THE LEGACY OF SALAMIS A Greek defeat at Salamis would have ensured the end of Western civilization and its peculiar institution of freedom altogether. Ionia, the islands, and the Greek mainland would have all been occupied as a Western satrapy of Persia. Those few Greeks surviving as autonomous states in Italy or Sicily would have succumbed to Persian attack, or remained inconsequential backwaters in an eastern Mediterranean that was already essentially a Persian and Carthaginian lake. Without a free Greek mainland, the unique culture of the polis would have been lost, and with that ruin the values of a nascent Western civilization itself. In 480 B.C. democracy itself was only twenty-seven years old, and the idea of freedom a mere two-centuries-old concept shared by only a few hundred thousand rustics in a backwater of the eastern Mediterranean. What allowed Rome later to dominate Greece and Carthage was its deadly army, its ability to marshal manpower through levies of free citizens, its resilient constitution in which civilians oversaw military operations, and its dynamic scientific tradition which produced everything from catapults to advanced siegecraft and superb arms and armor. Yet most of these practices were either directly borrowed from the Greeks or Greek-inspired. After Salamis, the free Greeks would never fear any other foreign power until they met the free Romans of the republic. No Persian king would ever again set foot in Greece. For the next 2,000 years, no Easterner would claim Greece as his own until the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the fifteenth century overran an impoverished, unaided, and largely forgotten Byzantine Hellas. Before Salamis Athens was a rather eccentric city-state, whose experiment with a radical democracy was in its twenty-seven-year-old infancy and the verdict on its success was still out. After Salamis, an imperial democratic culture arose at Athens that ruled the Aegean and gave us Aeschylus, Sophocles, the Parthenon, Pericles, Socrates, and Thucydides. Salamis proved that free peoples fought better than unfree, and that the most free of the free—the Athenians—fought the best of all. (Excerpt from “Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power” by Victor Hanson)
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 06:32:18 +0000
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