The Wages of Appeasement

Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama's America

Bruce S. Thornton

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781594035197
• eBook ISBN: 9781594035500
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Wages of Appeasement explores the reasons why a powerful state gives in to aggressors. It tells the story of three historical examples of appeasement: the greek city-states of the fourth century b.c., which lost their freedom to Philip II of Macedon; England in the twenties and thirties, and the failure to stop Germany's aggression that led to World War II; and America's current war against Islamic jihad and the 30-year failure to counter Iran's attacks on the U.S. The inherent weaknesses of democracies and their bad habit of pursuing short-term interests at the expense of long-term security play a role in appeasement. But more important are the bad ideas people indulge, from idealized views of human nature to utopian notions like pacifism or disarmament. But especially important is the notion that diplomatic engagement and international institutions like the u.n. can resolve conflict and deter an aggressor––the delusion currently driving the Obama foreign policy in the middle east. Wages of Appeasement combines narrative history and cultural analysis to show how ideas can have dangerous and deadly consequences.

Chapter One

Athens and Philip II

Yet I also saw that in pursuit of power and domination, Philip, our opponent in the struggle, had his eye knocked out, his collarbone broken, his hand and leg maimed, in fact that he readily sacrificed any part of his body that fortune might take so that afterwards he might live in honor and glory. Indeed, no one would have dared assert that a man raised in Pella, a small, obscure place at the time, would become so bold as to desire rule over the Greeks and to make that his purpose, or that you—Athenians!—who every day behold reminders of the valor of your forebears in all manner of speeches and monuments, would be so cowardly as to surrender your freedom to Philip voluntarily.

DEMOSTHENES¹

Philip’s Challenge

Philip II became king of Macedonia in 359, the Greek city-states for nearly a century had been fighting each other for the hegemony of Greece. The 27-year Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta—a “world war” wreaking havoc throughout the Greek city-states scattered around the eastern Mediterranean—had ended in 404 with the near destruction of Athens and the supremacy of Sparta. For the next three decades, Sparta expanded its power and influence in central and northern Greece, in the northern Aegean, and among the Greek city-states on the western fringe of the Persian empire, now the coast of modern Turkey. Next came the turn of Thebes, whose brilliant general Epaminondas defeated the Spartans at Leuctra in 371, ending the “Spartan hegemony” and initiating a brief summer of Theban ascendancy, which itself would wane after the indecisive battle against the Spartans at Mantinea (362). Meanwhile, Athens worked relentlessly to reassert its former status as the dominant power among the Greeks, eager to recover the subject city-states stripped from her by Sparta’s victory in 404, and thus to reconstitute her lost empire. Athens made a start in 379 through the Second Athenian Sea League, which at its peak comprised 75 allied city-states and islands. At Philip’s ascension to the throne, then, the major powers of Greece—Sparta, Thebes, and Athens—had settled into a troubled equilibrium, ratified by a shaky treaty of common peace (362), in which each jockeyed for dominance by exploiting traditional enmities and pursuing ancient quarrels. As the historian Xenophon wrote about the aftermath of the battle of Mantinea, “The state of Greece was still more evenly balanced and disturbed after it than before it.”²

Macedonia, a feudal world of tribal land barons evocative more of Homeric warriors than of city-state citizens, did not figure as a major player in the old polis game of power and influence. Indeed, despite decades of fitful Hellenizing, most Greeks didn’t even consider the Macedonians Greek at all, occasionally describing them with the deadly epithet “barbarian,” the antithesis of Greekness, despite the fact that the Macedonians spoke a dialect of Greek and had established their origins among the heroes of Homer and the gods of Olympus. ³ Historian Peter Green has summarized neatly the prevailing attitude of the Greeks, which was one of “genial and sophisticated contempt. They regarded Macedonians in general as semi-savages, uncouth of speech and dialect, retrograde in their political institutions, negligible as fighters, and habitual oath-breakers, who dressed in bear-pelts and were much given to deep and swinish potations, tempered with regular bouts of assassination and incest.”⁴ Incest wasn’t the only sexual sin of the Macedonians: the fourth-century historian Theopompus, a harsh critic of Philip, claimed that Philip’s courtiers were “man-killers by nature” but “man-whores by habit,” overly fond of homosexual sodomy.⁵ Macedonians were so degenerate that the Greek orator Demosthenes, Philip’s inveterate enemy, in one of his attacks snorted that one couldn’t even acquire a “decent slave” from Macedonia.⁶

Macedonia was more advanced and sophisticated than Greek bigotry admitted—King Archelaus (413-399) invited to his court the painter Zeuxis, the musician Timotheus, and the tragic poets Agathon and Euripides; the latter wrote his masterpiece the Bacchae at Archelaus’s court. However, chronic infighting among claimants to the throne, interference from the more powerful southern Greek city-states, and the continual threat from Macedonia’s neighbors, particularly the Illyrians to the northwest and the Paeonians to the north, kept the Macedonians weak and fragmented: “impoverished vagabonds,” Philip’s son Alexander the Great would say, with some exaggeration, years later, to his mutinous Macedonian troops, “most of you dressed in skins, feeding a few sheep on the hills and fighting, feebly enough, to keep them from your neighbors—Thracians and Triballians and Illyrians.” The achievement of Philip was not just to transform Macedonia into a nation of cities, laws, a developed economy, and a formidable army—“he made you city-dwellers,” Alexander went on, “he brought you law; he civilized you”—but also to impose its hegemony over the once powerful and more sophisticated city-states of ancient Greece.⁷ As the first-century B.C. historian Diodorus Siculus wrote in his Library of History, Philip “ruled as king of Macedonia for twenty-four years and from the most humble of beginnings he established his kingdom as the greatest of the powers of Europe, and, inheriting a Macedonia that was a slave to the Illyrians, he made her ruler of many tribes and cities.”⁸ And when Philip was assassinated in 336, he had already set in motion the conquest of the mighty Persian empire, a feat to be accomplished by his son Alexander. Yet all those achievements perhaps could not have happened if not for the failure of the free Greek city-states to recognize Philip’s challenge and mount an effective response.

The Rise of Philip

In 359, however, sheer survival, not empire, was Philip’s most pressing concern. First, he took care of the Paeonians, “having corrupted some with bribes and others with generous promises,” Diodorus reports, thus securing the northeastern border and gaining access to the territory’s silver mines.⁹ Next was the turn of the Illyrians. A year earlier, these long-time rivals in the north had defeated a Macedonian army, killing 4,000 soldiers and the king Perdiccas III, Philip’s brother, thus leaving Macedonia’s northern territories vulnerable to further incursions. Philip avenged that defeat and shored up the northwest border in a tactically brilliant battle, killing 7,000 of the enemy. The borderland became more securely Macedonian, with Philip building cities and forts, transferring populations, and luring Macedonian settlers with tax breaks and land grants.

Philip then turned to the Greeks to his south in Thessaly. A contest for supremacy between two cities and their dominant aristocratic clans rived this powerful state, famous for its superb horsemen. In 358, one city, Larissa, invited Philip’s support against its enemy Pherae. Philip entered into an alliance with the Thessalian League created by Larissa and married a Larissan woman, his third wife. With this move, Philip secured the southern passes into Macedonia, gained access to the Thessalian cavalry, which would become an important part of his reformed army, and created a mechanism by which he could interfere in Thessalian affairs. This last advantage would become one of Philip’s favorite techniques for extending his influence over the Greek city-states—exploiting internecine quarrels by posing as the champion of one side over another and insinuating himself into city-state leagues as a means of controlling their policies and legitimizing his Greek credentials.

Philip’s first move against the Athenians was on the city of Amphipolis. But to understand the importance of these northern Greek cities that fell to Philip, we have to sketch the geography of the north Aegean Sea, which lies between Greece and western Turkey. The northwestern corner of this sea is the Thermaic Gulf, north of which lay the coastal region of Macedonia, providing access to the trade routes of the Aegean. East of this gulf is Chalcidice, a peninsula terminating in three smaller peninsulas that jut like claws into the Aegean. East beyond Chalcidice a coastal plain ends about 150 miles away at the Hellespont (modern Dardanelles), a narrow sea passage from the Aegean into a small sea called the Propontis (Sea of Marmara), which in turn connects to the Black Sea through the Bosporus. The narrow finger of land forming the north shore of the Hellespont is the Gallipoli peninsula, which was known in antiquity as the Thracian Chersonese.

This coastal region was thickly sown with Greek cities and colonists and had immense geo-strategic importance, particularly for Athens. Apart from possessing timber and precious metals, this region bordered the sea route for the grain that Athens and other city-states imported from the Black Sea region, the largest sea-borne trade in the ancient Greek world. Imported grain was necessary—Attica, the territory of Athens, imported two thirds of its grain¹⁰—given the paucity of arable land in mainland Greece and the possibility of shortages because of crop failures and the burning of grain fields during war. Dependent as it was on this trade, Athens had numerous laws controlling who could import grain to Athens and the conditions of its sale. These were overseen by public officials known as “grain guardians,” and the importation of grain was a regular item on the agenda of the Assembly, the Athenian democracy’s main legislative body.¹¹ Thus Athens traditionally controlled through alliance, colonization, or outright domination the cities along the route to ensure that it remained open—an ancient orator called one city on the Hellespont, Sestos, the “corn-bin of the Piraeaus,” the port of Athens. ¹² Obviously, losing control of the Hellespont could be disastrous for Athens: the Spartan naval victory there at Aigospotamoi (405) cut Athens off from the Hellespont and Crimean grain. The threat of famine as grain supplies dwindled lead directly to Athens’s surrender to Sparta, ending the Peloponnesian War.

Amphipolis lay in the heart of this strategically important region, just east of Chalcidice on the river Strymon, and near several lucrative gold and silver mines and timber needed for ships. It commanded as well important trade and communication routes, being the only place to cross the Strymon for those traveling by land between the Hellespont and Greece.¹³ The city was founded by Athenian colonists in 437, but was captured by the Spartans in 424 during the Peloponnesian War, a loss that sent the historian Thucydides, a general at the time, into exile. In 422 an important battle was fought at Amphipolis between the Athenians and the Spartans—Socrates fought there—in which the Spartan king Brasidas and the Athenian demagogue Kleon, a favorite target of the comic poet Aristophanes, were both killed. After the war, Amphipolis became independent from Athens, but Athens never stopped scheming to recover the city, along with its mines, timber for ships, and coastal land, as an important step in recreating its empire.¹⁴ Moreover, the loss of Amphipolis was a wound to Athenian honor, historian G. T. Griffith writes, “a little comparable to the trauma of Alsace-Lorraine on the French psyche during more than forty years.”¹⁵

The city, however, sat on the border between Macedonia and a hostile Thrace and thus controlled Macedonia’s security and expansion to the east. In other words, Amphipolis was too strategically important for Philip to let Athens regain it. On his accession in 359, Philip faced a pretender to the throne, Argaeus, who was supported by Athens with ships and troops. Here Philip displayed his shrewdness at exploiting the short-term, shortsighted interests of his enemies. He led the Athenians to believe that the withdrawal of some Macedonian troops from Amphipolis, who a few years earlier had been invited to the city as insurance against the Athenians, was also an abandonment of Macedonian claims to it, even though the city had for some time been autonomous. The Athenian force, with the exception of a few volunteers, thus left the hapless Argaeus hanging, who on his march back from Aegae—the old Macedonian capital (it had been replaced by Pella) where Argaeus failed to rally support for his claim to the throne—was defeated by Philip’s troops and killed. Philip sent the few Athenian prisoners home, and Athens made peace with the wily Macedonian, who renounced all claims to a city he had no legal claim to in the first place. Philip was then free to deal with the Illyrians and Paeonians without worrying about the Athenians and their pretender.

Once those threats had been neutralized, Philip turned again to Amphipolis. He besieged the city, which quickly fell in the summer of 357 after attacks with scaling ladders, battering rams, and unidentified “machines.”¹⁶ The Athenians, probably encouraged in this belief by Philip, expected the city to be handed to them once it fell, and so refused the pleas of help from the pro-Athenian Amphipolitans. But the Athenians were quickly disabused when Philip instead kept the city and then turned on Pydna, an ally of Athens on the west coast of the Thermaic Gulf, and took it as well, eliminating another possible base for Athens and gaining more revenues for Macedonia.

The failure of the Athenians to heed the Amphipolitans when asked for help, and their credulous acceptance of Philip’s promises, was a turning point in Greek history, as the great Victorian historian of ancient Greece George Grote recognized: “Had they [the Athenians] been clear-sighted in the appreciation of chances, and vigilant in respect to future defense, they might now have acquired this important place, and might have held it against the utmost efforts of Philip.” However, what Grote calls their “fatal inaction which had become their general besetting sin” was reinforced by the promises of Philip and the anger of Athens against Amphipolis for holding on to its independence.¹⁷ The result was the Athenians lost not just Amphipolis and Pydna, but also another important northern Greek city, their ally Potidaea. This city straddled Pallene, the westernmost “claw” of the Chalcidian peninsula, and was a home to Athenian colonists. Athenian help was again sluggish and half-hearted, and the city passed into the control of Potidaea’s neighbor Olynthus, which had made a treaty with Philip. In 354, Philip seized the city of Methone, where he lost his right eye to a defender’s arrow. This city, the last non-Macedonian polis on the Thermaic Gulf, sat on the northern route to the Macedonian capital, Pella, and the southern route to Thessaly, the Greek state bordering Macedonia. It thus had immense strategic importance for Philip, who followed up its destruction and the ejection of its citizens with the seizure of four other coastal towns east of Chalcidice. Once more, Athens did little to challenge Philip’s seizure of this important city.

In the end, the loss of these key cities weakened Athens’s hold on the northwestern Aegean and the route for Black Sea grain, although the city still maintained through its other allies and colonists a presence in the Chersonese. Philip, on the other hand, had secured his eastern borders, seized control of the lucrative gold mines near Amphipolis—a thousand talents a year’s worth, according to Diodorus—and extended his influence over the strategically and economically important northern Aegean.¹⁸

In Philip’s annus mirabilis of 356—when his racehorse won first prize at the Olympics, his son Alexander was born, and victories were won over Potidaea and the Illyrians—Athens became involved in the Social War, a revolt of some of its allies from the Second Athenian Sea League. Like its obsession with Amphipolis, the Athenian desire to recover the power and wealth it enjoyed during the fifth century from its naval empire—a goal the recovery of Amphipolis would advance—was another shortsighted interest that distracted it from the long-term but much more serious threat of Philip. The historian Ian Worthington speculates that Philip may have had a hand in instigating the revolt: “the timing of the revolt with respect to his own activities was too good to be a mere coincidence. It would have been easy to play on the grievances that the allies harbored towards the Athenians. . . . His motive would have been to divert Athens’ attention away from his exploits in the north, especially his intended siege of Potidaea, and to weaken the city’s naval power” by stripping from the fleet the allied ships.¹⁹ In the event, by 355 Athens had to make peace after a naval defeat, and its resources and energy had been deflected for a year from confronting Philip. More important, the will to resist by relying on Athens’s traditional strength, its fleet, had been compromised: “This continual aggressor,” Griffith writes of Philip, “was more determined and resourceful, better equipped to deal with city walls. The naval power [of Athens] was there still, but the will that decided on its use was more hesitant, more divided in its aims in life, less concentrated on the self-preservation and self-help which sea power could serve so well.”²⁰

The pattern of Philip’s aggressive energy and Athens’s sluggish and shortsighted responses had been set. In 349, Demosthenes would chastise Athens for its continuing failure to counter Philip’s aggression: “It is not ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One - Athens and Philip II
• Chapter Two - England and Germany
• Chapter Three - America and Jihad
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright Page