Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Third, the Greeks at Salamis freely had the right to buy and sell property, pass it on, and to improve or neglect it as they saw fit, immune from political or religious coercion or confiscation. Even the landless sailor at Athens, in theory, could open a shop, trade his leather goods for a small vineyard, or hire himself out as a teamster, in the hopes of eventually obtaining some capital and land for his children. Most of those who drowned at Salamis worked vast estates owned by kings, satraps, gods, or aristocrats. Men fight better when they believe that war will preserve their own property and not that of someone else. When the Persians vacated Greece, stories abounded of the vast hordes of precious metals and bullion left behind—understandable when we realize there were no banks or other mechanisms in the East to protect private wealth from confiscation or arbitrary taxation.

  Later Eastern armies brought along their money into battle, while their Western counterparts left it at home, trusting in the law to protect the private capital of the free citizen. At Lepanto Ali Pasha hid a treasure on his flagship, Sultana, while Don Juan had none of his personal fortune on the Reale. Had the Greeks lost at Salamis, Attica would immediately have become the private domain of the Great King, who in turn would have distributed it to favored elites and relatives, who further would have sharecropped it to ex-soldiers under less-than-favorable conditions. Freedom is the glue of capitalism, that amoral wisdom of the markets that most efficiently allots goods and services to a citizenry.

  Finally, the Greeks at Salamis entertained a freedom of action. Some stubborn Athenians, for example, chose to stay in the city and thus die on the acropolis. Other Peloponnesians remained at home to fortify the isthmus. Throughout the campaign refugees, soldiers, and onlookers came and went, some to Aegina, others to Troezen and Salamis as they saw fit. When Pythius the Lydian dared act individually, King Xerxes had his son cut in two. No Athenian contemplated slicing to pieces any of his fellow citizens who preferred not to follow the general decree of the Assembly to evacuate Attica. Aristotle notes of freedom that the key principle is “a man should live as he pleases. This, they say, is the mark of liberty, since, on the other hand, not to live as a man wishes is the mark of a slave” (Politics 6.1317b10–13). This idea of freedom as the unfettered ability to choose is championed in Pericles’ majestic funeral speech, recorded in the second book of Thucydides’ history: “The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes.” At Athens, he adds a little later, “we live exactly as we please” (2.37, 39). In the Persian army such freedom was restricted to the Achaemenid elite. If it existed for a few rowers in the fleet, it was a result of laxity in control, or through kinship or favor with the king, to be revoked at his whim—not as an innate, legal, and abstract privilege for all citizens.

  A Persian sailor who preferred to stay behind in occupied Attica, who argued with his satrap or walked on Xerxes’ beach without permission, was as likely to be punished as his counterpart across the strait on Salamis was to be left alone. Western armies, it is true, are often unruly. At Salamis it was a miracle that there was any unity in attack or even a rough agreement on an operational plan among so many diverse and independent entities—such pre-battle squabbling between freemen would also nearly wreck the Christian effort in the hours before Lepanto. Nevertheless, freedom of action again pays dividends in battle. Soldiers and sailors improvise and act spontaneously if they are assured they will not be whipped or beheaded. Their energies are not diverted to hiding failure in fear of execution. Free men fight openly with the trust that later audit and inquiry by their peers will sort out the cowards from the brave.

  Themistocles on his own accord sent a secret deceptive message to the Persians before the battle. The Greeks marshaled for one last general assembly in the minutes before rowing out. Greek triremes singly and in groups joined at the last moment from the nearby islands and defected from the Persian armada itself. The Athenian conservative Aristides on his own initiative landed on the island of Psyttaleia to expel the Persian garrison. All were individual and free acts done by those who themselves were used “to do as they pleased.” Freedom of speech draws on collective wisdom and is thus critical among high command. In the heated debate over the defense of Salamis, Plutarch relates that Themistocles snarled to his rival Eurybiades, who was in charge of the Peloponnesian fleet and had expressed little inclination to fight for the Athenians at Salamis, “Strike me, but at least hear me out!” (Themistocles 11.3). And he did— and the Greeks won.

  Freedom in Battle

  Western ideas of freedom, originating from the early Hellenic concept of politics as consensual government (politeia) and from an open economy that gave the individual opportunity to profit (kerdos), protected his land (klēros), and offered some independence (autonomia) and escape from coercion and drudgery, were to play a role at nearly every engagement in which Western soldiers fought. Freedom, along with other elements of the Western paradigm, would help to nullify customary European weakness in manpower, immobility, and vulnerable supply lines.

  It is easy to identify the role of freedom among the ranks of Europeans at Salamis, less so at Mexico City, Lepanto—or among the intramural Western fights such as Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. Yet whatever differences there were between the French and English of the Middle Ages, the French and English at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or Germans and the Allies in World War I, their shared measure of freedom on both sides of the battle line was not even remotely present in armies outside of Europe.

  Even when constitutional government was retarded and lost, and the classical legacy almost forgotten, the Western tradition of economic and cultural liberality nevertheless survived enough to lend a European king’s subjects more freedom than a conscript in an imperial Chinese army, a Janissary of the sultan, or one of Montezuma’s flower warriors, who were subject to a degree of social, economic, and thought control unknown in most of Europe. What frightened Cortés’s men about Aztecs, aside from the continual sacrificial slaughter on the Great Pyramid, is what frightened the Greeks about Xerxes, the Venetians about the Ottomans, the British about the Zulus, and the Americans about the Japanese: the subservience of the individual to the state, or the notion that a subject, without rights, might be summarily executed for speaking or even keeping silent in a way that displeased a monarch, emperor, or priest.

  While strict obedience fueled by unquestioned devotion brings strengths to the battlefield, nevertheless when the central nerve center of such a regimented society is severed—a Montezuma kidnapped, a Xerxes or Darius III riding away from battle in open flight, a Zulu Cetshwayo hunted down, a Japanese admiral committing suicide—the will of the coerced serf or imperial subject often vanishes with him, leaving either fatalism or panic in its wake. Japan surrendered only when its emperor conceded; America fought when President Roosevelt’s declaration of war was passed by an elective legislature, and ceased when the same body ratified the peace proposals of President Truman.

  Freedom turns out to be a military asset. It enhances the morale of the army as a whole; it gives confidence to even the lowliest of soldiers; and it draws on the consensus of officers rather than a single commander. Freedom is more than mere autonomy, or the idea that men always fight well on their home soil to repel the invader. The Persians who were defeated at Mycale (479 B.C.), and those years later who were annihilated by Alexander the Great (334–323 B.C.), fought as defensive troops to repel foreign aggression from their homeland. But they were defeated as serfs in service to the sovereignty and home soil of Achaemenid Asia, not as freemen for the ideal of freedom.

  THE LEGACY OF SALAMIS

  The interest of the world’s history hung trembling in the balance. Oriental despotism, a world united under one lord and sovereign, on the one side, and separate states, insignificant in extent and resources, but animated by free ind
ividuality, on the other side, stood front to front in array of battle. Never in history has the superiority of spiritual power over material bulk, and that of no contemptible amount, been made so gloriously manifest.

  So wrote Georg Hegel of Salamis in his Philosophy of History (2.2.3)— a melodramatic judgment at odds with Arnold Toynbee, who in one of his more foolish asides suggested that a Greek loss to Xerxes might have been good for Hellenic civilization: the omnipresent despot at least bringing them relief from their own internecine rivalry. Toynbee should have examined carefully the fate of sixth-century Ionia and the demise of its preeminence in philosophy, free government, and unfettered expression under a century of Eastern rule.

  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.

  For the next three and a half centuries after Salamis, murderous Hellenic-inspired armies—the Ten Thousand, the Macedonians under Alexander the Great, and the mercenaries of Pyrrhus—possessed of superior technology and shock tactics, would run wild from southern Italy to the Indus River. The unmatched architecture of Greece, from the temple of Zeus at Olympia to the Parthenon at Athens; the timeless literature of Greece, from Attic tragedy, comedy, and oratory to Greek history itself; the rise of red-figure vase painting, mastery of realism and idealism in sculpture, and the expansion of the idea of democracy—all of this proceeded from the Persian Wars, prompting literary and artistic historians properly to mark the Greek victory as the fault line between the Archaic and classical ages.

  There is one final irony about Salamis and the idea of freedom. The Greek victory not merely saved the West by ensuring that Hellenism would survive after a mere two centuries of polis culture. Just as important, it was also a catalyst for the entire Athenian democratic renaissance, which radically altered the evolution of the city-state by giving free people even more freedom—beyond the imagination of any agrarian hoplite soldier of the seventh century B.C. As Aristotle saw more than a century and a half later, what had been a rather ordinary Greek polis, in the midst of a recent experiment of allowing the native-born poor to vote—the soon-to-be heroes of Salamis—would suddenly inherit the cultural leadership of Greece.

  Before Salamis most Greek city-states enforced a strict property qualification that limited full citizenship to about a third of the resident-born population, worried about the volatility and license of the uneducated, impoverished, and transient. Because Salamis was a victory of the poorer “naval crowd,” not an infantry triumph of the small landowner, in the next century the influence of Athenian landless oarsmen would increase substantially. The humble and indigent would demand political representation commensurate with their prowess on the all-important seas. In the West those who fight demand political recognition. This newly empowered naval class refashioned Athenian democracy into a particularly unpredictable and aggressive imperial power of free citizens who could decide to do pretty much as they pleased on any given day through a majority vote of the Assembly. The will of the people would soon build the temples on the acropolis, subsidize the tragedians, send triremes throughout the Aegean—but also exterminate the Melians and execute Socrates. Marathon had created the myth of Athenian infantry; with Salamis the navy had now superseded it.

  Plato argued that while Marathon had started the string of Greek successes and Plataea had finished it, Salamis “made the Greeks worse as a people.” Democracy was to Plato a degenerate form of government, and its rabble-rousing citizens little more than “bald-headed tinkers” who demanded rights that they had not earned, an equality of result rather than of opportunity, and majority vote in place of the rule of law. Before Salamis, Greek city-states embraced an entire array of constitutional prohibitions that limited the extension of this radical, new, and peculiar idea of freedom—property qualifications to vote, wars fought exclusively by those landowners whose capital and income gave them privilege, and a complete absence of taxes, navies, and imperialism. Those protocols of the traditional free agrarian city-state had defined freedom and equality in terms of a minority of the population who had ample capital, education, and land. Before Salamis the essence of the polis was not so much equality for all, but the search for moral virtue for all, guided by a consensus of properly qualified, gifted, and free men.

  Plato, Aristotle, and most other Greek thinkers from Thucydides to Xenophon, who were wary of what had transpired in the aftermath of Salamis, were not just elitists. Rather, they saw inherent dangers in the latitude and affluence that snowballed from a radically democratic government, state entitlement, election by lot, subsidy for civic participation, free expression, and free markets. Without innate checks and balances, in this more reactionary view, a freedom-mad polis would inevitably turn out a highly individualistic but self-absorbed citizen whose unlimited freedoms and rights would preclude communal sacrifices or moral virtue. Prominent Western philosophers after Plato and Aristotle—Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche, and dozens of others—would express nearly identical reservations about this singular idea of democracy that gave unlimited political freedom to citizens on the basis of an inalienable right—that men in general are born and should die as freemen.

  Better, the conservatives felt, that government policy should hinge on a majority vote of only those educated and informed citizens with some financial solvency. War—like the battles at Marathon and Plataea— should be for the defense of real property, on land, and require martial courage, not mere technology, public warships, or numbers. Citizens should own their own farms, provide their own weapons, be free from taxes and centralized government, and be responsible for their own economic security—not seek wage labor, public employment, or government entitlement. The courageous oarsmen of Salamis and their publicly constructed and owned ships changed all that in an afternoon. Once unleashed, radical political freedom was a virus that even the most autocratic of Western strongmen would have trouble extinguishing.

  With the Aegean wide open after the retreat of the Persian fleet at Salamis, and Athens now at the vanguard of the Greek resistance, radical democracy and its refutation of the static old polis were at hand. The philosophers may have hated Salamis—Plato
’s thoughts on the battle were near treasonous—but Themistocles’ and his rowers’ victory at Salamis had not only saved Greece and the West but irrevocably energized Western forces and expanded the idea of freedom itself. Forty thousand drowned imperial subjects in the strait of Salamis could attest well enough to the power of an idea.

  Salamis was not a reprieve, but proved to be the beginning of something entirely unseen in the eastern Mediterranean: the Western way of war was unleashed beyond the borders of Greece. In a mere century and a half, the military practices that had saved the Greek fleet a few thousand yards off the Athenian coast would put Alexander the Great 3,000 miles eastward on the Indus River.

  THREE

  Decisive Battle

  Gaugamela, October 1, 331 B.C.

  The Greeks, as I have learned, are accustomed to wage wars in the most stupid fashion due to their silliness and folly. For once they have declared war against each other, they search out the finest and most level plain and there fight it out. The result is that even the victors come away with great losses; and of the defeated, I say only that they are utterly annihilated.

  —HERODOTUS, The Histories (7.9.2)

  ANGLES OF VISION

  The Old Man

  POOR PARMENIO! Once more he was to be left behind as the divine Alexander, far away to the right, charged headlong into the Persian horde. Almost the entire battle line of the Macedonian army followed their king. The Companion Cavalry with Parmenio’s own son Philotas in charge, the royal phalanx of pikemen, assorted mercenaries, and the veteran shield-bearing infantrymen, or hypaspists—everyone on foot and horse, it seemed, but Parmenio was heading to the right and to the kill. Once again the old man was to stay fast; there was to be no glory for Parmenio other than in anchoring the left wing. He was left only with a few hundred of his battle-hardened Macedonian horsemen, supported by companies of pikemen left behind under the commanders Craterus and Simmias, some Greek cavalry led by Erigyius, and the 2,000 redoubtable Thessalian horsemen under Philip.