Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson Page B

sculpture, and the expansion of the idea of democracy—all of this proceeded from the Persian Wars, prompting literary and artistic historians properly to mark the Greek victory as the fault line between the Archaic and classical ages.
    There is one final irony about Salamis and the idea of freedom. The Greek victory not merely saved the West by ensuring that Hellenism would survive after a mere two centuries of polis culture. Just as important, it was also a catalyst for the entire Athenian democratic renaissance, which radically altered the evolution of the city-state by giving free people even more freedom—beyond the imagination of any agrarian hoplite soldier of the seventh century B.C. As Aristotle saw more than a century and a half later, what had been a rather ordinary Greek polis, in the midst of a recent experiment of allowing the native-born poor to vote—the soon-to-be heroes of Salamis—would suddenly inherit the cultural leadership of Greece.
    Before Salamis most Greek city-states enforced a strict property qualification that limited full citizenship to about a third of the resident-born population, worried about the volatility and license of the uneducated, impoverished, and transient. Because Salamis was a victory of the poorer “naval crowd,” not an infantry triumph of the small landowner, in the next century the influence of Athenian landless oarsmen would increase substantially. The humble and indigent would demand political representation commensurate with their prowess on the all-important seas. In the West those who fight demand political recognition. This newly empowered naval class refashioned Athenian democracy into a particularly unpredictable and aggressive imperial power of free citizens who could decide to do pretty much as they pleased on any given day through a majority vote of the Assembly. The will of the people would soon build the temples on the acropolis, subsidize the tragedians, send triremes throughout the Aegean—but also exterminate the Melians and execute Socrates. Marathon had created the myth of Athenian infantry; with Salamis the navy had now superseded it.
    Plato argued that while Marathon had started the string of Greek successes and Plataea had finished it, Salamis “made the Greeks worse as a people.” Democracy was to Plato a degenerate form of government, and its rabble-rousing citizens little more than “bald-headed tinkers” who demanded rights that they had not earned, an equality of result rather than of opportunity, and majority vote in place of the rule of law. Before Salamis, Greek city-states embraced an entire array of constitutional prohibitions that limited the extension of this radical, new, and peculiar idea of freedom—property qualifications to vote, wars fought exclusively by those landowners whose capital and income gave them privilege, and a complete absence of taxes, navies, and imperialism. Those protocols of the traditional free agrarian city-state had defined freedom and equality in terms of a minority of the population who had ample capital, education, and land. Before Salamis the essence of the polis was not so much equality for all, but the search for moral virtue for all, guided by a consensus of properly qualified, gifted, and free men.
    Plato, Aristotle, and most other Greek thinkers from Thucydides to Xenophon, who were wary of what had transpired in the aftermath of Salamis, were not just elitists. Rather, they saw inherent dangers in the latitude and affluence that snowballed from a radically democratic government, state entitlement, election by lot, subsidy for civic participation, free expression, and free markets. Without innate checks and balances, in this more reactionary view, a freedom-mad polis would inevitably turn out a highly individualistic but self-absorbed citizen whose unlimited freedoms and rights would preclude communal sacrifices or moral virtue. Prominent Western philosophers after Plato and Aristotle—Hobbes,