Athenians 'R' Us

IN THE NEWS
After this earlier post on Eliot Cohen's article, the Peloponnesian Wars have been rattling around in my brain all day. I've read Thucydides (the fellow pictured to the right), and two of Donald Kagan's four-volume series on the conflict. After picking up Kagan's much-recommended single-volume history today, I decided to look up the Melian dialogue on the web. There was something in this famous exchange between the Athenians and Melians that tugged at my memory, and now I remember what it was.

Melos was a Spartan ally, a small island surrounded by Athenian allies. It took the prudent course, therefore, of remaining neutral, despite its nominal allegiance with Sparta. Neutrality wasn't good enough for the Athenians, however, who wanted to make sure that Melos didn't present an unwanted and potentially dangerous complication. The Athenians blockaded Melos and beseiged the city.

Thucydides records the content of a negotiation between the Athenians and Melians, in which the Athenians are, to some extent, thunderstruck that the Melians are continuing to resist. Not only are they clearly outmatched, but the Athenians cannot understand why the Melians don't understand them. Aren't the Athenian concerns justified? Wouldn't the Melians do the same, if the situation were reversed?

Here's a key section of the debate:

Athenians: The fall of our empire, if it should fall, is not an event to which we look forward with dismay; for ruling states such as Lacedaemon are not cruel to their vanquished enemies. With the Lacedaemonians, however, we are not now arguing; the real danger is from our many subject states, who may of their own motion rise up and overcome us, their masters. But this is a danger which you may leave to us. And we will now endeavor to show that we have come in the interests of our empire, and that in what we are about to say we are only seeking the preservation of your city. For we want to make you ours with the least trouble to ourselves, and it is for the interests of us both that you should not be destroyed.

Melians: It may be your interest to be our masters, but how can it be ours to be your slaves?

Athenians: To you the gain will be that by submission you will avert the worst; and we shall be all the richer for your preservation.

Melians: But must we be your enemies? Will you not receive us as friends if we are neutral and remain at peace with you?

Athenians: No, your enmity is not half so mischievous to us as your friendship; for the one is in the eyes of our subjects an argument of our power, the other of our weakness.

Melians: But are your subjects really unable to distinguish between states in which you have no concern, and those which are chiefly your own colonies, and in some cases have revolted and been subdued by you?

Athenians: Why, they do not doubt that both of them have a good deal to say for themselves on the score of justice, but they think that states like yours are left free because they are able to defend themselves, and that we do not attack them because we dare not. So that your subjection will give us an increase of security, as well as an extension of empire. For we are masters of the sea, and you who are islanders, and insignificant islanders, at that, must not be allowed to escape us.

Melians: But do you not recognize another danger? For, once more, since you drive us from the plea of justice and press upon us your doctrine of expediency, we must show you what is for our interest, and, if it be for yours also, may hope to convince you:, Will you not be making enemies of all who are now neutrals? When they see how you are treating us they will expect you some day to turn against them; and if so, are you not strengthening the enemies whom you already have, and bringing upon you others who, if they could help, would never dream of being your enemies at all?

The negotiation ends with this statement by the Athenians (emphasis added):

Athenians: Help may come from Lacedaemon to you as it has come to others, and should you ever have actual experience of it, then you will know that never once have the Athenians retired from a siege through fear of a foe elsewhere. You told us that the safety of your city would be your first care, but we remark that, in this long discussion, not a word has been uttered by you which would give a reasonable man expectation of deliverance. Your strongest grounds are hopes deferred, and what power you have is not to be compared with that which is already arrayed against you. Unless after we have withdrawn you mean to come, as even now you may, to a wiser conclusion, you are showing a great want of sense. For surely you cannot dream of flying to that false sense of honor which has been the ruin of so many when danger and dishonor were staring them in the face. Many men with their eyes still open to the consequences have found the word "honor" too much for them, and have suffered a mere name to lure them on, until it has drawn down upon them real and irretrievable calamities; through their own folly they have incurred a worse dishonor than fortune would have inflicted upon them. If you are wise, you will not run this risk; you ought to see that there can be no disgrace in yielding to a great city which invites you to become her ally on reasonable terms, keeping your own land, and merely paying tribute; and that you will certainly gain no honor if, having to choose between two alternatives, safety and war, you obstinately prefer the worse. To maintain our rights against equals, to be politic with superiors, and to be moderate towards inferiors is the path of safety. Reflect once more when we have withdrawn, and say to yourselves over and over again that you are deliberating about your one and only country, which may be saved or may be destroyed by a single decision.

The Melians refused to submit. After the starved city finally fell, the Athenians executed every male citizen in punishment for not surrendering earlier.

The Melian debate inspires a lot of feelings, however many times you read it. The first is the question, almost a cry of despair: How could the Athenians do this? What happened to the Athens of Pericles and Themistocles--the cradle of democracy, a champion of Greek freedom during the Persian wars, the most civilized of the city states?

The answer, of course, is that the Athenians were no more immune to folly, arrogance, and short-sightedness than anyone else. You can pin the blame for Athens' fall from grace on everything from well-known individuals like Alcibiades to the most impersonal of historical forces, like the corrosive effects of war weariness. Whomever or whatever you blame, Athens had reached a point where it was not being needlessly brutal, but wasn't even understanding what, in war and politics, worked and didn't work.

The Melians resisted. That was the point I hadn't remembered. The ancient world's version of "shock and awe" had failed to compel the Melians to submit to Athenian demands. They lost, but in the long run, so did the Athenians, whose allies--tired of the shabby treatment they received from the haughty Athenians--revolted at the first opportunity. Athens had good reason, as they discuss in the Melian dialogue, to be more worried about smaller states like Melos than the other superpower, Sparta. The Athenians just didn't understand why they should be afraid of them.

Historical parallels are sometimes more informative than detailed accounts of current events because we can look at them more objectively. We have none of the investment in the Athenian cause that Americans have in their own today. Therefore, we can look objectively at the Melian dialogue, a scene replayed today in American diplomatic exchanges with other governments, and understand both sides equally well. We wish the Athenians weren't behaving in such an un-Athenian way, but it's not impossible to believe that they would. We can see why the Melians resist, even if there was an element of self-delusion about expected Spartan support. There were other elements at play in the Melian resistance, however, than calculations about when the Spartan hoplites would arrive. There was also a visceral outrage at being bullied. As the Melians say, it's hard to tell how events will play out, so perhaps there might be a better outcome from an honorable struggle than a dishonorable surrender.

Next time you're asking familiar questions about current events like, Why do they hate us? and, Don't they understand our motives? I suggest you sit down with a copy of Thucydides and read, long and carefully.

Comments

[Oscar]

Nice writing, but, in the case of the Jihadists, total rubbish. They declared war on us. We are the ones who must convert or die. I suggest you read the Gita for the proper perspective, not Thucydides. You may weep when you find your former friends arrayed against you on the field of battle, but you must fight for the right and destroy them, though their sin be folly and not evil.

[ali]

In the current conflict Hezbollah are likely to be our Melians, as the IDF have already found they’ll be a good deal harder to kill.

I do hope we aren't the Athenians, they bungelled it and lost to Sparta after all.

The Athenian behavior was more or less conventional. A city that resisted siege was put to the sword; the same was true, two millennia later, when the Roundheads stormed Drogheda. It’s interesting that ancient Athens is still so well regarded that the incident is shocking to many.

PS: Just read Hezbollah by J.P.Harik. Patchy but illuminating, it's a very odd war they've been fighting.

[Kingdaddy]

Oscar, I agree. They did declare war on us--and, like the dinosaur bitten by a rodent, the brain didn't register what the tail was feeling. The "convert or die" statement isn't exactly accurate, since what they argue is, "All believing Muslims need to live under the Shari'a." Functionally, that may mean the conversion of more states to their version of Islamist doctrine, but it doesn't mean the conversion of people. However, I'd rather live here than in Riyadh, so the distinction may be a bit meaningless in the long term. It's one that the Islamists insist upon, so you walk into a rhetorical trap if you say, "You people are insisting that all Westerners convert to Islam."

And my point had less to do with justification than resistance. I think many people were surprised at how doggedly the Taliban has held on in Afghanistan, or how "shock and awe" didn't impress the partisans or terrorists now fighting us in Iraq. Like the Athenians, we felt the overwhelming justice of our cause and power with which we could pursue it would make resistance self-evidently foolish. However, the Melians pursued a pretty foolish course of action, but for reasons (including honor) that made sense to them at the time.

We don't have a Sparta ready to fill our place as a superpower--even Europe is in no position to do this. However, vacuums don't have to be filled by states. Sometimes, they aren't filled at all, like much of Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Other times, they can be filled by a motley collection of smaller entities, or a unifying idea--like Christianity in post-Imperial Europe, or the way the Norman model of feudalism took hold in much of Western Europe in the 11th century. We could stumble, and something else might pick up the security burdens we dropped--and these new entities, whether states or not, may not have our interests at heart at all.

Ali, thanks for the recommendation. I've read older works about Hezbollah, like Jaber's book, so I'll be on the lookout for this newer title.