Laudator Temporis Acti

Peter Green (1924-2024), Armada from Athens (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970), p. 151:

Nothing is harder for a modern individual to understand than ancient concepts of loyalty and treachery. Those who have read so far will be uncomfortably aware that patriotism, in our sense, is a quality more or less irrelevant to Greek civic morality during the fifth century B.C. On very exceptional occasions — the Persian Wars are a good example — patriotism could burst its normal partisan bounds, and become something we all can recognise; but in the ordinary way loyalty was to one's family clan, one's religious or political group, rather than to that comparatively recent institution the polis. What one scholar describes as our passion for "the transcendental power of Greek city-state patriotism" is largely the pursuit of a modern myth. There was seldom a time when an oligarchic group was not ready to betray a democratically controlled city — or vice versa — to the foreign enemy at the gates. As for distinguished individual traitors, there was no shortage of them either in Athens or in Sparta: Hippias and Pausanias are only the first two names that come to mind. The number of Spartan rulers who defected, collaborated, or plotted against the state would make a very impressive roll-call on its own.