How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (4 page)

The performance of the Ten Thousand anticipated the results of foreign intrusions by Western forces over the next several millennia. Most Western expeditionary forces, from Alexander the Great to the British redcoats in Africa and India, were greatly outnumbered and often far from home. Nevertheless, they consistently routed their opponents because of the superiority of Western arms, tactics, and organization dating from the days of the ancient Greeks. For example, in 1879 at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift in Africa, 139 British regulars, only 80 of them actual riflemen, were attacked by an army of more than 4,000 Zulus, by far Africa’s most celebrated fighters, hundreds of them armed with captured British rifles. When it was over after ten hours of shooting, the tiny band of redcoats still stood firm in their disciplined formation surrounded by more than a thousand dead Zulus. The British suffered 15 dead and 12 wounded.
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This British victory was based on a fundamental principle of Western warfare as expressed by Plato: that true courage is the ability of a soldier to fight and stay in rank even when he knows the odds are against him.
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The oath taken by young recruits to the Athenian army included: “I will not desert the man at my side wherever I am positioned in line.”
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A Roman army manual stressed that victory is achieved not “by mere numbers and innate courage, but by skill and training.”
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Indeed, intensive and realistic training has long been central to Western military might. As the great Jewish historian and Roman commander Josephus (AD 35–100) explained, the Roman army’s “maneuvers are like bloodless battles, and their battles bloody maneuvers.”
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That Plato concerned himself with military matters underlines what is the most fundamental aspect of Western military affairs: that war is too important to leave to brave hotheads. Rather, it is a matter requiring reflection and reason. Thus, beginning with the Greeks, the West has always possessed clearly articulated principles of warfare, culminating in such institutions as the U.S. Army War College, the Prussian
Kriegsakademie
, and the French
École Supérieure de Guerre
—institutions devoted to military
science
.

Democracy

The existence of so many close-by, independent communities had many consequences for Greek governance. For one thing, should citizens become too disaffected, they could pick up and move elsewhere. Many historical
figures, such as philosophers, are known to have moved a number of times. Moreover, it was impossible for the elite to become distant, unapproachable rulers. Even Athens was so small that officials had to deal with the public face-to-face, which greatly limited their control and power.

When freedom is combined with groups too large to rely on informal decision making, experiments with political organization are inevitable. Consequently, the Greeks were among the first to systematically explore and develop various systems of democracy. In fact, they coined the word:
demos
is Greek for people, and
kratos
means power; hence democracy means people power. Democracy may have been first instituted in Athens, but it soon was widely adopted. In most city-states, as in Athens,
direct
democracy was practiced. That is, most important issues were decided by the votes of all male citizens. There were no class distinctions involved in Athenian citizenship (and in that of most city-states); men in manual occupations enjoyed full rights of citizenship, as did the wealthiest landowners. Indeed, since most officials were selected by drawing lots and all voters were eligible, “artisans, shopkeepers, workers, and traders” were always among those serving.
⁴⁷
A major innovation was the written constitution spelling out the rules for governance—Aristotle summarized 157 different Greek city-state constitutions.
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Keep in mind that democracy merely gives power to the people; it does not ensure that power will be used wisely or humanely. That is, Athens did not have what came to be known as a “liberal” democracy—one committed to the rule of law and basic human rights. For example, Athenians several times voted to slaughter all the men and enslave all the women and children of a conquered city-state. They also voted to convict Socrates of heresy and to impose the death sentence.

In recent times it has become fashionable to scoff at Greek “democracy” on grounds that it excluded women and slaves. That seems excessively anachronistic, especially considering that the alternative was various forms of authoritarian rule, none of which freed the slaves or empowered women. Of course, Greek democracy was somewhat unstable, there being interludes of rule by tyrants. But somehow democracy was reinstated time and again—until the Macedonian invasion and the subsequent rule by Rome.

The major benefit of Greek democracy was sufficient freedom so that individuals could benefit from innovations making them more productive, with the collective result of economic progress.

Economic Progress

Although the study of ancient economics is inexact for want of reliable facts,
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scholars agree that the ancient Greeks enjoyed centuries of economic growth, slow by modern standards but substantial for the time.
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As a consequence of democratic rule, taxes were much lower in the Greek city-states than in any empire of the era, and property was not subject to arbitrary seizure. It follows that increased productivity was profitable. The more that Greek farmers grew, for example, the higher their standard of living. We can assume, therefore, that they were inclined to seek and adopt more productive crops, methods, and equipment. The same ought to have applied to other producers. If so, the Greek city-states should have experienced long-term economic growth.

Evidence suggests that they did. For instance, archaeological evidence indicates significant improvement in the average diet. Measurements of skeletons of Greek men buried in ancient cemeteries reveal them to have been taller, on average, than Greek military recruits in 1949.
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In addition, even as the leading Greek city-states experienced substantial population growth over the centuries,
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the average level of consumption among peasants is estimated to have increased by about 50 percent.
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An additional indication of economic growth in ancient Greece comes from the major increases in the average size of Greek houses: in the eighth century BC it was 53 square meters; by the sixth century BC it had grown to 122 square meters; and by the fifth century BC it was 325 square meters.
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The Greeks also developed a far more sophisticated economy with several modern aspects. First came a shift from commerce based on commodities to one based on finances—in
Politics
, Aristotle described this as the pursuit of “monetary acquisition.” In keeping with that transition, the Greeks invented banks—which Edward Cohen, an expert on the ancient economy, described as “private businesses (‘banks,’
trapezai
), which accepted from various sources funds (‘deposits’) for which they had an absolute obligation of repayment while being free to profit from, or even lose, these monies in their own loan and investment activities.”
⁵⁵
Many ancient societies had institutions that safeguarded deposits; very often temples had this function. But these were not banks. It was the lending and investment of deposits that defined these Greek entities as the first banks. Strangely enough, because the Greeks deemed it demeaning for a free man to work under someone else’s control, even the banks consisted of an owner (and perhaps his wife) and a staff of slaves.
⁵⁶
In any
event, these developments not only reflected economic progress but also facilitated it.

At the height of the Greek “miracle,” then, ordinary free Greeks lived far better than both their ancestors and their neighbors (such as the Persians) who suffered under imperial rule.

Literacy

Writing probably predated the rise of classical Greece by several thousand years, but elsewhere literacy was limited to a small set of scribes who wrote whatever communications and records were required by the elite. Everyone else lived in a purely oral culture. There were no books; if there were playwrights or philosophers, they left no trace.

Thus it was a cultural revolution when literacy became widespread in Greece—when as many as a third or more of freeborn men were able to read and write, as probably was the case in Athens and some other ancient Greek cities.
⁵⁷
Greek literacy owed its initial debt to the development of a phonetic alphabet of only twenty-four letters, which made it far easier to read and to write, since words could be “sounded out.”
⁵⁸
Ideographic writing systems such as Chinese or ancient Egyptian required mastery of about three thousand different characters for elementary literacy—and as many as
fifty thousand
for full literacy.
⁵⁹
The Greeks also founded schools where large numbers of boys (but not girls) learned to read.
⁶⁰

Widespread literacy resulted in books and the accumulation of learning. Books such as those by Herodotus and Xenophon preserved important historical knowledge. Great works of literature that had long existed only in oral form survived because they were written down. And philosophers were able to build their work on that of their predecessors—“unrolling the treasures … they have written down in books and left behind them,” as Plato reported.
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Of course, Greek philosophers have lived on to shape Western civilization only because so many of their books survived. Literacy also greatly facilitated the spread of accurate knowledge of new technology among the ancient Greeks. For all these reasons, the Greeks referred to writing as “the mother of memory.”
⁶²

Arts

Greek sculpture was a revolution of realism (even if the focus was on ideally beautiful men and women). Whereas earlier artists had sculpted stylized humans and animals, the Greeks sculpted humans and animals
so real as to seem alive.
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The Greeks also began the tradition of “the artist,” in the sense that individual sculptors were (and are) known. The art in the ancient empires was produced by anonymous craftsmen within a traditional style. Greek sculptors were free to pursue personal expressions of the prevailing style and therefore engraved their names on the bases of their work. Many became sufficiently famous to have been written about at the time.
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Praxiteles (ca. 370–330 BC) is well remembered for having made statues of the female nude respectable—his famous Aphrodite of Knidos was said by the Roman scholar Pliny (AD 23–79) to be the greatest statue in the world (which reflected the Roman belief in the superiority of Greek culture). Greek painting was similarly admired by Romans, but, sad to say, none of it has survived.

The Greeks did not invent theater, but they advanced it far beyond the religious ceremonies and pageants of ancient times. They were probably the first to stage dramas with spoken dialogue rather than chanting, and likewise they probably invented tragedies and comedies. As with sculpture, Greek theater was not an enactment of timeless traditions but the work of celebrated playwrights. Greek theater was performed in outdoor bowls carved into hillsides, having superb acoustics and often able to seat up to fourteen thousand. Some of the plays that have survived in manuscript, such as
Medea
by Euripides (ca. 484–406 BC), continue to be performed.
⁶⁵

The Greeks were especially inventive in music.
⁶⁶
They stressed sound over form—music was best that sounded best. Thus did they establish the basis for “tempering” the scale. The ancient Greeks also developed the first system of musical notation, although it was a sketchy shorthand that fell well short of the notation system in use today (which was developed by medieval Europeans). Greeks pursued the physics of how strings created sound, establishing the fundamental equations involved, and developed or perfected many instruments, the water organ being the most remarkable. This was a forerunner of the modern pipe organ, using water pressure to drive the air over the pipes. Like the modern organ, the Greek water organ was played on a keyboard.
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Finally, the Greeks set the models for major forms of literature that have flourished ever since.
⁶⁸
Of particular importance were epic and lyric poetry. Two monumental works of epic poetry—the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, attributed to the mysterious Homer—remain pillars of Western literature. Herodotus is often called the father of history in that the
Greeks were the first to write general accounts of events. And, of course, the Greeks invented philosophical dialogues.

Technology

Our knowledge of Greek inventions and technological innovations suffers badly from what might be called learned neglect.
⁶⁹
Both in ancient times and today, those of literary inclinations tend to be little interested in, and badly informed about, practical matters such as plowing, plumbing, pumping, and propelling. Ancient Greek authors noted little about technology, new or old, and clearly were incorrect in some of what they did report. Hence our knowledge of Greek technology is scanty.
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It was the Greeks who invented waterwheels and used them to turn mills to grind flour. They facilitated this process by developing systems of gears that transformed the vertical motion of the waterwheel into a horizontal motion. The great mathematician and engineer Archimedes (287–212 BC) invented the hydraulic screw, a form of water pump still in use in some parts of the Middle East. The screw greatly facilitated irrigation by making it possible to raise water from lower to higher ground. The Greeks used the first known winches during a war with Persia to tighten cables supporting a pontoon bridge across the Hellespont in 480 BC. Around 515 BC they developed the crane, a structure using winches and pulleys to lift heavy loads, to replace ramps as the means for lifting stones into place on construction projects. About the same time they developed the wheelbarrow for use on construction projects and in agriculture.