How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (6 page)

Ancient Morality

A common failure in assessments of ancient Greece’s immense contributions to Western civilization is to notice only its gleaming marble buildings, magnificent statues, brilliant philosophy, and commitment to democracy. As the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) put it: “In the Greeks alone we find the ideal of that which we should like to be.”
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But there was a darker side that eventually played a substantial role in the downfall of Greek civilization: for all the brilliance of the Greek philosophers, they did not rise above the moral limitations of the ancient world.

The economies of all the Greek city-states rested on extensive slavery. In many, including Athens, slaves probably outnumbered the free citizens.
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Even modest households often owned two or three slaves; Aristotle owned thirteen and Plato owned six.
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The presence of such an overwhelming number of slaves, with few limits on their mistreatment, resulted in an increasingly idle citizenry and coarsened Greek sensibilities. Incredibly, many authors have shrugged off the massive slavery supporting ancient Greece as merely the price that had to be paid for the splendor of Greek culture.
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For example, the influential twentieth-century historian Joseph Vogt accepted Greek slavery as a necessary evil: “Slavery was essential to the [Greek] … devotion to spiritual considerations.… Slavery and its attendant loss of humanity were part of the sacrifice which had to be paid for this achievement.”
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But it seems far more likely that the Greek “miracle” happened
despite
the impediment of slavery. As the ratio of slaves to free citizens grew, Greek progress declined proportionately. No Greek philosopher was sufficiently “enlightened” to have condemned slavery. That awaited the rise of Christianity: the first known instance of the general abolition of slavery anywhere in the world lay a millennium in the future, in medieval Europe.

In addition, war was endemic among the Greek city-states. As historian Charles Freeman notes, “there was hardly a year in the fifth century that Athens was not fighting someone somewhere.”
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Brutality dominated, especially in the aftermath of defeat. In 416 BC Athens demanded that the island city-state of Melos become its colony. When the Melians refused, Athens laid siege, and when Melos surrendered the Athenians murdered all the men and sold all the women and children into slavery. Later, when the citizens of Mytilene revolted against Athenian rule,
Athens’s democratic assembly voted that its population be treated as the Melians had been.

Thus did Greek democracy embrace a self-destructive tyranny.

New Empires

If the Greek “miracle” was based on the existence of many independent city-states, Greek progress stagnated as the city-states were submerged beneath new empires.

The first to arise was the Athenian Empire. In 478 BC various Greek city-states formed a military alliance, known as the Delian League, in response to repeated Persian attempts to conquer Greece. From the start, Athens exploited the league to its own advantage. It gradually increased its control over the league’s resources and the internal affairs of other member city-states, until eventually Athens ruled an empire. According to Aristotle, “After the Athenians had gained their empire, they treated their allies rather dictatorially.”
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This resulted in festering conflicts, especially with Sparta, and led to the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. It was a long war, pitting the Athenian Empire against the Peloponnesian League headed by Sparta. The first phase of the war ended in 421 BC with the signing of a peace treaty. Hostilities resumed in 415 BC when Athens sent an expeditionary force to attack Syracuse, a Greek city-state in Sicily. The attempt to conquer Syracuse was a disastrous failure; the entire Athenian fleet was lost. The war ended in 405 BC when the Spartan navy under Lysander cut off Athens’s supply of grain by blockading the Hellespont; in the ensuing battle, 168 of 180 Athenian ships were sunk. After a year’s occupation by Spartans, Athens recovered its freedom and restored its democracy.

In 378 BC Athens rebuilt a semblance of empire by organizing a confederation of city-states for self-defense against Sparta. Even after Thebes defeated Sparta in 371 BC, Athens attempted to exert its power over the other members, which led to the Social War (or War of the Allies) in 357 BC. Once again the Athenian fleet was destroyed, thus ending forever any semblance of an Athenian Empire. But it also marked the end of an independent Greece.

While the Greeks continued to war with one another, a new power was growing to their north. The small kingdom of Macedon was occupied
by people who spoke a dialect of Greek and even claimed to be Greeks. Most other Greeks, and especially the Athenians, rejected that claim and dismissed the Macedonians as uncouth, in part because they were ruled by a hereditary king rather than an elected assembly and because some of the nobility, including the king, had multiple wives. But soon after Philip II became king of Macedon, the Greeks became concerned about a Macedonian threat.

One of Philip’s first actions was to redesign his army. He lengthened the pikes with which his traditional heavy-infantry phalanxes were armed and created a well-armored heavy cavalry. These innovations soon proved their worth when Philip took control of most of Thessaly while Athens was busy with the Social War. As the Greeks became increasingly concerned about Philip’s inroads, Demosthenes raised an Athenian coalition that included Thebes, by then the strongest of the Greek city-states. When these allies confronted the Macedonians at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, they were overwhelmed, leaving Philip as the master of all Greece.

But not for long. Two years later Philip was assassinated. (To this day there is debate over who may have been involved in the conspiracy.) Philip was, of course, succeeded by his son Alexander, soon to be called the Great. Although Aristotle had been his tutor, Alexander was no philosopher. He was, instead, a military genius. When he died after thirteen years of rule, the Macedonian Empire stretched from Greece to the Indus River, including all of Persia, as well as Egypt to the South. The eastern end of the Macedonian Empire was soon lost, but the Hellenic portion remained a Macedonian kingdom for several centuries, and the Egyptian portion was ruled by the Greek dynasty founded by Alexander the Great’s general Ptolemy until the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC.

The rise of Rome sealed the Macedonian Empire’s fate. Rome initially took over the many Greek city-states in Italy. Then, during Rome’s second war with Carthage (218–207 BC), King Philip V of Macedon allied himself with Hannibal, the Carthaginian commander, and helped him protect his supply lines from North Africa. Soon after Hannibal’s defeat, Rome launched an expeditionary army against Macedon. It defeated Philip’s forces in 197 BC and then his son’s army in 168 BC. This placed most of Greece under Roman control. Then the entire Hellenic world came under Roman rule after the defeat of Marc Antony and Cleopatra’s forces at Actium in 31 BC and again at Alexandria in 30 BC.

Gone but Not Forgotten

Although the Romans retained most Greek culture, the era of innovation had ended. In fact, the end of the Greek “miracle” had begun centuries before as the hundreds of independent city-states coalesced into the Athenian Empire and the Peloponnesian League. This is confirmed by a remarkable but forgotten study by the great American anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber. In
Configurations of Culture Growth
(1944), he presented data on when distinguished contributors to philosophy, science, and the arts have appeared through history; he looked at the period 900 BC through the present. For ancient Greece, Kroeber’s data showed a towering peak for the century 450 to 350 BC, followed by a steep and rapid decline.
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This is consistent with the geography of Greek philosophers: prior to the ascendency of Athens, famous philosophers had lived in many different city-states. But by the fourth century all the important philosophers lived in Athens—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno. The last, of course, did not measure up to the other three, and after Zeno, Greek philosophy declined into mediocrity. Meanwhile, Greek artists ceased to innovate, no new technology appeared, and democracy never returned. It was over.

But not forgotten. As the twentieth-century British historian J. M. Roberts put it so well: “Once the political and military structure protecting it had gone, ancient Egyptian civilization ceased to be significant except to scholars and cranks. Greece went on as a world influence long after Greek cities were themselves only ruins.”
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Jerusalem’s Rational God

T
he intellectual revolution that took place in Greece had no impact on most of its neighboring societies—the Persians were no more interested than were the Egyptians. But Greek philosophy had profound impact among the Jews. Unlike priests of the religions that dominated most of the world, from early days Jewish theologians were struck by the fact that what their scripture said about God was quite compatible with some aspects of Greek conceptions of a supreme god. In addition, since they were committed to reasoning about God, the Jews were quick to embrace the Greek concern for valid reasoning. What emerged was an image of God as not only eternal and immutable but also as conscious, concerned, and
rational
. The early Christians fully accepted this image of God. They also added and emphasized the proposition that our knowledge of God and of his creation is
progressive
. Faith in both reason and progress were essential to the rise of the West.

Hellenism and Judaism

At present there is bitter and misguided debate over whether or not Greek thought influenced Jewish theology. On one side are obvious examples of an extensive intermingling of the two traditions. On the other side are a host of Jewish scholars who claim that the rabbis who produced the Talmud had very little knowledge of Greek philosophy and despised it:
“Cursed be the man who would breed swine and cursed be the man who would teach his son Greek wisdom.”
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Whatever the Talmudic rabbis did or didn’t know about Greek philosophy seems irrelevant. Their writings did not begin until the third century AD, and it is certain that in earlier times there was extensive Hellenic influence on Jewish life and theology. As the twentieth-century historian Morton Smith put it, “The Hellenization extended even to the basic structure of Rabbinic thought.”
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It was this Hellenized Judaism that influenced early Christian theologians; they had virtually no contact with the Talmudic rabbis, nor any interest in their teachings.

It is important to realize that as early as 200 BC, most Jews lived not in Palestine but in Roman cities—especially the cities dominated by Greek culture. These communities are known as the Jewish Diaspora (literally: dispersion), and they were home to at least six million Jews, compared with only a million Jews still living in Palestine.
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(Several million more Jews lived to the east of Palestine, including a substantial community in Babylon, but little record of them survives and they played little or no role in the rise of the West.) The majority of Jews living in the Hellenized western cities were quite assimilated. Intermarriage with Gentiles was widespread.
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Moreover, the Diasporan Jews read, wrote, spoke, thought, and worshiped in Greek. Of inscriptions found in the Jewish catacombs in Rome, fewer than 2 percent are in Hebrew or Aramaic, while 74 percent are in Greek and the remainder in Latin.
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Most of the Diasporan Jews had Greek names; many of them, Israeli scholar Victor Tcherikover noted, “did not even hesitate to [adopt] names derived from those of Greek deities, such as Apollonius.”
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As early as the third century BC the religious services held in Diasporan synagogues were conducted in Greek, and so few Diasporan Jews could read Hebrew that it was necessary to translate the Torah into Greek—the Septuagint.

The Hellenization of the Jews was not limited to the Diaspora.
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Beginning with Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Middle East, Palestine came under the control of Ptolemaic (Greek) Egypt. This soon led to the founding of twenty-nine Greek cities in Palestine—some of them in Galilee, the two largest of these being Tiberius (on the Sea of Galilee) and Sepphoris, which was only about four miles from Nazareth.
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By early in the second century BC, Jerusalem was so transformed into a Greek city that it was known as Antioch-at-Jerusalem.
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According to the eminent scholar-theologian Sir Henry Chadwick, “Greek influence reached
its height under King Herod (73–04 BC) … who built a Greek theatre, amphitheatre, and hippodrome in or near Jerusalem.”
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