![]() ![]() These were only some of the men that dominated these early days, that spoke to the assembly. The scheming Sideros, for whom no argument proved too exotic, no challenge too formidable. Little personalities clashed we hear whispers of the smallest citizen, the angry old man who incoherently but courageously rants to the assembly, the noble Kallias who spoke with a rhetoric so notable he was later remembered for it. This was also a time of great consternation. Instant legends, the stuff of questioning, the stuff of mythology, to be immortalized spectacularly in writing and song, if not in play where the somewhat atrocious Eretrian playwrights were incapable of producing anything worth remembering. It was questioned if Drako was really a man of such virtue and wit and diplomatic brilliance as to stun both the assembly and the Pauketii envoys in awe by his display of laconic empathy, when he proclaimed at the end of the first war that the Paucetii have suffered, indeed, and "so have we". They would wonder if perhaps the numbers involved in the Battle of Bare Road were too high, if the men that Herodion dispatched to see Hades were too many to believe. This was a time of great heroes, perhaps too great in later days they would call into question the Battle of the Fifty Masts, where humble Eusebios broke the backs of the Liburnian pirates hellbent on sacking Eretria armed with only his sharp eyes and three Triremes. Greek or Barbarian, it was all a struggle for survival and immortality that claimed the lives of most of its participants one way or another. There was no other reality of human relations to strive towards, no shared ideals. In their native land they had been weak, but now they were strong, and in the ancient world, the strong triumphed over the weak. ![]() ![]() Even as Greeks found themselves forced out of their homes by the Persians, to flee across the treacherous Mediterranean, they imposed their hypocrisy on the peoples they encountered. As all Greeks who sought homes abroad, the triumph of their settlement was the tragedy of another displacement. Perhaps not wholly new, an echo of an idea they watched in their native land from the horizon of Attika, but certainly new in their new land.Īnd what a land it was! Well watered and rich, but not without enemies. Instead, they quarreled as men did, but out of their quarrels something new arose. That the city often did not meet the ideal was no great insult, for to reach such heights would surely herald a punishment from the Gods for hybris. It was a city of ideals of the people as polis, ideals of the low and the high united. This was not just the city of stone and clay that sat perched upon a promontory jutting into the Adriatic, but a city of men and women. Not only physical walls and temples, but a city had been built on the ashes of another. They were also times of building, of construction. These were the lean times, the times of suffering and discontent and trouble.
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