How the Greeks came of age
Two remarkable books on Greek history reveal that soft power preserved the Greeks as a nation during periods when they failed at political unity
The Greeks: A Global History, by Roderick Beaton
The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe by Mark Mazower
We are travelling through a shower of Greek anniversaries, triumphant and calamitous. Last year marked the 25th centenary of the Battle of Salamis, when 300 Greek warships defeated a Persian armada four times larger and ended the Persian Empire’s expansion into Europe. This year marks the bicentenary of the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, which resulted in the first European nation state successfully founded on the Enlightenment values of the American constitution (France preceded it but fell at Waterloo). Next year will mark the centenary of Greece’s defeat in Asia Minor, which ended its aspirations to absorb all the lands where Greeks lived and had lived since antiquity, an event still referred to as ‘the catastrophe’; and 2023 marks the centenary of the Treaty of Lausanne, which organised the first mass exchange of populations in modern times, forcing Christians and Muslims to leave Turkey and Greece, respectively.
In The Greeks: A Global History, Roderick Beaton encompasses the entire history of the nation, beginning with the Minoans whose civilisation ended 3,500 years ago. He defines as Greek anyone who spoke and wrote Greek, appropriately because language is the core criterion of how the Greeks defined themselves over the centuries. Much else about them was mutable. They have at various times called themselves Achaeans, Hellenes, Romans and Greeks. The boundaries of the Greek state have waxed and waned, disappearing entirely during centuries of subjugation, while the nation has been boundless, establishing itself literally everywhere on the globe. Unlike other long-lived civilisations, when the Greeks did achieve self-determination they experimented with different political systems including monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy and democracy (all Greek words). They were the subjects of two empires (Roman and Ottoman), and ruled at least three (Athenian, Macedonian and Byzantine). Their religious allegiance switched, too, from worship of the Olympian gods to Christianity.
But Beaton’s history makes clear that there have also been constants. The Greek peninsula and the Aegean Sea always formed the core of the Greek homeland. That has kept the Greeks at a crossroads of continents, often at war, and always pivotal to Europe’s relationship with Asia. It’s clear, too, that throughout their history the Greeks have been superb seafarers; in fact shipping has been crucial to their survival. They have always had an extensive diaspora. They are hoarders and developers of knowledge, and this soft power explains their astonishing ability to survive, adapt and prosper during losses of hard power. And they have always shown a penchant for vanity, envy, faction and betrayal, a glaring vice their enemies were quick to exploit.
Nationhood
That the Greeks felt cultural kinship with each other is clear. What is not clear is when they acquired a national political conscience. Most likely it happened in stages. If we believe the events of Homer’s Iliad, the Greek expedition to conquer Troy was a catalyst. Although the Mycenean world was organised as a collection of autonomous regions with a palace and a ruler at the centre of each, Agamemnon, king in Mycenae, was able to call upon all 30-odd to contribute men and ships to a campaign that lasted a decade. Greeks came from as far afield as the Ionian Sea, Crete, Rhodes, the coast of Asia Minor and the coast of Thrace.
Beaton believes that the moment when the Greeks begin to come together as a self-conscious political entity is the victory at Salamis in 480 BC, not only because of their military triumph, but also because of the propaganda that followed it in the form of Aischylos’ play, The Persians. “What his play celebrates, for the first time, is Hellas as a land and Hellenes as a distinct people,” he says. In fact, the two are allied, because Hellas “slays by hunger all those who are too numerous for it,” in Aischylos’ words, a reference to Greece’s aridity and scarce soil, which made the Persian navy vital to revictualling its million-man army. The play’s central character, Atossa, is the mother of the Persian king, Xerxes, and the widow of another king who had tried and failed to conquer the Greeks ten years earlier, Darius. Incredulous at the news of another defeat, she asks how the Greeks could have stood up to such enormous odds, and is told that the Greeks were fighting for their liberty. Thus The Persians “brings into being an entire moral and geopolitical universe that had not existed” before the Persian Wars, says Beaton. Briefly, Athens was an empire with a democracy at its heart – the model that still inspires America.
Beaton’s argument rings true – that repeatedly crossing swords with the east is arguably what hammered the Greeks into a polity. The Trojan War in 1194-1184 BC and the Persian Wars seven centuries later were followed by Alexander’s invasion of Asia in 334 BC, which established Greek kingdoms from Macedonia to India almost until the birth of Christ. (Beaton points out that some Greek kingdoms in northwest India lasted 300 years - longer than the British Raj). As rulers of the eastern Roman Empire from Constantinople, the Greeks established Christianity as the state religion and fought the Muslim Arabs, Zoroastrian Persians, pagan Slavs and the Turks for more than a thousand years, cementing their view of themselves as defenders of Europe from the east. That self-definition was surely fortifying, as few political constructs can boast a similar longevity.
Division
Political instability and infighting emerge as recurring themes in Beaton’s panoramic narrative. The sense of nationhood the Greeks achieved under Athenian leadership at Salamis did not last because it aroused envy among the Spartans, who had until recently been Greece’s supreme military and political power. Persian kings learned that it was far easier to set the Greeks against each other than to fight them, and paid Sparta to instigate a war against Athens. (Alexander the Great would later discover the correspondence between Persia’s satraps and Sparta’s kings in the archives at Sardis). The Spartans defeated Athens in the three decades-long Peloponnesian War and obsequiously returned to Persian control the Greek cities along the coast of Asia Minor, whose revolt Athens had supported triggering the Persian Wars.
Sparta did not enjoy its victory for long. Eager to keep the Greeks at each other’s throats, the Persian king Artaxerxes now began bribing Sparta’s enemies. The Korinthian War pitted Thebes, Korinth, Athens and Argos against Sparta. The Spartans narrowly avoided defeat by negotiating terms directly with Artaxerxes. Thebes would later defeat Sparta decisively under its brilliant general Epameinondas without Persian gold, but his untimely death forestalled the cementing of a new national leadership. The fourth century unfolded as an opera of constant wars among ever-weaker city states. By the time Macedonian king Philip II swept south to unite Greece by force, even Persian gold, spent lavishly on the Athenians to stop him, couldn’t finance a competent resistance.
After the death of Alexander, division also bedeviled Greece’s piecemeal efforts to resist the looming power of Rome. Greece made itself a target for Roman retribution when it sided with Hannibal in the Second Punic War. When a Roman army defeated the Macedonian king Philip on the plain of Thessaly in 197 BC, it was in part because many Greek city states had sided with the Romans in a bid to win back their independence from Macedonian rule. The Romans were astute enough to grant that independence at first, calculating that a string of city states on their eastern frontier posed no threat. But after two more Macedonian kings raised armies and were defeated, at Magnesia in Asia Minor in 188 BC and at Pydna on the Macedonian coastline in 168 BC, the kingdom of Macedon was split into four regions answerable to Rome. Autonomy on the Greek peninsula was at an end. Nor did the Romans give the Macedonian kingdoms in the east any respite. When Antiochos IV defeated Ptolemy VI in a bid to unite the Macedonian kingdoms of Asia and Egypt, a Roman envoy flew out to Alexandria to forbid the merger. Caius Popilius Laenas brought no army. He simply drew a circle in the sand around Antiochos with a stick and told him to decide whether to defy Rome before he stepped out of it. Antiochos relented, Egypt became a Roman protectorate and so, in effect, did the kingdom of Asia. Rome was the new Mediterranean power. Even now the Greeks played for the low stakes of local government. The cities of the Peloponnese formed a loose confederation called the “Achaean League”, based in Korinth, and asked Rome to sanction it. The Macedonian dynasts of the east had, at least, realised that size alone could consolidate Greek power against Rome. The peninsular Greeks, it seems, never did. Three years after it razed Carthage, Rome did the same to Korinth.
Thirteen centuries later, another Greek would make the mistake of enlisting an outside power he could not control. In 1195, a young heir to the throne of Byzantium, whose uncle had ousted his father in a palace coup, made his way to Venice. A French army was mustering there for a Fourth Crusade to claim Alexandria and Jerusalem for Christendom. The Venetians were building a fleet of shallow-bottomed boats for the expedition to navigate the Nile delta. The French couldn’t pay for these boats, but the Venetians were to recoup their investment through conquest. Now prince Alexios showed up from Constantinople, a city of fabled wealth, and told them he would pay their expenses if only they would restore him to his rightful place on the throne. The expedition changed course for Constantinople, and the mere sight of its thousand galleys in the Bosphoros was enough to turn the usurper uncle to flight with as much gold as he could carry. Alexios found the state coffers empty, vacillated about how to pay the crusaders, and found himself besieged by them. On 12 April 1204, the Catholic armies entered the city. The pillage of the city’s wealth, the rape of its women and the killing of all who resisted carried on for days. An inexperienced heir had brought ruin to the Byzantine Empire at the hands of fellow-Christians. Even though the Greeks reconquered the city in 1261, it never again became a geopolitical force. When it fell for the last time to the Ottomans in 1453, it had already lost its continental possessions to them in the Balkans and Asia Minor.
The loss of Constantinople still rankles the Greeks. When Pope John Paul II paid a visit to Athens in 2004 at the invitation of the foreign ministry, the reconciliation of Orthodoxy with Catholicism was the last thing on most people’s minds. What the Greeks wanted to know was whether he would issue a formal apology for 1204. His mumblings about the “mysterium iniquitatis” satisfied few. As far as the modern Greeks are concerned, and the Greeks of Byzantium for that matter, there was no mystery about this sin. The Latins were envious of the lucrative trading routes to the east that the Greeks controlled.
The errant Fourth Crusade proved beyond doubt a geopolitical reality: the Greeks’ constant confrontation with the east meant that they always needed to be on good terms with the west. This, at least, is a lesson the Greeks finally absorbed when they rebelled against the Ottoman Empire almost four centuries later.
Learning
An equally clear theme in Beaton is that having lost their independence, wealth and status through bickering, the Greeks were adept at infiltrating their conquerors with soft power. This happened repeatedly, and it is key to the survival of the Greeks as a distinct identity through the ages.
The first triumph of soft power came the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC. Athens acquired an afterlife as a cultural power, increasingly defining Greekness. Plato documents in his dialogues the philosophers who came from all over Greece to set up shop in what could be described as the world’s first tertiary education industry. Philip II made a conscious decision to steer the Macedonian kingdom towards classical learning. He hired Aristotle to teach his son, Alexander. Macedonians adopted Attic Greek, gave their children Athenian names and built their palaces in Athenian architectural styles. Beaton does not delve into the prickly brambles of debate about whether they were racially Greek. The point is that they were “rapidly becoming Greek,” and the culture Alexander established in Asia through his conquest of the Persian Empire was Greek.
This idea of belonging through culture was first articulated by the Athenian orator Isokrates in 380 BC: “By so much has our city exceeded all mankind in matters of thought and speech, that her students have become the teachers of others; she has caused the name of Greeks to be understood, not in terms of kinship any more, but of a way of thinking, and people to be called Greeks if they share our educational system, rather than a common ancestry.” This is nothing other than naturalisation, a basis for citizenship in the open societies of the Western world and a cornerstone of liberalism. It was first articulated 23 centuries ago amid the highly tribal politics of the city states, where, as Beaton puts it, “it was the idea of their autonomy from one another that held the deepest claim on the loyalty of Greek citizens, trumping by some margin their shared identity as Hellenes.” Isokrates had a political motive for his belief. He wanted the Greeks to rally behind Philip II in a national quest to conquer the Persian Empire and avenge the wrongs of a century and a half earlier. Restricting citizenship to the offspring of citizens was simply supremacist, in this view. The Spartans, who jealously preserved their genetic purity, were unpopular and then died out. Philip understood the magnitude of Isokrates’ vision. Most Greeks did not. In the modern era Greece has given up its tribalism somewhat reluctantly, being one of the last European Union members to pass a naturalisation law (three versions between 2010 and 2018). It deems nine years of secondary schooling for minors and five years of residence for adults as sufficient proof of a desire to put down roots and assimilate.
Athens’ soft power only grew in the Roman era. Greek tutors became a fixture in wealthy Roman households. When their children came of age, Romans sent them to Athens to learn literature, philosophy and rhetoric. The years of prosperity had given Athens remarkable architecture and tourism flourished. The Romans built their own imperial capital in styles learned from the Greeks, and their sculptors copied Greek bronzes in marble to learn their attitudes. Greek literary forms – epic, tragedy, comedy, historiography and the philosophical treatise – were being emulated by Roman authors such as Virgil, Seneca, Plautus, Livy, Cicero and Lucretius. Two ethical systems fought for the soul of the Roman ruling class – Stoicism and Epicureanism – whose schools had been founded in Athens. As Beaton says, “The process of ‘becoming Greek’ could work just as well through being conquered as through conquering others.”
After the Roman empire absorbed the Hellenistic kingdoms of Asia, the far-reaching effects of the Macedonians’ cultural assimilation became clear. During the intervening two-and-a-half centuries of Hellenistic rule, Greek had become the prestige language for business, education and administration from Syria to Afghanistan and from the Black Sea to Egypt. “There was never any formal recognition that the eastern half of the empire actually functioned in a different language from the official one,” says Beaton. “But much of the later history of Europe would be founded on an informal division that seems to have become tacitly accepted during or shortly after the time of Augustus – between a Latin-speaking west and a Greek-speaking east.” With Rome now dispensing citizenship, what made a person a Hellene was not birth in one part of the empire or another, says Beaton, but “his participation in a type of education that had begun in Athens in the fifth century BC.”
After Constantinople fell to the Latins in 1204, Greek learning again spread west. Italian efforts to recreate the original sung poetry experience of tragedy created opera. Greeks again became teachers of the arts, sciences and philosophy, helping to give rise to the Renaissance. After the second fall of Constantinople in 1453, Greek learning would come to be appreciated by the Ottomans, who gradually promoted Greeks to sensitive positions as interpreters and governors of European provinces, allowed them to continue their business as traders and bankers, and encouraged the settlement of more Greeks from all over Asia Minor in the imperial capital.
Perhaps most remarkably, the Ottomans ultimately offered the Greeks a monopoly on the Porte’s diplomatic service. This was a recognition of the fact that the Byzantines had developed diplomacy as a means of avoiding wars they could not afford or could not win - another facet of their soft power. The best example of this came in the late 11th century. The emperor Alexios faced imminent invasion by Seljuk Turks who had taken Nikaia (modern Iznik) on the far side of the Sea of Marmara from Constantinople. He did not have the money or manpower to repel them. He did, however, know that anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe was high, because the Seljuks had impeded Christians making their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Alexios’ envoys asked Pope Urban II to raise troops in western kingdoms for the defence of the church. The resulting First Crusade in 1195 helped the Byzantines defeat the Seljuks, but Alexios kept Latin troops far from the capital and made sure they were well fed, lessons the wastrel Alexios of the 13th century obviously never learned.
Perhaps the Byzantines’ most far-reaching diplomatic achievement was the conversion of the Slavs to Christianity, a brainchild of patriarch Photios in the 9th century. He assigned the task to two brothers in the clergy, Konstantine and Methodios. The first devised an alphabet for Slavonic (called the Cyrillic alphabet, because he later changed his name to Cyril) and Methodios translated the Bible using it. The conversion of the Slavs meant the Byzantines would never again have to face them on the battlefield.
Shipping
Greece’s oldest literature contains references to the importance of knowing what you’re doing at sea. Hesiod, the impoverished son of a ruined merchant shipowner, advises his brother never to set sail “until the topmost fig leaves are as big as a crow’s foot,” in other words some time in April, in his 8th century BC didactic poem Works and Days.
The Greeks were aware of their wider geographic neighbourhood because they sailed it. Greek tombs, pottery and other artefacts dot the coastline of the Mediterranean, testament to trading colonies the Greeks established long before the written word. That written word itself, the alphabet, was an import from the Phoenicians, making landfall in Evia and Boeotia sometime between 850 and 825 BC.
Archaeological evidence suggests that when the Hittites put down a revolt of vassal cities on the coast of Asia Minor, including Troy, at around 1,400 BC, Myceneans had helped support the rebellion – an impossible feat without a navy. The same scenario would play out nine centuries later when the Athenians assisted the revolt of the Ionian cities against Persia. The east Aegean coast, it seems, was long a contested space between the Greeks and whoever held the hinterland of Asia Minor.
Athens probably contested it longer and more successfully than anyone else. When a rich vein of silver was discovered in the state mines of Lavrion in the early 5th century BC, Themistokles advised the Athenians to build a fleet of 200 warships. The scheme must have seemed outlandish at the time. Thucydides tells us that other than the navies of distant Corcyra (Corfu) and Sicily, “there were no other navies of any importance in Hellas before the time of the expedition of Xerxes.” Themistokles was experimenting with what must have been a new way to project power in his time, and for half a century it made Athens a superpower.
The importance of naval power was not lost on the Byzantines, who took care never to lose control of the waterways around Constantinople. On the two occasions when they did, 1204 and 1453, they lost the city. Greek shipping continued to flourish under the Ottomans, who relied on it to provide grain from the Ukraine and Egypt to feed Constantinople. Greek ships came and went unmolested through the Bosphoros even during the Greek War of Independence, supplying Ottoman as well as Greek armies. One of the reasons shipowners didn’t play a decisive role in the war is that they had much more lucrative things to do than liberate Greece. Russia in the 18th century and Britain in the 19th extended protections to Greek shipping, realising the usefulness of the fleet for their interests.
The Greek shipping tradition continued to play a crucial role in both World Wars, when Greek ships were pressed into service. American war surplus helped the Greeks recover staggering losses from the Second World War, partly in order to serve the American interest of shipping Middle Eastern oil westward. Since the early 1970s, the Greeks have consistently held the biggest oceangoing merchant fleet by a wide margin. China and Japan trail a distant second and third. Greeks now carry an estimated fifth of global trade on a fleet recently valued at $132bn.
Returning
After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, the Greeks were separated from mainstream European history by an Iron Curtain. Though the Constantinopolitan Greek elite and shipowners enjoyed privileges, the reality for most Greeks was one of impoverishment at the hands of tax farmers and the surrendering of their sons for forced conversion to Islam and service in the Sultan’s army. When they re-claimed their independence in 1821, Europe had almost forgotten the Greeks existed as a modern nation.
As Mark Mazower makes clear in The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe, the Greek Revolution set out to liberate not just the lands that today make up Greece, but also Constantinople and the Greek-populated areas of Asia Minor. As he crosses into Moldavia to foment rebellion there and make his way south to Greece, the first leader of the revolution, Alexandros Ypsilantis, issues orders to co-conspirators in the Ottoman capital to burn the Turkish fleet and lead a simultaneous uprising there. The dream of a state that united the Greek nation would drive Greek policy for a century.
The audacity of the Greeks in1821 was breathtaking. Mazower estimates the Greeks could arm perhaps 15,000-20,000 men, a mere tenth of the Sultan’s army. As a percentage of the Ottoman Empire’s population they were meagre – Mazower estimates 3 million out of 23-24 million subjects, many of them living far from the Revolution. Revolutionary Greece’s revenues, says Mazower, were likely to have been “a few percent” of the 200mn grossia in imperial annual revenues. Even when Greece managed to float two war bonds in London in 1824, the terms were usurious by today’s standards: Greece secured perhaps £1.2mn in coin, weapons and stores for a face value of £2.8mn. This was never enough to turn the tide.
“Fiscally this was a contest between Goliath and David,” Mazower says. “Contemporary observers found it hard to believe the Greeks had taken the initiative alone.” Austrian Chancellor Klemens Von Metternich and Tsar Alexander assumed there was a much broader international conspiracy behind the uprising than there actually was. Sultan Mahmud II assumed Russia was the instigator.
The Greeks offset the harsh realities of their struggle with the hope that their fellow-Orthodox Russians, whom they had converted in the 9th century and continued to have an almost mystical faith in as a secret weapon, would indeed intervene on their behalf. The expectation of Russian intervention did help the Greek cause. It made Sultan Mahmud II fearful of removing the full force of his fleet away from Constantinople into the Aegean; and it persuaded British foreign secretary George Canning to bring Greece under British protection.
The Greeks were astute about the importance of Europe in their eventual fate, but occasionally they suffered lapses. When Peloponnesian peasants seized the moment of revolution to dispatch their landowners, as the French peasantry had done, warlord Theodore Kolokotronis reminded them that as mere rebels no-one would want to help them, and the Great Powers would help the Sultan instead.
When a Constantinopolitan Greek, Alexandros Mavrokordatos, assumed the leadership of the revolution, he moved quickly to impress Europe by passing a constitution that suggested a national government and showcased Enlightenment values - equality before the law, security of property and taxation on the basis of law. Restoration Europe – Austria, Britain and Russia – was still staunchly opposed to the republican values championed by the defeated Napoleon, but Greece had at least tapped into a rising political movement in the European mainstream. She had also appealed to the United States.
The reality on the ground was different. Although Mavrokordatos sent out regional prefects and started collecting tax revenue for the national coffers, Greece was reverting to the regionalism reminiscent of ancient city states, establishing three administrative districts under three leaders. Mavrokordatos knew that to appeal to liberal values, the revolution had to appear to be a national struggle for self-determination. Mazower points out that the rank and seems to have understood this, willingly sending elected representatives to every national assembly. It was the notables and warlords, or kapitans, who wanted to preserve discrete areas of influence. Tension between them and another power centre, the shipowners, would lead to two civil wars in 1824, which allowed the Sultan to roll back almost all revolutionary gains.
Mazower describes an astounding scene in which Greek warlords attend a nameday celebration at a house offering refuge to a Turkish notable, Kiamil Bey. During dinner, he tells them, “All of you come to my chambers wanting to ask me about riches and gold. I cannot deny that I have plenty in Korinth, but which among you should I confide in when you yourselves cannot trust one another?... I counsel you as soon as possible to establish an authority, so that I can help you.”
As the Sultan struck back and the revolution fell apart, Greece, once again, was saved by its soft power. The Enlightenment had witnessed a new surge in classical learning, and the resulting philhellenism created a groundswell of sympathy for the Greeks. Mazower points out that the Sultan’s excesses in slaughtering and enslaving Christians who had rebelled against him turbocharged European indignation, because the Greek revolution coincided with the beginnings of the abolitionist movement. “Philhellenism was becoming a cultural force… something we might term a European liberal conscience,” he says.
The endgame came in 1827, when the combined navies of Britain, France and Russia decimated the Turkish and Egyptian fleets at Navarino. Even then, only the Peloponnese, the Cyclades and Sporades island chains and southern continental Greece would be liberated. Thessaly would follow in 1881, Crete, Epiros, Macedonia and the eastern Aegean islands in 1913, western Thrace in 1923 and the Dodecanese in 1947. Each expansion came thanks to Greece’s unquestioning geopolitical alignment with the west and specifically Britain.
The one exception to this political astuteness came in 1920. Backed by Britain and France, Greece had launched 12 divisions into Asia Minor the previous year to enforce the Treaty of Versailles, which carved up Ottoman territory into Greek, French and Italian spheres of influence. In the midst of this campaign, the Liberal government of Eleftherios Venizelos held an election and lost. The winners were royalists who sought to restitute the disgraced and exiled King Konstantine, who, against the popular will, had prevented Greece from declaring for the Entente until 1918. Greece’s entry quickly helped break down German defences in Austria. Germany and Turkey capituated. The Entente had been pleading for this since 1915. Konstantine had allowed his marriage to the Kaiser’s sister to betray Greek loyalties, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives on the western front. The French never forgave Greece for bringing Konstantine back. In the meantime, the Turks had launched a republican revolution of their own under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In spring 1921 France and Italy signed signed a peace with Kemal and abandoned their weapons and ordnance to him. The French may have sent him more shipments, which the Greeks were never allowed to inspect. Because the Liberals in Athens had joined the fight against the Bolsheviks in Russia’s civil war, the victorious Reds now helped Kemal, too. In September 1922 Kemal routed the overstretched Greek armies, which had nonetheless come within just a few kilometres of Ankara the previous year. In the disorderly retreat, Smyrna was burnt and Greeks, Jews and Latins were ethnically cleansed from Asia Minor.
The soft power of the Greeks continues to serve them. As entrepreneurs, academics, scientists and artists they have built prosperous and influential communities in the west, even as they have been ejected from the east. Their geopolitics and their liberal values now more closely align. As US Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez recently put it to an Athenian audience, “We share the same values, we face the same challenges, we hold the same interests… Our destinies have been and always will be forever linked.”
John, typo in Returning section, 10th paragraph, first line. Thanks for this.