DEMOCRACY HAD ITS ENEMIES IN ANCIENT TIMES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23339, 6 May 1939, Page 1 (Supplement)

DEMOCRACY HAD ITS ENEMIES IN ANCIENT TIMES

Corfu, Historic Centre of Mediterranean Strife

By E. M. BLAIKLOCK

are spots on the earth's surface which are fated to be the cause of strife. Ancient Troy was one such place. The old tales of heroes, of Achilles of the fatal heel, of crafty Ulysses and the wooden horse, and all Homer's wealth of story, are memories, enshrined in the poetry of troubadours, of warfare centuries long. Excavations on the site of Troy show the charred remains of at least eight cities. Troy straddled the end of a caravan route which ran, for all we know, to far Pekin. Troy commanded the Dardanelles. Its chieftains doubtless grew rich on levied dues. And so it was that hungry eyes were turned on Troy, and greedy hands crept to the hilts of Grecian swords. Home of Peace

Another such place, over which the tribes of men have quarrelled, is an island lying sickle-shaped, its hollow side toward tho coast of Albania. Tlio ancients called it Corcyra. To-day, it is Corfu, most beautiful of the isles of Greece. It was once the home of peace. In Homer's story Ulysses swam ashore there and met the gracious Nausicaa, the loveliest of Greek girl-heroines. There he rested in tho palace of King Alcinous, who lived in peace among his vines and apple trees. One of tho king's ships took the hero home to Ithaca, and was turned to stone by the angry god when all but home. And there wo may see it to-day, a treecovered island, in Corfu's harbour.

The island* leaves the quiet world of legend and steps into the storms of history in 734 8.C., when it became $ colony of Corinth. A bare generation later, and the colony has broken loose' from the motherland and shattered her ships hi -battle. It was like the revolt of our own transatlantic colonies, and for 'just such a cause. But lest the parallel should be complete, Corcyra fell again, and Corinth saved its dignity by nominal control. In thoso days Sicily and Italy were the El Dorado of colonising Greeks. It was westward that Greek trade was thrusting. No mariner's compass guided the trader's clumsy ship. The long island of Corcyra was the handiest of steppijng stones in the widest stretch of open sea. The ships crept north along the broken coast, touched Corcyra, and then sought the blue line of Italy. So it was that Corcj-ra's people became mariners, built a war-fleet which rivalled that of Corinth and Athens, and attracted to its olive-covered hills the scheming eyes of mainland potentates. Proud Imperialism One of the great ages in the world's history is the fifth century before Christ. It opens with the din of battle. Persia has rolled west a million strong and tho free men of Greece hurl the Asiatic invader back, to make the fen-nel-choked plain of Marathon, and the narrow 6ea at Salamis places as familiar to their nation as Waterloo and Trafalgar are to us.

But now the century has half gone, and Athens and Sparta, who stood shoulder to shoulder when the great invader came, now glare across the frontiers. Look now at a map of the

jagged peninsula of Greece or picture it in the mind's eye. There lies Athens to the east. Its streets were filled by the most brilliant people who e„ver built a great democracy. Even counting its vast slave population it was no bigger than Auckland. But it was a state. Its thinkers have influenced the world as no others have done. Freedom was its life-blood—freedom and proud imperialism. A thousand cities, wrote Aristophanes, pay tribute to Athens. The poet exaggerated, but quite two hundred did. They were scattered through the islands o£ the-sea, and along the waterways to -fcho Black .-Sea, for Athens depended on the wheat ,6f_the Ukraine, and held the breadline firmly. The navy was Athens' wooden wall.

Fascist State

Look now at the fat claw map of Greece, which points 60utti f'btelow the Isthmus of Corinth. Here militaristic Sparta was predominant. Spme accident of history had made a group of aristocrats a dominant caste in a large population. The Spartan could,, only live and hold in check the surg*> ing mass of Helots by dedicating hisr life to the sword. For self-preservation' the ruling caste built that system which has become the world's byword. It tfas* a form of Fascism, complete with regimentation for male and female, Gestapo, contempt for culture, Horst Wessel songs, militarism and everything humanity to-day shudders at when Gayda and Goebbels perform. It is a fatality of history that rival ideologies cross their frontiers. There was no room in Greece and the islands of her seas, for the "two views of life Athens and Sparta represented to live together. There was Spartan propaganda among Athens' subjects and Athenian retaliation. The democrats among Sparta's subjects looked to Athens as the liberator. Aristocrats who chafed at' democracy found in Sparta their spiritual home. Ancient Axis Corinth lay between the rivals. But Corinth was a naval and a trading power, and hated the enterprise of the busy men of Athens. So it was that twenty-four centuries ago the world saw an axis against democracv. It ran■ from Corinth to Sparta, and there were times when timid lines ran out and tried to form a triangle, for hatred scrupled not to rouse the Persian king against the democrat. The king, however, was too biisy, even as the Mikado may be to-day.

Here we return to Corfu. The colonv had ne\ er loved the Corinthian motherland and had fallen easily to the clever diplomacy of Pericles, democratic leader of Athens. Then came the spark which was one of the two or three which set the Greek world on fire. Corcyra quarrelled with Corinth over a town, strangely enough on the Albanian mainland. Athens honoured her bond. Indeed, she could do no other. Corcyra's fleet was the third fleet of Greece and held the naval balance of powetf.

So the fire started in Corfu. It burned for a generation. Athens fell, rose again and then, a century later, fell together .with her, rivn,l before the arms of the Dictator Philip of Macedon; fell and never rose again. The story of the long war is told in the laconic pages of the Athenian Thucydides. Only once or twice does Corfu flash across his scene. One such occasion is a lurid interlude when the pro-Spartan Fascists staged a civil war. So Sparta worked, dividing within, like financed Nazi cells to-day. The end is one of Thucydides' grimmest stories. They stacked the corpses on the waggons "crosswise." The fire that spread from Corfu turned something out of Greek life. Without it, history might have been strangely different. And now we watch Corfu again. Soldiers from Athens camp beneath tho olive trees, and Sparta is across the Btrait with Mussolini.