Archive for the ‘Spartacus’ Category

It takes physical courage to demonstrate against an oppressive regime that is willing to kill you, as brave Iranians have done this month. Moral courage is less necessary. When someone holds you in chains, it is obvious that you should break them. All honor, even so, to those who risk their lives.

Spartacus would have understood – and approved.

It takes something else entirely to fight against friendly fascism. When the government offers cradle-to-grave security, who says no? Not the average American, to judge from recent events. The ordinary American citizen has neither protested trillion-dollar deficits nor the federal takeover of automobile companies. Now, a new poll shows support, by a wide majority, for a government administered health insurance plan like Medicare (The New York Times, June 21, 2009).

What does it take to say no to a state that, unlike Iran, wants not to shoot you but to smother you with its embrace? It takes: knowledge of the track record of nanny states in Europe and Canada, with their inadequate services and bankrupt budgets; skepticism about the plans of the elite, with their inevitable loopholes for the privileged few; a prickly fortitude that sets greater store by the freedom to fail than by the security of being told what to do; education in the civic tradition of western democracies and republics, from the Greeks and Romans on; religious faith in the divine mercy that allows the individual to struggle against enslavement by his own emotions, a drama in which government’s role is to step aside.

Perhaps Iranians know all that. Americans once did.

In spring 196 B.C. the Roman proconsul Flamininus gave a speech. The scene was the Isthmian Games, near Corinth. Rome was the new master of Greece, after having smashed the Macedonian army the year before. The Greeks were used to being pushed around by great powers like Macedon. From Rome, they expected more of the same.

So they were thunderstruck at Flamininus’s words (which he had a herald proclaim). Greece, he said, was free. The applause was so loud that frightened birds are supposed to have fallen dead from the sky.

Poor Greeks. They thought that when Flamininus proclaimed Greek freedom, he meant it. Actually, Flamininus meant that the Greeks were free to obey Rome. “Freedom,” to Flamininus, meant that each of the hundred-plus little Greek city-states was on its own. Neither Macedon nor any of the various Greek federal leagues could unite them. In other words, it was the old Roman policy of “divide and conquer.”

But the Greeks didn’t hear that. They fell for Flamininus’s charm and overlooked his ruthlessness. They insisted on actually trying to be free. Rome was not amused. Two wars and fifty years later, a Roman army had sacked Corinth, one of Greece’s greatest cities, and hauled the surviving leaders of Greece’s political elite into exile. Greece was now a Roman province, and a poor and neglected one at that.

About 2200 years later, the representative of another imperial power has gone east to give a speech. President Barack Obama’s address in Cairo, like Flamininus’s in Greece, received rave reviews. (That is, unless you are an Egyptian democrat, an advocate of the justice of America’s Iraq War, a skeptic about the willingness of the Palestinians to live in peace with Israel, or a worrier about the Iranian bomb.) But whether it will bring freedom – the president used the word or its variants seven times – and peace – he used the word or its variants twenty-eight times – is questionable.

American concessions will be interpreted as weakness. America will be tested in ways that are frightening and dangerous.

Honeyed words bring temporary relief but they sow the seeds for long-term conflict. Ask the audience at Isthmia.

In Spartacus’s day, gladiators advertised by parading through town, displaying their fierce physiques and touting their records of wins and losses. Nowadays, states advertise by testing missiles and nuclear bombs and then peddling the results to a global audience. So, Iran and North Korea in the past week. Their weapons make them winners; the implied loser is the United States, the superpower that maintains the world order that these two states seek to change.

For the U.S. to respond to every challenge would be to play a losing game of tit-for-tat. Some tests, however, are too important to ignore. The U.S. would pay a high price, for example, if it failed to counter Iran’s rising power by protecting its allies in the Middle East, from Israel to Saudi Arabia, and from Egypt to Turkey.

That cost, however, pales beside the price of failure in Northeast Asia. Command of the Pacific is a pillar of American power and prosperity. America’s post-Second-World-War hegemony in the Pacific has depended on the support of Japan and the defense of South Korea (and Taiwan) in order to check Chinese expansion. But South Korea and Japan are the two biggest potential victims of North Korean nuclear weapons. Neither state is able to defend itself without a patron. Either they will find support from the U.S. or they will jump on a new bandwagon – China’s. There is also the danger that, when it comes to Japan and South Korea, American irresoluteness now will drag us into a war to defend them later.

To retain the confidence of Japan and South Korea, the U.S. must respond to North Korea’s challenge. With nuclear weapons in play, war is unthinkable. Economic sanctions and strengthened anti-missile defense programs, followed by tough negotiations, may be the best course.

United Nations resolutions are a good start. But, against missiles and nukes, words will be about as effective as they would against a gladiator’s sword.

When American President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet in Washington, D.C. next week, the ghost of Rome will stalk the room. Although the Founders modeled themselves on the Roman Republic, Americans have long had an identity crisis: are they homebodies like Cincinnatus, who prefer the plow to politics, or tyrant-slayers like Brutus, who seek to strike blows for liberty? Israelis need no reminder that they live in the first independent Jewish state in the Holy Land since the Roman Conquest. They might not remember, though, that Rome once befriended the Jewish people; indeed Rome supported the Maccabean Revolt commemorated in Hanukkah.

All things human go through cycles, and American-Israeli relations are just one example. Currently, the United States wants Israel to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state while Israel wants the United States to put an end to Iran’s nuclear program. But the Netanyahu Government is dubious about the peace process and the Obama Administration is reportedly seeking a rapprochement with Iran. Allies and friends sometimes disagree.

“Ally and friend” – socius amicusque – is what the Romans might have called Israel in its relationship to the United States. (This was the relationship that Spartacus wanted to establish with Crassus, but the Roman indignantly refused.) No formal treaty binds the two but friendly ties and a series of mutual understandings are implied, with the acknowledgment that one state – the United States - is the stronger power. Scholars call this a patron-client relationship. So it is, but as the Romans believed, it is not a one-way street: patrons have obligations to their clients too. And as the Romans could attest, clients have minds of their own. (The Latin for headache is capitis dolor.)

Before his visit to Washington, Netanyahu has met with other American friends in the Middle East, President Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan. They are Netanyahu’s friends too, and it is widely thought that Saudi Arabia is also part of this friendship. Reportedly, all four states share a fear of Iran.

That Israel, Egypt, and Jordan (and perhaps Saudi Arabia) are friends is worth a Latin exclamation: mirabile dictu, “remarkable to say!” As for the meeting in Washington, consider this adage: amicus certus in re incerta cernitur, “a true friend is discerned in an uncertain matter.”

Even in a recession, someone always makes money. You’ve just got to have the right product to sell. Today’s newspaper carried a report that antiques are doing well, especially at the high end. The rich, it seems, need someplace to put their money, and many distrust the stock market these days. So why not buy a Louis XV chair? Or a mosaic?
Other products are also prospering in hard times. People eat out less but buy more supermarket food. New car sales have plummeted but old cars require maintenance, and so the auto after-market is booming. Executives are smiling at cut-rate kings Wal-Mart and McDonald’s.
We might have predicted silver linings among the economic clouds by studying Spartacus. His revolt plunged the Italian countryside into chaos. Yet when the rebels made their winter camp in the port city of Thurii, they were visited by…merchants. Even in a slave rebellion, someone was making money. Add in arms makers, the lower end of the free labor market (who would have been needed to replace slaves) and pirates, and the circle of selective prosperity widens.
War, it seems, is not the only arena in which the Romans behaved strategically.

He’s running for office. Of all the details in various media reports about boxing champ, Manny Pacquiao, that’s the one that strikes me. Pacquiao will face Ricky Hatton in a sold-out fight in Las Vegas on Saturday. The bout is highly touted, and for good reason, since Hatton holds a world title (140-pounds) and Pacquiao is often thought to be the best boxer in the business. Neither man is a heavyweight but both generate heat. Pacquiao (“the Pac Man”) is a fit lefty with speed and power; Hatton (“the Hit Man”) is strong and aggressive. The guaranteed purse is $12 million per fighter.

I’m putting my money on Pacquiao’s political ambitions. He plans to run for Congress in his native Philippines. His national hero status, some say, makes him more popular there than the president. He has even met Imelda Marcus.

The Pac Man’s aim outside the ring is a reminder of the age-old tie between sports and politics. Combat sports probably offer the most cachet: the mere fact of being a heavyweight gladiator, for instance, gave Spartacus credibility. But any sports success will rub off on an office-seeker. In ancient Athens, for instance, the rogue politician Alcibiades climbed his record of sponsoring chariot-race winners at the Olympics all the way to a top military command. Next to that, American presidential golfers and basketball players seem low-key.

If Spartacus were running for Congress today, would his campaign slogan be “He’ll clean house the way he cleaned up in the arena”? Or maybe, “Now that’s what I call a left hook”?

“Pitiful, helpless giant,” anyone? Richard Nixon’s salty description of American impotence comes to mind at this week’s news.

The Wall Street Journal reported that hackers broke into the Pentagon’s most expensive and confidential program – the Joint Strike Fighter – and made off with a treasure trove of data. So much for the security system of the F-35 Lightning, the aircraft set to be America’s most advanced and versatile fighter plane. Fingers pointed to Chinese cyberspies, but the Chinese government refuted the charge. A cynic might recall the journalists’ adage, “never believe a rumor until it is officially denied.”

What is it about empires that makes them vulnerable to smart and nimble attack? Cyberspies, nineteen terrorists armed with box cutters and airplane tickets, seventy-four gladiators wielding kitchen knives and skewers, a small but shrewd Greek navy lying in wait for its massive foe, a wooden horse outside the gates: from the Joint Strike Fighter to the 9-11 attacks to the Spartacus War to the Persian Armada of 480 B.C. to the legendary Trojan War, it is all of one piece. Top-heavy and institutionalized, empires – or, if you prefer, great powers – convince themselves that size is the only thing that matters. Their smaller rivals try harder.

Sometimes, the empire strikes back with success. Rome, for example, managed to defeat Spartacus and his ragtag band without making fundamental changes to its military doctrine. Rome made little use of the convoluted tactics of today’s counterinsurgency warfare. Instead, Rome reverted to form: it raised a big army, built massive, fortifications, and cut off potential allies by waging war from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. These giant steps required huge amounts of money and manpower, but the Roman people were willing to pay the price because, in the ancient world, conquest offered the best path to prosperity.

We live in a different era. Nowadays, when commerce pays much better than conquest, giant steps won’t work. Our ethos is more humanitarian, our instincts more peaceful. The American public won’t support war unless it is cost-effective and efficient. In order to compete with clever, hungry military competitors, the United States will have to fight smart. “It takes a thief” is a better motto for the U.S., as it responds to cyber-attack, than “Fee, fie, fo, fum.” Americans need to think like insurgents, not like an empire.

In that sense, at least, we are not Rome.

Today’s post is a guest blog for The Historical Society.

The question of whether the Bush Administration engaged in torture is in the news again. While others consider the matter, I found myself wondering whether Spartacus engaged in torture.

Certainly, he tried to protect civilians. On an autumn day in 73 B.C., his troops fell on a farming town in an upland valley of southern Italy. The Thracian ordered his followers not to burn down houses and not to rape, wound or kill civilians. They ignored him, though, and a massacre ensued.

That was Spartacus the Good. Spartacus the Bad showed no such reticence when it came to Roman prisoners. On one occasion he marked the death of his comrade Crixus by forcing 300 Roman prisoners to fight each other as gladiators.

An even more dramatic moment came when the rebels were penned in beyond Roman fortifications in the “toe” of the Italian “boot” in winter, 71 B.C. To remind his men what lay ahead if they lost, he crucified a Roman prisoner in the no-man’s land between his army and the enemy. This would not accord with the Geneva Convention, but neither would Rome’s treatment of runaway slaves: they were crucified. But slavery would hardly fit the Geneva Convention either.

Historical analogies help us to think about the issues of our own day. Applying modern standards to ancient history, however, is much more difficult. Spartacus engaged in torture, but some might consider that justified reprisal, especially given his attempts to protect civilians. The Romans were often far less scrupulous when it came to their treatment of innocent Thracians, Celts or Germans (among others).

Was Spartacus a tarnished hero or a man who sometimes rose above the tenor of his times?