Peak Human E-Book

Johan Norberg

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 702

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'Could a history book be more timely?' Economist 'Norberg is a prophet of anti-pessimism' Guardian Golden ages are marked by periods of spectacular cultural flourishing, scientific exploration, technological achievement and economic growth: Ancient Greece gave us democracy and the rule of the law; out of Abbasid Baghdad came algebra and modern medicine, and the Dutch Republic furnished us with Europe's greatest artistic movements. As such, each has unique lessons to teach us about the world we live in today. But, all previous golden ages have proven finite, whether through external pressures or internal fracturing. In Peak Human, acclaimed historian Johan Norberg examines seven of humanity's greatest civilizations - ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, Abbasid Baghdad, Song China, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Republic and the Anglosphere - and asks: how do we ensure that our current golden age doesn't end?

Leseprobe

Also by Johan Norberg

The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global FreeMarket Will Save the World

Open: How Collaboration and Curiosity Shaped Humankind

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2025 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Johan Norberg, 2025

The moral right of Johan Norberg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

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To my father, who made me realize that the only thing newin the world is history that we have yet to learn

CONTENTS

Introduction

1   Athens: Democrats, Dreamers and Other Deviants

2   Rome: Melting Pot of Marble

3   The Abbasid Caliphate: At the Crossroads of the Universe

4   Song China: On the Threshold of Modernity

5   Renaissance Italy: The Rebirth of Law, Literature and Libertas

6   The Dutch Republic: Trade, Toleration and Other Treasures of the Shore

7   The Anglosphere: Industry, Individualism and Impertinence

Conclusion: Further Rise or Inevitable Decline?

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

A society that has ceased to concern itself with the progress of the past will soon lose belief in its capacity to progress in the future.

JOEL MOKYR1

To every nation a term; when their term comes they shall not put it back by a single hour nor put it forward.

THE QURAN, 7:34

The feeling will be familiar to many who have visited the great cities of history: I had come to Athens for the first time and made a pilgrimage to its democratic Assembly, Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. And it left me with a sense of profound sadness. Here were the scenes of some of the most extraordinary moments in human history, and all that was left was rubble, garbage and dog waste. Instead of bustling creativity, there was silence, interrupted only by the odd intoxicated passer-by.

To be sure, I also experienced spectacular beauty in Athens, like the grand monuments on the Acropolis. But even that was a museum to bygone glory. This used to be the place around which the world revolved, and now it’s a collection of patched-together columns, stone blocks and shards with plaques telling us that it used to be impressive.

This must be what Shelley – a great admirer of ancient Greece – reflected upon when he wrote about the crumbled monument to Ozymandias, king of kings, ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains. … / The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

This encounter with the transience of great civilizations set my mind racing. What made it possible for them to rise so spectacularly, and how could they decline so thoroughly that they left little trace? It forced me to consider whether travellers will one day visit our proud landmarks and plazas and think about how our civilization lost its way and became so sluggish and stationary.

This is a precarious time to write about history’s golden ages. Ours is an era of authoritarian and populist revival, with savage dictators trying to extinguish neighbouring democracies, when the fear of inevitable decline seems more prevalent than belief in progress. This may invite speculation that my motive resembles that of the American legal scholar Harold Berman when he wrote his great history of the rise of Western law: it is said that a drowning man may see his whole life flash before him, perhaps in an unconscious effort to find something within his own experiences to escape his impending doom.2

I wouldn’t go that far. We are not yet drowning. But drawing on historical human experience can be a useful way to avoid ending up in a bad situation: it might even help us to keep our vessels seaworthy. It is said that we should study history to avoid repeating its mistakes, and that is all very well. But our ancestors were not just capable of mistakes.

Human history is a long list of depravations and horrors, but it is also the source of the knowledge, institutions and technologies that have set most of humanity free from such horrors for the first time. The historical record shows what mankind is capable of, in terms of exploration, imagination and innovation. This in itself is an important reason to study it, to broaden our mental horizon of what is possible.

This book is about seven of the world’s great civilizations: ancient Athens, the Roman Republic and early empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, Song China, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Republic and the Anglosphere. Why did I pick those? Because each of them exemplifies, in my understanding, what I think of as a golden age: a period with a large number of innovations that revolutionize many fields and sectors in a short period of time. A golden age is associated with a culture of optimism, which encourages people to explore new knowledge, experiment with new methods and technologies, and exchange the results with others. Its characteristics are cultural creativity, scientific discoveries, technological achievements and economic growth that stand out compared with what came before and after it, and compared with other contemporary cultures. Its result is a high average standard of living, which is usually the envy of others, often also of their heirs.

This could have been a much longer book, exploring many other cultures, because golden ages are not dependent on geography, ethnicity or religion, but on what we make of these circumstances. And these cultures just happen to excel in the era in which they, for some reason or another, begin to interpret or emphasize a particular part of their beliefs and traditions to make it more open to surprises – unconventional ideas and methods imported by merchants and migrants, dreamed up by eccentrics at home or stumbled upon by someone fortunate.

There are certain important preconditions for this progress, and you will find them making cameos in every ensuing chapter. The basic raw materials are a wide variety of ideas and methods to learn from and to combine in new ways. Therefore it takes a certain population density to create progress, and urban conglomerations are often particularly creative. Being open to the contributions of other civilizations is the quickest way of making use of more brains, which is the reason why these golden ages often appear at the crossroads of other cultures, and in every instance benefited greatly from the inspiration brought about by international trade, travel and migration. They were often maritime cultures, always on the lookout for new discoveries. Distance is the ‘number one enemy of civilization’, as the French historian Fernand Braudel understood so well.

To make use of these raw materials, it takes a relatively inclusive society. Citizens have to be free to experiment and innovate, without being subjected to the whims of feudal lords, centralized governments or ravaging armies. This takes peace, rule of law and secure property rights.

And, most importantly, there has to be an absence of orthodoxies imposed from the top about what to believe, think and say, how to live and what to do. If we limit the realm of the acceptable to what we already know and are comfortable with, we will be stuck with it, and deserve the inevitable stagnation. If we want more knowledge, wealth and technological capacity, we have to cut misfits and troublemakers some slack.

This book will look at how institutions that were built for discovery, innovation and adaptation had profound effects on science, culture, economy and warfare.

It is not easy to sustain such institutions for a long time. The most depressing aspect of studying golden ages is that they don’t last. You don’t have to wait 2,300 years to go back to Athens. There are many stories about people visiting centres of progress just decades later and finding that it’s all over. It’s the same place, the same traditions and the same people, but that irreplaceable spark has gone.

The California historian Jack Goldstone calls these episodes of temporary growth ‘efflorescences’.3 It is really another word for an anti-crisis: just as a crisis is a sudden and unexpected downturn in indicators of human wellbeing, an efflorescence is a sharp, unexpected upturn.

Goldstone argues that most societies have experienced such efflorescences, and that these usually set new patterns for thought, political organization and economic life for many generations. This is a corrective to the common notion that humankind has a long history of stagnation and then suddenly experiences progress. History is full of growth and progress; it is just that they were always periodic and efflorescent rather than self-sustaining and accelerating. In other words: they don’t last. That is why the subsequent silver, bronze and iron ages so often think of themselves as golden ages.

It is as if history has a Great Status Quo Filter (similar to a hypothesis about the Fermi paradox on why we have not encountered alien life despite the likelihood that it exists). Civilizations in every era have tried to break away from the shackles of oppression and scarcity, but increasingly they faced opposite forces, and sooner or later these dragged them back to earth. Elites who have benefited enough from the innovation that elevated them want to kick away the ladder behind them, groups threatened by change try to fossilize culture into an orthodoxy, and aggressive neighbours are attracted to the wealth of the achievers and try to kill the goose to steal its golden eggs.

Why would intellectual, economic and political elites accept a system that keeps delivering surprises and innovations? Yes, it might provide their society with more resources, but at the risk of upending a status quo that made them powerful to begin with. Often such institutions came about by accident or as a result of revolutionary upheaval, or they emerged unintentionally because they happened to provide important solutions in difficult situations or had to be accepted to provide necessary resources and technologies at a time of fierce competition against rivals.

But, sooner or later, most elites regain their composure, begin to reimpose orthodoxies and stamp out the potential for unpredictability. The great economic historian Joel Mokyr calls this Cardwell’s Law, after the technology historian D. S. L. Cardwell, who observed that most societies have remained technologically creative for only a short period.4

The perceived self-interest of incumbents who have much to lose from change goes a long way to explaining why episodes of creativity and growth are terminated. But such groups are always there, always eager to stop the future in its tracks. Why do their reactions prevail in some places and moments but not in others? Many factors are at play, and they will all figure prominently in this book. But there is one psychological factor that reinforces all of them.

‘What is civilization’s worst enemy?’ asked the art historian Kenneth Clark, and he answered: ‘first of all fear – fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planting next year’s crop. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything.’5

We humans have two basic settings: we are traders and we are tribalists. Early humans prospered (relatively) because they ventured out to explore, experiment and exchange, and to discover new places, partners and knowledge. But sometimes they only survived their adventures because they were also acutely sensitive to risks, and instantly reacted to a potential threat by fighting or fleeing back to the familiar, their cave and their tribe. We need both the adventurous and risk-sensitive aspects of our personality, but since Homo sapiens emerged over hundreds of thousands of years in a world more dangerous than today’s, our ‘spider sense’ had to be over-sensitive to threats. Therefore it often misfires and is easily manipulated by those who want to divide and conquer.

As I documented in my book Open: The Story of Human Progress, this anxious aspect has remained a central part of our nature, even after we left the savannah for a safer world. When we feel threatened as a community by, say, neighbouring armies, pandemics, recessions or conflicts, there is often a societal fight-or-flight instinct, causing us to hunt for scapegoats and flee behind physical and intellectual walls, even though complex threats might call for learning and creativity rather than simply avoidance or attack.

Again and again, we see civilizations prosper when they embrace trade and experiments, but decline when they lose cultural self-confidence. When under threat, we often seek stability and predictability, shutting out that which is different and unpredictable. Unfortunately, this often makes the fear of disaster self-fulfilling, since those barriers limit access to other possibilities and restrict the adaptation and innovation that could have helped us deal with the threat. The problem with paralysing fear is that it has a tendency to paralyse.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. That sounds a bit like underestimating armed raiders and bubonic plague. But it is certainly true that an insular, suppressive angst deprives us of the tools we need to take them on. Outsiders can kill and destroy, but they can’t kill curiosity and creativity. Only we can do that to ourselves.

History often repeats because human nature does. All of the golden ages ended, except one – the one that we are in now. ‘History’, said the American journalist Norman Cousins, ‘is a vast early warning system.’ Where does that leave our civilization? Let me hold my thoughts about that back until we have looked at the other episodes. But I can reveal this much: we still know how to swim, but it doesn’t happen automatically; it takes a conscious effort. For that reason, repeating history’s swimming lessons once in a while is helpful.

If you want to situate my argument in the context of current culture wars, I object to both the relativist idea that all cultures are equal and to the idea that there is a hierarchy of two opposing and clashing cultures – civilization versus barbarians (often associated with European Judeo-Christian culture vs the rest).

Some cultures are better than others. Denying that is, as pointed out by the physicist David Deutsch, ‘denying that the future state of one’s own culture can be better than the present’.6 Then chattel slavery and human rights are equally good (or bad). Some cultures are better than others because they provide institutions for positive-sum games instead of zero-sum, and their eras create liberties and opportunities rather than oppression and destruction, as we shall see in this book.

But, no, we are not talking here about the inherent traits of two opposite and clashing civilizations. Among the seven golden ages featured here, we meet pagans, Muslims, Confucians, Catholics, Calvinists, Anglicans and secular civilizations. Those who were seen as barbarians in one era became world leaders in science and technology in the next, and then roles reversed again. They just happened to excel in an era in which the culture was most open to the contributions of other civilizations, and so gained access to more brains.

This is why both the nationalist right and woke left are hopelessly unhistorical in their crusades against cultural hotchpotch. Civilizations are not monoliths with inherent traits, but complex, growing things defined by how they engage with, adopt and adapt (appropriate, if you like) what they find elsewhere. It’s the connections and combinations that make them what they are.

If you come away from this book with the impression that there were seven civilized civilizations and the rest were barbarians, I have not done my job. The battle between freedom and coercion, and between reason and superstition, is not a clash of civilizations. It is a clash within every civilization, and at some level within each one of us. Every culture, country and government is capable of decency and creativity, and of ignorance and jaw-dropping barbarianism. That is why ‘golden’ should be understood as much in relationship to what you could otherwise have been, as a comparison with others. It is of course not just down to sheer will, but you and I have it within ourselves to make our particular place on earth decent and creative rather than the opposite.

By the way, I should emphasize that the question ‘golden ages for whom?’ is not just overly sensitive sloganeering. All of the civilizations I describe in this book practised slavery, all of them denied women basic rights and all took great delight in exterminating neighbouring populations, to the last man, woman and child.

Whenever I am tempted to look back at these ages and dream about how amazing it would have been to be alive then, to debate philosophy in the Athenian Lyceum or Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, to discuss political strategy with Cicero or the Song emperor, or to be present at the creation of the Pantheon, The Last Supper or the printing press, I remind myself that I wouldn’t have come near those places. I would have been a destitute peasant, struggling desperately to keep my family safe from hunger and raiders for another season.

If I was one of the lucky ones, that is. As the classicist Mary Beard has remarked, when people say they admire the Roman Empire, they always assume they would have been the emperor or a senator (a few hundred people), never the enslaved masses in mines, plantations and other people’s households (a few million).

Recorded history is the work of a tiny literate elite, and for most people, in most eras, life was nasty, brutish and short. In fact, that goes for the small elite too. No matter how powerful they were, everything could be lost in an instant if they had the misfortune to displease a capricious ruler, and even he had little chance against, say, a bacterial infection or a barbarian invasion. Remember, every time history books record that a city was ‘sacked’, it means that thousands of civilians were raped, mutilated and disembowelled. This also tells us something about what mankind is capable of.

That our ancestors got through this is testament to their greatness. Some ten thousand generations suffered horrors and hunger, and then suddenly, in the past ten generations, everything changed, to the extent that many of us today have started seeing peace, democratic liberties and a full stomach as a natural state. History is more than a crime scene. It is also the place where ideas were developed that helped humanity to identify that something is a crime, and how to grow out of it. If we discard all the achievements of those who came before us because they weren’t sufficiently enlightened and decent (they weren’t), we will eventually lose the capacity to discern what is enlightened and decent. Because that very language and moral sense emerged out of their struggles.

So, if you discover something inspiring and useful there, in the overgrown ruins of the past, that can be salvaged to help ensure that our civilization does not just become one in the long list of Goldstone’s temporary efflorescenses, let’s fight for it, shall we? As Goethe once told us, you cannot inherit a tradition from your parents; you have to earn it.

Johan Norberg

1

ATHENS

Democrats, Dreamers and Other Deviants

In the history of mankind Greece will eternally remain the place where mankind experienced its fairest youth and bridal beauty.

JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER1

The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles [495BC] and the death of Aristotle [322BC], is undoubtedly… the most memorable in the history of the world.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 18152

[H]ad there been no Socrates, no Plato, and no Aristotle, there would have been no philosophy for the next two thousand years, nor in all probability then.

JOHN STUART MILL, 18433

To some, this is the story of the origin of Western civilization:

In 480 BC, the mighty, despotic Persian Empire invaded Greece to destroy the fiercely independent city-states before they could create their golden age, which would go on to inspire the Roman Empire and then the whole of Europe. According to Herodotus, 2.5 million men from all over Xerxes’ vast Persian Empire made the ground shake and drank many a river dry. Supported by a fleet of 1,200 ships, they were set to destroy the Greek enlightenment in its infancy. A moment, according to Hegel, when ‘the interest of the World’s History hung trembling in the balance’: a world united under one Lord versus separate states animated by free individuality ‘stood front to front in array of battle’.4

But then, miraculously, the advance of the largest army the world had ever seen was halted at the narrow pass of Thermopylae near the coast – by no more than 300 Spartans and some allies. Sparta was the admired, authoritarian city-state in the south-eastern Peloponnesian peninsula, governed by a strict hierarchy and a regimented lifestyle, where the landowners devoted all their time to training and exercise. They were the bravest in their fighting, almost always won, and if they didn’t, they would rather die in battle. Return with your shield or on it, as Spartan women told their husbands and sons. Shields were heavy, and to throw a shield away in order to run from the enemy was a disgrace worse than death.

Under the command of King Leonidas, the 300 Spartans, prepared for a suicide mission, held the hundreds of thousands of Persians back. When ordered to put down their weapons, the Spartans famously replied ‘come and take them’. Xerxes threw his best men from three continents at the Spartan soldiers but failed to break through. But, at the end of the second day of brutal battle, the Greeks were betrayed. Someone showed the Persians that there was a mountain path that could take them behind the Greek lines. The Spartans told their allies to escape but preferred to fight to the very end themselves. They came out from behind their defences and fought and fell, one after the other, but not before having taken thousands of invaders with them to Hades.

King Leonidas and his men died at the hot gates of Thermopylae, but they had delayed the Persians, and given others time to mobilize. More than that, the Spartans had, through their noble sacrifice, given the Greeks the inspiration to fight back. In the end, the Greeks united and defeated the Persian army, and so Leonidas’s sacrifice was not a defeat but the beginning of victory. It gave the Greeks their freedom and made possible a remarkable era of cultural flourishing and scientific discovery in Athens and other cities, which would go on to create Western civilization and the modern world.

It’s an amazing story, and one of the episodes that first made me fascinated with history and antiquity. Unfortunately, it is also almost all hogwash.

The Spartan losers

The Persian invasion did indeed happen, and the whole of Greece was almost subjected to Xerxes’ rule. The number of 2.5 million men is a gross exaggeration, but even if modern estimates of around 250,000 invaders is closer to the truth, it was still the biggest invading force the world had ever seen. However, the Spartans did not defeat the Persian army, and they were not defenders of freedom, not in Greece and not even in their own city. They were infamous for being a small oligarchy that, unlike most Greeks, enthusiastically enslaved other Greeks, whole neighbouring populations in fact. The lifestyle of the Spartan landowning elite was made possible by the enslavement of the neighbouring helot population, which was forced to farm the land for them. In ensuing wars, when Spartans failed to defeat Athenians and Corinthians on their own, they were happy to invite Persia back to function as their local enforcers in subjecting fellow Greeks.

About the only good thing that can be said of the Spartans was that the separation of boys and men into the harsh military-style ‘agoge’ school from the age of seven to thirty (the rite of passage was not the killing of a wolf as in the movies, but sneaking up on and murdering an unarmed slave) gave women a relatively strong position in society, as rulers of the households.

The Spartans were not the invincible soldiers of propaganda. They were good infantrymen who trained more than others, but they were not much better than the average Greek army. One attempt to assess 126 Spartan military engagements estimates that they clearly won only fifty of them, five were stalemates and seventy-one were defeats.5 And if the Spartans lost or were at risk of defeat, they often fled just like anybody else – leaving their shields behind rather than returning on them, as it were.

The classicist Bret Devereaux argues that the Spartans were uninventive in warfare and mostly tried the same things over and over. They never mastered logistics and did not experiment with new tactics, combined arms or naval operations. Judging Sparta by how well it achieved its strategic objectives, Devereaux writes:

Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power. … The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems.6

At Thermopylae, the Spartans were not 300 but probably more than five thousand with other Greek allies. Sparta decided not to risk their main army far from the hometown and blamed their small number on two ongoing festivals that forced the bulk to stay at home. However, they were joined by several thousand from other cities who had not found a convenient excuse not to fight. Even during their doomed last stand, when the main force had left, the 300 Spartans had the company of Thespian and Theban forces, and the Spartans ordered their slaves to remain, so they were in total more like two thousand men, with Spartans being the smallest contingent.

Neither did their sacrifice inspire the Greeks to unite and fight against the Persians, because they already had – the decision to fight at Thermopylae was a joint one at a congress of allied Greek city-states, and while that battle was underway, a united Greek fleet was fighting Persians ships outside Thermopylae, to stop them from outflanking the soldiers. That was on the urging of the Athenians, since the Spartan commander of the fleet, Eurybiades, wanted to retreat to the Peloponnese and rely on land forces, since he moaned that Persians were invincible by sea – ‘not perhaps the best qualification for a Greek admiral’ comments one historian.7 The Athenians had to bribe him to stay.

And, crucially, the battle of Thermopylae was not some sort of great success in disguise, as later mythology would have it. On the contrary, it was a fiasco that almost doomed the whole war effort. Thermopylae was cleverly chosen by the Greeks as the place where the Persians’ superior numbers could be offset. The pass was so narrow that at most two chariots could pass by each other. With more than five thousand well-trained and heavily armoured soldiers defending the pass, the position was nearly impregnable, no matter how many Persians lined up to take their turn. Man-for-man, the light-armed Persians could be defeated, and with such a large Greek force, they could constantly rotate out the wounded and exhausted off the line so that there were always fresh and alert soldiers at the front.

And a little persistence was all it would have taken. Xerxes had gathered perhaps a quarter of a million hungry and thirsty men, who lived off the land and were far from home. If the defenders could hold Thermopylae for just a few more days, the invaders would run out of supplies and be forced to retreat. At the Battle of the Persian Gate 150 years later, even fewer Persian soldiers held a similar narrow pass against Alexander the Great’s invading army for a month.

The Greeks could have blocked the mountain trail that led around the pass, which the Persians with their famous and feared intelligence capabilities were bound to learn about. But, in an epic miscalculation, King Leonidas stationed less experienced men to guard it, and according to Herodotus they also lacked a clear understanding of their strategic objective. The massive Persian elite force just marched past them (or eliminated them quickly), encircled the defenders of Thermopylae and massacred them. The impregnable pass was overrun in less than three days, and Xerxes’ army could quickly proceed to destroy resistant cities – then the road lay open to sack and burn Athens. The legendary Spartans had been ‘little more than a speed-bump under the wheels of the Persian war machine’, assesses Myke Cole, who has reconstructed the battle in detail in a popular history of the Spartans as soldiers.8 ‘Come and take them’, roared the Spartans, raising their spears and swords menacingly, and the Persians swiftly proceeded to do just that.

The Spartans are the most overrated warriors in ancient history; they just had very good PR – partly because the Athenians who wrote about them were aristocrats. They deplored the vulgar democracy of their own city and envied Sparta’s totalitarianism, which gave power to a tiny elite.

But in a perfect illustration of our broader historical theme – that openness and innovation tend to beat brute force – what defeated the Persian invaders and saved Greece was not Spartan bravery and muscle, but Athenian intelligence and imagination. As we shall see, through improvisation and innovation, and a lot of trickery and deceit, the Athenians managed to defeat the mighty Persians not just once, but twice. It was an astonishing success that would give the young democracy cultural self-confidence to deepen its freedoms, and unleash a cultural and philosophical golden age that changed the course of history. But not before their city had been burned to the ground and their temples destroyed.

Rocking the Athenian boat

Greece was different. The Hellenic tip of the Balkan peninsula in south-eastern Europe was close to older and more sophisticated civilizations like Egypt and the Mesopotamian cities, the exceptional pioneers of settled agriculture, a formalized economy with contracts and money, the written language, a written legal code and many sciences and other aspects of human civilization.

Greece was also on a Mediterranean ocean that had been culturally and economically integrated by Phoenician traders. Greek cities and thinkers built on these accomplishments, adapting an alphabet from the Phoenicians sometime in the eighth century BC, and picking up sciences, arts and skills from Mesopotamia and Egypt. But the Greeks also learned from each other because, unlike their neighbours, they were not subjected to one imperial ruler.

Greeks sometimes say that when God (perhaps not the God, but one of the gods in the ancients’ sprawling pantheon) made Europe, he threw all the rocks into Greece. Settlements separated by rocky hills, mountain ranges and stretches of water were not easily unified. Instead, Greece was made up of more than a thousand fiercely self-governing city-states, poleis (from which we take the word ‘politics’). A polis usually emerged around an easily defended acropolis (acro, high), close to the sea and therefore trade and transport. These city-states were always competing in wars and games, but they were also observing and imitating one another. They were never complete strangers: they shared language, Homer’s heroic epics, and Zeus, Hera and the other gods. Each of the cities bordered on one thousand small laboratories of innovation in law, economics and thought. A ‘supermarket of constitutions’ where anyone can ‘pick out whatever pleases him’, wrote Plato.9

As seafarers, constantly exploring and trading, they could not help being exposed to new ways and methods. Perhaps this experience of differences and access to options explains the Greeks’ peculiar habit of not seeing their rulers as gods, or even as exceptionally well connected to them. Egyptian and Mesopotamian rulers had presented themselves as divine or as rulers on behalf of gods, which meant that opposition to their commands was restricted to the remarkably brave. The Greeks found it odd that only Persian priests could preside over a sacrifice, since any Greek, even women and slaves, could sacrifice to the gods.

This individualism was reinforced by another strange custom. Many Greeks became independent property-owning farmers, rather than serfs and subjects. We don’t know exactly how this came about, but it happened after the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BC, when the old Greek palace cultures perished in a calamity of natural disasters and invaders with new, deadlier weapons. The population declined during the dark ages, and the governing aristocrats had to hand more power and land to the farm workers who were left. After a while, a group of farmers had secured property rights to their plots, which they could pass on to their children. This gave them an interest in developing the land and cultivating vines, fruit and olive trees that would take a longer time to bear fruit.

According to the American classicist Victor Davis Hanson, this was the group that changed the world, through their independent position, but also their contribution to war-making.10 The Greek world developed a special form of infantry, the phalanx, made up of what became known as hoplites. The men stood tightly packed, shoulder to shoulder, in an almost impenetrable formation, eight or more rows deep. Protected by the shields that gave them their name, the hoplon, they attacked the enemy with spears and, if these broke, short swords. It was tremendously effective. Before the invention of stirrups, charging cavalry would often just be knocked backwards by the array of spears.

Who could become a hoplite? They did not use a warhorse, so you did not have to be an aristocrat, but you had to be able to afford bronze armour, so you could not be poor. According to Hanson, the hoplites were the middling sort, those who had some independent property but not great wealth; in other words, they were the independent yeoman farmers.

Since they doubled as soldiers defending the polis, these hoplite farmers began to see themselves entitled to some share of the power. In some poleis, they met formally to listen to important information and sometimes debates between the ruling nobles on crucial decisions. It is not surprising that some of them dared think that they should be allowed to make their own voices heard. Eventually, after public pressure, negotiations, coups and possibly some of the world’s first bourgeois revolutions, they took a share of the power in certain places. Among all the things these hoplite farmers cultivated, public participation in government and constitutional rule were the most important. They even pioneered the idea that civilians should set policy for the military.

Trade further diluted the control of the aristocracy. After 750, there were waves of Greek colonization to relieve the burden of growing populations, first towards Sicily and southern Italy, and then the shores of the Black Sea. This stimulated trade over the whole region and created new relatively wealthy groups of merchants, manufacturers and mercenaries. The brand-new Ionian innovation of coinage facilitated transactions and undermined aristocratic gift exchange networks. At the same time, trade exposed the Greeks to other cultures, and spurred innovation in metalwork, vase-painting and poetry.

All these circumstances explain what has sometimes been described as a certain Hellenistic personality – open, curious and flexible. And, among the Greeks, Athens by the Aegean Sea, the most populous polis, seemed to embody this spirit par exellence. The Athenians had to become especially outwards-oriented, partly because they had few alternatives. Attica, the land around Athens, had relatively poor soil. Plato described it as a skeleton of a body wasted by disease. The grain harvests were not sufficient for the population, but the land could produce olive oil and wine, so Athenians developed extended trade links early on to import grain from the Black Sea in exchange for their goods. An increasingly impressive merchant fleet, built with imported timber, made the eventual decision to become a sea power natural.

New groups of relatively wealthy farmers and merchants started to upset the old status quo. At the same time, many poor farmers suffered and ended up in slavery because they couldn’t pay their debts to large landowners. Other peasants were in a form of bondage, forced to pay a portion of their production to a lord. It was a turbulent period with squabbling and plotting between aristocratic clans and threats of civil disorder and revolution. In an attempt to get to the bottom of the issues that threatened to tear Athens apart, one man, Solon (630–560 BC), was appointed with supreme power as lawgiver in the 590s BC.

Solon is probably the first real living person that we know of in Greek history, from the writings of others and from his own texts, which included many poems. Eventually, Solon became an almost mythical founding father, and all sorts of legislation and stories were attributed to him. He seems to have come from a noble family, but perhaps because of its poverty he became a merchant and travelled widely, comparing different societies and constitutions. His ambition was to create a moderate constitution, balancing the different classes and giving everyone a stake in the system.

He did not try to achieve democracy, but what the Greeks called isonomia, certainty of being governed equally according to laws, regardless of being noble or poor. Central to his project was the protection of liberties and property of even the lowest classes. Solon abolished feudal relationships on the land and banned the practice of debt slavery. Debts weren’t cancelled in general, but those that mortgaged human beings were. Peasants who had been enslaved were liberated, and it was even said that Solon searched for Athenians who had been sold abroad and brought them back as free men.

It did not remove slavery, though. Like every other polis, Athens had a large slave population, usually taken in war or purchased from abroad. It might have been as many as 100,000 in the mid-fifth century. Most of the slaves were owned privately and worked in households or in agriculture, but they also worked in industry and the most unlucky ones were forced to work in the state-owned mines of Laurion, where naked and branded slaves dug silver for a city that prided itself on its liberty. Slavery was taken for granted in the ancient world, unchallenged even by the most advanced and radical thinkers. Freed or escaped slaves also took slaves.

The precise details of Solon’s reforms are not known for certain, but they extended legal protection to all Athenian citizens and helped to protect the class of small landowners. He replaced the hereditary monopoly on public offices with a set of property requirements. The highest offices were restricted to the wealthiest, but lower ones were opened up to everybody but the poorest, the landless workers. However, even they got a seat in the assembly, which elected magistrates and held them to account.

Simultaneously, Solon encouraged the monetization of the economy and international trade. Foreign merchants were encouraged to settle in Athens and could even become citizens, which was unique at the time. The export of a cash crop like olive oil was stimulated, while at the same time the export of grain was banned for food security purposes.

The changes left aristocrat clans in overall charge, though, and they continued to feud. In the mid-500s BC, the general Pisistratus established himself as tyrant of Athens, the traditional name for a usurper who governs unrestrained by the law. He has been seen as a fairly benevolent despot who courted the middle and lower classes to secure his position, but the rule of his son, Hippias, degenerated into a paranoid purge of anyone who was seen as an enemy.

It was the struggle against the tyrant that gave birth to history’s first democracy, but it happened in a most surprising way and it was dependent on some of the most unlikely champions – exiled Athenian aristocrats and Spartan soldiers.

The democratic revolution

The powerful Alcmaeonid family were at times collaborators with the despot Pisistratus, but at other times they fought with and betrayed him. Eventually they found themselves in exile, from where they plotted their return. Cleisthenes (570–508 BC), a prominent Alcmaeonid, knew that the Spartans might be interested in destabilizing a rival city like Athens. But how could he convince the Spartans to invade and depose the tyrant? Always playing the long game, Cleisthenes had supported the priests of Delphi with a costly refurbishment after an earthquake. After such lavish patronage, Spartans who visited the Oracle of Delphi for advice started to hear the same reply to all their queries: First, free the Athenians.

The combination of having a chance to turn Athens into a Spartan client state and have divine sanction to do it proved irresistible, and so the Spartan king Cleomenes sent a military expedition to the city in 510 BC. It was defeated, but they then sent another larger one, which succeeded in removing the Athenian despot. That was the easy bit. Much more difficult was furnishing a compromise between the Spartan interest in creating a puppet state and the Athenian aristocrats’ ambition to rule. At first, the rival Isagoras, allied with the Spartans, took the offensive and tried to hand power back to the aristocrats. But times had changed. Despite the tyranny, trade had continued to grow and arenas for public participation had continued to function on issues where the ruler had not made up his mind. When the tyrant was gone, people thought the time had come for them to rule, not Spartans or oligarchs.

Cleisthenes knew that Athens had changed and saw his chance. Apparently, he and his groups had spent the exile engaged in some very serious thinking about how Athens could become a more stable place, where their clan did not always run the risk of exile or death when they lost a power struggle. The answer was completely unprecedented: he turned to the demos, the people, with a radical set of proposals to give them kratos, power. He invited all free men to design the future of the state and was met with a surge of public enthusiasm.

This so angered the Spartans that they returned to dismantle the democracy before it could get going, and to exile Cleisthenes and hundreds of anti-Spartan families. The Spartan king Cleomenes installed himself on the Acropolis with his men and Isagoras to draw up a new oligarchic constitution. But the Athenian people did not leave the Spartan king and his stooge to conspire in peace. Incredibly, they rose up violently in defence of their new freedoms, marched to the Acropolis and blockaded it for two days. By the third day, King Cleomenes was hungry and filthy, and surrendered in exchange for free passage to the border. The Spartans had been defeated not by an army, but by democratic rioters, who went on to slaughter Isagoras’s allies.

Cleisthenes returned triumphantly, and the city exploded in revolutionary fervour. Now was the time to create a new constitution, where the people took matters into their own hands. The changes were bold and complex, and implementation seemed extra urgent, since they knew that the humiliated Spartans would soon return in force, and other cities might also exploit the power vacuum. They had to act forcefully and instantly, and they did.

The Assembly of citizens, made up of all men who were not slaves or foreigners, was given supreme power over all issues. Everyone was allowed to meet at the hill of the Assembly, and thousands of people usually did in a typical proceeding. Every Assembly began with the words ‘Who wishes to speak?’ Anyone could take the floor and argue, and the will of the majority decided any issue. Executive positions were opened to most citizens, even though some property requirements remained for the highest magistrates.

To make sure that the Assembly would not be taken over by a small clique that had conspired in advance, a Council of 500 was instituted, which set the agenda for the Assembly and sometimes prepared specific proposals. Members of the Council were selected by lot, served for a year and could only serve twice during their lifetime. This meant that almost every Athenian would serve at some point.

But this was not all. Cleisthenes decided that he had to break the old aristocratic tribal allegiances entirely in order to make the democracy work. Therefore he divided Athens into more than a hundred districts, demes, which would govern themselves; these became the new basis of citizenship rather than membership of a family. To the great surprise of Athenians, from now on, they would take their names from these districts. Instead of having a personal name and your father’s name, you would now have your personal name and the name of your deme.

Furthermore, each of these demes was split into thirds, and out of these ten new tribes were formed, replacing the old hereditary tribes. Each of the ten tribes consisted of a share of urban, rural and coastal neighbourhoods. This meant that every person suddenly had multiple loyalties, and that there was a social and geographical mix in every tribe. Large landowners, urban artisans and poor dockworkers met in one and the same tribe. These tribes had the task of recruiting and organizing one hoplite regiment and a squadron of cavalry, and they elected their commander. They were also the source of members for the Council – fifty members were selected from every tribe. Fifty of the 500 served as the steering committee of the Council on a rotating basis.

Another institution was established that seems strange and cruel to modern observers: ostracism. Every year, the Assembly was asked if it wanted to exile someone from Athens, and if the answer was yes, a new vote was held two months later. Then people scratched the name of the person that they wanted to exile on a shard of pottery – an ostracon. If 6,000 people were present, the person who got the most votes had to leave the city for ten years. This was in fact a safety valve, to make it possible to remove a strongman or potential tyrant, without bloodshed. The ostracized person was not deprived of his property, and after ten years he could return to his old life and status.

Was this a democracy? Not by our modern standards, of course. The fact that women and slaves were entirely excluded from any kind of political influence means that the majority of Athenians did not count in this democracy. However, these groups were not included anywhere at this time. What Athenians (and everybody else) marvelled at was the fact that so many were included, not that so many were excluded. Suddenly even the poorest and least literate citizens could find themselves preparing issues of war, peace and public administration in the Council for nobles and generals. In the Assembly anyone could speak (if they dared), and when they voted, they each had one vote.

The judiciary was also handed to popular courts. There were no judges or lawyers, just two litigants arguing with each other. A jury of 501 or more, with the power to convict and decide the sentence, were chosen by lot from a group of 6,000 citizens who had volunteered to serve.

If the ancient Athenians were to judge us by their standards, they would probably say that we are the ones who don’t have a democracy, since we don’t meet in person to decide everything via direct democracy. The fact that we allow representatives to govern us, and can be re-elected again and again, would probably remind them a bit of an oligarchy. Several modern observers, such as Martin Wolf, have argued that some Athenian inventions, like allotted citizens’ assemblies, could help our democracies to become more representative and break the power of political tribes and campaigning.11

In his play The Suppliant Women, Euripides puts democratic ideology into the mouth of the legendary Athenian hero Theseus. When a Theban herald arrives and asks to speak to the ‘master’ of the city, Theseus replies:

Your start was wrong, seeking a master here.This city is free, and ruled by no one man.The people reign, in annual alternations.They do not yield the power to the rich;The poor man has an equal share in it.12

The scale of these changes was absolutely breathtaking, and it is difficult to find any major thinker at the time who thought that this system would work. But the citizen body apparently did. It worked at a frenetic pace to implement wide-ranging changes. All the institutions were in place in time for a coordinated attack on Athens from all sides.

Democrats at war

In the summer of 506 BC, the vengeful Spartans marched with their Peloponnesian allies over the Isthmus, the small land bridge between their peninsula and Attica, while the powerful Thebans were assaulting Athens from the west and a third army attacked from Chalcis on the island of Euboea in the north. The young democracy would be tested in battle for the first time. Standing next to their new tribal comrades, protecting them with their shield, the hoplites marched into battle.

First, the Athenians marched southwards to face the Peloponnesians, but before battle could commence, Sparta’s allies began to retreat. Historians cannot agree on a common story. Perhaps they learned about the Spartan plan to install Isagoras as tyrant and found it unjust, or they weren’t impressed by friction between the two Spartan kings or perhaps they were simply bribed by Athenians. Whatever the reason, the Spartans now found themselves alone on the south front and rushed back to the Peloponnese without a fight.

The Athenians, ecstatic over what couldn’t have been anything but divine intervention, swiftly turned northwards to face the Thebans and won a quick and decisive victory, taking 700 prisoners, according to Herodotus. Later the same day, the Athenians crossed into Euboea and defeated the Chalkidians. They confiscated the land belonging to its aristocrats and turned it into a colony for some 4,000 Athenian settlers.

The victors must have looked at their tribal partners, standing next to them in the phalanx, in disbelief. Every enemy had been laid to waste, the Spartans had fled, and the last group standing were the free Athenians: citizen soldiers who had fought, not for a tyrant or for aristocrats, but for their own freedom.

Herodotus describes the sense of wonder:

Thus Athens went from strength to strength, and proved, if proof were needed, how noble a thing equality before the laws is, not in one respect only, but in all; for while they were oppressed under tyrants, they had no better success in war than any of their neighbours, yet, once the yoke was flung off, they proved the finest fighters in the world. This clearly shows that, so long as they were held down by authority, they deliberately shirked their duty in the field, as slaves shirk working for their masters; but when freedom was won, then every man amongst them was interested in his own cause.13

The self-confidence these victories inspired saved the revolution. The unprecedented experiment had not just survived, but triumphed. At times, this self-confidence became too big for the city, and the Athenians set out looking for monsters to destroy. In 499–8 BC, when Ionian Greek cities on the opposite side of the Aegean Sea (now Turkey) revolted against their Persian rulers, Athens sent a fleet in a futile attempt to help export its revolution. The revolt was defeated after four years, but the resentment of King Darius of Persia against the Athenians remained. According to legend, he ordered a slave to tell him three times at every dinner, year after year: ‘Master, remember the Athenians.’14

In 491 BC, Darius sent heralds to Greek cities to demand earth and water, the traditional symbol of submission, and a sign that he planned to conquer the whole of Greece. Most cities quickly folded, but the two largest city-states showed their contempt for Persian demands in the clearest and rudest terms. The Spartans drowned the envoys in a well, telling them that they could look for earth and water there. The Athenians, proud of their commitment to legal procedures, put the envoys on trial instead. But, after conviction, the envoys were executed, nonetheless. At least Sparta came to regret its rash action and eventually sent two Spartan noblemen to the Persian king to be killed as compensation (he politely declined, refusing to absolve Sparta of its guilt). No middle ground could be found, and a Persian invasion force of 600 ships set sail with cavalry and perhaps 25,000 infantry men for what is remembered as the First Persian Invasion of Greece, the one before the more famous invasion referred to in the beginning of this chapter.

The much-dreaded Persian force landed at Marathon, north-east of Athens, in September 490 BC, and an Athenian messenger ran all the way to Sparta to request assistance, only to be turned down. The Spartans were in the middle of a festival (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) and could not join them until the celebrations were over. The Athenians had to rush out to meet the Persians with a hoplite force that was probably outnumbered by more than two to one. A bloodbath was expected.

A five-day stand-off between the forces ensued until the Athenians noticed that the Persian cavalry was gone, perhaps being loaded on ships to go straight to Athens. This presented a dangerous threat but also an opportunity to attack. The Greeks charged down the hill and smashed into the stunned Persians. To be able to extend their line to match the enemy, the Greeks had to weaken the centre, but this also played to their advantage. The Persians, knowing that no Greek army had ever defeated them in open battle, pushed forward in the middle, but this made it possible for the heavier Athenian wings to push forward and then turn around to encircle them. The Persians fled in panic towards their ships but were pursued and killed. At the end of the battle, more than 6,000 Persians lay dead but fewer than 200 Greeks. It was a stunning victory that sent shock waves around the known world and has ever since been remembered as a battle that saved Greece’s independence and so made modern civilization possible. In 1846, John Stuart Mill wrote:

The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods.15

But it was not over. The surviving Persian ships were heading for Athens, so the exhausted hoplites had to get up and march quickly towards Athens; they got there just in time to stop the Persians from landing, and so the Persians retreated. This is the march celebrated by the modern Marathon race. There are other origin myths that have conflated this story with the messenger who ran to Sparta, but that is a distance of 225 kilometres. The distance between Marathon and Athens, on the other hand, is around 40 kilometres, close to the Marathon race created at the first modern Olympic Games in 1896.

However, for a real Marathon run you first have to defeat a Persian army in the morning, then run the entire 40-kilometre distance with heavy armour and shields and be prepared to take on a whole fleet in late afternoon. This is what the Athenians did. They proved to the astonishment of the Persians, the whole Greek world and probably themselves too, that they could defeat even the greatest of empires. A useful skill, it would turn out, since the Persians would soon return.

The Battle of Salamis

And so we’re back where we started. In 480 BC, ten years after the Battle of Marathon, Darius’s successor Xerxes started the Second Persian Invasion of Greece, the one that made the ground shake and drank many a river dry. The time when the whole world’s history lay trembling in the balance. This time, the Persians took no chances. Forces from the whole empire had been assembled, perhaps a quarter of a million men and 600 ships. It was an irresistible force, and indeed, at the supposedly impregnable pass of Thermopylae, the Persians destroyed the Spartan defenders in just two and a half days. The road was open to Attica, where the Persians marched into Athens, killed all defenders, burned the wooden structures then at the Acropolis and destroyed the temples.

This would be a tragedy for any city, but especially terrible for Athenians, who took great pride in the mythical concept of autochthonous – they thought that they were indigenous, and that they had not come from anywhere but the soil, and they were not going anywhere either. Only they did. Before the city was destroyed by the Persians, it had been evacuated. The women had left for Troezen in the Peloponnese and all the men to the ships by the island of Salamis just west of Athens. All of this, and the operations that followed, had been planned in advance by the true hero of the Persian Wars, the Athenian Themistocles (524–459 BC), one of the most fascinating characters in the ancient world.

When the historian Tom Holland wrote a beautiful modern account of the war, Persian Fire, he explained the different personalities involved by turning to the great epics of Homer, which were essential in forging an ancient Greek identity.16 If Sparta’s Leonidas was Achilles, strong and courageous, yearning for a fight, and dying because he forgot to protect his vulnerable heel, Themistocles seems more like Odysseus, who is also a muscle man, but whose chief strength is his intelligence, schemes and deceits. And where Achilles famously preferred death in battle to a long, happy life, Odysseus only wanted to survive to get home to his wife, Penelope.

Themistocles managed to rise through Athens’ political system even though his father seems to have been a greengrocer without political connections and his mother was not even Athenian. He did so by appealing to the lower, previously neglected classes, and he was known to tour markets and taverns to court them. With their help, he became the most prominent politician in the city. He used that position to turn Athens into a sea power, because he knew full well that the Persians, whom he had last met when standing in the weakened centre of the army at Marathon, would soon be back in force.