From the Republic of Athens to the Athenian Empire: Athenian Hegemony and its Lessons for America.
The Lessons of Thucydides’
By Dr. Srdja Trifkovic
Thucydides lessons are timeless, and an in-depth knowledge of his History of the Peloponnesian War should be a part of every thinking person's education. What follows is a verbatim account of a lecture on the lessons of history that "the world's greatest historian" can teach us, and their relevance for our time. This presentation was made by Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, distinguished scholar, researcher and journalist, as part of The Regnery Lectures, at the Third Annual Summer School, sponsored by The Rockford Institute of Rockford, Illinois, from 1 to 5 August 2000.
Our common European civilization, of which The Old Republic is an integral part or else it is nothing, is rooted in the glory that once was Hellas. It is among Greek thinkers, scientists, and artists that our spiritual and intellectual mentors are to be found. This is reflected even in the way we repeat their political follies. Our present leaders do not know or care, that having lead a voluntary alliance of independent free polities against the mighty aggressor from the East, Athens grew rich, arrogant, and complacent in the aftermath of its victory. Its leadership degenerated into hegemony which was justified by the ideology of "exporting democracy." It was admittedly obeyed for several decades, initially out of self-interest, then out of fear rather than respect, and finally it was hated. The law of power generating countervailing power came into play, other Greek city-states united against Athens, and it fell at the end of the glorious fifth [century, B.C.], never to recover as a political or military factor of any significance in world affairs.
Historical parallels between eras and events are valid and important, because the factor of human nature remains relatively constant. It would be preposterous to assume that our jet engines or intimate search engines make us significantly different from our European ancestors. To claim that our material progress over the past century or two makes us in any way wiser or better than the Greeks of twenty-five centuries ago would be simply hilarious. Let us therefore look at the story of the Athenian rise and fall as a reminder to our present-day rulers that certain modes of political thinking and behavior will produce similar results today, just as they did in 404 B.C., or in 1815, or in 1945.
The Persian invasion of mainland Greece in 480 B.C. transformed the Greek world forever. It played a crucial role in the refinement and definition of the Hellenic identity. Admittedly, of the hundreds of Greek city-states, only a few dozen opposed the Persian King-of-Kings, and only a small minority of Greeks participated in the war. But the victorious Athenians asserted freedom from external restraint as the key ingredient of Greek consciousness. In the years that followed the Persian defeat, Athenian power grew unabated. Its rise was due, in no small part, to the geo-political genius of Themistocles, whose grasp of the need for a strong, permanent navy was eminently modern in its strategic assumptions, and in its concept of the projection of power. The withdrawal of the Spartans from the continuing war against the Persians additionally helped Athens' claim, still limited and modest at that time, to be recognized as primus inter pares.
In order to forge closer ties with the Ionians and the islands, and to prevent any further threat from the East, before it got out of hand, the Athenians established an alliance based on the island of Delos, the ancient center of Ionian worship, in 478 B.C. It became known as The League of Confederacy of Delos [The Delian League], but while it was formed as a defensive alliance against Persia, the League quickly evolved into a tool for furthering Athenian ambitions in Hellas proper. What did Hellas mean? The notion of Hellenic unity was originally based on freely evolving institutions, such as common shrines and beliefs, a common alphabet, and a shared Homeric tradition. But this spontaneous unity of culture and tradition by no means implied a necessity, let alone any widely spread desire, towards the centralizing, state-building experiments of a Bismarckian kind. The prevailing view of Hellas implied political diversity in cultural unity, somewhat reminiscent of the Southern view of the Union. Accordingly, by 468 B.C., after the Ionian cities had been liberated and the Persian fleet destroyed, many members of the League thought it unnecessary to continue the confederacy. They acted as reasonably, and therefore as naively, as those of us who felt that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] had outlived its purpose after the fall of the [Berlin] Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Empire.
In suppressing all attempts of League members to secede, the Athenians claimed, first, that the Persian danger still existed, second, that the Alliance was needed to maintain and protect the large free-trade areas so necessary for the allies' (read, Athenian) commerce, and finally, that it was needed to "promote democracy": the similarity with our own times is truly remarkable. It has been said that the Athenians created an Empire because they dared not unmake the confederation; this is giving them too much credit. Empires are not created by default, and against the wishes of allegedly reluctant hegemonists. Note how quickly, in order to keep its budding empire together, Athens started meddling in its clients' internal affairs, and ordering their lives in the name of spreading "democracy." This was the first time in history that the State sought to order the affairs of others in the name of an ideological concept. Athens aided and abetted the suppression of its local aristocratic structures, and held itself as the leader of a union of democratic States. Its self-appointed role signaled the birth of a view of international affairs that has created endless problems, both for its upholders and for its victims, ever since.
Athenian self-congratulatory rhetoric apart, to many Greeks, and primarily to the members of the traditionalist Spartan League, and the suppressed aristocrats within the "Democratic Empire," Athens was a tyrant city, and an enslaver of Greek liberties. Pericles -- part Lincoln, part Disraeli -- sought to justify Athenian imperialism in the language heralding Wilsonian millenarianism; claiming that it brought freedom from fear and want to the Greek world. " We did not gain this empire by force," he asserted, "our allies came to us of their own accord and begged us to lead them." True up to a point, but having been led, they were no longer free to thank the leaders and continue on their own way. Thucydides outlines how Athens embarked on its imperial experiment almost without pause, and without deliberation. As leaders of the League, it fully controlled the leadership: the Athenian citizens alone selected its treasurers. In 454 B.C., the Athenians moved the treasury of the League to their own city, and started collecting one-sixteenth of the allies' tribute to Athena Polis, patron of Athens, and now patron of the re-organized League itself. This was the formal admission of the changed character of the League. This money paid for the temples on the Acropolis, supported the fleet, provided work for the citizens of Athens, and accumulated a reserve fund.
By 450 B.C., the Delian League was an organization of de-facto Athenian colonies, still nominally autonomous, but whose center and treasury was now in Athens. The allied leaders largely went along, because they needed political stability and commercial predictability. And because, being "democratic," they no longer felt accountable to their own people ( think of Canada's Chretien, or Britain's Blair, and you'll get the idea ). The League went beyond its initial brief into anti-terrorist operations. Syros, Karystos, and Naxos, Greek pirate nests, were cleared of criminal elements and turned into Athenian settlements. An out-of-area operation, into the non-Greek Eastern Mediterranean, was on the agenda next. While the Athenian task-force to Egypt, in 459 B.C., was a Mogadishu-like disaster, others were successful and lucrative. Athens grew heady on its own brew. Alcibiades, at Sparta, sounded truly Albrightesque, when he vowed that Athens would conquer Sicily, then the Hellenes in Italy, next Carthage itself, and then the Peloponnese, with "all the additional Hellenic forces which we will have acquired in the West, until we be the masters of the entire Hellenic world." By that time "Hellenism" meant exactly what "The International Community" means today. It was but an alibi for rampant Athenian imperialism.
After 460 B.C., the Athenians gave up all pretenses of consensual leadership, and initiated hostilities with Sparta's allies, and soon, with Sparta itself. The fighting from 459 until 445, the start of the thirty-years' peace -- with an intervening five-years' truce -- is sometimes called the first Peloponnesian War, and is less known because we didn't have Thucydides to write about it. It was but a skirmish, though, compared to the carnage initiated in 431 B.C. During that time the Athenians became the sovereign power of Hellas, realizing for themselves the dream of the Kings of the Persians. Those proud men who had only recently won over the Spartans, reassuring them that nothing could enslave the Hellenes, were now trying to justify their attitude by three of the strongest motives: fear, honor, and interest. "It has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger," they said, and added that they believed themselves worthy of their position. As a modern Greek historian, Hondrocopoulos, pointed out, "under the pressure of three of the strongest motives, here it is then: ' there are things greater than liberty, things that exceed even the gods' demands, they're honor, and fear, and interest.'" An unbelievable statement. Why then, had these people lost their principles? Had they become bereft of any ideals? And not only do they seem to have replaced the recently spilled blood with the trinkets thrown before them, they had also converted this fallacy into an inevitable law, into a great principle; an inconceivable transformation. Is it ever possible for a whole people of heroes to give up the burning torch, in order to keep the kettle? Yes, precisely, the sharp-witted Thucydides tells us. We listen to the Athenians speaking unequivocally, and being completely familiar with the language of power, the language of the Persians, which they used to think impossible for them to speak.
Born after the battle of Salamis, Thucydides could hear the Athenians speak, after the victory and their new and complete dominance, a language that only Marlowe and Shakespeare were able to revive in the Elizabethan theatre. Pericles, in their rendering, explained to those who lacked the nerve to understand that they could not decline the burdens of Empire and still expect to share its honors: " To recede is no longer possible, if indeed any of you, in the alarm of the moment, has become enamored of the honesty of such an unambitious part. For what you are called to be is, to speak plainly, a Tyranny. To take it perhaps is wrong, but to let it go is unsafe. Hatred and unpopularity of the moment have fallen to the lot of all who have aspired to rule others." This hubris is totally undisguised in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, and I quote, " We believe that heaven, and we know that men, by natural law, always rule when they are stronger. We did not make that law, nor were we the first to act upon it; we found it existing, and it will exist forever, after we are gone. And we know that you, and anyone else as strong as we, would do the same as we do."
That just about sums it up. Euripides provided the finishing touch by justifying the Athenian's claim to be sovereign over Hellas on the grounds of their supposed racial superiority. By that stage, under Pericles' inept successors, Athenian imperialism displayed its seriously ugly face. In 416 B.C., the Athenians assaulted Melos, a neutral Aegean island that had been reluctant to join the Empire. They killed all men of military age, and sold the women and children into slavery. The following year, they resumed general war with an expedition against Syracuse, the major Greek city-state in Sicily. It ended in disaster. The Athenians hoped to add Sicily to their Empire, and so become powerful enough, as they had promised, "... to rule the whole of the Greek world." But the Sicilians, supported by Sparta, routed two Athenian fleets and a large army. Hubris ended in Nemesis. The war dragged on until 404 B.C., when Athens capitulated after its last fleet was destroyed by a Spartan fleet built with Persian money. The once-great city-state was also stripped of its Empire and de-militarized, never to rise again.
I'll conclude with a few theoretical observations on the meaning of it all. Thucydides' warning that war is imminent to the human condition is grim, but true. Human nature is grasping, overreaching, and insatiable, says he, and is reflected in international affairs. Morality is not a guide, even an outraged sense of justice generates strife and injustice. Furthermore, if the urge for domination is irresistible, as the Athenians claimed, it is then value-neutral, rather than unjust. Therefore, equal respect for equal power, just or not, is the prescription for stability and peace. It can be achieved through some form of the balance of power. Failure of the system generates war that ultimately ends in the hegemonist's defeat. Europeans understood this well, at least in the three centuries between the Peace of Westphalia and the Great War. America's present overseas interlopers are forced to re-learn the lesson. The logic of Albright's " Indispensable Nation " leaves them no choice.
So the message of Thucydides is that States, threatened by the Imperium, should take on a balancing role as a deliberate policy designed to discourage or contain excessive power. Russia and China are doing so as we speak, thank goodness. A timely check is the best we can hope for America. An imbalance neglected for too long, let us repeat, can only be resolved through the disaster of war. Thucydides sees such restraint on expansion as the only viable route to peace. It is in line with his oft-repeated view that those who have the power to block expansionism, but fail to do so, are the true culprits. Containment is good, acquiescence is bad. Thucydidian prudence, if properly applied, can prolong periods of peace and shorten periods of war; none can ever be permanent. This prudence is eminently American, and our rulers need to re-discover the notion of America as a real and completed nation: a State with definable national interests as the foundation of its diplomacy. This is neither defeatism nor escapist isolationism.
And now I part company with Thucydides on his implied inevitability of imperial overreach. We should be able to learn from history, lest we remain children forever. Why should we trust others to keep America in check and risk their failure if we can make a difference here at home? Surely, this is no pre-ordained tragic role that we are doomed to play in unopposed submission to our rulers. Some wars may have to be fought, but only those that touch us personally. Yes, we should resolutely uphold and defend the security and freedom of the United States on the basis of the golden rule. But we should reject both the neo-Wilsonian one-world globalism, and the even more odious neo-conservative hegemonist interventionism, as contrary to the authentic tradition of the American Republic, to its true interests, and to the will of the American people. As Diodorus Siculus narrates, a Syracusian named Nicholas was perhaps the last of the Hellenes who tried to redeem the sacred heart of Hellenism, in spite of Athens' betrayal of its own creation. Like a Serb bemoaning the NATO bombings in the name of the image of America that generations of East Europeans had grown up with, he passionately spoke for the virtues that the Hellenes should uphold, and reminded the Athenians of their own once-proclaimed ideals. He also begged his compatriots to spare the Athenians their lives, saying: "As many of you have acquired education and have learned the art of speech, show mercy to those whose city has been school for all people." Can we hope for any such plea when the tables ultimately turn on America?
And turn they surely will. Just as the commercial aristocracy of Athens was free to indulge itself in imperialism that brought ruin to all Athenians, America's present rulers pursue their project of global hegemony to the detriment of this country's interests, and contrary to the wishes of its people. Athenian elites, driven by commercial ambitions and self- aggrandizement, and devoid of any moral self-restraint, finally embroiled their country in a self-destructive war. There is nothing, nothing at all, to indicate that America's lot will be any different if its rulers are not restrained while there is still time. America's eventual demise is inherent in its present behavior, just as the demise of Athens was inherent in its rise. The fall was well-deserved. This verdict may sound harsh today because the Academe is in the hands of those who hold that democracy is the most divine form of government known to mankind. But in earlier, better times, critiques of Athenian expansionism were not uncommon. The entire history of Athens, Burke maintained, was that of "... rationalist folly, ingratitude, injustice, violence and tyranny, and indeed of every species of wickedness that can well be imagined." Concerning the Delian League in particular, he complained that the Athenians began "...to tyrannize over their equals; with their prudence they renounced all appearance of justice." Under Pericles, whom the eighteenth century Frenchman, Barthelemy, dubs "...the most dangerous of those leaders who paid court to the multitude," the Athenians "had the insolence to avow that the only law of nations they were acquainted with was force."
But at least we still have the immortal remains of Attic drama and the ruins of those splendid public buildings with which Pericles and the Athenians adorned their city during the heyday of the Empire. That legacy tempers our verdict, even tempts us to proclaim the folly ultimately worthwhile. The legacy of our latter-day global hegemonists is limited to [British Prime Minister] Blair's millennium dome, the bomb craters in Serbian cities, that stain on Ms. [Monica] Lewinsky's dress, and to a library of books that have been published to exonerate a criminal president who is as similar to Pericles as Madeleine Albright is to Athena. With them there is no saving grace and no salvation.
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Some editorial comment on Imperialist Hegemony:
In his book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, as cited in Chronicles. Sept. 2000 issue. pp. 22-24, Chalmers Johnson writes that "...globalization seems to boil down to the spread of poverty to every country except the United States." He also talks about the fact that while there is much talk about "rogue states," and what to do about them, the real problem is that "...the world is currently afflicted by a 'rogue superpower,' committed to the global eradication of 'racism' and 'ethnic intolerance,' even if it means invading every country on earth to do so."
This overweening hybris is exemplified by the yowling of "running dogs" to the elite globalist establishment like Madeleine Albright who travels the world lecturing, threatening, and, according to Johnson, "...overtly seeking to overthrow any regime that fails to bow before American hegemony." Albright, as an embodiment of the old adage about "power corrupt[ing] absolutely," preaches (again, quoting Johnson) about the " virtues of 'democracy, and free markets'," while haughtily displaying an autocratic disdain for the former, as when she was called upon to explain why it was necessary to launch cruise missiles against Iraq, her reply:
If we have to use force, it is because we are America.
We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall.
We see further into the future.
"In reality, Albright and company see no further than the next election, the next big indictment, or the next big contribution from a major weapons contractor." Johnson predicts dire consequences for humanity in the 21st century because "...our leaders believe that if so much as one American base is closed or one small country is allowed to manage its own economy, the world will collapse. ...[T]hey might better ponder the creativity and growth that would be unleashed if only the United States would relax its suffocating embrace."
The existence of such creatures as the Clintons, an Albright, a Kissinger, a Bush, or a Jesse Jackson, or, even more, a dumbed-down electorate that suffers such "leadership," is only possible in a society where the enduring lessons of classical scholarship are purposely ignored. No man who has had the benefit of an education where the classics are an integral part of the curriculum (as did all of the Founding Fathers of America), would be likely to tolerate a society where such clowns were given any credibility at all. Clinton, for instance, in a typical city-state of ancient Greece, could not have been elected to the position of "night-soil" collector, and most likely would have been executed for treason.
As far as America's elected "representatives" are concerned, any hope that they will put a brake on such power-lusting "servants of the people" is something we've disabused ourselves of a long time ago (as when John Adams said that a people "... sufficiently enlightened, [will] disabuse themselves of artifice, hypocrisy. and superstition), and are constantly being reminded of the Roman Emperor Tiberius (a man with whom Clinton has much in common), who would often, upon leaving the Senate, exclaim in Greek: "How willing these men are to be slaves." (Tacitus. Annals III. LXV.)
Of course, Greek was then the official language of the Roman Senate, as in Suetonius, who tells us that Julius Caesar never cried out "et tu, Brute!" but rather, "kai si technon" (Book 1.LXXXII. 3). Brutus and his band did with their knives what Americans would have done to Clinton with their jurisprudence and votes, had they been "sufficiently enlightened." (Speaking of Clinton, it has been said that "The trajectory of the Presidency from George Washington to Bill Clinton is sufficient rebuttal to Darwin's theory of evolution.")
For more on the myth of "diversity," and the ravages to any society that the empowerment of malevolent, self-serving numbskulls, in combination with a dumbed-down, "multicultural" citizenry-- can bring, see under The Culture War
Home Page The Big Picture 2001 - 2002
Sources:
http://www.grecoreport.com
http://www.grecoreport.com/thucydides.htm
http://www.grecoreport.com/the_big_picture_2001-2002.htm
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