Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson Page A
Authors: Victor Davis Hanson
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annihilated by Alexander the Great (334–323 B.C.), fought as defensive troops to repel foreign aggression from their homeland. But they were defeated as serfs in service to the sovereignty and home soil of Achaemenid Asia, not as freemen for the ideal of freedom.
THE LEGACY OF SALAMIS
The interest of the world’s history hung trembling in the balance. Oriental despotism, a world united under one lord and sovereign, on the one side, and separate states, insignificant in extent and resources, but animated by free individuality, on the other side, stood front to front in array of battle. Never in history has the superiority of spiritual power over material bulk, and that of no contemptible amount, been made so gloriously manifest.
So wrote Georg Hegel of Salamis in his
Philosophy of History
(2.2.3)— a melodramatic judgment at odds with Arnold Toynbee, who in one of his more foolish asides suggested that a Greek loss to Xerxes might have been good for Hellenic civilization: the omnipresent despot at least bringing them relief from their own internecine rivalry. Toynbee should have examined carefully the fate of sixth-century Ionia and the demise of its preeminence in philosophy, free government, and unfettered expression under a century of Eastern rule.
A Greek defeat at Salamis would have ensured the end of Western civilization and its peculiar institution of freedom altogether. Ionia, the islands, and the Greek mainland would have all been occupied as a Western satrapy of Persia. Those few Greeks surviving as autonomous states in Italy or Sicily would have succumbed to Persian attack, or remained inconsequential backwaters in an eastern Mediterranean that was already essentially a Persian and Carthaginian lake. Without a free Greek mainland, the unique culture of the polis would have been lost, and with that ruin the values of a nascent Western civilization itself. In 480 B.C. democracy itself was only twenty-seven years old, and the idea of freedom a mere two-centuries-old concept shared by only a few hundred thousand rustics in a backwater of the eastern Mediterranean. What allowed Rome later to dominate Greece and Carthage was its deadly army, its ability to marshal manpower through levies of free citizens, its resilient constitution in which civilians oversaw military operations, and its dynamic scientific tradition which produced everything from catapults to advanced siegecraft and superb arms and armor. Yet most of these practices were either directly borrowed from the Greeks or Greek-inspired.
After Salamis the free Greeks would never fear any other foreign power until they met the free Romans of the republic. No Persian king would ever again set foot in Greece. For the next 2,000 years no Easterner would claim Greece as his own until the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the fifteenth century overran an impoverished, unaided, and largely forgotten Byzantine Hellas. Before Salamis Athens was a rather eccentric city-state whose experiment with a radical democracy was in its twenty-seven-year-old infancy, and the verdict on its success was still out. After Salamis an imperial democratic culture arose at Athens that ruled the Aegean and gave us Aeschylus, Sophocles, the Parthenon, Pericles, Socrates, and Thucydides. Salamis proved that free peoples fought better than unfree, and that the most free of the free—the Athenians—fought the best of all.
For the next three and a half centuries after Salamis, murderous Hellenic-inspired armies—the Ten Thousand, the Macedonians under Alexander the Great, and the mercenaries of Pyrrhus—possessed of superior technology and shock tactics, would run wild from southern Italy to the Indus River. The unmatched architecture of Greece, from the temple of Zeus at Olympia to the Parthenon at Athens; the timeless literature of Greece, from Attic tragedy, comedy, and oratory to Greek history itself; the rise of red-figure vase painting, mastery of realism and idealism in
THE LEGACY OF SALAMIS
The interest of the world’s history hung trembling in the balance. Oriental despotism, a world united under one lord and sovereign, on the one side, and separate states, insignificant in extent and resources, but animated by free individuality, on the other side, stood front to front in array of battle. Never in history has the superiority of spiritual power over material bulk, and that of no contemptible amount, been made so gloriously manifest.
So wrote Georg Hegel of Salamis in his
Philosophy of History
(2.2.3)— a melodramatic judgment at odds with Arnold Toynbee, who in one of his more foolish asides suggested that a Greek loss to Xerxes might have been good for Hellenic civilization: the omnipresent despot at least bringing them relief from their own internecine rivalry. Toynbee should have examined carefully the fate of sixth-century Ionia and the demise of its preeminence in philosophy, free government, and unfettered expression under a century of Eastern rule.
A Greek defeat at Salamis would have ensured the end of Western civilization and its peculiar institution of freedom altogether. Ionia, the islands, and the Greek mainland would have all been occupied as a Western satrapy of Persia. Those few Greeks surviving as autonomous states in Italy or Sicily would have succumbed to Persian attack, or remained inconsequential backwaters in an eastern Mediterranean that was already essentially a Persian and Carthaginian lake. Without a free Greek mainland, the unique culture of the polis would have been lost, and with that ruin the values of a nascent Western civilization itself. In 480 B.C. democracy itself was only twenty-seven years old, and the idea of freedom a mere two-centuries-old concept shared by only a few hundred thousand rustics in a backwater of the eastern Mediterranean. What allowed Rome later to dominate Greece and Carthage was its deadly army, its ability to marshal manpower through levies of free citizens, its resilient constitution in which civilians oversaw military operations, and its dynamic scientific tradition which produced everything from catapults to advanced siegecraft and superb arms and armor. Yet most of these practices were either directly borrowed from the Greeks or Greek-inspired.
After Salamis the free Greeks would never fear any other foreign power until they met the free Romans of the republic. No Persian king would ever again set foot in Greece. For the next 2,000 years no Easterner would claim Greece as his own until the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the fifteenth century overran an impoverished, unaided, and largely forgotten Byzantine Hellas. Before Salamis Athens was a rather eccentric city-state whose experiment with a radical democracy was in its twenty-seven-year-old infancy, and the verdict on its success was still out. After Salamis an imperial democratic culture arose at Athens that ruled the Aegean and gave us Aeschylus, Sophocles, the Parthenon, Pericles, Socrates, and Thucydides. Salamis proved that free peoples fought better than unfree, and that the most free of the free—the Athenians—fought the best of all.
For the next three and a half centuries after Salamis, murderous Hellenic-inspired armies—the Ten Thousand, the Macedonians under Alexander the Great, and the mercenaries of Pyrrhus—possessed of superior technology and shock tactics, would run wild from southern Italy to the Indus River. The unmatched architecture of Greece, from the temple of Zeus at Olympia to the Parthenon at Athens; the timeless literature of Greece, from Attic tragedy, comedy, and oratory to Greek history itself; the rise of red-figure vase painting, mastery of realism and idealism in
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