So as promised, some thoughts on the Mytilene debate.
This happens in the fourth and fifth year of the war. In the Gutenberg Thucydides you can find it contained a few pages in, at Book III, Chapter IX. Mytilene, a Greek colony, had taken the opportunity of Athens being at war to revolt from Athenian control and ally with Sparta. Unfortunately they timed the revolt wrongly and Athens turned up with a decent navy and crushed the rebellion, bringing the ringleaders back to Athens for judgment.
Initially the Athenians had resolved to put all of them to death, but curiously Thucydides does not record this debate. Instead, he records what happened during a second debate when the Athenians were reconsidering whether to kill all of the rebels.
What follows is a profound debate on law and order and on mercy when at war ... but also has some profound insights on the nature of politics and the inherent problems of a democracy. These are particularly significant because the Greek form of democracy is often held up as an ideal for modern democracy to follow. If, then, the Greeks themselves had identified some fatal flaws to their model, it behooves us to pay close attention to them.
Speaking in favour of the motion to execute the rebels was Cleon, who Thucydides describes as a violent man but also with a great deal of popular support at his back. Some scholars believe Thucydides was biased against Cleon and that other accounts indicate it was Cleon rather than Pericles who had a leading role in the defence of Athens during the first years of the war. And we have no real way of being sure that Cleon actually spoke the words attributed to him by Thucydides.
To me this is somewhat missing the point. Cleon's speech, whether his thoughts or those of Thucydides putting words in his mouth, makes observations that ring true two and a half thousand years down the line when it comes to human nature and are directly applicable to our own time.
Cleon certainly opens his speech with a zinger:
I have often before now been convinced that a democracy is incapable of empire, and never more so than by your present change of mind in the matter of Mitylene.
This is intriguing given Thucydides' observation earlier in the History that tyrannies and dictatorships could not achieve anything notable, and that it took oligarchies or democracies to do this. One imagines this is Thucydides either badmouthing Cleon as an enemy of Athenian democracy or reporting the man's words accurately.
Fears or plots being unknown to you in your daily relations with each other, you feel just the same with regard to your allies, and never reflect that the mistakes into which you may be led by listening to their appeals, or by giving way to your own compassion, are full of danger to yourselves, and bring you no thanks for your weakness from your allies; entirely forgetting that your empire is a despotism and your subjects disaffected conspirators, whose obedience is ensured not by your suicidal concessions, but by the superiority given you by your own strength and not their loyalty.
In other words, "You people are assuming that because you don't plot and connive against one another, your 'allies' and 'friends' in other parts of the world think the same way as you. They don't feel great loyalty to you; they only fear the consequences if they cross you and you bring your military to bear against them."
Does this sound familiar? It's a very similar mistake that the US has been making in the Middle East for the past twenty years: the idea that any of the Arabic nations over there -- Sunni or Shia -- can be a friend to the United States, that any of them can be bosom allies of the US, that any of them want or need democracy. The US assumes that because it is democratic, that other nations want the same thing. It is an understandable blind spot in human psychology, but it's still a deadly one to have.
The most alarming feature in the case is the constant change of measures with which we appear to be threatened, and our seeming ignorance of the fact that bad laws which are never changed are better for a city than good ones that have no authority; that unlearned loyalty is more serviceable than quick-witted insubordination; and that ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows. The latter are always wanting to appear wiser than the laws, and to overrule every proposition brought forward, thinking that they cannot show their wit in more important matters, and by such behaviour too often ruin their country; while those who mistrust their own cleverness are content to be less learned than the laws, and less able to pick holes in the speech of a good speaker; and being fair judges rather than rival athletes, generally conduct affairs successfully. These we ought to imitate, instead of being led on by cleverness and intellectual rivalry to advise your people against our real opinions.
In political terms, Cleon is saying "If it ain't broke, don't fuck with it." But that's only part of the argument. As Cleon rightly points out, it's always people who think they're smarter than they are who are determined to fuck around with laws without realising that laws generally are in place for good reason and have evolved over a period of time to that state. There is also a good deal of economic sense to what he says, too: legal uncertainty is the death of business investment in a country, and laws changing back and forth are the very definition of uncertainty.
The persons to blame are you who are so foolish as to institute these contests; who go to see an oration as you would to see a sight, take your facts on hearsay, judge of the practicability of a project by the wit of its advocates, and trust for the truth as to past events not to the fact which you saw more than to the clever strictures which you heard; the easy victims of new-fangled arguments, unwilling to follow received conclusions; slaves to every new paradox, despisers of the commonplace; the first wish of every man being that he could speak himself, the next to rival those who can speak by seeming to be quite up with their ideas by applauding every hit almost before it is made, and by being as quick in catching an argument as you are slow in foreseeing its consequences; asking, if I may so say, for something different from the conditions under which we live, and yet comprehending inadequately those very conditions; very slaves to the pleasure of the ear, and more like the audience of a rhetorician than the council of a city.
This same fault in democracy, if not public discourse -- the fact that rhetoric and oratory tricks are more appealing than careful argument -- is present and endemic in the West today. Indeed it is present in a distilled form when it comes to gender politics. We have been on the frontlines of this storm. Consider how women and the MSM at large have been so quick and fierce to get on the false rape bandwagon, notwithstanding how dodgy the research is. Consider how hard it is to stop that bandwagon rolling even with Rolling Stone publicly backing down on its bullshit and the authors of surveys publicly admitting their results have been misconstrued. When politics becomes entertainment -- as it has in the West -- democracy dies.
For all that, though, you get the sense reading the speeches that Diodotus, Cleon's opponent, was the better orator and argued smarter. I could identify any number of rhetorical tricks he uses -- first, he distinguishes the political assembly from a court of law, where a death sentence would be all but assured, for a start. Secondly, as every amateur psychologist from Robert Greene to Dale Carnegie advises us, he appeals to the Athenians' self-interest. "This debate has nothing to do with punishment of a crime, it has to do with what's in the best interests of the state."
And it is interesting to see his argument against the death penalty:
Now of course communities have enacted the penalty of death for many offences far lighter than this: still hope leads men to venture, and no one ever yet put himself in peril without the inward conviction that he would succeed in his design. Again, was there ever city rebelling that did not believe that it possessed either in itself or in its alliances resources adequate to the enterprise? All, states and individuals, are alike prone to err, and there is no law that will prevent them; or why should men have exhausted the list of punishments in search of enactments to protect them from evildoers? It is probable that in early times the penalties for the greatest offences were less severe, and that, as these were disregarded, the penalty of death has been by degrees in most cases arrived at, which is itself disregarded in like manner.
Without adopting the argument, this is a beautiful piece of oratory. As with individuals, so with states: no criminal starts a crime thinking he's going to get caught; a state would not rebel if it didn't think it could get away with it, irrespective of the consequences attaching to that act, therefore no punishment is a deterrent.
This is a gorgeous piece of intellectually dishonest sophistry, though Diodotus gets away with it because he's arguing it before a democratic body and not a court or a logician or philosopher. Taken to its logical endpoint,
no punishment is ever a deterrent and the entire idea of punishing a crime, down to the smallest fine, is logically invalid.
Diodotus then piles on the logical fallacy of inappropriate generalisation:
We must not, therefore, commit ourselves to a false policy through a belief in the efficacy of the punishment of death, or exclude rebels from the hope of repentance and an early atonement of their error. Consider a moment. At present, if a city that has already revolted perceive that it cannot succeed, it will come to terms while it is still able to refund expenses, and pay tribute afterwards. In the other case, what city, think you, would not prepare better than is now done, and hold out to the last against its besiegers, if it is all one whether it surrender late or soon?
It's impossible to predict how one criminal will behave compared to another, so this at best is speculation. It's the
threat of punishment that is meant to dissuade people from committing a crime to begin with.
We must not, therefore, sit as strict judges of the offenders to our own prejudice, but rather see how by moderate chastisements we may be enabled to benefit in future by the revenue-producing powers of our dependencies; and we must make up our minds to look for our protection not to legal terrors but to careful administration. At present we do exactly the opposite. When a free community, held in subjection by force, rises, as is only natural, and asserts its independence, it is no sooner reduced than we fancy ourselves obliged to punish it severely; although the right course with freemen is not to chastise them rigorously when they do rise, but rigorously to watch them before they rise, and to prevent their ever entertaining the idea, and, the insurrection suppressed, to make as few responsible for it as possible.
This argument is still echoing down the ages excusing every young criminal or "institutionalised" offender who comes before the courts: if only you spent X amount of money before he went to court, he wouldn't be here. It is a blatant attempt at removing the offender's moral agency: read Theodore Dalrymple's essay "The Knife Went In" for expansion on this idea.
Thucydides goes on to record that the following vote was a near-run thing, but Diodotus's argument carried the day. Most of the rebels were spared. In its way, this decision was a small part of why Athens later failed at Syracuse: because it contributed to the watering-down of Athenian ruthlessness in dealing with its enemies. It contributed to the idea it could fight its wars without resolute commitment or with mercy.
