A shared quality between golden age America and Greece(and Rome, for that matter) is a military meta that prioritized mobilizing large numbers of heavy infantry combined with a level of state capacity that was unequal to the task of maintaining a permanent professional force on that scale. The aristocracy in this situation had to make some concessions to the ordinary citizens who formed the backbone of the army and navy if they wanted to win wars. When state capacity reached the point where a citizen militia is no longer needed, citizens' rights and autonomy were rapidly eroded.
Eras where the meta is prohibitively expensive tech such as cavalry, chariots, or air power favor aristocrats and plutocrats in those societies where state capacity is lacking, so you get feudalism or something like it instead of citizen republics.
Green, incidentally, published fine translations of the Iliad and Odyssey in his 90s, and died just before his 100th birthday. Perhaps spleen kept him going.
“A combination of atomization, urbanization, and political nationalization mean the average American’s control over their own government is lower than ever. But, much like with the fraudulently autonomous poleis of Hellenistic Greece, the ghost has (mostly) gone out of American self-government. A combination of atomization, urbanization, and political nationalization mean the average American’s control over their own government is lower than ever. Americans see bad laws, bad ideas, bad policies, and bad social trends all over the place, but when any change of course requires taking control of a country of 340 million, what hope is there?”
One area where Americans do govern themselves is zoning, and they have messed it up pretty badly. One can think of other examples.
I think public choice theory is a better way to understand what makes good governance than morality tales. And I don’t see the evidence that local control necessarily leads to better outcomes. If the point is perceptions of control, then maybe we should give people that rather than the real thing.
Direct democracy, as structured in Switzerland (which, by the way, is different from California in important ways), works well. Why not just give the people the power in a form which actually seems to preserve economic freedom?
The problem with this reaction is "better" outcomes. That misses the point of the post. The Left has become myopic about outcome based measures, so the country's ideals are pressumed best when ran by technocrats. Technocracy sucks the life out of living. Some expert somewhere is telling Americans how awfully they've failed to "close the gap", overcome the -isms, etc. Naturally, anyone who is constantly told they're always failing will grow callous and numb.
Americans did many great things. Like anyone from the past, they weren't perfect. But now it's profane to say that America is great. Or was great. The critical disdain has accelerated from the 1960s into intellectual elite, as the "us", who condescend the mass electorate, of the "them". "Maybe we should give people that" ... exactly the problem.
The point isn't that self-governing is always right, it's that a) self governing aligns the incentives as the one making the laws is also the one benefitting/being hurt by them and b) the competition generated by many smaller societies self-governing will make the good win out. If 99 cities fail at self-governing, while one city rises and spreads the good policies, that's a win. But it can take a while to get there.
In Historical Dynamics by Peter Turchin, it is argued that asabiya (group solidarity or group feeling) and identity increase at frontiers ans border zones, but decrease at central capital regions. The city states, being so small, were never insulated from their fronteirs like larger empires were. Thus, the asabiya of the Greek city states was always high, but the asabiya of the sucessor states of Alexander's empire was ever declining. Perhaps high asabiya is a necessary ingredient for cultural flourishing?
It’s enough to make Hispanics such a powerful force in the United States that it’s the only ethnic group that is listed as an option alongside “other” in the census.
I don't think our current situation can be compared to the Hellenistic period. The cultural decline and loss of autonomy is the same, to be sure, but there are two significant differences between then and now.
First is that there is no 'Rome' in our age. The author mentions China as an ascendant power, but they have already entered into their own phase of decadence and decline. Their birth rate is actually lower than most Western countries, and the average citizen also has less autonomy. People are miserable, especially young people, and many are trying to leave through any way they can. Last time they tried to invade anyone (Vietnam in the 70s) they were trounced soundly. Even if Xi somehow achieves his ambition of Taking Taiwan, it will a pyrrhic victory. Although the America-based world culture is declining, there no nation rising up to replace it.
The second difference is Christianity. Though abandoned by the majority of the population in the West, its death has been greatly exaggerated. Jesus Christ, through the holy Spirit which indwells his people, is the salt which preserves civilization. Even a minority of faithful believers has an enlivening and preservative effect on the life of a nation. When Rome became decadent, it was Christianity which replaced it, and the civilization which resulted, despite challenges, has endured to this day. I hope and believe that faith in Jesus Christ will be the force that rises and fills in the void of our decedent and failing culture, and not only our culture, but many others - Christianity is quietly becoming the dominant faith in China too.
In the last few days a man in the UK was arrested for the crime of talking in the street to muslims while wearing a Star of David. To take one minor example.
Edit: after some thought I realise that I may have made a jump there that is hard to follow. (One can no longer assume a common body of literature having been read by everyone.) The example is intended as just that, an example incident in the modern Romans v Hellenes.
Clausewitz defined war as "an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will". These days we would say "a sustained series of acts".
The infowar being conducted by the Ummah is compelling a Christendom that has lost belief in itself and is divided against itself to oppress Jews and accept Sharia, exactly fulfilling its will.
For the expenditure of hardly anything in soldiers and materiel, too. Genius.
In this echo of history, China is literally the Chin, or Qin as it is spelled in modern Romanisation. If it has not collapsed when the Ummah has subdued Christendom, no doubt it will get attention. But cyclically collapsing is China's schtick. The Ummah probably just has to wait.
The point about religion is important. Religions can outlast governments because they are often transnational institutions. The Catholic Church is one of the longest lasting institutions on the planet.
Secularists have distorted what data indicate about the death of religion. European religiosity has contracted, but American religions are stable via revivals like fundamentalism. Islam is growing. So anyone parroting Hitchen's wish for religion to go away, they're ignoring global trends.
When I told this to someone online, with PEW's data, they still insisted that any religious growth was ephemeral. Just ignore the data. It's ridiculous that modern intellectual people -- I assume anyone writing about the decline & growth of things can read charts -- choose to stick to talking points rather than evidence.
Religion is important because Americans developed and created society with the concept of civil religion. Europe never really got there. Good academics are well aware of the role civil religion plays in politics and society. That's why some of us, including myself, see a lot of this fortune-telling about the Fall of America to be moaning from non-religious intellectuals that the Age of Reason, materialism, and liberal critique did not bring about utopian society.
Great review! I do agree with the main thrust of your article but would articulate it a bit differently. 19th century Europe is Europe at its peak and hence is already the beginning of the decline and malaise, not the summit climbing Everest that you state. Similarly Pax Americana is already the beginning of the decline as is Pax Romana. On the outside these periods look great and shiny but at their core the vibrancy, self-belief and meaning is falling out from these societies at these times.
I've been reading rise and fall of the British empire by Lawrence James. His narrative similarly makes it clear that the qualities, traits, vibrancy and dynamism of Britain is born in the late 16th and 17th centuries. It's fading zeal can carry them through the 18th century but once Britain conquers and defeats Napoloeon, though on paper it will still grow and conquer more territory, it is already losing its essence. People who were once led by Divine Providence to build the world's greatest empire are replaced by people who self-doubt and constantly fear over inevitable decline.
Like I said, I don't think it changes your argument much. I think its just adjusts focus a bit. Maybe it just says that America has still got a long way to go before the painful final nail in the coffin. Doing the great thing inevitably changes you so radically that you are bound to never reach those heights again. Republican Rome can easily be argued to be starting its death once Scipio wins at Zama and unlocks all the wealth of the western Mediterranean. Republic falls 150 or so years later. Empire falls 1500 years later.
Excellent review. Thanks. My experience learning history was exactly like that. We met the Greeks, they conquered everything and then they reappeared as educated slaves in Rome…..
This review makes an assumption that participation in self-government is essential for providing meaning and motivation, which seems like an inside-the-beltway view? For many Americans, the federal government is far away, with the notable exception of financial concerns. Participation in the local HOA seems like an unlikely way of finding fulfillment?
An alternative view might be that politics is a distraction from what matters in life (for example, family and friends). Or for the ambitious, there is plenty of opportunity outside government.
At least, given sufficient income. But there are many millions of wealthy people in the US. If they’re unhappy or decadent, what’s their excuse? I don’t think it’s that the government is oppressing them?
The wealth and freedom available to many in the US seems quite unlike ancient times and the historical analogy quite strained. The economy is almost entirely different, not being built on peasant farming.
What I took was not that self-government was necessary for motivation or meaning, but that it coincides with societal vigor, self-confidence, and cultural excellence.
Actual self-government might include going to an HOA meeting once a month and participating actively, if you are interested in its affairs. But generally it looks like conceiving some social end you would like to achieve, and then organizing with others quickly and effectively in whatever ways are necessary to achieve it. That might mean working through existing organizations, or founding new ones, and disbanding them when they are no longer needed. Participating (a word suggesting passivity) in an HOA that was likely built by others, for purposes (based on complaints) one likely does not share, does not seem like a good example to me. Tanner Greer's "A School of Strength and Character" is good reading on this. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/03/30/a-school-of-strength-and-character/
Agency--taking goal oriented action in the world--can be a habit of individuals or of societies. It can be cultivated or it can atrophy. It should not be surprising that societies with outstanding achievements have governments which require and encourage higher levels of agency from their people. When people cultivate the habitual active pursuit of goals in politics, their ability to achieve is not limited to political ends.
It's not clear to me whether self-government is strictly necessary to cultivate high levels of agency. Maybe a true laissez-faire economy with low barriers to entry might provide enough latitude for action. Eventually though, some of the cabaple and powerful people produced will turn their will to political domination, and it seems wise to have a system in place which they can work within, not against.
I'm reminded of Tocqueville's famous quote on committees:
> Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. … Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate.
It doesn't seem like there is much in the way of structural barriers preventing people from creating associations to do most of these things. There may be less need for them, though: who would say that we need more inns in the US? (But then again, I suppose AirBnB found some unmet market demand?)
One thing someone ambitious might do is identify a need and found a startup company. Silicon Valley is generally considered the best place to do it. Does Silicon Valley have governments that "require and encourage higher levels of agency from their people?" Not so much. There are specific factors that probably helped, though. For example, non-competes not being enforceable in California.
I believe there are some small countries that have a high number of startups per capita? Israel comes to mind, but it's clearly a special case in a lot of ways.
Great review, entertaining and informative, but you get a different idea about the Hellenistic world if you consider its very high level of scientific and mathematical achievement. Lucio Russo calls Hellenistic science The Forgotten Revolution, in a book with that title. Just one example: Everybody knows that Aristotle – and thus “the Greeks” – thought that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. Supposedly it took Galileo to prove him wrong. But in fact there is a clear statement in Lucretius (De Rerum Natura II:225-239) that, in the absence of air or water resistance, objects of different weights will fall at the same speed through empty space; Russo argues that circumstantial evidence points to Hipparchus (190-120 BCE) as the source.
Russo argues that the recovery of Hellenistic science and math in the Renaissance played a crucial role in igniting the modern Scientific Revolution.
More recently, Reviel Nevetz in A New History of Greek Mathematics writes:
"Without the towering synthesis of the Principia there would have been no Newtonianism to define the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, arguably no Enlightenment, and a very different trajectory to modern history. But, working backward, without Galileo and Kepler, there would have been no Principia, and … both Kepler and Galileo would have been strictly impossible without conic sections. … Kepler and Galileo, and their entire generation turned to conic sections because they had Archimedes. … Conic sections … emerged exactly once in history – as the parting shot of the generation of Archytas and as the central theme of the generation of Archimedes. Take away these two generations and you take away the tools with which to make a Newton. … Europe, rather than China or India, produced the scientific revolution because, unlike the other major civilizations, Europe had the resources of Greek mathematics."
The conventional wisdom is that there were two peaks of science, in the Hellenistic period and in the Roman period. You can see this just by reading a list of scientists. You don't have to invoke Russo's radical theories to say that Hellenistic science was not decadent.
I think Russo is correct that the Roman period was inferior to the Hellenistic period, that it was people reading the ruins of the Library of Alexandria and trying to reconstruct the basics, not pushing forward. I think that book is correct about almost everything. But I think it is important to separate easy arguments from difficult.
Both Archytas (from Taras in southern Italy) and Archimedes (Syracuse) were Hellenes of that time period, but not of the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed Alexander. Was this a pattern, or did most of their contemporary scientists and mathematicians come from Greece and the lands they occupied?
Archytas was from the Classical period, not the Hellenistic period. He died when Alexander was born.
The big centers of learning were Alexandria and Pergamon, two classic successor kingdoms. Syracuse wasn't conquered by Alexander, but it was a kingdom. Green's beloved Rhodes was also an important center of learning.
I was a bit shocked at two things in this book review. First, that Mr. Neff was willing to lovingly review Green's writing, without honestly challenging some of the content. The second, which is related to the first, is that Green opined on the philosopher Epicurus with assertions that have no foundation in history. I won't go into all of Green's erstwhile scholarly opinions cited in the review attributed to Green on Epicurus was part of ancient scurrilous and today debunked and unsupported rumor mongering by enemies of Epicurus. Mr. Neff may be a student of ancient history, but his credibility as an unbiased reporter may be questioned. Many of the foul rumors about Epicurus were supported by early Christians, and Mr. Neff's professional affiliation with the Christian Nationalism of Turning Point USA makes me wonder at his motivation in shopping his review of Peter Green's Alexander to Actium to this Substack.
Is this the same Peter Green who pioneered the study of Late Antiquity as a period in its own right? Did he prefer Plotinus, Origen or Augustine of Hippo to the Hellenistic philosophers?
"Seleucus I, founder of the Syria-based Seleucid Empire, is happily married to his second wife Stratonice when he notices his son, Antiochus, is deeply enamored with her. No worry: Seleucus simply divorces Stratonice and has her marry Antiochus. This is actually a happy ending and works out for everyone, surprisingly."
As pointed out in François Chamoux's Hellenistic Civilization, this description of events is taken from Plutarch and simply inverts the story of Phaedra. The actual considerations at play (having contracted one alliance through marriage, Seleucus had to find a way to contract a different alliance) are discussed in, e.g. John Grainger's The Rise of the Seleukid Empire, 323–223 BC: Seleukos I to Seleukos III.
A shared quality between golden age America and Greece(and Rome, for that matter) is a military meta that prioritized mobilizing large numbers of heavy infantry combined with a level of state capacity that was unequal to the task of maintaining a permanent professional force on that scale. The aristocracy in this situation had to make some concessions to the ordinary citizens who formed the backbone of the army and navy if they wanted to win wars. When state capacity reached the point where a citizen militia is no longer needed, citizens' rights and autonomy were rapidly eroded.
Eras where the meta is prohibitively expensive tech such as cavalry, chariots, or air power favor aristocrats and plutocrats in those societies where state capacity is lacking, so you get feudalism or something like it instead of citizen republics.
Interesting point, I've never quite thought about it that way.
Green, incidentally, published fine translations of the Iliad and Odyssey in his 90s, and died just before his 100th birthday. Perhaps spleen kept him going.
“A combination of atomization, urbanization, and political nationalization mean the average American’s control over their own government is lower than ever. But, much like with the fraudulently autonomous poleis of Hellenistic Greece, the ghost has (mostly) gone out of American self-government. A combination of atomization, urbanization, and political nationalization mean the average American’s control over their own government is lower than ever. Americans see bad laws, bad ideas, bad policies, and bad social trends all over the place, but when any change of course requires taking control of a country of 340 million, what hope is there?”
One area where Americans do govern themselves is zoning, and they have messed it up pretty badly. One can think of other examples.
I think public choice theory is a better way to understand what makes good governance than morality tales. And I don’t see the evidence that local control necessarily leads to better outcomes. If the point is perceptions of control, then maybe we should give people that rather than the real thing.
Direct democracy, as structured in Switzerland (which, by the way, is different from California in important ways), works well. Why not just give the people the power in a form which actually seems to preserve economic freedom?
The problem with this reaction is "better" outcomes. That misses the point of the post. The Left has become myopic about outcome based measures, so the country's ideals are pressumed best when ran by technocrats. Technocracy sucks the life out of living. Some expert somewhere is telling Americans how awfully they've failed to "close the gap", overcome the -isms, etc. Naturally, anyone who is constantly told they're always failing will grow callous and numb.
Americans did many great things. Like anyone from the past, they weren't perfect. But now it's profane to say that America is great. Or was great. The critical disdain has accelerated from the 1960s into intellectual elite, as the "us", who condescend the mass electorate, of the "them". "Maybe we should give people that" ... exactly the problem.
The point isn't that self-governing is always right, it's that a) self governing aligns the incentives as the one making the laws is also the one benefitting/being hurt by them and b) the competition generated by many smaller societies self-governing will make the good win out. If 99 cities fail at self-governing, while one city rises and spreads the good policies, that's a win. But it can take a while to get there.
In Historical Dynamics by Peter Turchin, it is argued that asabiya (group solidarity or group feeling) and identity increase at frontiers ans border zones, but decrease at central capital regions. The city states, being so small, were never insulated from their fronteirs like larger empires were. Thus, the asabiya of the Greek city states was always high, but the asabiya of the sucessor states of Alexander's empire was ever declining. Perhaps high asabiya is a necessary ingredient for cultural flourishing?
It’s enough to make Hispanics such a powerful force in the United States that it’s the only ethnic group that is listed as an option alongside “other” in the census.
I don't think our current situation can be compared to the Hellenistic period. The cultural decline and loss of autonomy is the same, to be sure, but there are two significant differences between then and now.
First is that there is no 'Rome' in our age. The author mentions China as an ascendant power, but they have already entered into their own phase of decadence and decline. Their birth rate is actually lower than most Western countries, and the average citizen also has less autonomy. People are miserable, especially young people, and many are trying to leave through any way they can. Last time they tried to invade anyone (Vietnam in the 70s) they were trounced soundly. Even if Xi somehow achieves his ambition of Taking Taiwan, it will a pyrrhic victory. Although the America-based world culture is declining, there no nation rising up to replace it.
The second difference is Christianity. Though abandoned by the majority of the population in the West, its death has been greatly exaggerated. Jesus Christ, through the holy Spirit which indwells his people, is the salt which preserves civilization. Even a minority of faithful believers has an enlivening and preservative effect on the life of a nation. When Rome became decadent, it was Christianity which replaced it, and the civilization which resulted, despite challenges, has endured to this day. I hope and believe that faith in Jesus Christ will be the force that rises and fills in the void of our decedent and failing culture, and not only our culture, but many others - Christianity is quietly becoming the dominant faith in China too.
The Ummah is the new Rome.
In the last few days a man in the UK was arrested for the crime of talking in the street to muslims while wearing a Star of David. To take one minor example.
Edit: after some thought I realise that I may have made a jump there that is hard to follow. (One can no longer assume a common body of literature having been read by everyone.) The example is intended as just that, an example incident in the modern Romans v Hellenes.
Clausewitz defined war as "an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will". These days we would say "a sustained series of acts".
The infowar being conducted by the Ummah is compelling a Christendom that has lost belief in itself and is divided against itself to oppress Jews and accept Sharia, exactly fulfilling its will.
For the expenditure of hardly anything in soldiers and materiel, too. Genius.
In this echo of history, China is literally the Chin, or Qin as it is spelled in modern Romanisation. If it has not collapsed when the Ummah has subdued Christendom, no doubt it will get attention. But cyclically collapsing is China's schtick. The Ummah probably just has to wait.
The point about religion is important. Religions can outlast governments because they are often transnational institutions. The Catholic Church is one of the longest lasting institutions on the planet.
Secularists have distorted what data indicate about the death of religion. European religiosity has contracted, but American religions are stable via revivals like fundamentalism. Islam is growing. So anyone parroting Hitchen's wish for religion to go away, they're ignoring global trends.
When I told this to someone online, with PEW's data, they still insisted that any religious growth was ephemeral. Just ignore the data. It's ridiculous that modern intellectual people -- I assume anyone writing about the decline & growth of things can read charts -- choose to stick to talking points rather than evidence.
Religion is important because Americans developed and created society with the concept of civil religion. Europe never really got there. Good academics are well aware of the role civil religion plays in politics and society. That's why some of us, including myself, see a lot of this fortune-telling about the Fall of America to be moaning from non-religious intellectuals that the Age of Reason, materialism, and liberal critique did not bring about utopian society.
Thanks so much for drawing attention to this work. It's awesome in all the ways that you mention and still well worth reading.
Excited to read this! Thank you for carrying on the legacy of Charlie Kirk
Great review! I do agree with the main thrust of your article but would articulate it a bit differently. 19th century Europe is Europe at its peak and hence is already the beginning of the decline and malaise, not the summit climbing Everest that you state. Similarly Pax Americana is already the beginning of the decline as is Pax Romana. On the outside these periods look great and shiny but at their core the vibrancy, self-belief and meaning is falling out from these societies at these times.
I've been reading rise and fall of the British empire by Lawrence James. His narrative similarly makes it clear that the qualities, traits, vibrancy and dynamism of Britain is born in the late 16th and 17th centuries. It's fading zeal can carry them through the 18th century but once Britain conquers and defeats Napoloeon, though on paper it will still grow and conquer more territory, it is already losing its essence. People who were once led by Divine Providence to build the world's greatest empire are replaced by people who self-doubt and constantly fear over inevitable decline.
Like I said, I don't think it changes your argument much. I think its just adjusts focus a bit. Maybe it just says that America has still got a long way to go before the painful final nail in the coffin. Doing the great thing inevitably changes you so radically that you are bound to never reach those heights again. Republican Rome can easily be argued to be starting its death once Scipio wins at Zama and unlocks all the wealth of the western Mediterranean. Republic falls 150 or so years later. Empire falls 1500 years later.
Excellent review. Thanks. My experience learning history was exactly like that. We met the Greeks, they conquered everything and then they reappeared as educated slaves in Rome…..
This review makes an assumption that participation in self-government is essential for providing meaning and motivation, which seems like an inside-the-beltway view? For many Americans, the federal government is far away, with the notable exception of financial concerns. Participation in the local HOA seems like an unlikely way of finding fulfillment?
An alternative view might be that politics is a distraction from what matters in life (for example, family and friends). Or for the ambitious, there is plenty of opportunity outside government.
At least, given sufficient income. But there are many millions of wealthy people in the US. If they’re unhappy or decadent, what’s their excuse? I don’t think it’s that the government is oppressing them?
The wealth and freedom available to many in the US seems quite unlike ancient times and the historical analogy quite strained. The economy is almost entirely different, not being built on peasant farming.
What I took was not that self-government was necessary for motivation or meaning, but that it coincides with societal vigor, self-confidence, and cultural excellence.
Actual self-government might include going to an HOA meeting once a month and participating actively, if you are interested in its affairs. But generally it looks like conceiving some social end you would like to achieve, and then organizing with others quickly and effectively in whatever ways are necessary to achieve it. That might mean working through existing organizations, or founding new ones, and disbanding them when they are no longer needed. Participating (a word suggesting passivity) in an HOA that was likely built by others, for purposes (based on complaints) one likely does not share, does not seem like a good example to me. Tanner Greer's "A School of Strength and Character" is good reading on this. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/03/30/a-school-of-strength-and-character/
Agency--taking goal oriented action in the world--can be a habit of individuals or of societies. It can be cultivated or it can atrophy. It should not be surprising that societies with outstanding achievements have governments which require and encourage higher levels of agency from their people. When people cultivate the habitual active pursuit of goals in politics, their ability to achieve is not limited to political ends.
It's not clear to me whether self-government is strictly necessary to cultivate high levels of agency. Maybe a true laissez-faire economy with low barriers to entry might provide enough latitude for action. Eventually though, some of the cabaple and powerful people produced will turn their will to political domination, and it seems wise to have a system in place which they can work within, not against.
I'm reminded of Tocqueville's famous quote on committees:
> Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. … Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate.
It doesn't seem like there is much in the way of structural barriers preventing people from creating associations to do most of these things. There may be less need for them, though: who would say that we need more inns in the US? (But then again, I suppose AirBnB found some unmet market demand?)
One thing someone ambitious might do is identify a need and found a startup company. Silicon Valley is generally considered the best place to do it. Does Silicon Valley have governments that "require and encourage higher levels of agency from their people?" Not so much. There are specific factors that probably helped, though. For example, non-competes not being enforceable in California.
I believe there are some small countries that have a high number of startups per capita? Israel comes to mind, but it's clearly a special case in a lot of ways.
Great review, entertaining and informative, but you get a different idea about the Hellenistic world if you consider its very high level of scientific and mathematical achievement. Lucio Russo calls Hellenistic science The Forgotten Revolution, in a book with that title. Just one example: Everybody knows that Aristotle – and thus “the Greeks” – thought that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. Supposedly it took Galileo to prove him wrong. But in fact there is a clear statement in Lucretius (De Rerum Natura II:225-239) that, in the absence of air or water resistance, objects of different weights will fall at the same speed through empty space; Russo argues that circumstantial evidence points to Hipparchus (190-120 BCE) as the source.
Russo argues that the recovery of Hellenistic science and math in the Renaissance played a crucial role in igniting the modern Scientific Revolution.
More recently, Reviel Nevetz in A New History of Greek Mathematics writes:
"Without the towering synthesis of the Principia there would have been no Newtonianism to define the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, arguably no Enlightenment, and a very different trajectory to modern history. But, working backward, without Galileo and Kepler, there would have been no Principia, and … both Kepler and Galileo would have been strictly impossible without conic sections. … Kepler and Galileo, and their entire generation turned to conic sections because they had Archimedes. … Conic sections … emerged exactly once in history – as the parting shot of the generation of Archytas and as the central theme of the generation of Archimedes. Take away these two generations and you take away the tools with which to make a Newton. … Europe, rather than China or India, produced the scientific revolution because, unlike the other major civilizations, Europe had the resources of Greek mathematics."
The conventional wisdom is that there were two peaks of science, in the Hellenistic period and in the Roman period. You can see this just by reading a list of scientists. You don't have to invoke Russo's radical theories to say that Hellenistic science was not decadent.
I think Russo is correct that the Roman period was inferior to the Hellenistic period, that it was people reading the ruins of the Library of Alexandria and trying to reconstruct the basics, not pushing forward. I think that book is correct about almost everything. But I think it is important to separate easy arguments from difficult.
Both Archytas (from Taras in southern Italy) and Archimedes (Syracuse) were Hellenes of that time period, but not of the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed Alexander. Was this a pattern, or did most of their contemporary scientists and mathematicians come from Greece and the lands they occupied?
Archytas was from the Classical period, not the Hellenistic period. He died when Alexander was born.
The big centers of learning were Alexandria and Pergamon, two classic successor kingdoms. Syracuse wasn't conquered by Alexander, but it was a kingdom. Green's beloved Rhodes was also an important center of learning.
Well, Euclid worked in Alexandria and Eratosthenes was its chief librarian.
Archimedes?
I was a bit shocked at two things in this book review. First, that Mr. Neff was willing to lovingly review Green's writing, without honestly challenging some of the content. The second, which is related to the first, is that Green opined on the philosopher Epicurus with assertions that have no foundation in history. I won't go into all of Green's erstwhile scholarly opinions cited in the review attributed to Green on Epicurus was part of ancient scurrilous and today debunked and unsupported rumor mongering by enemies of Epicurus. Mr. Neff may be a student of ancient history, but his credibility as an unbiased reporter may be questioned. Many of the foul rumors about Epicurus were supported by early Christians, and Mr. Neff's professional affiliation with the Christian Nationalism of Turning Point USA makes me wonder at his motivation in shopping his review of Peter Green's Alexander to Actium to this Substack.
You have no idea how long I have waited for someone to expose the virulent anti-Epicureanism of the American Right.
I do what I can but I've got a tiny platform. You can call on me if you want to discuss it further. There's a lot of stuff to shovel.
Is this the same Peter Green who pioneered the study of Late Antiquity as a period in its own right? Did he prefer Plotinus, Origen or Augustine of Hippo to the Hellenistic philosophers?
You’re thinking of Peter Brown. No word on classicists Peter Black, Peter White, and Peter Mauve.
That's Peter Brown. I was briefly confused too. Brown has a more evasive writing style and it less down on anybody.
"Seleucus I, founder of the Syria-based Seleucid Empire, is happily married to his second wife Stratonice when he notices his son, Antiochus, is deeply enamored with her. No worry: Seleucus simply divorces Stratonice and has her marry Antiochus. This is actually a happy ending and works out for everyone, surprisingly."
As pointed out in François Chamoux's Hellenistic Civilization, this description of events is taken from Plutarch and simply inverts the story of Phaedra. The actual considerations at play (having contracted one alliance through marriage, Seleucus had to find a way to contract a different alliance) are discussed in, e.g. John Grainger's The Rise of the Seleukid Empire, 323–223 BC: Seleukos I to Seleukos III.
Magnificent review
Funny, even as I was reading this I was thinking "We have met the enemy, and they are us....."