Europe: A History (29 page)
Not surprisingly, the extreme complications of Greek political practice offered fertile ground for the growth of political theory. Plato’s
Republic
, which advocates the rule of the Guardians—a somewhat totalitarian breed of so-called philosopher-kings—and Aristotle’s
Politics
, with its categoric statement about man being
zoon politikon
, offer two opposing approaches to the subject. The basic political vocabulary of the modern world, from ‘anarchy’ to ‘politics’ itself, is largely a Greek invention.
Greek history-writing, like the theatre, had its triad of giants. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484–420) is commonly known as the ‘Father of History’, but his keen interest in foreign lands earned from his more chauvinistic compatriots the label of ‘Father of Lies’. He wrote from eyewitness reports and from personal observation on his far-flung travels. He saw the past in terms of the titanic contest between Europe and Asia, and his nine books culminate in the Graeco-Persian wars. Thucydides (455–
c
.401
BC)
the Athenian, in the opinion of Thomas Hobbes and many others, was quite simply ‘the most Politick Historiographer that ever writ’. He introduced the systematic analysis of causation and consequence; he quoted documents and treatises at length; and in the set-piece orations
of his principal protagonists he found a marvellous method for injecting his strictly impartial narrative with subjective opinion. His eight books on the Peloponnesian War were ‘not designed’, he wrote, ‘to meet the taste of an immediate public, but to last for ever’. Xenophon (
c
.428–354), another Athenian, was author of the
Hellenica
and of
Anabasis
. The
Hellenica
continues the narrative of Greek history from the point where Thucydides had broken off (in 411), just as Thucydides had to some extent carried on from Herodotus. The
Anabasis
, translated as ‘The Persian Expedition’, describes the long march of 10,000 Greek mercenaries, including Xenophon himself, who went to Mesopotamia and back in the service of a Persian pretender. The shout of
Thalassa! Thalassa!
—’The sea! The sea!’—when, after months of marching, Xenophon’s companions caught sight of the coast from the hills behind Trebizond, provides one of the most enthusiastic moments of military chronicles.
DEMOS
S
OME
people believe that in 507
BC
a lasting tradition of popular sovereignty was launched by Cleisthenes the Alcmaeonid. In
AD
1993 they were moved to celebrate ‘the 2,500th anniversary of the birth of democracy’. To this end, a lavish banquet in London’s Guildhall was addressed by the President of the Classical Society.
1
In fact, the seeds of Athenian democracy had been sown some time before Cleisthenes. The Assembly of Citizens, the
Ecclesia
, which met in the meeting-ground of the Pnyx alongside the Acropolis, was established by Solon. But it was easily manipulated by aristocratic leaders such as Pisistratus and his sons, who used it to bolster their fifty-year tyranny from 560 to 510 BC.
Cleisthenes belonged to a rich family which tried to share power with Pisistratus, then chose exile. He was probably responsible for refacing the Temple of Zeus at Delphi with Parian marble to atone for a massacre committed by his kin. He led an abortive invasion of Attica in 513, possibly seeking Persian aid. But it was the Spartans not Cleisthenes who drove out the last of the Pisistratids three years later.
Cleisthenes is said to have invoked the power of the people in order to undermine the old tribal organizations on which his predecessors had relied. By proposing sovereign power for the
Ecclesia
, he gained the authority to instigate still wider reforms. He replaced the four old tribes with ten new ones, each with its own shrine and hero-cult. He greatly strengthened the
demes
or ‘parishes’ into which the tribes were divided, and extended the franchise to all freemen resident on Athenian territory. Above all, he instituted the
Boule
, which functioned as a steering committee for the Assembly’s agenda. He also initiated legal ostracism. He has been called ‘the founder of the art of organizing public opinion’.
Athenian democracy, which lasted for 185 years, was far from perfect. The sovereignty of the people was limited by the machinations of the
Boule
, by the waywardness of the
deme
, and by the continuing influence of wealthy patrons and demagogues. To ensure a quorum of 6,000 at meetings of the
Ecclesia
, the citizens were literally ‘roped in’ from the streets, with a rope dipped in red paint. The extent of participation, both in the central and the district bodies, is a matter of intense scholarly debate.
2
And yet the citizens really did rule. They enjoyed equality before the law. They elected the ten top officials, including the
Strategos
or military commander. They drew lots for distributing hundreds of annual administrative posts among themselves. Most importantly, they held public servants to account. Dishonest or bungling officials could be dismissed, or even executed.
Not everyone was impressed. Plato thought that democracy meant the rule of the incompetent. Aristophanes made fun of ‘that angry, waspish, intractable old man, Demos of Pnyx’. At one point he asked, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and replied, ‘Women’.
Unfortunately, the link between the democracy of ancient Athens and that of contemporary Europe is tenuous. Democracy did not prevail in its birthplace. It was not admired by Roman thinkers; and it was all but forgotten for more than a millennium. The democratic practices of today’s Europe trace their origins as much to popular assemblies of the Viking type
[DING]
,
to the diets convened by feudal monarchs, and to medieval city republics. The Athenian notion of a sovereign assembly consisting of all qualified citizens found its counterparts in medieval Novgorod, Hungary, and Poland—in political systems which spawned no heirs. The theorists of the Enlightenment blended classical knowledge with an interest in constitutional reform; and a romanticized vision of ancient Athens played a part in this among classically educated liberals. But liberals could themselves be critical. De Tocqueville inveighed against ‘the tyranny of the majority’. Edmund Burke called democracy on the French model ‘the most shameless thing in the world’. Democracy has rarely been the norm.
Nowadays there is little consensus about the essence of democracy. In theory, it promotes all the virtues, from freedom, justice, and equality to the rule of law, the respect for human rights, and the promotion of political pluralism and of civil society. In practice, ‘rule by the people’ is impossible. There is much to divide the Continental brand of popular sovereignty from the British brand of parliamentary sovereignty (see p. 631). And all brands have their faults. Winston Churchill once said that ‘democracy is the worst of political systems, except for all the others’. What does exist, as always, is almost universal abhorrence of tyranny. And this is what propels all newly liberated nations in the direction of democracy, irrespective of previous realities. ‘Our whole history inclines us towards the democratic Powers’, declared the President of newborn Czechoslovakia in 1918.
3
In 1989–91, similar sentiments were echoed by leaders of all the countries of the ex-Soviet bloc.
This is not to deny that democracy, like any other movement, needs its founding myth. It needs an ancient pedigree and worthy heroes. And who could be more ancient or more worthy than Cleisthenes the Alcmaeonid?
By common assent, the zenith of Greek civilization was reached during the Age of Pericles in Athens. In the interval between the city’s salvation from the Persian invasion in 480
BC
and the onset of the ruinous war with Sparta in 431, the political, intellectual, and cultural energies of Athens peaked. Pericles (
c
.495–429), general and statesman, was leader of the moderate democratic faction. He had organized the reconstruction of the pillaged Acropolis, and was the friend of artists and philosophers. His funeral oration for the dead of the first year of the Peloponnesian War pulses with pride at the freedom and high culture of his native city:
Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about….Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs, but in the affairs of the state as well…. We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all….Others are brave out of ignorance, and, when they begin to think, they begin to fear. But the man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and what is terrible, and then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come.
20
The Athenian contemporaries of Pericles gave him good reason to be proud. Anaxagoras and Socrates, Euripides and Aeschylus, Pindar and Pheidias, Antiphon and Aristophanes, Democritus and Hippocrates, Herodotus and Thucydides, all walked the same streets, all watched the Parthenon taking shape for its inauguration in 438. Athens, ‘the eye of Greece, Mother of arts and eloquence’, had fulfilled the prediction of the Oracle: ‘You will become an eagle among the clouds for all time’. Most appropriate perhaps are the words from a fragment of Pindar:
(Shining and violet-crowned and celebrated in song, bulwark of Greece, famous Athens, divine city.)
21
Sparta, otherwise known as Lacedaemon, was Athens’s foil and rival. To modern sensibilities it was as ugly as Athens is attractive. Exceptionally, it was a landlocked city, built on the plain of Laconia in the middle of the Peleponnese. It possessed no native navy, and was entirely devoted to the militarism which had enabled it to confront all its immediate neighbours—the Messenians, the Argives, and the Arcadians. Its system of government, bestowed in remote times by the divine Lycurgus, was variously described as a despotic form of oligarchy or an oligarchic form of despotism. A council of
ephors
or magistrates wielded dictatorial powers. They gave orders to the two hereditary ‘kings’ of Sparta, who acted as high priests and military commanders. Sparta had few colonies, and solved its problems of overpopulation by culling its male infants. Weaklings were ceremonially left to die in the open. All surviving boys were taken by the state at the age of seven to be trained in physical prowess and military discipline. At twenty, they started their forty-year service as citizen-soldiers. They were forbidden to undertake trade or crafts, and were supported by the toil of an underclass of
helots
or slaves. The result was a culture which had little time for the arts and graces, and little sense of solidarity with the rest of Hellas. According to Aristotle, it was also a society in which the number of men began to fall alarmingly, and a large part of the land was held by women. To be ‘laconic’ was to spurn fine words. When Philip of Macedon sent a threatening letter to Sparta: ‘if I enter Lacedaemon, I shall raze it’, the ephors sent him a one-word reply,
an
, ‘if’,
[MAKEDON]
The era of hellenism—that is, the era when the world of the Greek city-states was merged into the wider but essentially non-Greek world created by Alexander and his successors—is frequently despised for its decadence. Certainly, in the political sphere, the internecine strife of the dynasties that latched onto Alexander’s dismembered empire does not make an edifying story. On the other hand, Greek culture had stamina, and the beneficial effects of a common tradition, through several centuries and in diverse lands, should not be casually dismissed. Greek rulers in the Indus Valley, where the veneer of hellenism was thinnest, held on into the middle of the first century
BC.
In Macedonia the Antigonid dynasty, founded by Alexander’s one-eyed general, Antigonus (382–301), reigned until their defeat by the Romans in 168. In Syria, and for a time in Persia and in Asia Minor, the Seleucid dynasty, founded by Seleucus I Nicator (ruled 280–261), controlled vast if ever-diminishing Asiatic territories. They were active hellenizers, consciously executing Alexander’s plans for a network of new Greek colonies in Asia. They surrendered to Rome in 69. The eastern half of the Seleucid realm was seized in 250
BC
by Arsaces, the Parthian (d. 248), whose Arsacid dynasty ruled in Persia for nearly 500 years, until the rebirth of a native Persian empire in
AD
226. In Egypt the Ptolemaic dynasty launched by Alexander’s bastard half-brother, Ptolemaeus Soter, ‘the Preserver’ (d. 285), reigned until 31
BC.
MAKEDON
T
O
ask whether Macedonia is Greek is rather like asking whether Prussia was German. If one talks of distant origins, the answer in both cases must be ‘No’. Ancient Macedonia started its career in the orbit of Illyrian or Thracian civilization. But, as shown by excavation of the royal tombs, it was subject to a high degree of hellenization before Philip of Macedon conquered Greece.
1
[PAPYRUS]
The Roman province of Macedonia stretched to the Adriatic
[EGNATIA]
,
and from the sixth century onwards was heavily settled by migrant Slavs. According to one theory, the Slavs mingled with the residue of the pre-Greek population to form a new, non-Greek Macedonian nation. The Byzantine empire was sometimes dubbed ‘Macedonia’ because of its Greek connections. But the former province of Macedonia, and much of the Peloponnese, was submerged in ‘Sclavonia’.
In medieval times Macedonia was incorporated for a time into the Bulgarian empire, and remained permanently within the exarchate of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. This strengthened later Bulgarian claims. In the fourteenth century it passed under Serbian rule. In 1346 Stefan Dusan was crowned in Skopje ‘Tsar of the Serbs, Greeks, Bulgars and Albanians’. This was to strengthen Serbian claims. Then came the Ottomans.
In the late nineteenth century, Ottoman Macedonia was a typical Balkan province of mixed religious and ethnic composition. Orthodox Christians lived alongside Muslims, and Greeks and Slavs alongside Albanians and Turks. By custom, all Orthodox Christians were counted as ‘Greeks’ because of their allegiance to the Patriarch of Constantinople.
Throughout the Balkan wars (see p. 874) Macedonia was fought over by Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. It was divided into three parts. (See Appendix III, p. 1309.) Southern Macedonia, centred on Thessaloniki, was taken over by Greece. After the Graeco-Turkish population exchange of 1922, and the Slav exodus due to the Civil War in 1949, it came to be dominated by a strong majority of highly patriotic Greeks, ‘Alexander’s successors’, many of them immigrants from Turkey. Eastern Macedonia found itself in Bulgaria, which treated it as synonymous with ‘Western Bulgaria’. Northern Macedonia, centred on Skopje and the upper Vardar valley, possessed a mixed Albanian and Slav population living within Serbia.
When this northern section was reconstituted in 1945 as the autonomous republic of ‘Makedonija’ within Yugoslavia, a determined campaign was launched to simplify history and to transmute the identity of the entire population. The Yugoslav leadership was intent on reversing the effects of wartime Bulgarian occupation, and on resisting the cultural charms of ancient Greece. The Slav dialect of the political élite was
declared to be a separate language; Old Church Slavonic was equated with ‘Old Macedonian’; and a whole generation was educated according to the ‘Great Idea’ of a Slav Macedonia stretching back for centuries.
2
Not surprisingly, when the government of Skopje declared independence in 1992, no one could agree what their republic should be called. A Greek scholar was reported to have received death threats for revealing the existence of a Slavic-speaking minority on the Greek side of Greece’s closed northern frontier.
3
Neutral commentators abroad adopted the evocative acronym of FYROM—‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.’ Equally useful was the curious mnemonic of FOPITGROBBSOSY—‘Former Province of Illyria, Thrace, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia, the Ottoman Empire, Serbia, and Yugoslavia.’
