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Ordinary Things, |
He talked to me at club one day concerning Catiline’s conspiracy—so I withdrew my attention, and thought about Tom Thumb.
—Samuel Johnson
More than five years ago I wrote in a small monograph, Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece, that the favored way of initiating infantry battle between classical Greek city-states at war, which was to devastate farmland, was a paradox of the highest order. Nearly all of our ancient literary sources make it clear that the Greeks themselves believed that the ravaging of grainfields, orchards, and vineyards was a serious affair. And we have traditionally assumed that the entire premise of Greek warfare was that the belligerents mutually assumed that further attacks by invaders against farmland must be checked by decisive infantry battle on the plains of Greece in order to save the livelihood of the defenders. Yet upon closer scrutiny a variety of disturbing indications from Greek literature, archaeology, and epigraphy suggested that, in fact, nearly the opposite seemed to be true: the sheer difficulty of destroying trees, vines, and acres of grain virtually ensured that comprehensive destruction was unlikely. Instead, farming continued immediately after the departure of the invaders, or in the very midst of their occupation, times when we might have imagined that destroyed farmhouses, ruined grainfields, and stumps in place of orchards and vineyards made such an enterprise impossible for an entire generation to come. For example, despite the shrill complaints of Attic farmers portrayed in Aristophanes’ comedies concerning their losses to Spartan ravagers, elsewhere in those very plays (first produced during the Peloponnesian War) there are plenty of references both to farm produce and to being able freely to move about in the countryside. Even the somber historian Thucydides, who presents the most detailed narrative of Spartan ravaging during the Archidamian (431–425) and Dekeleian (413–403) phases of the Peloponnesian War, presumes that the actual long-term losses to Athenian agriculture were not great. Why then did men march out to fight when the enemy entered their farms?
The rationale of Greek battle between heavy infantry of the classical period cannot be that it was a preventative to agricultural catastrophe but, rather, we must consider that it arose as a provocation or reaction to the mere threat of farm attack. The mere sight of enemy ravagers running loose across the lands of the invaded was alone considered a violation of both individual privacy and municipal pride. Usually a quick response was considered necessary, in the form of heavily armed and armored farmers filing into a suitable small plain—the usual peacetime workplace of all involved—where brief but brutal battle resulted either in concessions granted to the army of invasion, or a humiliating, forced retreat back home for the defeated. Ultimate victory in the modern sense and enslavement of the conquered were not considered an option by either side. Greek hoplite battles were struggles between small landholders who by mutual consent sought to limit warfare (and hence killing) to a single, brief, nightmarish occasion.
Ironically, most city-states (Athens of the late fifth century B.C. being the notable exception) never questioned the effectiveness of enemy ravaging of croplands, which continued before and after these ritualized set battles, yet we can be sure that the greater danger to any landholding infantryman was painful death on the battlefield, not slow starvation brought on through loss of his farm. The Greek manner of fighting must be explained as an evolving idea, a perception in the minds of small farmers that their ancestral land should remain at all costs inviolate—aporthetos—not to be trodden over by any other than themselves, land whose integrity all citizens of the polis were willing to fight over on a moment’s notice. At the end of the fifth century B.C., after two hundred years of hoplite warfare, Athens and other communities learned that it might be more advantageous to remain inside the city walls and dare the enemy to ruin their farm estates; the formalized ritual of pitched hoplite battle was then questioned and thus jeopardized. The rapid growth of auxiliary troops and siegecraft in the ensuing fourth century accompanied these new ideas and ensured that battle thereafter would be relentless rather than episodic, expanded rather than confined, a new opportunity for the victor to seek not a benign humiliation but often the unconditional surrender and subjugation of the defeated. In short, the entire notion that infantry battle was integrated irrevocably with agriculture was cast aside.
In my earlier work I felt that a proper understanding of agricultural devastation was significant chiefly in economic terms: we should not attribute civic upheaval during periods following even lengthy hoplite wars to wartime farming losses since so little actual damage was done in the countryside. However, there were, I realize, military implications as well that concerned the very nature of Greek battle. Infantrymen marched out not to save their livelihoods nor even their ancestral homes, but rather for an idea: that no enemy march uncontested through the plains of Greece, that, in Themistocles’ words, “no man become inferior to, or give way, before another.” (Ael. VH 2.28)
The initial ideas which led to that study a few years ago did not, I must confess, originate solely from a close reading of Greek literary and historical texts, or walks in the Attic countryside, or examination of epigraphical collections—although I argued such sources do confirm the general outlines of my thesis. Instead, it was my practical interest in the difficulty and frustration of removing fruit trees and vines on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California that suggested that these problems could only have been magnified (as they had been in my grandfather’s time on farms without tractors and chain saws) where the process was not an occasional, bothersome task for a forgotten fraction of the population, but a real worry in the mind of every citizen of the classical polis. I was struck also by how overly sensitive, how irrational, were our present-day neighbors (and myself) to the slightest incursion of their farms by troops of urban young hunters or the weekend horsemen who trespassed so freely. Convinced that our electrical pumps, sheds, irrigation pipes, and orchards had been ruined or at least “tampered with” by these invaders, on inspection we rarely found anything other than the occasional bullet hole or manured alleyway.
Obviously, then, I do not believe that we should imagine classical Greek society frozen in time and space, as a cultural standard maintained over the millennia, for a small elite. Humanists in our universities who look back to the fifth century B.C. to find solace in the excellence of Greek literature, art, or philosophy, all too often conceive of an image of a society that never existed. They picture writers, artists, philosophers, and other men of genius, but they do not picture them as related to the vast majority of Greek people and their “petty” concerns and, worse yet, they divorce them from the very physical landscape they inhabited. In their hands classical studies have grown only more rarefied and isolated from those who surely need its guidance now more than ever: all serious and hardworking citizens of our polis. All too many scholars—as any visitor to the learned societies’ conventions can attest—have somehow convinced themselves that classical Athens was a community similar to their own universities, a notion that is not only demonstrably false but also dangerous: this attitude has virtually ensured that only scarce resources are invested in their own limited interests, which in turn casts a further veil over the Greeks and removes them yet a further generation away from the rest of us. A good example is found in the relative neglect by classicists of ancient Greek agriculture. Nearly eighty percent of the citizens of most ancient city-states were employed in farming, and questions of food supply affected nearly all their economical or political discussions. Yet, until recently not more than a half-dozen books were devoted to the subject. Modern scholars have been far more interested, ironically, in “pastoralism,” the artificial and detached view of the countryside created by just a few ancient escapists, who like their modern admirers were often far removed from the concerns of contemporary society. Nor do the social scientists do us any better if they investigate the role of labor, slavery, women, family, and kin relationships in order to discover some structure in classical society that validates their ideas about contemporary politics—for inevitably they have a political agenda.
Rather, classical Greece still offers us the best—perhaps the only intellectual—explanation for how the pragmatic concerns of our own daily existence in Western society have been addressed and solved. If we concentrate on mundane and ordinary activities—the mechanics of ancient farming or fighting, to take a small example—we can discover in a well-documented, brief period in history that honesty and clarity of expression in all types of inquiry were of vital concern to the pragmatic Greeks of the fifth century B.C., to the men like Socrates, Sophocles, and Pericles who were stonemasons, soldiers, farmers, and businessmen. This process is inevitably a circular one: contemporary issues of vital concern, which we began by thinking so simple, inevitably become complex when we discover the unexpected ways in which Greek experience shared them, which in turn brings us a renewed appreciation for the versatility and novelty of the Greek legacy.
Of course, one naturally sees the ancient Greece one wants to see. For example, if there is a dangerous tendency among contemporary military strategists to make the experience (and thus misery) of soldiers in battle forever of only secondary concern, whether at the tactical level on the battlefield or in the global vision of the nuclear planner, Greek history can, I suppose, provide the supporting intellectual framework: strategy and tactics in the abstract sense are, after all, Greek words for generalship and troop arrangement. Yet the architects of the Somme, Schweinfurt, Vietnam, and other misadventures to come draw on the experience of their own counterparts, the fourth-century B.C. armchair tacticians or the Hellenistic pedant, not on the world of Aeschylus and Socrates, who knew the Greek battlefield as ordinary hoplites in the Athenian phalanx. The example of classical Greece insists that there was, is, and always must be a connection between the adolescent unshaven men who kill and either those who order or we who ignore them.
The only prerequisite in any investigation of classical Greece is that we must always consider the seemingly ordinary as well as the extraordinary if we are to understand and thus learn from the most profound lessons of these most practical of men. And while today the university is the last island in America where we can learn the necessary philological skills to study ancient Greece, the university surely has not, will not, and cannot teach us how to use the knowledge we acquire. That task is an individual affair, unwelcomed by many classical scholars. But the rewards of turning to classical Greece to investigate the ordinary are great, for the ultimate answers are always of a moral nature, and have a far greater likelihood to be applicable and comprehensible to nearly every one of us.