DIR Return Create A Forum - Home
---------------------------------------------------------
True Left
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com
---------------------------------------------------------
*****************************************************
DIR Return to: Ancient World
*****************************************************
#Post#: 25710--------------------------------------------------
Re: How the Greeks Colonized the Mediterranean
By: antihellenistic Date: March 30, 2024, 3:05 am
---------------------------------------------------------
True Westerners will side with Indo-European Democratic
Barbarians rather than Autocratic Roman Empire
[quote]Christianity, no less than the Greek and the Roman
legacy, has been chosen by many historians as the most important
cultural “foundation” of the West. I mentioned in a previous
chapter Lynn White’s emphasis on the “Christian dogma of man’s
transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature,” and the
idea that humans have a responsibility to work, as part of the
fulfillment of the ultimate goal of salvation and bliss. Another
influential claim has been that the ultimate basis of the West’s
identity and development lay in the ethical values of
Christianity (Nemo: 29–60). This religion is said to have
brought to the Greco-Roman tradition a unique ethic of love,
charity, and compassion, which motivated Westerners to struggle
against evil and suffering in the world, and which thereby set
in motion a historical process of moral progression without
parallel. It is argued that, while Greek ancient ethics and
Roman stoicism held that it was folly to struggle against the
destiny of human limitations and the objective realities of the
world, Christianity nurtured a feeling that humans could improve
themselves and bring about the advent of the Kingdom of God –
which was also in contrast to other non-Western religions which
conceived of salvation as something achieved by escaping into
the “world behind” or the “world beyond.” In this hope for
amelioration in the suffering of this world, there was a sense
that things could change, that history was not a cycle of time
but a “forward-moving” process, a linear movement from Creation
to the “end of time” and to the second coming of the Messiah
(Nemo: 35–6). Th is messianic impulse, which was evident in the
Prophets and in the Psalmist writings, is believed to have given
expression to the “millenarianism” of the Middle Ages, the
“utopianism” of Western political thought, and the modern
secular belief in economic and scientific progress.
These are strong arguments; excepting that they neglect
altogether the persistent influence of Classical values on the
intellectual formation of Christianity, the prior influence of
aristocratic values on the formation of Greco-Roman culture, and
the influence of Celtic, Germanic, Scandinavian, or simply
“barbarian,” values on the formation of Christendom.35 But the
point I would like to make now is that the primordial values of
Indo-European warriors would enter the developing West several
times over. Despite the eventual exhaustion of classical Greece,
the stagnation and “orientalization” of the Hellenistic
Kingdoms, and the aging despotism of Imperial Rome, the dynamic
spirit of the West was sustained thanks to the infusion of new
sources of aristocratic will to power brought on by fresh waves
of barbarians. The first Indo-Europeans who founded the
“civilized” West (and started to leave the state of nature) were
the Mycenaean warriors who comprised the background to classical
Athens. The second were the Macedonians who rejuvenated the
martial virtues of Greece after the debilitating Peloponnesian
War, and went on to conquer Persia and create the basis for the
intellectual harvest of Alexandrian Greece (Peters1970). The
third were the early Romans who founded an aristocratic
republic, preserved the legacy of Greece, and cultivated their
own Latin tradition. And the fourth were the Celtic-Germanic
peoples who interacted for some centuries with the Romans, and
then developed the Western legacy within a higher fusion of
classical, Christian, and barbarian values.
The “beginning” of the West was thus sustained several times
over by renewed impulses of Indo-Europeans. Accordingly, I want
to question the still popular perception that the barbarian
invasions into Rome were a “regression” because they brought
about the collapse of this civilization. It is true that for
some decades now a number of scholars have gone on to replace
the use of such “negative” language as “regression” “crisis,”
and “Dark Age” with neutral words like “transformation” and
“accommodation”. Peter Brown’s well known book, The World of
Late Antiquity, published in 1971, was a key text in the
expression of a more positive interpretation of the end of Rome.
He emphasized the gradual assimilation and intermixing of Roman,
Christian, and German cultures. While I will draw on Brown’s
ideas to emphasize the continuity of the West from Greece to the
early Middle Ages, I agree with the assessment of Ward-Perkins’s
book, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, according to
which, by the end of the 5th century AD, “an entirely new
Germanic aristocracy had been established through extremely
violent means” (2005: 4–8). I do, however, disagree with
Ward-Perkins’s negative view (which is closer to the still
popular perception) of the barbarian invasions. He is convincing
in showing that these invasions occasioned a dramatic decline in
the standard of living of the West and in the intellectual
skills of the general population. I sympathize with
Ward-Perkins’s mistrust of “postcolonial” studies which have
downplayed the “civilization” of the Roman Empire and elevated
the “barbarians” to the same level of cultural attainment. I am
not in favour of replacing the “story of strife between Germanic
and Latin peoples” with one of peaceful coexistence or
multicultural assimilation.36
At the same time, I want to point out how the West was sustained
and continued by these barbarians. The Roman order collapsed,
but without the dynamics of an expansionary barbarian
aristocracy the Latin West would have been unable to overcome
the degeneration of Imperial Rome and the pervading influence of
Near Eastern values within the Empire.37 Let us think for a
moment about the fate of Byzantium (or the Eastern Roman Empire)
as it was transformed into a Greco-Oriental civilization that
would eventually be unable to overcome the full ascendancy of
Islam. The Emperor Justinian (527–565 AD), to be sure, did
manage to restore some of the glory of the Empire by
re-conquering Roman provinces in North Africa, Italy and Spain
from Germanic rulers. He also made a fundamental contribution to
the continuity of the West by promoting the completion of the
Code of Justinian, which simplified and organized the vast body
of civil law which had been accumulated over the centuries, and
by supporting lawyers in the creation of a handbook called
Institutes for the education of students, as well as a Digest,
which was an extremely valuable collection and summary of
centuries’ of commentary on Roman law by legal experts
(Ostrogorsky 1969). The Justinian Code would constitute the
essential source of the Papal Revolution. But during the 7th and
8th centuries, knowledge of classical literature and science
gradually disappeared from this civilization except for a tiny
community in Constantinople. And, by 750, the Byzantine Empire
had been reduced to a small regional power struggling for
survival under the pressure of constant Persian attacks in the
south, combined with ferocious assaults from the north by the
Avars (who were originally from the eastern Asian steppes) and
by a dynamic new enemy (the Muslims) who defeated the Persians
and almost conquered the city of Constantinople itself between
716 and 718 (Kaegi 1995).
If the coming of the Germans was “very unpleasant for the Roman
population,” as Ward-Perkins contends (10), it was indispensable
to the preservation and rejuvenation of the Western
aristocratic-libertarian spirit. It was the vigor, boldness, and
acquisitiveness of Germanic warbands that kept the West alive.
These lads were uncouth and unlettered, much given to
quarrelsome rages, but they injected energy, daring, and indeed
an uncomplicated and sincere love of freedom, a keen sense of
honor and a restless passion for battle, adventure, and life.38
By the 5th century most Germanic tribes had kings usually chosen
by the great men. They were beginning to leave the “state of
nature”. The most basic units of the Germanic peoples were still
kingship-based clans consisting of all the households and blood
relations loyal to the clan chief who protected them and spoke
on their behalf before the king. Clan chieftains looked to the
king for military leadership, plunder and land, and in return
swore loyalty to him. The Kings were not autocratic but were
elected by the chiefs who were, like the king, men of noble
birth. The relationship between the kings and the chiefs was,
therefore, a free arrangement among peers based on mutual
interests. There was considerable social fluidity: men rose and
fell depending on the king’s favor, the king’s economic fortunes
and leadership, and the ambitious nature of other chiefs (Todd
1992).
By the mid-8th century, however, these tribes had managed to
consolidate themselves into four kingdoms in the lands that had
once formed the western side of the Roman Empire: the Lombard in
Italy, the Visigoths in Spain, the Franks in Gaul, and the
Anglo-Saxons in England. The most successful of these were the
Franks who managed to reunify most of the western European
territories. The Carolingian Empire created by the Franks during
the 8th and 9th centuries attempted to imitate the Roman Empire,
but it never really managed to create a standing army, a
professional class of civil servants, a network of regular
communications, and a monetized economy. The authority of the
Frankish kings was essentially based on personal loyalty rather
than bureaucratic rule. Charlemagne (r. 768–814) tried to
centralize his power by reorganizing the government around
territorial units called counties, each administered by counts
sent to lands where they had no kinship ties to serve as
representatives of the state. But by the 10th century AD the
Carolingian unity was gone, and local aristocrats stepped back
into power. The barbarians reverted, as it were, back to the
state of nature.39 The 9th and 10th centuries also saw a new
wave of invasions by nomadic but non-Indo-European horsemen
known as Magyars, who moved mainly into Eastern Europe, and by
Vikings who were ethnically Indo-Europeans – Danish, Norwegian
and Swedish – and came in shallow-draft ships up the rivers of
Europe, raiding and plundering deep into France. Some Viking
bands conquered and settled in England, Iceland, and parts of
Ireland; and others founded settlements in Russia, sailing down
the Dnieper and the Volga all the way down to the Black Sea and
the Caspian. There is evidence that one Viking band settled
temporarily in Greenland and across the Atlantic on the coast of
Newfoundland.[/quote]
Source :
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization by Ricardo Duchesne page
461, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466
*****************************************************
DIR Next Page