The Sin of Hubris
I share Maureen Dowd’s wonder at the obsession of conservatives for ancient Greece (New York Times Op-Ed 5-30-07 -- http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/05/maureen-dowd-how-were-animalistic-in.html) but I don’t find it nearly as amusing. 
If there is a lesson to be learned from the golden age of Athens, it is the sin of what the Greeks called “hubris” – outrageous arrogance – and the penalty for that transgression. Herodotus more than Thucydides warns us of the dangers of hubris, but it was the Athens of this later historian that put an indelible exclamation mark on his caveat.
It was after all the great fifth century Athens of Pericles and the Parthenon, host to the ancient world’s most remarkable democracy, that turned its alliance with other Greek states into a tyranny over what became its subject cities. The democracy that set out to preserve “the freedom of the Greeks” against Persian hegemony mutated into an empire that used the muscle of its powerful navy to subvert the independence of those it claimed to protect, all in the name of democracy and freedom. The price for resisting this “democracy and freedom” was often slaughter and slavery.
It is the great irony of Periclean Athens that many Greek cities turned against it and sought alliance instead with Sparta -- the brutal, antiseptic, totalitarian state of its day. What followed was the long, bloody Peloponnesian War that saw Sparta at last prevail. The Golden Age of Athens – and the democracy – was finished.
Perhaps today’s historically inclined conservatives may detect some congruence in our own hubris on the road to the Iraq War debacle, but I doubt it. Sinners rarely take note of their own sins.
If there is a lesson to be learned from the golden age of Athens, it is the sin of what the Greeks called “hubris” – outrageous arrogance – and the penalty for that transgression. Herodotus more than Thucydides warns us of the dangers of hubris, but it was the Athens of this later historian that put an indelible exclamation mark on his caveat.
It was after all the great fifth century Athens of Pericles and the Parthenon, host to the ancient world’s most remarkable democracy, that turned its alliance with other Greek states into a tyranny over what became its subject cities. The democracy that set out to preserve “the freedom of the Greeks” against Persian hegemony mutated into an empire that used the muscle of its powerful navy to subvert the independence of those it claimed to protect, all in the name of democracy and freedom. The price for resisting this “democracy and freedom” was often slaughter and slavery.
It is the great irony of Periclean Athens that many Greek cities turned against it and sought alliance instead with Sparta -- the brutal, antiseptic, totalitarian state of its day. What followed was the long, bloody Peloponnesian War that saw Sparta at last prevail. The Golden Age of Athens – and the democracy – was finished.
Perhaps today’s historically inclined conservatives may detect some congruence in our own hubris on the road to the Iraq War debacle, but I doubt it. Sinners rarely take note of their own sins.
posted by Garp83 at 8:40 PM
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