Taki Taki

How to fight a good war

I shall never forget the first time an account of the Battle of Marathon was read to me Credit: Getty Images/Hulton Archive / Stringer

Serifos

There’s no high life here, only family life, so I’ve been hitting the books about great Greeks of the past, and they sure make today’s bunch look puny. Philosophers, playwrights, statesmen, artists, poets, orators, sculptors; the ancients had them all. After 2,500 years, they’ve never been equalled. I was once walking around the Greek wing at the New York Met and I ran into Henry Kissinger, whom I knew slightly. He asked me what the population of ancient Athens was. ‘About 20 to 30,000 citizens,’ I answered. He shook his head in amazement. ‘And they produced all this,’ he said.

When I first began learning about the Greeks — my great-uncle was the foremost intellectual of his time and a brilliant pedagogue — I was mystified by the collapse of Athens and Sparta. Athens under Pericles reached its cultural peak: Western man was born. In Sparta, the martial state came into being. No state before or after has even come close to matching the martial readiness and spirit of my grandmother’s birthplace. Just imagine what those two, Athens and Sparta, could have accomplished together. But it was yet another Greek who managed it — to conquer the known world, that is.

The Greeks invented modern warfare, a collision of soldiers on an open plain where courage, skill and physical prowess were paramount. They also invented honour and fair play on the battlefield, and even the protection of non-combatants. Archers and javelin throwers, who launched from afar, were not held in the same esteem as those who fought at great risk to themselves. (I wonder what they’d think of the Saudis dropping ordnance on women and children in Yemen.) Sword and spear were manly and heroic, the rest was looked upon with suspicion.

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