Song of Wrath

Song of Wrath
By J.E. Lendon

For those interested in historical trivia, I can save you from reading this book with the following chronicle. From the time of the ‘Age of Heroes’ to 450BC Athens ranked number one. The 30 Year Peace agreement of 450 BC leaves Sparta as number one. The battle of Sphacteria between Athens and Sparta in 425BC signaled a quest for Athens to reclaim hegemony of Greece. Her over reaching and loss, not to Sparta but to Boetea, leaves Athens’s quest an illusive butterfly of illusion. She found supremacy for a brief span of a few years time where inevitably war returned and she eventually lost her grip. Ironically the triumph of Athens over Sparta or vice-versa it never came with terms that held complete sway over all of Greece or the outside world. The lesson learned was it was all in the minds of ego, an ego that was portrayed in this book primarily through the oration of Thucydides.

Comparing Athens-v-Sparta with its 30 Year Peace and USA-v-USSR with its 40 year cold war, finds parallel characteristics. Many proxy wars were waged. With the close of the Athens Sparta drama, Argos gained time and space to reenter the fray for supremacy found in ‘‘TIME’’. With the close of the USA-Soviet drama, the sick old man of Ottoman Empire, seems to have awoke with a bankroll of oil money. In the wake of the fall of the USSR, mankind found room for the resumption of ‘TIME’ to be tested once again between Muslims and the world. Hence we have ominous parallels for any reader of the 21st century.

‘Time’ with an overscore on the 'e' was how the Greeks ranked themselves. It was a measure of their worth. ‘Time’ was thought to give a real, almost physical existence in the world: it could for example be taken by one man from another. It could be captured in war. It was not just a Greek trait. I once heard from my Iranian Muslim friend. “Iranian’s do not want anything more than a seat at the table with world powers”, in essence ‘Time’. He also helped me see that they lost that seat in 646 when Islamic Arabs invaded Persia. The path to war follows these steps: ‘time’, hybris, wrath, revenge. With this undercurrent in the psyche of the Thucydydeian man we find it odd the bloodless way we now write about relations between states and the whitewashed diplomatic language of our ‘time’ have weakened our grasp on the power of emotion and psyche in foreign affairs.

Playing this theme in Lendon's introduction on our current world affairs that pits in my mind Muslim's on a similar path against the West asking the question: does the trail fit the story? If so then would you conclude hybris is at the core of psyche the Muslims or the West? Hybris is defined in this book as the act of essentially thumbing your nose at he who holds ‘time’ over you. Contrarily, it is popular opinion today for Western liberal thought, at least among the Press to acquiesce the allegation of Western hubris, a derivative word. Using Greek thinking, considering the superior standard of living, observing obvious status of Western ‘Time’ or superiority, should not the Muslims be charged with hubris/hybris instead? Evidence of this can be found not in Terrorist agenda, but rather in the Madrassas formulation of the Muslim terrorist psyche. The terrorist's actions are only the result of madrassas rooted in their quest for ‘Time’ where wrath and revenge are their modality.

This book uses the Peloponnesian War, the first ten years, to study foreign policy and statesmanship in examining the causes of war. It is interesting to read that all the States of Greece practiced ‘Time’ in their relationship with each other and as well in their war with Persia. In 570BC Persia was a world leader and was so for 1100 years before surrendering to the Muslim moniker and fall from world leadership. At the time Persians, Zoroastrians by faith, were transformed by Arab Muslims. They assimilated to the Muslims, yet to come to terms with their loss of their Zoroastrian faith they made a diversion and founded the Shiite schism sect of Islam. That schism is as deep today as it was 1600 years ago. Its depths are as great as the schism between Islam and the West. Like the ominous parallel of the Peloponnesian era where Argos stood on the sidelines, Shia and Sunni have still to find their place in ‘Time’ with each other. As a western strategy; is now the time to be engaging them?

With history as an answer, after ten years of war where Athens had the upper hand over Sparta who was not without victory, the belligerents came to a truce. The truce was born not in what victories were inflicted on each other or any slim advantage one side might have, but for the mitigation of risk of losing control over those they once mastered. Athens feared revolt from within her colonies. Sparta feared a loss of her allies. The truce and following alliance made Athens the victor without surrender. Athens' goal was to prove equal to Sparta. Sparta's goal was to prove her superiority. Truce being equated to a draw left Athens a shallow but meaningful victory in Greek terms. That victory was short lived. For within a few years after, inter-state intrigue found Athens an ally of Argos and Sparta an ally of Persia where a sound and thorough defeat was Athens' fate.

In conclusion a reader of this book may be found thinking the following. Look around the world for ‘Time’. Look at India – Pakistan, North -South Korea, Japan- China of the 1930s, France –Germany, dormant at the moment, every North American Indian tribe pre European conquest of North America. This book alludes to that character in “Time” vested in society as a root to war. Its symptoms are civil unrest, either through oppression or through economic stress. Thucydides points out: "Civil strife- stasis is the Greek word - has a fearful dynamic of it's own. Whatever it spark, civil strife burns high and soon consumes within it all the forms of division between men, giving license to wickedness under the cover of party and enforcing by a principle of tit-for-tat escalation to ever more fearful methods. When a person looks to another as superior in any way they might respect that person, but underneath their ego gives way to fear driven hybris of which carries through to wrath and finally vengeance. Is there a deed or a characteristic that he who holds ‘time’ can bestow on the rest those who may be prone to hybris to end the cycle of war? My only answer is transcending ‘time’

Below is my bibliography with nested notes. The last note in particular is worth reading. While I look to find a lesson in all that I read, I would have preferred a different author. I view Lendon as a PhD professor who fully subscribes to the ‘publish or perish” doctrine. And forcing his students to purchase and read his books.

Cool metaphor; not yet the cry of trumpets, but the moans of low bassoons



Bibliography

Page 64 understanding the ethos of alliances first and the in particular the status of Argos and Athens is key to understanding the rest of the mid century war.

Note: Argos held ‘time’ over Athens even though Sparta held ‘time’ over Argos. Since Athens and Sparta were rivals, Athens bent her homage towards Argos if for anything else to have an ally.

Page 81: Lacking in the Spartan victory in 446BC was the crucial psychological component that made victory "stick"- that made the defeated take their defeat, and therefore their inferiority in rank, to heart and therefore behave with lowly deference to the victor.

...it is best not to puff yourself up because of the misfortunes opponents says a speaker much later than Thucydides, "but only be confident when you have conquered their spirits". Said Churchill in response to the German smashing of French will, only they be responded to in kind in 1945, thus drawing to a conclusion of two countries propensity for war for hegemony.

Note: this book notes that it's not so much the sued terms at the conclusion of a war but the actual battle that marks the defeat. Making this point 2500 years later we find examples of Germany's defiance of the world in the 1930's and likewise Iraq thumbing it's nose at the world, the United States in particular, in 2003.

Page 86: What broke out in 431BC is one if the most famous passages in his narrative and one of the most quoted passages from ancient Greek historians today, for it encapsulated the cold principles of the contemporary realist school of international relations. "The truest cause of the war" wrote Thucydides, " was the growing greatness of Athens and the fear that this inspired, which compelled the Lacedaemonians to go to war."... This "growing greatness" more exactly atmosphere increase of Athenian' power, dynamis, was a threat to Spartan and her allies. ... This cause is distinguished sharply from the immediate. Events that led up to the war, which Thucydides terms the "charges" or the "grounds for complaint" (aitiai) and "points if difference" (diaphorai), which are not the “truest cause" of the war.

Note: I made it a reading project to analyze the causes of war using the 20th century Germans. I did not land on Thucydides’ theory but won’t challenge it as I may look back and add the theory to the mix in my thought. Does power and it's cousin "fear of power" underwrite the practical causes of war?

Page 87: ... Thucydides and Hobbs, who translated him into English, are the progenitors if the theoretical realism that abides in today’s universities and think tanks, perhaps more important they have molded the vulgate of age. Power and fear are the tools for thinking about relations between states unreflectively employed in the media. Thus if looking out the window we approve of Thucydides’ landscape, we do so unaware that it was Thucydides who cited the window in the first place.

Note: the different primary causes were not prevalent in Greece, nor if there in the 20th century Europe. Is this a mistake mankind has failed to correct? Or is Thucydides’ theory correct? The Cold War never fired a shot because there was no real fear between the contestants. That is only if you exclude the proxy wars, being the complaint underwritten by the Keannan Theory of 1950.

Page 103: the Spartans in ‘time’ would feel that they were waring to refuse arbitration and that their neglect of this term of the 30 Years Peace Treaty had offended the Gods.

Note: I find this correlating to the Gods parallel at least to the message of Christ, the basis of Christian faith. (Though too often obliterated by religious sects over 2000 years) Thucydides, Hobbs, contemporary think tanks and Christianity are the entire same mind yet they quarrel with each other much like Athens did with Sparta. The quarrel appears to be more for supremacy or in context of the thesis of Thucydides, ‘TIME’. Is the spirit of competition found in the Greek Olympic Games, with it's unintended byproduct transcendent in our modern world? Are the unintended consequences really the cause and not the effect or are they symptoms? Is Marx right? The internal philosophy of a corporation is in deed communal where surrendering to corporate missions is required of it's individual business units. Yet corporations compete with each other. This only applies to economics which is a philosophy with money as the metric. How does this translate to nations in competition? Clearly you see this correlation in the 2011 budget debate where the competition in international currency is central to the American way of life. Very rich people understand this and therefore are willing to contribute to America. But at large the middlemen (politician, press) and their pawns are lost.

Page 168; in 1888 Julius Von Pflgk-Hartung had a passive policy of no clear cut victory. He said to active engagement "No Pericles' plans were well conceived 'strategy of exhaustion' had every prospect of winning the war by wearing out the resources of Athens’s opponents. In fact however Pericles' strategy was one of communication: by carefully judged reprisals for the Spartan ravaging of Attica, by humiliation of the Spartans through attacks on Sparta’s allies and by exaltation of Athens by helping Athen's allies, Pericles planned to impress the rank and renown of Athens upon the Spartans and upon the wider world of Greeks.

Page 206: Slaves were, after all, the natural enemies of all free men in a society that kept them in shackles. In a poor world , too, much of a city's wealth was tied up in it's slaves, because buying slaves and putting them to work was one of the few ways free capital could be invested for profit - capital that would be consumed in the holocaust of a single moment were the slaves to be set at liberty. For men locked in civil strife to bid for the support of slaves, then signaled that an unnatural frenzy had come upon Corcyra: there was nothing the men of the island would not do or waste, if helped them to overcome their foes.

Page 211: Thucydides points out: "Civil strife- stasis is the Greek word - has a fearful dynamic of it's own. Whatever it spark, civil strife burns high and soon consumes within it all the forms of division between men, giving license to wickedness under the cover of party and enforcing by a principle of tit-for-tat escalation ever more fearful methods. It is war itself and the resulting scarcity, says Thucydides that destroys human morals and ideas. “War proves a teacher of violence that brings most men's characters to level with their fortunes." War is why “ancient simplicity into which honor so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared."

Yet Thucydides' diagnosis of the cause of stasis - his argument that domestic strife is usually the child of foreign war - was not true as a rule even in Thucydides' own ‘time’, and was certainly not true in the case of Corcyra, which was untouched by the wider war and hardly, in 427BC, confronted with "imperious necessities"

Note: while the wider war was between Sparta and Athens, there was a civil war between the oligarchs and democracy of Corcyra, where civil strive of that island prevailed over the larger rules of honor held between Sparta and Athens.

Note: Clearly the world witnessed this in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Page 224: in 426 Athens took a new tact on Sparta. Rather than simple revenge, Athens took a posture of Hybris. If Athens neglected Boeotia [an active ally of Sparta] it was not because they considered her a threat. But just as a southern gentleman jostled by another in the streets of Charleston, could coolly decide not to construe the contact as an insult and thus avoid a duel, so did an ancient Greek state in a war over rank, as we have seen, enjoy a certain latitude to fail to "notice" acts of their adversaries - by framing their acts too trivial to deserve revenge.

Page 232: this Greek checkerboard of loyalties in the northwest was no creation of the Athenians or Spartans but simply reflected the hostility of Greek states to their immediate neighbors: thus when one perhaps on the basis of ancient kinship, called the Athenians or Peloponnesians for assistance against a neighbor, that ally naturally allied itself to the other great power. Although Greek in language and habits, for the most part these continent dwellers lived as tribes and clans spread over the land, rather than owing their loyalty to individual cities, as was custom in Southern Greece. They were, then, and old fashioned folk, their men still carrying weapons on their daily rounds, leading to a more forthright, rambunctious, even Homeric notion of mine and thine than prevailed in
the city-states to the south.

Note: oh the ominous parallels of that neighboring track of land from the Middle East through central Asia, post 1919. The fall of the Ottoman Empire has yet to find the civility of the Southern Greek city- state of the forth century BC .

At this juncture of 2011 Barak Obama is making the same mistake as British Prime minister Lloyd-George did in 1919. It was for the same reason: his Empire was war weary and in economic despair. Iraq through the legacy of GW Bush mission and policy will prove to be an oasis of civilization in a sea of 'tribes in turmoil', if history does have a pattern, for the next 20 years. More ominous of historical patterns would be found in the dynamic of US-Sino relationships on a Greek canvas, and the allies of choice of those warring tribes.

Page 275: But the personal hurt of the Spartans and the trampling of the Greek warrior code by the Athenians were not the only forces at play in the Spartan decision to surrender. A singularly Spartan factor also contributed. For Spartans, far more than other Greeks, looked to be commanded in war, and the absence of command [the commanders were killed early in the battle] forced to form a tiny parliament of the wounded to debate their own fate, they proved different men from those, who under orders, were so dauntless. The Spartan authorities had expected their men to behave like Achilles,to choose noble death. But Spartans had not brought up their sons to act like Achilles; they had brought them up to obey orders. Never does the strange contradiction at the heart of Spartan society show so clearly here: Spartans were expected to live the Iliad, but an Iliad set in a totalitarian Sparta.

Page 276: The Spartans surrendered on the seventy-second day after the sea battle in Navarino Bay, in the middle of August, 1 the year 425BC. Thucydides pretends to read the minds of the greater Greek nation as they savored every appalling detail. Luke mere humans, the Spartans had surrendered because they were hungry. They had yielded their weapons to the Athenians: they had not been disarmed and helpless but surrendered with weapons in their hands. They had not fought until they were killed. The root of Spartan power, the martial mystique of the Lacedaemonians that the Athenians had so long both feared to confront on the field of battle and feared to encourage by compelling the Spartans to die fighting, was given a mighty yank halfway from the ground by this surrender. And as for rank of Sparta, the primacy that Athens and Sparta were fighting was over. The answer was obvious to any Greek. “the glory of the Lacedaemonians was cast down," wrote a later author, " because of thei loss of their men on the island."

Page 337: Bresadis [Spartan], pledging to revolt if he should come to them Amphipolis]. The kindly terms hebhag given at Amphilipolis urged along this movement, as did, the earnestness of his proclamations that he had come to free the Greeks from empire rather
than simply replace Athenians rule with Spartan. For he pledged to leave the constitutional arrangements of the rebels unchanged and to impose no garrisons or governors. After a seven year pregnancy, Sparta seamed finally to have brought to birth a son who was in earnest about freeing the Greeks from Athens, the slogan under which Sparta had gone to war in 431BC and that had brought Sparta such
goodwill at war's beginning.

Cool metaphor; not yet the cry of trumpets, but the moans of low bassoons.

Page 380: At the same ‘time’ as she became more successful at shaming Sparta, Athens also saw her estimation if value of shaming acts, as well as her definition of the make up of ‘time’, prevail in the minds of Greeks. Put positively, in terms of honor rather than shame, the Athenians managed over the course if Ten Years' War subtly to shift the definition of ‘time’, of the rank of states, from a preponderance emphasis on Andrei, the courage displayed particularly in hoplite battle, to place greater value on charis (helping friends and taking revenge upon enemies) and metis ( the cunning display of tactics and trickery). Since metis and charis played to Athenian strengths, while Sparta was supreme in Andreia, this change in the way Greeks estimated ‘time’ was decidedly to Athens' advantage. The war over the definition over ‘time’ chiefly depended not on convincing the Greeks directly but appearing to have convinced the enemy. And so it was that in the eyes of the Greeks, the Spartans slowly yielded the battle over the definition of ‘time’ to the Athenians. This was the legacy of Pericles.

Page 381: (Thucydides') realism is the theory of international relations that considers power, the dread of the power of others, and the quest for power that dread imposes impartially upon all as the primary drivers of acts of states.

Note: This book on page 382 makes a case that war is an idea of man, not of God. The US Constitution, 2000 years later fixed that mistake. 21st century liberal America appear poised to remake that same mistake. Power is not of strength Andreia but of previous combination of dominion over ideas and way of life. If one loses his way of life, liberty, his power is threatened of if not avenged then defeated.

And then in the end out of nowhere, within the pages of this book the author makes war about the complex nature of revenge, leaving the dynamics of ‘time’ and hybris as inconsequential. Lendon aside from the detailed spaghetti of events, is found a maddening author.