Sir,
A worthy post. I finished the Histories about two weeks ago. Indeed, Herodotus' work is still important. However, I do take issue with a few of Mr. Rahe's assertions. I only wish that you had posted this while my copy of the Histories was still in my college room so I could reference it.
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There is one obvious reason why Americans ought to find it useful to read and study Herodotus. He described a world that is in certain crucial regards like our own. Athens and Sparta were, of course, tiny communities. Herodotus tells us that at the time of the Persian Wars there were 30,000 adult, male Athenian citizens and 8,000 adult, male Spartan citizens. The difference in scale between these polities and our own is obvious and significant. But there is this that is similar. Athens and Sparta were republics. Matters of state were open to public debate; most major decisions were reached by voting; the citizens of both polities enjoyed the rule of law—and theirs were citizen armies.
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Athens was a democracy (not a republic), since voting on issues was done directly, if I recall correctly. Moreover, the city-state lacked the advanced bicameral structure or division of power that is characteristic of many modern governments. Athens deserves credit as a forerunner of democracy and republicanism, not to mention Western culture, but we should also realize that the Athenian democracy was rudimentary. Furthermore, voting rights were restrictive.
Sparta did have a council presided over by two kings, one Agiad and one Eurypontid. From what I have read, Sparta was a not a model of representative government. Citizenship was reserved for Spartans only past 30 years of age, if I recall correctly. There were non-citizen free Lacedaemonians, but the majority of the Spartan labor force were slaves or
helots. In most respects, Sparta was an oligarchy, and had been a supporter of the Athenian dictatorship of Peisistratos and his sons, although Cleomenes of Sparta eventually overthrew them.
I believe Rahe has idealized Athens and Sparta, the latter of which was a slave state. Also recall that Athen's period of greatness and democracy was also a time of serious political instability.
As to Rahe's population figures, I honestly can't remember that information. I'll have to check up on that.
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Roman liberty was arguably derivative from ancient Greek liberty: the republicanism that emerged in Rome ca. 509 BCE, the species of self-government that was instituted there, was an Etruscan variation on practices developed earlier in Crete, at Sparta, and elsewhere in the Hellenic world. Naturally enough, the Romans carried over into private life the practices of public life, and, in keeping with this trend, Roman corporate law, as applied to the management of waterways, was built on the following principle: Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus tractari debeat—“that which touches all should be dealt with by all.” This principle, borrowed by the Roman Catholic Church to make sense of the practice of electing abbots, bishops, and popes, provided an underpinning for the practice of self-government within guilds and cities and inspired the establishment of representative institutions within kingdoms. In part as a consequence of its propagation by the church, political liberty was no stranger in late medieval Europe, and this distinguished the Christian West from the Christian East and from the Muslim world as well.
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Rahe imputes some kind of socialist dogma to ancient Rome. From my readings, it appears that Rome was characterized by a lack of general economic policy or fiscal administration. For all its advances, Rome was a pre-modern empire that did not firmly grasp ideas like loans, currency value, balance of trade, or agricultural policy. So, that is my first objection to "that which touches all should be dealt with by all." I'll have to do more research on the subject, but I haven't seen evidence of this wonderful attitude.
Rahe also makes the fairly ridiculous claim that the Catholic church was a democratic organization. The election of bishops, when not downright dynastic (as the family history of Gregory of Tours attests), was usually open to bribery or warfare. Even after the Investiture Controversy, when the Holy Roman Emperors could not longer invest bishops with the ring and staff, they still presided over every episcopal election and had rights of homage from the new bishops. As the middle ages wore on, the laity were effectively excluded by the papacy. In fact, in 1059, the Papal Election Decree ruled that the election of the pope was reserved for the cardinals. Rahe's claims about the Catholic church throw his credentials into some question.
He noted that Western Christendom became 'democratic' while Eastern Christendom and the land of Islam did not. If he understood Byzantine history, which is the history of a state perpetually at war and besieged, he could see why absolute imperial control was necessary. As to the lack of democracy in Muslim countries, it is the sad truth.
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The republicanism that first emerged in ancient Greece and spread to Etruria and Rome was built on certain military practices. Liberty was coeval with the preeminence of massed infantry. At some point between 700 and 650 BCE, someone in Greece invented a new kind of shield, which was commonly called a hoplon. This shield was designed to yoke together a line of men, and those who bore it were sometimes called zeugitai, “men yoked like oxen.” It provided limited protection to the bearer, but contributed greatly to the protection of the man to his right; and, because horses will not plunge into a wall of shields, a phalanx of hoplon-bearers could face down cavalry. In effect, this military revolution meant that a sizable army of smallholders, wealthy enough to provide themselves with a spear, a sword, and the hoplon, could easily defeat an aristocratic force on horseback. This revolution, which rendered the old military aristocracy redundant, eventuated in its overthrow and the establishment of populist tyrannies in many Greek cities. In time, as tyrants or their offspring abused the power that they had seized, it gave rise to government by the army assembly.
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I do not comment on the history of the
hoplon or evolution of the common-man infantry since I have limited knowledge of the subject.
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Infantry’s Renaissance
The great revival of classical learning in the West that followed the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 coincided with a rediscovery within western Christendom of the capacity of disciplined infantry to defeat cavalry. In the second half of the fifteenth century, on two different occasions, the impoverished pikemen of the Swiss cantons defeated the mounted knights fielded by Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and from this time onward Swiss mercenaries were much in demand. The French hired them; so did the Spaniards; they were employed by the various cities and principalities of Italy; and to this day they guard the Vatican. Where they were not hired, their formations were imitated, and war underwent the revolution detailed in Machiavelli’s Art of War. In the aftermath, Roman military tactics were studied all over Europe in detail, Roman drill was adopted, and Europe was set on the path that led to the French Revolution and to national armies drawn from among peasants not unlike the farmers who had served as soldiers in ancient Greece and Rome. The feudal levy declined in significance; dynastic loyalties slowly withered away; and national loyalties grew. The logic of developments pointed towards populism and ultimately towards self-government; the old institutions originally inspired by the Roman principle “that which touches all should be dealt with by all” came to enjoy a new life; and works such as The Histories of Herodotus became astonishingly popular. To understand the world then emergent, educated men and women turned back to classical antiquity.
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It is true that the final decline and fall of the Byzantine state and the exile of Greeks such as Manuel Chrysoloras (d. 1415 in Constance) and John Argyropoulos (d. Rome 1487) revitalized Italy and Western Europe.
However, I think connecting this revival, which was cultural and scientific, to military practices is tenuous. The rise of infantry predates the fall of Constantinople. English infantry were already defeating French knights at Crecy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356. Moreover, Scottish pikemen routed the English at Bannockburn in 1314 (remember the very end of Braveheart?) The Turks themselves used their elite Janissary infantry to take Constantinople on the early morning of May 29th, 1453.
But that aside, even if there was an infantry revival no earlier than 1450, I require more proof that it was due to concerted reading of Herodotus. The
Historiae are not military texts, and the battles play second fiddle to Herodotus' geography, anthropology, and ethnography.
The rise of infantry was probably due more to better standards of living in Europe that seem to have accompanied the Renaissance. This allowed the middle class to arm themselves. In addition, European rulers realized the benefit of a disciplined infantry mass.
Finally, Rahe talks about movements towards populism and self-government. Where did this happen during the Renaissance? Medieval revolts like those of Cola di Rienzi in Rome or the Jacquerie in France were brutally put down. The 16th century saw a tremendous centralization of royal control. The 'new monarchs' like Suleyman the Magnificent, Charles V, Francis I, and Henry VIII all attest to this fact. Populism was simmering, but did not really come to the forefront until the English Civil war and the later Glorious Revolution. Even then, British history was not indicative of the rest of Europe.
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What happened in the span stretching from 1469 to 1789 and beyond was obviously a lot messier than can be indicated here. There were tyrants along the way: Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler are as important to this story as were Pheidon of Argos, Cypselus of Corinth, Thrasybulus of Miletus, and Peisistratus of Athens to developments in the Greece described by Herodotus. But the unfolding logic pointed beyond populist tyrannies, and by the 17th and 18th centuries, many in Europe, as well as in the English colonies in North America, found that in reading Herodotus they were reading about men rather like themselves.
In 18th and 19th-century Britain and in 20th-century America, this seemed especially true. When the British fought Louis XIV in the War of the Peace of Augsburg and in the War of the Spanish Succession, when they battled Napoleon in the later years of the French Revolution, when the Americans took on Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler in World War I and World War II, and when they squared off against Joseph Stalin and his successors in the Cold War, they tended to find Herodotus’ epic tale of the struggle of the Hellenes against Xerxes, the Great King of Persia, inspiring and instructive. When they read Herodotus, they were struck by his representation of the Greek resistance against the Persians as a struggle of liberty against despotism. It was easy for scholars and journalists to reclothe the Persians, the Athenians, and the Spartans in modern garb, and much of the secondary literature in the field reflects a certain propensity for distortion.
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Some of history's struggles do bear a genuine resemblance to the Greco-Persian wars. Certainly World War II, since the world came close to Axis dominion and there was the classic story of a 'God-king' figure succumbing to hubris. However, most of Rahe's examples are not pertinent.
The United States did not 'square off' against Stalin. Eastern Europe was sacrificed to the reality that Russia could not be confronted after World War II.
America did not 'take on' Kaiser Wilhelm II. We joined extremely late in the war, when our entry only hastened the defeat of the Central Powers, but did not decide the conflict. Much more useful, and you'll find this in any British history textbook, would have been early American intervention or show of force to dissuade the Kaiser in the first place and avoid years of trench warfare. In addition, imperial Germany was hardly a tyrannical government and was not looking for occupation of France or any other part of Europe. The Schlieffen plan was to bypass Paris and force the surrender of the French army. France probably would have given some territorial concessions and that would have been it.
The War of Spanish Succession was a war about which monarch to put on the throne of Spain, a Habsburg or a Bourbon. It had little to do with stopping tyranny or promoting democracy, Spanish peasants were still shitkickers no matter what.
Rahe has drawn flawed conclusions from Herodotus and from history because he has dangerously simplified conflicts, institutions, and social movements. He has applied a modern mindset and a historical consciousness that probably was not present. Although stirring, his ideas about Herodotus have some serious problems.
Regards,
Bulgaroctonus