Ping me.
Posted on 11/15/2002 2:10:24 PM PST by Sparta
I also had read that the short sword that the Spartans used was a fantastic weapon, and with it, they could out manuever the opponents since it was lighter. If you guys know more--post it please.
What are you talking about? They used the silver they found to build the navy because a wise leader was able to convince them that their greatest interest lay in defending themselves by building a strong navy. The silver was crucial not because the Athenians would not build without being bribed, but because they needed silver to pay for the navy... Perhaps you need to reread that section a couple of times...
The silver was crucial not because the Athenians would not build without being bribed, but because they needed silver to pay for the navy...
the infowarrior
the infowarrior
Muawiyah, you can't possibly be posting that in good faith. While you obviously have a very Arab/Persian-centric view of cultural importance, it is really difficult to believe that you have absolutely no comprehension of why others would choose to believe differently.
I don't really see a compelling need to reiterate the vast contributions of Greek cultures to Western Civilization. I have noted your posts in the past expressing your unique interpretations of Islam and the Sharia, and while providing a different viewpoint is always interesting, I find the phrasing of your post here most disingenuous. When you say "We look at them as if they were an alien culture" I would be interested to know who we are, since your view of the Greeks as aliens is hardly universal in the Western world. Perhaps this is something Edward Said suggested to you...
The difference between Xerxes and the Greeks was best delineated in the Frank Miller version of the event, obviously embellished. The Spartans demanded that you stand and fight, to the death if necessary, for the right to be a free man; the Persian God-King asked only that you kneel and serve him.
For those of us that admire the Greek way of life rather than the craven servility of the Persian mob, the importance of the Greeks is of an astonishing magnitude.
Sparta please add me to your ping list. Thanks!
I don't know how to state it more clearly than the article. The Athenians GAVE UP their personal shares of the silver and spent it to build up their navy. That is a prioritization of their freedom over wealth, since they could have much more cheaply capitulated and served Xerxes.
Are you suggesting that the ships should have been built on charity and good wishes? Are you implying that the foreign contractors and materials that were required ought to have materialized magically? Do you consider military manufacturing something that should operate under some variation of a communist system rather than as good honest profit for good honest work?
What we have is a mythology that's grown up about ancient Greece. Although the Athenians et al built beautiful structures in the hills above Athens, and began carving great sculpture, they, themselves, lived in mud-nuts down in the valleys. Even their great epic which was pieced together by Homer, obscures an important point demonstrated by the archaology at Ebla - namely, the people we identify as Greeks at that time were illiterate - hence an oral epic poem. At the same time, the folks in Troy, aka Illium or Allium, were literate. They have letters, on file, in Ebla, written in their own language! There are no comparable Greek communications (leastwise since I last read anything comprehensive about Ebla).
In short, they weren't all that civilized, and by the later Greek standard that a civilization was typified by literacy, they weren't civilized people at all!. Note that the story of the battle of Thermopolyae is a praise of barbarian virtues not much removed from counting coupe.
Still, the Romans shared your opinion regarding the place of Greece. They looked to it as a source of their own civilization, and we might suppose that to be true right up until the time when the Eastern religion called Christianity swept through the entire Roman empire and changed their culture profoundly.
Xerxes would be proud!
I am not sure what you mean by "craven servility". Do you mean, for example, the sort of behavior expressed in the parts of the Old Testament where Jews came into contact with the members of the Persian Court in the palaces of the king? (court life has always been stylized and nuts)
Or, are you pointing to the type of behavior discussed when the Jews, courtesy of their apparant biologic cousins, the Medes, now in the guise of Persians, are relocated back to Jerusalem whereupon they build the Second Temple.
Frankly, the only reason the Persians of that time get a bad shake from history is that they were soon (in an historic sense) overrun by Alexander and what passed for a Greek Army.
I've seen studies that note that when Alexander began his conquest of the world there were nearly 30 million people under his rule while the Persians had less than 8 million, and that in a far greater landmass.
In retrospect we can see that the Persians (Medes) were quite brave themselves having attempted a conquest of a far more populated Greece!
Fortunately Alexander was a bright guy and he made a valiant attempt to "merge" Greek military and economic might to Persian culture and philosophy. Sometimes he did this by direct marriage of large numbers of Greeks to large numbers of Persians (kind of like the Rev. Sun Moon Young, eh?!) - leastwise we can see that Alexander understood where the higher culture was coming from and had no illusions about Greece himself. Would that modern grekophiles could do so well.
As soon as you bring Spartans into the story, which you do when you refer to "Greeks", you are no longer dealing with "free men".
Numerous other Greek polities were little better than that.
In general Greeks were probably a little better off than folks who lived under tribal law, and they were economically superior to the others around them. Their quick conquest of most of the Middle-East demonstrates that. But their sense of "freedom" was not the same as our own. Actually, our own sense of "freedom" is not very old anyway.
On the other hand, culture and civilization as mediated by the Christian experience, as well as that of the old Northern Germanic belief systems (Thor, Odin, et al) are much more current in the European environment. We know Christianity arrived in a Jewish vehicle driven from Persia back to the Holy Land. Thor Hyerdahl suggests that detailed knowledge of Thor and Odin may have appeared in Norway by first being brought there by Assyrian refugees in the 1st Century AD.
Then, there's a lot of stuff European people invented themselves - e.g. English Common Law. The Greeks would have been aghast!
However, if they can help it, NONE of them live in Iraq where Saddam Hussein is the current dictator.
Now, why would they "worship" a man who attempted to exterminate the core of their civilization in the Iran/Iraq War just a decade and a half ago?
Try "Ayatollah" - add a anme, for the Persians - not Saddam!
It's an excellent candidate for a remake, and I'll save the producers of such a film the trouble of casting the lead actor in the role of King Leonidas of Sparta: Mel Gibson. He'd be perfect.
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