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I Finley: The Ancient Greeks and
Their Nation Why did the Greek states not unite as a single nation? Here is a summary of Finley's opinion on this recurring question. As a matter of theoretical expectation, we doubt that unity is a preferred outcome for multi-state systems as such. Our final comment, below, suggests that if there really is a question here, that question may have a different answer than the one Finley suggests. Near the end of the Persian wars a rumor spread that Athens had been solicited, and was tempted, to betray the Greeks. Sparta rushed a delegation to Athens, where they were quickly and emphatically reassured. 'An then there is our Hellenism,' Herodotus has the Athenians say (8:144), 'our being of the same stock and the same speech, our common shrines of the gods and rituals, our similar customs.' Many [Greek] communities, supported by advice from the Delphic oracle, refused from the first to resist Persia. But Herodotus' sentiments, if not an accurate statement of a universal and unequivocal Hellenic faith, cannot be brushed aside as propaganda of the moment. They recur too often in Greek literature. What, precisely, was Herodotus saying? A modern political scientist or sociologist might explain that he was enumerating the elements in Greek life and thought that justified the inclusion of the Greeks within that class of social organisms we call nation or nationality: common descent, common language, common religion, common customs, and a consciousness of belonging together. However, what Herodotus failed to include is equally noteworthy. Their common Hellenism may have made it unthinkable that Athenians should join Persians against Greeks; it never prevented Greeks (including Athenians) from fighting or enslaving Greeks and from employing foreign mercenaries in the attempt. Nor was there the faintest intimation that a single governmental structure was either necessary or desirable. In other words, being a Greek meant a great deal to Herodotus, intellectually, spiritually, morally, but it had no political content apart from the one point of non assisting non-Greeks to defeat and subjugate Greeks. When Herodotus was writing, Greek communities, most of them tiny, severely restricted in population and in space, were scattered from Phasis at the eastern end of the Black Sea all the way to Marseilles. The Greek peninsula itself was solidly Greek, as were the islands in the seas around it. The western coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), most of Sicily, the southern tip of Italy from Naples down, were heavily Greek, but they also contained substantial non-Greek populations. Unless prevented by another power, each community had its own government, it own coinage, calendar,and laws; its own temples and cults. The variations were infinite, yet Herodotus could speak, without descending to nonsense, of their common language, religion, and customs. They also had a common name label for all other peoples - barbaroi. Its deployment was a clear signal of a qualitative differentiation. Paradoxically, it can be argued that both the dispersion of the Greeks among barbarian nations and the absence of a central Greek political or ecclesiastical authority served as centripetal forces holding their common culture together. The former compelled them to cling to their Hellenism as a means of retaining self-identity. The latter prevented the emergence of regional loyalty, rebellion, heresy, and similar centrifugal forces familiar from later epochs in European history. I am of course suggesting not that any Greek offered these arguments against unification, but that we must propound such propositions if we wish to explain, not evade, the history of the Greek 'nation.' In an influential work on the history of nationalism in Germany, Friedrich Meinecke gave currency to the categories of Kulturnation and Staatsnation. Individual Greek city-states never emerged from the [Kulturnation or] vegetable state. Why not? In 1800 one could have said of the Prussians that they were Germans culturally but Prussians politically, as the ancient Athenians were Greeks culturally but Athenians politically. Why did the situation undergo a radical change in the former instance, not in the latter? 'The failure of the Greeks to realize their potentiality as a nation' - so runs a widely accepted view - 'was due to several causes of which the particularism of the polis was only one (though an important one).' This is a tautology disguised by the (misused) word 'cause.' City-state particularism was no fixed entity, neither was it a mere prejudice, pure emotionalism. What the Greeks called stasis [LS 7ed III: "party, faction, sedition, discord"] was endemic in their world so long as the autonomous city-state remained the characteristic political unit: 'city-state particularism' evidently included a considerable incapacity to live peacefully with one another within the individual, autonomous communities. Stasis is a very broad term, impossible to translate directly; its connotations range from faction to outright sedition, open civil war, bloodshed, and mass exile. 'Intra-state violence with political, economic, or social motivation,' though cumbersome and rather imprecise, will perhaps do, and that definition brings me back to the main theme. When stasis reached the stage of civil war, all other group loyalties were sacrificed if necessary. Thus, in 0197, little Opus in Locris requested the Aetolian army to assist them, 'but the richer faction shut out the Aetolians, and sending a messenger to the Roman commander, held the city until he came' (Livy 32:32:2-3). This unimportant little incident was typical of Greek behavior from early times, including the intervention, by invitation, of a foreign army, the barbarian, when circumstances permitted. 'National' Hellenic patriotism had a feeble appeal when in conflict with other overriding demands. Other demands were always overriding. That is precisely the point at issue, and a satisfactory explanation cannot be found by the prevailing preoccupation of historians with ideas and ideology in the abstract. I have stressed how little we actually know about Hellenic attitudes to Hellas, and now I must add that no matter how much we extend that knowledge, it will never tell us why the ancient Greeks did not transcend their 'city-state particularism.' Stasis was a terrible malady; ancient commentators and modern historians are agreed on that. But the Greeks never succeeded in finding a remedy, and for reasons. The most profound staseis were between the few and the many, as the Greeks commonly referred to them; between the rich and the poor: the references in Aristotle's Politics alone are too numerous to be cited. They disputed and warred for control of the state, for the power to make public policy, not only for its own sake - and I do not underestimate the attractions of power as power - but also for the substance of the measures to be adopted. Once the Greeks took the astonishing and unprecedented step of incorporating within the community all the free men of the community, peasants, craftsmen, and sailors as well as landholding aristocrats and noble warriors, they opened the door permanently to stasis. Not even the most perfect system of distribution could have fulfilled their [the poorer members' expectations, except at the expense of someone else, either of the more prosperous citizens - hence the perennial revolutionary cry, Cancel debts and redistribute the land - or of outsiders, by pillage and conquest, through war, tribute-bearing empire or outfight subjugation. Any other form of expansion, specifically a combination of city-states into a larger nation state, would, under ancient conditions, merely have extended the scale of the difficulties without substantially altering the fundamental condition of Greek life, including the malady of stasis. Modern critics of Greek particularism should first decry their failure to have an industrial revolution. The end of the city-state also meant, as last, the end of stasis. There was still violence enough, including hunger riots, but not the political stasis of the autonomous city-state, incompatible with dynasteia and effectively suppressed by dynasts. The 'few' had triumphed, and nothing in their world either suggested or permitted the nation-state.
Comment. We include this piece as pointing to an important fact, but we also find Finley's suggestions for explaining that fact still circular and insufficient. For one thing, if there was a sense of common Greekness among the various Greek polities, it was surely at the elite and not the vulgar level. And the incorporation of lower population (in some functional sense) into the state, as happened in the 04c Chinese states, did not doom those states to permanent particularism; on the contrary, it strengthened them for the showdown war in which one state would end by dominating the others. This variable thus not seem to explain the variation. But it did very likely matter that the Chinese states had a historical memory of unified rule, and thus an ongoing conceptual model for higher-level structures. Concepts predispose toward events. The Greeks had no such model that lay within their own experience as Greeks. As for the idea that the nation-state must wait on the industrial revolution, we suspect that here is one more area where, despite Finley's learning and acuity, his Marxist assumptions have let him down. We may add that "nation-state" is a red herring; "nation-states" are not the only mode for possible unification of smaller polities. There is, indeed, no doubt that the Greek city-states were unified. Under Roman domination, rather than by any collective momentum of their own, but still unified. As for the lack of collective momentum in that direction, we suggest that attention might profitably be paid to the question of cultural style as a factor in its own right. There are combative or cooperative dispositions in peoples as well as individuals, and these traits tend to persist despite such cosmetic overlays as industrial revolutions. What sort of people can profit, as a people, from the addition of industrial technology to their toolkit? Fukuyama (Trust 97f) explores the contrast between the cultural style of northern and central Italy, which have made a notable success story in the industrial age, and the different cultural style of southern Italy and Sicily, where the social infrastructures to profit from these opportunities hardly exist. It is perhaps notable that southern Italy and Sicily are precisely the zone which might be expected, given the distribution Finley begins by pointing out, to have a significant heritage of Greek cultural style. Fukuyama notes that the dysfunctional social character of this area was reinforced by the policies of later overlords. We merely suggest that the overlords' success in that task may have had predisposing conditions.
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