Thornton Chapter Four: "The Father of All" (War)


There are some important claims in this chapter: 1) The Greeks viewed war, as none of their contemporaries did, in a critical light that explicitly considered the individual soldiers and civilians and what war did to them. 2) The Greek way of war was superior to those of their neighbors. 3) The Greek way of war led to the superiority of Western militaries in general.

As to 3, what about the role of modern technology that came after the Greeks? Having guns, cannon, etc. surely counted for as much if not more than what formation one used. What Thornton must be claiming is that something about even that technology and its use goes back to the Greeks. He repeatedly makes claims about such things: that the Greek Spirit is somehow responsible for the mindset that makes westerners develop and use their technology in a certain purposive fashion that makes them better able to do things they set out to do. It does not make them better: rather it makes them better able to accomplish goals, whether those are good goals or bad goals.

Thornton starts out (84-86), as we have done in class, by pointing out the incredible facts about the Greek defeats of the Persians: the Persians were superior in numbers as well as in the monetary resources they could draw on. But a smaller force of Greeks nonetheless defeated them on land and sea twice.

Had Persia won, the Greeks would presumably have been subjected to the autocratic rule of the Persian Great King, whose rule, however enlightened it might have been (it does not seem to me, in my limited knowledge, to have been particularly enlightened, although Cyrus the Great seems to have been better than many a despotic ruler), was nonetheless monarchical and antithetical to the varieties of Greek governance that ranged from democracy to oligarchy to monarchy to mixtures of the three. It would have eliminated variety and certainly eliminated that most important phenomenon, democracy and an idea of citizenship that included having a say over the system one was governed by.

Thornton continues (86-91) to discuss the Greek way of fighting and its evolution from Mycenaean times to the time of Alexander. The phalanx and the hoplite are the central concerns here. We covered them in class too. One point that I think Thornton must be somewhat wrong about is that the fact that the Greeks were fighting for freedom and their own land, not some remote bigman ruler's riches and kingdom made them fight harder/better. While it may have done so, it seems clear that the superiority of the Greeks was due to their technology of war: they simply had a better formation and use of equipment than their opponents. That is clear mostly from the fact that the people's around the Mediterranean basin hired Greeks as mercenaries: the Greeks were experts in their martial technology and that is what made them good fighters.

Thornton is absolutely right in many ways that Alexander, however enlightened he was as a man, led the Macedonians and the Greeks on one of the world's greatest pillage-and-plunder runs. He did not free peoples. He conquered them. The only thing great about doing so was that he was an extremely capable leader/strategist, etc. There is nothing morally great about it. Culturally, it is debatable whether it was a good thing. I do not know enough about whether an infusion of Greek culture made the societies of Egypt, Persia, etc. more humane.

More importantly for the history of the West is the fact that the hoplite was a citizen soldier. He was not a professional soldier or a member of the lowest "rabble" rung of society, but rather a man whom typically we would consider middle class. This creation and societal support of a middle class seems to be the key to a strong and healthy democracy. A citizen freeholder who participates in politics was unheard of in the autocratic societies that made up the neighbors of Greece. Thornton claims that: Those are big and important claims.

As time went on in the fifth century, the middle class hoplite who took up arms to defend his polis started to become less significant. The oarsmen of the fleets did not need to be propertied. In democratic poleis, the lower classes acquired more power. The Athenian empire led to the transformation of their military (and that of much of Greece) into a tool for gaining territory and goods rather than a means of defending land and property.

Thornton is concerned to point out that pacifism was not an option for Greek city-states. "Pacifism is the transitory luxury of a people whose security has been earned by the bravery and militarism of earlier generations." (93) That said, the Greeks were the only peoples of the mediterranean of their time to devote their written thought to consideration of the human toll of war. That surely has to do with the fact that writings in Greece were not the product of or subject to the censure of, or designed to please an autocratic state as they were elsewhere. Rather, Greek writing was by private individuals for either other private individuals or for public entertainment (state-sponsored, but not necessarily censured in the sense of being required to toe an ideological line).

Certainly we find in Greek thought glorification of war, and we find accounts of brutality written in an approving manner, as we do in other societies, but alongside of them we find opposite sentiments and explicit criticism of war and its glorification.

In Athens, through the tragedies and comedies, we find a reflection of what the people were interested to think about. Euripides, for example, writes constantly about the injustices and horrors of war, and in particular, his plays MUST be reflecting on the injustices perpretrated by Athens herself, not her enemies. That self-criticism is typical of the Greek spirit. We see Aeschylus in the Persians able to write very sympathetically about the most bitter threat Greece ever encountered in his time, the Persian King. Herodotus too is very sympathetic to other peoples (perhaps partly because he himself was half-Greek, half-Carian). In the Suppliant Women, we find speeches descrying the horrors of war, and in particular the horrors of a war undertaken apparently for a just cause (that is SO relevant today), and the problems of a democracy, subject to the emotions of the people, that wages war. The Athenians had recently voted to enslave other Greeks out of pure greed. In sum, Athens, the center of a vast martial empire, was a bastion of free speech in which criticism of state policy was not just allowed, but also rewarded (Euripides' plays made him famous). The comedies are no less critical of particular politicians and the military exploits of the empire. "To Aristophanes, war is a force of chaos exploited by the ambitious and greedy, a senseless calamity that destroys life's greatest pleasures and happiness." (106) But Aristophanes was far from a pacifist.

Thucydides is perhaps the most powerful and interesting Greek author on war. "Thucydides ... does not glorify war but rather sees it as a failure of our better natures, a manifest evil that brings out the worst in men." (107)