Athens.
What’d you think of? The Acropolis? Socrates? Feta cheese? I’d always imagined ancient Athens as a sunny haven for long-winded philosophers, one big common room where any man’s opinion was welcome (except perhaps Socrates).
Then I started reading stuff besides the Dialogues. Take the History of Herodotus. King Xerxes of Persia goes nuts, even for an Eastern tyrant, and decides to march west and conquer Greece, along with pretty much every male Persian. That’s a lot of Persians, and they roll like a juggernaut, cutting a swath around the Aegean sea like a plague of locusts. Since “Greece” at this point consists of a terrified swarm of tiny, independent cities, it looks as if Xerxes’ only problem is deciding how much he wants to take.
But the Greeks face the apocalypse—and win. You’ve got to read this someday. By the time it’s over, Xerxes is back in Persia, and Greece is stronger than it ever was before.
Especially Athens. They built up their navy to defeat the invader, and now that he’s gone, they’re the most powerful navy in Greece. Perhaps too powerful.
Because a generation later, as the Athenian general Thucydides reports rather impartially in The Peloponnesian War, Athens has conquered enough of her neighbors to earn the title, “Empire.” She orders the vanquished to tear down their city walls, imposes taxes—and claims to be a democracy.
Sparta, the other great Hellenic power, views all this with understandable dismay. Soon it seems that if Athens isn’t stopped, she won’t stop. War seems inevitable, but Sparta hesitates. At a conference on the topic (the Greeks call more conferences than tenured professors), the Corinthians explain to the Spartans exactly how different they are from Athens. And Athens suddenly sounds rather familiar.
The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution; you have a genius for keeping what you have got, accompanied by a total want of invention, and when forced to act you never go far enough. Again, they are adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgment, and in danger they are sanguine; your wont is to attempt less than is justified by your power, to mistrust even what is sanctioned by your judgment, and to fancy that from danger there is no release. Further, there is promptitude on their side against procrastination on yours; they are never at home, you are never from it: for they hope by their absence to extend their acquisitions, you fear by your advance to endanger what you have left behind.
They are swift to follow up a success, and slow to recoil from a reverse. Their bodies they spend ungrudgingly in their country’s cause; their intellect they jealously husband to be employed in her service. A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss, a successful enterprise a comparative failure. The deficiency created by the miscarriage of an undertaking is soon filled up by fresh hopes; for they alone are enabled to call a thing hoped for a thing got, by the speed with which they act upon their resolutions.
Thus they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life, with little opportunity for enjoying, being ever engaged in getting: their only idea of a holiday is to do what the occasion demands, and to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.
The Peloponnesian war, Thucydides, Chapter III
Doesn’t that sound like some other big country you’ve heard of?
Nah. Couldn’t be. That’s ancient history.
