Matyszak - Expedition to Disaster

The tumult and the shouting dies
The captains and the kings depart
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice
An humble and a contrite heart
Lord of hosts be with us yet
Lest we forget lest we forget

Rudyard Kipling, Recessional AD 1897

T he world of the fifth century BC may seem remote from our own. Yet the time when the events of this narrative unfolded was exactly the time when the intellectual foundations of the modern world were being laid, and the same people were involved in both. The dynamic, fearless minds that were behind the expedition to Sicily also took a long hard look at the universe that their forefathers had known and ruthlessly reshaped their understanding of it in the hard light of logic. Even today we enjoy the benefits of those insights, and so deeply ingrained is the Athenian perception of the world that today we have difficulty imagining any other. In that sense, we are all Athenians.

The Athenians were inspiring, energetic, unconventional and both physically and intellectually courageous. We should rightly celebrate all these things. But the Athenians of the late fifth century were not good not good in the eyes of their contemporaries, and certainly not good by the standards of today.

This is a painful admission. There is much that is admirable in the Athenians of the era and we see the fifth century largely through the eyes of Athenian, or pro-Athenian, historians poets and playwrights. But the same intellectual honesty that swept aside the myths and misconceptions of previous eras also forced the Athenians to be clear about what they had done. They had taken allies who had fought shoulder-to-shoulder with them in the cause of freedom and forced them to subservience. Their alliance became an empire that they consciously chose to rule by terror. The small, harmless island population of Melos was massacred and enslaved for no other crime than refusing to surrender its ancient liberty.

The Athenians freely admitted their actions and claimed that imperial powers created their own morality. It was this morality that allowed them to attack the island of Sicily and attempt to subjugate its population. The ethics of conquest were something of a grey area in the Greek world, but even those later irredeemable imperialists, the Romans, at least tried to justify each of their conquests on moral grounds. The Athenians were alone in admitting that what they were doing might be wrong but that it did not matter .

It is this moral vacuum at the heart of Athenian policy that separates it from the expeditions launched by the modern superpowers into far-flung corners of the world. Whatever the outcome in pain and suffering, the protagonists can at least claim they were trying to do good and their enemies were not fellow democracies but odious tyrannies. In the military dimension, too, the modern and ancient expeditions are not comparable. The military adventures in Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq have been (in the modern military jargon) asymmetrical combats in which one side is massively outgunned. The Athenian expedition was against a state every bit as sophisticated and powerful as itself and is more comparable with the Napoleonic and German invasions of Russia in previous centuries all the more so because, like the Athenians, the Germans and French had other substantial wars already on their agenda.

So are there lessons for us today in the Athenian expedition to disaster? Thucydides certainly thought so.

It will be enough for me if my words are found useful to those who want a clear understanding of what happened in the past, and which since human nature stays the same will happen again in the future at some time or the other.

Thuc. 1.20

To some extent the tragedy of the Athenian expedition is a morality play written in blood. An empire abandons the values that made it great, and indeed actively turns against those who still hold those values. Yet while the exploitation of the weak and defenceless appears to go unpunished, the blind pride and ambition of the empire eventually over-reaches itself and (with a few deft nudges from fate) collapses into ruin. This is a story that has enjoyed a few re-runs since the fifth century BC, and it is not hard to pick up the plot today.

Among the self-styled elites of today there has been hubris on a massive scale, perhaps best exemplified by the words too big to fail. As with the Athenians in Sicily, we see the naked self-interest of a group being given a sophisticated spin to convince the majority that being exploited is actually for the best. Politicians, financiers and large corporations appear to share a separate reality in which ordinary people matter only to the degree they can be gulled or coerced into making good for follies that make the Athenian expedition seem wise by comparison.

Many in todays world have been carelessly damaged by the cynical use of power to satiate greed. Like the Athenians, the perpetrators have paid little attention to Nemesis. The question, perhaps, is whether Nemesis is paying attention to them.

FINIS