kind of system of orderly succession (or even any way out of office except death) until Diocletian came along, and his system didn't work perfectly either.
Of course the Roman system of government was not designed to accommodate Emperors. It did have a tight unifying national identity at its inception, but as the city-state grew into a vast empire, that national identity kept getting watered down. Citizenship was extended to more and more peoples, and after Julius Ceasar, that citizenship was hardly equal to what the original inhabitants of the seven hills enjoyed. Compare the right to vote today with what it meant in 1800 in our own country.
IMHO, Rome should never have messed with the Germania. But with Emperors instead of the Senate in control, status was based on conquest. The Emperors were named after the regions they conquered. This inability to live within limits was a major factor for the Empire. Somewhere in their history Rome's wars changed from defensive wars to offensive wars of sheer conquest. Thus runs the course of all over-reaching Empires.
Well, I surely have rattled on as much or more than you, SunkCiv. But this is OUR forum (by the good graces of JR), so who cares what the neighbors think. If you like, we can continue an exchange via FReep mail.
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. :’)