Download IBMYP United States Government Ancient Greece and Rome

IBMYP UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME READINGS
ATHENS AND SPARTA IN THE FIFTH CENTURY
The fifth century was the time of a great clash between two rival city-states, Athens and Sparta. In this period, Athens
reached the apotheosis of its artistic, political, architectural, and intellectual powers. The only military rival of
comparable strength and vigor to Athens at this time was Sparta. While Athens was primarily a maritime power, Sparta,
located to Athens’ south, was dominant on land. Sparta's was a martial culture, in which warriors trained from birth for
the rigors of battle. As the leading member of the Peloponnesian allies, Sparta was the only Greek city-state that stood
between a putative Athenian empire (formed with its allies in the Delian League) and domination of the Mediterranean
world. An uneasy peace had existed between the two competitors since the time of their mutual routing of Persia in 479
B.C. In 431, however, the Athenian statesman and general Pericles (495-429 B.C.) proposed a war with Sparta that he
hoped would end the rivalry and establish Athens’ complete hegemony. But this was not to be. The resulting
Peloponnesian War lasted decades and brought a terrible plague to Athens, to which Pericles himself ultimately
succumbed. After losing the war, Athens was thrown into political upheaval and never again achieved the glory it
enjoyed before the war. Much of what we know today about Athenian culture, democracy, and war with Sparta in this
period is from the work of the contemporary Greek historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, and from Plato’s
descriptions of the philosophy and criticism of Socrates.
SOURCE A:
The Democratic Aristocracy of Athens from: Busolt, Georg. Griechische Geschichte. As reproduced in Great
Issues in Western Civilization, trans. Donald Kagan, ed. Tierney, Brian, Donald Kagan, and L. Pearce Williams (New York: Random
House, 1967), 4-5.
Georg Busolt, a German classicist, held the view that while Athenian political life had some plural, democratic aspects, these
were in fact only realized in practice among a small elite. Furthermore, Busolt maintained that Pericles led the citizens of the
Assembly rather than being led by them, and asserted that a great deal more power was invested in the person of Pericles
than would be tolerated in a truly democratic political system.
The oligarchic party lost, with its organizer, its firm coherence and its capacity for robust opposition. Pericles was thus
without a rival, and therefore, in the eyes of the people, he became something other than what he had been before. If he had
earlier felt himself compelled to be at the people’s disposal and to yield to the wishes of the masses, he now began to behave
independently and to take the bridle into his hand. By using the weight of his personality he ruled the state—on the one hand
by means of the official authority given to him, on the other by means of his decisive influence on the decisions of the
popular assembly. For fifteen years he would be elected to the generalship each year. In difficult times of war he received the
supreme command, and at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War he also obtained extraordinarily full powers. Although he
did not usually have greater official power than the other generals, he nevertheless held the authoritative position in the
college of the generals and thereby collected into his own hand its conduct of the military, maritime, financial, and
administrative affairs that were still in its competence.
The unbroken continuity of office, in fact, released him still further from the principle of accountability and gave him an
exceptional position, which would nevertheless be held within bounds by the fact that the people by means of the
epicheirotonia that took place each prytany, could suspend him from office and place him before a court. In addition to the
most important ordinary annual offices, Pericles quite regularly held the extraordinary office of Epistates of a public
building...
But as the power of Pericles was dependent on popular election and the mood of the people, he could only steer the entire
ship of state in the direction he set if he could hold the leadership of the popular assembly in his hand. He succeeded by dint
of his firmly based authority, his proven political insight, the integrity of his character, the dignity of his bearing, and the
power of his speech. As he did not first need to acquire influence by improper means and was not accustomed to speak in
order to please but, on the contrary, by virtue of the esteem in which he was already held, he could, under certain
circumstances, even sharply oppose the people. He thus would not be led by the people, but instead he led them. As a result
there developed a regime that was a popular government in name but one ruled by the first citizen in fact, a monarchical
leadership based on a democratic base, which frequently resumed the traditions of the democratic monarchy of them
Peisistratids.
THE FALL OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC
From 509 B.C. Rome was a republic in which power was shared by annually elected magistrates, a senate of
distinguished citizens, and popular assemblies. The system gradually became more inclusive so that all citizens had a
chance to participate at even the highest levels, yet at its core remained consensus among the aristocracy. But beginning
with the turbulent career and murder of Tiberius Gracchus (133 B.C.), a series of crises shook the Roman political
system to its very foundation, eventually destroying it. A new populist style of politics emerged in which senatorial
consensus was bypassed and magisterial power subverted or abused. Violence became an ordinary tool of politicians,
and civil war broke out as Roman fought Roman for supremacy. Julius Caesar was the most successful politician in this
new style, and his assassination (44 B.C.) just after he had attained supremacy left the Republic leaderless and in
turmoil. From the ensuing chaos one man, his adopted son Octavian, emerged supreme. Styled Augustus in 27 B.C., he
was the first ruler of the new Roman government, the Principate, in which one man held all power.
SOURCE B:
Orderly Political Struggle to the Very End from: Gruen, Erich S. The Last Generation of the Roman
Republic. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 504-507.
Erich S. Gruen sees the late Republic as far from doomed. Even in its last decades, the Republic's atmosphere of robust political
competition survived, with elections, deliberations, and trials going on as usual. Only the series of civil wars from 49 to 31 B.C.,
of unprecedented scale, destroyed the system.
Civil war caused the fall of the Republic, not vice versa. The Republican machinery was not in a state of disrepair and collapse
awaiting but a final push to kick away the remaining traces. Institutions . . . operated in customary fashion even in the years
51 and 50. And the war itself, far from being inescapable or premeditated, followed from a series of miscalculations in the
last months before the opening of hostilities. Nor did the principals engage in conflict with the expectation, much less the
aim, of putting an end to the Republic. It is unfair and misleading to claim that participants must have cared naught for the
Republic, else they would not have taken up arms and turned it into a battleground. Civil strife and events beyond their
control forced a great many to select sides and engage in conflict against their will. In the confusion of armed struggles,
identification of the Republic's true champions was a matter of opinion and of expediency. Caesar and Pompey, it bears
repetition, both presented themselves as defenders of Roman traditions; and the same held true of leaders in the later
rounds of the contest: Brutus and Cassius, M. Antonius, and even Octavianus. Matters had been no different during the civil
war of the 80s. The Republic survived that conflict; Sulla's dictatorship aimed at guaranteeing its survival.
And it might well have survived again. Little profit accrues from speculating on Caesar's final aims; yet nothing in his securely
attested reforms was inconsistent with a Republican system. The assassination of Caesar, in any case, wiped his unfulfilled
plans off the slate. The brutal and lengthy contest that followed made it impossible to pick up the pieces.
One may naturally object that if the Republic were still in a full state of health in 50 it ought not to have collapsed in the
subsequent civil strife, any more than it did in the 80s. But the difference between these two struggles was vast in extent,
scale, and duration. It was not Italy alone that became engaged, but the resources and personnel of far-flung provinces. The
foreign clients of Rome's leaders were brought into play, transforming a political battle into a Mediterranean war. The
campaigns of Pompeius, of Caesar, and of other Roman conquerors in previous decades had enormously increased the
dependents and beneficiaries of leading nobiles [aristocrats]. In Africa, Spain, Gaul, and the East countless numbers were
dragooned into action by Roman patrons who summoned repayment on political debts and obligations. The involvement of
disparate elements in no way derived from attitudes toward the Roman Republic. But their participation gave to two decades
of warfare a massiveness and destructiveness that rendered the old order irrevocable.
Roman behavior was conventional, on the whole, rather than novel. The continuities weighed more heavily than the
innovations. The late Republic looked more to the past than to the future. Aristocratic politics had changed little. The noble
houses remained at the center of affairs, exercising control through familial connections and expedient groupings. The old
games were played not only by so-called conservatives but also by Pompey, by Crassus, and even by Caesar. The jockeying for
position and the rival ambitions were standard fare in Republican history. When Pompey amassed a potent lineup of
senatorial connections, a reaction set in, as it had so often in the past; groupings re-formed and the Pompeian cause
fragmented. Although the arrangement known as the "first triumvirate" gathered considerable influence, it evoked equally
formidable opposition and split its own following. The faction of Cato [the Younger] boasted success in checkmating the
triumvirs, but could not itself dominate senatorial politics. Overextension of political alliances generally brought greater
divisions and splintering. The system itself resisted major groupings. Julius Caesar hoped to circumvent the roadblocks by
attracting adherents from among novi homines [new men], equites [equestrians], municipal families, and men from the lower
ranks of the aristocracy. That fact and not any revolutionary designs prompted the senatorial stiffening against the proconsul
of Gaul.
SOURCE C:
The Disintegration of the Republic from: Smith, R. E. The Failure of the Roman Republic. (Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 1955), 129-131, 164-166.
R. E. Smith sees the fall of the Republic as the result of a process of social disintegration set in motion by Tiberius Gracchus in
133 B.C. and taking about a century to run its course. The consequences of this disintegration were not just political. Religious
sentiment and the moral character of the Roman people declined as well in consequence of the loss of confidence that
accompanied political and social upheaval. Smith's explanation is extremely conservative: he blames the Gracchi and populist
politicians for altering the relationship between the Senate and the rest of Roman society, and he sees traditionalists such as
Cicero as the last gasp of Republican spirit.
Caesar had no choice; . . . the nobles had become selfish and corrupt, unfit to be Rome's governors; and . . . any man of
ambition (and there should be scope for such men in a State) must oppose the nobles if he wished to achieve political
success. Yet we are at first astonished when we read Caesar's defence, both because of what he says, and because it is clear
that these were the terms in which Caesar knew the people expected his defence to be argued. The whole burden of his case
is that HIS dignitas [honor] and existimatio [respect] have been insulted; that he (an individual) has gone beyond what might
be expected in offering concessions and compromises to the government; and that since the government will not listen to
him, the preservation of his dignitas self-evidently requires that he lead his army against his country. The hostility of his
inimici (political foes) leaves him no choice; it is he or they.
This is what happened at Rome as a result of what the Gracchi did. Tiberius' challenge to the Senate, made in the way in
which it was, involved a challenge to the harmony of Rome's society, of which the Senate was so important a part; for
inevitably the question must arise whether the Senate should be governing the Roman world; and the mob is not the best
arbiter on so grave a matter. Yet to the mob Tiberius went, supposing that nothing but his legislation was at stake; his
shrewder brother, and hence more culpable, of deliberate intent set his face against the Senate, and thought it clever to have
raised the Equites against that body; what his shrewdness did not tell him--or at least, in his defence, we hope--was that he
had provoked a question which must now be solved before all others; and the answer to that question took a hundred years
to find. The clash of groups came into being, and nothing could heal the wound the body politic had sustained; the contest
for power at Rome made it impossible for Rome to be in harmony, and the longer it continued, the worse became the
disintegration, the lower the depths to which persons were prepared to go in their own or their group's interests. The ideals
which had made Rome a society evaporated into near-nothingness, and Rome was a society only in name. What is surprising
is the essential vitality of the Roman spirit, which after more than fifty years of strife and civil war emerged again as tough
and strong as ever, like an acorn from beneath a concrete slab, to create the Augustan Age and make possible the Roman
Empire.
Yet Rome could not sever herself from her past; what had been had been; the present was the child of the past, and Cicero's
Republic could never more come into being. Facts and sentiments were to be constantly at war; with Augustus as the
personal saviour of society they might seem to have agreed like lamb and wolf to live together; but the deep opposition
between the two could not be obscured or denied forever; as time passed, the antagonism became ever more open until in
Tacitus we see the fatalistic acquiescence in the facts against which the spirit revolted--in vain. This was the final
consequence of what the Gracchi did--the death of the Republic. No society can break with its past and start again; if it
changes--and change there must assuredly be--it must remain the same thing. England was more fortunate than Rome; in its
great crises and convulsions its leading men knew this instinctively, and the more violent the break with the past, the more
anxious they were to unite themselves with that past by spiritual bonds.
THE ROMAN PEACE
Over two centuries ago, the historian Edward Gibbon described the Roman Empire of the second century A.D. as the
"most happy and prosperous" period in human history. He regarded the period of the pax romana (Roman Peace) as the
one in which any reasonable person would wish to have lived. It most certainly was a time of pleasure and prosperity
for some: the entire Mediterranean region had been unified under one government, a feat never before or since
accomplished, and millions lived in relative prosperity under a stable government far from the threat of war. But not all
were happy: as the historian Tacitus, who lived during the pax Romana, wrote, "The Romans are a people who make a
desert and call it peace." Injustice and oppression remained part of the order of the day, and the huge Roman armies did
not long stand idle.
SOURCE D:
Not so Happy and Prosperous from Isaac, Benjamin. The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1990), 1-3, 419.
Benjamin Isaac challenges Edward Gibbon's (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) traditional narrative of
the happiness and prosperity of the inhabitants of the second-century Roman Empire. Writing two hundred years after
Gibbon, Isaac points out that his illustrious predecessor lived during a time when the British Empire was the preeminent power
in Europe. Therefore, Isaac asserts, Gibbon's understanding of imperial rule is vastly different from his own, post-colonial
views. In this way, as in many others, Isaac insists, modern historians must challenge previously held assumptions about the
Roman emperors, their armies, and the quality of life of subject peoples living under the Empire.
The traditional view of the Roman empire holds that the republic was a period of expansion, the principiate one of successful
defence against barbarian attack, the late empire one of less successful defence and retrenchment. Past generations could
look upon the growth of the empire with admiration, free from moral qualms. European imperialists were convinced that it
was a good thing for a civilization they considered superior (their own as well as Rome) to rule barbaric natives.
Both the republic and the principiate were admirable, the republic as a period of dynamic expansion, the principiate as one of
stability and defence of what had been achieved. In our time of doubts, anguish, and egalitarianism it is no longer easy to
admire an expanding empire. Self-determination is held to be a right. Infringement of that right is seen as immoral.
Accordingly, views of the Roman republic are now ambiguous. That leaves us with the Roman Peace of the principiate as an
object of admiration. From the moment when Augustus put a stop to expansion the empire became laudable in modern eyes,
for it defended civilization against the barbarians and thus laid the basis for our own achievements. In fact this is not true for
Augustus. . . . [His] period, in spirit as in fact, was one of aggressive expansion. Even so, however, the old view of the
principiate after his time still persists. One of the achievements of the principiate is held to be the development of a system
of frontier defence that allowed the citizens of the empire to live in peace and quiet. . . . The frontier also is considered a
suitable object for comparison with the frontiers of modern states organized to keep out the armies of neighboring states.
The Roman empire grew by conquering and absorbing neighboring peoples, one after the other. The subjects in the provinces
lost their identity as peoples and became, if they were lucky, Roman citizens. All this was ignored by the older scholars who
identified with empire builders and admired Rome. Modern Europeans, on the other hand, who disapprove of foreign
conquest and the suppression of liberty, still find much to praise in the principiate because it is assumed to be a period of
defence of the provinces against barbarian invaders, since modern states may legitimately defend their borders against
attack. . . .
It is often ignored by Roman historians that the forces of an empire never have the sole duty of defending the border. They
are armies of conqest and occupation, as well as defence. The work of an army of occupation is basically different from that
of a fighting army, but there is not usually a single, clear-cut process of reorganization which marks the transition. The work
of an occupying army is rarely morally edifying in terms of military glory or plain human decency. It requires very special
checks and balances for an occupation to be civilized in modern terms. These did not exist in the Roman empire. Roman
historians should not overlook the fact that the Roman army was in many areas and periods an army of occupation or an
internal police force and should try to realize the consequences of this for those who suffered occupation. A further essential
function of the Roman army was the maintenance in power of the ruler. The many civil wars that were fought cannot simply
be treated as so many irregularities. They were the result of a situation in which only the army kept an emperor in power and
only a rival with an army could bring him down.