Summer Reading

With summer just around the corner (and my schedule becoming too hectic to plan out a better post) I decided to share a reading list comprised of some of my favorite works. Happy reading!

Ancient Authors

Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War

Xenophon - Hellenika

Aristotle - Politics & The Constitution of the Athenians

Arrian - Anabasis of Alexander

Varro - On Agriculture

Historical Theory and Methodology

Machiavelli - The Prince & Discourses on Livy

Hegel - Introduction to the Philosophy of History

Marx - The German Ideology & 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon 

Max Weber - The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations

Lenin - State and Revolution

M.I. Finley - The Ancient Economy & Ancient History: Evidence and Models

G.E.M. de Ste. Croix - The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World

Pyrrhus of Epirus, "first as tragedy, then as farce"

 *For a full background, see Plutarch's Biography in volume 1 of his "Lives".


        Every king and would-be king of the successor states emulated Alexander.  Pyrrhus of Epirus (319 - 272 BC) was said to have been the most spitting image.  Hellenistic emulation can be richly understood in the context of a quote from Marx, in the pages the his Eighteenth Brumiere, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." 

        Alexander wore the mask of Achilles, dragging him up from depths of foggy prehistory.  He did so in a manner reminiscent of Odysseus when he conjured the fallen warrior from Hades with the offering of spilled blood.  This emulation served the purpose of glorifying the Hellenic conquest of long-coveted horizons, of the beginning of a new phase in civilization.  The emulation of the successors, though, was superficial in every way; they styled their hair and cocked their heads in a similar fashion as the late king, but there was no substance to the act.  These kings - Bonapartist adventurers all - were representatives of social instability; a sign of weakness parading as strength.  

        Their Alexandrian masks were a parody of past events.  Pyrrhus was the most representative man of this age: the gentleman mercenary.  Plutarch, a main source for information on the Epirot's life, relates that Antigonus thought him the greatest living soldier "provided he live long enough".  His mercurial nature, military prowess, and audacity endeared him to foes and allies alike; in one famous incident, he undermined Demetrius' authority over his mercenary forces by his reputation alone, winning the battle before a shield had been struck.  The sometime-king's career was marked by exceptional military prowess, an unmatched ferocity in battle, and an ability to inspire.  In the end, he was the Alexander of decline.  

Pyrrhus

Western Adventures

        Alexander claimed the rich East, but Pyrrhus made the most spirited attempt at that other great frontier, "the Golden West".  In 280 BC, he crossed the Adriatic Sea with a large Greek army, including elephants, at the invitation of the citizens of the south Italian Greek city of Tarentum, at war with Rome.  Plutarch tells the ominous tale of a Tarentine citizen who, making a spectacle of himself in the assembly, said that others should follow his lead and enjoy their liberties because things will change when Pyrrhus comes to town.  Indeed they did.  he turned the city into a barracks and conscripted the reluctant propertied class into arms.  The decadent ruling class was not used to answering to condetierri like their new general and many abandoned their city.  

        The allied army, said to be more than 30,000 strong, smashed into the Romans at Heraclea and eked out a victory.  After wintering in Campania, the two armies met once more in a two-day bloodbath at Asculus, a battle so famously brutal that the outcome has been immortalized in the phrase "Pyrrhic victory".  The uneasy truce that followed, coupled with the loss of an irreplaceable layer of his troops, caused the Epirot to search for a new, more lucrative opportunity.

        Opportunity came from Sicily.  He was able to intervene on behalf of the Greek cities in one of their many wars with the Carthaginians.  Sicily had long been a war zone, split between the two great Greek and Punic zones of influence.  Revolution and intestine struggles between different camps in the property owning class had plagued the cities throughout the 3rd century and foreign intervention (Corinth) along with the constant threat of war from Carthage left the rich cities exhausted.  Roaming bands of mercenaries terrorized the countryside and tyrants lorded over the aristocratic families.  This kind of chaos was the natural habitat for a condottiero.  

        Syracuse and Leontini, the most powerful states on the island, offered him kingship and others quickly followed.  He led the Greeks against the Punic cities in the West, distinguishing himself by acts of personal bravery, and the Carthaginians sued for peace - he refused any terms.  But his fortunes quickly changed.  Seeing that the allied Greeks were abandoning him, he left again for Tarentum.  After one last bloody contest with a Roman legion, he cut his loses and returned to the mainland where intervened in Peloponnesian affairs until his death in battle.  

The Man of His Age

         As I have previously claimed, the Hellenistic Age was characterized by Bonapartist regimes.  These came either in the guise of local tyranny or Macedonian kingship and always represented the rule of the sword over society.  I will discuss the model of Hellenistic society more thoroughly in a future post, just bear with me for now.  The rise of these regimes displaced the Greek propertied class from their political position and ended the domination of the polis.  In their place stood cliques of gangsters and adventurers who squeezed the ruling class financially while humiliating them politically.  Warfare took center stage in politics and economics alike; the kings financed their enormous campaigns with loot and treasuries siezed by the same wars.  Mercenaries and pirates found regular employment and even seem to have used their clout to demand a ten-month campaign year.  Fortunes changed quickly and always by the sword.  

        Pyrrhus was a violent adventurer and a high-stakes gambler, certainly no Alexander.  It was in this guise that the Greeks finally made their bid for Italy, and no sum of mercenaries or elephants could have changed the outcome: Pyrrhus, despite his ferocity, was the model figure of the rot at the core of the Greek social structure; a healthy Roman ruling class could still muster the strength of the citizens to meet such a threat.  

        His behavior was characteristic of the type of glory-seeker who dominated the Greek world.  His army, supplemented with a large number of soldiers of fortune, was a volatile weapon and required booty and victory to assure their loyalty.  His position as king was just as volatile, always threatened by rival adventurers.  Alexander had the luxury of commanding a core of soldiers who could withstand sustained hardship, something that his successors nearly always lacked.  Demetrius' hardened core of veterans who followed him to the end of a long road of reverses is a notable exception.  A violent death while seeking a quick, profitable victory was the logical end of a regime sitting on such unsteady foundations.  


               

Machiavelli as Historical Thinker

"Machiavelli grips us.  But if by chance we want to grasp him, he evades us: he is elusive." -Althusser

        Machiavelli is, by my estimation, one of the great thinkers of the Western World.  However, he is not a popular figure.  His name conjures up banal phrases such as "the ends justify the means" and the perennially popular "Machiavellian" with its charge of cynicism and immorality.  To many, he is the diabolical thinker of dictatorship, unsuitable for a the ideal of peaceful bourgeois democracy.  Such a boogeyman is suitable only for frightening certain academics.  Questions over whether he ultimately supported a republic or a tyranny, or whether or not The Prince was written with satirical intent, are below the man and his method.  One can only wonder if some of his critics have ever read his work with anything near the level of sincerity with which he wrote.  

        My reading of of Macchiavelli is from the point of view of the philosophy of history.  Is Machiavelli a philosopher of history?  Is there a method by which he theorizes history?  These are the questions raised by Althusser  in his "Machiavelli and Us", a work that has to a large degree influenced my own reading, though I do not share all of his conclusions.  Althusser answered, as do I, in the affirmative.  There is a historical-philosophical base to his thought, one that is essential to grasping him in his proper place.  My thesis is that his place lies in the short list of the most important thinkers of History and that there is a consistent historical method in his works, a method mediates the political content.  The contribution is that of a materialist approach, and, more critically, a formulation of the unity of political necessity and historical reality. 

That short list of thinkers looks something like this:

Thucydides -> Machiavelli -> Hegel -> Marx

Political Method

        Our Italian certainly dealt with history on an intimate level and handled the material with instinctive clarity and a razor insight.  Yet, his work (here I am focused on Discourses, The Prince, and The Art of War) is primarily political in its aim.  This is where I will begin.  In order to recognize his philosophy of history, we must first formulate the political aim; without properly recognizing the latter, the former will not appear.  The issue is not that the political element has been traditionally overlooked but that it has most often been improperly placed within the structure of his works.  An overemphasis on the political buries the historical and renders the system unintelligible.  A consequence of the deviation is an interposition of morality on the part of the reader which renders Machiavelli incoherent and contradictory.

        The title of the final chapter in The Prince clearly states the broad aim: Exhortation to deliver Italy from foreign barbarians.  Italy is the battlefield of the French, Spanish, and Swiss and its states are divided and in various levels of mismanagement and ruin.  Bands of mercenaries terrorize the countryside and hold states hostage to their services.  Gentleman adventurers plot and hedge their bets on foreign interventions against their neighbors.  A great prince, a world-historical individual, is needed to unify the peninsula under his command and to drive the foreigners out.  He considers Lorenzo de Medici to be just the man for the job.  

        He spends a great deal of time discussing the failures of states and their leaders.  What is needed is a new prince.  In the opening lines of Ch. 24 in The Prince we are told this explicitly: through studying all that was written previously, the new prince might be regarded with the same respect and honor as a hereditary prince.  The hereditary regime that can carry out the task does not exist.  Furthermore, he has already noted how apt new regimes are to fall, and his aim is to establish a state that will last (Althusser makes this point well).  The New Prince will unify the country with the vigor of a unique Great Man and hold it with the stability of a hereditary king.

       The New Prince is new in the broadest historical sense.  He is a break from the old, armed with the distilled gains of both antiquity and the middle ages.  Machiavelli spends a great deal of time conversing with the ancients, but he does not simply take the Roman Republic as a model to be emulated.  He reads Livy with his feet set firmly in the present.  The virtues of the ancients are extracted from their source so that they might be of use in a context that the author recognizes as unsuitable for simple repetition.  

      His process of extraction and synthesis is seen clearly in the treatment of military matters.  The New Prince cannot deliver Italy from foreign invaders without a proper tool, an army.  The Prince ends with a discussion on ways in which a Prince may exploit the military weakness of the foreign armies and gain fame for himself, The Art of War is concerned with the development of a new-model citizen army, and there is much discussion of military virtue and leadership in the Discourses.  In the Art of War, he acknowledges that the advances in military technology and technique would make the armament of the legionary useless.  So despite all of the tactical-technological detail in the work, the main thrust is given to the question of developing the most effective, reliable soldier through social-institutional change.  It is through studying the virtues of Roman society that the Prince will forge his weapon.  The analysis cuts through the particular of military conduct in order to arrive at the general and the general is profitable because it has the quality of transference.  

      Now, if a readers deviates toward the overemphasis of the political, then the process of historical distillation instead presents as moral.  The best soldier becomes the best soldier and so on.  The political factor is supported by the structure of the historical.  

Historical Method

        Machiavelli is difficult to grasp because he does not neatly formulate his method.  Instead, bits and pieces are sown across his works.  Nevertheless, the brilliance of the whole grips the reader and keeps him searching for the driving mechanics.  What we find is a materialist approach at the core of his thought.  There is a consistency which fuses the three pieces.  An outline of his historical method might look like the following:

1. Man acts based on a combination of necessity and personal capability, necessity being the compulsion to action and ability.
1. This is developed in Book I, Ch 1 of Discourses, "men act either out of necessity or by choice, and since ability is greater where choice has less authority", and more fully in Ch 25 of The Prince.  I would like to quote at length from the latter below.
2. "I compare [the balance of fate and will] to a swollen river...Everyone flies before the flood, and yields to its fury, unable to resist it;and notwithstanding this state of things, men do not when the river is in its ordinary condition provide against its overflow by dikes and walls, so that when it rises it may flow either in the channel provided for it, or at any rate its violence may not be entirely unchecked...It is the same with fortune who displays her power where there is no organized valor to resist her..."
2. States are subject to the constant drives of different groups
1. He does not recognize class as a category - he could not have - nor is he the first to recognize the different drives of nobles and commoners.  The depth of his thought on this point comes from viewing these drives as a constant and not just something that breaks out periodically.  
3. Therefore, they cycle through forms
1. In the the Discourses (1.2), Machiavelli gives an outline of the different types of government, and how social forces drive the changes from one to the other "forced by necessity or by the suggestion of some good man".  If any state could survive long enough, it would cycle through these forms over and over.  The state is in a constant state of change due to its social ingredients.  
4. The Great Man is great only so long as the conditions allow it
1. "Men almost always follow the beaten track of others...and yet cannot altogether follow the ways of others, nor attain the high qualities of those they imitate." (The Prince, Ch 6).  Every man is historical, hoping to imitate the great men of the past, but unable to do so.
2.  In the same chapter, he discusses the deeds of four men, Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus.  "We shall also find in examining their acts and lives, that they had no other favor from fortune but opportunity, which gave them the material which they could mold into whatever form seemed to them best; and without such opportunity the great qualities of their souls would have been wasted, whilst without those great qualities the opportunities would have been in vain."  He notes that "it was necessary for Cyrus to find the Persians dissatisfied with the rule of the Medes, and the Medes effeminate and enfeebled by long peace" and so on with the others.  Situation is a necessary prerequisite for the great man.  
3. He recognizes ( The Prince, Ch 7) that men attain power by fortune alone with regularity.  However, fortune is never enough to maintain the hold on power when challenged.
5. The historical situation poses the political question and furnishes the material to answer it 
1. He spends a great deal of time discussing the virtues of the ancients, but he is under no crude illusion that they can simply be replicated.  In the Art of War he notes as much - conditions have changed and they cannot become like they were in antiquity again!  Nor does he simply see all of antiquity as some golden age of good.  He recognized decline of virtu and general health under the principate.  Caesar is further connected (brilliantly) with the spread of mercenary service, a symptom of an unhealthy state.  
2. So, the task of the New Prince is a task posed by the real conditions of Italy, but he is educated by a serious reading of what allowed for the vitality and unity of Rome and armed with the transferable essence of virtu. 

        Charges of immorality miss their mark because morality plays little role in Machiavelli.  Neither his historical method or political goal rely on morality, except in how it might affect the longevity of the latter.  With him, politics is firmly rooted in the ground; the history of the state is theorized as something living.  He took lifted the veil of morality and saw historical events for what they were - read from the present and in light of present problems.  

        The intent was not to "learn from history", to use that hollow phrase repeated in every classroom.  Nor is there any scholarship for its own sake in his works.  Machiavelli approached history with a set of conditions in order to make it useful.  He has never been forgiven for that.

Reading the Iliad

      Reading the Iliad

      The Iliad is Western civilization's first piece of literature, and it remains one of its most troubling.  Each generation must face the work's challenges in turn: its unabashed, unflinching brutality, the meandering narrative with its mysterious themes, and its alien characters upon a misty, indistinct landscape.  Yet, the poem has never ceased to reel men in with its visceral humanity and dizzying synthesis of divine glamour and naked objectivity.  I am among its victims, struck dumb by its force and puzzled by its motives.  But, after a number of close readings and some consideration of relevant literary criticism, I feel up to the task of registering some of my conclusions and unfinished thoughts alike.

The Rage of Achilles

      The author famously reveals the work's subject in the first word, μῆνιν, rage, the rage of Achilles.  But his rage, whipped onward by the favor of the gods, is something more than human.  It would be very easy for a reader to characterize the son of Peleus as "angry", "hurt", or even "childish", and many have indeed waved him away with such simplifications - his characterization in the 2004 film "Troy" is such a case - but these descriptors find no subject here.  The rage of Achilles is divine - "godlike" - and it is solitary; Achilles is the most solitary man in the world.  

      He is the least relatable man in the epic, an avatar of martial violence and as aloof as a god in his rage; Agamemnon describes him as "the most violent man alive".  While the armies clash on the field of battle, he sits by the ships and smolders.  While encamped Achilles dreams of battle, wanting nothing more than to return to his element and sow black death, but denies his mortal drives.  The best among men, Diomedes, Odysseus, and Hektor, feel the pull of duty and honor among peers - or at least the fear of consequences; The gods, unchanging and unthreatened in Olympus, however, are not constrained by such concerns.  They intervene without concern in the lives of men, separated always by a gulf of immortality and timelessness.  Achilles, in his rage, also sits free from the affairs of his allies and enemies; he has already given up the hope for nostos - homecoming - and fumes at being denied the full weight of his heroic death-drive.  His rage is something greater than the limited emotional effect of Agamemnon's insult.  To understand Achilles as "god-like", the topics of violence and heroism must be confronted head-on.  

"The Rage of Achilles" Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Violence

       It is the poem's violence, described with the anatomical precision of a physician, that strikes the modern reader.  

With that he hurled and Athena drove the shaft and it split the archer's nose between the eyes - it cracked his glistening teeth, the tough bronze cut off his tongue at the roots, smashed his jaw and the point came ripping out beneath his chin. (5.321-5)

      Some have asked whether or not Homer celebrates violence or condones war - but such inquiries cannot be answered with any satisfaction, since Homer rejects their premises.  He does not justify the killing with any moral obligation to necessity or an appeal to a greater good, but shows it to us as it is.  This constitutes the enormous intellectual chasm of some 2700 years.  In Homer's world, early Archaic Greece, war and peace did not occupy distinct areas of activity; war was interwoven with the daily activities of society.  War was as much a normal function of economics and trade as farming, and the taking of slaves may have inspired pity, but it it never bred an abolitionist.

      The impression that the modern inhabitant of an advanced country has of war is that it is an unusual state, contrasting in every regard with the habitual rhythms of peacetime, that which is "normal".  Devastation is condemned and regretted, only made palatable if it can be justified with appeals to necessity or harm-reduction.  It takes place in a defined zone, often "over there", within the confines of a militarized zone.  Those who fight are supposed to be there, trained and in uniform.  The families back home expect regular communications, scheduled grants of leave, and mental health screenings for their "well-greaved" citizen warriors.  Perhaps the only way that a modern reader knows how to engage with the unjustified brutalities of Homer's heroes is to ask what the ultimate effect is, and whether or not he is hiding a sense of moral indignation.  But no comfort will come from seeking that which is not there.  

      If the sympathetic description of deaths on both sides of the Trojan War offer what seems like a glimpse of humanity at the tale's core, this is no mistake; the other side of the bourgeois morality of war is that the enemy is dehumanized for the sake of the ally.  Naturally, when there is a justified cause for which to engage in the awful business of organized violence, the side of right must be celebrated at the expense of wrong.  There are no "bad guys" in the Iliad, so our narrator is free to pity the fate of every soul who is sent to an early death.  And death is often pitiful in the Iliad; as in actual warfare, there is rarely dignity in the crush of the front lines.  See the fate of Chersidamas: 

Odysseus caught him up under the bulging shield with a jabbing spear that split him crotch to navel - the man writhed in the dust, hands clutching the earth (11. 501-3)

      Historically, Homer presents us also with a view of battle free from abstraction.  He wrote in a the world before generals or written works on tactics and strategy, his captains are nothing more than tribal front-fighters inspiring their men through speeches and personal bravery.  Historians have struggled to find a clear description of the mode of fighting in Homer's world, and part of the difficulty lies in the fact that war was not yet theorized in 700 BC.  We see what the combatant sees: chaos.

      The Hero

      The modern reader cannot help but notice that Homer's heroes are remarkably unheroic.  Achilles thinks only of his own fate, Odysseus and Menelaus feel no remorse at killing helpless men and prisoners, and even civilized Hektor pokes fun at the death pangs of his enemies.  The modern hero is worthy of praise due to the morality of his character or actions.  The flawed hero is a popular trope that allows an internally flawed character to redeem himself through the pureness of his actions.  The Greek hero, however, is not bound to, or defined by, morality.  

      The Greek hero is defined by his deeds as such, and by death.  Death in the Iliad is not dressed up in any religious sentimentality, it is simple oblivion.  When a character is killed, they are "cut down", "slaughtered", or their "life breath [leaves their] bones", but there is never a promise of heaven, no comfort in the end of war's labors.  Achilles proves the greatest hero because he gives up longevity and the sureness of life in order to embrace the abyss of death.  Immortality of the spirit after death, which has always been the comfort of those who follow the Judeo-Christian tradition, is absent for the Greeks.  The only path to immortality, bar being made into a god (not a likely end), is through the hero's sacrifice.  The ancient hero cults sang odes to their subjects so that they might live forever through their accomplisment.  Machiavelli (The Prince) recognized this tendency in the religion of antiquity and asked if perhaps it provided an ideological impetus to the accomplishment of great deeds.

      Sloterdijk (2009) wrote that "the early heroes are celebrated soley as doers of deeds and achievers of acts."  The heroes' refusal to be made subject to the tyranny of nature (death included), was a symbol of the achievement of civilization, which is the gradual tearing away of man from animal.   A hero's deeds were the proof of history before there was history. 

      Achilles' rage functions as the propulsion to action, the kinetic element in the doing of deeds.  Rage creates a singularity of the corporeal hero and the immortal deed, removing the considerations, second thoughts, and mortal trembling that mark the human element in other characters.  So, its function reveals why it is worthy of the muse's song: it is the primeval stuff of action, a cable between the plans of the gods and the events of humanity.  

Jackal-headed Anubis

      The support of the gods can also be read in the same light.  "The Greeks made their gods in their own image.  That had not entered the mind of man before.  Until then, gods had no semblance of reality.  They were unlike all living things. (Hamilton, 1942)"  The gods of the Eastern civilization were the cold, animal forces of nature, but, with the Greeks they ceased to be the representation of natural forces.  The gods thought, changed their minds, quarreled, and lusted.  Man was at the center of the Greek universe.  Bernard Knox (1990), wrote that in the epics, divine favor is "not a randomly bestowed benefit, but an advantage that expressed and reinforces a mortal's inherent qualities  and his or her ability to command the help of other mortals."  The hero was the medium through which the gods worked, even so they did not represent dead nature, but the vibrancy of humanity.

      Still, the gods were immortal, and the death of bystanders did not bother them as they sought their goals.  Neither does Achilles, in his rage, feels a connection to the world of men.  He has accepted death and becomes like a god of war after taking to the field once more.  He does not even shirk from human sacrifice.  When one of Priam's sons begs for his life, the answer is

 Fool, don't talk to me of ransom.  No more speeches.  Before Patroclus met his day of destiny, true, it warmed my heart a bit to spare some Trojans: droves I took alive and auctioned off as slaves.  But now not a single Trojan flees his death, not one of the gods hand over to me before your gates, none of all the Trojans, sons of Priam least of all! (21. 111-18)

Nearly all of the other heroes in the poem, no matter how great, feel the very human pangs of fear in the face of possible death.  Achilles despairs only at the assault of a god (21.308).  When Hektor seeks to reach an agreement with the rampaging hero, calling for the victor to return the body of the vanquished for a proper funeral, Achilles snarls "there are no binding oaths between men and lions. (22. 310)"  The tunnel-vision of heroic rage is never more pronounced than at this moment.

      It is only when confronted with the bravery of Priam, begging for the body of his son, that Achilles can regain his humanity.  He remembers his own father.  Hector, the scourge of the Achaean forces and Troy's last line of defense, is dead and his place in the songs of the hero cult is secured.  The godlike rage is spent and the emotions of a mortal wash over him.  Mortals can be killed.  

I have not touched upon the historicity of Homer because I do not believe that it affects the content of the entry.  But for an excellent, brief, exploration of the arguments and evidence can be found in Bernard Knox's excellent Introduction to the Pengiun Classics edition of Fagles' translation (1991).  A deeper exploration of the historicity of Homer can be found in Finley's The World of Odysseus.

While the Fagles translation is classic and very good, some might find Stanley Lombardo's 1997 edition to be an interesting, energetic take.  

Mercenaries and Bonapartists

Mercenaries and Bonapartists: Unraveling the Contradictions of Ancient Greek Class Society

        I have written quite a bit about the social forces that drove the ascent of the Greek world and its subsequent decline.  I have insisted upon their precise formulation.  There is a reason for the belabored approach, though.  These concepts are complex and lie outside the normal language and intellectual frame of the history we learn in school; they are the product of an unfamiliar mode of thought.  As a Marxist, I often find myself exasperated with the span of space and time that I need to cover on a subject before getting to a relatively simple point.  The truth is that when working from the Marxist perspective, there are no easy answers or simple conversations about history; in the classroom, I most often find myself rejecting the premise of the questions asked or points made, so any answer has to build its own framework.  We speak and think with constructs and concepts, and with casual ease because they are generally understood.  But, when we must explain such complex phenomena as human behavior in history, the simple concepts are insufficient and we must turn to more complicated and nuanced ones.  All of these are built with certain abstractions, and abstractions out of tendency in concrete phenomena.  The philosophies most commonly employed in schools and everyday life, though, are often incompatible with the Marxist philosophy, which builds its own constructs, often with a long series of intermediate abstractions between them and the perceivable.  Inevitably, the result is a cognitive dissonance.  So, the burden is upon the Marxist to constantly elaborate the basic building blocks of our thought.  The philosophy provides us with the most precise and accurate intellectual tools, but it is not grasped instinctively.

        I put a good deal of energy into writing an entry, between research, note-taking, and the long process of grappling with the concepts themselves - this is largely responsible for the irregularity of my content production.  This post will deal with many of the themes that I have explored in the past, especially in the Alexander articles, but in a more precise manner.  Given the difficult subject matter and my wish to keep these entries relatively short, I hope that the reader will forgive some amount of backtracking and overlap. 

        Ancient Greek society, like ours, was composed of social classes.  "Class" has been rendered almost meaningless by way it is commonly used in the mainstream news, by politicians and teachers.  It has become a measurement of income level, which tells one absolutely nothing at all about the individuals who fall into the brackets.  This entire way of thinking about class is arbitrary and hollow, amounting to the lack of a definition.  Classes are the social expression of the real relations of production, the relations that bring us into contact with one another on a daily basis; an individual's relation to production determines, broadly their class position.  Social class is not a precise measurement, and there are no neat lines to separate one from another - that kind of chart-making belongs to the academics.  The real world is a lot messier than income groupings. 

        In fact, it would be impossible to apply the method of measuring income to antiquity.  The way that we think about income, and about money, is firmly rooted in the workings of capitalism.  Money was of little importance to most Greeks, and there was always more demand for it than supply.  Finley (1973) noted that in a society where value was found primarily in the land, currency was often hard to come by, even for the ruling class of large landowners.  The trading of use-value items and payment-in-kind remained common practice in the rural areas of Greece for the whole of antiquity.
  
        Class plays a large part in explaining the interrelated phenomena of mercenaries and tyrants in the late Classical and Hellenistic Greek world.  By examining their causes, I will explain some of the forces driving the decline of Greek civilization.  I have chosen to focus mainly on the aspects of the subject that most affected the whole.

Mercenary Service

        War and economy have never been completely separate realms of activity.  This was especially true of the ancient world, where trade and piracy, taxation and armed robbery, were often one and the same.  Warfare was not only a consequence of the drive for wealth and access to land, but wealth and land were counted among the spoils of a successful campaign.  Individual soldiers could expect to come home with some booty of their own, especially the general, but the state took its share, too: half.  War was good business for most of those involved - on the side of the victors, that is.  Many farmer-warriors marched off to battle with hopes of coming home with a little something of value.

         The word “soldier” is an inappropriate label for the Greek man-at-arms for this time period; to the modern reader, it conjures up a series of associations that serve only to misrepresent the men and their place on the battlefield.  The modern soldier of the advanced capitalist world is disciplined, trained to fairly rigorous physical and technical standards, and (importantly for them) paid for their service.  The Greek warrior of the Archaic and Classical periods was none of these. If there is something more “modern” or familiar about the Greek hoplite than his Asian counterparts, it is certainly not due to his being more professional or soldier-like.  The typical classical army was a grouping of armed amateurs; training was deemed inferior to battle experience and the occasional drilling of citizen youths was considered enough. 

        As mentioned in the "Hoplite Heresies" articles, the Classical Greek city-state relied on its citizens to provide for their own arms and armor.  Payment for military service (the navy was something else) was not instituted with any regularity until well into the 4th century.  Even then, a good deal of this payment is better understood as a subsidy to pay for food and supplies on the road.  A basic shield and spear cost about 25-30 drachmas, or about a month’s earnings for an artisan (Hans van Wees, Greek Warfare, 52), while a full bronze panoply is estimated at around 100 drachmas, or three months earnings for that same artisan.  So, there was, in reality, a minimum wealth requirement for military service.  In the ancient economy this meant, in most cases, a requirement of land ownership.  Yes, the landless and destitute of the polis could serve as psiloi, literally "light guys", skirmishing with javelins and slingshots, but there was little social honor in doing so, and one would usually be serving alongside resident foreigners and slaves.  
 

Psiloi (http://johnnyshumate.deviantart.com)

        
     

       For a period, this method of military service worked, as evidenced the fact that it remained virtually untouched until the Peloponnesian War. The war was one of those "epoch making" conflicts, a "world war" if you will, in which the old is violently marked off from something new. Along with the Persian Wars, it bookmarks the "golden age" of Classical Greece. Like the two world wars of the 20th century, it was a violent explosion that resulted from many sharp and deep contradictions that had simmered just under the surface of society. I will not give an account of that terrible conflict here, but for the purposes of the essay, will recognize how it affected the military practices of antiquity, and how in turn the war was effected by social changes.


          Clausewitz (1832) tells us that a state will pursue a war with expenditure of social and financial resources in proportion to how dire the consequences of losing would be.  The conflicts between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian had been of limited scale and scope: Athenian campaigning in the Aegean against Persia, the usual border conflicts and raiding between Greek states, etc.  But, during the war of 431- 405, everything was on the line for the ruling classes of all the major combatants.  The Spartans emptied out the Peloponnese, marshaling an impressive allied army, some 50,000 strong and mostly of heavy infantry, on Attica in the summer of 431.  When the Athenians refused battle and countered with coastal raids on the Peloponnese, one of history's most classic examples of stalemate ensued.  The thing about a citizen militia, especially one that consisted mainly of farmers, is that they cannot stay in the field forever, but must return to their work.  As the war spread across the Greek world, horrible sieges and year-round campaigning called for a different type of troop.  So, the war marked the first case of wide-spread mercenary use among Greek combatants.  In a previous post on Alexander, I outlined the growth of mercenary service to meet the demand and its connection to social changes, but the world left in the wake of the war accelerated these processes. 

      A further sign that the traditional system of military service was breaking under stress was the development of specially trained hoplite corps in cities like Argos and Thebes during the 4th century.  Previously, only Spartan citizens engaged in any real training.  Furthermore, Athens began supplying arms to its male citizens, as well as minimal training.  States were no longer willing to risk their wealth and power on farmers' bravery, and fewer of those farmers could even afford to arm themselves.

      Land concentration was a constant process throughout antiquity, especially given the level of insecurity that loomed over most peasants in even good times.  The majority of citizen-peasants produced on a subsistence level, with a very limited ability to pay debt or weather a disaster.  Disaster often led to the peasant falling into debt to the large landowners, and that debt led to ruin.  Ironically, the more politically free a peasant was in antiquity, the less secure he was (Finley, 1973).  The process of ruin was accelerated by the widespread destruction that the war brought to the whole of the Greek peninsula for nearly three decades; there was hardly an arable region, from the backwaters of Arcanania and Elis to the Attic hinterland, that had not been trampled over by raiding bands and armies.  

        Behind the walls of Athens, peasants waited out the raiding Peloponnesian armies.  The marauders had a hard time killing green grain fields, olive trees, and grape vines (Hanson, 2005), but that does not mean that the farm's owners could simply return to work once the enemy went home.  The cost of repairing or replacing ruined fences, furniture, and houses, as well as dead livestock, added up quickly for most farmers, and for many it was too high to pay.  For the thousands who relied on rowing for the Athenian navy for work or supplementary income, the end of the empire was a terrible economic blow.  Likewise, the many large public works programs, which made use of every kind of skilled labor, were mourned by artisans.The wealthy generally had plenty of resources to repair their properties, and since many were involved in other ventures such as funding trading expeditions, leasing out slave gangs, or political money-lending, they were still aquiring wealth.  We see how in Athens, the most wealthy and populous polis, land concentration and pauperization undermined the social structure of democracy - one can imagine the effect of long-term war on the more backward and non-urban regions of Greece. 

          The war brought revolutions, outbreaks of plague, the destruction of entire cities, and the period that followed was one of continuing warfare and instability.  Thirty years of war had solved nothing; it merely heralded the end of the ascendency of the polis.  States rose and fell, desperately throwing all they had into their bid for supremacy.  By this point, the mercenary was a common sight on the battlefield, not only in "old Greece", but in the East and West.  For those citizens who could not hope to gain a living through agriculture, there was no other work; skilled labor and trade were primarily in the hands of resident foreigners, and the former employed slaves in their workshops, and those looking to earn a wage could only find work helping during the harvest.  So, thousands turned to mercenary work, which was in demand and could be lucrative.  

        The records of Greek mercenary service go back to the Bronze Age, when a pharaoh of Egypt employed a group of "men of bronze"; it was not a new phenomenon in itself.  The new element was the scale, which was determined by the two factors discussed above.  First, the ambitions of the Greek ruling classes to gain supremacy, in order to access the whole wealth of the trade routes, drove war past the military bounds of its old, tribal, forms.  Second, the continuing process of land concentration threw more men into pauperism, creating a reliable recruiting pool.

        Greeks were known to make good fighting men, and they found good work in the East.  Xenophon, in his account of the famous Ten Thousand Greek mercenaries in Persian service at the end of the 5th century, notes that the largest contingents came from the poor regions in the Peloponnese, such as Arcadia.  Among the whole of the that force, hardly 50 full sets of bronze armor could be put together: for every affluent adventurer (Xenophon) there were thousands of landless carrying little more than a spear and shield.  Xenophon's group was not the last in Persian service, Greeks remained a mainstay of the empire's infantry; Alexander fought a large group of them at the Battle of the Granicus River (334).

        Mercenaries also found a comfortable home in the West, "Magna Graecia", very often in the employ of a species of man that they would forever be linked with: the Tyrant.

Bonapartists 

         The instability of the period following the Peloponnesian War cut to the core of society, pushing on all tectonic fault lines of civilization.  Revolution and counter-revolution were common events as different wings of the ruling class plotted against one another.  In the crowded cities, the masses of landless poor seethed.  They were a cancer at the heart of the polis, incendiary, declassed elements who consumed and did not produce.  

        Every class society suffers from core contradictions that eventually lead to its end.  In classical antiquity, the land concentration that continued through the centuries, coupled with the primacy of slave and other forms of compulsory labor, brought about the crisis of long decline; men who had no hope of earning a livelihood on the land trickled into the crowded cities.  Revolution and counter-revolution were common occurrences in public life.  The ruling class of large landowners could no longer govern; they had undermined their base of stability through driving the peasantry into ruin.  Their wars exhausted the population and increased the rate of wealth polarization.  In fact, the wars of the 5th and 4th centuries endangered the whole social existence of the ruling classes, as evidenced by the ruin of Sparta by Thebes in 371. 
        
       Revolutions and instability lead us the question of the role of the state.  Ultimately, a state arises alongside social classes as a means for the ruling class to maintain the social relations which allow them to rule.  The definition is general and abstract; the typical state structure varies between different modes of society, and even at different points in the same society.  The state in Imperial Athens differed greatly from that of Persia, given the historical development of the two differing modes of society.  The military, bureaucracy, and means of enforcing the law all represent the organs of the state.  

        The state is an historical necessity for the ruling class, but that does not mean a simple equation of "Ruling Class = State".  The threat of Bonapartism, which is when the state raises itself above the contending classes, balancing itself between them, is inherent in the bureaucracy and organs that make up the state.  So, the institutions which rose to protect the rule of a class, can quickly turn around and face them as an enemy, wrenching control of society away for a period.  

        Bonapartism is a complex phenomenon, each regime having its own character, but I broadly organize them into regimes of an ascendent society and those of one in decline.  Marx offers us a brilliant glimpse at the role of an ascendent Bonapartist regime in his Eighteenth Brumiere of Louis Napoleon.  The coup of Louis-Napoleon in 1851 was a reaction to the revolutionary movements of 1848, a messy series of events in which the nascent bourgeoisie clashed with both the remnants of feudalism and the growing power of the working class.  A class is tied together by their common place in the process of production, and so pushed and pulled by the same forces and interests, but that does not mean that there is a consciousness among them; the Greek large land-owners, like the modern bourgeoisie, were a cannibalistic class.  The bourgeois state was perfected gradually through their revolutions against the aristocracy, but not always through their own leadership - they often needed to be pushed.  Louis-Napoleon's regime played the role of "armed arbiter", restoring social order and leaving behind a stronger state apparatus for the bourgeois to take back in the future.  Often, it takes a strong man to play the role of battering ram of history.

        Why talk about Napoleon III?  Because he provides a parallel to Solon and other early Greek tyrants.  These men came from various middling social backgrounds and played armed arbiter to the class struggles in the advanced areas, breaking the rule of the aristocracy and organizing the state for the rule of private property ( de Ste. Croix, 1989).  The class struggle in Athens c. 600 was, on the one hand, a struggle between the peasantry and the aristocracy, and then also between the aristocracy and the middling class of merchants and traders rivaling them in wealth.  The resulting impasse and chaos brought arbiters and strong men to the surface - reformers and law-givers who developed the state and restored order.  The bonapartist regime is, first and foremost, one of crisis.

        Solon gave legal and economic concessions to all classes involved, a common trait among bonapartists, but they also tended to attain their position on the support of the lower layers of society.  Solon's first act was to cancel all debts, which was a major demand of the peasantry. Peisistratos, the tyrant who followed Solon, likewise rode a wave of popular support from below.  Above all, these facts tell us that the ruling class did not have the strength to keep control of its own state during these periods of growth and change.  The Greek world was expanding both geographically and economically, and bursting the old bounds of the archaic states. 

 Tyrants

       Thucydides provides us with our first clear reflection on the subject, 

As Greece became more powerful and the acquisition of wealth became more important than before, tyrannies were established in most of the poleis - previously there had been hereditary kingship with specified privileges - revenues increased, and the Greeks began to construct navies and look towards the sea (1.12)

The bonapartist regimes of the tyrants were the battering ram for the rule of private property, clearing away the base of power of the nobility.  No Greek state had a written constitution in the middle of the 7th century; the tyrants were often law-givers and state-builders.  Cypselus of Corinth reorganized the tribal structure and his son introduced a boule (council), and passed laws to limit expenditure and display among the wealthy (aimed at the old sceming nobility).  Other tyrants followed suit.  These men generally came from within the ranks of the aristocracy but often rose up by positioning themselves as champions of the commoners during periods of class struggle; Dionysius is a good example of this.  Gelon, the first tyrant of Syracuse, came to rule the city through a revolution (485) during which the common people forced the aristocracy out of the city.  The exiles appealed to Gelon, who was reigning as tyrant of neighboring Gela, and seeing an opportunity, he seized the polis with his mercenary force.  In this example, he took advantage of the chaos by intervening on the nobles' behalf, but it did not change a thing about the nature of his regime. 

      As mentioned, mercenaries and tyrants enjoyed something of a symbiotic existence.  This was most readily seen in the West of the Greek world, Sicily and South Italy.  Here, there were specific regional factors that interacted with the universal contradictions in slave society to create an atmosphere of crisis, fear, and instability that was ideal for the propagation of tyrannies.  The Greek world can generally be considered a frontier society, clinging to the sea and interacting in various ways with their inland neighbors.  In the West, they lived alongside Carthaginians, Gauls, Etruscans, Sicels, and various native populations, often in the same cities.  The ongoing wars between the Punic and Greek cities brought drew thousands of mercenaries to Sicily and provided a continual catalyst for social strife.  Dionysius, the archetypical Classical tyrant, famously took advantage of the chaos of war to seize power, as did others before and after him.

      Machiavelli described the destructive role played by mercenaries: they must either be constantly employed, draining funds, or the state must deal with roving bands of armed and desperate men in the countryside.  Warzones attract mercenaries looking for work, and the West brought those desperate men from all over the Mediterranean and even darker Europe.  Tyrants were happy to employ them, but even they were eventually forced with the lose-lose choice of keeping them or letting them go.  So, they often gave them what they wanted - land and citizenship - which then further strengthened the political position of the despot.  Gelon enfranchised some 10,000 mercenaries during his seven year reign.  That the above lay at the core of the relationship between mercenaries and tyrants is confirmed in the events following the overthrow of Syracusan tyrant Thrasybulus (466), the new democratic goverment, headed by the sons of the ruling class, refused to grant access to public office to the "new citizens" enrolled by Gelon and Hieron; these new citizens were largely former mercenaries, and many were not of Greek stock.  Through this measure they hoped to stamp out the greatest social support for the disposed regime.  

      This relationship proved fruitful, and during the late 5th and 4th centuries, as the deepening of societal crisis caused a second great wave of tyrannies, it also bred a large recruiting pool of mercenaries.  Democracy is often the mode of government most associated with Greece, but most states at most times in their history were oligarchies or tyrannies.  Though tyranny features prominently in our sources during the 4th and 3rd centuries, scholars sometimes overlook the fact that it never went away during the 5th century.  These regimes always existed in the more marginal areas of Greece.  Similarly, bonapartist military regimes exist in our world even during periods of relative peace and stability in the advanced nations.  The next phase of bonapartists and mercenaries was played out in wars of the diadochi and the Successor kings with their giant armies, a period that lies outside the limited scope of this entry.  

      Perhaps I will dig deeper into the phenomenon of tyranny in a later entry, since there is quite a bit more to say, but I hope the above reflections are clear in expressing their substance.