The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (6 page)

Western Exceptionalism

W
AS SUCH ABSTRACT
speculation about war unique in the early West? Was it uncommon elsewhere to debate wars and to ratify decisions to go to war by majority votes, as was true in the polis and Roman Republic? In large part, yes. Classics should remind us that the Greeks and Romans were anti-Mediterranean cultures, in the sense of being at odds with much of the political heritages of Persia, Egypt, and Phoenicia. While Hellenism was influenced—and enriched—at times by Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Persian art, literature, religion, and architecture, its faith in consensual government and free markets was unique. Greek and Latin words for “democracy,” “republic,” “city-state,” “constitution,” “freedom,” “liberty,” and “free speech” have no philological equivalents in other ancient languages of the Mediterranean (and few in the contemporary languages of the non-West as well).

We have forgotten this ancient truth of Western exceptionalism. In the age of cultural studies, Americans have often made the common mistake of assuming that our enemies are simply different from us, rather than far different from us. Perhaps the hesitancy to appreciate the singularity of the West results from guilt over European colonialism. Or it may be laudable humility. Or it could reflect an ignorance of cultures in general and Western civilization in particular. Or we may live in an interconnected global age where all narratives are complementary rather than antithetical—no one “truth” having any absolute currency.

Nonetheless, Athens was a democracy; Sidon was not. Farmers owned property in Greece, voted, and formed the militia of the polis; that was not the case in Persia and Egypt. King Xerxes sat on a throne at Salamis and recorded the names of brave and cowardly subjects battling in the straits below. His counterparts, the Spartan general Eurybiades and the Athenian admiral Themistocles, debated the wisdom of fighting at Salamis, led their own sailors into the sea battle, and heard their rowers shout cries of “freedom” as they rammed the enemy.

Thucydides was able to criticize his mother polis, Greece; Persian clerks who recorded Darius’s res gestae on the walls of Persepolis could not. Such differences were not merely perceived but also real and critical, for they affected the manner in which people conducted their daily lives—whether they lived in fear or in safety, in want or in security.

If the public today would study the classics, they might rediscover the origins of their culture—and in doing so learn that we are not even remotely culturally akin to the Taliban or the Saudis, but are, in fact, profoundly different in the manner we craft our government, treat our women, earn our living, and set the parameters of our religion. The point is not that bias, oppression, and subjugation didn’t exist during the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, or the ages of overseas conquest and imperialism in the West. But rather there was also the blueprint of personal freedom and consensual government that survived the darkest moments of Western civilization and resprouted at the most unexpected moments in classical Athens, Republican Rome, Renaissance Italy, and Enlightenment Western Europe. It is unwise perhaps in triumphalist fashion to chest-thump in our globally connected world about past Western achievement; but in a transnational war of ideas, it is equally unwise to deny the radically different cultural attitudes toward religiously driven suicide bombing and the relationship between religion and secular government.

Modern cultural anthropology, social linguistics, cross-cultural geography, and sociology in theory could contextualize the Taliban’s desecration of the graves of the infidel, destruction of ancient statues of Buddha, clitoridectomies of infants, torture of the accused, murder of the untried, and hounding out of the non-Islamic as something not quite “evil.” Yet a world run according to the dictates of the Taliban or its supporters, like the satrapy that Xerxes envisioned for a conquered Greece, would mean no cultural anthropology at all. There would be no real voting and scant protection from arbitrary and coercive government. Instead, theocracy, censorship, and brutality would invade every facet of daily life. Such were the stakes at Salamis. And so too is the contest with the radical worldview of Islamic fundamentalists, who are as akin to ancient absolutists as Westerners are to the Greeks.

Such neglect of one’s own past can, I think, ultimately weaken a powerful society such as ours that must project confidence, power, humanity, and hope to those less fortunate abroad. The new species of often upscale and Internet-savvy terrorist hates America for a variety of complex reasons. (Ayman al-Zawahiri has listed dozens of grievances for al-Qaeda’s war on America that commenced on September 11, 2001—among them, our lack of campaign finance reform and the supposed presence of Jewish women in the holy city of Mecca.)

The terrorist despises, of course, his own attraction toward our ease and liberality, explaining why some of the most virulent Islamists are precisely those, who chose to be educated in the West. Mohammed Atta, the tactician of 9/11, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, its strategic architect, studied at the Technical University of Hamburg and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, respectively.

The terrorist recognizes that our freedom and affluence spur on his appetites more than Islam can repress them. But just as important, the al-Qaedist perceives that there is a sort of aristocratic guilt within a minority of influential Americans, who are too often ashamed of, or apologetic about, their culture—or have lost any ability even to articulate it. And in this hesitance, our enemies sense not merely our unfamiliarity with our own foundations but perhaps weakness as well—and at times wrongly believe that their assaults on America are simply an extreme reification of what many inside the West, in the abstract, do not like about the West.

Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause—and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess.

To sum up the Hellenic view of war and the lessons we may learn from the Greeks: Conflict is omnipresent. It is often irrational in nature and more a result of strong emotions than of material need. Preparedness is more of a deterrent than is empathy, understanding, or demonstrations of good intentions. War is sometimes won or lost as much by confidence in one’s culture as by military assets themselves. It is often not a question of a choice between good or bad but between bad or worse. And war should be judged moral or immoral by the circumstances in which it breaks out and the conditions under which it is waged, rather than by the fact that violence is employed.

We may not like such a bitter message, but recent events have shown the empirical Greeks of the past are still more relevant to present warfare than what passes for much of the wisdom of the contemporary age.

CHAPTER 3

Raw, Relevant History:
From the 300 Spartans to the
History of Thucydides

Why the Public Is Still Fascinated by the Wars of the Past
*

Real, Imagined, or Stylized Spartans?

W
HILE, AS I
argued in chapter 2, the study of classics can serve as a valuable foundation of military history, Greek and Latin nevertheless are difficult languages that require hundreds of hours of study, apart from the study of military history itself. And even in translation, the themes and ideas found in classical history, philosophy, and literature are not easy to digest. To study the Persian Wars is to enter a distant world of esoteric place names, unpronounceable nomenclature, and weird protocols presented by Herodotus or Plutarch as if they were second nature to the reader. A knowledge of the arcane disciplines of archaeology, art history, epigraphy, numismatics, and philology is often necessary just to make one’s way through the written record of the Greek past.

The result is that classics is often a mandarin discipline, as poorly understood by the general public as it is fascinating. Almost any effort, then, that brings the Greeks to the general public—vulgarization, as it is sometimes called—is to be welcomed. The public’s innate interest in our classical heritage sometimes manifests itself in surprising ways.

For example, on a Monday night in Hollywood in March 2007, I attended an advance screening of the Zack Snyder–directed movie
300
, starring Gerard Butler as Leonidas, king of Sparta. The prior October, I had watched an earlier uncut working version of the film at the request of screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, who drove a copy down to my farm. I liked much of what I saw, and then wrote an introduction to the book accompanying the film. So I am not a disinterested observer.

I thought from the outset that many critics would dislike the final version of the film, for a variety of reasons, even aside from its unabashed defense of the Spartan notion of martial excellence and the superiority of a free Hellas over a subservient Persian East. At earlier prescreenings, for example, some Europeans apparently bristled at such Western chauvinism, came to the strange conclusion that the movie was an allegory for George Bush and Iraq, and were appalled that the Persians appeared both bent on conquest and less valiant, man for man, than the free Spartans guarding the pass. Quite understandably, the autocratic, authoritarian contemporary Iranian government subsequently railed that the film depicted ancient Persia as an autocratic authoritarian government.

The movie is certainly violent, with beheadings and lopped limbs aplenty. The characters are one-dimensional, with little complexity and no self-doubt or evolution in their thinking. And, of course,
300
does not claim to be the true story of the battle at Thermopylae but rather an adaptation from a comic book that is itself an adaptation from secondary books and films about the battle. While there are plenty of direct quotations from the accounts of Plutarch and Herodotus, we are nevertheless a long way from the last stand of the Spartans, Thespians, and Thebans in the late summer of 480
B.C.
If you wish to learn the story of what actually happened at Thermopylae, this movie won’t necessarily help you do it.

But the impressionism of
300
is oddly Hellenic in spirit; the buff bare chests of the Spartans holding the pass are reminiscent of the “heroic nudity” of stylized warriors on Attic black- and red-figure vase paintings. Even in its surrealism—an ahistorical rhinoceros, futuristic odd-shaped swords, and an effeminate, Mr. Clean–esque Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), who gets his ear flicked by a Spartan spear cast—it is not all that different from some of Euripides’ wilder dramatic adaptations, like his tragedy
Helen
or
Iphigeneia at Taurus
, in their strange deviation from the mythological party line of the Homeric epics.

Like the highly formalist Attic tragedy—with its set length, three actors, music, iambic and choral meters, and so forth—
300
consciously abandons any claims of realist portrayal. The film’s actors may not seem believable, but remember that ancient Greek actors wore masks. Men played women’s roles. They chanted in lyric meters, broken up by choral hymns. The audience understood that dramatists reworked common myths to meet current tastes and to offer commentary on the human experience in stylized drama.

Again,
300
does not claim to follow exactly ancient accounts of the battle of Thermopylae in 480
B.C.
Instead, it is an impressionistic take on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, intended first to entertain and shock, and second to instruct. Indeed, at the real battle King Xerxes was bearded and sat on a throne high above the fighting; he wasn’t, as in the movie, bald and sexually ambiguous, and he didn’t prance around the killing field. And neither the traitor Ephialtes nor the Spartan overseers, the Ephors, were grotesquely deformed.

When the Greeks were surrounded on the battle’s last day, there were seven hundred Thespians and another four hundred Thebans who fought alongside the three hundred Spartans under King Leonidas. But these non-Spartans are scarcely prominent in the movie. All that said, the main story line mostly conveys the general truth of Thermopylae. A small contingent of Greeks at Thermopylae (which translates to “the hot gates”) really did block the enormous Persian army for three days before being betrayed. The defenders, as they are portrayed in the history of Herodotus and canonized in lyric poetry, claimed their fight was for the survival of a free people against subjugation by the Persian Empire.

Many of the film’s corniest lines—such as the Spartan dare “Come and take them,” when ordered by the Persians to hand over their weapons, and the Spartans’ flippant reply, “Then we will fight in the shade,” when warned that the cloud of Persian arrows will blot out the sun—are literal translations from ancient Greek accounts by Herodotus and Plutarch.

The warriors of
300
look like comic book heroes because they are based on Miller’s drawings, which emphasize bare torsos, futuristic swords, and staged fight scenes. In other words, director Zack Snyder tells the story not in the fashion of the mostly failed attempts to recapture the ancient world in costume dramas, such as
Troy
and
Alexander
, but in the surreal manner of a comic book or video game. Overt suspension of belief at the outset relieves the viewer from wondering whether the usual British-accented actors playing Greeks are all that close to their ancient counterparts.

The movie also demonstrates surprising affinity with Herodotus in two other areas. First, it captures the martial ethos of the Spartan state, the notion that the sum total of a man’s life, the ultimate arbiter of all success or failure, is how well he fought on the battlefield, especially when it becomes clear at last that bravery cannot prevent defeat.

Second, the Greeks, if we can believe Simonides, Aeschylus, and Herodotus, saw Thermopylae as a “clash of civilizations” that set Eastern centralism and collective serfdom against the idea of the free citizen of an autonomous polis. The ancient morality tale emphasized that a haughty imperious Xerxes was punished by the gods for trying, in hubristic fashion, to subjugate self-reliant and rather pious Greeks, whose creed was moderation, not superciliousness. That Hellenic-centric view comes through in the movie, especially in the fine performances of Butler and Lena Headey (who plays Leonidas’s wife, Gorgo). If the Spartans seem too cocky and self-assured in their belief that they are the more effective warriors of a superior culture, blame Herodotus, not necessarily Zack Snyder or the influence of cardboard comic heroes like Superman and Batman. The cinematography, acting, and computer-generated special effects are often quite stunning. The Spartans’ mood of defiance is chilling, especially when we remember that their gallant last stand ended in the greatest defeat in the history of Greek city-states—until Alexander ended their freedom 140 years later, at Chaironeia.

Some reviewers argue that the film’s graphic violence is gratuitous and at times revolting. But Thermopylae was no picnic. Almost all the Spartans and Thespians were killed, along with several hundred from other Greek contingents. Some of the film’s most graphic killing—such as Persians being pushed over the cliff into the sea—derives also from the text of Herodotus. And the filmmakers omitted the mutilation of King Leonidas, whose head Xerxes ordered impaled on a stake.

Some have suggested that
300
is juvenile in its black-and-white plot and character depiction—and glorification—of free Greeks versus imperious Persians. Yet that good-bad contrast comes not entirely from Snyder or Miller, but again is based on accounts from the Greeks themselves, who saw their own society as antithetical to the monarchy of imperial Persia.

True, 2,500 years ago, almost every society in the ancient Mediterranean world had slaves. And all relegated women to a relatively inferior position. Sparta turned the entire region of Messenia into a dependent serf state. But in the Greek polis alone, there were elected governments, ranging from the constitutional oligarchy at Sparta to much broader-based voting in states like Athens and Thespiae.

Most important, only in Greece was there a constant tradition of unfettered expression and self-criticism. Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Plato questioned the subordinate position of women. Alcidamas lamented the notion of slavery. Such openness was found nowhere else in the ancient Mediterranean world. That freedom of expression explains why we rightly consider the ancient Greeks as the founders of our present Western civilization—and as millions of moviegoers seemed to sense, far more like us than the ancient enemy who ultimately failed to conquer them. In the end,
300
went on to earn nearly five hundred million dollars in global box-office receipts, making it among the top one hundred grossing films of all time—a testament not only to its comic book splashy violence and video game imagery but also to an action-packed retelling of an ancient tale in which free men prevailed over their far more numerous oppressors.

Thucydides for Everyone

P
OPULAR INTEREST IN
the Greeks at war occurs at a more serious level as well. As a teacher of classics for some twenty-one years in the Central Valley of California, I was often surprised that the ancient Greek historian Thucydides was among the most popular authors I assigned to undergraduates, the vast majority of whose parents had not attended college. “An Athenian, who wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians”—with those words of introduction, the disgraced Athenian admiral matter-of-factly opens
The History of the Peloponnesian War
, his monumental, though unfinished, narrative of the twenty-seven-year war (431–404
B.C.
) between Athens and Sparta that left the Athenian empire and the entire culture of the Greek city-state in ruins.

Because he had lived through and participated in the events he described, Thucydides had an advantage over later historians, who have had to dig through unreliable records and consult secondary sources about the war. But even as he set down his record of contemporary events, Thucydides was eyeing posterity. His work, he boasted, was “not an essay to win applause of the moment, but a possession for all time.”

If his contemporaries failed to appreciate his true genius, perhaps people like ourselves would fathom it two and a half millennia in the future. And so we do. Studying how a seafaring democratic Athens fought an insular oligarchy like Sparta teaches us a lot about current world crises and the fickleness of public opinion. Thucydides knew nothing about conflict-resolution theory, God’s will, or the United Nations, but he could declare for all time that people—as the Athenians did to acquire and preserve their empire—go to war for reasons of “honor, fear and self-interest.” Period.

Thousands of paperback translations of Thucydides are sold each year, bearing out his extraordinary boast. But if his book, like other great works, is timeless, it is also very difficult, in places even obscure. A page of Thucydides takes as long to read as five of Tom Clancy. Thucydides doesn’t dispense easy virtues and won’t do a thing to get you into heaven. And his disturbing ideas turn every modern bromide on its head.

So it’s surprising that so many people read him at all—and in surprising places. There’s no reason to think a book by an ancient Greek would interest students at the California State University campus in Fresno, home to the wayward Bulldogs basketball team—once coached by the much maligned Jerry Tarkanian.

To generalize, most students are the children of farmworkers and the working poor from places like Bakersfield and Tulare. They are neither privileged nor well prepared for college. Their reference points come from television, not ballet, computer camp, or prep school. Many have never been outside the Central Valley—Thucydides’ Athens might as well be Athens, Georgia. Students here confuse Cleon, the Athenian demagogue, with a warrior race in
Star Trek
and think the Spartans are a rival San Jose football team, not dour foot soldiers from the Peloponnese.

At Stanford, where I did graduate work, Thucydides was an entirely different historian from the one I came to know in Fresno. The Thucydides of the graduate seminar is often now Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Hayden White all rolled into one. His book is the subject of many pages of jargon in which, for example, Pericles’ funeral oration is discussed as a dry rhetorical exercise that reflects subjective, not absolute, “truth,” or that can serve as a valuable “construction” that reveals the gender, class, and ethnic biases of Thucydides himself.