Athene ruled the waves

One thing is certain: George W. Bush was no Pericles. For which reason it is a pity that John Hale’s new history of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC is launched with a rhetoric more Texan than Attic.

The ancient Greeks knew that building a navy was an undertaking with clear-cut political consequences. A naval tradition that depended on the muscles and sweat of the masses led inevitably to democracy: from sea power to democratic power. Athens was exhibit A in this argument, and radical democracy would indeed be the Athenian navy’s greatest legacy.

To be sure it was not Dubya — nor even Hale, a classical marine archaeologist from the University of Louisville, Kentucky — who called Athens ‘a democracy based on triremes’ and who argued that

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Athenian democracy was strengthened by the masses who served in the navy and who won the victory at Salamis, because the leadership that Athens then gained rested on sea power.

That was Aristotle.

But it is one thing to acknowledge the profound democratising impact of almost universal military service — as, for example, in the second world war in Britain and elsewhere, though not the Soviet Empire — and quite another to detect an ‘inevitable’ causal link from sea power to democracy. On the face of it the requirements of good order and naval discipline, necessary as they may be for sea-going proficiency, are hardly redolent of the democratic spirit, however much English-speaking — or indeed Greek-speaking — romantics may cherish the dream that the special place which democracy has in at least parts of our history must somehow be connected with our love affair with the sea.

Were Parliament’s 17th-century victories over autocratic kingship or the revolt of the American colonies or the French Revolution or the 1832 Great Reform Bill in Britain, or indeed its successors in 1867 and 1884 , essentially driven by the experience of sea power? Cromwell, Marlborough, William of Orange and George Washington were soldiers; and Nelson’s crews did not become conspicuously active Chartists.