A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.

Plato

A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.

Plato

A state arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.

Plato

All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.

Plato

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

Plato

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.

Plato

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

Plato

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

Plato

Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous. Though the land be good, You cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation.

Plato

As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser.

Plato

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

Plato

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

Plato

Attention to health is life’s greatest hindrance.

Plato

Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.

Plato

Courage is a kind of salvation.

Plato

Courage is knowing what not to fear.

Plato

Cunning… is but the low mimic of wisdom.

Plato

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

Plato

Democracy passes into despotism.

Plato

Democracy… is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

Plato

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

Plato

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

Plato

Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.

Plato

Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

Plato

For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.

Plato

For good nurture and education implant good constitutions.

Plato

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato

Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.

Plato

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

Plato

Hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly.

Plato

He was a wise man who invented beer.

Plato

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

Plato

He who is not a good servant will not be a good master.

Plato

He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

Plato

He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.

Plato

Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.

Plato

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

Plato

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

Plato

I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

Plato

I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

Plato

I shall assume that your silence gives consent.

Plato

I would fain grow old learning many things.

Plato

If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.

Plato

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

Plato

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.

Plato

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

Plato

Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.

Plato

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

Plato

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

Plato

It is right to give every man his due.

Plato

Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.

Plato

Justice means minding one’s own business and not meddling with other men’s concerns.

Plato

Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Plato

Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.

Plato

Knowledge is true opinion.

Plato

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Plato

Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.

Plato

Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.

Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/plato.html#ixzz1n9VQlGHm

Eurozone finance ministers sealed a 130bn euro bailout for the country on Tuesday after persuading private bondholders to take greater losses and the government to commit to deep cuts.

After 13 hours of talks, ministers finalised measures to cut the state’s debt to 120.5 percent of GDP by 2020, a fraction above the target, to secure its second rescue in less than two years and meet a bond repayment next month.

Speaking after the deal was clinched, Prime Minister Lucas Papademos said: “It’s no exaggeration to say that to say that today is a historic day for the Greek economy.”

The outcome was also described as “better than planned” by the finance minister, who added that it was the first time that a Greek government was passing on less debt to future generations.

“Thankfully we have reached a positive result that was neither easy nor obvious. In these past hours, there were intense negotiations on multiple levels … The result is better than we one we planned that when we set out for Brussels, because the debt relief is greater than 100bn euros. This is a landmark agreement,” said Evangelos Venizelos.

By agreeing that the European Central Bank would distribute its profits from bond buying and private bondholders would take more losses, the ministers reduced the debt to a point that should secure funding from the International Monetary Fund and help shore up the 17-country currency bloc.

“We have reached a far reaching agreement on Greece’s new programme and private sector involvement that would lead to a significant debt reduction for Greece … to secure Greece’s future in the euro area,” Jean-Claude Juncker, who chairs the Eurogroup of finance ministers, told a news conference.

The euro jumped almost half a cent, reversing earlier losses, after the bailout was agreed.

But some economists say there are still questions over whether Greece can pay off even a reduced debt burden.

A return to economic growth could take as much as a decade, a prospect that brought thousands of citizens onto the streets to protest against austerity measures on Sunday. The cuts will deepen its five-year recession, hurting government revenues.

A report prepared by experts from the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund said Greece would need extra relief to cut its debts near to the official debt target given the worsening state of its economy.

If the government did not follow through on economic reforms and savings to make its economy more competitive, its debt could hit 160 percent by 2020, said the report, obtained by Reuters.

“Given the risks, the Greek programme may thus remain accident-prone, with questions about sustainability hanging over it,” the nine-page confidential report said.

Write off

The accord will enable the government to launch a bond swap with private investors to help put it on a more stable financial footing and keep it inside the eurozone.

Around 100bn euros of debt will be written off as banks and insurers swap bonds they hold for longer-dated securities that pay a lower coupon.

Private-sector holders of Greek debt will take losses of 53.5 percent on the nominal value of their bonds. They had agreed to a 50 percent nominal writedown, which equated to around a 70 percent loss on the net present value of the debt.

Juncker said he expected a high participation rate in the deal, but some bondholders may balk at the new terms.

Eurozone central banks will also play their part in reducing the debt.

A Eurogroup statement said the ECB would pass up profits it made from buying Greek bonds over the past two years to national central banks for their governments to pass on to Athens “to further improve the sustainability of Greece’s public debt”.

The ECB has spent about 38bn euros on Greek government debt that is now worth about 50bn euros.

The private creditor bond exchange is expected to launch on March 8 and complete three days later, Athens said on Saturday. That means a 14.5bn euro bond repayment due on March 20 would be restructured, allowing Greece to avoid default.

“It’s a result that can be justified and that creates the preconditions to get Greece onto a sustainable return to economic health if the swap deal with private creditors is successful,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told reporters.

Next to nothing in the 130bn euro programme will go directly to help the Greek economy.

The vast majority of the funds in the 130bn euro programme will be used to finance the bond swap and ensure Greece’s banking system remains stable; some 30bn euros will go to “sweeteners” to get the private sector to sign up to the swap, 23bn will go to recapitalise Greek banks.

A further 35bn or so will allow Greece to finance the buying back of the bonds. Next to nothing will go directly to help the Greek economy.

(Reuters, Athens News/gw)

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A wave of solidarity to crisis victims Greeks is sweeping the world, with a special event planned for Saturday afternoon in a number of cities.

YOUTUBE

More than 10 cities in Europe will see demonstrations under the banner “We Are All Greeks Now”, including Paris and Dublin.

“The people of Greece need the international solidarity and they call for our support. Let’s reply to their call. We are all Greeks,” reads the circular distributed across social media for the rallies that are scheduled to take place at 2 p.m.

A rally is also planned in New York, at the same park that the Occupy Wall Street rallies had started this winter.

Social media groups in solidarity to the Greek people suffering from the austerity measures and the fiscal crisis have also called for action as they express the fear that what the Greeks are going through is going to apply to other people soon, too.

At the jesuisgrec.blogspot.com blog, Internet users are invited to sign a form asking for Greek citizenship in solidarity to the Greeks.

Demonstrations were held in solidarity with the people of Greece on Saturday in many European countries as well as the US. Rallies were organised in Cyprus, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Italy and many more countries, after an overwhelming wave on support took over the social media.

In Germany protests were organised in Cologne, Leipzig and Berlin. In the German capital dozens of Greeks and Germans were gathered at Wittenberg square to show their solidarity. The protesters chanted slogans and played Theodorakis’ songs.

Cyprus made its presence felt in international solidarity rallies for Greece with an event held on Saturday at the intersection of Ledra and Onasagorou streets in Nicosia.

Holding the Greek flag, many citizens expressed their solidarity for the Greek people, who are suffering from the economic crisis, and protested against the tough stance shown to Greece by European leaders and the troika.

“We are all Greeks”, “Support for Greece” and “Solidarity for the Greek people” were slogans written on placards by the demonstrators.

They termed “disgraceful” the measures against Greece and expressed indignation. They also underlined that the stance of European leaders “is not only directed against the sovereignty of Greece, but against the sovereignty of other peoples as well”.

Over a thousand people of all ages, even families with children, filled Trocadero square in Paris on Saturday afternoon with slogans of support for Greece.

The atmosphere was militant and enthusiastic. And when Greek music was heard, the crowd started to dance in front the statues adorning the square.

Over 20 French organisations of the left political sector ultimately participated in the rally, as well as Greek students and employees in Paris and people wearing the “Anonymous” mask.

Some of the slogans heard from loudspeakers were “be careful, there shall be another Athens here tomorrow”, “today Greece, tomorrow you”, “down with the IMF” and “solidarity for Greece and against banks.”

In Chicago, a protest was organised outside the Greek consulate. In London the “We are all Greek” rally was help outside the Greek Embassy. The protesters were holding “Stop the looting of Greece” signs.

Around 150 people, mostly Greeks living in Belgium, gathered in front of the Greek embassy in Brussels to show solidarity with demonstrators against austerity measures in Greece.

(AMNA, aw)

Santorini receives more and more distinctions over the last years, ranking it among the top world destinations.

This time, it was BBC that chose Santorini as the most beautiful island in the world, in the travel pages of its website. Santorini is followed by Bali Indonesia in the second rank, Cape Breton Canada in the third position, Boracay Philippines in the forth and the Great Barrier Reef Australia in the fifth position.

Santorini feels like no other place on earth.

Here, 120 miles southwest of mainland Greece, everything is brighter: the whitewashed cube-shaped houses, the lapis lazuli sea and the sunsets that light up the caldera, is the BBC comment for this distinction.

No doubt such recognitions from international travel guides and tourist associations have raised the number of tourists visiting Santorini every year and have extended the tourist season. In fact, the first cruise ships arrive in Santorini in late March/early April and keep coming till late November.

Santorini island

History

The history of Santorini is not just the history of people. It is the history of a place which has the unrealistic distinction of constantly evolving and taking shape by itself.

In order to understand this, try thinking back an Aegean with Cyclades but without Santorini. Then imagine the island one day emerging from the seabed, rising, drying out and gradually being inhabited to become the home of a major culture.

Next, picture another day on which half the island founders, taking its people and their achievements with it inder the ashes and the waves. When the turmoil dies down, new inhabitants come to the island, give it a name of their own and start again from the beginning . Now imagine another island rising from the sea, little by little, and taking the place of that which shank.

The history of Santorini is the history of a place which is not to be taken for granted and whose map must, from time to time, be scrapped and redrawn from the start. The first inhabitants of Santorini were pre- Hellenes who arrived around 3.000 BC.

The influence from Minoan Crete became clear when the excavations at Akrotiri began and an entire settlement with two – storey houses containing wall paintings similar to those of Minoan palaces, was revealed beneath a thick layer of volcanic ash.

When this settlement was built, the island was called Calliste (Most Charming) or Strongyle (Round) because of its shape – the volcano had not yet begun its catastrophic upheavals.

During the 13th Century there was a Venetian occupation on the island.

The Venetians fortified 5 different places on the island with Imerovigli as the capital. They chose Imerovigli because it is the highest point of the Caldera.

There is also a strange rock formation in the front of the village, called Skaros. Here is where they built their strongest of the five castles. The castle was destroyed in 1956 during a terrible earthquake that registered 7.8 on the Richter scale.

Modern Santorini

Santorini was united with Greece in 1912. Its major settlements include Fira (Phira), Oia, Emporio, Kamari, Imerovigli, Pyrgos and Therasia, and Akrotiri is a major archaeological site with ruins from the Minoan era.

The island’s pumice quarries have been closed since 1986, in order to preserve the caldera, while it remains the home of a small but flourishing wine industry, based on the indigenous grape variety, Assyrtiko ; vines of the Assyrtiko variety are extremely old and prove resistant to phylloxera, attributed by local winemakers to the well drained volcanic soil and its chemistry, and needed no replacement during the great phylloxera epidemic of the early 20th century. In their adaption to their habitat, such vines are planted far apart, as their principal source of moisture is dew, and are often trained in the shape of low spiralling baskets, with the grapes hanging inside to protect them from the winds.

Also unique to the island is the red, sweet and extremely strong Vinsanto; white wines from the island are extremely dry with a strong, citrus scent, and the ashy volcanic soil gives the white wines a slight sulphurous flavour much like Vinsanto. It is not easy to be a wine grower in Santorini; the hot and dry climatological conditions give the soil a low productivity. The yield per acre is only 10 to 20% of the yields that are common in France and California, and the island’s primary industry is tourism, particularly in the summer months

Source: greekexporters.gr

A nation of fighters

When we think of ancient Greece, we almost invariably think of Athens. This is where the blueprint for Western civilisation received its first draft. Philosophy and science, art and architecture, democracy itself – all these have their roots there. But there’s more to the story of ancient Greece than Athens.

300 Spartans

Unlike Athens, Sparta can’t boast of its philosophers and politicians and artists. It became famous for two things: its frugality – which is where we get our word ‘spartan’ from – and its fighters. In everyday Sparta, these two were intimately linked.

The whole of Spartan society conformed to a strict code of extreme discipline and self-sacrifice. Their aim was to create the perfect state protected by the perfect. Although Spartan hard-line ideals don’t have the charisma of Athenian culture, they have meant as much to Western civilisation as the ideals represented by the Parthenon. Down the centuries, the Spartans have inspired a diverse range of people. Anyone with a plan for a utopia has cherry-picked their ideas – Plato, Sir Thomas More, the French revolutionaries, American pioneers, Adolf Hitler, even the founders of the English public school system. They all turned directly to the Spartans for ideas and inspiration.

So the story of the Spartans is also, in a way, the story of ourselves. It’s the story of how many of the values that we hold dear were first found in a warrior state on the mainland of Greece 2,500 years ago.

Early history

The Spartans’ history is highly dramatic – and it has a setting to match: the Peloponnese, a huge peninsula crowned by rugged mountains and scored by deep gorges, which forms the southern-most part of the Greek mainland.

The ancient Greeks thought of it as an island – and seen from the northern side of the Gulf of Corinth, it does have a brooding, closed-in feel, cold-shouldering the outside world.

Long before the Spartans of our story arrived on the scene, this part of the world was making history. Many of the Greeks who fought in the Trojan War more than 3,000 years ago came from here. King Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, came from Mycenae, in the eastern Peloponnese. And to the south, in the city-state of Sparta in the region known as Lakonia, was the palace of Menelaus and his wife Helen – for Helen of Troy, whose beauty caused the Trojan War, had once been Helen of Sparta.

The heroes of the Trojan War, their lavish palaces and possessions, the beauty of Helen – all offered a standard against which the later Spartans would measure their own actions and aspirations.

At some point in about 1200 BC, all this disappeared.

No one knows for sure what happened – earthquakes, tidal waves, slave revolts have all been blamed. But all over the eastern Mediterranean, the world of Helen of Troy disappeared in a cataclysm of fire and destruction. A remnant clung on for a few hundred years, but finally the Dark Ages came to Greece and the thread of history snapped.

The new Spartans

At some point in those centuries of darkness, new people came out of the north, seeking more hospitable lands. They were called the Dorians, and they brought with them a new Greek dialect, their sheep and goats and a few simple possessions. They settled all over the Peloponnese, and some found their way to Lakonia and the lands that had once belonged to King Menelaus.

It had been a journey worth making. The people who came to Lakonia must have thought they had found a Shangri-la. The plain of the Eurotas river was, north to south, 50 miles of precious, flat, fertile farmland. And the river ran through it all year round. In land-hungry Greece, where 70% of the land couldn’t be farmed and what was left was squeezed between the mountains and the sea, that was a lot of elbow room.

To the west were the spectacular Taygetos mountains, rising to more than 8,000 feet (2,440 metres) in places. Patches of snow still lingered while down on the plain spring was turning into summer. The slopes once teemed with game – deer, hare and wild boar, rich pickings for the new arrivals.

But statistics don’t convey the most striking quality of this place: the sense of security. Everywhere you look, you’re bounded by hills. The feeling is one of enclosure – not claustrophobia, but safety. You feel that everything you could possibly want is here – if you can just lay claim to it and keep the rest of the world at bay.

And so the herdsmen traded in their sheep for olive trees, and settled down. A new Sparta came into being, and the new Spartans built a temple, the Menelaion, to honour the legendary king and his wayward wife.

In the period of renewal following the Dark Ages, new city-states like Sparta appeared all over Greece. They varied in size and power, but had one thing in common: they were all communities governed according to a set of mutually agreed laws and customs. The rules by which people agreed to live varied, but their aim was broadly the same: to create good order and justice and to protect against chaos and lawlessness.

Few clues

In Sparta today, archaeologists are still piecing together the story of the people who first came here some 3,000 years ago and created an ideal city – a utopia. It’s not an easy task because they left relatively few clues behind.

Unlike the Athenians, the Spartans were famous for not building, not making things and, in particular, not writing about themselves. Nearly every account we have of the Spartan way of life was written by an outsider.

Some of these writers resented Sparta’s power, some were in awe of its traditions and achievements, and some were given to exaggeration – and there was much about Sparta that lent itself to exaggeration. So of all the cities and civilisations in the ancient world, the Spartans remain the most intriguing and the most mysterious.

Take, for example, Sparta’s kings. Since time immemorial, Sparta had been ruled by not one but two kings – two royal houses, two royal lines, twice the potential for the rows and wrangles to which all monarchies are prone. The Spartans explained this unique arrangement by claiming that their kings were direct descendants of the great-great grandsons of Heracles (Hercules), the strongman of Greek myth. According to the legend, it was this pair of twins who wrested control of the Peloponnese from the descendants of King Agamemnon.

The stories that people tell about themselves are always revealing. This tale of a land-grab by a pair of aggressive usurpers, themselves descended from the most macho man in mythology, sent out a worrying message to Sparta’s neighbours.

Aggressive expansionism

And it wasn’t long before the Spartans started throwing their weight around, seizing control of the whole of the Eurotas valley, enslaving non-Spartan inhabitants or categorising them as perioikoi – ‘those who live around’ or ‘neighbours’. In the rigid apartheid-like system that came into being there, the perioikoi would become a disenfranchised caste of craftsmen and traders, the economic muscle of the Spartan utopia.

But sorting out their immediate neighbours was just the first phase of Sparta’s aggressive expansionism. Despite the generous acres of the Eurotas valley, Sparta, like the rest of Greece, always suffered from land hunger. Other city-states dealt with the problem by establishing colonies throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. This Greek diaspora would eventually spread as far west as the Strait of Gibraltar, and as far east as the Crimea in the Black Sea.

Sparta came up with its own take on colonisation: it looked west and began to wonder what opportunities lay on the other side of the Taygetos mountains. It was there that they would go to satisfy their hunger for land. It was there that their Shangri-la would reveal its dark underside. For it was there that a slave-nation would be created to serve the Spartan master-race.

Slavery

The journey through the gorges of the Taygetos mountains is as spectacular now as it must have been some 2,800 years ago when the armies of Sparta headed west in search of conquest.

Several days’ hard march would have brought them to the territory of the Messenians on the other side of the mountains. The Spartans weren’t coming just to take their land – they wanted to take away their freedom, too. They intended to turn all the Messenians into helots. This word translates as ‘captives’, but it came to mean, more bluntly, ‘slaves’.

Slavery in ancient Greece was an accepted fact of life. But slaves were supposed to be foreigners – barbarians who spoke no Greek and so were obviously suited by nature to be slaves. The enslavement of fellow Greeks and on a massive scale was something else. The crushing of Messenia set Sparta apart from the rest of Greece.

It also shaped the kind of place Sparta became – wary of unrest, paranoid about revolt.

Enslaving the Messenians was no easy task. It took two full-scale wars, each lasting 20 years or more. We know something about the second one because we have an eye-witness to the events – one of the first identifiable eye-witnesses known to history. He was called Tyrtaeus:

It is a fine thing for a brave man to die when he has fallen among the front ranks while fighting for his homeland.

Let us fight with spirit for this land and let us die for our children, no longer sparing our lives.

Make the spirit in your heart strong and valiant, and do not be in love with life when you are a fighting man.

Tyrtaeus was a Spartan soldier and a war poet. His poems were battle cries, delivered with the directness of a sergeant major putting some backbone into shirkers and faint-hearts.

The Hoplites

The kind of fighter that Tyrtaeus addresses in his poems was the hoplite – an infantryman armed with an 8ft (2.4m) spear and a round shield. By the end of the 7th century, practically all Greek cities had their own contingents of hoplites. They were not full-time professional soldiers. They were generally farmers, who swapped ploughs and spades for spears and shields in defence of their communities. By standing side by side with their neighbours and taking part in the fight, these militia-men demonstrated not just their courage but their status as citizens.

Like the Minutemen of the American Revolutionary War who forged a republic on the ends of their rifles, hoplites were more than just fighters: they were agents of profound social change.

Olympia was home of the famous games. It was also the unofficial shrine of the hoplite fighter – for this was where he would come to dedicate his arms to the gods in thanks for a victory. The ‘House of Bronze’ must have been thick with the stuff, judging from the number of shields, helmets and breastplates found here, and now on display in the museum.

The round shield – hoplon – was the cardinal item of equipment, and it was from this that the hoplite probably derived his name. He held it by thrusting his left arm through the central armband – the porpax – and gripping the antilabe, a leather thong attached to the rim, in his fist. It was made mainly of wood, and weighed around 20lb (9 kilograms), which was quite a weight to carry through a day’s fighting. But to let your shield drop or fall in battle was the ultimate disgrace.

The phalanx

Hoplite fighting was a team effort: half your shield was for you, the other half for the man to your left. The hoplites would form into densely packed ranks, collectively called a phalanx, seven or eight deep and perhaps 50 shields across. Co-ordination and discipline were important, but most important of all was trust: if your neighbour broke and ran, you would be left exposed to the spear- points of the enemy.

When two phalanxes met, there was a natural tendency for each line to edge to the right as the men tucked themselves behind their neighbours’ shields. It was at moments like this that the discipline of the phalanx threatened to collapse. To be effective, you had to hold your ground.

Tyrtaeus had some helpful advice for Sparta’s nerve-wracked hoplites:

Those who dare to stand fast at one another’s side and to advance towards the front ranks in hand-to-hand conflict, they die in smaller numbers and they keep the troops behind safe.

There wasn’t much in the way of tactics once the shield walls came together. The battlefield all but disappeared in a dust cloud as the two opposing masses of bronze and muscle heaved against each other. The rear ranks provided the traction, pushing forward like rugby players in a scrum.

It was in the front three ranks, within range of the enemy’s spear points, that things got deadly. It was there that a hoplite would come face to face with the snake-haired gorgon, emblazoned on the shield of the enemy just inches away. The goddess’s stare was said to have the power to petrify people, and in the stabbing frenzy of battle, many must have felt as if their limbs were turning to stone.

Acts of citizenship

Crude it may have been, but hoplite fighting had far-reaching consequences. In the heaving sweaty, noisy mêlée, neighbours chose to stand together in support of the common good. It was an act of citizenship, and to take part in it was as much a privilege as an obligation.

To fight as a hoplite, you had to have the kit, and while few could manage a magnificent outfit, the basic panoply – shield, spear and helmet – was within reach of around a third of the city-state’s able-bodied male population. Being able to afford to fight was terribly important. Aristotle said: ‘Those who do the fighting wield absolute power.’ In other words, if you didn’t fight for your community, you couldn’t expect to have a stake in it.

So, on the day of battle, while well-to-do land-owners paraded in the front rank in their bespoke armour, a dirt farmer’s eldest boy, taking his place somewhere in the back with his grandfather’s dented helmet and his uncle’s battered shield, would be determined at all costs to maintain his family’s standing as citizens.

Keeping paradise safe

The Spartans finally defeated and enslaved the Messenians in about 650 BC. For the next 300 years, the latter would be forced to slave in the fields of their Spartan masters ‘like asses, worn out by heavy burdens’, according to Tyrtaeus.

But now that Messenia had been won, the critical question for the Spartans became, then and for centuries to come: how would they keep it?

Elsewhere in Greece, city-states were being torn apart by civil war between rich and poor. With the spoils of Messene up for grabs, the chances of that happening in Sparta were greatly increased.

To keep their paradise safe, the Spartans chose to act in a totally radical way. From now on, they would dedicate themselves to the creation of a perfect society, and it would be modelled on the hoplite phalanx – disciplined, collective and unselfish. There was going to be a revolution in Shangri-la.

Lycurgus

Every revolution needs a great leader. Sparta’s was Lycurgus – the ‘wolf worker’. He may or may not have existed. In fact, so vague are his outlines that most historians now dismiss him as a myth. But for the ancient Spartans, he was very real. He was a miracle worker who created a unique social system on the advice of the gods themselves, a blueprint that would turn Spartan society into one of the most extreme civilisations of the ancient world.

To keep the Messenian helots subdued and, just as importantly, to stop themselves from falling out over the spoils of war, the Spartans decided to dedicate themselves to becoming the most formidable, disciplined and professional warriors that Greece had ever seen. The whole of Spartan society became, in effect, a military training camp.

Spartan men would neither farm nor fish, manufacture nor trade. They would simply fight. And when they weren’t fighting, they would train. And when they weren’t training, they would socialise with their fellow fighters rather than with their own families, to bolster the solidarity and cohesion of the phalanx.

The single-mindedness and thoroughness with which they pursued this programme was extreme, radical and typically Spartan. Being born Spartan was not enough. All male Spartans had to earn their citizenship through long years of competitive struggle, and through surviving one of the most gruelling training systems ever invented.

Spartan eugenics

The first test came early. A ravine a few miles outside the centre of Sparta was known as the Apothetae – the ‘Deposits’. It was also called the ‘place of rejection’, because newly born Spartan boys were thrown into the ravine if they were judged unfit to live.

Infanticide was common throughout ancient Greece. Unwanted babies – usually girls – were left on hillsides. Sometimes they would be placed in a basket or protective pot so that there was at least a chance of someone coming along and taking the child in.

In Sparta, things were, as ever, different. Boys rather than girls were the likeliest candidates for infanticide. The decision about whether the child lived or died was not left to the parents but was taken by the city elders. And there was no possibility of a kindly shepherd rescuing a newborn child after it had been ‘placed’ down here. The decision of the city elders was final, terminal and absolute.

Such state-sponsored eugenics has won Sparta many admirers over the years. Here’s what one 20th-century leader had to say on the subject:

The abandonment of sick, puny and misshapen children by the Spartans was more humanitarian and, in reality, a thousand times more humane than the pitiful madness of our present time where the most sickly subjects are preserved at any price only to be followed by the breeding of a race from degenerates burdened with disease.

No prizes for guessing that these are the words of Adolf Hitler.

Education by ordeal

Surviving the Apothetae was just the start for the boys. At the age of seven, they were removed from their families and placed in a training system called the agoge, which means, literally, ‘rearing’. The children were treated little better than animals.

For Spartan boys, one of the classrooms of the agoge was the wild foothills of the Taygetos mountains. They were organised into ‘herds’ under the command of an older ‘boy herd’, who was responsible for discipline and punishment. Denied adequate clothing, they slept rough throughout the year – and, in winter, temperatures could drop below freezing. Kept on short rations, they were expected to steal to supplement their food. Anyone caught stealing was flogged – not for the theft itself, but for being an unskilful thief.

It was more of a trial by ordeal than an education.

One of the more famous Spartan legends concerns a young boy who allows his intestines to be gnawed away by a fox that he has stolen and concealed, rather than cry out or let the animal go. In the retelling, the story usually becomes a straightforward tale of endurance and moral toughness. Restored to its original context, however, it sounds more like a half-starved, brutalised boy dying from an excess of bone-headed obedience.

The Taygetos also provided the backdrop for one of Sparta’s most controversial and disputed institutions: the krypteia or ‘secret service brigade’. Membership of this was reserved for boys who had shown particular promise. Hard cases would be sent out into the wilds with basic rations and a knife. By day, they would lie low and, at night, would infiltrate the valley below, murdering any helot they caught.

For some historians, this vision of adolescent lynch mobs roaming the countryside is simply too lurid to accept. But a reign of terror – random, vicious and unprovoked – is precisely the kind of tactic that might keep a large slave population quiet.

Rite of passage

Although Sparta encouraged the collective spirit, it placed a higher value on individual achievement. The boys were tested constantly – against each other and against their own limitations.

The competitive nature of the Spartan system found its most extreme expression at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. If a boy survived his first five years in the agoge, he would go there at the age of 12 for a brutal rite of passage.

On the altar, cheeses were placed – the sort of homely nourishing foodstuff that young boys on short rations would have found irresistible. The challenge was simple: to steal as many cheeses as possible. But in front of the altar was a phalanx of ephebes – boys in their 20s – carrying whips. Their instructions were to protect the altar, showing neither mercy nor restraint.

Indoctrinated with the tenets of endurance and perseverance, and determined to excel in this public display, the 12-year-olds would brave the gauntlet again and again. Meeting the whips face on, they would have suffered the most horrific injuries. The weakest never left alive.

The sheer brutality of a system seems alien. But it’s not just modern audiences who find the Spartans shocking. The philosopher Aristotle argued that they turned their children into animals, while other contemporary Greeks pictured them as bees swarming round a hive, stripped of their individuality.

It’s been a popular conception of Sparta through the centuries, but one that misses an important point.

Taking part in any mass activity can be fantastically unifying. We all recognise that feeling if we’re part of a Mexican wave in a football crowd, singing in a choir or joining a protest march. As individuals, we are not diminished by the crowd. We become stronger; our reach is greater; our sense of self is magnified.

That was the underlying appeal of the Spartan system as a whole: the possibility of transcending your limitations as an individual and becoming part of something bigger and better.

War music

From the age of 12, the boys’ training became, if possible, even more exacting. Reading and writing were taught ‘no more than was necessary’, but music and dancing were regarded as essential.

The battlefields on which hoplites clashed were once memorably described as the ‘dancing floors of war’. A phalanx that was able to move together in a coordinated way made for a formidable dancing partner.

So the Spartans spent many hours perfecting what was known as ‘war music’, a kind of rhythmic drill in which changes in direction and pace were communicated musically. The Spartans earned the reputation for being ‘the most musical and the most war-like of people’.

The common messes

At the age of 20, with their training nearing completion, Spartan males faced their most crucial test: election to one of the common messes – dining clubs – where they would be expected to spend most of their time when they weren’t training or fighting.

But even if you had survived the brutal apprenticeship of the agoge, entry to these exclusive gentlemen’s clubs was not guaranteed. Election to a mess was by the vote of existing members. You could be blackballed if it was felt that you didn’t measure up – and that would be that. You would become a failed Spartan, consigned to a living hell of exclusion and public humiliation.

If, on the other hand, you were elected, you would receive from the state a share of land and a quota of helots. You were now one of the homoioi – one of the peers, the warrior élite at the top of Sparta’s hierarchy.

The common messes, which lay a mile or so from the centre of Sparta, were an essential part of the city’s social engineering, intended to keep discord and civil strife at bay. Old and young mixed here, easing generational conflicts – a constant source of friction elsewhere in Greece. More importantly, rich and poor met on an equal footing, the differences between them hidden by a rigorously enforced code of ‘conspicuous non-consumption’.

In egalitarian Sparta, the rule was: even if you’ve got it, don’t flaunt it. This was applied to everything from houses to clothes, even to food. In the common messes, the dish of the day, every day, was a concoction made of boiled pigs’ blood and vinegar, known as melas zomos, ‘black soup’.

The joke goes that, on being told the recipe for black soup, a man from Sybaris – a city in southern Italy infamous for its luxury and gluttony – said he now understood why the Spartans were so willing to die.

Spartan frugality may have shocked their contemporaries, but to a modern audience, their diet – leaving aside the black soup – sounds nutritious and healthy. Their land was very fertile, producing figs and quinces among other fruits. It was also a rich hunting ground. Compared to the diets of their neighbours – and enemies – the Spartans’ comprised a much higher proportion of meat.

Defining citizenship

Free from the need to make a living (thanks to their helots), free from the anxieties of ill-health (thanks to their healthy diet and rigorous keep-fit regime), free from the pressure to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ (thanks to their egalitarian code), the Spartans could be said to be a people who knew the ‘good life’.

More importantly, they were entirely new kinds of human beings: citizens. The Spartan system was one of the first in Western history to define what citizenship meant.

Sparta was the first society to offer a social contract based on duties and rights, and it was introduced there 100 years or more before Athens – the so-called ‘cradle of democracy’ – had even started thinking along similar lines.

Radical to conservative

The myth of Lycurgus ends on a prophetic note. Having persuaded his fellow citizens to adopt his radical rule book, he made them swear not to meddle with anything until he returned from a consultation with the gods at the religious site at Delphi.

The oath was given, Lycurgus departed … and never came back, sealing with his own, voluntary death the Spartans’ oath.

As explanations go, this is on a par with the rest of Lycurgus’s mythical life, but at least it attempts to explain one of the most puzzling facts about Sparta: that, having embarked on a radical social experiment, this revolutionary city-state would soon become the most hide-bound and conservative in the whole of ancient Greece.

Change was coming – but it was originating beyond Sparta’s borders. In 480 BC, disturbing news reached the Spartans: the Persian empire was on the move. A huge invasion force was heading west by land and sea, bent on subduing the troublesome Greeks. The time had come to see whether Sparta’s celebrated warriors would live up to their fearsome reputation – and save the Greek world from the threat from the east.

Leonidas

Archaeology came relatively late to Sparta. It wasn’t until 1906 that a British team began the first systematic excavations. In 1925, they made a major discovery: a striking life-sized bust of a Spartan warrior dating from the 5th century BC. When it was discovered, one of the Greek workmen said unhesitatingly, ‘This is Leonidas.’

Leonidas was Sparta’s super-hero – the king who, with 300 warriors, made a doomed last stand against the might of Persia in the pass at Thermopylae.

These days, the warrior presides magisterially over the museum in Sparta – they still call him ‘Leonidas’, though the name is safely within quote marks. The enigmatic smile is a convention of sculpture from this period, but it definitely gives him a Mona Lisa-type quality. The eyes are blank, but would probably have been inlaid with precious stone. The posture is puzzling – he seems to lunging forward so much that he looks like he might topple over.

But, all in all, he conforms to the heroic Spartan ideal, right down to his facial hair – for one of Lycurgus’s more pernickety rules was that the upper lip should be clean-shaven and the beard long.

We know very little about the real Leonidas. He was a member of the Agidai, one of the two aristocratic families that supplied Sparta with her kings. He had been on the throne for 10 years when the Persian juggernaut began to roll west.

The Persians

Persia was the regional superpower of the eastern Mediterranean – a vast empire stretching from present-day Afghanistan to the Aegean. The Greeks were an insignificant but increasingly troublesome presence on the western limits of the empire, inciting rebellion among the king’s Greek subjects in Asia Minor.

In 499 BC, a major rebellion ended in the destruction of the royal city of Sardis. This was too much for the Persians. They demanded oaths of loyalty from all the Greek city-states. Some caved in, but others followed the defiant examples set by Sparta and Athens. When Persian heralds went there demanding water and earth as tokens of submission, they were executed – an act of sacrilege and a declaration of war.

King Darius made the first move. In 490 BC, he landed a punitive force on the Greek mainland at Marathon, only to see it sent packing by Athens and her allies. When Darius died, it was left to his son Xerxes to avenge the insult. Around the year 485, he began assembling a massive invasion force to sort out the Greek problem once and for all.

The Persians set out, by land and sea, early in 480 BC. The land army was so vast that, according to the Greek historian Herodotus (who lived during this time), it drank whole rivers dry. Herodotus also reckoned that the combined Persian forces numbered more than 1.5 million men. A more sober estimate would put the ceiling at 300,000 – far more than enough to crush the minnow-like city-states of Greece.

Thermopylae

When the Spartans learned that a Persian invasion was imminent, they asked the oracle at Delphi for advice. The oracle was a kind of messaging service for the gods, delivered through the mouth of a possessed priestess.

The Spartans were unswervingly pious, so what they were told now must have worried them greatly:

Hear your fate, O dwellers in Sparta of the wide spaces.

Either your famed great town must be sacked by Perseus’ sons [the Persians] – Or the whole land of Lacedaemon

Shall mourn the death of a king of the house of Heracles.

Beneath the flowery language, the advice was straightforward: capitulate.

But despite the dire warning, Sparta decided to put itself at the head of the resistance to the invasion. As the Persian army swung south towards the Greek heartland, a Greek force, under the command of King Leonidas, headed north to stop their advance at Thermopylae – the ‘gates of fire’.

In 480 BC, Thermopylae was a natural bottleneck. The road south squeezed past the mountains on one side and the sea on the other. Today, the mountains are still there, but the sea has retreated a few miles. To this place came a force of 7,000-8,000 Greek hoplites from half-a-dozen city-states. They rebuilt a wall that ran across the narrowest part of the pass, and hunkered down behind it, aiming to halt the Persian advance in its tracks.

Geography favoured the Greeks. Despite the overwhelming odds, the position was not hopeless. If the Persian advance could be slowed here, it would give the Greeks a chance to organise more formidable defences, on land and sea.

But for Leonidas in overall command, and for the 300 Spartan warriors who had accompanied him, Thermopylae was more than a strategic strong point. It was the place where they intended to show the world what it meant to be a Spartan.

For the first three days of the battle, the Greeks held off the Persian advance, sheltering behind their wall and then counter-attacking in hoplite formation. Three times, the Persians attacked; three times, they were beaten back.

Xerxes had almost given up hope when he was told of a secret path that crossed the mountains and came out behind the Greek defences. When Leonidas discovered that the Persians were on their way, he knew the game was up and, before long, the Greeks would be surrounded. While there was still time for them to escape, Leonidas dismissed his allies, setting the stage for one of history’s most celebrated last stands.

In reality, the Spartans weren’t entirely alone. Leonidas kept with him 400 troops from Thebes, a city thought to be dangerously pro-Persian. There were also 700 fighters from Thespiae, as determined as the Spartans to go down fighting. Finally, there were the Spartans’ own helots, who had no choice but to stay by their masters’ sides. But this was Sparta’s show, and the parts played by others, willingly or unwillingly, were bound to be overshadowed.

On the final morning, the Spartans followed their usual pre-battle rituals. They stripped naked and exercised. They oiled their bodies and combed out each other’s long hair. They wrote their names on small sticks and tied them to their arms – an ancient form of ‘dog-tags’ that would allow their bodies to be identified later. Persian spies, observing these strange pre-battle rites, reported back to Xerxes, who thought them laughable.

In the morning, the Persian king poured a libation to the rising sun and then ordered the advance. The Greeks under Leonidas, knowing that the fight would be their last, pressed forward into the widest part of the pass. They fought with reckless desperation – with swords if they had them and, if not, with their hands and teeth – until the Persians, coming in from the front and closing in from behind, overwhelmed them.

The legacy of Thermopylae

Militarily, Thermopylae was insignificant. The Persian advance, delayed for less than a week, was soon rolling south again. A far more important battle took place shortly afterwards in the bay of Salamis, where a Greek fleet, led by Athens, destroyed the Persian armada. It was a scrappy, hit-and-miss affair, but Salamis marked the beginning of the end for the Persians’ invasion, and the following year, they were finally driven out of Greece.

But in the aftermath of victory, it was the doomed heroism of Thermopylae that captured the imagination.

The 300 were buried at Thermopylae and honoured with an inscription that still echoes down the centuries:

Go tell the Spartans,

Stranger passing by,

That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

Thermopylae was a stage on which the Spartans performed the role for which they had spent their lives training and preparing. They had shown the world the kind of place that Sparta was and the kind of men it produced. They had fulfilled the ideals of their city and justified the claims of their utopia.

And by doing that, according to Herodotus, they had ‘laid up for the Spartans a treasure of fame in which no other city could share’.

Leonidas’s stage management certainly paid off. Today, in the Louvre in Paris, you can see the Spartan king and the 300 at Thermopylae captured in all their nobility by the French revolutionary painter David.

The Spartans certainly impressed Hitler. In February 1945, he told Martin Bormann:

And if, in spite of everything, the Fates have decreed that we should once more in the course of our history be crushed by forces superior to our own, then let us go down with our heads high and secure in the knowledge that the honour of the German people remains without blemish. A desperate fight remains for all time a shining example. Let us remember Leonidas and his 300 Spartans! In any case, we are not of the stuff that goes tamely to the slaughter like sheep. They may well exterminate us. But they will never lead us to the slaughter house!

Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third party sites.

Source: Channel4.com

Greece’s plight has alerted the world to the way the EU extinguishes democracy.

It is peculiarly appropriate that the country that gave the world the words “democracy” and “tragedy” should now be the beacon which alerts the world to the fact that the EU is extinguishing democracy – part of a wider tragedy that will eventually lead to the extinction of the EU itself. But what of our own country’s part in this horrible drama?

It already seems an age since we were told, last June, that David Cameron had “won his fight” to prevent the EU extracting a loan of billions of pounds from Britain to help Greece pay off some of the colossal debt it has run up since it was so foolishly allowed to join the euro. The next move, we learned, was that we would have to lend the money anyway, not through the EU but through the IMF.

George Osborne still cannot promise that he will be able to resist this demand, even though he knows we are having to borrow an additional £2.5 billion every week just to pay for the ever-rising deficit on our own Government’s spending. Thus, in order to lend £17 billion through the IMF to Greece, which it will never be able to repay, we would have to borrow even more money than we are doing already.

The latest contribution to this tragi-farce, it seems, is Sir Mervyn King’s decision to roll the printing presses and conjure a further £50 billion of imaginary money out of thin air. As Fraser Nelson explained in Friday’s Daily Telegraph, this will keep interest rates on annuities at rock-bottom, and thus rob Britain’s pensioners of an estimated £74 billion.

So our pensioners’ money will be disappearing into a bottomless pit of debt, not least to help save the euro, which the EU cannot allow Greece to leave, because this might set off a domino effect, bringing down in turn all those other eurozone countries that have run up debts they cannot repay, and plunging Europe’s and the world’s economy into unimaginable chaos.

There were those of us who long ago came to see that the dream of building a politically united Europe had all the makings of a tragedy doomed eventually to end very badly, and to carry what remained of European democracy with it. But I confess that not even in our worst nightmares did we foresee that it would end quite like this. And even now the end game has hardly begun.

Source:  telegraph.co.uk

The behaviour of the EU states towards Greece is inexplicable in the terms in which the EU defines itself. It is, first and foremost, a failure of solidarity.

The “austerity package”, as the newspapers like to call it, seeks to impose on Greece terms that no people can accept. Even now the schools are running out of books. There were 40% cuts in the public health budget in 2010 – I can’t find the present figure. Greece’s EU “partners” are demanding a 32% cut in the minimum wage for those under 25, a 22% cut for the over 25s. Already unemployment for 15-24-year-olds is 48% – it will have risen considerably since then. Overall unemployment has increased to over 20%. The sacking of public sector workers will add to it. The recession predicted to follow the imposition of the package will cause unbearable levels of unemployment at every level.

In addition the “package” demands cuts to pensions and public service pay, wholesale privatisation of state assets – a fire-sale, since the global market is close to rock bottom – and cuts to public services including health, social welfare and education. The whole to be supervised by people other than the Greeks. An entire disciplinary and punishment system.

When we casually use a term like “bailout”, it is important to remember that it is not people who are being bailed out, or at least not the Greek people. The bailout will not save a single Greek life. The opposite is the case. What is being “bailed out” is the global financial system, including the banks, hedge funds and pension funds of the other EU member states, and it is the Greek people who are being ordered to pay – in money, time, physical pain, hopelessness and missed educational opportunities. The relatively neutral, even stoic, term “austerity”, is a gross insult to the Greek people. This is not austerity; at best it is callousness.

On top of this callousness, we must remember that the strategy itself is nonsense. Every intelligent observer is agreed that cuts do not produce growth. The highest rate of growth in the EU at present is in Poland where massive public investment is driving the economy. GDP is declining or barely moving among the “austerity” nations, including the UK.

In essence, this crisis is a failure of the EU states to show solidarity in the face of an onslaught from the financial markets. At first glance this seems to be a very simple fight. In one corner you have nation states, which have the wellbeing of their citizens as their raison d’être; in the other you have global capitalism as represented by the financial markets, which has the wealth of a tiny few as its raison d’être. But the nation state has, for a considerable time, identified itself with those same markets. States have agreed to see themselves as economies rather than societies. More recently we have been led to believe that the market alone can provide everything the citizen needs and much more efficiently than the structures that the citizens normally rely on and which they have, over generations, erected as protections against the revenge of the market.

This is the triumph of capitalism, that it has persuaded the world that capitalism is the world.

It has led to the undoing of 200 years of struggle between ordinary people and the super-rich. Trade unions didn’t appear overnight, they were a response to exploitation. Their defeat has led to the ubiquity of precarious, and now free, labour. Workers are not protected in their workplace by capitalists, they are protected by the laws won by struggle against the capitalist. A sweatshop in China is a direct assault not just on the rights of the Chinese worker but on those of workers in, for example, the UK. Socialist internationalism and solidarity were conceived as a way of defeating that ploy. Old people do not die in the streets not because charity has saved them but because 200 years of struggle has brought us the old age pension and public health. The privatisation of those services is a return to the 19th century. None of this public good would have been won if people had identified with the super-rich of 1812. Now that we have been brought to such an identification, we stand to lose them all over again.

Now we see capitalism at its most triumphant. Greek police beat Greek people in order to impose the will of the banks and hedge funds. The EU member states, including Ireland, are the middleman, the quislings of capital. Rather than reach out a hand of solidarity, we say, “better them than us”. As if the global markets will choose to pass on Ireland once Greece has been destroyed. Solidarity is not just compassion for one’s fellow man; it is also materialist self-interest. One for all and all for one. We stand or fall together. There is strength in unity.

Instead we have decided to sacrifice the Greek people to the market in the hope that our sacrifice will appease the gods of speculation. We condemn them to misery and poverty to keep Standard & Poor’s off our backs. But we have miscalculated. Firstly, the communist left currently stands at 42% in the polls, Pasok at 8%. Pasok (the leading party in government) will vanish and a combination of real leftwing parties will win the next election. They will not bend the knee and put their necks on our block.

It seems to me now that Greece will withdraw from the euro and default on its debt. Who knows what will happen to it then, but it can hardly be much worse than what we want from them, and at least it will be something of their own choosing. The speculators will then take a little time to consider which of the other economies to bet on. Perhaps then the Irish government will regret its lack of solidarity. Whatever happens, our behaviour and that of our EU compatriots has been shameful.

Source:  guardian.co.uk