February 9

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by gerryadmin

Excerpts from the Peloponnesian War

For a historian one of the most interesting passages comes from the attempt by Thucydides to date the moment that the war started. The ancient Mediterranean lacked a universal calendar and you can see in this excerpt the problem that caused:

For fourteen years, the thirty year’s peace which was concluded after the recovery of Euboea remained unbroken. But in the fifteenth year, when Chrysis the high priestess of Argos was in the 48th year of her priesthood, Zenesias was ephor of Sparta and Pythdorous had four months of his archonship to run at Athens, in the tenth month after the engagement at Potidaea at the beginning of spring, about the first watch of the night, an armed force of somewhat more than 300 Thebans entered Plataea, a city of Boeotia, which was an ally of Athens.
 
Thucydides was very much of the Henry Kissinger realist school of international relations:
 

Abstinence from all injustice to other first-rate powers is a greater tower of strength than anything that can be gained by the sacrifice of permanent tranquillity for an apparent temporary advantage.

The only sure basis of an alliance is for each party to be equally afraid of the other.

[Y]ou know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Let him remember that many before now have tried to chastise a wrongdoer, and failing to punish their enemy have not even saved themselves; while many who have trusted in force to gain an advantage, instead of gaining anything more, have been doomed to lose what they had. Vengeance is not necessarily successful because wrong has been done, or strength sure because it is confident; the incalculable element in future exercises the widest influence, and the most treacherous, and yet in fact the most useful of all things, as it frightens us all equally, and thus makes us consider before attacking each other.

And a sadly prophetic look at the tone of today’s social and political discourse:

Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation held to a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either do break up your party and afraid of your adversaries.

February 8

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by gerryadmin

Thucydides in context

There is a pleasant story told by Hobbes that says that when young Thucydides, son of Olorus, heard Herodotus giving a reading from his Persian Wars in Athens, the lad burst into tears. The old historian is said to have complimented the boy’s father on having a son who had shown such a natural gift for learning. We don’t know if this tale is true but we do have some facts about the life of the man who was to become the second great historian.

Thucydides was born before 455 BC to a rich Athenian family related to the famous political leaders Miltiades and Cimon. He rose to a position of wealth (owning gold mines in Thrace) and considerable political power himself in his native city, being elected to the Board of Generals in 424 BC when Athens was in the midst of its great war with Sparta, a war which Thucydides had already begun to record. Unfortunately Thucydides failed in a military mission by being unable to save Amphipolis from the Spartans and as a punishment he was driven into exile. He spent his 20 years in exile writing his history of the Peloponnesian War and spent part of this exile among his old enemies which allowed him to see the viewpoints of the Spartan side. The details of his death are uncertain. In some accounts he dies at sea after leaving Athens in disgust at the rule of the Thirty Tyrants; some say he died in Thrace; some say he was murdered in Athens shortly after the end of the war. What we do know is that his Peloponnesian War was unfinished at his death and unpublished. It soon became well known and three Greek historians all tried their hands at finishing it: Xenophon, Cratippus and Theopompus.

 Unlike Herodotus of Halicarnassus whose city had been occupied by, and cooperated with the Persians, Thucydides was a man of mainland Greece and its most powerful city Athens, the saviour (in its own eyes and those of Herodotus) of Greek civilization. The notion of the polis or city-state was the dominant political idea in the Greek world: few Greeks could conceive of a higher loyalty than to one’s own city and the disunity of the Greeks, so harmful during its war with the Persians, continued after the Persian menace receded in 479 BC. The short-lived and touchy wartime cooperation between Sparta and Athens soon began to erode. Athens went on to establish, at the instigation of Aristides in 477 BC, a confederation with smaller cities and Greek islands whose intention was to recapture control of the Aegean and drive the Persians out of Ionia, liberating the Greeks of Asia Minor. The confederacy was called the Delian League because its treasury and assembly were held on the sacred island of Delos. What started as an alliance, before long became an Athenian empire. The commanders of the military force were Athenians; Athens decided who was to provide ships and who was to provide money; and Athens decided how that money was to be spent — in fact much of it would come to be spent on rebuilding Athens and strengthening the democratic forces in the city. The League muscled Sparta out of Byzantium, chased the last Persian garrisons back across the Hellespont and drove the Persians back from their Mediterranean bases in Ionia. At the same time Athens kept its so-called allies on a short leash and allowed them little independent action; they were particularly discouraged from seceding from the League. The leadership of the Greek world was thus passing from conservative, land-based Sparta to democratic, sea-based Athens. The Peloponnesian War was a result of the tensions this new situation engendered.

February 7

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by gerryadmin

Herodotus set himself the task of determining the cause of the conflicts between the Greeks and the eastern barbarians which had recently manifested itself in two Persian invasions of Hellas. The first had been repelled at Marathon in 490 BC by the Athenians, and by a combined fleet at Salamis in 480 BC and by a united army at Plataea the next year. Thus, his book is known variously as The Persian Wars or The Histories (from the Greek for “inquiries” or “researches”.)

These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and barbarians from losing their due portion of glory; and to put on record what were the grounds of the feud.

I know that human happiness never remains long in the same place.

Now these Egyptians had done their guard duty for three years, and no one released them from it. So they took counsel together, and by general decision they all deserted and made for Ethiopia. Psammetichus heard of it and pursued them. When he came up with them, he entreated them mightily; he would have them, he said, not desert their household gods and their wives and children. At this, it is said, one of their number showed him his prick and said, “Wherever I have this, I will have wives and children.” So they took themselves off to the king of the Ethiopians and surrendered themselves to him, who gave them a gift in return.

In peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.

For if one should propose to all men a choice, bidding them select the best customs from all the customs that there are, each race of men, after examining them of all, would select those of his own people; thus all think that their own customs are by far the best.

It is better to be envied than pitied.

If the Greeks were given side dishes, say the Persians, they would never stop eating. They are very addicted to wine, and it is forbidden to vomit or make water in the presence of anyone else. They keep very strictly to this practice, too: that they are wont to debate their most serious concerns when they are drunk. But whatsoever they decide on, drunk, this the master of the house where they are when debating proposes to them again on the next day, when they are sober. And if they like it, too, when sober, they act on it; but if they do not like it so, they let it be. And whatever they debate, in preliminary fashion, sober, they give to final decision drunk.

The Spartans fought a memorable battle; they made it quite clear that they were the experts, and that they were fighting against amateurs.

[The Spartans] made it plain to everyone, however, and above all to the King himself, that although he had plenty of troops, he did not have many men.

This is the bitterest pain among men, to have much knowledge but no power.

The Scythians take cannabis seed, creep in under the felts, and throw it on the red-hot stones. It smolders and sends up such billows of steam-smoke that no Greek vapor bath can surpass it. The Scythians howl with joy in these vapor-baths, which serve them instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water.

February 6

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by gerryadmin

Some background to Herodotus and his Persian Wars

Herodotus  (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) was born in Halicarnassus, an Ionian city occupied by the Persian empire, at the eastern periphery of the Greek world where Greeks and foreigners met regularly, a place where a cosmopolitan attitude would have been natural. [But remember that the Greek word for foreigner was “barbarian”.] Herodotus came from a wealthy family, influential in politics and the arts — an uncle had written an epic poem called Ioniks on the foundation of the Ionian cities. Though the Persians were the city’s overlords, they had permitted a local tyrant to rule directly — this was the remarkable woman Artemisia (who appears played by Eva Green in the execrable movie 300 Rise of an Empire). Herodotus participated in an attempted coup against her and after its failure he was exiled. He returned later and, probably with the help of Athens, overthrew a tyranny led by Artemesia’s grandson but he found that he was unpopular with the citizenry and left his native city again. When the call when out for colonists to settle at Thurii in southern Italy in 443 BC, Herodotus volunteered along with the famous sophist Protagoras. He may well have died here, probably around the year 425 BC.

Exile was a common feature of life for prominent Greeks. Every city at any given time had citizens banished for a fixed time or forever, many of them scheming to return and work the same fate for their enemies. Athens institutionalized exile with its practice of ostracism and several of the heroic figures in Herodotus will be exiled by their city. Most such exiles however did not leave Greece but Herodotus seems to have been different in this regard. During his life in exile he made extensive travels through the Mediterranean world where he did his “researches” for his Persian Wars. We know he went to Egypt and made a trip to Tyre and Babylon, then all in the Persian empire; he voyaged into the Black Sea and into what is now the Ukraine and Russia, going 40 days journey up the Dnieper River. Ionia, Greece and southern Italy were all part of the Hellenic world which he knew personally. He does not seem to have spoken any other language than Greek (which may account for his credulity in some instances) and does not seem to have been an assiduous note-taker during his travels…”I seem to remember, etc.”

His book appears to have been written over a long period of time and amended more than once before its publication, which occurred sometime between 430-424 BC. It is a loosely-knit book with numerous digressions (deliberate and enjoyable). Such conventions were from Homer, on whom his audiences were brought up. It also points to the fact that it was meant to be read aloud; some sections are clearly meant for a stand-alone lecture — one of the ways that Herodotus earned his living during his exile. Silent reading was still relatively rare in any work longer than a letter. The Greeks and Romans reacted more responsively and immediately to the spoken word than we do. There is one source that claims that the Athenians voted Herodotus the sum of ten talents after hearing a part of his work. Now Persian Wars is a very pro-Athenian piece at a time when Athens was not popular but ten talents was an unbelievable fortune — 570 pounds of silver? We do know too that Thebes told him to take a hike and refused to let him speak to their young men but that Spartans were great fans of history — they hated thinking but they loved tales of war, politics and conflict.

The picture above shows a handsome modern historian clad in the Tilley hat that is the unmistakeable sign of a Canadian in foreign climes. He stands beside the bust of Herodotus in his home town, now known as Bodrum in southwestern Turkey. It’s a rather gaudy tourist site these days, most visitors coming for the gorgeous sea and the night clubs, but it contains a few memorials to Herodotus, some fragments of the Mausoleum that was once one of the Seven Wonders, and a splendid crusader castle.

February 5

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by gerryadmin

Who was the Father of History?

Historians have pondered this question for centuries. I’ve always favoured Herodotus who seems to have been the first to ask an important question about the past, undertake research to establish the truth, and to publish a book of his findings. There were many before him who wrote of past events, usually the deeds of kings or religious figures, but they lacked the inquisitorial method and first-hand observations of the man from Halicarnassus.

Thucydides has his partisans. He was certainly less credulous than Herodotus and omitted any reference to the supernatural in his writings. On the other hand, his reconstruction of what Greek leaders might have said is nothing I would applaud in historians working today.

Nevertheless, both of these guys are of enormous value to our understanding of the past and both are, in their own ways, charming writers. (And I have busts of both of them.) For the next couple of days I’ll feature chunks of their works for those of you who have not had the pleasure of their acquaintance.

A guide to distinguishing libertarians from conservatives

Home / Something Wise / A guide to distinguishing libertarians from conservatives
by gerryadmin

The libertarian takes the state for the great oppressor. But the conservative finds that the state is ordained of God. In Burke’s phrases, “He who gave us our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection. – He willed therefore the state – He willed its connexion with the source and original archtype of all perfection.” Without the state, man’s condition is poor, nasty, brutish, and short-as Augustine argued, many centuries before Hobbes. The libertarians confound the state with government. But government-as Burke continued-“is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.” Among the more important of those human wants is “a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individual, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can be done only by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue.” In short, a primary function of government is restraint; and that is anathema to libertarians, though an article of faith to conservatives.

— Russell Kirk

February 3

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by gerryadmin

1904 The birth of Pretty Boy Floyd

Depression-era America was a period in which its criminal element were figures of great public interest. The restrictions of Prohibition and the hardships of the Dirty Thirties helped persuade many law-abiding citizens that the nation’s outlaw class were latter-day Robin Hoods or at least celebrities worth reading about. The names of John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, and Ma Barker were on the lips of school children, reporters, politicians, and furious police officials.

One of the most famed of the banditti was Charles Arthur Floyd, aka “Pretty Boy”, fabled in literature, film, and song. Listen to his tale as recounted by Woody Guthrie:

Well gather round me children, a story I will tell
About pretty boy Floyd the outlaw, Oklahoma knew him well.
It was in the town of Shawnee on a Saturday afternoon
His wife beside him in the wagon as into town they rode.

Then along came the deputy sheriff in a manner rather rude
Using vulgar words of language, his wife she overheard.
Then pretty boy grabbed a long chain and the deputy grabbed a gun
And in the fight that followed he laid that deputy down.

Then he ran to the trees and bushes to live a life of shame
Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name.
He ran to the trees and bushes on the Canadian river shore
And many a starving farmer opened up his door.

It was in Oklahoma City, it was on a Christmas day
A whole carload of groceries with a letter that did say:
You say that I’m an outlaw, you say that I’m a thief
Well here’s a Christmas dinner for the families on relief.

As through this life you travel you meet some funny men.
Some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen.
As through this life you ramble, as through this life you roam
You’ll never see an outlaw take a family from their home.

There is a lot of poetic anti-capitalist license in Guthrie’s version of events. Rather than being forced into a life of crime, Floyd was already a thief and convict by the time he was 21. After his release from prison in 1929 he turned his hand to bank robbing. Despite the killings that often marked his passage, he acquired a reputation as a friend of the common man. Tales spread of his destroying mortgage documentation in banks and giving money to poor farmers, but there is little hard proof of this. What can be proven is a series of murders and thefts in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Ohio.

In June 1933 “the Kansas City Massacre” made the headlines; four policemen and a prisoner were killed in a botched rescue attempt – Floyd was named as a suspect but he publicly denied his involvement. By now local and federal authorities were turning up the pressure on the brigands. Machine Gun Kelly was caught, Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger had been gunned down, vaulting Floyd to the top of the Most Wanted List. In October 1934, after a car crash Floyd was cornered in a farmer’s field and shot to death. Baby Face Nelson was killed within weeks and Ma Barker was shot a few months later. The age of the rural outlaws had ended.

February 2

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by gerryadmin

The perils of being a royal mistress 4

Like Nell Gwynn, Marie-Jeanne Bécu, aka Madame du Barry, rose from the depths of the sex trade to the heights of royal favour. 

She was born in 1743, the illegitimate daughter of a seamstress and a monk. After a convent education, she worked as a street pedlar, a lady’s companion, a shop assistant, and a prostitute. She caught the eye of Jean du Barry, a Gascon nobleman who had made a fortune as a war contractor and who operated as a high-class pimp. He took her as his mistress and with his help she became one of Paris’s most successful courtesans. Her blonde hair, blue eyes, and pretty face (which seems rather insipid in contemporary portraits) eventually attracted Louis XV’s attention in 1768. Since the death of the king’s previous favourite Madame de Pompadour four years earlier, Louis had acknowledged no one as his maîtresse en titre. (Only the French could have invented an official role for a royal doxy, complete with state-funded apartments and privileges.) Du Barry needed a noble title to aspire to that role so a convenient marriage was arranged and she could openly appear at court.  

Du Barry kept her royal lover happy until his death in 1774 by which time she had made powerful enemies for her dabbling in politics and her unbridled extravagance. The new queen, Marie Antoinette, had her banished to a convent for a time and du Barry was never able to return to the court of Louis XVI. She lived quietly on her rural estates until the French Revolution. She managed to survive the first few years of turmoil but her support of counter-revolutionary émigrés led to a sentence of death in December 1793. Her last words on the scaffold were “You are going to hurt me, please don’t hurt me, just one more moment, I beg you!”

February 1

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by gerryadmin

The perils of being a royal mistress 3

We have spoken about ladies-in-waiting and the ease of their transition to the role of  royal mistress. Sometimes, however, a woman is just so gosh-darn attractive that the king plucks her from the lower orders and keeps her as a pet. For a while.

Say hello then to Nell Gwynn, prostitute and actress (then, as now, the two professions were often considered one and the same), born in London in 1650 in the midst of the revolutionary Puritan rule of England. She seems to have grown up in a brothel but was attracted to the life of the stage where, since the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, for the first time in English history women were allowed to take women’s parts. By her mid-teens she had moved from being an orange-seller in the theatre to increasingly large roles in plays, especially comedies. Her reputation as “pretty, witty, Nell” attracted a series of noble lovers and by 1668 she had captured the attention of dissolute King Charles II.

Charles II kept a string of mistresses, often juggling more than one at a time, so there was no reason to think that Nell’s tenure would be a long one. In 1670 she gave birth to a royal bastard, whom she named Charles. The king had so many illegitimate children that he was known as “The Father of his Country” but he was uncommonly good to them, handing out royal titles and pensions with an open hand; in fact many of today’s English upper crust owe their noble status to these episodes. Nell’s son became the Duke of St. Albans.

Charles was a secret Catholic who was receiving bribes from French king Louis XIV to openly proclaim himself a member of the Church of Rome and to bring the country into obedience to the pope but by this time anti-Catholicism had become the English popular religion. Thinking Nell’s coach to be that of the king’s Catholic mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, an Oxford mob created a disturbance — to quell it, she stepped out and cried “Good people you are mistaken; I am the Protestant whore.”

Nell was a gambler and big spender, leaving her frequently in debt. On Charles’s deathbed he asked of his brother and heir James II, “Let not poor Nelly starve.” She died in 1687, probably of syphillis. She requested that her funeral sermon be preached on the text from Luke 15: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”

January 31

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by gerryadmin

The perils of being a royal mistress 2

As we learned in yesterday’s thrilling episode, the post of lady-in-waiting to a queen may be a launching pad to the role of mistress to the king. Such women are chosen for their beauty and amiability, are generally well-born, and are constantly at court, where they are visible – and accessible– to the monarch. Because royal wives are usually chosen for their dowries or political connections, pretty young ladies-in-waiting often outshine their queen, hanging upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.

Let me then introduce Înes de Castro, lady-in-waiting to Constanza Manuel, wife of the Portuguese Prince Peter. However great the attractions of Constanza were , they paled in Peter’s eyes to those of Înes with whom he soon began an illicit relationship. The prince, nonetheless, did his marital duty and poor Constanza died giving birth in 1345 to a son, Fernando. As far as Peter was concerned, this left him free to marry his true love, but he was forbidden to do so by his father King Afonso who, for dynastic reasons, needed his son to wed higher up the royal ladder than Înes.

Peter stubbornly refused to remarry and rejected the princesses his father suggested for a future bride. He lived apart from the court with Înes who produced three children. King Afonso feared that his son was favouring Spanish relatives of Înes and that civil war might erupt if the relationship continued, so in 1355 he sent three assassins to where she was living. They murdered her in front of one of her children.

At this affront Peter rebelled against his father. He was defeated but soon after succeeded to the throne of Portugal upon the king’s death. He captured two of the assassins and ripped their hearts out with his own hands. A splendid legend says that he had Înes disinterred, her corpse clad in royal robes and enthroned. All the nobility that had slighted her when she was alive were forced to kneel before the cadaver and kiss the skeletal hands.

Peter had a magnificent dual tomb erected in the Alcobaça monastery. He and Înes were buried facing each other so that on Resurrection Day the first thing they would see would be each other.