Remove ads

Magna Graecia: Titanomachia (A City State Quest)

Reader mode
phil03 said:
On the subject of Athens I find it deliciously irronic that, for all the bad blood of our first years toward them, we have essentially became pocket-Athenai.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

To make it worse, so far Eretria's survival have greatly strengthened Athens. I worry about Athens winning the Peloponnesian Wars and imposing Hegemonia in Italia.

Athens could make a far superior effort at actually uniting Greece than Sparta did after their victory in OTL.

Godwinson said:
Take careful note of how readily he hefts the stone in service of his argument!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Also note how he hefts an ornately carved stone, rather than simply opting for any old bolder.

Truly, a bear of Eretrian sensibilities, who understands the need of properly decorated rocks to support the dignity of debate in the Ekklesia.

LonelyWolf999 said:
So I've been doing some thinking. Right now, we currently make 9.1 talents off of this. That's out of the 302.1 talents we make total, roughly 3% of our income.

... Why are we doing this again? It's pretty clear that the League serves a much better purpose as an extension of our sphere of influence, culture, and trade network than any sort of traditional empire you derive tribute off of. To be blunt, this tax seems like an egregious stick in the eye of the narrative we want to pull with little actual benefit for our city. While I don't think getting rid of the taxation altogether is a good idea - it'd be a loss of face and admission of guilt, major no-no's in inter-state politics - perhaps more officially shifting the use of the coin towards something other than furnishing our pockets would be a good idea. Like, we could use it as an official colony fund, or marked for the maintenance of an Adriatic defense fleet, or funding cross-league projects of various sorts. Surely the political capital and practical gain of something like that is vastly more useful than pulling in nine talents per year.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Well, if you ask me, we want to get money from the league mainly to diversify our sources of income. More diversity means more ability to weather bad times.

Also, I'm not sure we'd get any political capital by replacing the league tribute with ring-fenced funds everyone contributed too. I'm pretty sure the league members would see making such a change as a way to limit our liabilities to them in the event of bad times. Add to that, silver sitting in a vault actively hurts our economy. There's no efficient banking, no stocks, no shares, no government bonds. Silver being saved for a rainy day is firmly out of economic activity and the treasury to secure said silver costs money due to needing security and routine maintenance. So such a common fund could also be percieved as an unwelcome burden.

fasquardon
 
phil03 said:
On the subject of Athens I find it deliciously irronic that, for all the bad blood of our first years toward them, in many regards we have essentially became pocket-Athenai.

We have both pionnered new, and more democratic, form of governments, our meteoric rise in the west pretty much followed along Athens own meteoric rise in Hellas, we both have foreign policies on the adventurous side of things, we both played a key role in the great conflicts that have defined what the Western Greeks and Hellas have become geopolitically (the Great Sicilian War for us and the Persian Wars for Athens) and we have both builded maritime leagues in the seas where most of our commerce occur while also developing rather good navies.

Even more ironic is the fact that the man who had once started his political career as the leader of the Oligarchic opposition, and quite possibly played with the idea of toppling Eretria's government at some point, has given its name to, and has his familly lead, the Demos who seek the go the furtherest in the ''Athenai-The Furthest'' direction. To the point where Symachos scheme for Kerkyra did have rather strong vibe of being the Eretrian equivalent of the Sicilian Expedition.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I am now concerned that we may lose our entire fleet twice on far-off adventures among other disasters, but that is probably my mind going places.
 
phil03 said:
We have both pionnered new, and more democratic, form of governments, our meteoric rise in the west pretty much followed along Athens own meteoric rise in Hellas, we both have foreign policies on the adventurous side of things, we both played a key role in the great conflicts that have defined what the Western Greeks and Hellas have become geopolitically (the Great Sicilian War for us and the Persian Wars for Athens) and we have both builded maritime leagues in the seas where most of our commerce occur while also developing rather good navies.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

By Greek democracy standards, we are less democratic, since we elect an executive even in peacetime and for civilian matters. You could call our experiments with Metic assembly more democratic though.
 
Furthest Eretria is massively undemocratic because she doesn't sort things by sortition and thus enables an elected oligarchy to rule instead of her leaders be the choice of the constant Olympians. :(
 
ManusDomini said:
Furthest Eretria is massively undemocratic because she doesn't sort things by sortition and thus enables an elected oligarchy to rule instead of her leaders be the choice of the constant Olympians. :(
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Would sortition essentially give lucky players the opportunity to create new and interesting opportunities/problems?
 
The lithokratia is the most democratic part of Eretria's system since it most closely resembles the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the most democratic system there is.

Of course, we'll never be capable of actually fully implementing this radically democratic system. :cry:
 
Random Member said:
The lithokratia is the most democratic part of Eretria's system since it most closely resembles the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the most democratic system there is.

Of course, we'll never be capable of actually fully implementing this radically democratic system. :cry:
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The lithokratia is just "elect your oligarch". :V
 
fasquardon said:
To make it worse, so far Eretria's survival have greatly strengthened Athens. I worry about Athens winning the Peloponnesian Wars and imposing Hegemonia in Italia.

Athens could make a far superior effort at actually uniting Greece than Sparta did after their victory in OTL.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I mean, on a purely OOC basis I am a proud Atticophile and have probably spend too much time back on AH.com arguing with what I see as a tendency many have to witewash Sparta, to at least some extent. As a result, I am personally more then cool with the tought of Athens winning at the end.

On an IC level, yes Athens has better ods at winning the peace after the Peloponesian War but I would still argue that a Spartan victory would be far worse for Eretria as Athens is at least reasonably friendly to the city now, while Sparta, with her ties with Taras and Syracuse alongside her historical despite for anything that wasn't an oligarchy, is unlikely to as well disposed toward Eretria.

Furthermore, just because the war ended up in total victory for one side in OTL doesn't mean it necessarely will ITTL, and one has to admit that Athens victories around the Gulf of Corinth has served us pretty well too. Without them the window we needed to have a go at establishing our naval hegemonia on the Adriatic would never have existed. All and all I would say the idea scenario for Eretria would be a clear, but not decisive, Athenian victory. Enough to hasten Corinth decline dramatically and keep Sparta from interacting with the Western Greeks in any truly meaningfull sense but not enough to allow Athens to essentially do what it want.
 
Last edited:
Our ideal spot would be stalemate in Hellas while we build up in Italy, honestly. Can we engineer that ourselves? I'm not sure. Maybe the best we can hope for is to position ourselves towards Athenai in a friendly enough way they don't bother about our little nearly closed off lake.
 
Nyvis said:
The lithokratia is just "elect your oligarch". :V
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Uh... I think it's actually kind of the exact opposite of that. You're thinking of the Roman 'dictator.'

In lithokratia, the existing elected representative leaders explicitly return their power to the assembly, and the only new quasi-official person elected is a very literal speaker whose job is to bring up topics for discussion in the assembly and ensure that political debate proceeds in an orderly fashion.

All actual decision-making is made by the assembly past that point.

It's effectively a dissolution of the government and reversion to direct democracy, with the absolute minimum of official governance required to make it even mechanically possible for an assembly of thousands of citizens to engage in meaningful discussion and make meaningful decisions.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Uh... I think it's actually kind of the exact opposite of that. You're thinking of the Roman 'dictator.'

In lithokratia, the existing elected representative leaders explicitly return their power to the assembly, and the only new quasi-official person elected is a very literal speaker whose job is to bring up topics for discussion in the assembly and ensure that political debate proceeds in an orderly fashion.

All actual decision-making is made by the assembly past that point.

It's effectively a dissolution of the government and reversion to direct democracy, with the absolute minimum of official governance required to make it even mechanically possible for an assembly of thousands of citizens to engage in meaningful discussion and make meaningful decisions.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

In theory. In practices our demes are heavily influenced by the Oligarch, and the QM already explained this is part of why they work with the democracy rather than against. Because they have their influence anyway, without the backlash of an official oligarchy.
 
Nyvis said:
In theory. In practices our demes are heavily influenced by the Oligarch, and the QM already explained this is part of why they work with the democracy rather than against. Because they have their influence anyway, without the backlash of an official oligarchy.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Well, the radical Athenians claim it's an oligarchy. In practice I'm not really so sure. The Athenians also use slaves for their civil service rather than citizens and preserve legal class distinctions, so it's not as if one democracy is obviously more radical than the other.

Lithokratia explicitly strips all of those positions away and gives power to a citizen assembly. Not sure how much more anti-oligarchic you can get.

phil03 said:
Furthermore, just because the war ended up in total victory for one side in OTL doesn't mean it necessarely will ITTL, and one has to admit that Athens victory around the Gulf of Corinth has served us pretty well too.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It's a fairly significant departure from our timeline. Kerkyra wasn't part of the Athenian tributary network OTL but it is here, and Athenai has also impressed the other Ionian islands into the league. It has a much larger Adriatic presence and focus and kept Pylos here, where it did not OTL, in part because of the impasse between Athenai and Sparta but also because Pylos can help protect Eretrian grain shipments to Athenai.
 
Yeah.

It's like, I'm pretty sure that if something vaguely recognizable as "Western civilization" eventually emerges in this timeline, and its historians know about Eretria, that "lithocracy" is going to go down in history as a term adopted by ANARCHISTS. A term for the idea of radical direct democracy removing presumably inept or corrupt public officials, and resolving all matters through discussion and voting among themselves.

It's not "rule by that autocrat" or "rule by those oligarchs." It's "rule by the stone."

Like "who is the ruler? Not the chief executive, not the foreign secretary we elected? Fuckit, that rock is in charge. There is no ruler! The "rulership" chair is occupied by an inanimate stone! No one is in charge.

All decisions will be made consensually by public conversation among the citizens followed by a vote. No bureaucrats, no elected officials, the citizenry recognizes no masters.

...

@Nyvis , you can argue that this is still oligarchic in that there are still some people with enough social leverage that they are more likely to be listened to. But if so, then there is never going to be any form of government that isn't an oligarchy. And if the word 'oligarchy' no longer has the capacity to distinguish between one set of governments that is oligarchic, and one set that isn't.
 
Well obviously any democracy in which there remain significant economic distinctions between the people, especially one in which labour is still very unproductive in comparison to the post-industrial era, the democracy remains dominated by the aristocracy, or at the very least the plutocracy, of the most wealthy and most capable of spending time on the matter. There are areas in which this is not the case, but remains a fundamental reality of Athenai; all of the notables and speakers remained wealthy, and the ordinary citizen was most important in areas where financial incentives made it possible for them to participate most, like juries.

There is an inequality of leisure and time that privileges the more wealthy, but that doesn't mean that the wealthy rule. Taking a realistic perspective on the issue can avoid idealistic boxes of placing a state like Eretria or Athenai as simply democracies or oligarchies, terms designed as rhetorical devices to classify states, and thus necessarily simplify.

Deadly Snark said:
Athens is definitely in a much better position here. But the war is still young and Persian Gold is a hell of an advantage.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Persian gold doesn't start being a significant factor until the Decelean War, however, as the Athenians decide to support the son of a rebelling satrap from Lydia.
 
Last edited:
I mean I would assume the statrap wouldn't want an Athens that's too strong running around even without that. A strong and rich Athens is one that can incite revolts in the Ionian Cities under Persian rule.
 
Deadly Snark said:
I mean I would assume the statrap wouldn't want an Athens that's too strong running around even without that. A strong and rich Athens is one that can incite revolts in the Ionian Cities under Persian rule.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Athenai already controls all the Ionian cities of any note. Smyrne is fairly small and was destroyed a while ago so it's just a collection of villages.
 
Deadly Snark said:
Oh shit we buffed them too much.

QUICK SOMEONE SEND A DIPLOMAT TO SPARTA!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Well no, this is historical. Athenai had control of the Ionian cities following liberating them in the Persian Wars. They're some of the biggest moneymakers in terms of tribute, with large cities like Miletos and Ephesos sending huge amounts of tribute to the city. After transferring to Spartan control, were lost following a failed Spartan invasion of Persia and the Korinthian War in the early 4th century BCE through the King's Peace.

It also helped underline how messed up the situation had gotten in Hellas by this point that the Spartans were using explicit Persian support to maintain hegemony over the rest of Greece.
 
Last edited:
Simon_Jester said:
Yeah.

It's like, I'm pretty sure that if something vaguely recognizable as "Western civilization" eventually emerges in this timeline, and its historians know about Eretria, that "lithocracy" is going to go down in history as a term adopted by ANARCHISTS. A term for the idea of radical direct democracy removing presumably inept or corrupt public officials, and resolving all matters through discussion and voting among themselves.

It's not "rule by that autocrat" or "rule by those oligarchs." It's "rule by the stone."

Like "who is the ruler? Not the chief executive, not the foreign secretary we elected? Fuckit, that rock is in charge. There is no ruler! The "rulership" chair is occupied by an inanimate stone! No one is in charge.

All decisions will be made consensually by public conversation among the citizens followed by a vote. No bureaucrats, no elected officials, the citizenry recognizes no masters.

...

@Nyvis , you can argue that this is still oligarchic in that there are still some people with enough social leverage that they are more likely to be listened to. But if so, then there is never going to be any form of government that isn't an oligarchy. And if the word 'oligarchy' no longer has the capacity to distinguish between one set of governments that is oligarchic, and one set that isn't.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Cetashwayo said:
Well obviously any democracy in which there remain significant economic distinctions between the people, especially one in which labour is still very unproductive in comparison to the post-industrial era, the democracy remains dominated by the aristocracy, or at the very least the plutocracy, of the most wealthy and most capable of spending time on the matter. There are areas in which this is not the case, but remains a fundamental reality of Athenai; all of the notables and speakers remained wealthy, and the ordinary citizen was most important in areas where financial incentives made it possible for them to participate most, like juries.

There is an inequality of leisure and time that privileges the more wealthy, but that doesn't mean that the wealthy rule. Taking a realistic perspective on the issue can avoid idealistic boxes of placing a state like Eretria or Athenai as simply democracies or oligarchies, terms designed as rhetorical devices to classify states, and thus necessarily simplify.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

This, basically. Any anarchist worth its salt with recognize the interesting parts of the democratic system, like the sovereign direct democratic assembly, frown a bit at the executive with its large power especially on missions abroad but shrug it as a necessity with the time... Then go apeshit about private property, class, castes and slavery.

Direct democracy when some people starve if they take time off is a bit of a joke by modern standards, even without mentioning the people who don't have a vote. Or the uses of wealth in influencing people to your side.

There's definitely inspiration to be had, don't get me wrong, and I could see anarchists taking from lithocracy. Maybe combined with the idea of leagues of cities to compensate from the issue of distance and increasingly larger assemblies. But they wouldn't see Eretria itself as the ideal, just one idea worth salvaging.
 
I wouldn't really expect modern ideology to be perfectly reflected in an ancient Greek city state. If it was I probably fucked up somewhere.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top