There is one obvious reason why Americans ought to find it useful to read and study Herodotus. He described a world that is in certain crucial regards like our own. Athens and Sparta were, of course, tiny communities. Herodotus tells us that at the time of the Persian Wars there were 30,000 adult, male Athenian citizens and 8,000 adult, male Spartan citizens. The difference in scale between these polities and our own is obvious and significant. But there is this that is similar. Athens and Sparta were republics. Matters of state were open to public debate; most major decisions were reached by voting; the citizens of both polities enjoyed the rule of law—and theirs were citizen armies.
These similarities are by no means accidental. The modern nation-state owes a great deal to the ancient example. In the medieval period, antiquity never entirely lost its purchase. Cicero’s De officiis survived through the Dark Ages within the Christian West and was at all times widely read. In some measure, Roman law survived as well, and certain of its elements were imported into canon law, the only universal law in the Christian West. From canon law these made their way into the various common law systems regnant locally within that otherwise exceedingly diverse world. One principle, derived from Roman law, deserves special attention.
Roman liberty was arguably derivative from ancient Greek liberty: the republicanism that emerged in Rome ca. 509 BCE, the species of self-government that was instituted there, was an Etruscan variation on practices developed earlier in Crete, at Sparta, and elsewhere in the Hellenic world. Naturally enough, the Romans carried over into private life the practices of public life, and, in keeping with this trend, Roman corporate law, as applied to the management of waterways, was built on the following principle: Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus tractari debeat—“that which touches all should be dealt with by all.” This principle, borrowed by the Roman Catholic Church to make sense of the practice of electing abbots, bishops, and popes, provided an underpinning for the practice of self-government within guilds and cities and inspired the establishment of representative institutions within kingdoms. In part as a consequence of its propagation by the church, political liberty was no stranger in late medieval Europe, and this distinguished the Christian West from the Christian East and from the Muslim world as well.
Massed Infantry
The republicanism that first emerged in ancient Greece and spread to Etruria and Rome was built on certain military practices. Liberty was coeval with the preeminence of massed infantry. At some point between 700 and 650 BCE, someone in Greece invented a new kind of shield, which was commonly called a hoplon. This shield was designed to yoke together a line of men, and those who bore it were sometimes called zeugitai, “men yoked like oxen.” It provided limited protection to the bearer, but contributed greatly to the protection of the man to his right; and, because horses will not plunge into a wall of shields, a phalanx of hoplon-bearers could face down cavalry. In effect, this military revolution meant that a sizable army of smallholders, wealthy enough to provide themselves with a spear, a sword, and the hoplon, could easily defeat an aristocratic force on horseback. This revolution, which rendered the old military aristocracy redundant, eventuated in its overthrow and the establishment of populist tyrannies in many Greek cities. In time, as tyrants or their offspring abused the power that they had seized, it gave rise to government by the army assembly.
Infantry’s Renaissance
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