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THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
February, 2005
1. INTRODUCTION
This month's newsletter (slightly late) describes the syndrome of decline in classical Greece. Some aspects may strike a chord.
Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson
2. THE DECLINE OF CLASSICAL GREECE
Today, the civilisation of classical Greece is considered a point of departure for all western politics, philosophy, mathematics, science, literature and historiography. It was, depending on your definition, responsible for five of the Seven Wonders of the World. The point is arguable because some of them were put up during the Hellenic era, when the classical city states-Athens, Sparta, Corinth etc.-had been incorporated in the empire of father Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great. It would be convenient if societies rose and fell in a simple manner, so that we could say Greek civilisation started here and stopped there. Unfortunately, history is never that neat. Classical Greece was on the one hand terminated through being conquered by the Macedonians but was on the other hand granted a new lease of life as the Macedonians spread Greek culture through the empire they conquered from Egypt to Pakistan. However, we are jumping over more than a millennium of history. Let us go back to the beginning. Classical Greek civilisation emerged out of the four-hundred-year dark age that followed the destruction of Mycenae (c. 1100 BC). It did not represent a recovery of Mycenaean civilisation, but was something new, created by the immigrants who arrived during the centuries leading up to and immediately after the Mycenaean collapse. It was about 700 BC that writing returned, cities were rebuilt and trade began to pick up.
The early Greeks had a sense of inferiority relative to the past, as if recognising themselves as the barbarians who had once brought down a great civilisation. The poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC) wrote of humanity's descent from golden and silver ages, via the bronze age, to the degraded iron age of his own time. Yet whereas the 'terrible coming of iron' had indeed contributed to the downfall of bronze age civilisation, the new order was bringing this military technology under control. Quite simply, the development of fighting techniques and social institutions to tame the effects of iron-based warfare was a sine qua non for the dark age to end. These early Greeks made effective troops, and served as mercenaries in the Egyptian army. We think of the Greeks as artists and above all thinkers. However, this was the achievement of later generations, only made possible by the down-to-earth activities of the new civilisation's founders. For, in addition to military prowess, the earlier Greeks had a reputation for being shrewd and energetic entrepreneurs. They founded merchant colonies from southern Italy to the Black Sea and acted as intermediaries serving both the venerable civilisations of the east and the developing regions of the western and northern Mediterranean. Around 400 BC there was a shield-making factory at Athens employing a hundred and twenty people, and the Greeks made considerable progress in commercial and banking techniques necessary to underpin international trade. Without this Greek talent for making money, there would never have been any Parthenon or the other architectural marvels. The western conceit that everything began with the Greeks can probably be traced to the Romans, who took much of what they knew about the arts of civilisation from Greece. In the second century BC, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder complained bitterly about the extent of Rome's borrowings from Greece. Yet ascendant civilisations always borrow, there is no shame in that. Had societies not stood on each other's shoulders, humanity would not have got as far as it has. The Greeks certainly learnt much from their predecessors. They copied the alphabet, for example, from the Phoenicians, but they made it their own and turned it into something new. Similarly, Pythagoras's theorem was known in Babylon 1200 years before Pythagoras was born, but the Greeks incorporated it into a new systematised form of geometry based on axioms and deductive proof. The ancient Iraqis knew how to calculate the square root of two to an accuracy of one part in a million, but it was the ancient Greeks who realised that this quantity could not be represented by a fraction and thereby discovered the so-called transcendental numbers. Most of the great scholars of Greece would visit Egypt to complete their educations. Solon, who later became famous as the great Athenian lawgiver, spent a decade there before returning to reform the constitution of his native city at the start of the sixth century BC. While he was in Egypt, one of his tutors gently chided him, "Solon, Solon, you Greeks are like children. There are no old men in Greece." The Egyptians must have seen little threat from these brash foreigners who came to study, to fight for the Egyptian army, or simply to make money in the Egyptian economy. One day, though, they would find themselves under the rule of Greek-speaking pharaohs. Throughout the classical era, Greece was divided into numerous city states. They saw themselves as having a common culture, and they formed themselves into various leagues, but they were never united under one leader. The history of the period is one of individual states jostling for position. Nevertheless, their divisions and conflicts did not prevent them from making a lasting contribution to world civilisation, and may even have stimulated it. At the beginning of the fifth century BC, the Greeks showed their talent for military innovation when they overcame the numerically superior armies of the Persian Empire. The Persians may have a better claim even than the Romans to have built the greatest empire of antiquity, in terms of both organisation and extent. To this day, Iran is a giant country, larger than the entire European Union. The Persians first attacked Greece in 490 BC, after the Greek-speaking cities of Asia Minor, which were then under Persian domination, had staged a revolt with help from the mother country. The Persians were defeated in the Battle of Marathon, this being the occasion when Pheidippides ran all the way back to Athens with the news and created the legend behind the modern race (it was not part of the ancient Olympics). At Marathon, thanks to superior Greek tactics, over 6000 Persians were killed for a mere 192 Greek lives. Ten years later, the Persians were back, under their new king, Xerxes. His army consisted of a hundred thousand men, comparable to the one that landed in Normandy on D-Day 1944. It included Indians and East Africans, alongside Xerxes' own troops. With the Persians approaching, the Athenians consulted the Delphic Oracle. They were told that "the wooden wall only shall not fall." Some argued that this referred to the hedge that had once encircled the Acropolis, and meant that, while the Acropolis might be saved, the rest of Athens would be destroyed. They suggested abandoning the city to the Persians and fleeing en masse. However, another group argued that the "wooden wall" meant the navy, and they urged a crash programme to build more ships. This opinion prevailed, and a few months later the Greek and Persian fleets came face to face at the Battle of Salamis (480 BC). Despite being outnumbered nearly three to one, the Greeks again thrashed the Persians by a series of daring manoeuvres. Xerxes trudged home, never to bother the Greeks again. The prominent role played by Athens in defeating Persia made it look increasingly like a rival to Sparta, which had long been used to a dominant position among the city states. This rivalry finally broke down in the Peloponnesian War of 431 to 404 BC, in which Athens was defeated. Thucydides, an Athenian who fought in the war and wrote its history, said that though people referred to many particular reasons why the war broke out, the fundamental reason was "the growing power of Athens, and the fear this produced in Sparta." He thereby put his finger on a syndrome of universal significance. The time when a new player is rising on the international stage is always a dangerous one. The thrusting ambition of the up-and-coming power collides with the efforts of more established powers to keep the status quo, and that often leads to war. Like Germany or Japan after World War Two, Athens bounced back from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War and, for the next fifty years, resumed the commercial growth that had helped to precipitate the original crisis. This was also a period of great intellectual advance. Socrates, his pupil Plato, and Plato's pupil Aristotle all lived during this time. At the same time, there was a new power emerging in the rough hinterland to the north of Greece. This was the kingdom of the Macedonians who, for most of Greek history, had been a primitive and distinctly unpromising people, useful primarily as a source of mercenaries. There was no reason to suspect they might be capable of anything very much. The Greeks happily taught them their technological and military secrets, for they assumed that the Macedonians knew their place in the order of things. In 359 BC, Philip of Macedon came to the throne, and introduced the most effective military formation the world had yet seen-the Macedonian phalanx. The phalanx was originally a Greek invention-the interleaved rows and columns of men protected by shields and trained to turn instantly in any direction, so that they always presented the enemy with an uncompromising wall of metal-but Philip took it to a new level of efficiency. Long pikes poked out between the ranks, capable of engaging the opposing troops with near impunity. Cavalry and lighter armed troops harassed the enemy as the heavy, deadly, slow-moving phalanx moved in. With these tactics, the Macedonians conquered the northern part of the Greek peninsula and brought the other city states under their indirect control. Philip hired the forty two year old Aristotle as tutor for his son Alexander, who, within six years, had succeeded to the kingship. Alexander now embarked on the most rapid campaign of conquest in the entire history of the world, before or since. He began with the Persian Empire, which since the days of Xerxes had seen a bloody struggle for the throne, as kings murdered their own sons and were in turn assassinated by army generals or ambitious princes and royal brothers. The government was in the hands of the court eunuchs and their network of spies. The state's resources were lavished on palaces, ceremonial and a burgeoning bureaucracy, while the people were treated as slaves and subject at any time to arbitrary arrest, confiscation of property or execution. Such a society, run on fear, fell easily to Alexander's onslaught. The Persian Royal Road, connecting the Mediterranean world to the imperial capital at Susa, had inns for travellers every fifteen miles, between which relays carried mail at the rate of a horse's gallop. Private letters might be sent but were read by officials for security reasons. This transport and communications system helped the Persians to administer their far-flung empire. It also helped Alexander to conquer it. When he died in Babylon at the age of 33, Alexander's empire encompassed Greece, Egypt, the Middle East and Central Asia. It promptly fell apart into those four regions, each under Hellenic kings of basically Greek language and culture. It is tempting to think that the downfall of the Persian Empire at the hands of once obscure neighbours is explained by its totalitarian institutions and has no relevance for today's democratic nations. However, the distinctly democratic states of classical Greece also fell to the Macedonian onslaught. Indeed, Plato associated democratic ideas with decline. He regarded democracy as a miserable form of government that compared unfavourably with the great nations of his time. There was nothing democratic about Alexander the Great. He was a man of violence, who once killed his best friend in a drunken brawl. Athens has been hailed as the birthplace of democracy, although there seems to have been a form of representative government in the earliest cities of Iraq. At any rate, Athens started off as a monarchy, but royal power was gradually curtailed and in 683 BC the kingship was replaced by so-called archons, who were officials elected by the aristocracy. Over the next century, peasant revolts and the growing prosperity of the middle class produced a demand for wider political participation until, in 594, Solon was appointed to devise a new constitution. The main effect of Solon's reforms was to emancipate the working class. Peasants were no longer tied to their landlords and instead became free to run their own lives. The aristocracy still had the upper hand, since only those who owned property were allowed to vote, but limits were set to their power. People's rights were protected by the courts, to which everyone now had access. Solon's constitution turned out to be not the final word but just another step in the continuing evolution of Athenian democracy. Power increasingly devolved to the ordinary citizen. By the middle of the fifth century BC, all Athenians were considered equal in terms of rights, and even the lowest class had acquired the vote and was allowed to run for the chief offices of state. A hundred years later, rights to participate in the assembly, and presumably to vote, were extended to women, foreigners and even slaves. There were also reforms in other areas. Torture was abolished, for example, and those convicted of capital crimes were to be poisoned by drinking a cup of hemlock, considered a more humane form of execution. Per diem expenses were introduced for those fulfilling government posts and serving on tribunals, so that everyone, not just the rich, could afford to participate. The democratic system did not commend itself to Plato in part because of its seeming inefficiency and inability to take decisive action, and in part because it provided an arena for ambition and corruption that opposed rather than promoted wise rule. There was also the way that it tended to encourage the lowest common denominator. At one time, paideia, or education, was recognised to be the hallmark of a civilised person. To possess paideia was to possess manners, culture and sophistication. Yet as time went on, such elitist values were scorned. Contemporary commentators lamented that ignorance and vulgarity were no longer a cause for embarrassment. In the Athenian heyday, youths swore an oath at the age of eighteen, stating 'I will hand on my fatherland, not diminished but larger and better'. Such uncritical loyalty came to seem ridiculous, and the practice was abandoned. As democracy widened, the sense of civic duty shrank. The courts were increasingly busy pursuing people for their contributions to the public purse-something that had been unthinkable in earlier times, when people gave freely and willingly. Volunteers stopped coming forward to serve in the armed forces. Conscription had to be introduced and the Greeks, who had once served as mercenaries for other decaying civilisations, now turned to using mercenaries themselves. As the threat from Macedon loomed on the horizon, the great orator Demosthenes, called for a significant build-up of the armed forces, but his fellow Athenians voted for subsidised theatre performances. Demosthenes also castigated the conspicuous consumption of the rich, who retreated into their ever more opulent houses for a life of luxury. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens did little work and preferred to eke out a meagre existence on the fees they got for attending tribunals. The gap between rich and poor, which had shrunk during the sixth century BC, began to grow again. It is important to remember that the energetic entrepreneurs of early Greece and the parasitic idlers of later times were not the same people. The later generations were the many times great grandchildren of those who had been the founders of Greece's wealth. They grew up regarding their society's affluence as natural and something to be enjoyed. They had little notion of the efforts that made it possible, let alone the motivation to repeat them. Cultural attitudes shifted away from conformity and in favour of individual expression. It has been said that the later Greeks became interested in men not Man, and indeed in women not Woman. The idealised female figures of former times gave way to portraits of real women, in which they appeared as sexual figures or as realistically flawed. In art and literature of the fourth century BC, prostitutes, criminals, and street urchins came to be of greater fascination than the old heroes. Where mortals had once been depicted like gods, the gods were now depicted like mortals. Playwrights turned away from the great political and philosophical questions, in favour of entertainment that was based on everyday reality and the problems of domestic life. Classical Greece is known for nothing if not philosophy, and here the changing attitudes can be readily traced. There was a growing call for toleration and against moral absolutism. Truth and justice were presented as relative with no built-in validity. Socrates was among the first to argue along these lines, as he pointed out that there could be no unambiguous definition of what was virtuous and claimed that his city's traditional values had no logic. He was put to death in 399 BC, after the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian war, on the grounds that his nihilist teaching was corrupting the city's youth. The execution of Socrates has gone down in history as a crime against reason, but some might think his accusers had a point. This was a time of social crisis, when, for example, the worship of the city's gods was being neglected and Athenian self-confidence was at rock bottom. Socrates deliberately provoked the judges, and brushed aside all attempts to give him a way out. He finally made a martyr of himself by taking the cup of hemlock. The fate of Socrates in no way diminished the attractiveness of his ideas, but more likely increased it. Within decades, the Cynic school was arguing for the complete freedom and self-sufficiency of the individual, and advanced the notion that individuals owe loyalty only to themselves and not to the community. Its founder, Diogenes, declared that he was a citizen of no state, expressed contempt for patriotism, and asserted the naturalness of sexual activity by masturbating in public. He said that "what is natural cannot be dishonest or indecent and therefore can and should be done in public," by which he justified his habit of defecating in the street. He had no time for the thought that other people might prefer to be spared intimacy with his bodily functions. The Stoic school represents an alternative reaction to the crumbling moral order of late classical Greece. Stoicism emphasised a resigned attitude to the difficulties of life and the need to maintain personal standards of conduct in an imperfect world. It was still an individualist philosophy, but it came to a different conclusion, advocating forbearance rather than self-indulgence. The point was to recognise that the world was evil, to give up hope of changing or challenging that evil, and instead to concentrate on not adding to the evil there already was. Though admirable in its way, this philosophy bore little trace of the verve and can-do spirit that once brought Greece out of its post-Mycenaean dark age. It did, however, provide solace to those who felt bewildered by the egotistic and ignoble times in which they lived. It is no coincidence that Stoicism became popular again centuries later in Rome, as the empire's troubles were mounting. At the time that the Greeks were making a heroic stand in the Persian Wars, Rome was just an obscure town on the Tiber. Even those Greeks who had heard of it would never have thought it could pose a danger to the cities that turned back Xerxes' great army. Yet in 146 BC, after defeating the Macedonians in a series of battles, the legions occupied the Greek peninsula and turned it into a Roman province. For later Roman administrators, Greece was a ghastly hole, and they avoided getting posted there if they could possibly help it.