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subjects-of-the-king · 11 months

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The Concept of Government Legitimacy in Greek Antiquity and the Modern World, Part II: Sparta and the Greater Peloponnese

An original essay of Lucas Del Rio

Athens in many ways was the premier city-state of ancient Greece. She was the birthplace of democracy and home of some of the greatest Greek philosophers and other thinkers. Ancient Greece, however, had over one thousand different city-states of greatly varying size, strength, and influence. After Athens, the most important on the Greek mainland were Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Argos, Eretria, and Elis. Influential cities off of the mainland included Syracuse, Aegina, and Rhodes. Here there will be an exploration of the political history of Sparta and other Peloponnesian cities, how the concept of political legitimacy evolved there, and how all of this compares to similar events in recent decades. In order to explore the times when Sparta warred with Athens, enjoyed political hegemony, had this supremacy crushed by Thebes, and finally was among the Greeks who fought the last stand against Rome, the history explored here will extend beyond the Archaic Era and into the Classical Era before concluding in the Hellenistic Era. The journey, however, shall begin in much more ancient times.

It was in the Peloponnese that the Mycenaeans were the most expansive, and the city of Mycenae herself was found in the region. As the Greeks had many legends about Mycenae, she was undoubtedly a highly prominent city in the prehistoric era of Greek civilization. Near Mycenae was another city, which was highly influential well into recorded Greek history, known as Argos, and sometimes “Argos” was used for the chunk of the Peloponnese that surrounded it. Homer frequently refers to the Greeks as “Argives” in the monumental epic poems known as the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” indicating that this part of Greece was so dominant over the other regions early on that they were, in a sense, more Greek than everyone else. People from Argos had more of a right to rule than other Greeks, as evidenced by the fact that the aristocrats leading the siege of Troy are described as Argives. In ancient times, urban areas were centers of political gravity and economic activity, but most of the population was scattered in hamlets and farms across a countryside that was largely wilderness. Today, this is generally no longer the case, although this does not mean that identification with particular cities has lost political relevance. Politicians in almost any country in the modern world can claim certain credentials when stamped with the brand of a culturally iconic city.

According to Eusebius, Argos was originally known as Inachia, a name derived from Inachus. Apollodorus says that this Inachus was the son of two Titans, Ocean and Tethys. His granddaughter Niobe, according to the Greek traditions purported by Apollodorus, was the first mortal woman that Zeus had a child with, and this child was called Argus. Eventually, Argus was crowned king, which both Apollodorus and Eusebius agree followed the kingship of a man named Apis. Eusebius, however, who holds a Christian viewpoint rather than one of Greek polytheism, says that Apis ruled when “Joseph governed the Egyptians.” As one might expect, Inachia began to be called Argos because of his successor, a move almost certainly made to cement political authority. While this is a purely symbolic gesture, it is not unheard of in modern history. Perhaps the most impactful examples were in the former Soviet Union, where Leningrad and Stalingrad celebrated the two Bolshevik revolutionaries who helped lay the foundation more than anyone else for twentieth century communism. During the second half of the twentieth century, swearing allegiance to communist icons granted unquestioned political legitimacy throughout the eastern bloc of the Cold War.

In 1480 BC, according to the dates of Eusebius, a tyranny occurred in Argos, with Danaus seizing power and establishing the Danaid dynasty. Mythology enthusiasts will be familiar with the story of his daughters, known simply as the Danaids, who murder the men that they are forced to marry. Apollodorus tells this story, as do Pindar, Aeschylus, Horace, and Ovid. Danaus, claims Apollodorus, also married his sons to maidens from Arabia, Phoenicia, and Ethiopia. Regardless of whether or not this would have been feasible at such an early date, marriages were indeed one of the key components of royal legitimacy in ancient times. In an era where absolute monarchies are a dying breed, marriages have much less relevance to politics, especially the legitimacy of leaders, in modernity. Marriage ties do not provide any de jure titles of authority in republican systems of governance. While titles such as “First Lady” exist in the United States, such titles are ceremonial only and are not, using the example of the United States, what gives the president the legal right to executive authority. Nor do countries in the modern era make treaties with each other based on marriages.

Another major change, according to Eusebius, occurred in 1176 BC when a new royal family in Argos, reigning from Mycenae, began to rule. In the chronology given by Apollodorus, the early rule of Mycenae coincides with the reign, in neighboring Tiryns, of Perseus, the legendary Greek hero who both slew Medusa and rescued the princess Andromeda. It is impossible to assess individual figures with any degree of certainty, yet there can be no doubt that there is a thin thread of fact to at least some individuals such as Perseus. Hypothetically, if Perseus were based off of a real person, then it is clear that his feats were wildly exaggerated. Furthermore, it is very likely that these exaggerations were encouraged by a local regime that used his character to promote its legitimacy in some way. For example, Perseus could have been used as the founding father of a ruling dynasty, or his status as a hero may have encouraged loyalty to the militia of a polis. While the myths themselves may be less fanciful, the use of national heroes by modern governments is no less significant. Some such heroes are very old, whereas others are much newer. Around the globe, for instance, leaders rally support by invoking the names of ancient religious figures, as modern societies continue to value them. On the other hand, they also invoke the names of individuals who in recent centuries fought struggles against class differences, imperial occupation, and foreign invaders.

Mycenae may have been one of the foremost urban centers of the Aegean Bronze Age, but the city faded in relevance once the better documented time periods arrived. Her last truly notable moment was that in the “Iliad” it is Agamemnon, the King of Mycenae and the brother of King Menelaus of Sparta, who leads the Greek expedition against Troy. Occasionally, powers and the individuals leading them will fade, and so does the international legitimacy of both. An easing of Cold War tensions towards the end of the 1980s, for example, greatly depleted support for juntas in industrializing nations from the great powers. Many once untouchable military dictators fell, including Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1990 and Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire in 1997. Sometimes, however, seemingly doomed regimes can also recover. When civil war erupted in Syria in 2011, rebels swept across huge swathes of the country in a surprisingly short amount of time. Syria became a pariah state, with a government widely seen as illegitimate for its war crimes and human rights abuses. Against all expectations, President Bashar al-Assad remains in power today and has in the last several years regained control of all but a few key regions, and the country was very recently welcomed back into the Arab League.

Of course, when establishing the prehistory of the Peloponnese, the most important cities for the later, historical eras of Greek history are Corinth and, yes, Sparta. Eusebius provides semi-legendary dynastic chronologies for these two city-states as well. He does not bother to cover any such Corinthian or Spartan history prior to one legendary event often considered by scholars to have roots in actual history, the return of the Heraclids. Pivotal for the Peloponnese, this myth is recounted by Apollodorus. Following the myriad of adventures and eventual death of Hercules, the sons of Hercules took refuge first in Ceyx, then Trachis, and finally, Athens. The Heraclids were fleeing Eurystheus, his adversary in life, and war now resulted. According to the writings of Eusebius, the Heraclids emerged from hiding once the war was won in 1103 BC and conquered everywhere in the Peloponnese other than Arcadia, establishing new Heraclid dynasties in the process.

Since the nineteenth century, there has been a community of historians who have proposed that the tale of the return of the Heraclids is representative of a true phenomenon in the Greek Dark Ages that they have labeled the “Dorian invasion.” Several dialects were spoken in Greece during classical antiquity, one of which, Dorian, was spoken primarily in the Peloponnese. Proponents of the Dorian invasion theory argue that the return of the Heraclids in the timeline of Greek mythology coincides with the disappearance of the Mycenaeans in the Greek historical timeline. The key theory can be briefly summarized as Dorian speakers being invaders from the north who swept through the Peloponnese, plundered the cities of the Mycenaeans, built new cities such as Sparta that spoke in the Dorian tongue, and installed rulers claiming the right to rule through Heraclid ancestry. Defenders of the idea say that it would explain why the Mycenaeans seemed to disappear so swiftly and violently, Dorian was spoken heavily in the Peloponnese but not elsewhere, and such a large number of kings in the Archaic Era belonged to dynasties allegedly descended from the legendary Greek hero. An additional argument they make is that Sparta was the largest and one of the most southernmost of the Dorian settlements, indicating that it was where they settled after carving their path of destruction and explaining why Sparta was such a warlike society. While this theory is more scrutinized now than in years passed, it nonetheless remains very common for historians to believe some variation of it.

If there is indeed a substantial amount of truth to the theory, it would be difficult to claim that the events are directly mirrored by any in the modern world, as very few countries have hereditary rulers that are much more than ceremonial, much less ones claiming descent from demigods. A similar phenomenon has still occurred, albeit relatively rarely, in the last century, in which ethnic, racial, or national identity is used as a justification for forcibly and violently displacing another ethnic group viewed as inferior by a regime using hatred as a tool for legitimacy. The most cataclysmic example, of course, was during the Second World War, although related events have happened on a much smaller scale in the decades since. No region of the world has been completely spared from this menace, with some particularly disheartening examples including the Rohingya in the Myanmar Internal Conflict (1948 - present), Mayans in the Guatemalan Civil War (1960 - 1996), Tutsis in the Rwandan Civil War (1990 - 1994), Bosniaks in the Bosnian Civil War (1992 - 1995), and Kurds in the Syrian Civil War (2011 - present). Unlike the Second World War, however, politically motivated genocides during and after the Cold War have almost always been in the context of civil rather than interstate conflicts. In the rare recent example of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the offending party even is claiming to be fighting for the very people that they are targeting by stating that they desire their liberation. Unthinkable in ancient times, governments in the modern world are surprisingly cooperative about putting a halt to situations of ethnic cleansing before they spin out of control.

One can find in the dates provided by Eusebius that the Heraclids ruled Corinth until the tyranny of Cypselus deposed them in 656 BC. Supposedly the Corinthians were the subjects of twelve Heraclid kings until “descendants of Heracles who were more than 200 in number” changed to a system in which “each year they chose one of their number to be president.” In essence, Corinth had become an oligarchy rather than a monarchy, with the right to rule still being based on Heraclid ancestry. Meanwhile, Eusebius and his list of Spartan kings have the Heraclids ruling the polis until 739 BC. Eusebius writes of Lycurgus, a crucial figure in Spartan history, as having been born in 884 BC. Modern historians debate both the historicity of Lycurgus and, if he genuinely existed, when he lived. Estimates range from as early as the tenth to as late as the sixth centuries BC, thus making the date of birth given by Eusebius an exceptionally early one. Both Herodotus and Polybius, a Hellenistic Greek historian from the second century BC who wrote primarily about the Roman Republic, provide a few details about his life and times, with the two agreeing that he was the mind behind the Spartan Constitution. Polybius goes as far as to say that the constitution created by Lycurgus was the first ever, yet he also claims it to have been inferior to its Roman counterpart. A detailed biography of Lycurgus is given by Plutarch in “Parallel Lives.”

If Polybius is correct that Lycurgus crafted the first constitution in the history of the world, then he was indeed one of the most revolutionary men of his era. In modernity, it is arguably constitutional rule that, at least ideologically, is the greatest claim to legitimacy for a ruling government. Oftentimes in the modern world it is even a prerequisite for a government to not only have a constitution but to have one with strong democratic foundations in order to even be a candidate for legitimacy. Meanwhile, countries without constitutions, including the remaining African juntas such as Chad, Mali, and Sudan, are automatically regarded by the international community as having governments without a legal right to rule, even if the major powers can be selective in their application of this policy. Xenophon, a Spartan most famous today for his memoir “Anabasis” on serving as a mercenary with the “10,000” in the Persian army, also wrote a summary of the laws of Spartan society in his “Constitution of the Lacedaemonians.” Spartan society was an unquestionably harsh existence, although it is also just as unquestionable that they did make a major contribution to the evolution of governance. The polis became a major military power in the Peloponnese, establishing rule over the neighboring Messenians in 620 BC and defeating the local hegemony of the Argives of 546 BC.

The brave warriors of Sparta showed that their society gave Greece a polis to be proud of when a small band of only a few hundred fought to the death at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, inflicting heavy casualties on the invading Persians and helping to save Greek independence in the process. Sparta, although certainly not Greece, reached her peak of glory with a victory in the long and bloody Peloponnesian War against Athens in 404 BC, having been fighting off and on since 431 BC. A society whose strength was based solely around political will was fragile, however, and further wars with other city-states, especially Thebes, meant that the hegemony they had for so long sought after was vanquished within a matter of central decades. Perhaps even a constitutional society built around only military strength and loyalty to that concept is not a good example or leader to other states. After leaving the Achaean League in 149 or 148 BC, Sparta was finished. As Polybius noted, the Romans had a society with a more developed constitution, one with more developed institutions. Maybe the Romans, for all their bloody conquests, could still consider more than the sword and shield.

#ancient history #ancient greece #sparta #ancient sparta #ancient civilizations

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subjects-of-the-king · 1 year

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The Concept of Government Legitimacy in Greek Antiquity and the Modern World

An original essay of Lucas Del Rio

Note: This piece of mine references both the modern and ancient worlds. Dates in antiquity will always have BC attached. If there is no BC attached, then the date can be presumed to be AD. All references to events in the modern world are solely for the purpose of historical analysis and are not intended to support any political agenda.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a series of international conflicts, both with and without bloodshed, have arisen over the issue of the right of governments to rule their people. After the Second World War, a push occurred against colonialism, which at least in theory was because states were increasingly expected to have a right to constitutional sovereignty. Similar to Latin America in the nineteenth century, local peoples in Africa and Asia began to grow more nationalistic and demanded the right to have governments that answered to their own subjects rather than being the subjects themselves of imperial powers. This dream would be shattered, however, by the conflicting interests of the United States and the Soviet Union, who both had their own ideas of what a legitimate government meant. Now government legitimacy was no longer derived primarily from popular sovereignty, but rather from the two opposing systems of government and economic structure demanded by the rival superpowers. Consent from the people, as well as the right of a nation to rule itself, grew irrelevant as the former colonies became battlegrounds of political ideology through proxy war and coup d’etat regardless of what their citizens actually wanted. Even with the dissolution of the Soviet Union more than thirty years ago, the major powers of the world have far from ceased operating in this manner. Some countries, such as Somaliland in northern Somalia, have fully functioning governments without any international recognition of sovereignty. Others, such as the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China, both claim the title of legitimacy over the other and both enjoy the recognition of certain other governments. Further still, some nations may try to undermine the status of another internationally, such as how the United States uses sanctions on Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela.

One might assume that this recent history is only characteristic of the timeframe in which it occurred. With nationalism and the notion of universal human rights both being relatively new concepts, older history was indeed frequently dominated by empires, absolutism, and slavery. The idea that there was historically no consideration of government legitimacy could not be further from the truth, however. This topic has the potential to be studied in a myriad of times and places, but consider ancient Greece. Countless city-states were strewn across the country prior to the eventual finalization of the Roman conquest after the Battle of Corinth in 146 BC, and there was a lengthy political history in each of them before this annexation. Cities had different systems of governance, conquering cities installed puppet regimes in one another, and most importantly, there were standards for political legitimacy. In order to study the beginnings of the Greek political systems that would come to dominate her cities in the Classical (490 - 323 BC) and Hellenistic (323 - 30 BC) eras, the focus of research shall be on Athens in the Archaic Era (750 - 490 BC) and earlier.

The earliest surviving Hellenic writings that tell their history in an objective manner are the “Histories” of Herodotus. After spending as long as multiple decades traveling and writing about what was the known world to the Greeks in the fifth century BC, his finished text is arguably the best extant source on Archaic Greece, although little of it extends further back than the late seventh century BC. A crucial source for events before this is the “Chronicle” of Eusebius, a fourth century Christian scholar under Emperor Justinian the Great of the Byzantine Empire. In addition to more accepted facts, some of the contents of his “Chronicle” are clearly derived from legend, although folk tales can often help to decipher the history of a people. For this reason, the “Library” of Apollodorus the Grammarian, an Athenian scholar from the second century BC, is also useful. While the work had the explicit purpose of being a handbook to the ancient Greek beliefs about their deities, demigods, and other mythical figures, there is a great deal of purported information on the rulers of cities in the so-called heroic era, which when used with caution can allow it to serve as a sort of guide to Greece before it was chronicled by Herodotus and his successors. These three texts will therefore act as the main sources on the origins of Greek political structures.

The three better studied eras of ancient Greek history are preceded by the Aegean Bronze Age, a time period stretching from the first cities being founded on the archipelagos that surround the Greek mainland to the disappearance of the Mycenaean civilization, and the Greek Dark Ages, which last until official dates for Greek history are objectively established by the Olympic Games. As a side note, while historians generally simplify the dating by calling 750 BC the dawn of the Archaic Era, the first Olympiad was in 776 BC. In the Aegean Bronze Age, truly large cities emerged first on the island of Crete before being followed by those of the Mycenaeans on the mainland. Many historians have postulated that some later Greek legends were distant recollections of events in the Mycenaean era. This theory, one which deserves much greater study than it has received, is for the most part only applied to the Trojan War, although it has the potential to be used as a starting point for the study of the dawn of Greek politics. Greek legend, like those of many other cultures, had a flood myth in which Zeus attempted to wipe out the human race over anger about child sacrifice. Since the story of the Minotaur also involves child sacrifice of a sort, it seems very likely that the Greeks at one time may have had such a ritual practice. After all, the Greek hero Theseus, son of King Aegeus, overcame great odds against King Minos of Crete, interestingly the location where civilization had arisen first, when he slew his monster that had been living on the flesh of Athenian boys and girls.

If the Greeks truly did practice child sacrifice early on, then both of these stories appear to be a moral condemnation of it. In the case of the flood, it was Lycaon, King of Arcadia in the Peloponnese according to the Latin poet Ovid, who had sacrificed a boy to Zeus. Disgusted, the King of the gods of the Greeks was said to have executed the offending monarch with lightning before receiving the assistance of Poseidon and Triton to flood the world with the heaviest rains ever seen. No one would have a more legitimate claim to kingship than the one who ruled from Olympus, and he had the right to depose a much lesser leader for an obsolete, barbaric practice. To fulfill his goal, he requested help from other members of his family with their own realms. This would be followed by the suffering of many others. While Zeus and probably also Lycaon belong solely to myth, the story could represent child sacrifice surviving as a practice in the peripheral regions of Greece until the leaders of these areas were wiped out by their stronger foes. There is also the possibility that the child sacrifice is allegorical for a different practice of one or more kings, but it still demonstrates the mindset of the Greeks at the time. Given that King Minos also sacrificed children, however, it may be more than a mere allegory.

Contemporary international relations also involve countries that are more powerful and more favorably viewed looking at weak and isolated countries as both primitive and backwards, then using this mindset to justify military or other action. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Middle East, where the United States views Islamic countries, albeit selectively, as foes who refuse to adapt to the modern world. An especially long-running example is Iran, where the Islamic Revolution of 1979 left the country as an adversary of the United States. Iran is condemned by the United States for its theocratic system of governance, a system that the United States sees as illegitimate. More recently, they have accused the Iranians of developing nuclear weapons, which the United States views with suspicion. Of course, most people in the world would agree that theocracy is obsolete in the twenty-first century and that continued nuclear proliferation, regardless of the country obtaining the weapons, is dangerous for people everywhere, just as they would be horrified by child sacrifice. At the same time, many would disagree with the practice of heavy economic sanctions and repeated military threats, which they might view as illegitimate means of diplomacy in the twenty-first century.

The story of Theseus and the Minotaur, as previously asserted, is also essentially about child sacrifice. Unlike King Lycaon, however, it is King Minos who is the powerful ruler subjecting Athens to his will, demanding human sacrificial tribute in a manner similar to the Aztecs. Theseus in this case is playing the role of revolutionary against an old custom. As this tale involves Crete as the location of the greatest power, it is probably that it represents earlier events, when child sacrifice was the norm and still practiced by the most important kings. Here Minos, therefore, is the illegitimate ruler because of his oppressive actions which unjustly interfere in the affairs of another sovereign state. In a twist, Theseus was said by the Athenians to have initiated upon his return the most important political development in Greek history, and arguably, if there is any truth to it, the world. Plutarch, in his work “Parallel Lives” about the greatest of the Greeks and Romans, writes “he promised government without a king” where “he should only be commander in war and guardian of the laws, while in all else everyone should be on an equal footing.” This, according to Plutarch, was “a democracy.”

There is one last notable development to this story, however, and it is that at least some of the Greeks telling it did not view this decision by Theseus favorably, including Plutarch. “He saw that a large part of the people were corrupted” writes Plutarch, who also adds that they “wished to be cajoled into service instead of doing silently what they were told to do.” For many Greeks, the democracy that had been won by the Athenian hero after he freed the city from Cretan subjugation was not the most legitimate system of government, as much of the international community would agree today, but rather the least. Even in the twenty-first century, this story has great relevance. Some highly autocratic leaders, especially in Africa, still try to discredit the concept of democracy by pointing to the failures of democracies that are otherwise similar to their own states by pointing out the failure of these governments to bring down corruption, crime, disorder, poverty, and reliance on foreign powers. The Latin American strongmen, juntas, and one-party states in countries such as Chile, Argentina, and Mexico used similar arguments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and some would argue that the region has grown significantly more authoritarian in the last decade or so. Furthermore, like Theseus, leaders in modernity who attempt to initiate change by fighting imperial powers and establishing radical new systems of government are rarely successful. Communism is the most well-known example, although a similar issue can be seen in the African anticolonial revolutionaries of the 1960s, where newly democracy almost immediately collapsed in nearly every newly independent state and is yet to return to many. Unfortunately, both the terms “communist state” and “African state” have become heavily associated with tyranny, whether the generalization is fair or not.

Plutarch may provide a lengthy biography of Theseus, although Apollodorus discusses several other legendary Athenian kings, and Eusebius gives a simple yet thorough chronology. Apollodorus maintains that the different gods built cities that would be their respective site of worship, and the one built by Athena was Athens. Ogygus, according to Eusebius, was their first king, then “the Greeks relate that their great ancient flood happened in his reign” and “Attica remained without a king for 190 years.” There is no evidence, of course, that such a flood genuinely occurred, although the unknown event that mysteriously led to the crumbling of the Mycenaean civilization at the dawn of the Greek Dark Ages likely left governance in some parts of Greece in a state of limbo. It is therefore not unthinkable that central control in Athens could have broken down for almost two centuries, possibly with a multitude of warring factions all claiming the title of legitimate ruler while decrying the others as tyrants. “Tyrant” was a frequently used word in ancient Greece for a usurper of the government of a polis, especially one previously controlled by a “rightful” royal family and particularly in the Archaic Era. Its roots originate with the Lydian people of Asia Minor, whom Herodotus says were ruled by a dynasty descended from the Greek hero Heracles, better known today by his Latinized name Hercules, until they were overthrown by Gyges of the Mermnad dynasty. Using lengths of reign and other chronological dates provided by the celebrated Ionian historian, modern scholars have calculated the date of this seizure of power to have been 716 BC, or early in the Archaic Era of the neighboring land of the Greeks.

When the legitimacy of a regime is questioned in the modern world, the result can be the collapse of the central government. Oftentimes a military government ends up replacing a civilian one, or worse yet, central authority completely collapses into an ungovernable warlord state. Two Arab countries in North Africa are recent examples of the two situations. In 2011, the longtime dictators Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, in power since 1981, and Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya, in power since 1969, were both expelled from power after mass demonstrations erupted into widespread street violence. Both leaders suddenly received condemnation from the international community, with Mubarak choosing to step down while Qaddafi was killed after risking a civil war that he lost. Egypt was celebrated for holding her first free and fair elections, but there was once again anger from both world leaders and the local population with the newly elected Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. A coup d’etat followed in 2013 with a minimum of international condemnation, Morsi would die under suspicious circumstances in 2019, and the country is now led by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the military officer who deposed him. A far more dire situation has occurred in Libya, which quickly descended into a civil war with various opposing factions backed by several different foreign countries, including some of her African neighbors as well as the great powers of the world.

Tyranny was exceptionally common in the Greek Archaic Era before a transition towards more democracies and aristocracies as the Classical Era dawned. Herodotus writes heavily about the different tyrants, as his successor Thucydides does to a lesser extent. The author of the “History of the Peloponnesian War,” which chronicled the catastrophic violence between Athens and Sparta in the late fifth century BC, Thucydides is generally considered to have been the greatest historian of the Classical Era after Herodotus. Some modern scholars even prefer Thucydides as a writer because they feel his approach is less biased and that he more carefully vetted his sources. He writes that “the old form of government was hereditary monarchy with established rights and limitations” until “tyrannies were established in nearly all the cities.” Clearly Thucydides considers monarchy to be a more legitimate form of government. Today, military seizures of power are at the very least internationally condemned and often met with economic sanctions such as embargoes and asset freezes, showing that unconstitutional rule by juntas is now no longer seen as legitimate as it was during the Cold War and earlier. On the other hand, while the official international consensus is supposed to be that absolute monarchy is obsolete, powerful countries such as the United States continue to work closely with hereditary regimes such as Saudi Arabia. One reason given for the illegitimacy of military government is the squandering of economic resources, a sentiment shared by Thucydides when he says “for a long long the state of affairs everywhere in Hellas was such that nothing very remarkable could be done” and “cities were lacking in enterprise.”

According to Eusebius, following the reestablishment of monarchy in Athens by King Cecrops, who is also mentioned in the myths told by Apollodorus, the city was ruled by a series of seventeen kings. These kings, he says, belonged to the Erechtheid dynasty, who reigned for 450 years. As Athens transitioned from monarchy, the heads of government were the archons. The reason for this abandonment of monarchy by the Athenians is unclear, but there must have been forces in the city causing a different political system to be considered a more legitimate form of rule. Initially, the archons held power for life, and then his dates show that after 763 BC they began to be appointed for ten year terms. After 684 BC, these terms changed to one year. Just like in Athens, countries in the modern world grapple with the legitimacy of individual leaders based on the duration in which they are permitted to remain in power. Especially in the more peripheral states of the world, changes are frequently made to national constitutions regarding term limits and the length of individual terms. Herodotus mentions a series of tyrannies and attempted tyrannies in Athens that occurred prior to the democratic reforms that historians believe occurred in 508 BC.

A pivotal moment occurred in Greece, which foreshadowed a major aspect of modern geopolitics, as the Archaic Era was coming to a close. This was the first and second Persian invasion of Greece, which caused something to occur in the world that had never happened before. In these wars, the greatest imperial power of the world chose to use its massive army against a people who, more than had happened up until this point in history, were starting to develop a national identity. The Greeks did not wish to be subjects of the Persians. To the Greeks, despite their many scattered governments, only Greek rule over Greece was legitimate, and they therefore showed unity and strength to defend their sovereignty. During the eighteenth century, such a notion of nationalism spread across the globe. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became commonplace for nationalist partisans to resist instances of foreign occupation. Since the Second World War, direct occupation of a different nation-state has grown increasingly difficult, as evidenced by the local responses in Afghanistan in 1979, Iraq in 2003, and Ukraine in 2022. Like the Greeks of the fifth century BC, the people of the modern world are increasingly valuing both democracy and their own sovereignty, and like the Classical Greeks, they have the potential for some of the greatest deeds in human history.

#history #ancient history #ancient greece #historical writing #historical analysis #greece #greek governments #geopolitics #international relations #political theory

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