author

July 2005

Response to Readership

I would like to find out about Greece after it became a colony of Rome. Is there a book that covers this period that you could recommend?

Hanson: Several in fact. The period between Pydna (167 B.C.) and the end of "Rome" — as characterized by the fall of Mistra and other diehard strongholds in Greece (the 1460s) after the fall of Constaninople — is pretty well known. I take it you are thinking more, however, of the western Empire, mostly that period before AD 500.

Polybius’ The Histories is the best place to start, along with Livy’s The History of Rome. There are fascinating accounts in Plutarch's Lives, start perhaps with those of Pyrrhus, Aratus, Flaminius, or Sulla; Diodorus' Library of History covers the entire period as well. And there are fascinating tidbits in Pausanias’ Description of Greece and Strabo’s Geography, that rely on lost contemporary historians of the period. Far more coins and inscriptions (see the translated collection edited by S. Burnstein) survive from the Hellenistic than the classical period.

For modern historical works, I think the older accounts are the best; e.g., cf. the chapters in the Cambridge Ancient History and Michael Rostovzeff's Social and Economic History (there are two works: one for the Roman Empire and the other the Hellenistic World) , as well as William S. Ferguson, Hellenistic Athens. There are good surveys by Walbank, The Hellenistic World and Boardman, Greece and the Hellenistic World. Books by Susan Alcock (Graecia Capta) incorporate archaeological material and Peter Green (Alexander to Actium) offers a narrative that is engagingly written. Erich Gruen's various treatments (i.e. The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome) reference all the major ancient and modern sources.

The ancient sources such as Polybius and Plutarch reflect after Pydna largely a place at peace, increasingly a sort of ennui from the dividend of Roman security — as if the Greeks were at the End of History, and wondered at the ruins of the often depopulated countryside. Roman taxation and proconsular insider-rule seem to have led to the decline of yeoman farming and the vibrant city-state culture of old, and thus the art and literature of the classical age. Contrast the deme of Marathon around 450 B.C. and when in the imperial period it was nearly owned by the single grandee Herodes Atticus of the 2nd century A.D.

Both literature and archaeology reveal larger corporate farms, fewer people, and a different type of slavery without the paternalism of the past. The notion of decline is not our own; the Greeks themselves wondered "what went wrong" and nearly deified their ancestors, whose architecture and literature were felt to be superior and only poorly emulated in their own time.

I would like to find out about Greece after it became a colony of Rome. Is there a book that covers this period that you could recommend?

What are your thoughts on the works of Ralph Peters such as Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World and Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace?

Hanson: I admire all of Peters' work. I've met him and appeared on the radio with him, and while we sometimes differ on tactics in this war, I admire his candor and good sense. His criticisms of the war are always from the point of view we can do better, rather than not do anything at all. So, yes, he is to be listened to, and is an independent voice who owes fealty to no one. I hope he continues to write and to offer his often novel takes on seemingly intractable dilemmas. We need more like him who combine honesty, military experience, a maverick streak, and a deep love of the United States.

You wrote "Each time a public official evokes Hitler to demonize the president, the American effort in Iraq or its conservative supporters, cheap rhetorical fantasy becomes only that much closer to a nightmarish reality where the unstable, here and abroad, act on the belief that America really is Hitler's Germany.
We will all soon reap what the ignorant are now sowing."

What is it you fear we will reap?

Hanson: There are a lot of marginal people, both in the West and especially abroad. When a Muslim youth reads that a U.S. Senator thinks that what the United States is doing to Muslims is the same as what the Nazis did to innocents, then naturally he will think America deserves the same fate as Hitler. Sen. Durbin and others like him only galvanize the enemy at a time of national peril. And here at home, our own nuts can be pushed over the edge. If George Bush — as novels, plays, and caricatures allege — is another Hitler, then some deviant may think he can find not only celebrity by attacking him, but moral worth as well through ending the rule of a dictator.

What Durbin and many others have said was reprehensible, and, yes, I really do fear that in the future we may reap what their stupidity has sown.

I would be interested to know any thoughts you have on the passing of Shelby Foote.

Hanson: I think he was an American original. I had read his Civil War history well before his Ken Burns-inspired resurrection, as well as his novel on Shiloh, and liked them both. He was a great stylist who was not appreciated by academics until the last two decades of his life. It is rare in one individual to possess innate charm, charisma, a mellifluous voice, historical rigor, and engaging prose, so he was a renaissance man, perhaps the last of the great southern stylists, who, aside from the great novelists, made an important contribution to American letters. Foote was in the league of Ransom, Tate, and Warren. I don't see anyone writing like them today, perhaps because English and History departments put no emphasis on style and clarity or even the sweep of history. "Theory" did a terrible disservice to American letters and it will take a while before we escape the dry, pedantic and jargon-filled prose that now bores us to death.

The following set of facts from History is quite puzzling to me:

1. Before the Six-Day War: a) France would supply most of its weapons to Israel; b) But the United States would supply it very few, and with reluctance

2. Then, all of a sudden, on the morrow of the Six-Day War: a) France refused to sell any more weapons to Israel (even withheld those
ordered); b) The U.S. started a long tradition of providing Israel with most of its weapons.

What happened? Why did the war change everything from the respective viewpoints of France and the U.S.?

Hanson: Your point is well taken and is discussed in great detail by Michael Oren in Six Days of War. It is forgotten that he United States had very little military connection with Israel prior to the 1967 War. Many here were skeptical of its socialist economy and some former ties with the Soviet Union among early Israeli leftists. We also had much longer (and very disturbing) connections to the Gulf Arab autocracies that soon were ostensibly predicated on the U.S. not backing Israel publicly. The ongoing war in Vietnam was felt to have tied us down in Asia, and restricted our options of getting involved in the Middle East in the sort of surrogate confrontation with the Soviet Union that had cost us so much in Southeast Asia.

France, in contrast, aside from its propensity to sell arms to any and all, was eager to remain neutral in the Middle East, unsure of the politics. It had sided with Israel in its 1956 debacle in the Suez. But after the problems in Algeria, it was ready to improve relations with the Arab world, and conscious of the new role of oil and fear of terrorism in winning appeasement for Arab dictatorships. And of course there was always triangulation: it is a cornerstone of French policy since De Gaulle that whatever we are for, they are against, at least up to the point of not risking our alliance that has proved so beneficial to them.

But after the stunning victory of 1967, we saw that Israel was a valuable counterweight to the Soviet presence in the Middle East in places like Iraq, Egypt, and Syria, a state that could oppose the communists without the presence of American troops. (If it won in 1967 without many American arms, what might it do with them?). The spectacular victory in 1967 seems to suggest at last we had an ally that was competent and in direct contrast to the mess in Vietnam and Korea earlier.

Another unremarked phenomenon: Many doves in Vietnam were hawks on the Middle East, so at a time of demands for retrenchment from JFK's "pay any price" rhetoric, there was never opposition from the Left for military support for Israel.

Can you recommend any books or commentaries on Aeschylus’s tragedies?

Hanson: There are good introductions to the plays in the prefaces of the Lattimore, Fagles, or Vellicot translations. Good surveys in English of his work are found in Conacher, Winnington-Ingram, Stanford, and Hogan. The older Rose and Frankel commentaries on the Greek texts have invaluable observations that still can be used without knowing Greek. The green Cambridge Greek series is very good too.

He is the most difficult of the three tragedians, being a first-generation Athenian in the age before the sophistic revolution. His imagery is sometimes difficult and his language—multisyllabic adjectives, loose syntax, strange words—makes parts of the Agammemnon almost impossible to read, at least in Greek. That said, the ancients realized that he was the most majestic of the three, and his worldview of cosmic forces at odds, especially the will of man versus the fate decreed by the gods, is more relevant than ever. Few today read the Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes, or Persians because their plots are one-dimensional and the characters can appear wooden, compared to say a Euripides or Sophocles at his best. But the Orestia trilogy and the Prometheus rank with the Oedipus, Antigone, Bacchae, Medea, and Hippolytus as the best of Athenian tragedy.

In your account of the philosophic foundations of neoconservatism, you often reference the German-born philosopher Leo Strauss. Of course, he is not only famous for his conservatism, however one may articulate it, but for his novel approach to reading works of philosophy, often referred to as his theory of esoteric writing. Are you familiar with this approach (especially as it applies to Plato and classical philosophy)? If so, what are your thoughts on it?

Hanson: As a classicist, I know him for his less-read work on Thucydides and a translation of Xenophon's Oeconomicus; but I have looked at his other work—all written in almost impenetrable style—and I suppose you could summarize it as an attack on convention, relativism, and historicism, or a repudiation of the notion that human nature is constantly evolving, and with it, morality. More disturbing to some, he believes, I think, that natural right is based, as is often pointed out by many of the Platonic interrogators, on certain truths that we cannot escape. There is in essence a natural elite, i.e., we are not born equally, and primordial emotions reflect these facts—and law and diplomacy ignore them at their peril. Rather than providing an excuse for the privileged to ignore, in Thrasymachus-like fashion, the needs of the weaker, he argues that the strong have a responsibility to use their talents to lead society.

Perhaps the natural hierarchies in Xenophon’s treatise on household management attracted him. Most of Strauss’s thought is caricatured and “Straussian” is now a loaded term without much meaning. For most scholars he was a very learned student of ancient texts and had interesting things to say about key passages in Thucydides and Plato. In some sense he was a reactionary who thought the classical dichotomy of nomos/physis (custom or law versus nature) was central to our existence, and that there is a natural system at work to which man is subject and which he cannot change, a truth that lays at the heart of most of the failures of utopian systems.

What is your opinion on the military treatise "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu?

Hanson: It is a brilliant mediation on the proper attitude toward warmaking, reflecting the holistic ancient Chinese approach toward conflict, and the need to consider all manner of strategies — as if war is metaphysical as well as concrete. It is more analogous to Greek philosophical writing such as Plato's Ion or Aristotle's Politics than the proper genre of Western military writing per se.

For example, at about the same time of Sun Tzu, the 4th-century B.C. Greek general Ainias of Stymphalos wrote a larger treatise on Military Preparations, a portion of which ("On the Defense of Fortified Positions") has survived. The contrast with Sun Tzu is instructive.

Like Xenophon's contemporary military treatises (e.g., The Cavalry Commander), Ainias is practical and empirical, as he systematically reviews how to go over, under, and through a city, and goes into detail about everything from a 5th column to the locks on the gates.

In other words, very early on in Western military thinking, the goal was applied science and practical advice (cf. the later treatises of Ailian, Arrian, Vegetius, etc.). There is none of Sun Tzu's "hot and cold" or "ying and yang." I don't think it is too much of a stretch to see a vast cultural difference already apparent 2400 years ago, in which Western military doctrine sought to identify an enemy, establish a strategy, find successful tactics, and then defeat the enemy militarily, leading to a political solution, something quick, brutal, and lasting, a system that through proper manuals and instruction could be taught to almost anyone.

In contrast, Sun Tzu sees war as a more long-term existential struggle, its tactics and methods not so concrete or set, or indeed as important as one's mindset — and especially knowledge of the opponent and how one can use subtle and nuanced tactics to nullify apparent advantage. To paraphrase loosely U.S. Grant, there is very little in Sun Tzu of "Don't worry what the enemy might do to us, worry about what we are going to do to him."

The weakness of the Western approach is that we often are impulsive and simply bring capital, technology, and a system of organization to war, regardless of the nature of the enemy; our strength is that it usually works in the end, though often at terrible cost. Thus the present-day Chinese military, while its long-term tactics and ideology might owe their origins to something like Sun Tzu, in the here and now its organization, arms, tactics, and supply, are parasitical on Western practice, an acknowledgment of the efficacy of the Western military operational doctrine.

A Xenophon, Ainias, or Vegetius would lecture on the proper weapons and tactics to adopt in Iraq, how to bring them to bear, and what organizational techniques would allow us to establish who is the enemy and how to destroy him.

A Sun Tzu might first ask what the enemy wants, how to nullify his advantages, and what mental preparation is necessary for us to employ strategies that might not be our first impulse, but in the end in subtle ways bedevil our adversaries.

It all reminds us of the vast gulf between Eastern and Western medicine: we believe illness is a foreign problem — a virus, bacterium, cancer, or plaque; Eastern doctrine sees it more as a failure of the host, who, due to poor diet, age, stress, or inadequate exercise has allowed his defenses to lapse and gone out of balance, and thus fallen victim to an array of ubiquitous enemies. Our doctors search for ways to destroy enemies, Eastern medicine emphasizes how to prepare your immune system never to allow them in. If you have a tumor it would be far wiser to listen to Western doctors who know how to radiate, poison, or cut it out immediately. If you don't, Chinese practitioners might be of some valuable in preparing yourself not to get such a disease in the first place.

From a purely military point of view, what would be wrong with a civil war breaking out between the Shi’ia and Sunni in Iraq? It would be bloody, but wouldn't it end the conflict rather quickly?

Hanson: It would be bloody but not quick. In the Arab world, Shi’ites outnumber Sunnis, but only in Iraq, and there would be no guarantee that Wahhabists from Syria and the Gulf, as now, would not flock in, creating a Balkans or Lebanon for years on end. For better or worse, constitutional democracy, backed by American guarantees, are Iraq's only immediate hope.

Also, America really doesn't do realpolitik very well. Our sort of satisfaction at the Iran-Iraqi War was overshadowed by the horrendous human suffering that gave everyone pause.

For all the caricatures of the present policy, we are doing the smart and the right thing that alone has the chance to stop these successive wars of the last two decades. This time we addressed the ultimate problem with fascism in Iraq; and we will either win or lose — and it will be over, unlike the story since 1991 when one war, operation, policy, embargo, strike, etc. only led to another and another. This last fourth Iraqi war is for all the marbles.

Would you write some words of advice on how to learn classical Greek or Latin and recommend some excellent texts for this purpose?

Hanson: Don't get me started, since I might not stop. As both a professor and student, I was a philological conservative and felt there was no way around mastery of grammar and vocabulary, and so for 20 years taught Chase and Phillips for Greek, and Wheelock for Latin. The other "immersion" and "learn by reading" approaches always seemed to leave big gaps in students' syntax, and the made-up Greek and Latin were never the same as what they would later encounter in real texts.

As far as learning these difficult languages, I had very old-fashioned European teachers at Stanford in graduate school and very modern 60's types as an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. Yet they were both similar in their emphases: write down words on vocabulary cards that come up in the reading; review them often; write into Greek and Latin as an exercise to build an active vocabulary of recall rather than a passive one of mere recognition; read real Greek and Latin, or at least try to, while learning grammar: they are symbiotic not sequential pursuits.

Be smart in allotting your time: 1 hour mastering the subjunctive forms will be worth more than one hour mastering the rarer optative; 3 hours mastering the aorist will be more valuable than 3 hours learning the middle imperatives. If one thinks, to paraphrase Napoleon, that you can memorize it all, you often memorize nothing.

I grasped rather late that it was valuable to read aloud and hear Greek and Latin, not just to learn where stresses and accents fell, but also to aid in vocabulary memorization and to develop an appreciation for the beauty of the words that could enthuse one in ways not explicable by mere knowledge or reason. Looking back, I poo-pooed recitation and memorization of poems and choruses; the British do that and it works, so that you have set pieces in your head, replete with Greek and Latin words for the rest of your life, making it an aesthetic experience.

And some silly final recommendations. Get exercise and seek variety in activities while memorizing all day. I didn't as a student. I took four years of Greek and Latin as an undergraduate, avoiding General Education courses by advance placement exams so I could take more classical languages. And at graduate school, the next four years I used to read for 9-10 hrs without interruption. The result was an over-concentration, lack of physical activity, and as I look back at it sometime poor health. Greek and Latin can prove taxing on your system, and you must approach their mastery in holistic fashion.

I wrote about some of this with John Heath in Who Killed Homer? in a subsection on learning Greek. It is a lonely experience since you don't speak, meet few if any who read it, and are asked by the curious, what is the point? I remember meeting someone at the Stanford business school who told me at 21 that had I invested half the hours of Greek composition to simple research in the stock market I would not be then living in east Palo Alto. So the student must think hard about the investment and be able to justify it on grounds other than financial reward. All that being said, learning and teaching Greek and Latin for the last 35 years changed my life. Along with rural life and the wisdom and model of my mother and father, it was the most seminal influence in my thinking and outlook. And I have deep appreciation for those who taught me and introduced a largely ignorant and lost farm kid from an isolated agrarian area to the world of Greece and Rome. I had wonderful teachers and still miss them a great deal.

You correctly noted that America has never taken tribute from subjugated states. However, America has gone further by giving millions of dollars to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq. (Not to mention Japan or Germany after World War II.) Has any other "empire" in history done this?

Very rarely. Britain invested lots in its colonies, but very little when they were no longer colonies; in contrast, no American wants to stay all that long in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the billions we provide. Do you remember the British play/movie "The Mouse That Roared," a comic take on the U.S. propensity to help those it defeats? What is strange these days is this new paradigm that the more the U.S. does, the more it is distrusted. Even before the Tsunami crisis was really known, we were called stingy by U.N. officials, and then called miserly, as if carriers and military ships that provided aid came out of thin air. Provide Korans and ethnic food in Cuba, and you are called the equivalent of the Nazi camps; withdraw troops from Saudi Arabia and send billions to Iraq and you are called colonialist; be slandered by Europeans as imperialists and then when we withdraw soldiers be told that we are punitive.

So we have reached one for those classic no-win situations between a parent and teen-ager, in which the more subsidies create both a bigger appetite and more anguish and anger. Perhaps it is past time to find a way to give our critics what they wish on our terms. If a South Korea insists we are the problem, we should agree and slowly withdraw; or if a Turkey continues to damn the United States, we must find a way to replace our air bases there. It is no longer enough just to say such cheap anti-Americanism is because of George Bush or the perennial wage of a superpower; the American people no longer wish under the present political situation to subsidize the defense of a South Korea or Germany, or give billions to a Jordan, Egypt, or Palestinian Authority. So we have to find a new third way between the Charybdis of subsidizing defense abroad for nominal allies and the Scylla of nostalgic isolationism.

We have two children who will graduate from high school in the next two years. They are smart and work hard to get good grades, but are not geniuses. Are there any colleges or universities known to be stimulating but with an emphasis on nurturing and teaching undergraduates (as opposed to published teachers, teachers from prestigious universities, schools with heavy endowments and prestige, high entrance exam scores, research, etc.)?

Hanson: I think there are plenty of them. In the past I have praised small campuses like St. John's, Hilldsale, Pepperdine, and St. Thomas Aquinas. I would avoid large universities that have graduate programs whose faculty often neglect undergraduates, as well as many of the pricey "top" liberal arts colleges — a Smith, Vassar, Amherst, etc. — that are highly politicized and, to be frank, only worth the tuition in terms of the prestige it gives the undergraduate who otherwise receives no better and often far worse an education than possible at a good state university.

Can you please comment on Dr. Rice's Cairo speech and her articulation of the transformed U.S. foreign policy to promote and support global democracy?

Hanson: It was a wonderful speech and long overdue. She admitted past U.S. Cold War realpolitik, but didn't back down in warning the Egyptians ($2 billion plus a year in U.S. aid) to start following through on promised reform. For all the frenzy and hysteria of the Arab street, the truth is starting to permeate in the Middle East that the United States this time is really supporting democratic reform, and is going to distance itself from countries that deny rights to their people. It's the only solution, easily caricatured and hard to follow. The surprising thing? The absolute silence of the Democrats who should be swooning over such idealism, but instead in a fit of insecure pique can't say anything if it remotely resembles praising the Bush administration.

Do you think it is sad that Mr Bush doesn't want to bust up Iraq — which after all is only an invented country — and form three different countries, Kurdistan, Shi’ite Iraq and Sunni Iraq? He probably is worried about the Turks and Iranians getting antsy about a new nation of Kurdistan.

Hanson: Trisection — Sunni/Shi’ite/Kurd — is often raised, but would be, I think, a grave mistake. We would only transfer ethnic and religious rivalries to national disputes, especially over oil, and create a hyper-Sunni state analogous to a chaotic version of Saudi Arabia. It would set a Yugoslavia-like precedent, where other tribes in the region would agitate for separate nationhood. And it would weaken our efforts in the Middle East, and strengthen various dubious players in the region, such as the Syrians, Iranians, and Saudis that would all have their own client states. Finally, I think Turkey might invade Kurdistan or worse, and it would probably mean that the Arab world had proven incapable of pluralistic democracy. Dictators would arise in all three such new countries.

To what do you attribute the large decline in homicide bombings in Israel over the past year?

Hanson: The decapitation and jailing of the Hamas terrorist elite, coupled with completion of ever more miles of the fence, along with the death of Yasser Arafat. The controversial Sharon plan is primarily a security strategy, sort of the Roman defense line at the Danube and Rhine: get as many assets back on the right side of the fence, and then deploy forces to protect vital areas around Jerusalem, while promoting change on the West Bank.

Soon we are going to see a situation where Palestine is left with a wall of no-entry, and the choice of feeble terrorist pinpricks or the alternative to make real changes in order to negotiate about the remaining so-called settlements. It will be their call, and they won't have the terrorist card to play anymore.

They are quietly destroying themselves and don't even know it. The Palestinians have an open border with their brethren in Jordan and should be happy about not being able to get in, or even to see, the Zionist entity, but instead they are furious that their window on the West — its elites' cheap guilt, lots of aid, and entry into everything from freedom to affluence — is shutting down and closing them off.

American misapprehension of its history and position in the western canon is a crack in the foundations of U.S. democratic institutions. How long is it before an uber-Perot endowed with a fortune of untold billions and a prodigious capacity to incite emotions among Americans is elected president? With popular approval of a miseducated majority the demagogue could suspend the constitution in the name of defending the nation against some external threat. 100 years? 200 years?

Hanson: I don't know. But I think the greater threat is a left-wing hyper-capitalist that is less transparent than your uber-Perot. Like a mega-speculator George Soros who means well and is smoother in its efforts to inflame and distort. If you look at speech codes at some universities, the hounding of a Larry Summers (and his reeducation-camp like apologies and promises to pay bribe money of $50 million to regain the graces of the thought police), the rules of investigating and adjudicating charges of "racism" and "sexual harassment" (often the accusers are shielded and not required to identify themselves), then you can see how scary "good intentions" can become. When a Europe starts renaming old towns that have the prefix "black" in them, or sending its functionaries into small communities to approve everything from beaches to open air grills, then you can see the peril of arrogant social utopians who just want enough power to become angels of change, these devils who tire of the give and take of parliamentary politics and constant scrutiny.

All we hear now is "Bush lied" when he operated on false intelligence that also took in the U.S. Congress and foreign heads of state. But we forget that Dan Rather each night insisted a forged document was real when the stakes were the U.S. Presidency, a Newsweek printed an untrue rumor in the midst of an ideological war that could only inflame the 8th century enemy, and entire genres in book publishing and art exhibits openly talk about assassinating the President. Often in American history, the hard right has been the danger to freedom, but now? I think it is the well-meaning left that has lost its bearings and gone stark-raving mad in its rhetoric. Tune into a C-Span aired rally against the war, and you see the most amazing things. The deceptions of Michael Moore rivaled those of the more gifted Leni Riefenstahl. The diversity industry on campus has relegated many questions of merit to secondary status and sets the agenda, both overtly and insidiously. I saw this about 1980 when all of a sudden dozens of people I knew were hyphenating their names, adding an accent, changing the spelling, anything to give off a glint of "the other" and hence with it tribal pride, apparent victim status and reparation in hiring and compensation. Some day a modern Swift will write about the modern university in a way that will capture the nonsense that went on.