femmenietzsche:

Been thinking about the narrative arc, or the moral arc, of ancient Greek history. That is, how the history of ancient Greece works when you drop the historical nuance and consider the period as a grand story, with nations and peoples acting as individual characters, and with a lesson to be imparted. Not every historical period can be reduced in this way. There are lots of boring periods when trade slowly expanded and all of the wars seem minor and hopelessly dull. Archaic Greece, that is Greece in the 500s BC and earlier, before the Persian Wars, is one such period. Lots of important stuff was happening - writing was reintroduced after the Bronze Age collapse, Greek colonies were founded across the Mediterranean and Black Seas, Western philosophy began - but those are all just broad trends, not a story. The Greek world was far too politically divided for that.

That changes with the Persian invasions. Even though each city state is still responding in its own way, the introduction of a common antagonist gives Greek history a shape it would otherwise lack. And the Persians are very good narrative foils for the Greeks. The vast, cruel empire controlling most of the known world vs. the plucky, (sort of) self-governing poleis. Tropes which were codified because of these wars. Somehow these squabbling cities just manage to hold a coalition together and win a series of smashing, improbable victories (or glorious defeats like Thermopylae).

Very understandable why people find that a satisfying period to learn about, but it’s not what I mean by a narrative arc of history. That’s just the story of a single conflict, not a multi-generational story spanning a century or more. For that, you have to keep going. And within a few decades you get the next narratively compelling conflict, the Peloponnesian War. Under pressure from Persia, the city-states have been compelled to join coalitions with their most powerful neighbors, Sparta and Athens, who use their alliances mainly for their own benefit, and are also natural foils for each other. Inevitably, these coalitions wind up at war with each other. Again, a narratively compelling conflict with many famous characters and events, but still not quite what I mean.

Going further forward, there are several less famous wars which are basically similar in character to the Peloponnesian War, with the most powerful city-states all trying and failing to establish lasting hegemonies and exhausting themselves in the process. From the end of the Peloponnesian War onward, this gives the Persians more and more opportunities to intervene in Greek affairs, playing one side against the other and backing the weak faction against the stronger.

Here, the broader arc starts to become clear. The Greek city-states were able to unite once to fight off the Persians, but they were incapable of carrying that unity forward. In fact, the supposed unity is revealed to be a sham all along, an excuse for the most powerful cities to expand their influence over their neighbors more than anything else. And the result of all this is that, as Xenophon says at the end of his history of the period, “In Greece as a whole there was more uncertainty and disturbance… than there had been before.” The city-states are all exhausted, all of them having failed in their bids at hegemony in basically the same way, all of them now prey to outside powers. Up to this point, the shape of Greek history is a tragedy, of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, thanks to inevitable human selfishness.

But classical Greece continues on for just a little while longer, with the rise of Macedon. Macedonia was basically ethnically Greek, but always on the outside of classical Greek culture, and a kingdom not a city-state. But it’s that unusual position which allows Philip II to also intervene in the affairs of the city-states and establish his own hegemony over the region, which provides his son Alexander the Great with a springboard to conquer the whole of the Persian Empire. That in turn spreads Greek culture over a vast area from Egypt to Afghanistan. On its surface, this might seem like a sudden and happy reversal of the slow decline of Greece that characterized the previous century. (Happy for the Greeks, I mean.) But what was really accomplished? The city-states still linger on after this, but I think it’s fair to say that their vitality was fundamentally gone by this point. Until the Romans came they could still self-govern but had little in the way of true independence. And the Hellenistic states established in the wreckage of Persia by Alexander’s generals were like the Persian Empire itself, but worse. Inbred, infighting kingdoms that were every bit as tyrannical as what had come before, probably more so.

So the conflict between Persia and Greece ends with a total Greek victory, but in the most ironic way possible. It comes at the cost of everything that originally defined Greek-ness. That, I think is the narrative arc of ancient Greece: friends who in their youth won a great victory that granted them everything they wanted, only to fritter it all away in middle age through greed and violence, only to be granted, as if by magic, everything they had lost and more, but at the cost of the last remaining scraps of who they once were.

Or that would be how you’d tell the story as fiction, obviously the actual history is far more complicated and has no true moral to learn. Very compelling though, and with many subparts that are fascinating in their own right.

After the classical period ends, Greece enters the Hellenistic era, which is again narratively formless. While the trend of the archaic period was growth and expansion, the trend of the Hellenistic kingdoms was decline; forgettable kings fought each other as one by one their kingdoms fell to native rulers or to Rome.