Julia Tsaoussis

HST 470
due 5 May 2015
I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System.
Ageless Antiquity: A Comparison between Scholarly Analyses of
Warfare of Ancient Greece and Modern Western Civilization
The United States stands to this day as the epitome of military preparedness
, the perfect picture of gusto even on the front lines. Compared to the other ma
jor powers of the world, our nation is fairly young for how dominant it has been
in terms of trade, diplomatic involvement, and certainly most of all, of milita
ry empowerment. Yet its judgment and course of action in world affairs is contin
ually challenged, not least of all by scholars who themselves attack United Stat
es strategy from all angles: Why is war the best decision over all other alterna
tives? How are our allies going to react to it? What about theirs? What will we
gain from war that we could not obtain by any other means?
These questions do, however, have a common purpose: to seek the beginnings of wa
r in the first place. After all, such drastic measures must have a thoughtful in
centive. Perhaps, like all other nations under the umbrella of Western Civilizat
ion, the United States acquired their war philosophy from the Ancient Greeks - w
hose scholars were wondering about the same things.
Ancient Greece stands as a well-known comparative model for our own society and
government, and has been for many centuries to this day. A significant temporal
distance between us and them is hardly enough to prevent us from observing simil
arities between the two civilizations; rarely does one attribute the facets of A
merican society to its more recent influencers - nearly every sociopolitical, ci
vil process mimics that of the Hellenistic structure. Ancient Greece is a suitab
le model from which we can distance ourselves to explore critically, yet similar
enough to make reasonable comparisons to our own. This leads to many questions
on the permanence of the need for war from a psychological and perhaps biologica
l point of view - that is, if the ideals held by the Ancient Greeks are found to
be similar to our own ideas of war, the permanence of those ideals should be ab
le to give us insight on how humankind as a whole handles war.
Greece experienced the greatest population increase around 3000 BC, around the b
eginning of the Bronze Age, but it was not until a thousand years later that the
first large-scale city-state armies were formed, and another millennium and a h
alf later the national army reached its peak in power, not only in terms of shee
r size but in casualties and acreage of usurped land (1). It seems that, before u
ndertaking the venture of civilizing other lands, they took the time to work on
their own, remarks Professor Gregory Nagy, Chairman of the Center for Hellenic St
udies at Harvard University, on the matter. During this time, the Greeks, along
with their Middle Eastern and North African counterparts, had been carefully dev
eloping the crafts - or rather, the arts - of agriculture and metallic toolmakin
g, and from their newfound skills they began trading the crops and tools they ha
d crafted in conjunction with their already well-established seafaring , essenti
ally marking the birth of their economy (2) and, thus, of the very principle of
world economy.
The Greek economy, despite its current state*, was not only flourishing around t
he Minoan and Mycenaean Civilizations (about 2000-1000 BC) and the nation s Classi
cal Period (500-100 BC), but was also heavily recorded by countrymen and foreign
ers alike. The Athenian scholar and mercenary Xenophon was a major contributor t
o these records, who noted that yeomen were not only well-versed in their trade
but in trade itself; the most expert of landowners familiarized
* Despite this, a brand new majority party in control in Greece is taking steps
to ameliorate the current situation - a further research pursuit might perhaps i
nvolve expanding this essay to include the results of the new regime.
themselves with the language and customs of those with whom they bartered. As a
result, even fairly small cities like Chalkis and Lamia received hundreds of shi

ps on a weekly basis from distant traders and sent out about an equal number of
their own. (3)
Xenophon also wrote that an enemy can be a form of wealth. It seems only fitting t
hat an interesting assertion like this will inexplicably have an interesting con
nection to those of the British war journalist Robert Fisk
[CONC] Most academics will recognize Plato s quote: Only the dead have seen the end
of war.

WORKS CITED
Thucydides, Richard Crawley, and Richard Feetham. Thucydides' Peloponnesian War.
London: J.M. Dent, 1903. Print.
Nagy, Gregory. Email interview. April 2015.
Xenophon, and Sarah B. Pomeroy. Oeconomicus. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Print.