101 Stumbles in the March of History

Earth and Water, a Misunderstanding

490 BCE

By Bill Fawcett

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

This book begins with a situation where a politician caused a war that changed the world. It ends with another example of the same thing. Both even deal with the spread of democracy.

Greece in the fifth century BCE was made up of dozens of independent city-states. Two of the greatest, Athens and Sparta, were close to war. Athens feared defeat from the much more warlike Spartans and searched for an ally that would discourage their enemy from even attacking. They soon realized that there was really only one power so great that even Sparta would have to hesitate. This was the Persian Empire, ruled by Darius.

Now, the Athenians already had a dubious relationship with Darius and his empire. Ten years earlier, they had sent an army to support a revolt by one of their former colonies that had been absorbed by Persia decades earlier. The revolt never had a chance, but the combined army of Athens and two other Greek cities did succeed in almost conquering the capital of the Persian state (known as a satrapy), the city of Sardis. They managed to capture all of the city except the central fortress, where the Persians were still resisting—when a large relief army approached. The Athenians burned Sardis before hurriedly withdrawing. It was an insult made even stronger by the fact that the ruler of the satrap of Sardis was Darius’s brother-in-law.

So when these same Athenians appeared a decade later, looking for an alliance, they were informed that Persia would protect them only if an offering of “earth and water” was made to Darius and Persia. It seems that the Athenians, anxious for support, did not check out exactly what this meant. There were many ceremonies sealing alliances with pledges before the gods within Greece itself. They may have thought this was just another version of that. They probably did not realize that this particular offering involved a pledge of fealty and obedience to Persia forever by Athens and all her citizens. By doing this, Athens was, in the eyes of the Persians, joining the Persian Empire and acknowledging Darius as its emperor. Or perhaps the members of the Athenian delegation were so desperate that they accepted or ignored the meaning of the demand. So, through their ambassadors, Athens swore an oath of earth and water to Darius. Considering all the problems Athens had caused Darius before, it is not surprising he demanded a high price for his support.

The delegation had not even been back in Athens long enough for the promised Persian support to follow when the Spartans hurried to attack. To the amazement of both sides, Athens met them in battle outside the city and drove off the Spartans. The threat ended, Athens sent a message to the Persians that their aid was not needed and the deal was off. But you just did not pledge, then take away, your allegiance to a Persian emperor. You certainly did not do this if you were just a small city-state that was hundreds of times smaller than their empire. More so since you had already earned the emperor’s enmity. It was by Persian standards a supreme insult. To them, Athens had agreed to be part of their empire and then was in revolt before the ink dried.

This misunderstanding initiated more than a century of warfare. Where the Greek cities had been basically ignored by the Persians, now their destruction and incorporation into the empire became an imperial priority. The resulting wars strained all the Greek city-states. The first battle resulting from the Persians sending an army to claim Athens, which they felt was theirs, led to a Persian defeat at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. Darius’s son Xerxes invaded with a massive army and fleet seeking revenge for the Athenian insult and perfidy, but was defeated finally at Salamis. That Greek victory came too late to save an evacuated Athens from being burned by the Persians, possibly in direct revenge for their burning of Sardis. The conflict was only settled a century later when a united Greece, in the form of Macedonia and Alexander the Great, turned the entire dynamic around and conquered ­Persia.

There is a good probability that, if the desperate Athenian embassy had just checked to see what they were agreeing to, war between Persia and Greece could have been delayed or even avoided. The repeated wars and invasions had to have distracted the Athens of Plato and Socrates from even greater development and advancement. How far would the arts, sciences, and thinking of the classic Greek thinkers have advanced with a century of peace with Persia? There would still have been intercity conflicts, though without Persian meddling even the destructive Peloponnesian War would have been shorter and less damaging. Science could have advanced, democracy spread, and distant colonies such as Rome might have been less independent. A golden age of Greek culture would have profoundly changed life today. It would barely be recognizable. Given time for Greece to unite, there might never have been a Roman Empire. Southern Europe might be speaking not a Romance language today (one based on the Latin of Rome) but a ­descendant language from the Greek. Democracy in some form might have been the rule for two thousand years, rather than kings and emperors. The trouble started when those sent to ask for Persian aid failed to understand, or reject, a price too high for something they eventually did not even need. If they had, there might well have been a very different and better world today. All the mistakes that follow in this book would not have been made, though it is safe to assume that humanity would have found new ones to replace them.

2 and 3

Bad Omen

414 BCE

By Bill Fawcett

An unnecessary war.

It took two mistakes, both classical in all senses of the word, to bring down the world’s first democracy. There have been times when superstition in the form of omens and prophecies affected a battle, but there was one omen that lost Athens the entire Peloponnesian War. Athens had been winning a protracted war with Sparta and that city’s allies. It appeared to almost everyone that Sparta was about to lose and just one more push was needed. But military actions were expensive, particularly for Athens, which traditionally paid the rowers and other sailors. This meant they had the best and most enthusiastic crews, but this was costly. Then one of the city’s most ambitious and controversial figures, Alcibiades, began to push for Athens and its allies to invade Sicily and conquer Syracuse. The fabled treasury of Syracuse could then be used to finance the rest of the war.

No one, except the most conservative Athenians, cared that they were starting a second war with one of the other democratic cities on a distant island. They were defeating Sparta; how difficult could Syracuse be? Everyone expected to win quickly, long before a battered Sparta could react. Athens, as head of the Delian League, literally voted to open a second front against a powerful and rich enemy in the middle of war. This was so classic a mistake that, even then, there were already a thousand years full of examples of why it shouldn’t be done. Then, to make sure the mistake was really serious, it was decided to double the expedition to Sicily and so jeopardize a large part of their army and navy. A good decision if the numbers led to victory, but a risk that Athens simply did not have to take. Another world-changing military disaster that did not need to happen that can be attributed to the heady and blinding optimism of “victory disease.” No one considered what it meant if the invasion failed. So the first mistake was starting the war to begin with.

From the beginning things did not go well in Sicily. The reason for this was the choice of commanders. At first it looked like Athens was going to make the traditional mistake of splitting command. Both the impulsive Alcibiades and perhaps the most reverent and hesitant noble in the city, Nicias, were put in command of the invasion of Sicily. Likely the idea was for the two to balance out each other. What happened was that, due to a scandal involving the destruction of sacred statues of Hermes just before they left, Alcibiades was recalled shortly after arriving. Since it appeared that he was about to be railroaded on the charge, Alcibiades sailed not home, but to Sparta—and changed sides.

Alcibiades’ defection left Nicias in charge of the entire invasion. But this meant that it was to be run by a hesitant commander who had originally opposed it. In the first months, the Athenians missed two chances to easily conquer Syracuse. One where they had a quick access to the unready city and then another when ­Syracuse’s army ventured off to a distant corner of Sicily and left the city ­virtually unprotected. But both times Nicias dithered, waiting or marching indirectly. Both opportunities for a quick victory were missed.

For the next two years neither of the two sides was able to strike a winning blow. Battles over walls that should have cut Syracuse off and fleet actions in their small harbor eventually tilted the victory against Athens. Nicias called for reinforcements and, just when Syracuse thought they were about to win, five thousand additional hoplites and sixty-five warships arrived, under the command of Demosthenes. The morale of the Athenians soared and that in Syracuse plummeted. Then Demosthenes, looking for a quick win, made a night attack on Syracuse’s allied city of Epipolae. At first things went well. Then the certain chaos caused by a night battle was increased by a counterattack that forced the Athenians to retreat in confusion. Athenian morale crashed and never recovered.

The fighting continued in bursts until it was finally decided, more than two years after landing and after another naval defeat, that the Athenian force needed to simply retreat back to Athens. There still remained forty thousand Athenian hoplites and sailors and enough ships for them, too, to leave. They were preparing to do this when there was an eclipse. Nicias, commanding with Demosthenes, announced that he needed to interpret the omen ­before they could leave. He retreated to his tent for twenty-seven days. By the time he emerged and announced they could finally retreat, it was too late. The situation was desperate. The army was almost out of food, had lost more ships, and was nearly surrounded. Finally, it managed to break out across Sicily in two columns. The one under Demosthenes was forced to surrender first; he tried to negotiate, but got only the assurance that his men would not be killed outright. At this point, only six thousand of his original twenty thousand still survived. Nicias was later surrounded by the entire might of Sicily and, after an intense battle, forced to surrender as well. He may have had fewer than five thousand of his original twenty thousand left. All the surviving Athenians were sold into slavery or worked to death in the local quarries. Demosthenes and Nicias were executed.

Making a military decision, or rather not making it, for twenty-­seven days on the basis of one general’s reverence for, and fear of, an omen was the second mistake. Between the two mistakes, the Delian League and Athens turned near-certain victory into defeat. It took ten more years to lose. Athens held on and raised fleets whenever it could. But the Delian League had lost tens of thousands of soldiers, citizens, and sailors, and nearly its entire fleet in an unnecessary war. The city of Athens and its League were literally and monetarily spent. Eventually, the Spartan side, helped by the defections of Athens’ former allies, won the war and doomed the city. The Delian League was dissolved. Because of two ­mistakes—fighting a war on two fronts and allowing superstition to override military necessity—Athens was never again the center of Greece or its culture.

Your life would today be different had the Delian League prevailed, which it almost certainly would have if its ill-fated invasion of Syracuse had not happened. Greece might have united as a nation. Macedonia would not have been able to overwhelm a united Greece. Persia might well have hesitated to make its many invasions, or perhaps Alexander would have partnered with Greece to invade Persia and change the world. Or Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander might have been obscure footnotes in books about the Delian League’s defeat of Persia. Or there might be chapters about Persia defeating Greece. If Athens had been dominant for more centuries, then would democracy in some form have become the conventional form of government, not the exception, for the next twenty-five hundred years? That surely would have changed everything.

4

Lost Victory

387 BCE

By Bill Fawcett

When someone is an absolute ruler, his personal flaws can create an absolute disaster.

Before Alexander became Alexander the Great, conqueror of the known world, he had to defeat the most powerful and largest empire that had been formed up to his time. One whose scope would not again be matched for four hundred years. The Persian Empire was one of a kind. It was much bigger, much wealthier, and more powerful than any of its neighbors or predecessors. No other empire waited on its borders to compete with it. At seemingly no risk to itself, Persia meddled constantly and overtly with Greece, using the empire’s wealth and power to play one city state against another. The ferocity and length of the ruinous Peloponnesian War can be partially attributed to Persian support shifting to whichever alliance of Greek cities was losing.

There was a great deal of difference between the two cultures. The Greek and neighboring peoples valued individualism, courage, and accomplishment. It was in the city state of Athens in Greece that democracy first arose. The key values of the Persian Empire were obedience to central authority, accepting your place in society, and generally being a good part of a very large machine.