Opposite Cold War

archaeogeek

Banned
The UK still had a monarchy, an undemocratic empire, and a hereditary upper house.
The bolshevik leaders also didn't see themselves as an "army lording over slaves" - that's how they perceived the capitalist oligarchs to be.
 
archaeogeek wrote:
The UK still had a monarchy, an undemocratic empire, and a hereditary upper house. The bolshevik leaders also didn't see themselves as an "army lording over slaves" - that's how they perceived the capitalist oligarchs to be.
..er, the empire bit, we're agreeing on already. That was a similarity with Athens. The "army lording over slaves", OTOH, was propaganda, and hardly goes at the real intent of the speaker any more than, say, our Bush II's propaganda on Iraq.

To me, actions are the important bit. Communist Russia managed even less free elections than the UK's, only letting Commie Party members vote and having all rotten boroughs. And, there was little freedom, in practice. The state chose what you'd do, both in training and occupation.
 
Agh.
Athens was the communist-like power in ancient greece.
Proposing a new, "revolutionary" form of government based on people traditionally excluded from it (and giving to all the possibility of having a state-funded small salary, by means of randomly choosing names far minor statal charges), exporting it abroad fomenting civil wars in surrounding cities, building up a military empire of satellites based on subject states fearing its military might (and falling on them as a ton of bricks when they tried to defect, see Melos and compare that to Budapest or Prague).

Sparta, on the other hand was the paladin of traditional values (as opposed to Athen's new revolutionary values), and Sparta slogan was "Freedom for the greek cities" (Eleutheria).

Thus if you have to do a parallel, it would be much more:
Athens = CCCP
Sparta = USA
than the other way around

No, not even close. The closest modern analogue to Greek political thought would be Fascism, and before you say that the two are ultimately the same, they're not.

The core of Greek politics was the polis-the city-state. Someone's virtue was determined by their service towards the polis, or the state. Somone without a polis or whose polis had been destroyed were considered aliens or even sub-human. That is why the Metics in Athens were never given citizenship, despite the fact that many of them had lived in Athens for generations.

Now, you may say that service to the State is virtually the same as service to the People, yet the Greeks also thought that each individual and indeed each polis was in a state of natural competition with one another. We can see this through the Iliad, where the greatest clashes in the poem aren't between 'Greece' and 'Troy' but between the heroes-between Achilles and Hactor, Odeysseus and Ajax. The Greeks placed enormous importance in being the best-if you were only second best you were nothing. This is best represented in the Iliad where Odeysseus and Ajax compete over Achilles' armour. Odeysseus wins the armour and is hailed by his compatriots. Ajax, the loser, is abandoned and spurned, and later kills himself.
Furthermore, the Greeks in general had a love of youth and vigous which oen can also find in the Fascists, although you could say that it's more of a Futurist idea. To the Greeks, youth and vitality were everything, and old men were either to be venerated as great sages or ignored as useless old men.

These three things make Fascism the real descendent of ancient Greek thought, and you can most clearly see this in Plato's Republic, where there is no social mobility, absolute discipline and absolute loyalty to the state. Now obviously there was no one 'Greek' political philosophy; I use the term loosely to denote Athenian, Aristolean and Platonic political thought, which were the most influential even after the Classical period.
 
But to say that Epaminondas wanted Thebes to have power under Spartan hegemony is entirely ridiculous.

No, I was not meaning that.
quite the opposite in fact.
Sorry if I was not clear.
What I was meaning was: "the situation before was that Sparta was hegemon.
Epaminondas wanted to get power for Thebes (thus subtracting that from Sparta) making some Spartan 'subject' poleis become 'subject' to Thebes instead"


Theban government was essentially a set of magnates ruling a federation of free people, their elite military recruited for their esprit de corps :))). Spartan government was nothing like that, and by that point they weren't for the autonomy of the polites but actually established friendly military dictatorships.
Here we have different views.
However, my point was not about Spartan intention per se, but rather on how they were perceived by Delos League members during the War.
And during the war both Thucydides and Xenophon testify that the eleutheria propaganda campaign had become a serious focus of hope.
Something like Free Europe Radio for Eastern Europe during the Cold War
 
Here we have different views.
However, my point was not about Spartan intention per se, but rather on how they were perceived by Delos League members during the War.
And during the war both Thucydides and Xenophon testify that the eleutheria propaganda campaign had become a serious focus of hope.
Something like Free Europe Radio for Eastern Europe during the Cold War
Well, I don't disagree with that. I think we're also confusing the Peloponnesian War with later wars.
But the larger point here is that Sparta and Athens are not analogous to the USA and USSR, or even to the British Empire and Nazi Germany. They are their own conflicts with their own issues. They also did not inspire the Founding Fathers of the US all that much. The Founders were much more interested in the Roman Republic and how to avoid its pitfalls.
 
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