Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Those Darn Greeks

Those Darn Greeks

Most TV talk show personalities and Radio Talk Show Hosts would have you think that the world began with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Well it didn’t. There was some stuff happening on this planet before 1776. American History is very short…I believe I told you that my father once said that he talked to a civil war veteran as a boy who related a story of his great grand something or other told, who fought in the American Revolution. It is sort of like JRR Tolkien’s Silmarillion, which shows that in the history of the Elf’s, the Lord or the Rings Trilogy was a footnote.

Democracy started with the Greeks… In days of old they were more than the seedy group of socialists that currently occupies the turf. Anyway these Greeks of the old school pushed back the frontiers of enlightened thinking in virtually every area imaginable and it used to be… In the Civil War era, that a liberal arts education was the only education and it carried with it a liberal dose of Latin and Greek. This is where all the fancy notions in our Constitution came from. Jefferson took them from the Greeks and the members of the Constitutional Convention pretty much understood what he was talking about. Now there were many Greek States and Democracy was not the only form of rule…indeed it was, outside of Athens, not to be seen much in evidence. This is because it required a citizen to both look out for their self interest as well as the public good at the same time. Is that pie in the sky or what?

Anyway after the Peloponnesian War… you know after the Spartans finally kicked the Athenian’s ass… with the help of the Persians….Sneaky Devils…, those Persians….The Greeks were flat on their butts, after years of war fighting, rape, pillage and destruction. Now in those times Cyrus, the second son of the King of Persia was the conduit for much of the financial aid and political support that had flowed into the Spartan Camp. He saw in the unemployed Greek armies a fighting machine that had taken war fighting to an all time high level. His political ambitions were to displace his brother as Sultan and to this end hired 10K of these Greek Mercenaries.

So good were these Greek fighters that in short order they cut through a vastly numerically superior Persian enemy and were on the outskirts of Bagdad. It is here that Cyrus did something stupid and went and got himself killed. To take advantage of the power vacume, Big Brother, the Sultan, or whatever his title was… declared a truce and called everyone together to negotiate what was going to happen next. He set up tents, arranged for catering, good food and wine, no doubt some dancing girls and some of the amenities for which the decadent Persians are famous.

Naturally all the Greek generals accepted the invitation and flocked to the gathering. I’ll tell you tomorrow what happened, if you haven‘t already guessed. For all their genius, the Greeks of the day were pretty dissipated and their enlightment didn't run all that deep into common sense.