The following is an excerpt from a chapter in my upcoming book on Thucydides and directly follows On Tyranny.
Our long exploration into the nature of tyranny will unfortunately overshadow the second subject that Thucydides intended to focus our attention: the coming of powerful navies. Here too, many volumes could be dedicated to how naval power impacted the historical development of the Greeks; however, for our purpose, it will suffice to notice the names of the many peoples and places that are mentioned in these several chapters including Samos, Corcyraea, the Ionians, the Carthaginians, and the Persians who gained naval relevance through their conquest of the Phoenician city-states, but it is Corinth that stands at the forefront being the perfect representative of greatness in the raw Thucydidean sense. With the command of good tyrants, growing wealth, successful colonial expansions, and most importantly a powerful navy outfitted with the latest and greatest trireme ships, which, if I recall, the Bronze Age Pervert once succinctly likened to the possession of intercontinental ballistic missiles in our own time, anything becomes possible.
Sparta and Athens are noticeably absent from these passages, and therefore blotted out, or at least depreciated, from Thucydides recapitulation of this important period in the Greek’s historical development. Whatever the Spartans and Athenians may have cultivated during this period – perhaps we can say the unique educative effects of Lycurgus and Solon respectively – was fundamentally different compared to what a people like the Corinthians had cultivated. Of tyrants the Spartans had no experience, and for Athens’ Pisistratus’ rule was discontinuous and existed on top of the far more enduring political ideals set in motion by Solon; of navies neither city had any practical knowledge of triremes until the crises of the fifth century spurred necessity on. For Thucydides, at least here in these very specific passages which describe the development of Greek wealth, power, and daring from their emergence out from the Dark Age up until the eve of the Persian Wars, featuring Corinth over Sparta and Athens emphasizes the recognition of a new, materialist, and universal measure of greatness – a new ideal – which the Peloponnesian War must have made strikingly clear to our historian. “War is a violent teacher.”
Corinth represents the raw conception of greatness: it was a burgeoning city ruled by energetic tyrants who promoted and understood the importance of wealth and naval power. Lacking these apparent advantages, Athens and Sparta were representatives of cultural power: they had lawgivers and poets who educated their citizenries molding both bodies and minds toward particular ideals. While Thucydides may hold Corinth up as the greatest Greek city during this earlier period, it is worth mentioning that Herodotus shows us a different valuation by way of that infamous Lydian, King Croesus. After Croesus received the Oracle of Delphi’s advice that if he marched against the Persians a great empire would be destroyed, “he began to investigate which Hellenes were most powerful in order to add them to his own forces as friends and supporters. By making inquiries, he discovered that the most distinguished among them were the Spartans of Dorian ancestry and the Athenians of Ionian ancestry.” According to Herodotus, these were the “eminent powers” in antiquity (the fifth century) as well as Croesus’ own time which, being around 550, was still in the high period of Greek tyranny. Periander’s rule in Corinth probably ended around 580, but there is no indication that the city severely declined in terms of wealth or military power during the gap in time. Nevertheless, contemplating why Croesus made no mention of the Corinthians provides a counterbalance to the raw Thucydidean view and forces us to think harder on the true nature of greatness.
Bringing up Herodotus’ story of Croesus by no means signals the defeat of Thucydides’ valuation; rather, it helps better elucidate the younger historian’s perspective and serves as one of the many examples where students can see Thucydides as a liminal man molded by worlds old and new. In this context, the old world represents the life of the traditional city-state, the Persian Wars, and the historical horizon revealed to the Greeks as a result of their united victory; and in our effort to evaluate the true nature of power and greatness, the Persian Wars vividly showcase the inferiority of a material force like Xerxes’ hoard of mere biomass to a cultural force like the freemen of Greece with the Spartans and Athenians first among them. Of wealth, Sparta had none as gold and silver were banned and commerce forbidden; of ships, the Athenians built their fleet of 200 triremes just three years before squaring off against 1,200 Persian warships. The possession of cultural force over material force, especially in times of national crisis, proves quite valuable in terms of projecting power, building coalitions, and achieving greatness. Wealth was relatively easy to generate or fall upon, ships could be manufactured at a rate of about 12 every two months, but good men and a courageous citizenry were no accident – for beauty requires deliberate molding and careful cultivation over the course of generations.
Although Thucydides lived in the afterglow of the Persian Wars, it would be a mistake to assume that he, as well as his contemporaries, were not molded by their great victory and sensitive to the advantages of Hellenic culture over the ways of barbarians. It might be worth remembering how the Greeks faired against the Persians when the cultural advantages of the Athenians and Spartans were not brought to bear. Nine years before the Battle of Marathon, the magnificently wealthy and tyrant-led cities of Ionia revolted against King Darius and suffered a humiliating defeat. Only after the polis-led coalition prevailed against Xerxes in 479 do we see the raw standards used to consider questions of power and greatness become refined; culture had won a place among the Titanic material forces of wealth and naval power. This refinement is further evidenced in Thucydides’ conclusion on the tyranny question: despite all the material advantages of their rule, “nothing great proceeded from them.” Before the Persian Wars, “we find causes which make the states alike incapable of combination for great and national ends, or of any vigorous action of their own.”
As much as Thucydides’ idea of power and greatness was formed by the older view, which placed Greek cultural superiority on a pedestal, he was also a creature of his own day. The Persian Wars had opened a new historical horizon for the Greeks. Suddenly, after they had united in a grand military coalition to turn back the most wealthy and powerful empire to exist up until that point, the world opened up in new ways hitherto unknown. But as the men of each city turned to view the opportunities of this new horizon, their agonal nature and old jealousies remained. The strongest among them, the Spartans and the Athenians, vied for mastery over the whole Greek nation; and it was in this ensuing contest that Thucydides’ mind, and whatever feelings he had toward the traditional arrangements of the polis and the lofty prospect of a united Greece, were, by means of harsh necessities, dragged down to reality.
The Spartans and the Athenians were the highest representatives of the traditional ideals of Greek culture so, in a contest between them, cultural force was not a decisive factor. The ethnic and political distinctions between Dorian oligarchs on the one hand and Ionian democrats on the other are often inserted here, but their weight is wildly inflated. Ethnic tribal affiliations were not so strong as to ever dissuade the two rival hegemons from seeking even the smallest strategic advantage over one another in the composition of their competing alliances; political differences, far from orienting the entire shape of the war, flared up internally within individual city-states as duels between competing factions that were eager to bring the weight of a sympathetic hegemon down upon their fellow countrymen. It is important to always keep in front of us this fact: the cultural distance between the Doric Spartan oligarchs and the Ionian Athenian democrats was virtually a non-factor compared to the gulf that stretched between Hellenic and Persian culture. The Spartans and the Athenians both saw eye to eye on what was in front of them and what they had to suffer; neither side ever doubted what had to be done. Nietzsche’s “whisper to the conservatives,” which would have been self-evident to these two rivals on the eve of war, remains a vital reminder for modern readers today:
What was not known formerly, what is known, or might be known, today: a reversion, a return in any sense or degree is simply not possible. We physiologists know that. Yet all priests and moralists have believed the opposite — they wanted to take mankind back, to screw it back, to a former measure of virtue. Morality was always a bed of Procrustes. Even the politicians have aped the preachers of virtue at this point: today too there are still parties whose dream it is that all things might walk backwards like crabs. But no one is free to be a crab. Nothing avails: one must go forward — step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern “progress”). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more.
Compared to the Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian War constituted a completely different kind of crisis for the Greeks. Instead of a contest between Greeks and barbarians, the Peloponnesian War was more like a Hellenic civil war. As we discussed above, culture would not be the decisive factor in this contest between Greeks vying for mastery of the Greek nation. In this kind of fight, there was not some cultural dimension unique to either the Spartans or the Athenians that would have given either hegemon the decisive edge; rather, the raw material forces of money and ships were much more relevant. I believe this transvaluation in how the nature of power and greatness was measured – from the refined emphasis that valued cultural force to the raw emphasis that valued material force – was inspired by the new realities confronting the Greeks following the Persians Wars. Seeing the relevance of this raw perspective in his own time, Thucydides projects it backwards onto his characterization of Greeks during this earlier period of their historical development. Again, here, between when the Greeks emerged from the Dark Age in about 800 to the Persian Wars, Thucydides does not tell us a story about the cultural development of the Spartans and Athenians; rather, he draws our attention to wealth, navies, and the tyrant-led cities who possessed these material advantages.
All that has been laid out within this chapter accentuates a key point where modern readers of Thucydides often lead themselves astray. Since most do not understand the historical development of the Greeks, they lack the contextual basis to see Thucydides as a liminal man shaped by both old ideals and new circumstances; instead, they see him simply as an ancient authority who gives weight to the raw materialist conception of power and greatness – which is the only conception the average uncultured person is capable of understanding. At various points we have described this raw materialist conception as being “universal” because the materialist view is so intuitive. Most people, irrespective of a particular time and place, tend to understand wealth and material might as power and greatness itself and remain totally insensitive to the refined view which prizes culture. Thus, the type of person who obsesses over GDP and birthrates, or those who have inaugurated China into the pantheon of great cultures and civilization because of how their “strong economy” appears in contrast to the self-flagellating liberal democracies in the West today, will certainly read Thucydides and believe they have found in him credible confirmation of their own material valuations of power and greatness.
This universalist view, which can be ham-handed, insensitive, and barbaric, is also paradoxically heralded as one of the great achievements of Greek thought. Thucydides is frequently regarded as a modern, scientific thinker; he was able look at the Peloponnesian War and derive universal insight into human nature, politics, and war from the particular contest between the Spartans and Athenians. As rational and enlightened moderns we hold an obvious bias in favor of this kind of universalist thinking – especially when analyzing events from ancient history from which we are personally so far detached. We are prone to champion the movement from particular to universal thinking as a sure sign of intellectual progress, but, as discussed above, progress must be viewed in terms of tradeoffs and not as a linear line. The costly side of particularist thinking is obvious reflecting on how parochial customs, petty nationalisms, priestly superstitions, and overall tribal clannishness have suffocated the intellect and limited the historical potential of so many peoples. The costs of universalist thinking may seem less apparent, but it can blindly deconstruct the superiority of a particular people thus reducing what is higher and rarer in favor of what is lower and more common. Consider how the Greek view of nature informed and oriented this particular people, not downward to what is average and universal in men, but upward to what is ultimately the best and most beautiful.
Good students should make it a point of personal pride to develop an intelligent standard of greatness through which many ideas, events, and individuals can justly pass. The hazard presented by the raw materialist view that most readers will immediately intuit from these chapters of Thucydides is that the value of culture is overlooked – they will only be perceptive to the universal value of wealth and ships and not to the particular culture which shaped the Spartans and the Athenians. When the Greeks are incapable of being seen truthfully readers risk compromising their entire educative mission because they will not be able to see themselves truthfully. It should only take a moment of self-reflection to understand how the raw materialist view of greatness teaches us nothing about our true needs. Do we require more wealth and power today? Modern nations are richer and more technologically advanced than ever before, yet our glories are so few and much less significant compared to what had been achieved in the past. The material advantages of our age are not producing the impetus, whether it be common action or bold daring, that advances a people in the most important ways.
What we require above all else now are men, and the creation of men falls into the much more difficult (and controversial) work of culture. Commerce, global supply chains, outfitting armies, financialization, communication, venture capital investments – we can find these activities being performed all over the world today in various capacities. Historically, these activities have been basic civilizational constants. But to have knowledge of a definite high ideal is much rarer, and the molding of men to that ideal by means of a deliberate program of education and discipline rarer still. This is where true greatness resides, and perhaps we can deduce from our reading of Thucydides a more complete understanding: wealth and material are exponents to greatness, but culture provides the sense of direction. To what ends ought the advantages of wealth and material be employed? Toward the cultivation of a higher type of man, toward the rule of the best, toward mastery inward over one’s self and one’s own country, as well as outward over and against others.
Absolute banger. Can't wait for the book.