The United States is going to distinguish itself historically.
We’ve already had our plague years but maybe we can do it again, and this time our tyrant will succumb. Then we can take over the Delian League/NATO and turn it into our personal empire before a more powerful nation to the West stomps on us. The future is bright!
Didn’t you have your Melian Dialogue already with Greenland?
It’s a timely analogy, since the US also executed their celebrity pedophile by state-mandated suicide.
=9)-DX
“Democracy, Mister Cromwell, was a Greek drollery based on the foolish notion that there are extraordinary possibilities in very ordinary people.”
— King Charles I,Cromwell/ (1970)
You’re doing it all in the wrong order if you do.
First you’re supposed to ban debt slavery and release everyone from their debts (Solon’s seisachtheia, early 6th Century)
Then you’re supposed to have a couple of tyrants first (Peisistratus and his children – late 6th Century)
Then comes the brief period of democratic flourishing (Cleisthenes to Ephialtes, first decades of the 5th Century)
Then you take over the Delian League (post Salamis, c.480-440)
Then you have the big war with your former allies, Melian dialogue, Mitylene fiasco, etc.
Then it’s the plague (c.429-428BC). Ideally great literature should result from this (Oedipus Tyrannos), but yours didn’t seem to deliver
After that a brief period of further oligarchy (The Thirty Tyrants, 411-10BC). This is supposed to last thirteen months, but yours has already been decades.
Then come the disastrous sea battles (Arginousae, Aegospotami), the attempts to recall Alcibiades, etc., followed by the abject surrender, murder of Socrates, Aristophanes’ Frogs, etc.
After this you should be fine. The 4th Century BC was pretty good on Athens. This is the age of Plato and Aristotle, the flowering of the philosophical schools, and the broadening of horizons with the Hellenistic period. A Macedonian tyrant will at some point install his harem in your temple of the virgin goddess, but you’re pretty used to that already.
On the other hand, Athenian democracy was designed to be actually democratic. As in the ordinary people were put in charge. American “democracy” has, from the beginning, been anti-democratic. The founders deliberately introduced things like the Senate, electoral college and property qualifications to prevent ordinary people from gaining power. Madison was explicit about it – like Aristotle he understood that democracy and inequality were incompatible. Aristotle’s solution – reduce inequality. Madison’s – limit democracy..
Bring on the ostraka.
Has USA ever had ‘the rightous Aristides’ ?
FWIW:
… and she’s no longer in that job.
Did the United States ever get to the ratio of one enslaved person to one citizen or did women ever vote in Athens ? The US has a way to go yet then.
Maybe a social media fight comes close to the dishonesty and manipulative rhetoric of an Athenian court case but the Athenians had pros on that stuff.