On the Benefits of Conquest for the Conquered
Companions of Alexander over his body. Frame from the film "Alexander the Great" (2010)
Exodus 1: 10
History and culture. Babylon is the greatest city of the ancient world. The city is in mourning, and there is a reason for that: the god-like Alexander, the Hellenic king, conqueror and ruler of the world, is dying. At the bedside of the dying man are his friends-commanders. Behind them are Macedonia, Egypt, Pontus, Bithynia, Pergamon, the Achaean and Aetolian unions. Lands and people, wealth and poverty, caravan routes and trade areas. Temples of the gods and their priests. Soldiers and officials. Warlords have only two questions that they want answered immediately. "To whom are you leaving your kingdom?" - "To the best!" is the short answer. - "Who will be the tomb sacrifice over you?" - "You!" - exhales the king his last word [1]. Then, colliding with each other on the battlefield, all of them will remember these words of his more than once. The era when Alexander's military leaders fought each other for power even received a special name: "The Wars of the Diadochi". And this era lasted until the conquest by Rome in 30 BC. e. Alexandria of Egypt, where Queen Cleopatra ruled ...
Before that, Greece repulsed the invasion of Xerxes, who gathered a huge army ... Frame from the movie "00 Spartans"
And now I would like to note that I really liked the series of articles by our author V. Ryzhov, in which it was just about the wars of the Diadochi that they were told. And he told everything there so well and interestingly that it would be a big disgusting thing for me to get into this topic of his and try to add something to it. However, there are also issues that Valery did not touch on, because they went beyond the scope of his story. And here is one of them, moreover, directly related to the events of today, we will consider.
When in Rome he established his principal in 27 BC. e. Octavian Augustus, neither Macedonia nor Greece as a whole had been independent states for more than a century. In 148 BC. e. Macedonia, and in 146 BC. e. Greece fell under the rule of a young and energetic Rome. And this was no longer the same Greece, whose warriors, like all 300 Spartans who met the Persians at Thermopylae, did not spare their lives, following the “precepts of the Lacedaemonians”.
In the movie "300 Spartans" (1966), King Xerxes is shown as a vindictive but stupid ruler. Although, it is possible that he was just that ...
In the II century BC. e. the ancient Greek historian Polybius (210/200–120), himself a former Greek military leader and son of a strategist of the Achaean Union, having started writing his “General History”, asked himself the question: how did almost the entire world then known fall under the rule of the Romans during some then fifty years? And he found an answer to it, which at the same time became a derogatory criticism of the mores of his contemporaries.
In his opinion, people have deteriorated, selfish interests, greed and money-grubbing, luxury and depravity have become dominant. Corruption seized Hellas to such an extent that the habit of not doing anything to anyone for nothing took root. Polybius denounced the carelessness of officials in charge of public money. But most of all, he was outraged that in Sparta, the heroic Sparta of Leonidas, it was now possible to get royal dignity and genealogy from Hercules for five talents distributed to five ephors.
And these were the same Greeks who had previously denounced tyranny and tyrants. And the Boeotians, according to Polybius, were so discouraged that they completely indulged in gluttony and drunkenness, and did not participate at all in the wars of other states, preferring to pay off both their own and other people's money. And many of them feasted so often that ... they had more meals than there were days in the month [2].
The same tunics, the same shields, the same cloaks dyed with expensive purple paint, the same helmets of Chalcis. That's when the first uniform began to appear
But the most striking changes that occurred with the Hellenes towards the end of the XNUMXrd - beginning of the XNUMXnd century BC. e., demonstrates the fate of the Athenians. Herodotus describes them as courageous, strong-willed, self-sacrifice citizens. In his opinion, the Hellenes withstood the fight against the Persians only thanks to their courage. Thucydides, a younger contemporary of Herodotus, speaks of them as those who know no other pleasure than doing their duty. In his opinion, nature itself intended the Athenians to ensure that they themselves did not have peace and did not give it to others.
Such characteristics are no longer found in Polybius. The Athenians of his day retained nothing of the glory and valor of their ancestors. They preferred to grovel before the kings of Macedonia and Egypt, who brought them bread and, most importantly, provided them with spectacles. They did not want to defend the freedom of Hellas on the battlefield, and they could not, since they had forgotten how to fight properly. And the independence they achieved in 229 B.C. e., the Athenians simply bought for 150 talents that were paid to Diogenes, the head of the Macedonian garrisons in Attica. Having returned their freedom in such a shameful way, according to Polybius, the Athenians rejoiced, and Diogenes was bestowed with many honors: he received both the rights of an Athenian citizen and the title of “benefactor”, and, finally, annual festivities were even established in his honor - Diogenes.
The main weapons the Spartans were precisely the spear! Frame from the movie "300 Spartans" (1966)
That is, now the Athenians, like all other Greeks, preferred to buy the freedom of their homeland for money. And they did not want to sacrifice their lives for her sake on the battlefields at all. The times of the heroes who forged the greatness and glory of Athens, Sparta, Thebes are gone without a return. Now in the first place they had the interests of ordinary inhabitants, who wanted only comfort, a calm and well-fed life, and material prosperity.
This was a potential threat to the ethnic group, to civilization, about which A. Tolstoy wrote in the same novel Aelita:
As soon as the generals in the military camp began to "have fun with the girls", this became the first sign that society would sooner or later become corrupted and die from satiety and all sorts of excesses. Frame from the movie "Ducky" (1966)
After all, in the event of a collision with a young people full of strength and energy, the Greeks would inevitably be defeated. And when from the end of the III century BC. e. the Romans first entered the land of Hellas, the confrontation between these two peoples went exactly according to this scenario. And why be surprised, because it has become a country of quiet and passive inhabitants, where, as E. Bickerman wrote,
Such Hellas became an easy prey for Rome, which is not at all surprising!
By the way, all this, if not fully, then at least partially concerns us. And our present position. Love for a "strong hand", elections and re-elections of the same elective institutions at all levels ... "Russian peppers" that pot-bellied men so love to watch, lying on the couch. Kashpirovsky with passes from the screen and his charged water, the mass obsession of Russians with the treatment of their own urine, the dominance of "amoebic thinking" - "I was pricked, well, I'll prick in response too" - all this is not good at all. And we can only console ourselves with the fact that, precisely because of natural-geographical reasons, this has not yet gone so far in our country. What is someone with all this ... even worse!
And the Roman said, “Open the gate! Before you are the rulers of the world!”
Now it becomes clear why the majority of researchers, not only foreign, but also domestic, considered the conquest of Hellas by Rome to be a blessing, and first of all for the Greeks themselves. So, V.V. Latyshev writes that the relics of the Aetolian Union prevented
Historian Yu. V. Andreev believes that the state of chronic "war of all against all", in which the Greek world was then, ceased only with the arrival of the Romans. So it turns out that the Roman conquerors in the full sense of the word "saved the Greeks from themselves." For G. A. Koshelenko it is obvious that
And the leader of the Dacians replied: “Not yet! Fight us first!"
That is why the statement, which appeared in the middle of the II century BC. e., quoted by Polybius: "We wouldn't be saved if we weren't quickly crushed» [5] spread so widely. It was short, succinct, and... extremely accurate in describing the current situation.
And now a little about why this happened. At that time, the existence of genes was not even suspected, but they tried to ensure that the most daring, strong and others went to war - with the “+” sign. People who were unhealthy, cowardly, "on their own minds", that is, with the opposite sign, tried to avoid war, although they supplied the combatants with provisions, weapons, ships ... Such people were also needed, no one argues. But the first ones basically died rather quickly and did not have time to multiply, which means they could pass on their “plus” qualities to their children. But no one and nothing prevented the reproduction of all others. And while the heroes paved the road to Babylon for the same Alexander the Great with their bones, they successfully passed on their views and their morality to their children. Women have always contributed their share of "anti-heroism". Still, being the wife of a living man is much more pleasant than entertaining yourself with an ivory phallus - a gift from a spouse who left to fight, and so on from a trip to his native Attica and did not return.
So it was the victorious wars of the Greeks that caused their unfortunate situation at the turn of the millennium, and then the once mighty and great Rome would also suffer their fate.
Centuries have passed, but only today, in the XNUMXst century, wars have finally begun to acquire precisely the character when the concepts of “victory” and “defeat” are decisive, both in the distant and not very distant past. That is, no matter how beautiful words military operations of the XX-XXI centuries. people didn’t cover up, there is only one reasonable goal of the war - the destruction of the enemy’s passionate gene pool in order to ensure the survival of the most prudent, tolerant and ... not prone to aggression people. Why, for example, neither we nor the Americans can put an end to the "caliphate" in northern Iraq? Not enough, bombs, planes, soldiers, or ... no one really wants to destroy it? Without a doubt, the latter. And all because he, like a vacuum cleaner, draws in all the radicals of the Muslim world, from whom they themselves are a continuous loss, and there ... there they die and do not multiply! So the main damage is not the destroyed plants and factories, they can be rebuilt, but the dead people (good people!), who left no offspring. Accordingly, the destruction of enemy soldiers, men capable of reproduction, is the primary task of the current level of hostilities, and everything else will be added to this over time. Moreover, the citizens of the defeated state, if it professes a misanthropic ideology, only benefit from their own defeat. The defeat of the USSR by fascist Germany would have been a catastrophe, because then the immoral ideology of fascism would have won. And vice versa - the defeat of Nazi Germany became a blessing for her, despite all the sacrifices suffered by the German people. However, we also got it: after all, how many worthy people died among us, while the “not quite worthy” quietly sat in the rear, and the same captured Bandera saved their genes from destruction ... in Siberian camps. There, of course, there was also no sanatorium, but the bullets and shells tearing the flesh to pieces still did not whistle. And remembering this and understanding all this is very, very important today!
Here is all that remains of the former courage of Sparta - a stone slab and these lines engraved on it: “Traveler, go and tell our citizens in Lacedaemon that here, observing our covenants, we all died with bones". Frame from the movie "300 Spartans"
1. Quoted. ed.: Diodorus Siculus. Historical Library / Per. from ancient Greek M.E. Sergienko. http://fanread.ru/book/10858833/?page=235, 2012
2. Quoted. hereinafter according to the ed.: Polybius. General history / Per. and com. F.G. Mishchenko. M., 2004. Part 1. S. 5-6
3. Latyshev V.V. Essay on Greek antiquities. Part 2. S. 311
4. Koshelenko G.A. Greece in the Hellenistic Era // Hellenism: Economics, Politics, Culture / Ed. E.S. Golubtsova. M., 1990. S. 143
5. Quoted. by: Polybius. General history / Per. and com. F.G. Mishchenko
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