I’ve been teaching a course on the Greek city in which we read large selections from Herodotus’s Histories and (since March 3rd) Thucydides’s War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians. And, along with the rest of the world, I’ve been transfixed since February 24th by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
So I can’t help but feel that I was the target audience for classicist/polemicist Victor Davis Hanson’s March 13th essay at American Greatness, “Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Classical Choices.”
Unfortunately, Hanson’s essay is a better case for reminding us of the limits of analogy than for the use of classical history to enlighten current affairs.
I. Russia as Persia, Ukraine as Greece?
Hanson lays out four possible parallels between the current conflict and moments from ancient Greek history, and leaves it up to future events to conform more to one or another. Three are drawn from the Persian Wars that are the subject of Herodotus’s Histories. In Hanson’s telling, Russia is like the Persia Empire in each parallel, whereas Ukraine is variously like the heroically defiant and ultimately triumphant Athenians at Salamis, or the eternally-shamed Medizing Thebans at Plataea, or the heroically defiant but utterly doomed Spartans at Thermopylae.
In what sense is Putin’s Russia like, and unlike, Xerxes’s Persia, and Zelenskyy’s Ukraine like, and unlike, the Greek cities of the early 5th century? In some respects, they fit the roles: Russia is like Persia in being the invader, and in being the greater force in a head-to-head contest with Ukraine. Defense of one’s homeland against an unjust invasion is always noble, and the choice to stand and defend one’s homeland against an overwhelming force is all the more heroic. (I leave aside any further comment on the spirit of the relevant nations. Even the strongest defenders of Ukraine as a bastion of liberal democracy will admit to the pervasive corruption and gangsterism of the Ukraine of the early 2010s, before falling silent on the topic as they turn to the present struggle against Russia.)
In other respects, however, Hanson’s comparisons are strained. Unlike the Persians (and their sundry subject peoples conscripted into Xerxes’s invasion force) and the Greeks, the Russians and Ukrainians are closely intertwined by blood, language, religion, and history. Putin and his apologists can declare with a straight face that Russia and Ukraine belong together for all these reasons. One might dispute the conclusion, or parts of the historical argument about the development of the Russian people, their relation to the various and sundry peoples whom they have ruled for centuries, the development of Ukrainian nationalism, etc. But we are here concerned with the strength of Hanson’s analogy. No Persian would have thought to declare that the Greek cities belong to the Persians for any such reasons, but only because they have committed some offense, or are weaker, or because it would be glorious for Xerxes to extend his empire to the borders of the realm of the gods. In this way, the war between Russia and Ukraine is more like a war between neighboring Greek cities, or perhaps between the Medes and the Persians, than between an Eastern empire and a collection of Western cities.
Indeed, once one takes into account the massive (though sclerotic) pseudo-allies that Ukraine has in NATO, the EU, and the United States, the roles of Russia-as-Persian-Empire and Ukraine-as-Greek-polis become even less convincing. The early-21st century West in relation to Russia and Ukraine begins to look like the late-5th century Persian Empire in relation to Athens and Sparta. In the decades after their humiliating defeats at the hands of the Greeks, the Persians played the Athenians and Spartans against one another, and once war broke out, both Athens and Sparta sent to Persia for aid against their enemy. This should not be surprising: it’s only what every empire will do, consciously or unconsciously, as it bestrides a world full of lesser powers. Of course, we haven’t been arming the Russians directly, as we have been arming the Ukrainians. But money is fungible, and until recently the West has been buying billions of dollars/euros worth of energy from Putin. As Harriet Hageman, who is challenging Liz Cheney for the GOP nomination to Wyoming’s Congressional seat, recently put it: “We’re funding both sides of the Ukrainian war: we’re the ones who made Putin rich,” through decades of energy policy buying oil and (in the case of the Europeans) gas from Russia. (An America First foreign policy must be complemented by American energy independence.)
We needn’t go all the way to indicting America as the Persian Empire, admiring Putin as the Greek cities that refused to give Xerxes earth and water, and sneering at Zelenskyy’s Ukraine as the Thebes of the 21st century, to conclude that Hanson’s Herodotean analogies are not sufficiently compelling to illuminate the present struggle.
II. Russia as Athens, Ukraine as Melos?
Hanson’s fourth possible parallel is the Siege of Melos, the occasion for Thucydides’s (in)famous Melian Dialogue. Here, for Hanson, the Russians are like the coldly self-interested Athenians, and the Ukrainians are like the doomed Melians, who believe in justice, the assistance of the gods, and of their sometime-allies (Sparta for the Melians, NATO/the EU/the US for Ukraine). Hanson writes:
Putin, like the Athenian diplomats, has no interest in rehashing past biased histories and counterallegations. He will deal only with present realities, namely that Ukraine is weak, and Russia is strong. Thus, idealistic but doomed Ukrainian resistance is a selfish and immoral act on the part of Zelenskyy because his own sense of heroism and gallantry will end up getting thousands of innocent women and children needlessly killed who otherwise might have at least lived under Russian domination.
This is simply false. Putin has an interest in “rehashing past biased histories and counterallegations.” At least, he spent a great deal of time doing exactly that in his public declarations: the very long and historically-detailed “Address to the People of Russia on the Donbas Problem and the Situation in Ukraine” on February 21st, and the much shorter, but still historically-detailed “Empire of Lies” speech (“Address to the Nation Announcing the Start of Military Campaign in Ukraine”) on February 24th. These speeches, which very few (including, apparently, Hanson) in the West seem to have bothered to track down and read with any care, are not at all concerned “only with present realities, namely that Ukraine is weak, and Russia is strong.” They are attempts to persuade the Russian people, the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian military in particular, and the wider world, that Putin’s invasion is justified. They suggest that Putin, at least, thought he had an “interest” in making this attempt, because he was speaking publicly, to rally his own people, to appeal to Russian-sympathetic Ukrainians, to attempt to demoralize Ukrainian resistance, and perhaps even to justify himself to other nations. (In these speeches, he makes many appeals to international law and prior decisions of the United Nations!) Most surprisingly, Putin claims for himself and his invasion the mantle of a humanitarian intervention against an alleged “genocide.” We don’t have to believe any or all of these claims to notice that he made them, and thus to see a significant difference between Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Athenian destruction of Melos.
Of course, the Melian Dialogue takes place behind closed doors, as an exchange between the Athenian envoys and the Melian leaders, pointedly not in the Melian assembly; and it is for this reason that the Athenians can dispense with all the niceties (appeals to justice rather than pure self-interest) and reveal their horrifying belief, “that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” and that, moreover, they believe that this follows not only from the nature of men but from the nature of the gods as well, “that they rule wherever they can.” Who knows what Putin says behind closed doors?
Hanson, like many others in the West, seems to think he does. Unfortunately, he hasn’t even shown that he knows Putin’s public words, much less his private thoughts.
I don’t pretend to know Putin’s mind. But it seems useful to begin as the classical historians do: to take seriously the nomoi (laws, customs, traditional beliefs) of the cultures in conflict; to take seriously what is said in public as a starting-point for political analysis; and to take seriously the passions in the soul—fear, honor, self-interest, a sense of justice—motivating these public speeches.
I do not have at my fingertips a fifth, and more convincing, classical analogy to the present conflict, which is still so shrouded in the fog of war that it is difficult to see in any detail. But perhaps we should start, as Herodotus and Thucydides do, by seriously considering the difference between cultures, the public speeches of foreign leaders, and the anxieties and ambitions of those other nations.
Consider that this might not be the first time VDH's eternally recurring analogies to the one thing he knows are strained. When all you've got is a hammer and many unquestioningly adore the way you swing it . . . .
P.S. More VDH on Ukraine
https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/16/10-realities-of-ukraine/