I was reading a very brief history of the ancient Greek civilization at an excellent Website called The History Guide. While reading about the ancient Athenian city-state, I was struck by how similar it seemed to modern (post-WW II) USA. Of course, the parallels are not exact, but they are worth noting.

Two great city-states emerged in the Greek world around the 6th century BC – Athens and Sparta. Athens became a democracy (like the US, but a more direct one), while Sparta was an isolationist, militaristic city-state (like the Soviet Union). For half a century or more, each considered the other its principal rival and ’strategic threat’. There was, in effect, a Cold War between them quite similar to the modern US-USSR Cold War. The major break in this similarity came when the Athens-Sparta Cold War actually turned ‘hot’, resulting in the series of skirmishes and battles collectively called the Peloponnesian Wars. One of the major reasons the modern Cold War never turned ‘hot’ may be because of the mutual deterrent nuclear weapons that each side possessed.

After Persia attacked Athens at Marathon and then at Thermopylae with relatively small forces (a weak parallel to the 9/11 attacks on the US), Athens and its allies defeated them and drove them back to their homeland. But, many Athenians were not satisfied with this victory and wanted to march into Persian territory and defeat the ‘barbarians’ in their own land. In order to do this, it gathered together a group of smaller city-states and formed an alliance called the Delian League, of which it assumed leadership. Much like the US, which launched the ‘global war on terrorism’, drafting allies by coaxing, nudging or coercing them.

Athens, like the US, was a democracy at home, and wished to ‘promote democracy abroad’. By driving the Persians back, it claimed to ‘liberate’ a lot of small city-states. Persia was a convenient rival around which to gang up with those city-states. The US chose to do the same by attacking Afghanistan and Iraq, and deliberately upping the ante against Iran and North Korea.

The Peloponnesian wars changed everything, though, and the parallels drawn here, end. It was the democratic Athens which suffered the most and was devastated by these wars, while the militaristic Sparta emerged victorious, imposing a non-democratic government on Athens. The modern Cold War, on the other hand, ended with the Communist USSR disintegrating and the US emerging as a sole superpower.

Patterns do repeat in history, and people do forget historic lessons…