The Western Greek Slogan of Freedom

de Lisle, Christopher

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the western Greek adoption and adaptation of a key Greek diplomatic slogan – the ‘freedom of the Greeks’ – is central to understanding how that slogan developed from the fifth century BC to the Roman conquest. The western Greeks developed their own version of this idea, which remained connected to the mainland Greek discourse, but developed unique features that had a particularly significant influence on the Romans and their diplomatic interactions with the Greeks. Scholars such as K. A. Raaflaub and S. Dmitriev have produced excellent studies of the development of the discourse about freedom in mainland Greece, but the western Greek dimension of this discourse has been neglected. This western dimension is part of the same discourse: as in the mainland, so in the west, non-Greeks were portrayed as enemies of ‘freedom’ and the defence of ‘freedom’ against them was used to justify the construction of empires. The crucial difference was that from the start, the western Greek slogan placed stress on the role of the individual military leader as the protector of Greek freedom, which was used by Sicilian tyrants to justify autocratic rule. The importance of the individual military leader for the defence of freedom encouraged non-autocratic regimes in the West to import temporary autocrats to lead them. In the Punic Wars, Roman generals successfully assumed this role as imported defender of freedom. The impact of this western experience can be seen, finally, in the way the general Flamininus deployed the slogan of freedom during the Roman conquest of mainland Greece.

Citation

de Lisle, C. (2021). The Western Greek Slogan of Freedom. In G. Masalcı-Şahin, & A. Doğan (Eds.), War and Diplomacy in Ancient Times: Eskiçağda Savaş ve Diplomasi (163-198). Zero Books

• Publication Date: 2021
• Deposit Date: Mar 10, 2022
• Pages: 163-198
• Book Title: War and Diplomacy in Ancient Times: Eskiçağda Savaş ve Diplomasi
• Publisher URL: https://www.zerobooksonline.com/tr/product/url/eskicagda-savas-ve-diplomasi