Part IV—Aristotle on Greek Nations Brought to Civil Stripe by Immigration

The Greek philosopher Aristotle lived from circa 384 to 322 BCE.  At one point in his book entitled Politics, he discussed various causes of revolution and civil war.  Generally, he said,

The universal and chief cause of this revolutionary feeling [is] the desire of equality, when men think that they are equal to others who have more than themselves; or … the desire of … superiority, when conceiving themselves to be superior they think that they have … the same or less than their inferiors….  (Politics V, 2, 1302a 2–3)

Consequently, either an oligarchic society’s great inequality of wealth and status or a socialist-inspired forced equality may cause revolt. Moreover, differences in the natures, loyalties, and perceptions of ethnic groups will have the same dismal result.

Among specific causes for revolt or civil war, Aristotle emphasized the disastrous results of incompatible ethnic groups living together in the same country. And (far more than for any other cause) he provided examples of this problem from historical Greek colonies.  He wrote:

Another cause of revolution is a difference of races, which do not at once acquire a common spirit; for a state is not … a multitude brought together by accident. Hence the admission of foreigners to colonies, either at the time of their foundation or afterwards, has generally produced a revolution. For example, the Achaeans who joined the Troezenians in the foundation of Sybaris, being the more numerous, afterwards expelled [the original colonists]; hence the curse fell on Sybaris. At Thurii the Sybarites quarreled with their fellow-colonists; thinking that the land belonged to them, they wanted too much of it and were driven out. At Byzantium the new colonists were detected in a conspiracy, and were expelled by force of arms. The people of Antissa, who had received Chian exiles, fought with them, and drove them out. The Zancleans, after having received the Samians, were driven out of their own city. The citizens of Apollonia on the [Black Sea], after the introduction of a fresh body of colonists, had a revolution. The Syracusans, after the expulsion of their tyrants, having admitted foreigners and mercenaries to the rights of citizenship, quarreled and came to blows. The people of Amphipolis, having received Chalcidian colonists, were nearly all expelled by them.  (Politics V, 3, 1303a 11–13)

Therefore, Aristotle (along with Plato) understood the disastrous effects of a true nation transforming into a multi-ethnic state.  Nevertheless, no modern textbook on ancient political theory quotes any part of Aristotle’s woeful litany. Furthermore, the vast majority of such textbooks do not even mention this cause of civil disorder, and this is despite Aristotle’s extensive emphasis. Such is the academic self-censorship that afflicts a modern totalitarian “democracy.”

In fact, conflicts similar to those that Aristotle described in the Greek colonies of southern Italy and Asia Minor were also suffered by the older Greek nations (called “polises”).  These included Athens, where Aristotle lived for many years.  The political society that became the Athenian state actually originated when Greek-speaking and largely Nordic Indo-Europeans conquered the native Mediterranean people of the small region called “Attica.”  After a few centuries, those two semi-compatible peoples merged into a kind of nation, but conflicting ethnic and cultural mindsets lingered.  Meanwhile, as the political system became more commercial, a person’s economic class (starting with Solon’s reforms) became an official measure of one’s political worth.  Then, beginning in 508 BCE, the reforms of Cleisthenes established what was called a “democracy.”  These reforms dramatically reduced the Indo-European citizens’ political privileges and granted citizenship to all native-born residents of Athens.  This process was completed a generation later by his grandnephew Pericles.

Meanwhile, the Athenian state became wealthy as well as part of an international economy.  One result was that increasing numbers of foreign merchants called “metics” took up residence there.  At the same time, the rich few, especially metics, imported vast numbers of slaves who disproportionately came from West Asia, and the foreign slaves eventually outnumbered even the expanded citizenry by three to one (Durant 1939, II 278).  Moreover, wealthy metics gradually took over the arts and came to dominate the culture (Ibid).  Society became individualistic.  The family unit weakened, and sexual perversions increased (Ibid).  Competition from slave-worked enterprises caused the middle class to shrink, and the gap between rich and poor greatly increased.  This pattern was duplicated in other Greek polises as well.

Resulting from such national fragmentation, during Aristotle’s own lifetime, all Greek polises were so weakened that his own former pupil, King Alexander III of Macedon, took control over virtually all of Greece.  Then Alexander ordered his Greek client states’ soldiers to join his Macedonian troops for the pointless conquest of the alien peoples, cultures, and Levantine civilization of West Asia—comprising most of what we call the “Middle East”.

Alexander the Conqueror’s empire soon linked the incompatible civilizations of Classical Greece and Levantine West Asia.  Numerous merchants and political overlords migrated from the Greek polises and Macedonia and founded colonies throughout West Asia.  Of course, over a few generations, these Greek enclaves were absorbed into the West Asian masses.  Meanwhile, even more Levantine peoples migrated from West Asia, flocked into the Greek polises, and corrupted their last vestiges of true national unity.

During the same period, three Levantine immigrants into Athens established three new philosophies that further weakened traditional values.  They all asserted that everything, even the soul, is composed of matter. One of them was Diogenes of Sinope (ca. 412–323 BCE).  He was a bankrupt money-lender who came from Asia Minor (presently Turkey), and in Athens he founded the philosophy called “Cynicism.” He and his Cynic followers would not bathe or work.  They begged for food, advocated free love, and they relieved themselves and fornicated in public like the “dogs” the Athenians accused them of being (Durant 1939, II, 506–509). Another influential migrant was Epicurus of Samos (ca. 341–270 BCE) who founded Epicureanism. He and his followers sought an ambition-less life of temperate pleasure-seeking and avoidance of pain, and they shunned civic responsibilities (Ibid, 644–649). Meanwhile, Zeno of Citium (ca. 336–264 BCE) was a half Greek and half Semite merchant who migrated from Asia Minor to Athens, and there he founded Stoicism. He and other Stoics sought the suppression of emotions and an indifference to pleasure and pain, and, at first, Zeno even espoused a system of value-free and anarchistic communism (Ibid, 650–656). Adherents to all of these doctrines rejected racial and national boundaries and considered themselves (in their words) “citizens of the world” (Ibid, 507, 648, 656).

A few generations after Aristotle, an adulterated “Hellenistic” Greece and Macedonia were both absorbed into the Roman Empire.

Cited References:

Aristotle.  2000.  Politics.  Translated by Benjamin Jowett.  Mineola, N. Y.  Dover Publications, Inc.

Durant, Will.  1939. The Story of Civilization.  Vol. II.  The Life of Greece.  New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc.