When most people think of Ancient Greece, they think of Athena. The second-place runner-up would be Sparta and in third place is probably Corinth. If you’re a gamer, you might be thinking of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, but even in that game, Athens is a central location, her magnificent Acropolis reconstructed in all of its glory.
The game makes no attempt to downplay the might of Athens. It sports a fantastically tall statue of the goddess Athena, protector of cities and mother of democracy. So incredibly tall was this statue, that it could be seen from miles away on the ocean. Everything about the Acropolis was large and magnificent, a reflection of the city’s wealth and power, and, of course, the gods’ glory.
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey takes place smack dab in the middle of the Peloponnesian War, but how did it get there, and what lessons can we learn from the Ancient Greek’s fear of hubris?
Hubris as a Sin
They say that pride comes before the fall, and early Christians believed that pride was the father of all seven deadly sins. In the only good thing about the Lorax movie, which was a song that never even made it into the film, the titular character makes the observation that you can’t blame The Ouncler’s expanding business on greed; it goes back to pride.
Pride has been condemned by cultures both modern and ancient, but hubris is like pride the nth degree. It is extreme pride that borders on being dangerous, and is combined with overconfidence and often arrogance. Hubris is the RMS Titanic, the character Carl Denim in King Kong, and real-life characters like Julius Caesar. The Ancient Greeks in particular had a real disdain for it, believing that if their religion had any behaviors that could be classified as sinful, it was hubris and inhospitality.
Even the story of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun, is a metaphor for hubris.
It is this extreme stance on hubris, one of the only mortal behaviors that the Greeks found offensive to the gods, that makes it difficult for us to imagine how Athens managed to enter into an era marked by a complete lack of self-reflection.
How Did Things Get Bad?
The Greco-Persian Wars, which began in 499 BC (BCE) and ended in 449 BC (BCE), saw the various Greek city-states at war with the Achaemenid Empire. Without going into the details of the conflict itself (Persians looking to seize territory in Greece), various city-states had banded together to drive the invading armies out of Greece once and for all.
Athens played a key role in this victory, thanks to their incredible naval force and their incredible wins, such as their victory at the Battle of Marathon. The result of all of this was hubris. The Athenians swelled with pride and they established the Delian League. The purpose of this league, incorporating some 300 cities, was to keep a reserve of funds to expel any future intruders through the use of paying Athens tributes in the forms of men, ships, and money.
The result: Athens became a regional powerhouse that exploited the many cities that were now under its power.
In the beginning, the treasury and tributes were kept on the uninhabited island of Delos, which served as a sanctuary to the god Apollo, but it wasn’t long before all of this was moved to Athens’ own Acropolis and kept inside Athena’s magnificent temple, the Parthenon.
Now, as any Assassin’s Creed player would know, the Acropolis isn’t exactly off-limits to the people. Everyone is able to swarm her many temples, partake in trade, and conduct sacrifices and petitions to the gods. Even if your average worshiper stayed with the statues littering the grounds and seldom strayed into the main temples themselves, it wasn’t long before people of importance were happily raiding the treasury to spend on building projects and Athenian interests, kind of like when Congress decides to raid social security.
Naturally, the other members of the Delian League weren’t happy at all! They were dutifully paying their tributes and working toward the goal of a unified defense against aggressors, not paying taxes to Athens so she could then fuel her own economy.
In response to these accusations, Athens became more brutal and corrupt – a perfect image of Hubris.
Of course, Athens wasn’t without any self-awareness at all. The city, though steeped in misogyny and bigotry, was the foundation of modern democracy. They prided themselves on their learning, philosophy, and civility. As such, there were many philosophers and play writers within her walls to act as antibodies, trying to fight off the cancer that is hubris before the city fell to ruin.
Plato had already warned against this arrogance and corruption, and Aeschylus wrote a play about their previous invaders, the Persians, not-so-subtly implying that the modern Athens was no better than the previously tyranny they’d driven off. Likewise, Thucydides later remarked that Athens’ moral compass was abandoned, replaced by savagery.
It’s no wonder, then, that Sparta, the city-state that’s not nearly as cool as comics and movies have made it out to be, began seeing Athens not only as an annoyance but as an actual military threat. In 431 BC (BCE), they mounted their own proxy war on the island of Corcyra. This revolt kicked off the Peloponnesian War, which waged on and off for around thirty years (it ended in 404 BC) until it ended with the destruction of Athens. All their achievements would be temporarily set aside as puppet rulers, or tyrants, controlled by Sparta established a new, anti-democratic regime.
To demonstrate just how bad Athens had become, drunk on their own hubris, in 416 BC (BCE), the Athenians killed all of the men of Melos and enslaved all of the women. This cruelty was done in retribution to the Melians not paying their taxes – Prince John of Robin Hood fame has nothing on these guys. One year later, Euripedes wrote his famous play The Trojan Women as an anti-war piece that still haunts audiences today.
This is the hubris of Athens. What a tragedy in world history that so great a city fell so hard!
