How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (3 page)

An example will clarify these points.

Late in the tenth century an iron industry began to develop in parts of northern China.
¹⁶
By 1018 the smelters were producing an estimated 35,000 tons a year, an incredible achievement for the time, and sixty years later they may have been producing more than 100,000 tons. This was not a government operation. Private individuals had seized the opportunity presented by a strong demand for iron and the supplies of easily mined ore and coal. With the smelters and foundries located along a network of canals and navigable rivers, the iron could be easily brought to distant markets. Soon these new Chinese iron industrialists were reaping huge profits and reinvesting heavily in the expansion of their smelters and foundries. The availability of large supplies of iron led to the introduction of iron agricultural tools, which in turn began to increase food production. In short, China began to enter an “industrial revolution.”

But then it all stopped as suddenly as it had begun. By the end of the eleventh century, only tiny amounts of iron were produced, and soon after that the smelters and foundries were abandoned ruins. What had happened?

Eventually, Mandarins at the imperial court had noticed that some commoners were getting rich by manufacturing and were hiring peasant laborers at high wages. They deemed such activities to be threats to Confucian values and social tranquility. Commoners must know their place; only the elite should be wealthy. So they declared a state monopoly
on iron and seized everything. And that was that. As the nineteenth-century historian Winwood Reade summed up, the reason for China’s many centuries of economic and social stagnation is plain: “
Property is insecure
. In this one phrase the whole history of Asia is contained.”
¹⁷

No wonder that progress was so slow within the ancient empires. Anything of value—land, crops, livestock, buildings, even children—could be arbitrarily seized, and as the Chinese iron magnates learned, it often was. Worse yet, the tyrannical empires invested little of the wealth they extracted to increase production. They consumed it instead—often in various forms of display. The Egyptian pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Taj Mahal were all built as beautiful monuments to repressive rule; they were without productive value and were paid for by misery and want.

The ancient empires inherited a considerable level of civilization from the societies they combined and ruled, and technological progress may have continued as an empire consolidated its grasp. But then improvements effectively stopped.
¹⁸
For example, in 1900 Chinese peasants were using essentially the same tools and techniques they had been using for more than three thousand years. The same was true in Egypt. Despite their dependence on agriculture, in none of the ancient empires (including Rome) was there any selective breeding of plants or animals.
¹⁹

Stagnation occurred because the ruling elites had no need for innovations and usually neither rewarded innovators nor adopted their innovations. Worse, the ruling elites often destroyed, outlawed, or made little use of innovations that did occur, whether of domestic or foreign origin. For example, the Romans knew of the watermill but made nearly no use of it, continuing to rely on muscle power to grind their flour.
²⁰
The Ottoman Empire prohibited the mechanical clock, and so did the Chinese.
²¹
(Imperial opposition to progress is pursued at greater length in chapter 2.)

The Greek “Miracle”

Amid these long centuries of exploitation and stagnation, suddenly there burst forth the Greek “miracle,” an era of prodigious progress: intellectual and artistic as well as technological.
²²
In her famous book
The Greek Way
, the great classicist Edith Hamilton noted that what most set the
Greeks apart from all prior societies was joyful living. This way of life was “something quite new,” she wrote:

The Greeks were the first people in the world to play, and they played on a great scale. All over Greece there were games, all sorts of games; athletic contests of every description … contests in music, where one side outsung the other; in dancing … games so many that one grows weary with the list of them.… Wretched people, toiling people, do not play. Nothing like the Greek games is conceivable in Egypt or Mesopotamia.… Play died when Greece died and many a century passed before it was resurrected.
²³

Greek play reflected the exuberance of life in small societies of free citizens. In this era, freedom too was unique to Greece (despite the multitudes of slaves). And out of this freedom grew not only joy and play but also the first flood of innovations leading to modernity.

Historians date the beginning of ancient Greek civilization to around 750 BC, but the brilliant era of Greek achievement began about 600 BC and ended in about 338 BC, when Philip of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) conquered the Greeks. Even in these golden days, there really wasn’t an ancient “Greece.” What existed were Greeks—a single people, united, as Herodotus (484–425 BC) noted, by common blood, customs, language, and religion but who lived in about a thousand city-states.
²⁴
Initially these city-states were politically independent.
²⁵
Over time, some conquered others and many entered into alliances and unions, but overall there remained a diverse and independent set of small Greek societies.

The Greek city-states were located throughout what is today Greece and also in Sicily and southern Italy, around the Black Sea, and along the coast of Asia Minor (most of which is now Turkey)—“like frogs around a pond,” as Plato put it. Many city-states were tiny, having no more than 1,000 residents,
²⁶
and even the largest were small when compared with the populations of the empires of this era. In 430 BC Athens may have had a population of 155,000, Corinth was estimated to have 70,000 residents, and there were about 40,000 Spartans.
²⁷
In contrast, there were about 40 million Persians.
²⁸

The independence of the city-states was aided by geography. Greece is crisscrossed with mountain ranges that occupy about 80 percent of the
land area,
²⁹
and each of the valleys scattered among the mountains (most of them coastal) sustained a city-state, and sometimes two. In addition, many islands in the nearby waters became city-states. Of course, the geography of Greece is quite contrary to claims that Europe’s eventual supremacy rested on natural advantages. Even the best agricultural land in Greece is rocky and “its productivity is mediocre,” as Leopold Migeotte notes in
The Economy of the Greek Cities.
³⁰
Moreover, observes Victor Davis Hanson in
Carnage and Culture
, Greece is “without a single large navigable river, cursed with almost no abundance of natural resources.”
³¹
In contrast, the great empires of the time—including Egypt, Persia, and China—occupied huge, fertile plains well served by major rivers. This facilitated control from a central capital.
³²
Thus, having an “unfavorable” geography contributed to the greatness of Greece, for disunity and competition were fundamental to everything else.

Michael Grant spoke for all classical historians when he wrote, “The achievement of the … Greeks, in a wide variety of fields, was stupendous.”
³³
Here the focus will be on six areas. First comes warfare, because only the Greeks’ remarkable military superiority allowed them to survive as independent city-states rather than to have been submerged by the Persian Empire. Next is the great Greek achievement of democracy, followed by economic progress, literacy, the arts, and technology. Then the chapter turns to a seventh field, the most lasting of all the Greek achievements: speculative philosophy and formal logic.

Warfare

Given constant wars among the many Greek city-states, the Greeks developed weapons and tactics far superior to those of contemporary empires, especially the nearby Persians. Perhaps the most important factor distinguishing Greek armies from those of the surrounding empires is that the men in the ranks were neither mercenaries nor slaves but citizen-soldiers (known as hoplites). The self-interest of Greek fighters was, therefore, not merely to survive a battle but to win it, thus defending their homes, possessions, and families. Despite being civilians, Greek soldiers were far better trained and disciplined than their opponents, which was essential for fulfilling the tactics that made Greek formations devastatingly superior to their enemies.

It is obvious that, all else being equal, victory will go to the side that outnumbers the other. What is less obvious is that where outnumbering
really counts is not across the whole field of battle but at the points of contact. And by use of the phalanx—a dense, highly coordinated formation—the Greeks greatly outnumbered their enemies where the two sides actually met.

The phalanx consisted of closely packed infantry, four to eight rows deep, wearing bronze helmets with cheek plates, breast plates, and greaves, or leg armor. (Because of the weight of their armor, they were called heavy infantry.) Each Greek soldier also carried a large shield that protected his left side and the right side of the man next to him. From this wall of shields were projected sharp pikes (seven to nine feet long) that could stab opponents, often before they could reach the Greeks with their weapons.
³⁴
Intensive practice allowed the phalanx to maneuver as a single unit, in response to commands. Of particular significance when fighting non-Greek foes, the phalanx was nearly impervious to cavalry charges, the horses being impaled on the pikes. As military historian Jim Lacey explained, “When it comes to cavalry charging a phalanx, human bravery counts for nothing. It was the courage of the horse that mattered, and in this case [the Battle of Marathon] Persia’s fabled Nesaian mounts proved to be no braver than any other horse.”
³⁵

Greek opponents, often Persians, usually wore little or no armor, and most of them used a weapon such as a sword or an axe that was swung, not jabbed, and therefore required “elbow room.” Because of the compactness of the phalanx and the looseness of non-Greek formations, Greeks outnumbered their opponents by as many as three to one when the two groups collided—and suffered many fewer casualties. Herodotus described Persian tactics against the Spartans in the Battle of Plataea (479 BC): “They were dashing out beyond the front lines individually or in groups of ten … charging right into the Spartan ranks where they perished.”
³⁶
According to Herodotus, at the famous Battle of Marathon (490 BC) about 10,000 Athenians confronted about 50,000 Persians, with the loss of only 192 Greeks but more than 6,000 Persians.
³⁷

The Greeks were able to drive a huge Persian force from the battlefield by exhibiting a style of warfare that has remained the basic Western model ever after—
well-organized, well-armed, highly trained and disciplined infantry having high morale and tactical flexibility.
³⁸
Morale cannot be overlooked. When the renowned Greek dramatist Aeschylus (525–456 BC) died, his epitaph (which he wrote himself) made no mention of his plays but noted only that he had fought at Marathon—“of his noble
prowess, the grove of Marathon can speak, or the long-haired Persians who know it well.”
³⁹

There is no better summation of Greek military superiority than the stirring adventures of a Greek army in Persia as reported by the Greek general and remarkable writer-historian Xenophon (430–354 BC). His
The Persian Expedition
(also known as
The March Up Country
) is one of the great reads in Western literature.

Xenophon was born in Athens to an aristocratic family and studied for several years with the philosopher Socrates (ca. 470–399 BC), about whom he eventually wrote a book. (That a student of Socrates became a famous soldier is not so strange given the rarely mentioned fact that Socrates himself took part as an ordinary soldier in three military campaigns and distinguished himself for his bravery.) At around age thirty, Xenophon joined a Greek mercenary army being recruited by Cyrus the Younger to seize the Persian throne from his brother Artaxerxes II.
⁴⁰
Although Greek armies consisted of citizen volunteers, there always were some adventuresome souls who, during peacetime, were willing to fight elsewhere for pay. In 401 BC an army of 10,000 Greek mercenaries set forth into Persia, where they were joined by an army of Persians and marched about 1,500 miles to confront Artaxerxes’s imperial army at Cunaxa, north of Babylon. During the battle the Greek phalanxes smashed an entire wing of the huge imperial army while suffering only one casualty. Their superb performance was in vain, however, because Prince Cyrus was killed when he rashly charged across the battle line in pursuit of his brother. Subsequently, the Greek commander Clearchus was invited to a peace conference along with his other senior officers. They were betrayed and beheaded by Artaxerxes II. Left without leaders, deep in hostile Mesopotamia, the Greeks, known ever after as the Ten Thousand, had to consider their options. In a series of democratic votes they decided not to surrender but to fight their way home. They elected new officers, including Xenophon as a general, and set out on a long march along a dangerous route. Pursued all the way by a far larger Persian force that they had to defeat again and again, challenged by savage local tribes all along the way, caught in snow drifts in the high mountain passes, and afflicted with outbreaks of illness, the Ten Thousand reached safety after a yearlong journey covering several thousand miles. “Five out of six made it out alive,” Victor Davis Hanson reports, “the majority of the dead lost not in battle, but in the high snows of Armenia.”
⁴¹