THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND US (English version)

 

Karen Cronick

Published in Spanish in a Kindle version, by Amazon, January 9, 2022, Los Antiguos Griegos y Nosotros (https://www.amazon.es/Los-Antiguos-Griegos-y-Nosotros-ebook/dp/B09Q4QPPNZ)

 

NOTE: This paper was originally written in Spanish, then translated to English. In the process, quotes that were originally in English have been transformed two times. I have reasonable confidence in the fidelity of the sense of these quotes in this version of the essay, but there may be small changes in wording.

PROLOGUE

The Greeks continue to fascinate us. The gigantic but improbable achievements of a disorganized jumble of cities/states in the first millennium B.C. are amazing. At the end of this millennium, the resounding failure of this experiment with civilization surprises us, but its triumphs continue to inspire us, and still warn us of similar dangers that lie in wait for us today. The same social and cultural conditions persist, despite our technological advances; our sectoral wars are similar; we are still unable to form lasting alliances for peace and prosperity; our desire for empire is analogous to the interests of the Greek powers and, as with them, our weaknesses limit our ability to create lasting, healthy and stable societies. Moreover, our insensitivity to social inequality is not very different from what happened in Greece.

In this small book I try to explore the contributions of Athens and Sparta to our Western culture and pay attention to the warnings they left us. To achieve this goal I have constructed three parallel stories: in the first chapter, I review the Homeric legend of the conquest of Troy in the Iliad. There I reflect on the origins of Greek culture, its ideas about heroism, the ideal of the "good king" and the beginning of the construction of Hellas[1] as a shared cultural zone. On the other hand, military life was of paramount importance in Greece and marked a great distance between the lifeworlds of Athens and Sparta. Both cities cultivated their military capabilities, but there is a difference in them that continues to appear in our own century between democracies and governments that resemble Spartan communism and what we call today fascist dictatorships. In the second chapter I explore this influence and its role in the creation of Athenian democracy. In the third chapter I explore the wonderful cultivation of reason, almost from the beginning of Athens. This is a distinctive feature that laid the foundation for what we might like to achieve for ourselves, at least since 1787[2] But as happened with the Greeks, we do not all agree on what it means to share power among all citizens, and for this reason our democracies, and even our sciences and philosophies are fragile. Finally, I make some reflections in which I aspire to bring together all the separated threads in a more complete and representative canvas of the Greek contributions.

Let's look at the improbable origins of the Greek miracle: at first, in the south of the Balkan Peninsula, a small island began to prosper, called Crete, whose inhabitants knew how to develop maritime navigation to trade with other regions.[3] since 3000 B.C. In the 1st century BC, the island was united under a strong monarchy; the period of Crete's greatness was called the Minoan Age, after its king Minos, a Bronze Age mythical figure based on a historical monarch. This epoch lasted until about the end of the second millennium.

The Cretan civilization expanded through the Aegean islands to European territory, and developed an important trade network in the Mediterranean, including Egypt. Finally, when the Greek tribes on the mainland had created their own cities, they rebelled against Cretan domination. A legend says that Theseus, an Attic hero (i.e., from the area around Athens), put an end to the tribute that Athens paid to Crete. The Greeks thus put an end to centuries of Cretan rule over the mainland. Finally, around 1400 BC. they attacked Crete, seized the city of Knossos, and destroyed the palace. Probably, when Greek merchants occupied the island, and their ships took over the trade, the Cretans already were gradually losing control of their space.

This was the beginning of the Greek era. The geographical area where they inhabited developed into an extension that would eventually include: the Balkan peninsula, the east coast of Italy, the islands of the Ionian Sea[4] and the Aegean[5], and the western lands of what is now Turkey.

This civilization became one of the most important in the entire history of Western culture, and it has for us an enduring political, social, artistic, mathematical and philosophical significance. In the beginning, at the end of the second millennium B.C. There was nothing to distinguish Greece as the cradle of Western civilization; the self-aware thinkers that later would distinguish the peninsula had not yet appeard. The Balkan Peninsula is mountainous and the land is generally poor for agriculture. There were small kingdoms, each with its legendary monarch; they spoke various dialects of the same language, but they did not even have a collective name for themselves. They shared a common religiosity, and it can be said that what united those kingdoms scattered throughout the valleys of Greece was a sense of belonging that distinguished them from the "barbarians" who did not share their customs, gods and language.

The origin of the proper name for this area has been lost in legends. In the Iliad, Homer calls the Greek forces besieging Troy by three different names: the Argives, the Danaans, and the Achaeans. Later the term Hellenic became popular: this name has its origins in the mythological figure of Hellen, the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha mythical firures that reigned in the Thessalian region of Phthia. Each name is, in fact, a regional designation.

After the eighth century B.C. when they began to be called "Hellenes" a myth arose to explain the other regional designations: according to this myth, Hellen gave his name to the "Hellenic" tribes collectively, and gave the regions the names of his children and grandchildren: he named the Aeolians after Aeolus, the Dorians after Dorus, the Achaeans after Achaeus (Hellen’s grandson) and the Ionians after Ion (another of Hellen’s grandsons) (Smith,  n.d. and Grokipedia, 2026).

The term Greece is rather of Roman origin, and is used today in countries that have a strong cultural link with this empire, such as the Italians, the French, the English and the Spanish-speaking areas. The Germans refer to "Griechenland", the Russians refer to "Gretsiya", but those who inhabit the Balkan Peninsula today refer to themselves as "The Hellenic Republic", or "Elláda".

Ancient thought

The history of the Hellenes is lost in the mists of legend, but the stories, passed down orally from poet to poet for hundreds of years, create a surprisingly coherent impression.  The most famous of them was Homer, the blind bard of the eighth century BC. He was possibly born in Chios, in the Aegean Sea, near the coast of Anatolia. His real name, as well as the place of origin, are not clear, but he is firmly placed as the rhapsode, or chief minstrel of Greek antiquity; he was the troubadour who knew how to create epic poems from the many scattered poems that existed at that time about the siege of Troy by the Achaeans[6] at the end of the Bronze Age.

In the first chapter of this book I describe his poem, the Iliad, as an ode of lamentations for the losses of the war, but there are many more interpretations that can be given to it. It is also a collection of portraits of some of the men who fought on both sides, and a representation of the kings and heroes who followed their leader Agamemnon to Troy; Homer examines them and judges their capacity for command and courage.

Homer does not tell everything about the siege of Troy, only a series of events that lasted less than a year, especially the legend of the warrior Achilles, taken from a war that lasted ten years. But even so, it gives a glimpse of the essence of the onslaught and the character of the men who participated in it. The poet does not even tell the conclusion of the story,[7] but for us this does not matter. It was a tragedy for almost all its participants, where human and divine wills collided and ended up producing a destiny that no one really would have wanted. Men are represented as mere playthings in various and contradictory divine wills. Achilles' anger is causal in the end, despite the wiles of the gods.

 The invention of the polis

After the end of the Trojan War, and then, after a period preceding the appearance of written histories, the kingdoms gradually became polis, the designation of the city-states of the Hellenic world after the eighth century BC.  The polis included the city and a surrounding territory that was not very extensive; each was an autonomous and independent political entity. They were rivals with each other, and, although they were able to unite to repel a "barbarian" aggressor like the Persians, they frequently attacked each other. As Kitto (1957/1985f) points out: "The polis stimulated and satisfied at the same time the highest instincts and aptitudes of man [... It was] originally a local association for common security, it became the center of the moral, intellectual, aesthetic, social and practical life of a new man, aspects that it developed and enriched as no society did before or since" (p. 4). I will discuss this development in chapter two.

The Hellenes developed new rules of government. In chapter two I describe this development for Athens and Sparta. The former underwent a gradual evolution towards a democratic model of government. In that Middle Eastern environment there were certain antecedents: there is evidence of some degree of citizen participation in power throughout the region of Mesopotamia and Armenia in the Bronze and Iron Ages. However, it is difficult to attribute "democracy" in the sense given by Athens to these Mesopotamian antecedents. After the sixth century B.C. every citizen of that city-state had at least the right to participate in the Assembly and in the legal trials.

Where did Athenian democracy come from? What historical influences allowed the Athenians to move from a regime of kings to a system of elected leaders? In chapters two and three of this book I explore answers to these questions, first from a civic-military point of view and then from the perspective of the city's intense intellectual and literary culture.

In Athens there was an unprecedented achievement in history. Great men such as Pericles, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and Demosthenes represent just a few of the statesmen, philosophers, playwrights, orators, historians, and artists who flourished there in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. They came with the effervescence of cultural "authorization" to choose, discuss, form opinions, and above all to doubt "truths" that were not previously open to questioning.

Greek democracy was not complete. Citizenship was restricted to free men and excluded women, slaves, and many other classes of people, but it must be recognized that Athens represented a substantial amplification of the power bases in any historical context. Moreover, for those who were considered citizens, the distribution of their potential to participate in all affairs of state was quite equal.

It constituted an enormous advance in political action, and this in turn stimulated gigantic advances in almost everything that has to do with human culture: science, mathematics, technology, philosophy, literature, architecture and the visual arts. It must have been – for citizens – an exciting and hopeful time, especially in the fifth century BC.  Perhaps the greatest advance of these times in Athens was to discover that the world has rules beyond the dictates of the gods, and that they dominate not only science, but also the social and political world. Athenian democracy was based on the idea that man can decide for himself how he wants to live, without the authority of the most powerful, and in harmony – without subordination.

 

 

The destruction of democracy in Athens

In Athens the great destroyer was Alexander the Great. But from the seventh century B.C. The Athenians themselves supported dictatorships when they were frustrated by economic instability, or simply when they were dazzled by some "strong man" who reminded them of the heroes of antiquity. Also the Peloponnesian War weakened the viability of the city/state. In the fourth century B.C. There was a terrible dictatorship in Athens, known as "The Thirty", and although it lasted only a few months, the restored democracy was weak and the citizens did not come out to defend it as before. They did not listen to the warnings of their best orator, Demosthenes, about the dangers posed by Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, and in a short time the Athenian experiment was over.

Why return now to the ancient Greeks? Because it is important to understand how such a complex and fruitful civilization could develop, with almost no precedent in the world. The Greeks laid the foundations of our own culture, and faced the same problems that we have to solve now. We still have to understand the role of the hero, the qualities that distinguish between the tyrant and the "good king" and the charm that the Herculean populist may have. We do not differentiate the steps from democracy to tyranny and the processes needed to recover self-management. We have yet to understand how personal and collective agencies can exist and how to regulate them. We have not solved the problem of excluded groups and the recognition of the Other as a fellow man.

They are our tasks for the future, but the Greeks left us excellent clues to tackle them.

CHAPTER I

THE ILIAD: A COMPLEX CULTURE OF WAR

FIRST APPRECIATIONS

History is a process that, although it does not necessarily imply progress towards more humane ways of coexistence, leaves traces that can be used to avoid dangers and that serve to build new social solutions. The ancient Greeks created and recreated an environment of reflection on issues such as justice, government, and what a leader should offer. We can see the beginnings of this thought in the Iliad, an epic poem that narrates part of a dreadful historical war that occurred in the twelfth century BC. It tells how the Achaeans (Homeric name for the Greeks) besieged the city of Troy with the stated aim of rescuing Helen, the queen of Sparta, whose abduction was, for its participants, the obvious reason for the conflict.

More deeply, it is a concern about the nature of leadership, the value of heroism and about the creation of a new cultural identity.

There is a tendency to try to censor or eliminate cultural reminders that recall any past of injustice, rejecting documents, films and monuments that do so. With this criterion history becomes an empty endeavor. With my current appreciation of Homer, I find that in the Iliad there is a wide arch of memory that questions past heroism and remembers injustice. In this poem there are profoundly anti-war and humanitarian aspects; it is evident once again that the traces left by the march of human time must be preserved and analyzed.

Homer sang the story of the Iliad 400 years after the battle he describes.  We have no knowledge of written documents about this Bronze Age conflict, only the collective and generational memory of the rhapsodes[8], which was captured six hundred years later in stories, and transcribed poems and plays. Oral poems passed on these traditions by mixing legends and myths, supposedly without adding much of their own authorship. The singers relied on what they heard from other troubadours, implying the continuous propagation of the same stories for ten generations, considering the possibility of an average life span of 40 years at that time.

The poet Homer existed as an individual with his own history; He was a well-known singer who learned the scattered fragments of poetic narratives through these same paths of cultural affiliation. Although there is insufficient evidence to suppose that he is the author of everything attributed to him, one can perceive in his two main works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the hand of a virtuoso poet. The poems that have come down to us in his name were copied, possibly by Solon in the sixth century, two centuries after Homer’s death, even though the Greeks had already invented a phonetic alphabet in the tenth or ninth century, two hundred years before Homer.

That is, between the battles of Troy and the time of transcribing Homer's poems, six hundred years passed. It is a period of time equivalent to the interval between the fourteenth century, before the discovery of the Americas, and the twenty-first century of our era.  The aedos, another name for the singers of poetry and legends, must have had phenomenal memories. Sure, it was a prized and cultivated gift in those days, but remembering, and repeating the names, relationships, and details of each actor and event is an impressive historical feat. It was a collective memory, transmitted from singer to singer, from generation to generation and from evocation to evocation.

The Iliad is more than a scattered collage of gathered songs. In it one finds the sense of a work that has been thought out and constructed, with themes and subthemes in which the personalities of the protagonists are very well developed. Although the poem has the obvious purpose of extolling the heroism of the combatants, and creating the basis for a Hellenic consciousness (or of the ancient "Achaeans" [9]), there is a hidden, almost subversive theme: horror in the face of so much violence. The description of the battles is terrifying. Homer glorifies the toughness and heroism of all the participating warriors, both Greeks and Trojans, and mourns all the dead equally.

One of the most important and attractive protagonists is Hector, a Trojan prince, and an enemy of the Greeks. He is portrayed as a constructor of peace, and a lover, son, father and husband; honored at the same time as the best fighter in his kingdom. The impartiality of the poet is not causal, because he does not sing a tendentious and  “patriotic” hymn of good and bad, but rather celebrates humanity. This is remarkable for a work that centuries later would claim the status of a foundational text for Hellenic identity.

It is necessary to rescue these ancient contradictions, and to appreciate how compassion can coexist with the fervor of loyalty to the kingdom. In these reflections I have selected some key moments of the Iliad, particularly those in which the poet deliberates on the meaning of such a violent war, and the role of the heroes who participate in it. I analyze the contradiction between the desire for heroism and the longing for peace. The gods also intervened, and their action reveals the structure of mortals' values and hopes.  Basically, in this work I reason about the capacity for human sensitivity that the warrior has in Homer. I analyze the role of the poem in the creation of Greek identity, and try to create an interpretive approach between aesthetics and historical interpretation.

I propose a new look at these times. In six hundred years, the Greeks went from promoting a cruel war of extermination to creating the first democracy in the world. I want to examine these origins and see these ancient reflections on the ideas of: the sense of leadership, the value of human life, the defense of the homeland, participation in a collective project, the relationship of the Greeks to their deities, and the creation of a Hellenic value that goes beyond each individual "Greek" kingdom.

To this end, I have organized these themes under broader genres: a) the personalities of the protagonists in "Some Characters", b) the contradiction between the desire for heroism and the desire for peace in "War and the Longing for Peace", c) the feeling of submission of the heroes to the arbitrary will of their deities in "The Role of the Gods",  and d) the sensitivity of the human being in the context of hostility in "The Humanity of the Warriors" and e) the Iliad as a fundamental work of Greek culture in "The Origins of Those Who Considered themselves to be 'Greeks'".

 SOME CHARACTERS

In the Iliad, the main characters have been very well developed; Their temperaments emerge during their conversations, in their performance on the battlefield, and in the quality of their relationships with others. I will briefly describe some of the most outstanding: Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles, and Hector. Together with them I make brief references to other characters who accompany them such as Paris, Priam, Helen and Patroclus.

Agamemnon and Menelaus

In Homer's Iliad, Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, is the top commander of an army composed of kings from scattered fiefs of what we now call "Greece." There is enough in the Iliad to grasp Agamemnon’s petty personality. He has been the subject of numerous works, such as those of Aeschylus (458 BC/ff) and Ovid (2 AD/1998). In the fifth century BC, Aeschylus wrote about the same character described in the Iliad, in his play "Agamemnon": He tells how this character sacrificed his own daughter to gain the support of the goddess Artemis, before setting sail with his troops to Troy. Homer could not have known this work, but he must have had access to the same songs that Aeschylus heard.

In the Iliad, at times Agamemnon is a risky and arrogant soldier, although in other situations he flees from war.  He is usually proud, ambitious and ruthless, impetuous, immoderate, greedy and eager to acquire and maintain power. But in the face of a challenge he has no control, he becomes someone who begs for help from others.

The feudal kings, members of Agamemnon's army, had not come together to participate in any collective project before the call for the Trojan War. The apparent motive for the war is to rescue Helen, his sister-in-law and Menelaus' wife, whom Paris, a Trojan prince, has kidnapped (although without the lady's resistance). Paris now lives with Helen under the protection of his father, King Priam in Troy.

With regard to Agamemnon, we can assume that he was not only fighting to rescue Helen; He had his eye on a greater regency that would be based on his own leadership of the Greek hosts. Although the slogan was to rescue Helen, the Greeks united in support of hegemonic, or at least cultural, designs and in the hope of being able to plunder the riches of Troy.

At the beginning of the Iliad, Agamemnon puts the entire war in jeopardy when he confiscates for himself the slave and lover of his best warrior, Achilles. Achilles, in responce withdraws his support from the Greek cause. Later, when it seemed that the Greeks were going to lose the war, the king implored the help of the still resentful Achilles. In the Ninth Book he tries to bribe him to fight again on behalf of the Greeks, even offering to adopt him as a son.

Menelaus, his brother, and king of Sparta, is Helen's spurned husband. He is described as a brave warrior, although he is not one of the great heroes. He has asked Agamemnon for help to recover his wife, but he does not intend to lead the army to Troy, rather preferring to remain under fraternal protection. The reader tends to compare him to Paris who is an attractive seducer who has enticed Helena, but he is not a warrior.^[10]

At the beginning of the Iliad, Menelaus, the spurned Greek husband, fights in the war while Paris flees to his chambers to stay comfortably with Helen, but in the end, after his brother Hector's reprimands, Paris also comes out to defend Troy.

A

chilles and Hector

The overall plot of the play gives great importance to Achilles. From the beginning, readers – or listeners – are waiting for Achilles to come out of his tantrum with Agamemnon, for having seized  this Greek prince’s lover, the slave Briseis, and finally to begin to defend the Greeks. In fact, the poet suggests that the thousands of deceased who lie on the sands of Troy, including all the anonymous combatants, died due to the negligence of Achilles; If he had left his tent earlier, to fight and support the Greeks, the war would have ended sooner.

In the Iliad, Homer does not mention Achilles’ divine invulnerability to his enemies’ weapons, but he describes his hero’s enormous capacity as a warrior, and suggests that he would have given victory to the Greeks without so much suffering. In the end he only came out to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus, after Hector, a Trojan prince, killed him. It is suggestive how Achilles is motivated by his personal passions rather than by loyalty to the group. Homer made it clear that this character had his doubts about the prolonged conflagration, whose purpose he considered "private" and not Hellenic, but he wanted to participate, and traveled without coercion from his native town Pythia to Troy, as the poem also tells us, "voluntarily".

The aedo makes us suspect that Achilles came in search of warrior glory, and not for a common purpose, not to rescue Helen, nor to participate in a Hellenic project. This prince came from afar, from the north of the Greek peninsula, and perhaps he does not share this longing for cultural unity. He is an enigmatic warrior; in his quarrel with Agamemnon he said:

"What cause have I to war at thy decree?

The distant Trojans never injured me"....

Hither we sail'd, a voluntary throng,

To avenge a private, not a public wrong  (Homer, Pope’s translation, book 1)

And yet, when Hector kills his childhood friend, Patroclus, he goes out in grief to avenge him.

Hector, the Trojan prince is a broader man, almost – one could say – more modern. He is a formidable soldier, but he detests war and despises his brother Paris for bringing it to Troy. He is a respectful son and a tender husband and father. He is a statesman in the old sense of despotic kingdoms, and he tries several times to negotiate disagreements, or to reach agreements that do not involve so much bloodshed. But when he fights, Homer describes him as a "god," a man capable of doing the martial work of entire armies.

 "Full in the blazing van great Hector shined,

Like Mars commission'd to confound mankind.

Before him flaming his enormous shield,

Like the broad sun, illumined all the field;

His nodding helm emits a streamy ray;

His piercing eyes through all the battle stray" (Homer, Pope’s translation, Book 13)

He is the only one of the heroes who fights primarily to defend his family and his city, and he declares it several times. A day before his death, he encourages his compatriots to continue fighting on behalf of their family and ancestors:

"Think of their hopes, their fortunes,

 Of their wives, their children, their parents:

Think of your hopes, your fortunes; All the care

Your wives, your infants, and your parents share:

Think of each living father's reverend head;

Think of each ancestor with glory dead;

Absent, by me they speak, by me they sue,

They ask their safety, and their fame, from you:

The gods their fates on this one action lay,

And all are lost, if you desert the day" (Homer, Pope´s translation, Book 15).

In the end, with Hector dead, the Greeks engage in a perverse appetite for pillage, destruction and predation against Troy.

WAR AND THE LONGING FOR PEACE

From the fourth book the Iliad is almost an anti-war poem. There is no way to read it without beginning to feel overwhelmed by so much death because Homer creates terrible images of adversaries bathed in blood, such as this one:

For this in arms the warring nations stood,

And bathed their generous breasts with mutual blood.

No room to poise the lance or bend the bow;

But hand to hand, and man to man, they grow:

Wounded, they wound; and seek each other's hearts

With falchions, axes, swords, and shorten'd darts.

The falchions ring, shields rattle, axes sound,

Swords flash in air, or glitter on the ground;

With streaming blood the slippery shores are dyed,

And slaughter'd heroes swell the dreadful tide" (Homer, Pope´s translation, Book15).

The bard sings of something greater than glory, he also denounces the savagery of battle. They are men who have lost any vestige of awareness that the enemy also has humanity. For his listeners, Homer awakens something between horror and pity. It is an endless record of deadly encounters between Greek and Trojan heroes, described in painful detail. The poet names each deceased chief – in many cases he also mentions their parents, wives and children who will remain to mourn their dead. He often describes the wounds in great anatomical detail, so that the reader – or listener – can feel compassion for the lost heroes:

"[Tydides] spoke, and rising hurl'd his forceful dart,

Which, driven by Pallas, pierced a vital part;

Full in his [Anchises'] face it enter'd, and betwixt

The nose and eye-ball the proud Lycian fix'd;

Crash'd all his jaws, and cleft the tongue within,

Till the bright point look'd out beneath the chin.

Headlong he falls, his helmet knocks the ground:

Earth groans beneath him, and his arms resound;

The starting coursers tremble with affright;

The soul indignant seeks the realms of night. (Homer, Pope translation, Book 5)

In this case Tideida does not die: fortunately for him, he was the mortal son of the goddess Aphrodite, and she intervenes, saving her son, even if she herself was injured in the hand. We will return later to the role of the gods in this contest, but in this passage we already see that the goddesses Athena/Pallas and Aphrodite were "enemies" and active participants in the encounter between the humans Diomedes/Tideida and Anchases.

The most heroic warriors are the ones who kill the most enemies. Rossman (5/10/2017, p. 44) made an analysis of these massacres; found that, if we measure the heroism of the characters by the number of casualties produced by the main combatants, we have the hierarchy in Table I.

 However, Homer mourns all the dead. He sings of the loss of their youth, deplores that they will no longer see their families, and of the loss that will be felt by their relatives who love them: "Lamented youth! in the first bloom of life they  fell, Sent by great Ajax to the shades of hell.... " (Homer, Pope’s translation, Book 17).

 Table I

Deaths attributed to each hero

Hero's Name	Number of deaths it caused
Patroclus	54
Diomedes	33
Hector	29
Achilles	24
Odysseys	18
Ajax the Greater	16
Teucer	16
Agamemnon	12

 The Warrior and Pain

War is filled with rituals and opulent battle pomp. The horses are beautiful and well-groomed (they eat "ambrosia"), and the heroes' armor shines in the sun. The armor that the god Vulcan made for Achilles, to replace the one that Hector stripped from Patroclus' body, was sublimely described in multiple verses by the bard in the eighteenth book. The other warriors also wear beautiful armor and gleaming chariots. All this paraphernalia gives a glow to the combat that hides the guts and blood that cover the battlefield.

Fix'd on "the spot they war, and wounded, wound

A sanguine torrent steeps the reeking ground:

On heaps the Greeks, on heaps the Trojans bled,

And, thickening round them, rise the hills of dead" (Homer, ¨Pope’s translation, Book 5).

The modern reader rejects so much agony. The poet also laments the massacres, although he praises and honors the bravery and courage of the combatants. He celebrates the heroes of both sides and deplores so much loss. These three quotes testify to his feelings; the first and third are lamentations of Homer's voice as poetic narrator. The second appears in the voice of Nestor, the wise old counselor of the Greeks when it seems that they are losing the war:

1."The war renews, the warriors bleed again:

As o'er their prey rapacious wolves engage,

Man dies on man, and all is blood and rage." (Homer, ¨Pope’s translation, Book 4)

 

2. "Cursed is the man, and void of law and right,

Unworthy property, unworthy light,

Unfit for public rule, or private care,

That wretch, that monster, who delights in war" (Homer, Pope’s translation, Book 9).

 

 3."So fought each host, with thirst of glory fired,

And crowds on crowds triumphantly expired" (Homer, ¨Pope’s translation, Book 4).

This last quote speaks for the whole poem: "they died in triumph."  There are all the great contradictions of the epic. The members of each army fight for "glory," and even if they die, they know that a hero who shows great skill, drive, toughness, dynamism, and courage will enter the legends forever.

With few exceptions they do not fight out of hatred, in fact, the most powerful heroes on both sides recognize each other as equals (except Achilles), and there is a kind of mutual respect between them, a brotherhood of superior men. When the Greek and Trojan warriors, Ajax and Hector, fight each other, in an unsuccessful effort to decide which side would end up winning the entire war, they fight terribly for a while until the "ministers," or referees, call for a rest (really a conclusion to the fight) because night is approaching. Up to the moment of this solution, each of them has been trying to kill the other, but now, with the greatest courtesy, the Trojan Hector says to Ajax:

 "O first of Greeks! (his noble foe rejoin'd)

Whom heaven adorns, superior to thy kind,

With strength of body, and with worth of mind!

Now martial law commands us to forbear;

Hereafter we shall meet in glorious war… (Homer, Pope’s translation Book 7)

They even exchange gifts. It is the language of courtesy, of the diplomacy of war, but it is also the appreciation of the correspondence of parallel roles, of the rules of gentlemen found in a cultural rite that everyone knows and accepts.

The ultimate logic for a military man is the protection of his own kingdom and his people. Hector, expressing what he considers the reasons for participating in the war, and in the midst of the final assault on the Greek ships, shouts:

"The gallant man, though slain in fight he be,

Yet leaves his nation safe, his children free" (Homer, Pope’s translation, Book 15).

There is no way to deny the viciousness that also influences the participants, especially when in the end it seems that the Greeks are losing. Peneleus the Greek, after killing Ilioneus, boasts of the pain he has just caused to those who loved his victim:

 "Trojans! your great Ilioneus behold!

Haste, to his father let the tale be told:

Let his high roofs resound with frantic woe,

Such as the house of Promachus must know;

Let doleful tidings greet his mother's ear,

Such as to Promachus' sad spouse we bear,

When we victorious shall to Greece return" (Book 14).

All warriors have fathers, mothers, wives, children, and siblings; They are loved and love their families. Homer is pained by the losses on both sides, but he expresses the passions that occur naturally in battle and that are expressed by his warriors, especially in the most dramatic moments of the conflicts. It is the contradiction of the military world: to desire life, to want to return to the home where one's family is, and at the same time to defy – even provoke – death. After seeing his comrades killed, the combatant can forget about protocols and rejoice in killing an enemy.

 Friendship

Soldiers often come in pairs of friends or family. The friendship between Achilles and Patroclus is legendary, and the death of the latter is what provokes Achilles to go out to avenge him, thus giving the final victory to the Greeks. Among the most famous pairs  of friends are Ajax the Great and Ajax the Lesser; Meríones and Idomeneo; Sarpedon and Glaucus (cousins), and curiously Diomedes and Glaucus. In the latter case the first is Greek, and the other is from Lycia and fights on the side of the Trojans. In the sixth book the two realize that their ancestors were friends and so they exchange shields and swear not to hurt each other on the battlefield.

These are affectivities that constitute important contrasts with the nefarious demands of battle because they are expressions of love and brokenness, but the heat of battle usually leads to the thirst for revenge.   Here Hector sees his brother Polidoro dead.

 "When Hector view'd, all ghastly in his gore,

Thus sadly slain the unhappy Polydore,

A cloud of sorrow overcast his sight.

His soul no longer brook'd the distant fight:

Full in Achilles' dreadful front he came,

And shook his javelin like a waving flame" (Book 20).  

The final waste

Again and again the Trojans offer a peace treaty; they propose to return the riches that Paris stole from Menelaus, an additional amount of tribute, and the possibility of burying the dead. The Greeks accept the offer of a timeout for funerals, but reject the offer of peace. Tideida shouts:

 "Oh, take not, friends! defrauded of your fame,

Their proffer'd wealth, nor even the Spartan dame.

Let conquest make them ours: fate shakes their wall,

And Troy already totters to her fall" (Book 7).

It is the beginning of the end. The Greeks no longer fight for their honor, or even for the dignity of Menelaus. Now they are fighting over the possibility of looting.

  The death of Hector

The deaths of Hector and Achilles are predestined. Many Greeks have tried to put an end to Hector, but the poet (and the god Jove) know that he will die only at the hands of the infamous idol, the superman Achilles. For this to happen, Achilles must overcome his tantrum with Agamemnon. No one else can triumph over Hector; among many others, Teucer tried, and would have succeeded had it not been for divine intervention. Hector is protected until he has eliminated Patroclus and confronted Achilles. Neither Teucer nor anyone else can achieve it, at least for one more day:

 "Once more bold Teucer, in his country's cause,

At Hector's breast a chosen arrow draws:

And had the weapon found the destined way,

Thy fall, great Trojan! had renown'd that day.

But Hector was not doom'd to perish then:

The all-wise disposer of the fates of men

(Imperial Jove) his present death withstands;

Nor was such glory due to Teucer's hands.

At its full stretch as the tough string he drew,

Struck by an arm unseen, it burst in two;

Down dropp'd the bow: the shaft with brazen head

Fell innocent, and on the dust lay dead.

The astonish'd archer to great Ajax cries;

"Some god prevents our destined enterprise:

Some god, propitious to the Trojan foe" (Book 15).

 Finally, Patroclus, dressed in the armor borrowed from his friend Achilles, goes out to meet Hector; the Trojan prince annihilates him, but in his final agony Patroclus told him what we all know:

 “… it sounds thy death:

Insulting man, thou shalt be soon as I;

Black fate o'erhangs thee, and thy hour draws nigh;

Even now on life's last verge I see thee stand,

I see thee fall, and by Achilles' hand" (Book 16).

 Hector is afraid, but he is also very daring. He puts on Achilles armor, which he had confiscated from the dead body of Patroclus, and proclaims: " Hector in proud Achilles' arms shall shine, Torn from his friend, by right of conquest mine" (Book 16).

 It is extremely difficult to bring the news to Achilles, both sides are fighting for the body of Patroclus. The Greeks are furious because Hector has already taken possession of Achilles' armor. Upon learning of his friend's death, Achilles throws himself on the ground, rolls in the ashes of the campfire, and all the nearby women approach worried. In these battles, warriors lack the spiritual generosity that would allow them to view deaths as tragic sacrifices. Only the poet is capable of this. Soldiers cannot hope that the long, bloody war will end for the good of all. Achilles cries out, "Patroclus dead!"

Patroclus dead, Achilles hates to live.

Let me revenge it on proud Hector's heart,

Let his last spirit smoke upon my dart;

On these conditions will I breathe: till then,

I blush to walk among the race of men" (Book 18).

Achilles, when he recovers, agrees with Agamemnon to return to the fight, receives through his divine mother a new armor made by the god Vulcan especially for him, and goes out to battle with Hector, knowing that his own life is also doomed. He shouts:

"I know my fate: to die, to see no more

My much-loved parents, and my native shore—

Enough—when heaven ordains, I sink in night" (p. 591).

Although he is a hero condemned by fate – like all the others – Achilles arouses neither the admiration nor the compassion of the modern reader. He is not an attractive figure. If before he was spiteful, now he is bestial. There is no remorse for this creature of violence and destruction. After a failed first attempt to kill Hector, he unceremoniously exterminates any Trojan he has within reach, some of these, very young, ask for mercy.

 "This way and that, the spreading torrent roars:

So sweeps the hero through the wasted shores;

Around him wide, immense destruction pours

And earth is deluged with the sanguine showers....

High o'er the scene of death Achilles stood,

All grim with dust, all horrible in blood:

Yet still insatiate, still with rage on flame;

Such is the lust of never-dying fame!" (p. 613).

The frightened Trojans retreat behind its walls, all except Hector. Priam, his father, implores him to return to the city, but Hector stands firm waiting to confront Achilles. Priam begs Hector:

 "Have mercy on me, O my son! Revere

The words of age; attend a parent's prayer!

If ever thee in these fond arms I press'd,

Or still'd thy infant clamours at this breast;

Ah do not thus our helpless years forego,

But, by our walls secured, repel the foe.

Against his rage if singly thou proceed,

Should'st thou, (but Heaven avert it!) should'st thou bleed" (p. 645).

 Héctor reconsiders his alternatives. He can go in and save himself or he can stay and fight. If he stays outside the walls, he has these two possible outcomes: survive the confrontation with Achilles and save his city, or sacrifice himself for the same cause.

"I feel my folly in my people slain.

Methinks my suffering country's voice I hear" (p. 647).

  Hector is not without dreams of glory, but, he is first and foremost the guardian of his city and his town. He also thinks about the possibility of negotiating a pact with Achilles, but Héctor does not trust him.  At the last moment Hector sees that his enemy is about to attack him, and ends up fleeing, he runs all around the city three times, until suddenly the two confront each other. Hector, having lost his spear and seeing himself finished, says: "Death and black fate approach! ' tis I must bleed" (p. 654). Hector dies, but Achilles does not abide by the minimum rules of war: behind his chariot he drags the corpse through all the fields of Troy in front of the eyes of the family and the other Trojans. He then leaves the prince's body lying on the ground, unburied, and returns to the Greek camp to organize a huge funeral ritual in honor of his friend Patroclus.

His pain is great, but he only mourns Patroclus. He falls exhausted on the beach and dreams of all that has happened. In his dream Patroclus appears and repeats the prophetic warning that Achilles will also die on the beaches of Troy:

"When once the last funereal flames ascend,

No more shall meet Achilles and his friend;

No more our thoughts to those we loved make known;

Or quit the dearest, to converse alone.

Me fate has sever'd from the sons of earth,

The fate fore-doom'd that waited from my birth:

Thee too it waits; before the Trojan wall

Even great and godlike thou art doom'd to fall.

Hear then; and as in fate and love we join,

Ah suffer that my bones may rest with thine!" (p. 671).

Patroclus asks that when this happens, they both be buried in the same tumb. Achilles wakes up, amazed by the very real presence of his dead friend:

"Tis true, 'tis certain; man, though dead, retains

Part of himself; the immortal mind remains:

The form subsists without the body's aid,

Aerial semblance, and an empty shade!

This night my friend, so late in battle lost,

Stood at my side, a pensive, plaintive ghost:

Even now familiar, as in life, he came;

Wings! how different! yet how like the same!" (p. 672).

 The Greeks prepare a sumptuous and ostentatious funeral for Patroclus in which they sacrifice both beasts and twelve Trojan prisoners (who are only consider offerings, without any prerogative as soldiers).

"Then last of all, and horrible to tell,

Sad sacrifice! twelve Trojan captives fell

On these the rage of fire" (p. 676).

 The ritual also demands the preparation of a feast, a horse race, wrestling competitions and archery. They even end up squabbling over who won the competitions! The prizes are diverse: horses, gold containers and slaves, and Achilles does not shy away from reciting what these prizes are worth, like a host who has to boast about the prices of his gifts. It is a commemoration and a solemnity to honor Patroclus, but it is also a distasteful spectacle.  

 On the other hand, pain and pity do not yet extend to the lifeless body of Prince Hector, his corpse is still lying unprotected on the battlefield. Achilles finally drags him into the Greek camp. It is only after the gods Aphrodite (Venus) and Phoebus (Apollo) again intervene that his corpse is finally protected from the wild dogs and vultures. The god Apollo complains about Achilles' behavior, comparing him to a beast that kills everywhere without discrimination, that exterminates:

“A lion, not a man, who slaughters wide,

In strength of rage, and impotence of pride;

Who hastes to murder with a savage joy,

Invades around, and breathes but to destroy!

Shame is not of his soul; nor understood,

The greatest evil and the greatest good.

Still for one loss he rages unresign'd,

Repugnant to the lot of all mankind;” (p. 709).

  And he ends by saying that Achilles "(30) "…violates the laws of man and god" (p. 710)."

The gods arrange a meeting between the Trojan king Priam and Achilles. The king of Troy must go alone – only with an old servant in a mule cart loaded with gifts to recover the body of his son. He is terrified, but he meets the god Hermes on the way, who treats him with respect and affection. The god says to him:

"Yet suffer not thy soul to sink with dread;

From me no harm shall touch thy reverend head;

From Greece I'll guard thee too; for in those lines

The living image of my father shines" (p. 724).

But he also warns him that the next day Greece will attack the walls of Troy.

 Hermes leaves Priam in Achilles' tent. The meeting between the two reveals a totally different side of this hero. Suddenly he sees Priam as a father, as his own.

“Now each by turns indulged the gush of woe;

And now the mingled tides together flow:

This low on earth, that gently bending o'er;

A father one, and one a son deplore:

But great Achilles different passions rend,

And now his sire he mourns, and now his friend.

The infectious softness through the heroes ran;

One universal solemn shower began;

They bore as heroes, but they felt as man" (p. 732).

Achilles is capable of generous and open emotions, though only in his most intimate relationships. He loved Briseis (the slave who caused the tantrum with Agamemnon), and Patroclus, his childhood friend. He loved the relatives he left behind in Pythia, especially his father, and in the intense meeting in his tent with the Trojan king he regretted that he would not see them again.

 But he is relentless; even though he relates so closely to Priam, it does not occur to him to think of a negotiation to end the hemorrhage of dead on both sides. Achilles gives Priam a period of twelve days for his son's funeral ceremonies. It is then understood that Troy will fall, although Achilles has previously expressed his doubts about the reasons for fighting ("The Trojans... I've never been bothered... We sail... To avenge an evil that is private..."-(see note 1). These are stingy concessions; they have cried together like men, but Achilles has not been able to overcome the barrier of hatred that war promotes. The conflict must continue to its ultimate and tragic consequences because it is inevitable. There is no human contact that can change this misery and this fatality. Priam spends part of the night in Achilles' tent and then returns to Troy.

The contrast between the funerals of Hector and Patroclus could not be greater. The Trojans performed the rites of cremation and concluded their activities in dignity and sorrow. And so the Iliad ends. The rest we know: Troy falls, Paris kills Achilles, the city's inhabitants die or become slaves, and the surviving Greeks return home. Homer sings the events of a story, but, as an excellent playwright, he also leaves the denouement open.

  THE ROLE OF THE GODS

The gods do not agree with each other. Some of them remain faithfully in favor of the Greeks; another group invariably supports the Trojans, and in the meantime still other gods switch sides. Homer sings about how Apollo protects the Trojans while Athena supports the Greeks:

"Apollo thus from Ilion's lofty towers,

Array'd in terrors, roused the Trojan powers:

While war's fierce goddess fires the Grecian foe,

And shouts and thunders in the fields below..." (p. 157-158)

Although Jove/Jupiter is the ultimate ruler of all, the other gods frequently complain about his orders. For example, when Jove sends the goddess Iris with a message to Neptune to stop supporting the Trojans, he replies:

"What means the haughty sovereign of the skies?

(The king of ocean thus, incensed, replies;)

Rule as he will his portion'd realms on high;

No vassal god, nor of his train, am I" (448).

Neptune ends up obeying, but reluctantly. In the course of the epic many deities rebel against the chief of the heavens, but they end up accepting his power, even if the will of the ruler of the firmaments is wavering. At the beginning of the Iliad Jove/Jupiter and Athena promise victory to the Greeks, and Apollo and Mars back the Trojans. Aphrodite/Venus protects her (mortal) Trojan son. But Jove's support is unstable: he offers and then withdraws his protection in a back-and-forth that confuses the Greeks, and sometimes even supports the Trojans. In the Eighth Book he commands all the deities to refrain from intervening further in the war, but without much success, partly due to the insubordination of the other gods. To the Greeks this seemed like the breaking of their promise of victory over the Trojans that he had given them earlier. Sometimes Jove starts the day supporting one side, and by noon he supports the other, as in the eleventh book, at first he supports Agamemnon, the Greek king, and then he gives strategic advice to Hector, the Trojan. Finally, he supports the Greek side again. It's like a cat playing with a couple of mice; here he appears helping Hector:

"The goddess then: "O son of Priam, hear!

From Jove I come, and his high mandate bear.

While Agamemnon wastes the ranks around,

Fights in the front, and bathes with blood the ground,

Abstain from fight; yet issue forth commands,

And trust the war to less important hands:

But when, or wounded by the spear or dart,

The chief shall mount his chariot, and depart,

Then Jove shall string thy arm, and fire thy breast" (321).

He even allows his mortal son, Sarpedon, to die at the hands of the Greek Patroclus. Jove wanted to save him, but his death was predestined, although the origin of this fatality is not clear. Jove laments:

"The hour draws on; the destinies ordain,

My godlike son shall press the Phrygian plain:

Already on the verge of death he stands,

His life is owed to fierce Patroclus' hands,

What passions in a parent's breast debate!

Say, shall I snatch him from impending fate,

And send him safe to Lycia, distant far

From all the dangers and the toils of war;

Or to his doom my bravest offspring yield" (p. 492-493)

Predestination is confused in the Iliad. So many die, and the gods intervene sometimes. Jove intervenes at times on both sides, but something prevents him from saving his son. He contemplates doing so, but his wife (and sister) tells him that it is not possible.

"Short is the date prescribed to mortal man;

Shall Jove for one extend the narrow span,

Whose bounds were fix'd before his race began? (p. 493)

Jove orders Phoebus/Apollo to take Sarpedon's lifeless body to his native Lycia to be tended to and reverently buried there. And in the meantime, he orders the death of Patroclus, his executioner. The will of the gods is unfathomable.

"The god who gives, resumes, and orders all,

He urged thee on, and urged thee on to fall (p. 503)

 

This celestial inconsistency may have an explanation: at the time Homer describes in the Iliad, the Greeks were not always successful. If Jove had been consistent in his support, they would have won the war in a short time. Assuming a certain historical veracity in the story, the poet has to resort to changes in the divine will to explain the difficulties of both sides on the battlefield.

The gods are not mere spectators. They actively intervene as an undisciplined audience would do at a football game. They give special powers to the heroes of their choice and sometimes even ride the chariots to physically fight on the battlefield, as when Mars helps the Trojans by precipitating their attack on Diomedes/Tideida. In this encounter the goddess Palla/Athena intervenes on the Greek's behalf, saves him and in the process she wounds Mars. The god, however, is immortal, he can suffer pain, but cannot die. Lamenting, he ascends to heaven and there he is healed.

"The god ... at Tydides flies.

Now rushing fierce, in equal arms appear

The daring Greek, the dreadful god of war!

Full at the chief, above his courser's head,

From Mars's arm the enormous weapon fled:

Pallas opposed her hand, and caused to glance

Far from the car the strong immortal lance.

Then threw the force of Tydeus' warlike son;

The javelin hiss'd; the goddess urged it on:

Where the broad cincture girt his armour round,

It pierced the god:. ....Mars bellows with the pain:....

In such a cloud the god from combat driven,

High o'er the dusky whirlwind scales the heaven.

Wild with his pain, he sought the bright abodes,

There sullen sat beneath the sire of gods,

Show'd the celestial blood, and with a groan

Thus pour'd his plaints before the immortal throne: (p. 176)

Mars, knowing himself immortal, joins the battle and kills the mortals he considers enemies. The distinction between gods and mortal heroes is feeble: almost the only thing that separates them is the miraculous power of the gods and the mortality of men.

It can be said that men are the puppets of the gods because they are the ones who decide if men’s spears will be accurately aimed. Or if their shots will go to go astray. The gods decide whether they will protect their warriors. In the end they provide an explanatory structure for the singers’ listeners: through divine influence mortal heroes can understand why some are saved and others are lost. The gods are the forces that drive mortals to defend their city – or to besiege a foreign population. They act as the apparent engines behind the kings’ desire for power; we would say today, they function as interpretative projections of human desires. In the following quote the Greeks, who were previously winning the war, now feel momentarily unable to defend the fortress on the beach that protects their ships, and Menelaus explains what he fears will be an imminent defeat:

"… On Greece no blame be thrown;

Arms are her trade, and war is all her own.

Her hardy heroes from the well-fought plains

Nor fear withholds, nor shameful sloth detains:

"Tis heaven, alas! and Jove's all-powerful doom,

That far, far distant from our native home

Wills us to fall inglorious! …" (p. 388).

And Paris, who has come out to fight after his brother Hector’s criticism, defends himself now, but also giving the gods credit for his successes on the battlefield:

"When Paris thus: "My brother and my friend,

Thy warm impatience makes thy tongue offend,

In other battles I deserved thy blame,

Though then not deedless, nor unknown to fame:

But since ...,

I scatter'd slaughter from my fatal bow.....

What with this arm I can, prepare to know....

But 'tis not ours, with forces not our own

To combat: strength is of the gods alone" (p. 410).

The idea that men could decide their future came centuries later to Athenian culture.  In the period between the twelfth century B.C. to the sixth century B.C. there were seismic changes for world civilization. In the Bronze Age and at the time of the siege of Troy, the Greeks felt totally controlled by an invention of their own cultural making, that is, their pantheon of gods. Six hundred years later, in the time of Solon (the first ruler to think of the need for a constitution to govern Athens), the Athenians declared themselves masters of their own destiny and set out on the road to the world's first democracy. Despite this new liberation, they did not totally abandon their faith in the gods, not even after Solon. In fact, Socrates was condemned to death because of his respect for the power of reason. The conservatives of his time considered him "impious."

 THE HUMANITY OF WARRIORS

Heroes also have families: parents, wives and children. The farewell between the Trojan prince Hector and his wife Andromache is full of tender details, such as when his son is frightened to see the father with the war helmet full of shiny ornaments, and Hector, realizing the problem, takes it off so that he can hug the baby. Andromache asks Hector to stay, but he, thinking about the fate of his family if Troy does not survive, reluctantly recognizes his obligation on the battlefield.

"The babe clung crying to his nurse's breast,

Scared at the dazzling helm, and nodding crest.

With secret pleasure each fond parent smiled,

And Hector hasted to relieve his child,

The glittering terrors from his brows unbound,

And placed the beaming helmet on the ground;

Then kiss'd the child, and, lifting high in air,

Thus to the gods preferr'd a father's prayer" (p. 204).

This whole scene is a preparation for Hector's death. Homer wants to make it clear that Hector was not just a hero; He was also a valuable and loved person. But martial values permeate the atmosphere. In his prayer he wishes that his son will grow strong and become an even braver warrior than his father.

Hector regrets the war and fears both the fate of Troy and that of his family who will be captured and used as slaves. He seeks a solution that is first agreed upon by the gods Apollo and Minerva. He will have the responsibility of challenging the strongest Greek to a duel that will decide the future of the war, where there will be only one more victim. He goes out on the battlefield and shouts:

"You then, O princes of the Greeks! appear;

'Tis Hector speaks, and calls the gods to hear:

From all your troops select the boldest knight,

And him, the boldest, Hector dares to fight" (p. 212)

At first no one gets up. Then Menelaus does it, but his brother convinces him that there must be a soldier stronger than him. The Greeks select Ajax; We have already described how the battle ends due to the fall of night. And then, the ruthless war continues.

Although everyone mourns their dead, Hector is the most sensitive of all the combatants.

THE ORIGINS OF THOSE WHO CONSIDERED THEMSELVES "GREEKS"

The Greeks who sail to Troy have come from places scattered throughout what we now call Greece.  Achilles and Patroclus come from Pythia in the northeast, but in general the combatants come from the south: a) old Nestor is the king of Pylos, b) Menelaus is the king of Sparta, c) Agamemnon is the king of Mycenae, d) Odysseus is from Ithaca, and f) Diomedes/Tideida comes from Argos. This dispersion of origins points to a diversity of tribes—the Aeolians, Dorians, Achaeans, and Ionians, and others[12], and Homer sings of the exploits of all; he sings and conjures up a cultural construction: the name “Achaeans” is a term that begins to refer to everyone because "Hellenes" was not yet used to refer to the inhabitants of the peninsula, the islands and the colonies of Anatolia. In the twelfth century B.C. They came to the defense of something beyond Helen's rescue: they are in the process of defining a territory that has a shared meaning in relation to the surrounding kingdoms.

There was already something of a culture with mythical origins.  The term "Helas" comes from Hellen, the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha. The mythological Deucalion in turn was the son of the Titan Prometheus. He and his consort Pyrrha repopulated the land after a gigantic flood, by throwing stones that later became people; one of the foundation stones produced King Hellen, who became a great patriarch. Thucydides writes, in Book I of his History of the Peloponnesian War:

"I am inclined to think that the same name had not yet been given to the whole territory and, in fact, did not exist at all before the time of Helen, the son of Deucalion; The different tribes, of which the Pelasga was the most widespread, gave their own names to the different districts. But when Hellen and his sons became powerful in Phthiotis, their help was invoked by other cities, and those who associated with him gradually began to call themselves Hellenes, although it was a long time before the name prevailed throughout the territory. Of this, Homer offers the best evidence; for he, though he lived long after the Trojan War, nowhere does he use this name collectively, but confines it to the followers of Achilles of Pythia, who were the original Hellenes; when he speaks of the whole host, he calls them Danans, or Argives, or Achaeans" (Book I, paragraph 4).

Homer recognized that the siege of Troy represented an historical, cultural, and ethnic milestone for the Greeks of the eighth century BC., and many of his countrymen at that time could identify with the longing for a shared entity. There is other evidence of this cultural expansion: the Amphictyonic League already existed in Homer's time, it was certainly founded after the Trojan War; it comprised about a dozen tribes in central Greece, and although it was not a civic or political grouping, it required the general collaboration of separate groups. Its purpose was the protection and administration of the temples of Apollo at Delphi and Demeter at Anthela; it evidently signaled the beginning of a new Greek spirit.

In the original language of the Iliad, Homer hints at several dialects that together can be added to Greek (Derks & Roymans, 2009).  The poet lived at a time when there were many migrations within the peninsula and between the islands of the Aegean Sea.  There were even Greek settlements in Anatolia, which is now the eastern coast of Turkey. He himself had traveled between some of these places. Derks and Roymans say that probably by the seventh century B.C. there were people who spoke more than one dialect and who recognized them as variants of the same language.

The desire for a shared cultural space spanned the centuries, from the Trojan War to Alexander's conquest of Athens in 335 B.C. In the Greco-Persian Wars in which the Greeks were defending themselves against the Persian Empire, all the cities helped to expel the invaders, especially Athens and Sparta, first on the plains of Marathon in 490 BC. and then at Thermopylae and at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC.

However, this did not prevent wars between the cities/states; it was after the Peloponnesian Wars (431-404 BC) that Sparta replaced Athens in the Hellenic leadership, and Athenian democracy was briefly supplanted by the "Regime of the Thirty", a terrible tyranny led by Critias. This subjugation lasted less than a year, but it decimated the population. A coalition eventually negotiated the restoration of something resembling a democracy in the city.

Greece was experiencing the ups and downs of a multiple culture, which combined various hegemonic aspirations with the desire for self-government. It lived through cruel wars that coexisted with attempts to form leagues of cooperation, and it tried with a long and ill-fated regional effort to forge a shared identity. Above all, Athens experimented with the meaning of human agency in understanding of itself, of the world, and of freedom. These efforts lasted for more than a thousand years until Alexander made the region a vassalage of Macedonia, and then the Romans conquered the Macedonians and claimed the peninsula as a mere dependency of their own Empire.

However, Athens survived as a center of culture where philosophy, science, and education continued to thrive. The Romans continued to look to Greek culture to fill their own gaps: Horace, the Roman poet, famously said: "Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit" ("The captive Greece captivated her rude conqueror") (Horace, 11/11/2004, paragraph 4). And we also look to this story for the answers to our most distressing questions.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The Iliad is an incomplete tragedy because it does not describe the final fall of Troy, except in a kind of anticipatory reflection in the twelfth book when the poet warns that the end is approaching. Even when the Trojans were tearing down the wall that protected the Greek ships, and it seemed that they might win the conflict, Homer wisely disabused his listeners with his very sad predictions, not only about the end of Troy but about the absolute elimination of everything. He warned that there would be nothing left.

"Without the gods, how short a period stands

The proudest monument of mortal hands!

This stood while Hector and Achilles raged.

While sacred Troy the warring hosts engaged;

But when her sons were slain, her city burn'd,

And what survived of Greece to Greece return'd;

Then Neptune and Apollo shook the shore,

Then Ida's summits pour'd their watery store; ----

Helmets, and shields, and godlike heroes slain:

These, turn'd by Febo from their wonted ways,

Deluged the rampire nine continual days;

The weight of waters saps the yielding wall,

And to the sea the floating bulwarks fall.....

Now smooth'd with sand, and levell'd by the flood,

No fragment tells where once the wonder stood;

In their old bounds the rivers roll again,

Shine 'twixt the hills, or wander o'er the plain" (p. 356).

Although Homer says that the walls of the city will be carried to the sea by the overflowing rivers, and neither the sabers nor the shields of the heroes will remain on the sand, we know that the songs of the aedos would remain.

At the height of the 21st century we revisit Agamemnon, Menelaus, Priam, Hector, Paris, Helen, Achilles, Patroclus and the others. Their dramas move us, and at the same time give us new windows into our own world. It is inevitable to ask whether, with a different Greek leadership, the war could have been avoided, or at least if Héctor might have succeeded in his attempts at negotiation. To answer these questions, it is necessary, for a short time, to dispense with the influence of the gods on mortals.

With modern eyes we have to examine the conflict between leadership and heroism.  Gadamer (1977/1991) would say that this is impossible because historical events only occur in their true contexts, and that the role of the interpreter is to approach the world he observes, getting rid of the prejudices of his own time. In our times, similar characters direct similar processes, and epic documents serve as a basis for understanding our own times.

If Agamemnon was a military figure that took advantage of the circumstances to become the despotic leader of all Greeks, the Trojan king Priam is the kind king who weeps over the misfortunes of his people. If Menelaus is the representative of a stated motive for action (the rescue of Helen), Achilles represents a violent hero without cause and without a purpose; a murderer without consideration, who contradictorily could love and mourn his own losses. If Hector was the negotiator and defender of his people, Diomedes/Tideida was a daring fighter who followed orders, knowing that he was protected (by the goddess Venus, his mother).

The kings of all times lead their peoples into battle. Legends tell how Agamemnon led a large army across the Aegean Sea to attack a distant village; and when Priam accepted Helen's presence, he must have suspected that the Greeks would come to her rescue. It was a situation of tense anticipation whose outcome no one could predict, but they were all willing to take the risks. Each side had potentially something to gain.

Kings make decisions and heroes obey. The fiercer the soldiers, the more they are appreciated for their military valor. They neither reason nor doubt. The ethics of war are similar in all ages, and what is different in this case is that the rhapsodist weeps equally for all its victims. It can even be said that, for Homer, the Trojans have acted less like martial ruffians than the Greeks have. The poet recognizes a tempered and even loving courage in old Priam when he crosses – almost alone – the war lines between the two sides to search for the corpse of his son Hector.

Even the gods are problematic in the Iliad. They fight each other, they are disloyal, and instead of caring about the wellbeing of the heavens, the Earth, or human beings, they spend their time creating their own spheres of influence. I do not think it was Homer's purpose to criticize them; rather, as I have observed, their tumultuous motivations help us understand the erratic course of an endless, unpredictable and paradoxical human war.

Normally in novels, plays and songs that are admired as fundamental works for the identity of a people, the authors celebrate the victory of their own state or kingdom; they denounce the invaders of their own lands and they praise their own conquests. In the Iliad, Homer denounces a generic tragedy, while praising the courage of all the protagonists.

Ricoeur (1981/1994) proposed that we incorporate some "suspicion" into the interpretation we make of other people's works, and that we look for the hidden themes under these texts. In this case, I believe that the Iliad is a hymn to humanity, and may even be the basis of the preoccupations that centuries later would begin to manifest itself in Athens, where men would assume responsibility for their actions and govern themselves. The fifth and fourth century heroes of Athens were the philosophers of reason, although sometimes, as in the case of Socrates, they paid for their teachings with their lives.

CHAPTER II

THE COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND MILITARISM

A BRIEF DYNASTIC HISTORY 

Contemporary history moves too fast to grasp its great meanings and trends. For us, a hundred years represents almost two generations, and three hundred years are almost lost in memory. We get lost in the forest, and concentrating on the individual trees of the past, we do not notice the thickness of time that encompasses the reasons for events, such as the origin of wars and the strategies to achieve peace and prosperity.  We don't even see when our democracies begin to turn into dictatorships, and we don't question the justice of wars. We stay focused on the particular battles and our personal difficulties to survive.

The history of a past civilization can help us compress the details, sometimes through it we can gain a broader view of our own lives. In this sense, the ancient Greeks with their heroes and gods, their poets, their legends and their achievements and failures can help us understand ourselves.

Why return to the Greeks? Because they represent more than a thousand years of history, from the Bronze Age to the Roman conquest at the Battle of Corinth in 146 BC.  In those thousand years there was everything: wars, the founding and fall of kingdoms, the first attempts to control tyrants, the establishment of the first true democracy in the world, the creation of many variants in a magnificent aesthetic culture – plastic, theatrical and poetic – and the "discovery" of rational thought, mathematics and science. It was no small thing.

But in the end that culture spawned its own nemesis: its inability to resist Alexander the Great who sent Greece back ten centuries to a time when its inhabitants were no longer citizens, just subjects under the command of powerful commanders. Reflecting on them is like reviewing all the possibilities that human beings have.

We see among the Hellenes (a name that was adopted sometime after the eighth century B.C. to refer to all the Greeks) the great drama of the conflict between self-management, reason, militarism and instances of power anchored in archaic traditional beliefs.

In general, even in democracies, military power does not come from electoral processes or from national constitutions that establish the submission of martial power to civic power. Rather, it stems from the military's ability to establish itself at the center of the political system, especially at the center of the national security complex. This is true in both parliamentary systems and dictatorial regimes.

Moreover, both in ancient Greece and in colonial regimes of all times, overseas empires justified their conquests by saying that they brought wisdom and religion to barbarians or savages. The reality of these wars is that they have been a means of obtaining goods through plunder; Aristotle accepted this practice as natural: There has always been a tense relationship between the yearning for democracy and military action. Aristotle considered that military action was a natural means of acquiring goods: "War itself is, in a way, a natural means of acquiring [goods...] it is a battle that nature itself has made legitimate" (Fourth Century B.C. /31-10-2017, p. 17-18).

In the beginning, in archaic Greece, kings were the de facto commanders of their troops and their warrior’s actions arose directly from the king's will. The male population constituted the army. There was no separation, and yet there was always a need to convince the soldiers. We remember from the play Antigone (Sophocles, n.d.) how Agamemnon had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to convince his soldiers to follow him to Troy.

Ancient kings were expected to generate warlike feats as part of their duties. The historian Herodotus in his first book tells of the incessant raids of the Greek kings in Anatolia, or Asia Minor, against the Phrygian and Lydian peoples at the beginning of the first millennium B.C. Likewise, the Persians raided the Greek Ionians[14]. The rewards were pillage and territorial increase for the aggressor army. War was a way of life, even for villages that had sufficient agricultural provisions to be self-sufficient.

Then in the democratic times of Athens, the authority to declare war came from the Citizens' Assembly. The hoplites, that is, the soldier-citizens, were part of it, they were the citizens of high and medium social rank. Achieving the incorporation of hoplites into the political life of Athens was a very important advancement, because the soldiers who were going to risk their lives had a voice in the decision to fight.

On Greek soil, threats from the Persians, and competitions with the other Greek city/states were persistent. Sparta and Athens were always rivals, and the other cities, such as Corinth, were also perceived as hegemonic threats. This produced a number of military conflicts, which, without a doubt, affected the proper functioning of democracy in Athens, both because of the military expenses that impoverished the population, and because of an inevitable governmental instability that went back and forth from elected leaders to dictatorial leaders.

I will attempt to describe and analyze this process in what follows. In the following pages I will review the rise and end of two great cities/states, that of Sparta and that of Athens, and I will take a look at the relationship between democracy and militarism.

Evidently it was not all war: although the early history of Greece was marked by its legends of wars and conquests, in artifacts such as painted jugs, mosaics and architectural remains one can see domestic scenes and pious images that suggest the existence of quiet lives, at least among aristocrats, which reflect some happiness and domestic love.

We have seen how even the gods took an active role in fighting. In the legends of the deities there were sometimes stories of resentment, rivalry, revenge, and extreme cruelty.  In fact, although the gods were immortal, they were born, grew, fought and committed crimes, just like human beings. Zeus himself, the chief of all the deities, is an example: his childhood was extremely dysfunctional, and he was saved from being devoured by his father Cronus only because his mother Rhea hid him, and gave Cronus a stone wrapped in blankets instead of the baby. The gods were sometimes rapists, thugs, and evildoers.

Part of these stories "explained" the fate, or misfortunes, of humans in their battles, and sometimes revealed the divine origin of some of the heroes and kings – and therefore their right to rule. They adopted and defended specific populations of human beings: Apollo, for example, usually defended Troy during Greek acedia. In other words, these legends were more than dramatic and flamboyant tales: they also served to promote human purposes and justify venerable lineages.

They expressed the aspirations of their times. Over the centuries, the identity of some gods was modified to incorporate new cultural desires.  Apollo, one of Zeus' sons, is an example. In the Iliad he is a warrior god, one of the divine beings who actively participates in the defense of Troy. But as the centuries went by, his character was culturally enriched: by the seventh century B.C., Apollo represented perfection and beauty. He was the god of the sun and also of healing. If he once sent a plague to sicken the Greeks while they were besieging Troy, he later came to represent health and reason.

IN THE BRONZE AGE

Greece did not emerge in a civilizational vacuum. The history of human settlements in what is now the Middle East, especially Anatolia and Syria, is very old. The temple of Göbekli Tepe in Anatolia (today Turkey) is probably ten thousand years old. It was built by a group of people who were still nomadic, but with a degree of social organization that allowed the construction of a monumental work. (Collins, 2004). Likewise, the first city called "Jericho", located in modern Israel, was one of the oldest settlements in human history; its origins can be traced back to 9000 BC (Kenyon, 20-4-2021). In Egypt[15] there were powerful leaders and organized human groups since the fifth millennium. From the 4th millennium there were various groups with different degrees of social organization in the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia. Among these groups were Greek migrations that slowly populated the islands and coasts, and by the eighth century B.C. they occupied what is now Greece, the islands of the Aegean and Ionian Seas, and the coast of Anatolia.

The first civilization of any importance in ancient Greece was the Minoan civilization that began around the third millennium BC. on the island of Crete. This culture takes its name from King Minos, a mythological figure, who, like many kings of legend, was considered the son of a god. These days there is archaeological evidence for his existence.  Cretan society was prosperous, based on agriculture, crafts and trade. They did not base their wealth on agriculture – as other Greek kingdoms did in conquest and colonization – but in their extensive commercial contacts with other civilizations in the Mediterranean.

In the Bronze Age Greek settlements began to appear in what is now Greece, Turkey, Syria, Egypt and Italy.  In Greece the first archaeological evidence of the Minoan Cretan culture also dates back to the 4th millennium B.C. In mainland Greece there are indications of powerful kings or lords since the Bronze Age, but documentary evidence is scarce. One of the first, known only through mythology, was Hellen, king of Pythia (in the far north of Greece). Like many of the mythical founders, he was the son and grandson of divine or semi-divine figures (his grandfather was the Titan Prometheus). He became the ancestor of all the "Hellenic" Greeks, including the Aeolians, Dorians, Ionians, and Achaeans (Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, October 7, 2016).

There is no doubt that there was a Greek proto-culture before Homeric times. Homer referred to the group of Greeks fighting in Troy as "Achaeans," but at first they were separate kings in their various kingdoms. We have precarious access to the characters of the end of the Bronze Age and through myths. For example, the name Eurotas comes to us as part of the founding legends of Sparta. He passed the regency to his son-in-law Lacedaemon, who was the son of the god Zeus and Taygete. Lacedaemon then married his own daughter Sparta, and named the kingdom in her honor. Although there are no records of these characters, their legends allowed those who claimed to be their descendants to assume divine lineages. There is no way to locate dates, neither of birth or death, nor the dates during which they may of reigned, we only know that, if they existed, they preceded the Trojan War (XII – XIII century BC).

In general, data on the Spartan kings are scarce; they governed in pairs, an arrangement we will discuss later. Gill (07/2019) has drawn up a chronological list of their times, and in it can be seen that the first twelve monarchs lack dates, meaning that their names come to us only through the bards’ fables. There is only documentary information after the sixth century B.C.

Written language

Perhaps the most important civilizational achievement for all cultures is the invention of written language. It signifies a certain independence from oral traditions, and extends human memory for centuries and millennia. The written words become poems, books, plays and scientific reflections, and accumulate in palaces, and then in libraries. At first, however, they exist only on clay and stone tablets in isolation, and give us only limited and unrelated testimonies about the cultures they represent.  The history of Mediterranean writing includes Mycenaean, Egyptian, Sumerian, Aramaic, Latin, Tamil, Sanskrit, and Elamite.

As a general rule, writing began to appear in the first millennium BC. It was associated with bureaucratic tasks or receipts for commercial sales. In this sense, the Mycenaean written language was mainly related to records and inventories and trade, in a syllabic script known as Linear B; it has been found on clay tablets in Crete, Pylos, Mycenae, Tiryns, and Thebes. (JohnBlack 11/10/2013). Later (in the ninth century BC) the Phoenician alphabet was adapted for written Greek; this new version was phonetic; it was the first of this type of alphabet in history.

Homeric society

In the times described by The Iliad and the Odyssey, there were settlements all over what we call today Greece and others in Anatolia (Turkey). They were domains whose kings claimed divine ancestry in many cases.  The royal houses were extensive, subsisting on agricultural production and some trade with the Egyptians and other kingdoms in what is now Turkey and North Africa. Cairns (2015) says that it is probably about: "a world in which independent heads of families and loose confederations of local men [that] were involved in some kind of local entity, what we might consider to be an archaic koinon [... of the common man] or some form of emerging polis" (p. 52). Surely there were many low-ranking people associated with each king: in the battles Homer describes outside the walls of Troy, he mentions the high mortality rates among the foot soldiers, sometimes ten thousand or more in a single battle. Homer may have employed some poetic hyperbole, but these chieftains were capable of gathering armies of considerable size.

What were their motives for fighting? In the case of the Trojan War, it can be doubted that they all went to fight as enthusiastic troops ready to punish Paris for the abduction of Helen.  The low-ranking soldiers had no other options: surely there was a lot of control by the kings over their subjects, and a lot of compulsion. But even the foot soldiers enjoyed pillage.

Among the great lords the motives were diverse. The potential profit that came from looting was one of them. From the Trojan War to the conquests of Alexander the Great, poets and chroniclers have detailed a great deal of wealth stolen from peoples defeated in wars.

Many of the chieftains and their associates embarked for Troy in search of military glory. Honor and renown were deep motivations among them. They believed that their warrior abilities and daring would outlive them in the legends of the bardes, and that this reward was a more important value than their own lives. In fact, today we know the exploits of the Greeks in Troy thanks to the poet Homer. There is hardly anyone who does not know about the life of Achilles, and the military still bury its dead with the desire that each soldier’s memory be recalled with "honor and glory."

The laws

In the beginning, kings pronounced individual sentences for acts that they themselves defined as crimes. The first book of Herodotus (second or third century BC / 1981) is full of stories where kings such as Croesus of Sardis, or Cyrus of Persia decided the fate of their subjects in an audience. For the Greeks in Homeric times there was no system of pre-defined laws, but there was a tacit agreement between powerful men about acceptable behavior. The most important thing was the will of an Agamemnon or a Menelaus, even if the kings still had to negotiate with the men of their court.

In another tradition, the code of Ur-Nammu, from the second millennium B.C., is the oldest formal code preserved today, in the sense of a series of laws written with the intention of formalizing in tablets a certain permanence and universality. It is in the Sumerian language and defines certain crimes and their punishments, which were often fines, although for some offenses, such as murder, capital punishment was required. Three centuries later the code of Hammurabi (c. 1760 BCE) of Babylon appeared. In the seventh century B.C. In Athens, Dracon also drew up a code of crimes and punishments to delimit the capricious omnipotence that aristocrats had to decide individual cases.

The Greeks after the sixth century were different: they did not limit themselves to enumerating possible crimes and prescribing appropriate punishments; they tried to find a symbolic and secularized expression of the notion of abstract law, referring to the polis, especially in Sparta and Athens. Law was considered a moral value, inscribed in a constitutional regime of cities/states. With the passage of time in Athens the body of individual laws became democracies at the social level. (UNAM, n.d.). There was a popular assembly in which all citizens could participate in judging criminal behavior, but these decisions were based on spontaneous popular will, not a code of law.

The development of abstract laws appeared as a civilizational discovery in the first millennium. It was a society under construction, but as Cairns (2015) points out, there were expectations even at the time of the Trojan War about the qualities that a good ruler should have. Homer described Agamemnon, for example, as angry and fickle, and this description was a comment on his shortcomings as king, while the old Nestor was diplomatic, respectful, and conciliatory. Homer highlights the qualities of Nestor, and repudiates those of Agamemnon. He is even very critical of Achilles, the splendid but temperamental and irascible Greek hero.   In those early years, it was a matter of collective expectations about the performance of a ruler, but not a system of laws that generally apply to the entire population.

From the beginning in the ancient history of Greece there were two currents, one of conquest, colonization and territorial rivalries, and another in which a culture emerged from dispersed peoples that expressed itself with ever more explicit mutual expectations. They spoke different dialects, but recognized each other as peers of a larger entity. We have speculated in this book that the amalgam of armies that sailed to Troy had two purposes; the first and most "ideological" was the rescue of Helena. But there was another, more important motive: to create a "nation" or region that went beyond the individual cities-states, under the command of a king (Agamemnon) who claimed to represent them all.

Over time in almost all of them there was a system of laws and obligations both for kings and for the other classes. Aristotle said: "Justice is a social necessity, because law is the rule of life for political association, and the decision of what is just is what constitutes law" (Fourth century B.C. /31-10-2017). Despite this system of laws, different but existing in all the cities-states of Greece, slavery occurred in all of them, and social classes were divided according to their activities in relation to agriculture and military hierarchies.

I will concentrate in these reflections on the systems of Sparta and Athens. After the sixth century B.C., both cities were governed by laws. They had schools of philosophy, science, and artistic works, and both had sui generis systems to avoid the concentration of power in one of their elites.

THE CITY-STATES

Sparta

We have referred to the Homeric legend in which the king of Sparta, Menelaus, was the main reason for the Trojan War – or the one who captured the imagination of the soldiers – when he demanded support from the other Greek kings to rescue his wife Helen after Paris took her to Troy.

It is impossible to mention Sparta without referring primarily to its martial culture. Sparta was famous for the military prowess of its people, even for women. All male citizens entered the army as teenagers. They became "hoplites", warriors who observed a very strong discipline, and who received, not only excellent training in the arts of war, but also a military culture that permeated their entire sense of life.

There was also in Spartan society a subaltern and non-citizen social class of merchants and artisans, who were sometimes called to fight, called "perokoi". They were not considered citizens and lacked the possibility of participation in state decisions. A third class called "helots" were serfs, almost slaves, who worked in agricultural production. Absolute obedience was expected of them. 

By the end of the eighth century BC, Sparta had conquered most of Messenia and basically enslaved its native population. Due to the accumulation of the territory that it controlled, it became the largest city-state in Greece. The conquered peoples of Messenia and Laconian were the sources of the helots, and they formed the basis of the economy. The helots were able to keep a percentage of the produce they cultivated, but they were also regularly hunted down to keep them under control. In this way, the Spartan citizens of the city were able to free themselves from activities in the countryside, and could engage in political, military, artistic activities and hunting for sport.

The city of Sparta was an agricultural, communal, and militaristic city-state with no commercial development. Its socio-political structure – for citizens – was based on its sixth-century (B.C) Constitution., which was attributed to Lycurgus, a figure of legend. This constitution organized Sparta according to four elements: a) a dual monarchy, ruled by two kings representing two noble and rival houses, b) a Council called Genusia, made up of 28 elders elected from among the noble families, c) a general Assembly called Apella in which all male citizens over 30 years of age participated, and d) the magistrates,  or ephors who wielded the real power. Participation in the Apella was prized among the men of Sparta, and its members considered it an expression of their freedom and dignity. All citizens received a portion of land that they could not sell.

"It was a society with communist pretensions and profoundly militaristic that imposed itself for eight centuries [...]" (UNAM, p. 45).  This “communism” was, however profoundly classist.  

The city was in constant rivalry with the other major Greek cities of Athens and Corinth, and internecine wars were frequent, although, as in the Persian Wars, sometimes Sparta and Athens united in the sole cause of defending Greek culture. It is interesting to explore the reasons for these conflicts and eventual alliances, and to ask why these cities-states did not understand the potential benefits of permanent peace treaties and collaboration. In fact, there were some agreements, but they always had the underlying purpose of achieving the military protection of their cities against some outside threat. For example, after the Persian Wars, in which Sparta and Athens collaborated to save Greek culture from the hegemonic projects of the Persians, Hellenic collaboration could not advance to encompass the creation of some kind of peaceful coexistence afterward. We will briefly mention the meaning of these wars later.

Athens

As happened in Sparta, the first Athenian kings are known to us from legend. Cecrops was the first king. He was considered the origin of civilization, including such basic institutions as marriage and such knowledge as the art of navigation. He was half snake and half man. He was also the one who recognized Zeus as the main deity of the city. In his time Athena was designated the patron goddess of the city, and gave her name to the population, supposedly in a contest with Neptune who also desired that honor. Although Cecrops is a legendary character, the idea that he chose Athena as the patron saint of Athens was prophetic: they decided to choose reason, when they could have preferred Ares, the god of war and manly bravery, but from an early age they recognized the value of science and wisdom.

From the beginning in mythology, it is interesting to reflect on this preference of Cecrops for Athena; she was the goddess of knowledge, reason, just war, law and justice in general, as Imperium proclaims (n.d.). She defended the Greeks in their siege of Troy, but in addition, she was the goddess of mathematics, strategy, artistic skill, courage, bravery and inspiration. From its beginnings Athens was a city with broad and thoughtful aspirations. Even in the Athenian colonies[16], for esample in the city of Miletus (in what is now Turkey) they emulated and tried to incorporate Athenian aspirations, and after the fourth century B.C. there were democratic ambitions there. With democracy comes interest in the products of reason: science, mathematics, art, and philosophy.

In the ninth century BC a council of nobles who assisted the king developed, and this group gradually evolved into a body known as the Areopagus, which formed an oligarchy from which the leaders were elected. The Areopagus elected from its members nine men, known as "archons," who were responsible for making decisions that were then ratified by the Areopagus. In these antecedents one can perceive the origins of Athenian democracy (Preceden, n.d.).

In the interval between 900 B.C. and 650 B.C. Athens went from being an entity governed by the will of a king to an oligarchic system in which the king's advisors, that is the Areopagus, had as much or more power than the monarchy. In time they replaced the king, and with some regularity they elected from their members a chief "Archon" the main governor under the authority of the Areopagus. Among the archons we find the names of Solon and Cleisthenes[17].  

It is interesting that these rulers were originally chosen to quell revolts among the inhabitants due to various economic crises, but their solution was the incorporation of ever larger sectors of the population into the government's decision-making process. On the other hand, Sparta's solution for calming their Helots was to repress them. The Athenians decided to incorporate many of the people impacted by scarcity as citizens with decision-making power.

Solon was elected in 594 B.C. and established economic reforms. He created a system of socio-economic classes that regulated the participation of each citizen in the decisions of the State. The wealthiest could be part of the Areopagus. The less well-off were part of the Council of 400. In turn, the Council invited the poorest to participate in a people's tribune that decided certain legal cases.

These various levels, however, excluded women[18], men with restrictions on their freedom and slaves.  This discrimination was not questioned at the time; in fact, Aristotle accepted domination over women and slavery as natural things, and in his book "Politics" he has an entire subtitle in defense of slavery.[19] Among other things, he expressed that gender inequality and slavery are based on the natural inferiority of these groups, although he must have known that many of the slaves in Athens came from conquered territories, and that in their original cultures performed on an equal footing with their neighbors and in their armies.

Aristotle said (Fourth century B.C. /31-10-2017, p. 5): "The house, then afterward the woman and the ploughing ox"

And then on the same page he said:

 

"Yes, the Greek has the right to command the barbarians since nature has willed that barbarians and slaves were one and the same thing."

 Cleisthenes, who ruled Athens from 525 B.C. to 524 B.C., declared that all free men in Athens were "citizens," and developed a system of separation of powers. He allowed all citizens to participate in the Assembly, and proclaimed that this body was the only body with the authority to declare war. This was a huge advance since a king or dictator could not lead the city into a conflict without the support of the population. We remember that Athena was the goddess of a just war. Cleisthenes created the notion of isonomy, or equality of citizens before the law. He did away with the tribal system – dominated by powerful families – and reorganized the population in geographical terms, similar to modern parishes.

The men of Athens received military training. 18-year-olds who were the children of citizens, were admitted to the military academy or "Efebica University"; they took an oath, the "ephebic oath".[20] It was necessary for these young men to graduate to obtain the status of citizen, and then they were accepted as "hoplites", the corps of military elites or militiamen who remained at the service of the city in times of conflict; some continued as hoplites all their lives, but others returned to civilian life.

It is interesting to reflect on the cultural heritage of Solon and Cleisthenes: they were civilian characters, who at the time had fulfilled their military responsibilities. These civil leaders were pioneers in the creation of political systems of coexistence that eventually led to the world's first democracy, and yet today their names are almost unknown to the general public. They are not famous, and their lives are not the subject of movies, such as the notorious name of Achilles, son of the goddess Thetis, a hero who carried the shield of the god Hephaestus in the legends of the Battle of Troy. Rather, they were the decorous heroes of concord, coexistence and tolerance, and they also deserve celebration.

It is also important to remember Pericles (in power from 444 BC until his death) who reaped from the achievements sown by Solon and Cleisthenes, and built on their works a broader, more direct and prosperous democracy. He was a great orator, and he was able to present his vision of the State before the Assembly. Under his leadership, the less economically privileged Athenian citizens could aspire to civil servant positions. He achieved the payment of a per diem for the civil servants who attended the Assembly and, in general, he reduced the difficulties that poor citizens had to participate in the government. Thucydides said in the discourse called the Funeral Oration of Pericles:

 "We enjoy a political regime that does not imitate the laws of our neighbors; rather than imitators of others, in fact, we ourselves serve as a model for some. As for the name, since the administration is exercised in favor of the majority, and not of a few, this regime has been called democracy; with respect to the laws, everyone enjoys equal rights in the defense of their particular interests; With regard to honours, anyone who distinguishes himself in any aspect can access public office, since he is chosen more for his merits than for his social category; and neither does his poverty prevent him from rendering his services to the country, if he has the possibility of doing so" (Funeral Speech of Pericles in Thucydides, Fifth Century B.C. /ff)

Work began on the Parthenon in 447 BC. In the beginning of the time of Pericles. This construction represented the visible flowering of Athenian imperial power after it had freed itself from the Persian invasion attempt two years earlier, which we will examine below. The temple was the symbol of Pericles' power and influence. These were the golden times of Athenian democracy.

The Persian Wars and the defense of democracy

Some wars divided the Greeks and others united them. We have referred to the Trojan War, which can basically be considered an attempt to create a single political entity under the command of Agamemnon. Centuries later in the Persian Wars (490 BC – 449 BC), Athens and Sparta fought together to defend their culture from external threats.  The king of Persia, Darius I, ruled over a large part of the Mediterranean in the sixth century, and the Persian empire had a clear vocation for universal dominion.

The Greek city of Miletus, located in Asia Minor, was a center of antiquity and prosperity; it had democratic aspirations and schools of philosophy that had produced figures of the importance of Thales, one of the fathers of Greek philosophy. It was a commercial hub of some importance, and one of the most culturally rich cities. For Darius it was an attractive military target, and a first step towards conquering Europe. Suddenly, Miletus – along with other Ionian cities in Asia Minor – rose up in defense of their newly emerged democracy inspired by the Athenian model. In 499 B.C. Darius I reacted and destroyed almost all the Ionian cities[21], without Athens being able to do anything about it.

This was the beginning of the Persian Wars, a series of conflicts between the Persian Empire and the states of ancient Greece. They were of great importance because Greek culture was in danger.  By the fifth century, democracy had taken hold in Athens and other cities of Greek origin, but it was an incipient and fragile endeavor, and in fact democratic leaders alternated with tyrants. The conflict with the Persians represents a crucial point in the destinies of Europe and Asia. We can speculate what would have happened if the Persians had won these wars. Persian culture was splendid but totalitarian, and after having entered Greece, Athenian democracy would probably have been a very vague memory, a footnote in some learned historical books.

In 493 B.C. Darius I initiated the first Persian War against the states of ancient Greece. The second war, in 480 B.C., was led by Xerxes I. Within these conflicts, the well-known battles such as the Battle of Marathon, the Battle of Salamis and the Battle of Thermopylae took place. In these wars the Persians invaded and subdued Macedonia and several Greek cities. The Athenians and the Spartans united to defeat Xerxes and with this victory, a barrier, at least temporarily, was put in front of the advance of the satraps from the east.

The fragile alliances

It is interesting at this point to reflect on the various alliances and pacts of collaboration between Greek cities. The collaboration between Sparta and Athens was purely military with no other signs of cooperation. In fact, the two cities kept their armies separate and intact: the generals commanded their own troops without mixing the Athenians with the Spartans. It was a discordant military alliance.

Although Sparta had a system that somewhat restricted the emergence of a single tyrant, its motive for confronting Persia was not the defense of democracy as it was for the Athenians. Rather, they defended their honor, their property, and their physical kingdom. For the Athenians, on the other hand, the defense of democracy was paramount. In 472 B.C. the poet Aeschylus[22]  wrote the play "The Persians" in which he ironizes the disappointment of Atossa, Xerxes' wife when she heard about her husband’s defeat at Salamis by the Greeks. She asks what these Greeks are like, and Aeschylus makes the messenger answer her in very Athenian terms: Atossa asks; “Which monarch reigns over them? Whose power commands them?” And the messenger bringing the news replies: “They are not the slaves of any lord, they do not submit to the power of a king" (Aeschylus, 472 B.C./2009).

Upon defeating Xerxes, direct collaboration between Sparta and Athens ceased. The Delian League had the ostensible purpose of guaranteeing the military protection of several Greek cities against any future Persian invasion, and each of the cities that made up that confederation contributed money, arms and soldiers. This league, in which Athens and Sparta originally participated, continued to exist after the termination of the Persian Wars, although finally Sparta left it.

Probably its real purpose after the end of the Greco-Persian Wars was the defense of Athenian imperialism. It remained in effect until Alexander the Great invaded the city-states of northern Greece in 338 BC. He then organized them to participate in his own invasion of Persia.

In a seesaw of military victories, the Greeks and Persians alternated their influence in Asia Minor until Philip and Alexander of Macedonia defeated the Persians, and in a campaign of revenge and conquest, they created a new empire, a brief monarchy where Easterners and Westerners enjoyed a certain equity in their influence and power. That arrangement lasted until the death of Alexander. But the democracy of Athens and the cities of the east no longer existed.

For our reflections it is interesting to ask why the Greek cities/states could not organize themselves to facilitate trade, agriculture, and culture? Instead of leagues for peace, the Athenians and Spartans organized themselves for military defense, to have allies for conquest, and to maintain their colonial acquisitions. Athens became an imperial power, and under the Delian League, it attacked the Persian territories in the Aegean and Ionia. They managed to eliminate the Medes from the Aegean and occupied their territories in Anatolia. The Delian League collected tribute from the conquered areas and with these resources the Athenians built a war fleet and public works.

Some efforts to collaborate for peace

An exception to the constant internecine wars of ancient Greece can be found in the sporting events in Olympia, and then the Panhellenic Games. There is information about them dating back to 776 B.C.; They were extremely popular and continued until the year 394 of the Christian era. It was a sanctuary of peace in honor of Zeus. Athletes took oaths of obedience to the rules, and throughout the whole territory of Greece, and the Greek cities in Ionia, a truce of concord was declared to allow the participants to arrive without danger to the competitions. For our account, the important thing about these games was the ability of the cities/states to proclaim peace in honor of the celebration of dignity, the education of the body and mind, beauty and, above all, the essential unity of the Greek world.

Similarly, the Oracle of Delphi was a temple dedicated to the god Apollo and was a center that was revered throughout the Greek world. It was the enclosure of the "Omphalos”[23] or center of the universe.  From the eighth century B.C., a pilgrimage network was established that linked all of Greece and Ionia with that place. Cities sent sacred delegations to ask the temple’ oracle questions about public and private affairs. Respect for Delphi was unwavering throughout the Hellenic world. There were kept, without danger of theft, the valuable offerings that came from Thebes, Athens, Corinth, Massalia and from the kings and regents of all Greece and Anatolia.

We may ask: if the Greeks could be unified in the battle of Troy, in the Persian Wars, in the establishment of the Olympic Games, and in their reverence for the temple at Delphi, why were they not able to establish a truce of lasting peace between the cities/states?

But it was too late. The year after Pericles' funeral oration, in 403 BC, Athens was struck by a plague that caused enormous mortality and in which Pericles also died. Then Greece faced a brief but fierce dictatorship and several destructive wars. In the end the Macedonians arrived.

The Peloponnesian War

The wars for the domination of Greece weakened Athen’s democracy. Between 431 BC and 404 BC. The cities that were part of the Delian League (headed by Athens) clashed with the Peloponnesian League (headed by Sparta). The initial reason for this conflict was Sparta's jealousy of Athens' apparent successes. This war, which was interrupted by a failed attempts at peace, sapped Athens' energies due to the loss of its colonies in Asia and the possibility of forming alliances. The Persians entered the conflict, first supporting Athens' allies, but then sheltering Sparta, which eventually increased in power and influence.

Having negotiated peace with the Persians on dishonorable terms, Sparta came under the influence of Persia's king, Artaxerxes, its former enemy. All of Greece was exhausted by destruction and poverty. The conflict between Athenian democracy and the Spartan oligarchy crumbled into a series of senseless local military campaigns motivated by the aspirations of particular warlords, including Abiselaos, the great king of Sparta (Plutarch, first century AD/1859). Sparta had invaded Lydia, but in the end, it ended up accepting Persian authority. Its glory days were also coming to an end.

As a whole, the fourth century was a period of crisis in the Greek world, mainly due to the development of wars. Two great historical processes characterized the Greek fourth century: the decline of the polis as a model of state, and the rise of Macedonian hegemony, under the command of King Philip II first, and then of Alexander the Great.

From 404 to 403 B.C., the "Regime of the Thirty" was established in Athens, temporarily eliminating Athenian democracy. The "Thirty Tyrants" lasted less than a year in power, but in this time there was a widespread slaughter of the population, especially the non-citizen artisans, or metecos, and the confiscation of their property. Athens was divided between those who still supported a return to democracy, and others who wanted to eliminate it. In 403 B.C. There was an uprising - in which the hoplites participated - that overthrew the dictatorship and re-established democracy. However, the Athenian Empire declined, and piracy in the Aegean Sea was revived. Then Athens, although it was able to partially rebuild its empire ("Second Maritime Confederation"), faced the growing threat of Macedonia, as a military power.

Sparta was weakened for other reasons: because of the wars themselves and the discontent of its subject populations in Messenia and Laconia. These semi-slaves required vigilance. Agisilaus, the king of Sparta, had to return from his wars in Persia to tend to problems at home. (Plutarch, First Century A.D. /1859). The centuries in which the helots were dominated and excluded from full citizenship left the city vulnerable.

Alexander the Great

In 335 BC Alexander invaded Thebes, and then Athens surrendered without a battle, thus ending for forever the remnants of self-government in Athens. Democracy in less complete forms continued in other parts of the Greek world until it was completely ended under the domination of Rome. The glory days when Athens defended itself against the enemies of self-determination, such as the Persians, was a distant memory.

There is no doubt that Alexander the Great, born in 356 BC. was an excellent military strategist. But at the same time he was petulant, presumptuous, conceited and proud, and he did not see the merits of constitutional governments, and even less those that decided their public affairs in the public square. He destroyed all the local Greek governments and those of the Persian world.

Some Athenians such as the philosopher Diogenes despised him. Plutarch's description of the celebrated meeting between Alexander and this philosopher reflected something of this discontent and the resentment that the Athenian democrats felt at the loss of their sovereignty (in "Alexander". Plutarch, 1st century A.D. C./1970):

"The Greeks having gathered on the Isthmus, decreed to march with Alexander to war against Persia, appointing him general; and as there were many statesmen and philosophers who visited him and gave him the blessing, he hoped that of Diogenes of Sinope, who resided in Corinth would come also. But he made no account of Alexander, but spent his life quietly in the Skull; and so Alexander had to come to see him. He happened to be lying in the sun, and having risen a little at the arrival of so many personages, he fixed his gaze on Alexander. The latter greeted him, and asked him at once if he would like anything offered to him: "Very little," he answered, "that you get out of the sun." It is said that Alexander, with this kind of contempt, was so astonished at such an elevation of spirits, that when they were withdrawn from there those who accompanied him began to laugh and mock, he said to them: "Well, if I were not Alexander, I would gladly by Diogenes."  (p. 40)

This meeting took place after Alexander had ended the democracy of Athens.  It can be seen that the entourage of the new king had been filled with obsequious "subjects" who did not regret having lost their identity as free citizens.

SOME FINAL SPECULATIONS ABOUT MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY

The Greeks can help us understand ourselves. Their civilizing feats, some of which we will see in the next chapter, were always threatened by their wars and the libertarian concerns of those they had conquered or enslaved. This is not the fault of the Greeks alone: Herodotus tells in great detail how the same thing happened with the Cappadocians, the Lydians, the Ionians, the Persians, the Hittite Empire, Arzawa, Ephesus, Phrygia, and others. It is the eagerness of empire.

The desire for empire never died: the Romans later followed the same path. Later, Justinian in Byzantine times wanted to rebuild the Roman Empire. Charlemagne started the Holy Roman Empire in central Europe, which grew to include France and then dwindled in size, but continued under different names such as the Habsburg Empire until its final dissolution after World War I in the 20th century. The French accompanied Napoleon in his conquests of Europe until his defeat in Moscow. The National Socialists in Germany attempted to create the Third Reich in the 20th century. European colonialism ended up occupying all of the Americas and a large part of the African continent until the various wars of liberation put limits on this practice in a process that began in 1776[24] and lasted until the twentieth century.

The desire for conquest has tragically accompanied developments in law, art, philosophy and coexistence in general. The conflict between militarism and democracy remains one of the most painful problems of our time. As in ancient times, military spending is related to the economic capacity of the city, kingdom or state. It is a phenomenon that is still in force, as Eloranta says (16/9/2005, p. 14-15):

"[...] Economic development is often more significant in explaining military spending than the other way around. As some of the hegemonic theorists suggest, economic prosperity could be a necessary prerequisite for war and expansion. Thus, [...] economic growth would induce an increase in public spending, which in turn would allow for greater military spending; therefore, military expenditures would be "caused" by economic growth over a certain period of time. For military spending to hinder economic performance, it would have to outperform all other areas of an economy, as is often the case during war" (p.14-15).

Military expenditures are related to the defense of the group that produces them. Individually, each one is inserted among many other groups, some of which may have hegemonic motives for expansion. But states can also benefit from confiscating the property of adjacent groups. We in modern times have not escaped this dilemma. Colonialism, slavery, discrimination and territorial occupations are still with us, even though we have managed to reconsider and diminish them.

Reflecting on Athens and Sparta has given us some clues to speculate about ourselves. Sometimes Athens and Sparta fought for similar ideals, or at least coinciding values, as when they defended themselves from the attempted Persian invasion in the Persian Wars. For Athens it was about the defense of democracy by means of arms. In modern times something similar happened when "the Allies" confronted German expansion in World War II. In the same sense, when Athens established city-states in Anatolia, such as Miletus, it left in them the ideal of democracy and at the same time defended them militarily.

Normally, the reasons for the war had two appreciations in the Greek world. To the conquering king or city, the opponent's losses were seen as gains, because the leader of the troops took for himself the territories and wealth of the conquered, and enslaved their inhabitants. For the loser, the consequences meant regrets and often dreams of revenge. Successful occupations – or, on the other hand, misfortunes – were always attributed to the designs of the gods, and very rarely to human blunders.

We can give the example of the king of Lydia, Croesus. He was not Greek, but his life could represent the way of proceeding throughout the region. According to Herodotus (second or third century BC / 1981) Croesus was immensely wealthy, perhaps due to the conquests he managed to make in the early part of his life, and the pillage that always resulted from these military incursions. Like almost all other paladins of his time, he saw these raids as glorious indications of his bravery and the greatness of his people. He had his eye on the kingdom of Persia, and to see whether an offensive against Cyrus the Great, its king, was propitious, he sent a question to the oracle at Delphi, and received in answer an ambiguous prediction that if he crossed the river Halis in the direction of Cappadocia, this action would be the cause of the ruin of a great empire. The oracle did not specify which power would fall. Thus, believing that the ruined empire would be that of Cyrus, at the end of his life he attacked Persian territory.

Croesus ended up losing both the battle, his capital Sardis, his army and his own kingdom. According to Herodotus, after the defeat Cyrus asked Croesus, "Who induced you to undertake an expedition against my land, and to show yourself an enemy instead of my friend?" Croesus replied, "King, I blame the god of the Greeks who prompted me to attack you. For no one is so foolish as to prefer war to peace: in the latter the children bury their parents, and in the former the parents bury their children. But perhaps the gods wanted it to happen that way" (p. 142). Croesus, with his enormous fortune, could have stayed at home. This dual way of looking at government and military conquest permeated all the kingdoms and cities of those times. First, they felt that war and conquest were sources of prestige, honor, and wealth. Second, when they lost, they mourned the dead and the destruction and blamed the gods.

In a contrasting example, although Homer was Greek, he lamented the loss of Troy, (Homer, 8th century BC/1989):

"Without the gods, for so short a time can the monument made by the proudest human hands stand! [....] when they exterminated their sons, their city was burned, and those who survived from the Greeks returned to Greece; then Neptune and Apollo shook the coast, [....] And no fragment endorses where that wonder was" (p. 356).

In Athens, wars influenced the development of democracy. By contrasting Athens with Sparta, we remember that in both cities almost all free men were hoplites and had the obligation to defend their city militarily in the event of a provocation. But in Athens, since the time of Cleisthenes, they could vote on political issues and in relation to social justice; as part of the voting population they even had the right to decide whether to go to war or not. They were active participants in civilian life. Spartan citizens did not have this right. The Spartan subject’s only role was to obey his leaders and perform with honor on the battlefield, that is, to return home at last. either carrying his shield, or placed on it as a dead hero.  

It was customary to reward military men such as hoplites with political privileges. In Athens this points to a certain relationship between the conduct of war and constitutional development. As the polis grew and the hoplites grew stronger, the base of the population that was incorporated as citizens widened. This had two consequences: first, hoplites were free men who valued democracy. But, in addition, they constituted a strong influence on policies related to the development of the empire and the codes of military honor.

The treatment of the lower classes in Athens and Sparta

Sparta was forced to defend itself against those excluded from citizenship. By creating the class of helots, according to Aristotle (Fourth century B.C. /31-10-2017, p 55), the Spartans created an internal enemy that required constant vigilance: "[The Spartan helots] are eternal enemies, who ceaselessly spy on the opportunity to profit from any calamity." That is, the helots had no reason to defend the city and its interests, and frequently tried to revolt.

We can reflect on the protests and uprisings of the dispossessed classes in the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century of our times. There have been two reactions from the powers-that-be: a) a false inclusion and b) police/military repression. In the first situation, National Socialism in Germany gained massive support in the 1930s, motivated by the discontent of the impoverished population after World War I. In this case there was a deception that offered a false participation – in reality Hitler only offered the possibility of dying unhappily as an imperial soldier; Fascism ended with even more destruction, and even one of the worst cases of genocide in the history of the world. There have been other populist offers that have also ended up mocking the expectations of the followers of chimerical leaders. On the other hand, in relation to the repressive responses, in the 21st century, from the "Arab Spring", whose repression began the current and brutal war in Syria, to the marches of the excluded sectors in Venezuela, Colombia and Chile, we are repeating the same repressive and militaristic responses of the Spartans against the Spartan helots, and forgetting the lessons in inclusion left by the Athenians.

In the same sense, in Sparta the honor of the warrior was above all other values. In this regard, Aristotle said that one can reflect on systems of government as Plato did in his Laws, and that it is not healthy to emphasize only the virtue of the warrior, as Sparta did. He said (Fourth century B.C. /31-10-2017, p. 60):

"I do not deny the usefulness of courage in attaining domination, but Lacedaemon, which has sustained itself while it has waged war, has lost power because it does not know how to enjoy peace and because it has not devoted itself to exercises higher than those of combat. A no less serious fault is that, recognizing that conquests must be the reward of virtue and not of cowardice, [...] the Spartans have come to consider them as something superior to virtue itself, which is much less laudable."

Ethos, pathos,  and logos are words used by Aristotle in the "Rhetoric" (fourth century B.C.) to indicate three different declamatory styles used by an orator to convince his listeners. Ethos refers to the character, or the ethics of the speaker and what he says, Pathos is the appeal to the emotions, and logos refers to the evocation of the logic of the speech. Ethos  can also be understood as a way of being, both personal and social. It implies the creation of personal ethics and aesthetics and also the foundation of rules and laws that order the conduct of citizens and establish what the possible relationships between them will be.   What strengthened the city-states in the sense of their cultural heritage was their ability to generate varied cultural solutions that created for each the idea of an ethos as a theory of life.

City-states can be described according to the latter meaning of ethos, each one created a way of being for people within society. This was the main feat of the Greeks, but it also led to their eventual destruction, because the ethos of each geographical and political entity was incompatible with that of the others. Perhaps the main axis that divided them culturally was the relationship between militarism and democracy.

CHAPTER III

THE BIRTH OF REASON

MODELS OF REASONING AND THEIR ORIGENS

There are several models of reasoning. Classically we always refer to induction and deduction, we can also talk about inferences (using words like "plausible"), or the middle term of the syllogism.

We can also speak of the instrumental reason that guided the nomad in the manufacture of his arrows and in the construction of his huts. It is impossible to erect a temple only by praying to the gods, and for this reason it is necessary to make and manipulate instruments, and know how to balance stones or make structures using varied materials. This capacity had to be present in the first groups of people, and in the first cities, at least among those who built the temples, and among the sailors who determined their routes at sea by observing the stars; Survival has always required some minimal understanding of the physical world.

Instrumental reasoning may even be much older. On the island of Crete, a Palaeolithic site has been discovered with a large number of quartz tools such as axes, manufactured at least 130,000 years ago. What's more, it's not even clear that they were made by homo sapiens. Since Crete is an island, this means that those who made them arrived by sea, that is, they had boats and could sail (John Black, 25/10/2019).

In the previous chapter we mentioned the recently found ruins of the temple of Göbekli Tepe in Anatolia (today Turkey) that are probably more than 10,000 years old. They were built by nomads before the beginning of agriculture, and yet they offer evidence of a complex culture that had enough knowledge to create structures in an area measuring a thousand meters wide and 50 meters high in successive layers of sand. The stone circles are beautifully decorated (BBC News Mundo, 18-5-2020).  To be able to do this, knowledge with a certain degree of technological objectivity is needed. This is a special case because of its antiquity, but then the Egyptians, the summaries, and others showed themselves to possess from very early on the capacity for this kind of rationality. The summaries, for example, invented the system for measuring time that we still use: 60-minute hours and 24-hour days, using a sexagesimal basis for counting – instead of a decimal base as we do. And they did so in the third millennium B.C. (Sullivan, 1/10/2017).

In a more formal sense, the word "reason" has several meanings. According to the Royal Spanish Academy, among them is the faculty to think, reflect, infer, and argue in defense of a point of view, motive, or opinion. It is a process of reaching an accurate conclusion, or forming judgments about a certain situation. (Definition, n.d.). To this can be added the elaboration of methods or models of reasoning as Euclid, Archimedes and Aristotle did[26]. From the perspective of philosophy, it is the ability to recognize and question concepts. The objective is to establish the coherence or contradiction between the arguments. There are multiple logical resources to reach "reasonable" conclusions, such as the principles of identity, non-contradiction and the excluded third (between the being or not being of a concept, there is no possibility of an intermediate situation). On the other hand, skeptical reason would be the ability of human beings to doubt, think, reflect and question old beliefs, or anachronistically, we can mention, as Descartes in the seventeenth century AD. When he established, a significant relationship between the "subject – cogito" – who thinks, and the external world. Doubt is always the first step.

How do you distinguish between mythical or traditionalist thinking and the ability to reason? It is a problem that we have not yet been able to overcome. We can identify the sources of reason, but many people do not internalize them: today there are those who believe they have "reasons" to think that the world is flat, that visitors from other planets built the pyramids of Egypt or that vaccines are tricks of governments to control our thoughts. These are picturesque cases, but they illustrate the most common ones that result from extreme identification with religious, political, or ethnic dogmas. They emphatically reject any other way of thinking, and refuse to look for more criteria. In this respect we are very much like the pre-Homeric Greeks.

Historically in Greece, reason, in the formal sense of the word, was born with Athena, curiously from the pantheon of the gods. When the mythological King Cecrops named her as the patron saint of Athens, he did something prophetic: he dedicated the city to justice and reason. It probably responded to a prevailing mood among its inhabitants; this act pointed to a certain system of values already in existence, and the king fixed it culturally in place for his descendants.

Justice, paideia and arete

The background that we have just pointed out is by no means exhaustive; it only indicates that rational thought arose very early in human times. What the Athenians did, the novelty, was to apply rationality to their own society and to public administration, and to realize that self-government was not only possible, but also that it had the capacity to increase the well-being of its citizens. Aristotle said in the Politics:

"Nature, therefore, instinctively draws all men into political association. He who first instituted it did an immense service, because man, who when he has attained all possible perfection is the first of the animals. He is the last when he lives without laws and without justice. In fact, there is nothing more monstrous than armed injustice. [….] Justice is a social necessity, because law is the rule of life for political association, and the decision of what is just is what constitutes law" (Aristotle, p. 7).

In Athens, the "just" decision was the result of debates in the public forum.[27] As we can see below, the Athenians invented doubt and fixed it in their speeches and writings, that is, although the citizens did not stop believing in oracles and legends, some of their philosophers distanced themselves from these traditions and trusted in the product of their own thoughts and decisions. The thinker’s personal speculations led to group speeches, in the streets and in the public forum. Those who governed had to listen to the debates and obey the decisions of the Assembly.

We have spoken of Greek law in the second chapter. In the Athenian legal system after Pericles, courts resolved disputes by argument rather than by resorting to a prescribed system of explicit rules for each case[28]. The Assembly conducted trials and decided both in political cases and individual trials, as well as in the decision to declare war. They were subjects of passionate debate.

They did not always achieve accurate decisions. For example, in 399 B.C. They condemned Socrates, and later in the fourth century they did not listen to the warnings of Demosthenes about the dangers represented by the Macedonians; in the first of his speeches called "the Philippics" he said:

"Could there be stranger news that a man from Macedonia is gaining over the Athenians at war, and ordering in the affairs of the Hellenes? [....] Is Philip dead? [....] if anything should happen to him, a second Philip would soon appear, [....]" (Demosthenes, (349 or 351 B.C. /10, 2005, paragraphs 11-12).

The second Philip ended up being Alexander the Great. Unfortunately, Demosthenes’ compatriots did not listen to him in time. This story of Demosthenes reveals to us the complex process of making decisions in the Assembly. Not all of them were correct, but they responded to the will of the citizens.

There were many theories about the state and constitutions in Athens, and evidently the idea of basic laws and prototypes of different models of democracy were subjects of speculation: in this regard Aristotle mentions and criticizes the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Phaleas of Chalcedon, Hippodamus of Miletus and those that ruled in Lacedaemon, Crete and other places. We can conclude that the work of elaborating democracy in Greece was an unfinished task, and there was an eagerness to continue it even after Solon, Cleisthenes, and Pericles. Perhaps if the city had survived Alexander and the Romans, its citizens would have had new and more complete versions of self-government and justice.

Formal education for citizens was of paramount importance in Greece. There are two important concepts to understand its educational system, especially in Athens: "paideia" and "arete". The first refers to education, in the sense of a rigorous intellectual, spiritual and athletic formation, and points to the creation of an essentially human, ennobled and full human character. Arete is a concept related  to paideia, and refers to excellence, which includes honor, courage, eloquence, and in general an aggregate of civic, moral, and intellectual qualities.  It also includes training in how to think.

From the archaic time of Homer the arete was mostly associated with bravery, honor, and combat prowess. The educational system was enriched from the Homeric model to a more democratized version by the fifth century B.C. López Noriega (n.d.) says that the arete  began to extend the benefits of education to citizens, eliminating exclusion as much as possible.[29] Homer's heroic perception was not ruled out, but: "Hesiod sings and praises the silent and arduous work, as well as the wisdom of the Greek craftsman and worker" (paragraph 45). In other words, the relation of arete to manual labor that was traditionally considered by aristocrats as dishonorable.

Excellence in a citizen in the democratic era consisted in the cultivation of courage and moderation. Plato and Aristotle also considered prudence and justice important. In short, the arete among the Greeks of the times of Solon, Cleisthenes and Pericles (excellence in reasoning and oratorical ability, for example) can be contrasted with the same concept of Homeric times (the courage and audacity of the warrior and the skills of a soldier like Achilles). Over time, martial values were not eliminated, but ideas such as justice, equality and peace were added to them.

Their philosophy

Three millennia before the Greeks there was an incipient attempt to reflect on philosophical themes in Babylon, such as the origin and nature of language, the art of communication between gods and humans, and the idea of the immutable veracity of monarchical justice (Van De Mieroop, 2016). But philosophy based on doubt and reflection had to wait for the first millennium BC. in Greece.

After the fifth century of that millennium, Greek philosophers were cosmopolitan: they came from settlements throughout the Hellenic world, from the south of what is now Italy, to the colonies in Anatolia in the east, to all of Greece. This is important in itself, because it indicates that suddenly there was a great flowering in the whole culture, except perhaps in Sparta.[30] It was a spontaneous and generalized explosion, but it is difficult to identify a causative and original spark; the pyrophoric materials of this combustion can, perhaps, be found in Solon, Peisistratus, Cleisthenes, and Pericles, a succession of leaders who spoke of social justice and successive forms of self-government.

Many Hellenic philosophers lived for a time in Athens, or were influenced by it. By examining some of them we can see how their thought began to go beyond the traditional mythical morality. Without the resources of modern philosophy and science, they began to question the existence of matter, truth, justice, and honor. Although some of their conclusions seemed picturesque to us in the 21st century, it was a totally new way of looking at the world. Instead of accepting the explanations of fable, they inquired into nature itself to find its answers.

Pre-Socratic philosophers in Greece were mainly interested in issues related to the origin or substance of the universe. They found it in earth, water, air and fire (Empedocles of Acragas), or in numbers (Pythagoras). Pythagoras became aware of the isomorphism between certain physical phenomena such as music and mathematics, and developed the first reflections on geometry. For his part, Parmenides questioned the possibility of change, which led Democritus to refute his ideas with his physical doctrines that were based on a surprisingly modern idea of matter: he considered matter to be essentially empty, or an infinite space in which a vast number of atoms that produced the physical world moved. He considered these atoms to be eternal, indivisible, and infinitesimal.

It is interesting to compare this with modern physics according to Heisenberg, the German theoretical physicist of the twentieth century AD.  The inheritance is evident:

"The thesis of the existence of atoms was the natural consequence of the development of the concept of substance (arche), which is the concept with which ancient natural philosophy first wrestled. The idea was that in the constant movement of phenomena there must be something fixed [..... The idea of the smallest indivisible units of matter arose, [....] In the opinion of the atomists, atoms are the true reality; between them there is only nothingness. [….] Modern atomic theory also admits the existence of indivisible elementary components of matter. [….]  The experience of current physics teaches that there are no atoms as simple corporeal objects, but that only by introducing the concept of atom is it possible to formulate with simplicity the relations that determine all physical and chemical processes" (Poe, n.d., quoting W. Heisenberg).

Critical thinking

We are particularly interested in this chapter in examining the development of critical thinking that perhaps was born with the Sophists. They were masters of rhetoric, a tool of orators that was of paramount importance in a system governed by an Assembly with political decision-making power. Rhetoric is about a series of instructions for speakers, in order to convince others, without reference to the quality of the topic under discussion. The Sophists extended these rules and interpreted the world at large in a radically relativistic sense. "The art of persuasion is not at the service of the truth but of the interests of the speaker. They called this art 'soul driving'. Plato would later say that it was the 'capture of souls'" (Semos, n.d.).

The passage from thematic relativism of the rhetorical uses of orators to skepticism with respect to matter is small. A speaker says what is necessary to convince his audience. If the conclusions of the arguments are relative, then the Sophists went so far as to deny the entire existence of a single truth, not even in relation to what can be said about the physical world. We can say that it was a kind of "adolescence" for reason, with rebellious, crazy and provocative philosophies. 

The position of the Sophists, although radical, opened a space for doubt. The comfortable certainty offered by the world of legends and the belief in a pantheon of gods, or in the lawfulness of the right of kings to rule, inhibits the construction of new ways of thinking and living.  They opened a necessary breach for the birth of reason and democracy.

On the other hand, Socrates did believe in the possibility of seeking the truth; He considered that men knew it at birth, but that they had forgotten it. According to him, teaching and reasoning led to the "recall" of knowledge. This philosopher, who left us nothing written,[31] walked through the streets of Athens assuming a posture of ignorance and questioning the people he met there, asking them successive questions, aimed at discovering the reality underlying their beliefs. It was a process we call "maieutics".

Socrates' Logos was far more developed and fruitful as a method of reflection than the relativism of the Sophists, or Heraclitus' reality of contrasts; it was a meticulous and dialectical search, a verbal interrogation of a particular problem in order to find an answer. And this final response was a sense of recognition, like one gets when one distinguishes a friend in a crowd. Socrates arrived at this sensation through successive and methodical questioning, such as passing through orderly and systematic doors until he reached verisimilitude. The amazement of the Greeks of the fifth century B.C. In discovering the power of "reason" in its different meanings, in contrast to the iterations and reiterations of mythical thought, must have been exalting and jubilant. Back then, for his disciples, conversing with Socrates must have been a feast of liberation.

In the end, he was prosecuted for "corruption of youth" because he doubted traditions. In the speech that Socrates gave in his own defense ("The Apology", Plato, 1997), he used the same oratorical method that he had always used in his dialogues with his disciples, but this time against Miletus, one of his accusers. In this process Socrates gradually guided his accuser and slanderer to answer his questions, demonstrating the illogic of his accusations.

However, in spite of this oratory, Socrates was sentenced to death. The death of Socrates is, perhaps, the main tragedy of the whole Athenian attempt to achieve democracy and reason. As Plato lamented in Phaedo: "Such was the end . . . of our friend of whom I must say, of all the men of his time that I have known, he was the wisest, the most just, and the best" (Plato, between 389 and 399 B.C./2008, p. 71.)

The condemnation of Socrates has been repeated again and again in the intransigence of the traditionalists of all times who do not tolerate doubt. The ancient vision of the world only admitted obedience to the gods and the governor or king.  Although the gods did not really offer coherent explanations, neither about the origin of things, nor about the relationships between humans, nor about the duties of honor and the meaning of life, the legends and dictates of the oracles provided the security and identity of a whole people, embodied in ancestral rites and knowledge. Many people in those times were not only afraid to question their beliefs, but were also willing to use violence in their attempts to protect their values.

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the others were not afraid to imagine new social and political worlds. Already in Sparta and Athens there were constitutions that limited and specified the powers of the leaders. The Athenians were proud of theirs, but they could imagine the possibility of changes in it:

"Since our purpose is to inquire which of all political associations should be preferred by men who are the owners of choosing one to their liking, we shall have to study, at the same time, the organization of the states which pass the best laws, and the constitutions imagined by philosophers, limiting ourselves to the most remarkable. By this means we shall discover what each of them may contain in that is good and applicable, and at the same time we shall show that if we attempt to form a political combination different from all of them, we have been moved to do so, not by a vain desire to show off our ingenuity, but by the necessity of making clear the very defects of all existing constitutions" (Aristotle,  taken from the Politics, p. 31).

Plato, who was a student of Socrates, applied similar methods to reflections on the social and political world. Among the diversity of constitutional proposals were those of Socrates (and Plato) who proposed a system of communal property (including women and children), but Aristotle refuted these ideas with a long reflection in the Politics.  At one point he said:

"For the rest, little is said about how pleasant the idea and feeling of property is. Self-love, which we all possess, is not a reprehensible feeling; it is a completely natural feeling, which does not prevent selfishness from being rightly combated. [….] It is a real charm to favor and help friends, guests, companions, and this satisfaction can only be provided by individual property" (Aristotle, p. 38).

POETRY AND THEATRE

Evidently poetry did not begin in Greece, not even with Homer. Poetry probably began as an integral part of human language, in the rhymes of children learning to speak. In Greece, as elsewhere, lullabies, mime, dancing, imitations and collective songs were always present. However, there are Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions, and works such as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh to attest to the old epic songs and poems.

Since time immemorial the aedos and rhapsodes, the professional singers, sang their poems in front of diverse audiences, but the presentation of a theatrical show, with author, script and actors is something that is attributed to a young man named Thespis.

Paul Gerard describes Thespis, an almost unknown boy from Ikaria, as the first author and actor of Greek tragedy; the young man is also recognized by Aristotle and others for the same reason. After some success in his own village, he was taken to Athens. Gerard says:

"However obscure the facts [of the] tragedy in Attica, it was Thespis who made the first attempt among the Athenians to [develop it....] One tradition attributes to him the invention of the prologue and that of long iambic diatribes. [….] Be that as it may, it was probably Thespis who was the first to compose tragedies to some extent. His dramas, [...] were not without literary value; from Ikaria, we see it transported to Athens, where its novelty attracted a large audience. Solon himself went to them represented [....] (Girard, 1891, p. 3).

Poetry, and later plays, were reflections and criticisms on the events of time and on the past. I have considered in the first chapter how Homer praises the heroes, both Greek and Trojan in the Iliad. I have reflected on how the work constitutes a lamentation for the losses of the war, and for the destruction of the city of Troy itself, even though Homer was Greek. It is not a simple celebration of an ancient victory by a patriot: it is, above all, a longing for peace. In the same vein, "The Trojan Women" by Euripides (V century B.C./ 2015) laments the loss of Troy and the sad fate of its women who become the slaves of the conquering Greeks. The author does so only by arousing the empathy of the audience when he hears their laments.

Poets and playwrights were people of very high cultural level. As the editor of the Museo del Juglar says:

"In Hellenic society, the poet [...] was more than a mere professional of entertainment, he was above all an enlightened person, expert and jurist; his histrionic condition was in the background. He was the depository of tradition and myths, bearer of the collective memory that gave identity to the Hellenic order" (2015. Paragraph (4).

Greek theatre was not simple entertainment either, not even in its comedies. Its most prominent playwrights, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus and others developed dramas in which the great problems of society were captured, although usually buried within legends.

Aristotle said in the Politics that:

"It is true that the voice can really express joy and pain, both in humans and in other animals, because its organization allows them to feel these two affections and communicate them with each other; but the word has been granted to express good and evil, and consequently the just and the unjust, and man has this special among all animals: that he alone perceives good and evil, the just and the unjust, and all the sentiments of the same order whose association constitutes precisely the family and the State" (p. 7).

Greek theatre appeared in Athens at the end of the sixth century BC. C. ; the plays that have survived to the present day were written and performed in the period between 472 B.C. and 401 B.C., that is, they represent only 71 years of the entire Hellenic tradition, and only 33 plays have survived (Historiae, n.d.). Among them are works by Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. Many works perished in terrible tragedies, such as the burning of the Library of Alexandria and other historical misfortunes. Of those that have come down to us, some were saved by Arab chroniclers, such as the Moors of Granada and Cordoba in the Middle Ages of the Christian era.

As an example of Greek tragedy in the times of democracy we can examine the play Antigone by Sophocles. It is a long reflection on the value of traditions and the temerity of kings who try to challenge them. It also has to do with the courage and virtue of defying the edicts of a despotic king. We can see it as a reflection on the merit of tradition in contrast to the Sophist and pre-Socratic questioning. Among the Sophist questions were these problems: do the rules occur naturally, or are they given by the gods? Are they established by men? In this sense, Sophocles also examines the ethics of challenging the power of an unjust and intransigent king.

We can make a brief summary of Antigone (Sophocles, 442 BC): Antigone's two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, vie for the throne of Thebes, and in this struggle they kill each other. Creon, Antigone's uncle, becomes king of Thebes and rules that, for having betrayed his country, Polynices will not be buried with dignity, and will be left on the outskirts of the city exposed to the stalking of predatory animals. Antigone is tormented by the decision, since tradition obliges the performance of funeral rites.   Antigone decides to bury him herself. When Creon discovers her "crime," she explains that she has disobeyed him because human laws cannot prevail over divine ones. Creon condemns her to be locked alive in a tomb. Later, he is warned by a fortune teller about the consequences of his abuse, and decides to release her, but she has already taken her own life by hanging herself. At her side is Hemon, her fiancé, and son of Creon, who has also committed suicide. Returning to the palace with his dead son, Creon is informed that his wife Eurydice has also committed suicide upon hearing the news. The chorus ends with a reflection on the need to respect divine laws.

Among the elements of Greek tragedy is the tension between human actions, the conditions that determine them and the excesses of humans, seen as the will of the gods or the arrogance of the powerful. It has its background in the very ancient "explanation" given by the gods for the successes and failures of individuals. In another example, Oedipus, in the play of Sophocles, was condemned by the gods at birth, and from then on all his actions were simple confirmations of fate.

But it also occurs in tragedies after the fifth century B.C. that transgressors like Creon in the work of Antigone cited above were victims of their own arrogance and lack of human decency. Similarly, in Aeschylus' Agamemnon, upon returning (triumphant) from the war in Troy to his kingdom in Mycenae, his wife Clytemnestra murders him in revenge for having sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia before leaving for Troy.  In another work by the same author, their son, Orestes, avenges his father's death by murdering his mother Clytemnestra, and in a divine punishment is pursued by the furies.[32] In other words, he becomes mentally ill. The tragedy in this case is not the work of the gods; it is the product of human pride and ambition, in this case, it is Agamemnon's failings that pass on to the second generation as personal catastrophe.

The final point regarding Greek tragedy is that it captures the feeling of the times. The works are not simply a means to entertain the population; they were rather elaborate reflections on the same topics on which politicians and philosophers were speculating. Perhaps the underlying theme was the possibility of human agency. If the Athenian citizens were trying to govern themselves, and had come to believe that they could reason and then create the society in which they wanted to live, the theatre was a reflection of the great thinkers of their time.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT REASON

From the mythical times of King Cecrops, the ethos of Athens, in the sense of the predominant character of the city, was its dedication to justice, paideia and the arete.  These concepts are nested in reason, a human capacity that no culture had previously applied to its own civilization and government. Reasoning involves the ability to doubt one's beliefs and judgments that one has previously had.

The willingness to doubt and seek better solutions requires an educational system to create this potential among citizens.  The boys of Athens received an education in which physical exercises, the recitation of poets, reasoning exercises, reading and writing and some mathematics were mixed. After their time of military service, young men with sufficient financial resources could attend some school of philosophy.

Most of these schools were private, but Plato considered that education was fundamental to democracy and that it should be accessible to the children of all citizens. There was obvious discrimination in favor of wealthy families in pedagogical terms. This was perhaps a major mistake in Athenian culture, because all citizens could vote in the Assembly, but not all had an educational background to be able to make sound decisions. For this reason, perhaps, in the Assembly they condemned Socrates and did not listen in time to Demosthenes' warnings against the dangers posed by the power of Macedonia and the hegemonic ambitions of its kings. Ignoring the importance of universal education in a democracy is a fundamental mistake that we continue to make today.

The values embodied in reason, so dear to Athens since the sixth century BC, confronted millennia of tradition that did not easily yield to the ethos of doubt. Mythical thinking is strong, and can resist the challenges imposed by a nascent rational thought. Myths embody the intrinsic values of a people's history and their very sense of identity.

 "Mythical thought [....] dramatically expresses the ideology by which society lives,  [It maintains] its qwareness not only the values it recognizes and the ideals it pursues from generation to generation, but above all its very being and structure, the elements, the bonds, the balances, the tensions that constitute it [...]" (p. 28 Georges Dumézil in Prat,  n.d., p. 28).

However, rational thinking was liberating and protective for many people, in the sense of opening up for citizens the opportunity for true agency in the most important decisions in their lives.

The tension between, on the one hand, the consolation of being able to identify with the myth, and on the other, embracing the uncertain autonomy of reason, still exists. Prat holds up a mirror where we can see the manifestations of our own collective imagination that comes from the media, where UFOs, comic book characters, science fiction productions and the creation of archetypes from celebrities are some of our expressions of mythical thinking. He says that: "Characters such as Marilyn Monroe, Simón Bolívar, Elvis Presley, Teresa of Calcutta, Lady Diana or Che Guevara are much more than real historical characters" (Prat, n.d.).

The contests between these two imaginaries, myth and reason, are sometimes accompanied by the simple desire for power. Individuals rise up against democratic control, appealing to some savior hero. We have seen them in Chapter II, for example, in characters such as Peisistratus (and his two sons Hipparchus and Hippias); they appear in times of crisis as champions of the "people", and they wrap themselves in mythical traditions such as the hoplite hero  (the citizen warrior); they present themselves as the only ones who can rescue traditions, or they are members of a group that may feel threatened in their ethnic or social class loyalties. Peisistratus was Solon's cousin; he took advantage of his military fame and histrionic abilities to capture the approval of the citizens of Athens and seize power. He maintained Solon's constitutional achievements, but without real effect, assuming all power for himself. He was popular with much of the population, and strengthened the economy and the religious and patriotic identity of the city. After his death the domain passed to his sons, who turned out to be nefarious tyrants, especially Hippias. In the end they defeated Hippias – with the help of the hoplites – and then Cleisthenes, a democratic governor, was appointed archon of the city, thus returning it to self-government.

What interests me now, at the end of a chapter on reason in Athens, is to ask how the citizens of an incipient democracy have allowed themselves to be cajoled by an apparently heroic and supposedly saving figure.  It is the disguise that has been used by many fraudulent liberators throughout all of human history.

This question brings us back to the problem of the need for quality paideia, a massive system of free education for all citizens. Ethos can assume many forms; in a democracy one wants to retain the ideal of reason, both in political activity and in relation to an arete that is conscious of its excellence.

                   

CHAPTER IV
FINAL THOUGHTS

 I have traveled a millennium, from the Trojan War to the conquest of Athens by Alexander the Great. What, in the end, have we seen? We have seen an incredible development. Primitive settlements at the end of the Bronze Age became astonishing city-states, with constitutions and developments in political, legal, philosophical, and artistic thought. The first democracies appeared there. In that region, especially in Athens, they dared to look their myths in the face and question both man's place in the world and the possibility of true human agency.

In the beginning there were only a few scattered and primitive settlements whose kings harbored a rudimentary notion of shared culture, and vague hegemonic aspirations. Before the beginning of the first millennium B.C. and under the command of Agamemnon, they crossed the Aegean Sea and attacked Troy, a prosperous city that controlled the entrance to what are now the Dardanelles. This city had an advantageous geographical location that allowed it to collect taxes from ships passing through the Strait. Surely the prosperity of Troy attracted the avarice of the Greeks, a motive that accompanied, or even surpassed, the legend of Helen and Paris. However, after destroying and plundering Troy, the Greeks did not stay to colonize the area. They returned exhausted, each Achaean king to his own kingdom.

What is fundamental, what makes the Iliad the primordial poem of Greek history? This poem occupied the same place in which the Bible stands today for many Jews and Christians, namely, as the irrevocable and unquestionable source on the times in which it was written. Kitto said:

"But the important question is not who Homer was, but what he was. The Iliad and The Odyssey have been called the Bible of the Greeks. For centuries these two poems were the basis of Greek education, both of the formal education of the school, and of the cultural life of the common citizen. [….] A kind of Fundamentalism spread, similar to the interpretations of the Bible of some Protestant sects" (Kitto, p. 20).

Greek historians such as Herodotus did not doubt the veracity of the poem. What interests me here is the significance of these Homeric times for the Greek culture that emerged later. In these reflections, neither the archaeological history of Troy, nor even the authenticity of the legends is that important. We are interested in the lifeworld found in The Iliad, that is, Homer’s ideas about leadership, heroism, the role of the gods in human life, his notions about love and friendship, wisdom and virtue.

Until the sixth century B.C. In Athens, the role of kings and rulers was to decide on the important matters of their kingdom or domain. There was little consultation with the inhabitants. This began to change with the arrival of Solon.

Throughout the first millennium B.C., in the surrounding empires, there was always a kind of cultural "permission" for kings and rulers to act according to their own will. Plutarch (first century A.D. /10/11/2017), in his book "Maxims of Kings and Generals", presents a series of moral adages about the conduct of monarchs and other powerful people, from the Persians to the Spartans and the Macedonians. It can be seen how this historian reveals his admiration for the individual ingenuity of many of the kings, which he sometimes takes as instances of "justice". For example, Philip II, after starting the conquest of Greece (accompanied by his son Alexander[33]) in 338 BC. was thus advised by some of his officials. They suggested that he should " place garrisons in the cities. No, he said, I'd rather be called merciful for a little while, than a great commander for long time ...” (Plutarch, Maxims, 1st century BC /10/11/2017, p. 11).

It is something that Plutarch interprets as a kind of magnanimity, but this attitude of a conqueror, who can do whatever he wants, must be contrasted with the attitude of the free citizens of Athens after the sixth century B.C. Kitto (1957/1985, p. 3) says:

 "Arbitrary government was an offense to the Greek that wounded him intimately. That is why when he considered the richer and more civilized Eastern countries, he saw in reality how a palace regime, headed by an absolute king, governed not according to the rules of the primitive Greek monarchs, rules coming from Themis or responding to a law derived from Heaven, but according to his personal will, which was not responsible to the gods.  because he himself was a god. The subject of such a master lived in the condition of a slave."

Over time, after the Homeric period, the Athenians managed to establish humanized laws, created by citizens in the free exercise of their will.

There was a certain predisposition to localism among the Greeks, evidenced by the existence of different areas in which kings and rulers could act independently. This autonomy endured and was expressed in the creation of the city-states, more or less in the eighth century BC. Each city, together with the immediate territory, formed a separate political entity, although they all recognized each other as Achaeans or Argives – and later Hellenes – and in Roman times: Greeks. They were sometimes organized into leagues in which some cities/states participated, such as Ionia against Persia, the Peloponnesian League and the Olympian Amphictyony, but they never managed to form a general alliance of economic and cultural collaboration, nor to form a Hellenic state despite a serious but unsuccessful attempt, initiated by Pericles. There were some hegemonic attempts by some cities – especially Sparta – to expand their influence through the conquest of their neighbors, but in general the Hellenes maintained their different identities and spaces of domination.

This independence was both an advantage and a weakness. It allowed the cultural evolution that occurred in Athens, but the lack of concord and military collaboration weakened the Greeks in the face of their adversaries such as the Persians, and even in the face of internal hegemonic rivalries between the cities themselves.

ATHENS AND SPARTA

I have considered how isolated monarchies evolved into aristocratic regimes. Part of this evolution had to do with the role of citizen soldiers: I have described it as the role of the hoplites soldiers.  It was different in the cities of Athens and Sparta. In Athens they were finally included as citizens in political decisions with the right to vote in the Assembly; they were militiamen who came to the defense of their city when it was in danger. In fact, the Athenians considered that their democratic political system had facilitated some of their military achievements, such as their success in repelling the Persian invasion. They considered that the Hélade[34] was saved by the free and democratic Athenians.  In this sense, the military success of the Athenians can be found in their high morale, as they fought for their land and their system of government.

In Sparta, on the other hand, the hoplites were professional soldiers; Although they were supremely capable and willing, only obedience and heroism were expected of them. This limitation slowed down the Spartan capacity to develop politically and intellectually, and it can be said, channeled its growth almost exclusively towards conquest and domination.

For both the Athenians and the Spartans, the interests of the hoplites coincided with the imperial incentives of their peoples. During the 5th and 4th century of democratic Athens, colonial expansion into the markets of the Aegean was important because of its maritime trade. The hoplites and nautical forces were crucial in this economic growth, and the benefits extended to the social class of small urban merchants in Athens. Democracy in the political life of the Assembly and the Council was expanded to include many dispossessed, about 5000 citizens without property, and all were favored by the activity of military interests.

In addition to predisposing the inhabitants towards the dubious imperial adventures of both cities, the presence of hoplites in Athens, as militias and citizens with the right to vote, influenced the city’s attachment to democracy.  They defended their freedom, and opposed the repressors, especially in two attempts to install dictatorships in the fifth century. On these two occasions the hoplites resisted those despots. Again, it is important to contrast the Athenian militiamen with the professional soldiers without political rights in Sparta, although in both cities they considered themselves to be "free".  

The laws

Probably one of the greatest contributions of these city-states was the elaboration of formal rules for the exercise of power, that is, their constitutions and their laws. Even if the origin of these agreements is lost in the times of prehistoric legend, limiting the handling of power was a fundamental milestone for all of our Western history. I have described how the Spartans built a complex system of command based on the simultaneous existence of two kings, and although this restricted the emergence of a single dictator, it did not include all citizens in the decision-making process. On the other hand, the Athenians made abstract laws, subject to the will of the citizens. This is the first time in history that this has happened.

We have seen that the rules of Athens and Sparta were very different, and led to very different lifestyles. This fact is very worthy of reflection: although there were basic cultural discrepancies long before, when they were formalized, they remained. Sparta remained a militaristic, communal and highly regimented regime. Athens, on the other hand, opened itself to questioning, political exploration and an remarkable developments in philosophy, mathematics, the arts and formal thought in general.

Doubt

The passage from Homeric fundamentalism to the questioning of the pre-Socratic philosophers is something that should interest us all. It is a problem that still concerns us as a civilizing task. To examine this step it has been essential in this book to reflect on the difference between Athens and Sparta.

Kitto tells of the daily life of Athenian citizens, men who owned slaves for ordinary tasks, and who had time to walk the streets, talk and reflect. He says that they were a "sociable" people:

¿What other society than Athens could have produced a figure like Socrates, the man who changed the tide of human thought without writing a word, without preaching a doctrine, simply conversing in the streets of the city he only left twice to go to war? [....] The True Education of the Athenian... It was given in the meeting places at the hours of conversation in the market square, in the peristyle or in the gymnasium, in political assemblies, in the theater, in the public recitals of Homer and in religious celebrations and processions" (Kitto, 1957/1985, p. 18).[35]

Athenian innovation was to apply rationality to its own society and public administration, and to realize that self-government was not only possible, but also that it had the capacity to increase the well-being of its citizens.

For the purposes of this book, I call the possibility of doubt "acceptance of uncertainty," especially with regard to the mythical traditions of ancient Greece. One must admire the amazing efforts of the ancients to be able to think independently and have confidence in their own abilities to deliberate and reach plausible conclusions.

A good king Vs a constitution

Above I mentioned the "permission" that kings had to make decisions without consulting their people. Athenian writers of the fifth and fourth centuries paid much attention to this problem, and these reflections echoed a widespread sentiment in the city. In other words, the passage from an unrestricted monarchy, to an autocracy and finally to a democracy, was an improvement thought out and matured over time. There was nothing random about this progress, although, yes, there were a lot of political fluctuation and recurrent state chaos.  In the third chapter I talked about the play "Antigone" by Sophocles and the two plays about Iphigenia written by Euripides.  Behind these three tragedies is the problem of the tyrant. In Iphigenia in Aulide, Agamemnon, sacrificed his daughter in order sail to the Trojan War,[36]. Underlying these two figures (Iphigenia and Antigone) is the problem of the king's prerogative to act without restriction.

Agamemnon was an ancient king (from Homeric times) because he married Clytemnestra, the daughter of Tyndareus the previous king. What interests us here is how Agamemnon seized the throne and power. When he married Clytemnestra, he killed her first son (from another father) to ensure his right to command. Then, he killed his own daughter Iphigenia so as not to lose control of the army he was about to take to Troy. He was a brutal monarch with no limitations except those occasionally imposed by his subordinate generals.[37] It was a command marked by the visceral exercise of power.

Sparta adopted a constitution in which there were always two hereditary kings, one who went to war and the other who remained administering the city. But the real power was located in an assembly of warriors, and in a council of elders over 60 years of age. It was a fragile balance between institutions, based on the laws of the city. Even so, the power of decision was limited to a few people.

Athens began in a different way, with a "good king". I have spoken of the mythological king Cecrops in the second chapter, the first king of Athens. This legendary monarch (half-human, half-snake) was the one who chose the goddess Athena as the protector of Athens[38]. The goddess had authority in matters related to civilization, wisdom, and strategy, and was not a warrior of blind heroisms like the god Ares. In short, despite the royal and undisputed authority of King Cecrops, he was a "wise" ruler rather than a tyrant.  From these beginnings, Athens was choosing paths that fostered reason over thoughtlessness and tradition.

Solon, Cleisthenes and Pericles

Athens was selecting its rulers from a small group of men. Plutarch tells us, for example, that:

"Pericles was [...] of the noblest cradle on both the side of the father and the mother. Xanthippus, his father, who defeated the generals of the king of Persa in battle, married Alcmaeonis Agarista, the granddaughter of Cleisthenes, who expelled the sons of Pisistratus, and in the noblest way ended their tyrannical usurpation [...]" (Plutarch, Life of Pericles).

I have referred to Solon, Cleisthenes, and Pericles at various times. Now it is time to make one last reflection on these three men and their times. These three leaders began to govern in difficult times for the city.  Despite belonging to a powerful class, they chose to share command with the other citizens. Part of their motivation was clearly practical, that is, to recover the community’s peace in times of discord and scarcity in the population, and they probably used participation as a political ploy. But they also responded to a particularly Athenian desire to achieve a system in which there would be citizen intervention in power (although not everyone shared this desire). Pericles remained as strategist (or general) of Athens for thirty years. He was re-elected every year, always maintaining a democratic stance, although it can be speculated that at times his period in power resembled a kind of beneficent populism.

I have noticed that this participation was based in part on the existence of a lot of free time that free men had to exchange ideas in the streets and squares, because they had slaves to do the practical work. But I have also observed that slavery was not responsible for Athenian democracy. Aristotle defended vassalage. There was, in fact, a lot of social class prejudice, a great rejection among wealthy and aristocratic citizens against those who did productive work. Plutarch observed: "[...] when we like a job, we look down on the worker or the artist himself, as, for example, in perfumes and purple dyes, we love things in themselves, but we think that dyers and perfumers are sordid people" (in Pericles, paragraph 4).  

It is a mistake to associate free time with the growth of democracy. I have pointed out that in ancient times there was slavery in all cities and kingdoms, and yet Athens was the only city to develop the idea of citizen intervention in government. There was something about Attic culture[39] that opened the possibility of seeing man as an agent capable of evaluating and deciding his actions. This political advancement was necessarily accompanied by a new scientific zeal, that is, the search for evidence (in contrast to belief), and as I have been observing, by the cultivation of doubt. Plutarch (in Pericles) tells how on one occasion people marveled and sought meaning and revelation when viewing the portent of the head of a ram with a single horn in the center of its head. In response, Anaxagoras split the animal's skull open, showing that its brain had an abnormality that had caused the phenomenon. Those who observed this rational enlightenment accepted it and abandoned the search for mystical explanations.[40]

 

THE FALL OF ATHENS

Athens and all the cities/states of ancient Greece lost their autonomy largely due to internal wars and their inability to form, on the one hand, an overarching political entity based on agreements and on the other, a decision to develop concord among all cities/states. In the final part of Pericles' rule, there was a plague that weakened Athens; the disease reached Pericles himself and killed a large part of his family. The loss of rational leadership destabilized the economy and political life, and the usual dictators emerged from the miasmas of insecurity. As Kito observed:

"The Peloponnesian War meant virtually the end of the city-state as a creative force that adapted and shaped the lives of all its members. During the fourth century, Greece moved firmly towards new ways of thinking and living. [….] Among the oligarchies established or supported by Sparta, there was in Athens a cruel and bloodthirsty group, known as the "Thirty", led by a certain Critias, [....] They ruled by terror for a few months, for the oligarchy could not last long in Attica. Democracy was restored, and with a courage and moderation that somewhat compensated for the folly and occasional violence it had shown during the war" (Kitto, p. 73).

Philip II and Alexander III of Macedon later appeared. Although the Athenians had regained their democracy after the dictatorship, they were exhausted by so much unrest (the wars, the plague, and the cruelty of Critias) and could not listen to the warnings of Demosthenes. The Macedonian aristocrats, on the other hand, had become rich under Philip, and by means of conquests and agreements between kingdoms they had increased their capacity for war and influence. They had an old resentment against the Persians and desired revenge; In addition, the democratic process was worth nothing to them. However, Philip admired the Greek philosophers, and invited Hellenic immigrants to his court; “Those men who accepted his patronage were granted generous donations of land and a good place at court. In the close circle of Alexander's childhood friends, three were not Macedonians [....]" (Meotto, 5/27/2021). This patronage probably concealed Macedonia's intentions, calmed the fears of the Greeks, and contributed to their not listening to Demosthenes[41].

The important thing here is that Philip and Alexander's quest for empire and power destroyed Hellenic democracy. Philip is a perfect portrait of the expansionist, self-centered king. Like Louis XIV of France more than a millennium later, he created a monarchy where he stood indisputably at the pinnacle: "L'État, c'est moi"[42]. Philip left a kingdom for his son, but Alexander grew impatient and wanted an empire: he conquered a vast territory, from Egypt to India, but in his haste he did not establish a power base to safeguard it, and his imperialist influence disappeared very soon after his death. He was a skillful military general, but he did not take the time to consolidate the conquered territories, and after him the rivalries between his governors brought everything down. He was able to destroy, but did not build – although, it must be recognized – the known world at that time was affected for a long time.

Alexander, although the "Great One" was just another conqueror, and just like Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler, his empire did not survive. However, although the Macedonians did away with Athenian democracy, Greece's cultural influence endured for a long time. In the territories conquered by Alexander, much of Hellas' cultural heritage was assumed. After Alexander's death, some of his successors founded royal successions, such as the Ptolemaic in Egypt and the Seleucid in Syria. The educated Romans spoke Greek and employed Hellenic philosophers as tutors for their children. I repeat Horace's famous phrase: "Captive Greece captivated its rude conqueror" (Horace, Epistles II, 1st Century c. C/1909).

In the end

Athens has survived as a possibility of government and a model of political abstraction.[43] Its poetry, art, and science has inspired us for two millennia. It lives on in the philosophical reflections of all times and in the foundation it gave to the possibility of a scientific as a model of thought. But the reappearance of formal and functioning democracies took a long time, more than two millennia. It was not until the eighteenth-century A.D. that new democracies appeared, partly based on the British model, and partly on Athenian standards. Unlike the British model[44], the new experiments with self-management were characterized by the elaboration of formal constitutions, such as that of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Republic in the sixteenth century AD. The United States ratified its constitution in 1789 and the French ratified one -for a brief time- in 1791.​

Democracy has never been easy. The same anxieties that plagued Athens continue to bother modern systems: colonialism, coups d'état, dictatorships, populism, wars, the lack of sustainable agreements between nations, slavery and the restlessness of the dispossessed classes.  We can use the Greek experience to be forewarned and to avoid the dangers that beset them.

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ENDNOTES

[1][1] Hellas is a term used by the ancient Greeks to refer to the geographical territory of what is now Greece.

[2]The U.S. Constitution was adopted in its original form in 1787 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and later ratified by the people. It was the first attempt to follow the Athenian model of a formal constitution to govern a democracy in two millennia.

[3]In this book we speak mainly of the Greeks. Before them there were advanced civilizations in the Middle East, such as the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians.

[4]The Ionian Sea is an arm of the Mediterranean Sea, south of the Adriatic Sea.

[5]The Aegean is the part of the Mediterranean Sea between Greece and Turkey.

[6][6] One of the ancient names for the Greeks.

[7]Homer does not refer to the Trojan Horse in "The Iliad". In "The Odyssey" the character of Ulysses mentions him in a few lines. However, this story did not unfold until seven centuries after Homer in Virgil's "The Aeneid."

[8]Professional singers of the poetry of legends

[9]One of the names used by Homer to refer to all the groups that participated in the siege of Troy.

[10]There are moments in the poem when Helen looks at Menelaus from the towers of Troy, and admires the bravery of her forsaken husband.

[11]Phrygia was a region of Asia Minor in the Anatolian peninsula, in the territory that now corresponds to Turkey.

[12]These are terms that refer to the original Greek tribes. The Aeolians were concentrated in the north, in Thessaly; the Ionians settled in the area that would later become Athens and spread to western Anatolia (today Turkey). Over time they referred to the colonies of Anatolia as Ionia. The Dorians were located in the Peloponnese. "Achaeus" is one of the names used by Homer to refer in general to the Greeks in Homer's Iliad.

[13]The Spirit of the Forest

[14]"The Ionians" in this context refers to the inhabitants of western Anatolia in the Athenian colonies.

[15]Around 3000 BC. By the time they built some of their pyramids, the Egyptians had already developed their hieroglyphic writing. They achieved imposing physical constructions, for example, the Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2650 BC, They had their own system for calculating, and they could do multiplication and division operations. This indicates the level of development they achieved from very early on (Robertson and O'Connor, n.d.).

 

[16]For Athens, the idea of colonization had two meanings. The first was the traditional one, that is, the conquest of territories with the motive of profiting from the resources found in them, including cheap labor. The second meaning was the dissemination of the ideals of democracy. Miletus, for example, had deep aspirations for self-government. But it must also be remembered that the social structure that Athens exported had classes, workers who lacked citizenship and also slaves. Colonies could be places to plant ideals, and at the same time land for exploitation.

[17]Cleisthes did not follow Solon in power. After Solon there was a time of successive archons who were weak, and of dictatorships like Pisistratus and his sons. The dates when they were archons are: Solon 594-593, and Cleisthenes 525-524.  Evidently there was a long lapse between these two amazing rulers.

[18]However, there were influential women, for example, Elpinice, a woman of the Athenian aristocracy, who had several encounters in which she publicly denounced Pericles (Plutrarch's Lives. "Pericles").

[19]We remember that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were slave owners at the beginning of the United States Republic. However, they had pangs of conscience about it, especially Jefferson. They never defended the practice.

[20]“I will never bring reproach upon my sacred weapons, nor will I abandon the comrade at whose side I stand, but I will defend our altars and our homes, alone or with the support of many. To my native land I will not leave a diminished inheritance but greater and better than when I received it. I will obey whoever has authority and I will submit to the established laws and to all others that the people promulgate harmoniously. If anyone tries to overthrow the constitution or disobeys it, I will not allow it, but will come to its defense, alone or with the support of all. I will honor the religion of my parents. May the gods be my witness, Agraulus, Enyalius, Ares, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, Hegemone" (Wikipedia, 2021).

[21]Ionia is the ancient name for the west-central coast of Anatolia, which also included the adjacent islands. At present, the mainland belongs to Turkey, and islands such as Samos belong to Greece.

[22]Aeschylus was an Athenian. It was they who triumphed in the battle of Salamis. The poet feels entitled to extend the motifs of his city to the whole of Greece.

[23]The Omphalos in Greek mythology it was the stone covered in infant blankets that Zeus' mother used to trick Cronus, his father, from devouring the baby.

[24]Date of the Declaration of Independence of the United States from Great Britain.

[25]“Black Lives Matter" is an American movement that opposes violent police repression of Black people.

[26]In modernity we can talk about statistical and mathematical models, computer programs and physical systems.

[27]With a few notable exceptions. For example, the condemnation of Socrates and other populist decisions by the Assembly.

[28]Draco was an archon or political leader in Athens in the 7th century BC. C.; He created a system that associated each crime with a predetermined punishment. Due to the severity of the punishments, its name is associated with the adjective "draconian".

[29]Even so, many children, children of poor citizens, did not have the privilege of a formal education.

[30]With the possible exception of Chilon, an advisor to King Anaxandridas. He left nothing in writing, but he was responsible for humanizing policies in Sparta, such as creating an alliance with Tegea after conquering it in 560 BC. instead of enslaving her as he had done in other provinces.

[31]His thoughts were collected by his disciples like Plato.

[32]We can say that he went crazy.

[33]Alejandro was 16 years old.

[34]Hellas is a term used by the ancient Greeks to refer to the geographical territory of what is now Greece.

[35][35] I have reflected several times on the role of slavery in ancient Athens. It is necessary to emphasize that slaves existed throughout the region, but only in Athens was a highly developed democracy achieved. The presence of slaves was not causal in this development.

[36]But in Iphigenia in Tauris she is saved by the goddess Artemis, the same one who demanded her father to immolate her.

[37]We have seen in chapter I how Achilles, for example, refused to continue under his orders.

[38]In addition, Cecrops promoted the cultivation of vineyards and the use of censuses to know the population of the city.

[39]Attica is the geographical area around the city of Athens.

[40]But Plutarch adds to his account the observation that perhaps the two ways of thinking can coexist, that explanation describes the "how" of a phenomenon, and meaning expresses the "why."

[41]Athens and Thebes faced the Macedonians at the Battle of Chaeronea, and Demosthenes was part of this opposition. Then, Antipater, Alexander's successor, sent assassins against Demosthenes, but he committed suicide before he was killed.

[42]I am the State.

[43][43] When I say political abstraction, I mean politics governed by rules and laws. Laws are abstract in the sense of being above individual contests in the Assembly. Individual disputes have a changing character that depends on the results of the participants' transitory decisions.

[44]The British model was based on the Magna Carta (1215 AD) and the Bill of Rights (1689).