Why were the greeks never able to form real states despite a tradition of democracy? In Rome they formed an empire with extremely efficient bureaucracy to ensure public works were built, taxes were collected, and a large professional army. In the same period, the warring states and later Han dynasty China was similarly well organized.Why is it that the Greeks, from the city states to later the diadochi sucessors, so dogshit when compared to Rome and China?
What do you mean? The conquered the fertile crescent, the cradle of the first civilization, they inspired Rome.
To put into perspective, Macedon suffered 1 bad defeat in 2nd Macedonian war at Cynoscephelae and the war ended right there and then. Half their army dead or captured.Meanwhile Warring States China routinely fought and lost and mobilized hundreds of thousands. Rome too lost astronomical amounts of men during the wars against Carthage, most of them drowning in the Mediterranean, yet they simply mobilized more men.
>>18626676The impression I got from reading a small introduction to Greek history is that they had little interest in taking things seriously. The wars between city states almost always seemed a result of petty quarrels or resentment over previous defeats. Cities conquered by Athens repeatedly revolted for the sake of freeing themselves, even though all that Athens imposed on them was democracy. Alcibiades is talked about as a legendary Athenian, although all he seems to have accomplished is successfully switching sides and betraying allegiance several times in the war between Sparta and Athens, not entirely his fault but as a result of Athenian superstition over bad omens.Sparta was insurpassable fighting on land, and Athens equally insurmountable at naval combat. Again and again, they insist on fighting each other seemingly because they just wanted to. Only when faced with the threat of utter annihilation and subjugation by Persia do they form a league. Once Persia is gone, they return to the happy state of feuding.The long Peloponnesian War is finally ended when a Spartan decides to sail up the Hellespont and block the Euxine corn Athens needed to survive from entering. How could it possibly have taken them that long to end it that way? Why wasn't that the first thing they tried? It gives the impression their wars were a choice and a luxury.
>>18626683They sound like women
>>18626677Inspired rome and yet they got completely annexed into rome and made a province, adopting roman laws and customs. They paid taxes straight into roman treasury.
>>18626676>real states despite a tradition of democracy>democracy>real states
>>18626676>Why were the greeks never able to form real states despite a tradition of democracy?>real states - despite democracy>In Rome they formed an empire with extremely efficient bureaucracy>empire - bureaucracyit seems you have conflated forced bureaucratic stability with having a "state".
>>18626712No I haven't. I wouldnt consider backwards tribes in the Archaemenid empire part of a larger state. The various Chinese states though, Rome, later European states like Prussia or France, those are states. They have a bureaucracy that is able to collect vast sums from otherwise disparate peoples and whos peoples identify with the state rather than with their own shitty tribes. When men of Berlin marched off to war they did so as Prussians. When men of Capua or Mutina marched off to war, they did so at first as Socii but later as Romans.
>>18626729Conversely when an Athenian marched off to war under King Alexander, they did so as Athenians.
>>18626729>>18626731"state" derives from the root "sta" which means "place", because it's a geographic placeholder and not a bureaucratic descriptor
>>18626765You sound like an LLM. A redditor, if you will.
>>18626765"Africa" could theoretically be a continent-sized state, separate from wether its a republican, kingdom, union or whatever else bureaucratic system it was united under.end of story;State = geographic
>>18626768eat a dick, you're wrong.
>>18626680No one knows, actually. You hear about 50k roman dead at Cannae, but it's all likely just bullshit
>>186266761 actually "democracy" comes from demes, the ATHENIAN division of the attic countryside into voting blocks, in the literal sense Athens is the only democracy, Rome and US practice their modified version, but the deme system was invented so power doesn't concentrate in the city itself and the surrounding attic populations had some power, the system is for the perpetuation of Athens dominance over Attica, their peninsula "homeland" anything bigger they needed something like league2 diadochi relied on diplomacy with each other as well as war, their rivalries were stronger with each other due to generations of fighting and diplomacy, hence ironically when the archaean league invited the romans to kick out the Macedonians the romans stayed and dismantled the hellenic systemRome could see other powers as something they can deal with, even if say the roman diplomats are asshats they still operated in the principle that foreign powers representatives are dealt by some kind of senate rank equal, in the case of diadochi since they were all kings many powers were just ignored as those kings did not see non-hellenic powers as worthy, either due to post alexanders pride or just hellenic bias, hence they couldn't get alliance or coalitions oftentldr, the romans tries to be superpower, the greeks couldn't be bothered
>>18626676I guess you're not counting the Byzantines, who get shit on by everyone, but nevertheless managed to maintain for a thousand years a huge multiracial empire with long, porous, indefensible borders and fearsome enemies - Lombard, Sassanid, Bulgar - on all sides. So ignoring the Byzantines, I think there was something about Greek cities that made their residents fanatically loyal to the city but no higher authority. The key thing is that the second tier cities, Thebes, Corinth, and Argos, could never ever tolerate Athenian or Spartan domination.Rome was able to unite the Latins and Italics fairly easily, these people had already been ruled by the Etruscans and they didn't require much convincing to follow Rome.Even the cities of Asia Minor, who were Ionians just like the Athenians, for some reason just could not stand the idea of becoming one nation under Pericles.
>>18626772>>18626776just kys as quickly as you can. youre an embarassment. fucking arguing semantics is the lowest of the low, your iq must be lower than the jeets. just fucking die.
On an unrelated topic, from what I read the Athenian demes were divided into equal squares that intentionally crossed tribal boundaries in order to confuse and erase the pre-existing tribal allegiances in Attica, to deracinate them.Not to project modern politics onto archaic Greece, but it just struck me how old the idea of subjugating your conquered foes by deconstructing their identity and forcibly racemixing them is. It's an ancient strategy.I think part of the hysteria around racial replacement, even when it seems to be happening without any actual explicit mandate from the rulers, is that it seems like such a natural thing for your enemies to do to you that people intuit their rulers must be actively doing it.
>>18626778>Byzantinestheres no such thing faggot
>>18626787here we go again. why even bother flamewaring like this? no one is going to say anything you haven't heard before. You know what I'm talking about when I say Byzantine.
>>18626789They werent greek.>flamewaring>>>/pol/
>>18626785demes were older than when cleisthenes, they were only formalized for election, before you had to be an athenian to vote which means you needed a lot of wealth to move to Athens in the first place and have clan relations, after reforms the demes and tribes allowed participation from the country side as citizenship to deme became a requirement, ie, if some upstart wanted political recognition he might have to move to some attic town instead, it gave more representative power to the surrounding towns
>>18626778It's not that hard to imagine, no one really likes a huge centralized state, except those in power aka the bureaucrats. and frankly I'm still against being told what I can or can't do by a bunch of pencil pushers that removed themselves from reality, that relegated every individual to a bunch of statistics and claim "this is the way" as they cannot imagine a world or system where they cannot stand above the rest.
>>18626800>>>>/pol/yes you're the one who should go there for not contributing anything to historical discussion except trying to revive a political feud between west and east.If a Greek man who speaks Greek and acts Greek and whose ancestors were Greek were to rule the Byzantine empire, then his behavior as such would be insight into the Greek style of empire.
>>18626804so is that a yes or no? Were the demes drawn with the intention of discarding antiquated tribal disputes, deracinating Attica and remaking its identity as Athenian? That was what I vaguely remember from Charles Oman's book.
>>18626676>In Rome they formed an empire with extremely efficient bureaucracy to ensure public works were built, taxes were collectedPublic works in Rome were generally financed by private donors - this was a central part of their political system, even. Tax collection was farmed out.
>>18626810They are Roman. They called themselves Roman. They had Roman laws, Roman customs, Roman architecture, Roman coins, Roman Imperators, Roman legions, Roman every fucking thing. Nobody called them Greeks, not themselves, not the Saracens, not the Turks. You're so fucking stupid it is unbelievable. You need to be vivisected and studied.
>>18626813no, because your idea of tribe is not their idea of tribe, it's like the romans and italics, italics being tribes, before reform tribes had to move to Athens to vote, while establishing a power base there, after reform they can elect in their own tribal assemblies for the deme
>>18626676OP I think your answer is city states kind of are an alternative to territorial state which seem to be what you refer to as real states. Think of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Despite the latter's akkadian empire being commonly cited as the first empire in the world it post dates the great pyramid by 100+ years and the first unification of Egypt by 600 years. Pharaohs already ruled more subjects before cultural uniformity between north and south set in, but because there was not enough time of fragmentation for alternative political regimes of city states to emerge so the Old Kingdom goes unrecognized as an empire like it ought to be. Meanwhile Empires in mesopotamia were a succession of short lived regimes until neo Assyria, but the city states they comprised kept going and reemerging after each individual empire until late antiquity. Egypt in comparison is the China before China of bureaucratic monarchic rule punctuated by episodic division.
>>18626676They had no interest in forming large States. Instead of using excess manpower to consolidate, they used it and their expert seafaring skills to settle new colonies. They did for Leagues and city States were aligned with each other.Ancient This also makes a narrative history of ancient Greece a lot more complex and clunky, there's no single unified State to follow, no single leader, and over 1000 independent cities.
>>18626858Why didnt one of them subjugate all the rest like across the adriatic
>>18626824>Nobody called them GreeksWe call them Greek because they were Greek.
>>18626827sounds like the answer is that you don't know whether or not the borders of the demes crossed tribal borders, so you're doing that gay historian coping mechanism about how tribes were fluid borderless concepts back then that couldn't be divided.It's not complicated: there's some river through Attica, the people on one side hate the people on the other side, consider them rivals, they compete for fishing waters and grazing land, and have different styles. If the deme's border crosses the river, they have to vote together and form a joint assembly for the deme.
>>18626906>anachronismIt comes from ancient greek ἀναχρονισμός (anakhronismós) which is ἀνά (against) and χρόνος (time).
>>18626824you're the same guy who thinks Bell Beaker cultural material isn't from Iberia kek.
>>18626680Almost like Macedon was a small heavily rural kingdom and the Warring States were dozens of times larger in population and multiple times in size.>Rome too lost astronomical amounts of men during the wars against Carthage, most of them drowning in the Mediterranean, yet they simply mobilized more men.The Central Italians practiced mass mobilisation and conscription, nearly every man between the ages 18-30 were engaged in military affairs. Such large rates of mobilisation wouldn't exist anywhere in the world until the 19th century with the advent of modern mass conscription. If the Warring States conscripted as many men per capita as the Romans did, they would have armies thrice as large as what they used. The Greek city states unlike the Warring States were not large, they did not have a massive population, they were not united outside of fighting large outside threats. A single serious defeat in battle could cripple a city for a generation.
>>18626914who are you quoting
>>18626680Macedon's a stupid example as said above, the real turning point was Magnesia. Not only undid a succesful lifetime of Seleucid restoration but set the stage for future civil wars as Seleucid heirs were stuck in Rome as hostages when they needed to be around to readily assume the throne.
>>18626930You severely understimate legalist autism when it comes to how far they went for conscription.
>>18626676Due to food mostly. Greece has a rough terrain, not very suitable for farming, so population growth was difficult to sustain. Instead excess populations of Greeks just left and formed new colonies. China and Italy both have extremely fertile river valleys, so when they had excess population, they could stay at home, and the state had to adapt.
>>18626964I dont think it is fair to answer every "why" in history with "geography"
>>18626909before the reform there were only 4 tribes that dominated Attica, and they are traditional blood based aristocracy, not modern ethnic divisions
>>18626899Eventually that did happen with Macedonia. The city states were so obsessed with their own freedom, it was a cultural feature to not subjugate each other, they would just send excess citizens out for new colonial expansion.
>>18626772me>>18626776not me>>18626779use language correctly or shut the fuck up when people correct you. if you want to return to monkeynoises, madagascar has gotplenty of space for you.
>>18626680>Rome too lost astronomical amounts of men during the wars against Carthage, most of them drowning in the Mediterranean, yet they simply mobilized more men.Polybius is not a reliable source on the 1st punic war. His writings on the 2nd have a tinge of propaganda, but his writings on the 1st are patently absurd.
>>18626969you fucker, fuck you, fuck you faggot for wasting my time with your bullshit. You started saying the demes were older than Cleisthenes and only formally organized the tribes and now you say there were only four tribes.Cleisthenes made 139 demes that comprised ten new tribes, Aristotle specifically says he did this to racemix the population and break the bonds of the old tribes.You did it you got me to seethe, congratulations. Such a waste of time to use this board, there is no point being here. You go back and forth with someone for multiple posts and they refuse to tell you the obvious answer you could have looked up in two seconds on google.
>>18627122yeah I was going to say the same thing, the stuff about Rome getting squadwiped and conjuring up new legions out of the blue was not real. There was Cannae, but it was 9 years after Cannae that they had sufficient numbers to beat Hasdrubal at Metaurus
>>18626676Because they were fundamentally more aristocratic and elitist and culturally weren't used to, or able to, absorb losses and keep fighting, accept that anyone outside of a very narrow wealthy class had ANY value as a person, intellectual l, or combatant, or generally do anything needed to build a lasting polity bigger than a single city. Romans could see you as an equal. And equal with the potential to BE Roman, even. They had entire ethnicities who essentially paid their taxes in soldiers. They had gallic senators, ect. Essentially Rome was somewhat meritocratic and could integrate people into their society. The greeks were basically haplogroup autistic by comparison.
>>18626824Byzantineboos should get the fucking rope. The greeks were as roman as the western barbarians and the likes of the holy roman empire, but you don't see people wanting to call them "romans" just because they called themselves "franks" (a roman construction, btw) and/or "latins". You also don't see people calling the Italians "ROMANS" although the Milanese, the florentines, the aquileans, all the communes were roman originally and preserved many of the institutions and culture of the civitas. As did cities like Augsburg, or Utrecht. And these cities had massive influence on the politics of the time and almost all of them were of roman foundation all over Europe. You don't see faggots saying the Umayyads being fucking roman despite basing their entire empire on the roman levant and inhering the roman state on that region, even keeping the dioceses up and running. The greeks are roman until the 1400s, then by the time you get to the Ottomans suddenly constantiple doesn't have a shred of romanness anymore. Fuck you and your terminology. Greeks are greeks because they are greeks, and that doesn't stop them of being roman at the same time, or that arbitrary institutional history determines who gets to call themselves roman as if we are trying to determine who is the next Emperor int he 21th century. This attempt against western prejudice just reinforces the "dark ages" on the west.
>>18628004>the Milanese, the florentines, the aquileans, all the communes were roman originally and preserved many of the institutions and culture of the civitas.They didn't actually. The Italian communes appeared in the 10th century in the forms they would take for later. There is no continuity between the Roman city and the Italian commune other than the city itself, no institutions survived. The city councils outlasted the empire by maybe a decade, only in Rome it survived thanks to the Senate, and they became defunct in the 7th century. >You don't see faggots saying the Umayyads being fucking roman despite basing their entire empire on the roman levant and inhering the roman state on that region, even keeping the dioceses up and running.They didn't, what are you talking about? The Umayyads dissolved most Roman institutions and replaced it was an ad hoc form of governance even in Syria. Much of the Levant was given to tribes to rule for themselves. The law courts and administration ceased to exist.
>>18626677/thread
