School of War - Ep 53: David M. Pritchard on Athens at War

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

David M. Pritchard, Associate Professor of Greek History at the University of Queensland and author of Athenian Democracy at War, joins the show to discuss how and why ancient Athens fought its wars. ▪️ Times  • 01:41 Introduction • 02:3 Martial culture in Athens • 05:08 Democracy and victory • 11:42 Innovation and participation • 15:38 Joining up in ancient Athens • 19:10 Broad support for war • 24:43 Military morality  • 30:49 Control of the battlefield is victory • 38:28 Democracy and war today

That ancient Sparta was a place of military excellence is a commonplace. There's no shortage of popular culture attesting to that belief, some of which we've covered on this show. But what about Democratic Athens? It was Athens, after all, that played the truly central role in defeating the Persian invasions at the start of the 5th century. And though Sparta triumphed over Athens nearly a century later at the end of the Peloponnesian War, it was Athens that ruthlessly exercised dominion over much of the Greek world for much

the 5th century. How? What does it mean to be a democratic empire? And a question relevant to us today, what is the relationship between martial valor and a society that prioritizes freedom? It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stay-on. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We will fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets. We shall never surrender.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. Delighted to be joined today by David Pritchard. He is associate professor of Greek history at the University of Queensland in Australia. He's the author of a number of books, most recently, Athenian Democracy at War. David, thank you so much for joining the show. Great to be here, Aaron. So there's obviously a lot of ways, it's a vast subject and a lot of ways into the subject. I thought maybe we could start by addressing what strikes me as a fairly widely held popular prejudice

towards to the extent that people have prejudice is about ancient history and Greek history, which is that Sparta is the warlike polity and that it's sort of closed society lends itself to a kind of war-making culture and success at war-making. and Athens, while obviously capable of war, somehow less characterized by warmaking. Is there any truth to that? How would you characterize the one city against the other in terms of its martial attitudes or martial culture? Well, thanks, Aaron.

So let's see. So I think when we think about classical Athens today, the two things that come to mind really are democracy and culture. So the classical Athenians affected democracy, are responsible for development. culture. We think of Greek theatre, Greek art, Greek architecture, all these. But when we think of Athens, we think much less often of Athenian warmaking. In actual fact, Athens was in the classical period, Athens was for a century of more or more a military superpower in the Eastern Mediterranean. Athens, in fact, perfected the art of war in fifth century Greece. Athens pushed

The Persians out of the eastern Mediterranean, Athens had armed forces which were attached in their size and professionalism. So in actual fact, when people think about Athens today, they often make that mistake. When in actual fact, the Athens were leading soldiers. They were leading planners for military power. They were very significant militarily in classical Greece. One of the things I found most interesting about your argument is the work you do to develop the connections between democratic governance as such or democratic governance as it existed and evolved in Athens and the expanding military power of Athens. And you assert that there are real connections there. It's not accidental.

Can you say a bit about what you mean by that? But I can. So first of all, it's interesting to look at the historical records. So Athens became a democracy around 500 BC. And before 500 BC, Athens was not a democracy. It was at best a tyranny or an oligarchy. But around 500 BC, there was a democratic revolution in Athens. And from that point on, Athens became more democratic.

And it so happens that Athenian military success matches that democratic revolution perfectly. So very quickly after democracy emerged in Athens or democracy was created in Athens, Athens becomes much more significant militarily. And it's quite clear that there are all these causes or all these causal connections between democracy on one hand and Athenian military success. Maybe if you give us a bit of more detail on the evolution of Athens and its military power into its sort of classical moment, which, I mean, I sort of defer to you on how to define that, but the fifth century sort of broadly. How do we get there? Okay. So let's see.

So Athens before democracy was militarily insignificant. Athenian armies were small. They weren't very successful. Athens never succeeded in expelling foreign invaders successfully. Athens never exploited the potential of its very large population for military activity. So Athens before democracy. is very unimpressive as a military power. But around 500 BC, in fact, precisely in 506 BC, there was a democratic uprising in Athens against a tyrant and the Athenian, ordinary

Athenian people decided to take control of government. And with the assistance of aristocratic leaders, they created a new state structure. This new state structure made democratic decision-making the core of policymaking in this state, but also this new democratic structure created for the first time, a systematic method for mobilizing soldiers for war. This new structure provided a new set, a new military corps for Athens, a new hoplight army with specific divisions of the army that were based on political decisions. And almost overnight with these new democratic structure, and this new capacity to mobilize the population, Democratic Athens had an enormous standing army.

And within only one or two years of the Democratic Revolution, Athens was defeating its rival neighbors in significant battles and holding its own. Then within 15 years of the Democratic Revolution, the Athenian Hoplight Army defeated the Persians at the Battle of Marathon. At Marathon, Athens put into the field the largest army of hoplites in the eastern Mediterranean and in an extraordinary battle defeated a larger army of the Persian Empire. That was very, very significant. Then after the first Persian war, the Athenians realized that the Persians would come back

and the Persians were no easy enemy. The Persians had the world's largest empire. They could put into the field. Hundreds of ships, a thousand ships, a thousand warships, tens of thousand, 50,000 troops into the field. The Athenians knew they had to get organized. And so in the several years after marathon, the Athenian demos made the significant decision to use strong public income

to build Greece's largest war fleet. They built a fleet in the late 480s, a fleet which was Greece's largest public fleet of warships, in the late 480s. In addition, at the same time, they created Greece's first professional corps of archers, and the new Navy and the archers defeated the Persians at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC.

Another unlikely victory, and in fact it was Athenian result, that kept the small Greek coalition fighting against the Persians. The Athenians and the Spartans then defeated the Persians at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC, and then at subsequent battles in the same year, they pushed the Persians out of the Balkans. At that point, the Spartans decided, look, we've won. The Persians are no longer in the Balkans.

the Peloponnesian, the Peloponnesus is safe, Sparta is safe. Thanks guys, we're going home. But the other Greeks thought, my God, the Persians still control the Aegean stee. They still control the coast of Anatolia, the coast of northern Greece, all the cyclades, all the islands in the Aegean Sea, they're still the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean. We are still living with their garrisons. And so the rest of the Greeks said to the Athenians, listen, Sparta has gone home. Can you lead the war against Persia? And the Athenian Demos said, we will lead the war. And for the next, let's see, so for the next 30 years, Athens waged total war against the Persian empire in the eastern Mediterranean and pushed the Persians out of the GNC. They push the Persians

away from the Anatolian coast. They pushed them out of northern Greece. They even tried to fight the Persians in Egypt itself. So by 450, Athens did most of the fighting. At the end of the day, the Greeks gave the Athenians money and ships. Ordinary Athenians did the fighting. So by 450, Athens had pushed the Greek, the Persians out of the Aegean Sea and had made, made sure that the Greeks of the Aegean Sea and the Aegean coasts were free of Persian domination. At the same time, Athens had turned their alliance, their voluntary alliance, into an empire. So now Athens said to the other Greeks, listen, you need to pay us a small tax each year, so we will fight wars for you, but you cannot leave. This empire is forever. And if you leave, we will fight you.

So by about 450, Athens had this enormous empire of 300 Greek states. It had annual income of around 40 tons of silver per year. It had very impressive armed forces. It was really the predominant power in Greece. Your account there reminds me of the sort of standing Washington joke that most things, they start as causes, they become businesses, and they end as rackets. That account you just gave races all sorts of interesting directions we can go on. I want to sort of respond with a very broad question, which is, you know, if you were of the mind

that democracy is somehow antithetical either to, it's big terms, but militarism or imperialism, you know, so if you want to avoid imperialism, you need to be more democratic and less oligarchic, you know, in your politics. And same goes for military power. The story you just told cuts a bit against that, no? Yeah, it does. So let's see. So it's very clear that democratic practices in Athens were responsible in large part for Athenian military success. So democracy meant that proposals for war were interrogated and wars were prosecuted efficiently because there was political debate about the prosecution of wars. In addition, democracy supported innovative thinking about the armed forces and military reform because democracy is about fighting new ideas, thinking outside the box, weighing up different considerations.

So democracy was very good at that. Democracy was also important for mobilisation and the military participation rate. Because when the Athenians became a democracy, working class Athenians said, okay, the state is now ours, we're now more willing to fight and die for Athens because we are the masters of the state. So democracy is also very important for the military participation rate. Now, democracy in Athens also resulted in this pro-war culture. So in Athenian public debate, war was an unambiguously good thing. War was seen as something that always gave benefits.

Yes, it was sad that people died in war, but we should focus on what war brings Athens and brings Athenians. The Athenians developed these stories about themselves that developed a national, story about themselves, which was all about military success and the need to engage in more wars to establish their success at war, to establish their mainlandness as well. So this shows quite clearly that this democracy, Athens was a very democratic place. It was the most democratic place in the ancient world. It had democratic institutions that were more democratic than our institutions, for example. But in spite of these things, Athens still developed this pro-war culture. Athens didn't support the development of anti-war discourses. The Athenians were not

very good about talking about the human costs of war at all. They really created a militaristic culture. Now, I think for us, this means that classic Democratic Athens both is a cause for hope for democracies today at war, in that it shows that democratic practices are not antithetical for military success. Democratic practices can underwrite military success and the winning of wars. But on the other hand, Athens shows us that democratic institutions do not automatically translate into Pacific public discourses, into anti-war critiques, into a more peaceful way. of doing things. If a people, if an electorate is wedded to war and sees warmaking as the ultimate human virtue, then that democracy will develop a pro-war culture. There won't be anti-democratic

discourses that question going to war. I just want to get specific here for a bit. So in the classical period. I'm a young, I'm a young Athenian. I belong to one of these tribes. Maybe you can say a bit about what that means. I grow up and time comes where I, well, I don't even know how to phrase it here, where I might join the military, or I must join the military. Walk us through, you know, how does that process work? What does it look like? Are there decisions that the young, you know, Athenian, I don't know what, what even to say here, middle class, even appropriate term, working class? What sort of decisions does he face? What age does he face them? How does it actually look on the ground. Yeah, let's see. So look, that's something like actually I really focus on in my book,

Athenian democracy at war, to think about how people ended up in the armed forces. So in classical times, in classical Athens, there was the expectation that every man was served in the armed forces. So everyone, every male citizen was under, in a sense, social pressure and moral pressure to have a stake in the armed forces to be able to fight for Athens when Athens was at war. So everyone was expected to fight in the armed forces. In addition, during military emergencies like Salamis, for example, or some battles in the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian state could conscript all men to fight in the armed forces as well. So there was a social pressure to serve in the armed forces. And and there was also a legal obligation.

And in an emergency, you could be called up for the armed forces come what may. However, Athens had a highly articulated military, had well-articulated armed forces. So Athens had an army of hotlights, an army of heavily armed soldiers. It had a branch of horsemen and a cavalry corps with a, Greece's largest cavalry call. It even had a core of professional arches and it had the Navy. And in my book, I talk about how people at different social levels would make choices to join different branches of the armed forces.

And so if you really were a man of really modest means, if you're a working class man who always counted his drachmas and his obols, had to make sure that it was always a struggle to put food on the table, then you probably couldn't afford to be a hoplight, a heavily armed soldier, because that would cost, you know, two or three months of wages to get the kit. In addition to be a hoplight, you needed your own slave. A slave cost the equivalent of one-year's wages. So for many Athenians, they couldn't afford to be hoplites. And so they decided to be sailors, to be in the Navy.

Better off Athenians could afford to be hoplites. to be a hoplight. You simply said when you're 18, I'm going to join the hoplight core, and you made a point of buying your own kit, making sure you could use, you had a slave, or you could use one of your father's slaves when you went on campaign as well. Things were different for rich Athenians, and so at the top of the social hierarchy in Athens, you had a class of rich people, and they provided political leadership in the democracy. They lived a life that was very different. from the rest of the population, and the Athenian state, in fact, made it compulsory for rich

young men to fight in the cavalry corps. The Athenian state made it compulsory for rich, older men to be ship captains in the Navy. So again, everyone was obliged to fight. People could be conscripted in emergencies, but apart from the elite, apart from rich people, people had a choice about which branch they fought in when Athens went to war. When I had a bit of a classics education in my youth, I was taught that there was a direct and very tight connection between the Athenian Navy specifically and the employment that it provided for poor Athenians, and thus the interest those poor Athenians had in revenue for the Navy, imperial expansion and so forth, that it created this, you know, to use the term of

a sort of phallisocracy where naval policy was dominant, where naval policy, sort of economic policy that benefited the poor, and an imperial policy were all kind of linked up together. It was a sort of self-sustaining dynamic. Well, you take a look at this view in your book. To what extent is that accurate? Would you amend it? If so, how? Let's see. So I think that, look, I think that support for war was broader than that in Democratic Athens. So you've just suggested that it was working-class Athenians, people who served in the Navy who were the most warlike in classical Athens, who were most committed to waging war and supporting an empire that allowed the Athenians to continue to wage war on a massive scale. I don't think that's correct.

I think that support for war was much broader in classical Athens. So it wasn't just sailors who earned a wage military campaigns, it was also hoplites as well. Hoplites and sailors were paid a lot of money to fight Athenian wars. One drachma a day if you're a sailor, two drachmas a day if you're a hoplite. One drachma for you, one for your slave as well. In addition, even the cavalry corps were paid two drachmas a day to fight in the armed forces. In addition, rich Athenians had an interest in war and empire as well because the empire relieved them of the need to pay for wars themselves. The empire gave them tremendous private benefits. It gave rich Athenians the possibility to acquire, for example, more farmland in the

territories of subject states overseas. So I would say that particularly in the 5th century, all strata of, Athenian society supported war, everyone saw a benefit in maintaining the Athenian imperial system. So is it too far to say that your view is that the, I'm going to use some anachronistic terms here, but the right of center Athenian intellectuals of the fourth century, the Plato's and Aristotle's and so forth, who took a dim view of the democracy, that the view I expressed and that you just responded to as a creation of theirs and that the true answer is just Athens' imperial designs, which ultimately ran into a great deal of difficulty. They just had much broader sources,

much broader base. Yeah, let's see. So look, when we think about Athenian democracy and its foreign policy, we need to be careful about our sources. And so you're quite right that after the fall of the empire, after Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, intellectuals flourished. in 4th century Athens, and many of them opened their own universities. And these intellectuals catered to catered for wealthy Athenians. And as such, it seems that those wealthy Athenians were critical of democracy and they're critical of what really was a social democracy in 4th century Athens. And so these intellectuals kept their students happy, kept the fathers who were paying the school fees happy by criticizing Athenian democracy. And so they often spoke about how the demos got things

wrong. They often spoke about how the demos was too militaristic in the fourth century. We need to really treat what they say cautiously, because in a sense, they were not speaking for the great mass of Athenians, and they often exaggerated problems in fourth century Athens. So I think when we need to assess fourth century Athens, it's really important to focus on the record of Athenian democracy, what we know about its political decisions, and on an objective assessment of how it afared in relation to other states or in comparison to other states. You have this observation in the book that I found really arresting. I'm going to ask you to say a little bit more about it, that part of the Athenian military revolution of the fifth century has to, to do with overcoming traditional conceptions of courage, which limited military innovation.

And it seems to me that if we understood that, that would help us understand overall what has occurred here, what is distinctive about Athens at its peak, which has this kind of, you know, much like reading the funeral oration in Ducydides, Pericles, funeral oration, right? There's a kind of uncanny self-recognition. It looks a lot, you know, the armed forces,

as you just described them a few minutes ago, that's, I mean, obviously, you know, archers to this. but in many respects, which you just described, you know, you can draw a straight line from that in, you know, modern armed forces of the 21st century. And I suspect it would be a lot harder to do that if we go back to the, you know, the sixth, seventh century. So, so what is the nature of this revolution? What do you mean by overcoming traditional concepts of courage? Okay. So, so let's see. So in ancient Greece, let's see. So traditionally, the ancient

Greeks based military morality on the hoplight phalanx and what heavily armed soldiers did in pitch battles on land. And in order to win a pitch battle on land, the main thing you had to do was not run away. So it was important not to run away and there was less emphasis on actually killing people because in a sense, the side that didn't run away actually won the battle. So most Greeks, in fact, based military morality on what soldiers needed to do to win pitched battles. But the problem here is that that conception of military morality, what you need to do to be a good man in battle, is very restrictive, i.e. you have to be a soldier, you have to fight a land battle, you have to not run away, you have to be prepared to die where you stand in the line of battle.

So that's the conception. Now that conception is really, really rigid, okay? It's a conception too that plays havoc with other types of combatants. So when you've got sailors, sailors often row away from an enemy tri-ring. Sailors, in fact, and in fact, that's a sensible thing to do. You win a naval battle if you can row away and then you can advance when the enemy don't expect it. Okay. So that conception made it difficult for the Athenians to assess what sailors were doing. It made it difficult for the Athenians to imagine different types of soldiers and different types of strategies and tactics.

For example, archers. Archers are very effective. They give you an edge in naval battles. They give you a real edge in land battles. But archers don't stand still. If the enemy gets too close, arches run away. and then when the enemy stops pursuing them, they start firing their arrows again. So for the Athenians, what was critical was that at some point they realized, okay, this conception of courage, this conception of what a good man does in battle, is too restrictive. And we need to understand that different combatants can do different things in battle. we need a more flexible definition of courage.

And so the Athenians in the course of the 5th century, and we see it very clearly, for example, in Pericles' funeral oration, they developed a new conception of courage, an idea that you could run away. The critical thing was simply to be willing to risk your life in battle. So once they had that new conception of courage, they could imagine different types of fighting.

So while the Spartans were reluctant to have archers, Spartans didn't like the idea of a cavalry call because all these people run away. The Athenians developed Greece's first, Central Greece's first professional core of archers, of a huge innovation. Athens developed Central Greece's largest core of cavalry. Athens perfected, Athens perfected naval warfare, which was mobile sea warfare where retreat and advance were an intangled part of the battle plan. So the Athenians were able to do that because they could think outside the box in terms of military morality. And it was democratic debate that really allowed them to think outside the box, to develop new conceptions of courage, and to imagine new ways of fighting, new tactics, new military call. It's fascinating to hear you outline it like that because I feel in a limited way I've actually lived it.

And I'm curious to know your response to this. So I spent a little bit of time in Afghanistan, most of it fighting the Taliban, but a good chunk of it working with the Afghan army. And it was working alongside these units that we were training and mentoring. And for all sorts of reasons, many of which do not reflect well on American military planning and organization. It was often a frustrating experience. And one of the things that was frustrating in which you sort of would figure out in time how to work with it is that not just the Taliban, but the soldiers, the Afghan professional soldiers, just thought about fighting in a very different way than Marines had been trained to think. American Marines have been trained

to think about fighting. For us, the outcome of a fight, you're looking to achieve a decision, all terms you're familiar with. And, you know, in practice, that means killing, killing or capturing the bad guys are acceptable outcomes. You know, a fight in which that is not the result is a waste. It's a waste in material terms. It's potentially even a waste in more. terms, depending on how you want to look at it. And that's very much the mindset of the U.S. Marine Corps, but the American military, I think, I think it's fair to say more broadly. And the Afghans, just they did not, they did not think about combat like that. It is more as you describe the older Greek, the older Athenian way of thinking about combat. Who stands on the field afterwards is

critical. It's critical. To be able to stand there and say, I chase those bastards away is kind of the ball game. You might kill some of them. They might kill some of you. There is, there's, there is courage and, you know, there's, there's absolutely a kind of courage of, you know, of exposing yourself to death and being willing to die. But the nature of the decision that's being sought was fundamentally different. And our failure, my personal failure to understand this, you know, in the initial months of trying to do this job just led to no, no end of confusion and frustration. I just could not, I could not get it through my head why we were not communicating here. in the end kind of came up with.

We referred to it. In the end, they sort of, it was a bit derisive. It was, well, they want to play, we want to fight a war. They want to play cowboys and Indians. And it's how we kind of came to think of it. It sounds, you know, I'm curious to what you do. It sounds very similar in a way to the kind of dynamic you're discussing. Well, let's see.

So I think that, look, that's very interesting. And it reminds me really of the incomprehension often that the Spartans had about the Athenians. I mean, what are the Athenians doing? Why aren't they playing by these rules? So the Peloponnesian War really is the story about the Spartans playing that old Greek game, that the person who controls the battlefield wins the war and dictates the terms of the peace. But the Athenians basically indicated to the Spartans at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, we're not playing that game anymore.

The game is no longer about big armies confronting each other on the field and the army that does not run away wins, the battle wins the war and dictates the peace, we're not playing that game anymore. So from the go-get of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta found that it had an enemy that no longer played by the old rules, no longer played by the old game. And so the Spartans only won that 30-year war because they actually worked out what the Athenians were doing. They worked out what the new rules of engagement were and how Athens could be defeated. If there is this link, as you're describing it, between Athenian warmaking and Athenian democratic politics, did the evolution of Spartan warmaking, or to change in Spartan warmaking have an effect on their politics in a democratic direction or any other direction?

Look, so Sparta's very interesting. So look, while I believe that ancient democracies had a positive impact on the warmaking of ancient states, I don't deny the fact that there were other types of government in ancient Greece and the ancient world that were successful at war as well. So the Spartans were successful for a long time. They were an oligarchy, a very narrow oligarchy with a small citizen population. And their militaristic way of life, Athens had a much freer way of life. Sparta, in fact, forced all men to be professional soldiers for most of their lives. Sparta was pretty successful, but Sparta, in classical times, was also reluctant to go to war.

Fucydides makes it very clear. In his account of the 30-year Peloponnesian War, Thucydides makes very clear to quote the great Kuot Ruff Lab that the warmongers were in Athens. It was Athens that always waged wars never stopped. always thought about the next war, the Spartans were really, really reluctant to go to war. And the Spartans were, in a sense, forced into the Peloponnesian War by their allies who said, listen, fight the Athenians, or we leave, we leave your alliance. And that forced the Spartans to act.

Now, in the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans had to learn how to fight war differently. for 10 years at the beginning of the Polynesian War they led into Attica, into the territory of Athens, this enormous coalition army of 50, 60, 70,000 hoplots. And the aim was to lure the Athenians out for a pitched battle, destroy them, destroy the Athenian Empire, dictate the terms of the peace. But the Athenians never came out for battle. They had built impregnable fortifications around their... city and their port. They stayed within their fortifications. They relied on their maritime empire for money and food. They waged amphibious war against the Spartans in different parts of the

Peloponnese. So the Spartans had to learn to fight differently. And I suppose the standard joke about the Sparans is it took them, it took them 20 years to work it out, right? So it took them 20 years to work out that if we are to defeat Athens, we too must become a naval power. And that's why I always talk about the last 10 years of the Peloponnesian War as the period when Sparta became Athens. After 20 years, the Spartans learned, we must become a Mediterranean naval power. We must find the resources to do that. And we must destroy the Athenians at sea. That's what they did. What's striking about Sparta is that after the Peloponnesian War, when it was really the sole superpower of the ancient Greek world, it was unchecked in terms of what it could do, the Spartan state really only survived for another 30 or 40 years.

Sparta tried to do too much with a citizen army which was too small. So by 371, the Spirons have been defeated decisively by the Thebans and the Athenians in naval and land battles. And that was the end of Spardom power. So I think that's a difference in that in Athens, when Athens became this superpower at the beginning of the 5th century, it was able to keep it going for 70 years. Athens made terrible mistakes in not reaching terms of the Spartans and being too heavy-handed with its imperial subjects.

But Athens persisted for longer in the 5th century as a superpower. Athens returns as a major military power in the 4th century. And it was these strong state institutions, these strong democratic practices that kept Athens, on the strata narrow that allowed it to keep going through thick and thin. Spartan institutions at the end of the day were not up to the task of being a Mediterranean superpower, and as a consequence, Sparta was destroyed as a superpower and a regional power quickly after the Peloponnesian War.

So I have here in front of me your book, the book we've principally been discussing Athenian Democracy at War. And on the cover, there's a photo, which I will, I will disdemean. described, when I first saw it, I thought, well, that can't be accidental. And indeed, there's a pageant that the book realized it wasn't. But it's not, as one might expect, in such a book, you know, a painting of ancient Athenian action or something like that. It's, it's two British soldiers in 1944, amidst the ruins of the Acropolis sitting there in their own uniforms, you know, two democratic soldiers, at the time, imperial soldiers contemplating

the ruins of a lost democratic empire. And it, it, you know, know in the book itself you do a couple of things that i really appreciated one you are at pains to think through what any of this might mean for us and two um you give a lot of attention to something that i think is is all too often you're dismissed or thought of an unhelpful ways which is the relationship between regimes on the one hand and sort of foreign and defense policy on the other it's as you know you know it's either dismissed by you know quote unquote realists sort of out of hand There's not really being any connection of the one to the other, or as often as not, regimes are focused on in the following ways. Our regime is great. Can't really see anything

too bad about it. And other regimes should be more like ours. And so regimes are considered in that sort of frame of thinking about the world, but not probably with as much self-criticism or critical thought as we might want. So I guess the punchline of all this is, what does any of this mean to us today? What should we take away from the study of ancient Athens, war that we ought to reflect on as we think about policy in the 21st century. As Americans or indeed as Australians. Yeah, or even as French citizens as well. So let's see. So I'm sitting here in France. I'm a research fellow in France doing research on democracy and war in ancient Greece. And in Europe, there is a major war. There is, for the first time in 70 years, there is an absolute major war.

For the first time, in a hundred years, there are trenches where soldiers are killing each other. This is a very significant turn of events. This is very troubling to say the least. And in this war, it's really clear that we've got, it's a war that's not just about territory. It's not just about whether or not Russia can hold on to former imperial territories. It's also a war, I think, about regimes as well and testing ideas about regimes. It's also a war about the future, I think, for Central Europe and Turkey. terms of what regimes will flourish in Central Europe as well. Now, in this war, the opponent,

Russia, the Russian president, no less, has made very clear that he doesn't think that democracy gives Ukraine an edge at all. He's very dismissive of the fortitude of the democratic allies of Ukraine too. He thinks that democratic allies of Ukraine are going to give up. So I think a discussion about the relationship between democratic practices and warmaking is kind of like a live issue right now in Europe. It really means something. And how, let's say, how, if Ukraine comes out of this in a good shape, I think we can investigate what impact its democratization had on its military performance. In addition, this is a debate with Putin. an autocrat about whether an autocratic regime or a democratic regime can sustain long-term

total war as well. So I think this is really important here. I think Athens is a case study that can give democratic states great cause for some hope when it comes to foreign policy, when it comes to warmaking. There is this old idea that democracies, are not good at waging war. This goes back to no less Alexei de Tocqueville in his account of 19th century America. But I think that Democratic Athens really shows that to be groundless,

that in actual fact, consolidated democracies can do very well at warfare. Consolidated democracies can do very well at sustaining long wars as well. In addition, you don't have to take the word of an ancient historian here. My historiography is greatly, indebted to American political science. So look, I've done work and run conferences with

Alan Stam and Dan Ryder. And their work on democracies at war is very significant as well and showing that statistically modern democracies are very successful at war. So I think Athens confirms that finding of American political scientists that democracy can make a difference and that should give us hope for what we're doing today. On the other hand, I think that Democratic Athens, a great place. I divided my life to studying Democratic Athens, but we also need to face up that there were some dark aspects of Democratic Athens. And one dark aspect was its militarism. So, yes, it's important for all of us to be able to defend ourselves and to fight wars successfully, but we should also do so sparingly, right? We shouldn't haphazardly go to war. We shouldn't waste the lives

of our young soldiers. It's important to have anti-war discourses. It's important to have a peace camp that questions proposals for war. Unfortunately, Democratic Athens didn't have this anti-war discourse. Democratic Athens developed this militaristic culture where war could only be seen as good, and that was really dangerous. At the end of the day, that meant that the Athenians fought more wars that they needed to fight. It meant that thousands of young Athenian men died needlessly in wars that the democracy had chosen for the wrong reasons. So I think Athens has a complex message for us. One, it gives democracies hope that they can wage wars successfully. But the other message is that modern democracies need to be careful. They cannot assume that they are intrinsically peace-seeking.

they need to cultivate the values of peace. They need to cultivate the discourses of peace so that there is balanced foreign policy so we don't wage wars without good reason. David Pritchard, author of Athenian Democracy at War, thank you so much for joining the show. That was great. Thank you, Aaron.

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