Posts Tagged ‘Greek history’
“Is it not always the way of the people to put forward one man as its special champion and protector and cherish and magnify him?”*…
Matt Gatton on the clash of two Athenians, Alcibiades and Callias, half-brothers and students of Socrates, one of whom flirted with becoming the ancient city-state’s tyrant after leading a successful passage past Athens’ enemy Sparta…
… The road to Eleusis is open, and Alcibiades is a hero. The army is exalted in spirit and feels itself invincible under his command. The people are so captivated by his leadership that they are filled with an amazing passion for him to be their tyrant. (A tyrant is, of course, a person with sole political power, which, when matched with his sole military power as autocrat, would make Alcibiades more like a king than a general.)…
What Alcibiades thinks about the idea of being named tyrant is unknown, but it frightens many of Athens’s most influential citizens. Perhaps Callias most of all: imagine the sort of dread that would be triggered by the thought of a psychopath being given the power of a tyrant, particularly since this would-be tyrant has already profaned your religion, stolen your money, punched your father, possibly murdered your sister, and certainly plotted your own assassination. Anyone, but especially Callias, must have grave concerns about what Alcibiades would do with unchecked power. Callias had grown up with Alcibiades, they were “half” brother after all, and he knew him better than anyone else, knew his nature and his malevolence.
There is no word on Socrates’s feelings about the chatter of Alcibiades being named tyrant, but Socrates’s perspective on tyrants in general is well recorded by Plato. To Socrates, the flaw of democracy is its vulnerability to tyrants. The populace—the mob, as he calls them—are gullible and can easily fall under the spell of a charismatic leader. Alcibiades certainly fits the bill. In Socrates’s estimation, the tyrant first appears as a protector. The people have something they fear, either inside or outside of the state, either real or imagined, from which the tyrant claims he can guard them. He will make them the “victors.” The people flock to him of their own accord, for he pays them in lies, lies they want to hear, lies they want to believe. They are “superior”; they are “true patriots.” His favorite tools are false accusations and unleashing his mob against the “threat.” In time, the tyrant erases any and all opposition, “with unholy tongue and lips tasting the blood of his fellow citizens.” He and his supporters are empowered by the purge, “and the more detestable his actions . . . the greater devotion he requires from his followers.” These words are as true in the modern world as they were in ancient Athens.
Many countries today still struggle with this structural defect of democracy: the majority of the populace in a democracy may elect a tyrant, who will invariably disassemble the democracy that elected him—a democracy can make a tyrant, but a tyrant can unmake a democracy. The weak portion of the populace yearns to be strong, so they attach themselves to a strong man; such is the allure of the bully, the appeal of the despot, the attraction of the tyrant. Ancient Athens is where democracy first began and first fell, and so can teach us lessons that are, unfortunately, still applicable…
A lesson from the past: “The Bloody Rivalry That Led to the Fall of Democracy in Athens,” in @CrimeReads. Excerpted from Gatton’s recent book, The Shadows of Socrates: The Heresy War, and Treachery Behind the Trial of Socrates.
* Socrates, in Plato’s Republic
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As we avoid autocracy, we might recall that it was on this date in 197 that Emperor Septimius Severus defeated usurper Septimius Severus in the Battle of Lugdunum, the bloodiest battle between Roman armies– 150,000 Roman soldiers engaged for both sides.
Your web… Your web on drugs…
Spiders routinely spin the sort of web pictured above. When they are doing drugs, however, spiders’ webs become really interesting…
a web on marijuana
Cannabinoid receptors have been found in non-human mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and even some invertebrates, so there are plenty of animals that react to marijuana. Most of those reactions aren’t that surprising, or all that interesting, though. Dogs and cats act kind of funny and groggy after eating weed (please don’t feed them your stash, no matter how YouTube famous you want to be, though—the stuff can be toxic to them, especially dogs), and monkeys exposed to THC keep wanting more.
Spiders, though, are infinitely interesting when they get stoned because the effects of the drug are clear in the odd-looking webs they build afterwards.
Getting spiders high for science started in 1948, when German zoologist H.M. Peters got fed up with trying to study web-building behavior in spiders who wouldn’t do him the courtesy of working on his schedule. His garden spiders tended to build their webs between two and five a.m., and he asked his pharmacologist friend P.N. Witt if there might be some chemical stimulant that would coax the spiders into building their webs at a more reasonable time.
Witt tried giving the spiders some amphetamine and, while they kept building at their usual hour (to Peters’ dismay), the two scientists did notice that those webs were more haphazard than normal. Over the next few decades, Witt continued to dose spiders with a smorgasbord of psychoactive substances, including marijuana, LSD, caffeine and mescaline, to see how they reacted. Since spiders can’t use tiny bongs or drink from little mugs, Witt and his team either dissolved the drugs in sugar water or injected them into flies and then fed the spiders with them.
The drugs affected the size and shape of the spiders’ webs, the number of radii and spirals, the regularity of thread placement and other characteristics. By comparing photographs and measurements of normal and “drug webs,” Witt and other researchers could see how the different substances affected different aspects of the web and, by extension, the spiders’ motor skills and behavior.
Read the full story– and see webs spun on caffeine and chloral hydrate– at “What Does Marijuana Do to Spiders?”
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As we commune with our inner monkey, we might recall that it was on this date in 490 BCE – ironically, as this year it’s Labor Day – that Pheidippides of Athens set out on the run that inspired the Marathon. Pheidippides was on a mission seeking military support from Sparta in defense against the invading Persian army. Tradition (that’s to say, Herodotus) holds that he ran the ran 246 km (153 miles) between the two city-states in two days. The Spartans, constrained by religious law, were unwilling to help until the next full moon. So two days later, Phidippides ran the return leg alone.
Pheidippides then ran the 40 km (25+ miles) from the battlefield to Athens to announce the Greek victory over Persia in the Battle of Marathon; he uttered the word Nenikékamen (“We have won”), collapsed, and died on the spot from exhaustion.
Leggo my Lego…
Readers will recall The Antikythera Mechanism (“A Connecticut Yankee in King Agamemnon’s Court?…“), the oldest known scientific computer, which was built in Greece probably around 100 BCE. It was recovered from a shipwreck in 1900; but its purpose remained a mystery for over a century, until archeologists and scientists realized its ingenious intent: it’s an extraordinarily-accurate astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies– an analog computer with over 100 gears and 7 differential gearboxes– accurate to a day or two over its range.
Andrew Carol has rebuilt the device… in Lego:
Read the story and see photos here. And for extra fun, check out Carol’s Lego homage to Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine. As he says of his work,
Having always loved complex mechanical devices, and never having fully outgrown LEGO, I decided to explore where computational mechanics and LEGO meet. This is not LEGO as toy, art, or even the MindStorms® fusion of LEGO and digital electronics. This is almost where Steampunk and LEGO meet. Hand cranked devices that perform complex mechanical tasks.
[TotH to Universe Today]
As we revel in the satisfaction of making round pegs fit, we might recall that it was on this date in 1271 that Genghis Khan’s grandson and Coleridge’s celebratee Kublai Khan renamed his empire “Yuan,” officially marking the start of the Yuan Dynasty of Mongolia and China. By 1279, the Yuan army had defeated the last resistance forces of the Song Dynasty, which it succeeded.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree
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