So, for the sake of assuaging my own fears, I would just like to ask: is there a possibility that giving in to the Kymaian position now could lead to them making more demands to us, similar to the situation with Eretria's metics?
I mean.
The metics have been making repeated "demands" (actually more like "polite requests") because frankly their situation sucks donkey nuts. Eretria treats them rather poorly and exploits them in many ways, so when they get together to send messages to the assembly, the messages will predictably be of the form "gee, could our taxes maybe be lower" or "could we maybe be allowed to own our own houses" or "wow, we are in a
shitload of debt, can anything be done about that, it's kind of backbreaking?"
The metics have grievances, and will periodically air them. The only way to avoid this would be to refuse to hear the metics' grievances at all, which would cause even more problems in the long run.
...
The Kymaians are in a different position. Basically, they're in a pretty dire military situation, but may still want assurances that we're not just offering them candy until they get in our van and we take them away to be sold into slavery or whatever. And that we're not going to relentlessly subjugate them and humiliate them once they join our Epulian League, a political construct they are none too familiar with.
They are, no doubt, grateful for the
material aid we are providing, but the fact that Greek city-states rarely do this for one another inherently gives rise to a bit of suspicion as to our ulterior motives.
But I don't expect the Kymaians to "demand concessions" in the sense of getting anything much nicer than what we might reasonably give them anyway to help them get on their feet. And it's a lot more likely to be an ask than a demand.
Are we making slaves of them, though? No. What we are doing is giving them free land, food, shelter, and asking that in return all they do is follow our league law and allow the common people of the league who have funded this extravagance to eke out an honest living from the earth as well. Were your drowning man not only rescued but offered a plot of the captain's cleared land on condition that his son or friend might tend to a corner, would you think it just if the rescued man threw him out because "it is his land"?
Leukos:
"If that is your concern, we have only to buy less land from the Daorsi, and let the Kymaians purchase or conquer the rest for themselves. Or to found a second polis of our own, close to Nea Kymai, for Epulians. Or to insist that the Kymaians' League dues be raised from the tenth part to the eighth part, until the debt they owe the Epulian League and Eretria is paid. Any of these would be more fitting than to demand that the proud Kymaians to accept the dissolution of their polis at the hands of uncounted foreigners who know their ways not."
Nice story and all, but once again this is both a disingenuous comparison as well an inaccurate representation of the current situation.
Firstly, you erroneously are mischaracterizing the situation. We did not just happen upon Kymai in the midst of their distress, deciding to take advantage of the situation as your little story seems to portray. As you said, we consciously chose to go out of our way to save Kymai, spending much time deliberating on their situation...
Finally, the last sentence referencing swooping down upon our fellow Hellenes, to bring unto them ruin like vultures pecking upon a dying beast rings hollow when we take into account what occurred with Lykai, where in this case two vultures in the form of Taras and Eretria swooped down upon Lykai, with the disloyal citizens being exiled to our lands, with us then granting them a colony at our sufferance in the Epulian League. Should we have simply killed the Lykaian exiles as you suggest? Letting them drown so to speak in your parlance, rather than letting them be humiliated?
In short, I think the story here is a gross mischaracterization of the situation.
We are not sailing in with a fleet into Kymai demanding that they join the Epulian League or die, which is what you suggested earlier:
We instead are sailing in with a evacuation fleet, offering to take any who are willing to take our offer. They are under no obligation to join us. Just as we are in no obligation to accede to their terms...
They would still be citizens is said colony however, that's how colonization works. If they don't take up our offer, their city state will still cease to exist when the Oscans finally breakthrough.
None of this changes anything.
The point remains, the Kymaians are surrounded by an enemy they cannot defeat. Their city will fall eventually, at which point they will all be killed or enslaved by the Oscans.
The choices they make, with that being their alternative, cannot be said to be
free and unforced choices. You keep glossing over the part where if they don't accept our offer,
they die, or become slaves, or if they're very lucky become isolated refugees with no city to call their own.
...
What you are saying, essentially, is that we have a right to make an offer on any terms that we please, even terms that force the Kymaians to abase themselves, because otherwise the Kymaians would have nothing at all.
The point of my writing Leukos telling a story about the sea captain trying to enslave the drowning man is that it's essentially the same argument the captain advances. The captain argues that since he's the only person who's even trying to save the drowning man, he has a right to ask whatever terms the drowning man sees fit. All the man's possessions? Sure, what use are those to a dead man? The man's freedom? Sure, if he'd rather be dead than a slave, that's his choice. If the man doesn't want to take the deal, he can just say no... and die.
It's exactly the same argument.
What's being raised in counter to this is that it is fundamentally unjust and unethical to demand things of a group of people, which they would never concede if not forced and coerced, and expect them to comply because of an outside threat of death. It is, when you get down to it, just another way of exploiting the desperate for personal gain. It is not a fitting thing.
Secondly, you speak of the power imbalance involved when it comes to the "slavery" imposed in the story, where the slavery is conflated to be the Linean Laws. As the Hegemon of the Epulian League, there already is an inherent power balance between us and the rest of the Epulian Poleis. We know it, and they know it. The rest of the Epulian Cities follow us because we offer them protection, with their long term survival being at stake otherwise. Why should we give Kymai a pass here, when we certainly don't give the rest of the League that sort of leeway?
Why
shouldn't we?
We've never played Eretria as a particularly cruel master for the little cities that make up the League. We tax them much more lightly than, say, the Athenian taxes on the Delian League. I can't remember a single time that we've had to threaten the use of force on a League city. And if some disaster like a fire or earthquake befell one of the League cities and they were in severe distress, I suspect we'd be open to waiving their League dues or providing them with economic aid to get them back on their feet.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Epulian League is that even though Eretria is by far its largest city, it
isn't an extractive empire designed to raise up Eretria and tax the League cities out of proportion to the benefits of having Eretria around (i.e. more trade and more protection from pirates, barbarian invasions, and being pushed around by cities like Taras or Corinth). Joining the Epulian League is a
pretty good deal, which is a big part of why we can send Obander to places like Melaina Kerkyra and be reasonably confident that he'll be able to convince them to join without us having them squawk to the Kerkyrans and end up at war with them or something.
And that's a real advantage for us. We have a reputation as a kindly master, and arguably not so much a master at all as an "elder brother," for the cities in our League. We don't leverage our position of advantage
nearly as hard as we could. And that means we're not constantly worrying about the League cities selling us out, or switching sides in a battle if they think they can get away with it, or us having to put down rebellions the way the Athenians are constantly having to do.
And it's an advantage that evaporates if we start self-justifying abusive or predatory actions against the League cities, carried out on our part to enrich ourselves or prevent potential rivals from emerging, in terms of "League rules" or "it's only fair, we're the biggest."
Your argument is a farce. You know what the League will see with a Linean Law bound Kymai? A grateful Kymai. The goodwill just doesn't miraculously vanish because less people agree to it, not when the lower number would be the people explicitly agreeable to such a deal. Furthermore, we have obligations to the League that we've willingly agreed to- how we uphold our obligations and how we exercise our beneficence are by no means one and the same.
And you know the difference between a Linean Law bound Kymai and a free Kymai from the perspective of the League would be? One is open to them, they can trade there, own property and engage with them as equals, and as fellow men offer their condolences and aid as prospective brothers in arms. The other? The other sees them as outsiders, would be thieves of their very identity, refuses them property or any rights beyond those afforded to a stranger...
Lords themselves above the rest of the league by right of their history beyond it...
Leukos:
Why would the Neakymaians consider Epulians as thieves, when Epulians have taken nothing from them? They ask to be allowed to decide who will and will not be a citizen of Kymai, not because they view us as thieves, but because we are not Kymaians, as surely as they are not Eretrians.
When the Eretrians first came to Epulia, they decreed that all who had landed with the fleet would be citizens. Suppose that the Athenians had aided the fleet, but imposed their own version of the Law of Linos upon the first Eretrians. All might have been different. Eretria would have been flooded with others, men who knew not of the Divine Marriage, who did not see the relationship between the
aristoi and the common man as Drako did, who did not respect trade not as our great merchants did, who might have raised up tyrants or split the city into stasis, or done other, stranger things we cannot now imagine. The city might have starved, or thrived. But it would not have been
Eretria.
That is what these imagined, Athenians of another life might have taken from us.
But in this life that is, they took no such thing. We do not consider them thieves. Why would the Kymaians see us in any other way, when we do not take this from them?
...
And why would they consider Epulians beneath themselves, any more than the Eretrians would treat a Tarentine with scorn when he walks among us?
A new city, built on the bare rock and cleared out of unoccupied land, can accept any man as a citizen, but a city that has stood for a generation is one whose citizens are a firm and established band. But when a city reaches a proper age of years, and is considered grown, we do not ask it to open its gates to admit foreigners as citizens against their will.
Tiny Ankon was made an exception to this, as it is still so young. None of the other League cities were asked to do so, as they are not. Melaina Kerkyra and Epidauros will not be asked to do so, as they are not.
So the question becomes, is Kymai a new city, or an old one? Is the city of Kymai destroyed, with the Kymaians now homeless men who happen to arrive on a foreign shore, forced to accept any custom of that shore's people as the price of their salvation? Or is the city of Kymai to survive, having been rescued from destruction by our strength and magnanimity?
Is the site of Nea Kymai a new colony and new city that never existed before? Or is it the new site of the old city of Kymai?
