Greek History – The Archaic Era

In the eighth century B.C., the first great literary works of Europe, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were created. They told about the struggle of Troy, and about the mistaken journey of Odysseus. We call their author Homer. In the eighth century B.C., too, the Olympic games were celebrated for the first time. And finally, in the eighth century B.C., a new script was invented, an alphabet, which was much simpler than all the earlier methods of writing in Greek; it consists of only a few letters.

The Greeks got the idea of an alphabetic writing system, instead of pictographic or cuneiform writing, from Semitic tribes. Our script today is of the same type that the Greeks developed out of the Semitic alphabets. The Greeks created the necessary preconditions so that we today can read and write, and don’t need professional scribes, as they existed in ancient Egypt. The Greeks formed the bridge between us and the original Semitic inventors of alphabetic writing.

We have also taken on many words from the Greeks, e.g., “political”. It meant in Greece “having to do with the Polis” or “belonging to the Polis”. “Polis” literally means “city” and means literally the city with its streets, temples, and walls, as well as - and above all - the city as a community of citizens.

Whoever behaved “politically” had, according to the Greek understanding, not only his own interests in mind, but rather those of all the citizens of a city. And, just as all the citizens learned to read and write, so also all the citizens codetermined about the fate of a city, occupied offices, and were judges. That is amazing. But remember, only a minority of those who lived in the cities were considered “citizens”! In Egypt, a civilized culture indeed arose, in which there was division of labor, but nowhere was there before the concept of a city as the political community of all citizens. How did the Greek polis arise?

Between 1000 and 700 B.C., we find tribes in the various regions of Greece, originally ruled by kings. The land was tended by farmers who were not serfs of the king, as in Egypt, but rather who had their own piece of land.

By the eighth century B.C., at the latest, large differences in property arose: whoever had much property was admired and didn’t need to work in order to survive. The wealthy people had free time, therefore, and filled it, by competing with each other in all activities, e.g., sports, public speaking, wealth. Much of what the Greeks achieved is related to competition. What consequences did competition have for the communal life of the Greeks?

Until the end of the sixth century, Greece was not threatened by any external power. Kings, therefore, were not needed as military leaders. And so the rich - we call them the nobility - pushed the kings out, called themselves “kings”, and oppressed the farmers by means of their “crooked verdicts”. The farmers often had to turn their land over to the nobles because of debts. Since the second half of the seventh century, the farmers demanded a redistribution of the land: “land reform”. The competition between the nobles now went so far, that some of them were prepared to side with the farmers, in order to get ahead of their fellow nobles.

This is the situation in which it was first attempted, in Greece, to introduce effective social structures and constitutions. This ordering was supposed to ensure that the farmers could work their land freely and independently of the power of the nobles. And, aside from that, it was now intended, that the nobles should be integrated into the polis, to seek an equilibrium between the claims of individuals and the claims of the community. The Athenian lawgiver Solon, around 600 B.C., still gave more to the nobles than to the simple farmers.

But in the fifth century, the Athenians then wanted that all citizens of the Polis should have the same political rights. Every citizen should take on almost any political office, the collection of all citizens should be able to decide about all important questions. According to the constitution of the Athenians, the freedom, too, of all citizens could only be realized by means of such political equality. Again, only a minority of the inhabitants of the city were “citizens”. We will see how this constitution effected also other areas of human life, e.g., the family and art.

The Puzzlingly Undemocratic French Revolution

The French Revolution was begun, allegedly, in the name of the people and in the name of freedom. Yet it was an authoritarian and dictatorial imposition on the people, not a freeing of them.

Why did this Revolution feature no meaningful election process? The few elections which took place were designed to give the appearance of voting, while shielding the Revolutionary government from any accountability to the voters.

A revolution might be a time and a place in which great freedom in speech arises, especially political speech. But the French Revolution imposed some of the harshest political censorship.

Freedom of religion, likewise a stated goal of the revolution, disappeared, and the leaders of the French Revolution executed people merely because they were followers of Jesus.

What went wrong? The leaders of the French Revolution tried to change, not only the political system, but society itself. The problems which triggered the revolution were political and economic, not social.

Maximilien Robespierre was perhaps one of the most influential figures in the Revolution. The names of the phases through which the Revolution progressed are telling: “The Great Fear,” “The Reign of Terror,” and “The White Fear.”

This escalating violence was the result of the effort, by Robespierre and others, to make people fit into their idea of a good system. The revolutionary leaders claimed to know what was best for the people, and did not give the people a chance to choose their own way.

On this logic, then, there was no need for elections. A few “show elections” gave the appearance of political engagement, but did not give the voters any meaningful input. As historian Jonah Goldberg writes:

Robespierre’s ideas were derived from his close study of Rousseau, whose theory of the general will formed the intellectual basis for all modern totalitarianisms. According to Rousseau, individuals who live in accordance with the general will are “free” and “virtuous” while those who defy it are criminals, fools, or heretics. These enemies of the common good must be forced to bend to the general will. This state-sanctioned coercion he described in Orwellian terms as the act of “forcing men to be free.” It was Rousseau who originally sanctified the sovereign will of the masses while dismissing the mechanisms of democracy as corrupting and profane. Such mechanics — voting in elections, representative bodies, and so forth — are “hardly ever necessary where the government is well-intentioned,” wrote Rousseau in a revealing turn of phrase. “For the rulers well know that the general will is always on the side which is most favorable to the public interest, that is to say, the most equitable; so that it is needful only to act justly to be certain of following the general will.”

Thus the revolution, begun in the name of the people, failed to actually establish a republic with freely-elected representatives. It was a dictatorship, one that changed its form several times during the course of the revolution, from 1789 to 1799.

The deaths inflicted, as the government sought to force people to conform to its system, were many. Public executions killed between 20,000 and 75,000 civilians, mainly by guillotine. The war started by the French Revolutionary government in April 1792 against Austria killed thousands more.

When the French Revolution imposed price controls on all food in September 1793, agricultural production collapsed, and thousands died in a famine.

The French Revolution was never an expression of individual political liberty. It was a violent attempt to make the population of a nation fit into an abstract governmental paradigm.

Instead of confining itself to changes in government and economics, the leaders of the Revolution sought to change human society, culture, and civilization. This doomed their efforts not only to failure, but to self-destruction.

Finding Babylon and Its Ishtar Gates

Like Schliemann’s vision of Troy, archeologists considered Babylon to be as much myth and legend as physical reality. Attestations occur mainly in the Hebrew Tanakh. Classical sources include Herodotus, but his data is not very helpful.

Some scholars in the mid nineteenth century began to doubt the existence of numerous ancient locations. Troy and Babylon were among them.

Even among those who did not deny the existence of these cities, some argued either than these sites couldn’t be nearly as grand as the textual sources reported, or that there would be little to nothing left of them after more than twenty or thirty centuries.

The rise of archeology at that time was in part a response to that skepticism. Thankfully, many archeologists were more cautious and rigorous than the flamboyant Schliemann, who nonetheless served a useful role by drawing attention and support to such enterprises.

Today in the city of Berlin one can see the amazing gates of ancient Babylon. These structures feature a glaze on the surface of their tiles. Historians Joachim Marzahn and Klaudia Englund write:

The exploration of Babylon began relatively late in time, probably because the remains of the city were by no means imposing. Mere heaps of debris and mounds of sand, only one of which still bore the name “Babil”, gave account of the location and size of the town. The remnants of colored glazed bricks suggesting that splendid buildings must have existed in the city, however, facilitated the decision to begin exploration there. What the excavators, digging on behalf of the Berlin Museums and the German Oriental Society, unearthed during 18 years of continuous work from 1899 to 1917, elevated Babylon to the first rank of important cities of Antiquity.

The famous Ishtar Gates, which formed the ceremonial entryway in Babylon, use primarily blue and gold in their composition, and are decorated primarily with images of lions. King Nebuchadnezzar ordered them to be built around the year 575 BC.

These gates would have been standing, then, when the Israelite captives entered the city between around 597 BC and 581 BC.

The excavations of Babylon and Troy showed the reliability of ancient textual sources.

The Emergence of Postmodernism?

The word ‘postmodernism’ has been so misused, overused, and abused that one hesitates to use it all.

Various circumlocutions which can substitute for that word may be more accurate, less misleading, and less charged. ‘Postmodernism’ has been used both as a term of condemnation and as a term of praise.

The word, or any of its grammatical variants, does not appear even once in Carl Schorske’s book, Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, even though segments of the book are arguably about appearance of postmodernism.

Schorske captures one aspect of postmodernism - its privileging of emotion over reason - by contrasting two constructs, the rational man and the psychological man. Schorske’s “rational man” is a placeholder for Lockean and Cartesian understandings of human nature, and how such nature shapes culture, ethics, and social and political structures

Troubling is the hypersubjective and foundationless meanings attached to volatile political vocabulary like ‘justice’ or ‘oppression,’ which in the working’s of Schorske’s “psychological man” become synonyms for ‘comfort’ or ‘discomfort.’ Schorske writes:

Traditional liberal culture had centered upon rational man, whose scientific domination of nature and whose moral control of himself were expected to create the good society. In our century, rational man has had to give place to that richer but more dangerous and mercurial creature, psychological man. This new man is not merely a rational animal, but a creature of feeling and instinct. We tend to make him the measure of all things in our culture. Our intrasubjectivist artists paint him. Our existential philosophers try to make him meaningful. Our social scientists, politicians, and advertising men manipulate him. Even our advanced social critics use him, rather than the criterion of rational right, to judge the worth of a social order. Political and economic oppression itself we assess in terms of psychological frustration.

This postmodern understanding - if Schorske may be here understood as speaking of postmodernism - entails that there can be no case in which justice, in which the morally right thing to do, is painful.

Any apparent counterexamples - voluntarily embraced suffering for a cause - melt under the scrutiny of a Freudian ‘pleasure principle,’ which sees such suffering as overridden by a greater satisfaction from the fulfillment of the purpose for which the suffering was embraced.

Admittedly, there is an insight in noting that the pangs of hunger are gladly endured if one has forgone food in order to give that food to one’s child, or in order to lose a few pounds and thereby be healthier or better-looking.

But to judge a political or economic system based on whether those within the system experience frustration - and here Schorske has rightly described much of postmodern political pandering - is to ignore the reality that frustration and pain are necessarily part of human existence, and to forget that greater purposes are not always fully comprehended or known by those enduring hardship for their sake.

Frugality for the sake of frugality is not pleasant, and one cannot always see the purpose for which one exercises thrift. Yet it will ultimately serve a valuable purpose, and enduring it is a good thing - if not a pleasant thing.

The same is true of diligence.

The dismissiveness with which Schorske’s “psychological man” treats reason will cast both the individual and the collective adrift. Rational discourse about culture, society, or politics becomes impossible.

In the absence of reason, people merely emote, and do so in alternating and competing patterns, which then pass for ‘debate’ among a public which has forgotten what rational argumentation is.

Schorske seems to have accurately captured postmodernism, without even once having used the word!

Ancient and Beyond Ancient

When we read history, our sense of temporal distance can become distorted. Didn’t Julius Caesar have lunch with Hammurabi?

The Greeks and the Romans flourished over a series of centuries. One hinge of classical history is the morphing, around 27 BC, of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. The Greeks started getting attention when Homer wrote his two major works around 750 BC.

Just as we look back 2,000 years to see Roman history, the “ancients” - the Greeks and the Romans themselves - looked back equally far to see civilizations which predated them by the same amount of time.

Between 2334 and 2279 BC, a leader named Sargon united the regions of Akkad and Sumer and thereby founded an empire. The empire later became known as Babylonia, and its capital city was Babylon. In Sargon’s era, these names were probably not yet widely used.

The city of Babylon is mentioned already in the 23rd century BC, but only years later did it rise to prominence. As historians Joachim Marzahn and Klaudia Englund write,

When Athens flourished, Babylon was but a provincial town; the desire of Alexander the Great as ruler of Asia to make the city once more the capital of an empire was thwarted by his untimely death; when the Roman legions conquered Europe, its name was scarcely remembered. The tradition passed on derived for the most part from the Bible and was all but praiseworthy: “The Babylonian Whore”. The city became a symbol of vice and lechery. For a long time Europe only knew this image. Yet Babylon was once a thriving metropolis, situated on the navigable Euphrates, in the midst of abundant fields and palm gardens. It was the center of international trade and of specialized industries, the abode of the god Marduk and his powerful priesthood, as well as the seat of political power of an empire comparable to that of the Romans. Our knowledge of these facts only became available when, in the 19th century, excavations commenced in the Near East.

While Babylon represented a high degree of civilization, it also remained a human and therefore essentially flawed society. While assembling complex legal, economic, and scientific patterns, it also displayed, along with best of human efforts, the baser side of human nature, as John Noble Wilford writes:

A new examination of skulls from the royal cemetery at Ur, discovered in Iraq almost a century ago, appears to support a more grisly interpretation than before of human sacrifices associated with elite burials in ancient Mesopotamia, archaeologists say.

Thomas Cahill notes:

We do know that human sacrifice was not beyond the Sumerians.

To contextualize this data, however, it’s worth noting that human sacrifice was part of every known civilization at that time.

By the time the city of Rome was founded around 753 BC, Babylon was well over a thousand years old. By the time the Roman Republic was founded around 509 BC, it was almost two thousand years old - or possibly older; the data is unclear. By the time the Roman Empire began, Babylon was an insignificant town.

Alaric Outwits Rome: the Goths Arrive

Could someone live during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and not know it? The large contours of history are always clearer in hindsight.

Perhaps those living in the empire during its last days assumed that they were experiencing merely a temporary setback, and that there was still a chance for the empire to revive itself.

Thus it came to many as a surprise when the Goths, led by Alaric, attacked and sacked the city of Rome in 410 A.D.

Alaric led the Visigoths - the western Goths in contrast to the Ostrogoths - and conquered much of the Italian peninsula. Alaric understood that the key to holding Roman territories would be controlling Africa, and the shipping to and from Africa, because Rome had become dependent on imported food.

Rome’s economy had undermined domestic food production, and Alaric understood how the interplay between military strategy and economic strategy would enable him to consolidate his hold on Rome.

Sadly, Alaric died before he could complete his conquest of Rome.

A generation after Alaric, Theodoric, leader of the Ostrogoths, would see the final fall of the Roman Empire. Wealth and a sense of security weakened the Romans.

The Goths eventually bested the Romans because the Goths were continually innovative, living by their wits, with no historical momentum behind their empire.

Lulled by their tradition of success, the Romans awoke too late to the fact that the Goths were competing with them. Historian Thomas Cahill writes:

Though it is easy for us to perceive the wild instability of the Roman Imperium in its final days, it was not easy for the Romans. Rome, the Eternal City, had been untouched since the Celts of Gaul had sacked it by surprise in 390 B.C. In the ensuing eight centuries Rome built itself into the world’s only superpower, unassailable save for the occasional war on a distant border. The Gauls had long since become civilized Romans, and Rome offered the same Romanization to anyone who wanted it - sometimes, as with the Jews, whether they wanted it or not. Normally, though, everyone was dying to be Roman. As Theodoric, the homely king of the Ostrogoths, was fond of saying: “An able Goth wants to be like a Roman; only a poor Roman would want to be like a Goth.”

Rome’s continuous centuries of hegemony may have been its undoing. The Goths were more ambitious.

After taking from the Romans their gold, silver, and other treasures, Alaric required them to free their slaves: their “barbarian” slaves. The Romans had derisively called the Germanic tribes “barbarians” - the Goths, and other less famous groups like the Cimbri and Cherusci - but now the Germanic tacticians had outwitted the Romans.

The leaders of the Roman senate, seeing all that they had lost to Alaric, asked him, “What will you leave us?”

Alaric’s historic answer: “Your lives.”

Byzantium Besieged

Centuries before the Crusades (they began around 1095 A.D.) and even decades before the Islamic invasion of Spain (that was in 711 A.D.) the newly-minted Muslim armies were on the march.

Muhammad died in 632 A.D., and even before his death, Islamic invasions were conquering large parts of the ANE (Ancient Near East). After his death, the Muslim military continued to gain new territory.

Due to their superior horsemanship and swordsmanship, the Muslims managed to expand their empire - their ‘caliphate’ - rapidly. They moved westward, conquering large parts of northern Africa. They advanced toward the northeast, defeating Syria and moving into Persia.

Islam next set its eyes on Europe. Historian Rodney Stark writes:

Having defeated the Byzantine armies in Syria and Egypt, and having begun a successful campaign to conquer the entire north coast of Africa from Byzantium, in 672 the caliph Muawiyah decided to strike directly at his enemy. From his new capital in Damascus, the caliph directed his fleet to transport an army through the Dardanelles (the narrow strait linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Sea of Marmara). Numbering about fifty thousand men, the caliph’s troops captured the peninsula of Cyzicus, across the water from Constantinople, and fortified it as their principle base, from where they began a siege of Constantinople.

This siege, from the principal base across the water, was unsuccessful.

After this attack in 672 A.D., the Muslims tried again in 717. Defeated but persevering, they assaulted the city of Constantinople again in 718. In fact, Islam assailed the city repeatedly for several centuries. It finally fell in 1453.

The assaults on Constantinople were part of a three-front strategy. Islam hoped to stretch Europe’s defenses thin by striking from the southwest at Spain, from the south at Italy and Sicily, and from the southeast at Constantinople.

This left Europe with thousands of miles of coastline to defend: a difficult task at best, if not simply impossible.

After enduring decades of attack all along the Mediterranean south, and offering ad hoc defenses, Europe decided to organize a strategic counterattack: to stop the invasions at their source in the Middle East, rather than wait for Islamic armies to arrive yet once again on European shores.

This defensive counterattack would be called ‘The Crusades,’ but that title would not be given to it until centuries after it happened in 1095 A.D.