Upon Wings of Wax

A history of high-flying hubris and financial folly

You’ve heard it said before, Dear Reader: there is nothing new under the sun. 

“Too true,” says the week just gone, “too true!”  

Plague… war... disasters both natural and man-made... so frequently do such events wash over the world that we seem to have become blinded to their regularity. 

“There have been as many plagues as wars in history,” observed French-Algerian philosopher, Albert Camus, “yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.” 

We came here to Greece - and to this tiny seaport town, named after the patron saint of seafarers, Saint Nicholas - in spite of such common catastrophes. 

“If we’d listened to the news,” Wife Anya mentioned on our podcast last week, “we’d have remained at home, hiding under the covers in the fetal position, cowering in manufactured fear.”

Wife Anya is right, as (husbands well know) wives tend to be. Prior to setting sail, we were beset by fantastic warnings and dire premonitions of all kinds. 

News channels told of wildfires ripping through mainland Greece, threatening to engulf the entire Peloponnese in an inferno of truly Hephaestian proportions. 

Temples were set to melt... the Parthenon to topple from the Acropolis... the Gods themselves to weep from their hazy mountain top. 

And yet, when we visited Athena’s crowning jewel a few days later, there she was... standing in all her majestic glory. 

“Last week, we have the fires,” explained our taxi driver, as he navigated the far more dangerous Athenian avenues, “Next week will be something else. In Greece, is always a crisis, but never is serious.” 

Nevertheless, the broadsheets echoed the drama, running article after article on the “record setting heat-wave,” inextricably linked to the “climate catastrophe,” of course. 

“Welcome to global warming!” screeched one tourist, seemingly plucked at random and interviewed by the “impartial” newswire, Reuters. 

“We are constantly recording maximum record temperatures all these years,” chorused Stavros Solomos, a local researcher at the Centre for Atmospheric Physics and Climatology of the Academy of Athens, before adding, somewhat absurdly, “which means that climate change is here.” 

Yes, Mr. Solomos. Climates change. It’s what they do. It would be a busy day on news desks if they stopped changing. 

Climate Stasis: now there’s a story for you!

Temperatures did, indeed, rise above 100 °F... but soar like Icarus they did not. In the end, the heat was barely enough to melt the ice in your frappe, never mind the wax on your wings. 

As for the “record-setting” mercury, local historians must have been in stitches. A 30-year record... in a nation with continuous habitation dating back hundreds of thousands of years? What kind of cheap notch is this?

The Apidima Cave in Mani, in Southern Greece, which contains the oldest known remains of anatomically modern humans outside Africa, dates back some 210,000 years (give or take). The Petralona Cave of Macedonia reveals evidence of human ancestors dating back 270,000 years. 

We have no idea what the temperature was when our Balkan forefathers walked these parts a quarter of a million years or so ago... but we’re pretty sure it was... different. 

“Change is the only constant,” observed the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, more than two and a half millennia ago. Clever fellow, that ol’ Ephesian. But even if “no man ever steps in the same river twice,” history does tend to rhyme. The tale of sovereign debt defaults, that tragi-comic play in which Greece has earned a recurring, sometimes starring role, provides a useful example.

Much editorial ink has been spilled describing the current and ongoing economic crisis here. (Our guess is that much more will be spilled before it is over… should that day ever actually arrive.) But shirking one’s debt is nothing new for the Hellens.

Indeed, history’s first recorded “sovereign debt default” occurred not far north of where we sit, on the island of Delos, historical centerpiece of the Cyclades archipelago and mythological birthplace of Apollo. 

The tiny island produced very little of real world value… thus making it the ideal meeting place for the bloviating congresses of the ancient Delian League. Leto, mythological daughter of Titans Coeus and Phoebe, beseeched the island while searching for a birthplace for her twins, Artemis and Apollo:

Delos, if you would be willing to be the abode of my son Phoebus Apollo and
make him a rich temple -; for no other will touch you, as you will find: and I think
you will never be rich in oxen and sheep, nor bear vintage nor yet produce plants
abundantly. But if you have the temple of far-shooting Apollo, all men will bring
you hecatombs and gather here, and incessant savour of rich sacrifice will always
arise, and you will feed those who dwell in you from the hand of strangers; for
truly your own soil is not rich.

~ Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo 51-60

And so it was that, for a time, the Temple flourished… until the wealth residing therein became too alluring for the many hands grabbing at it.

In the years following the end of the Persian Wars, a dozen or so municipalities drew loans from the Temple of Delos, the Delian League capital where the vast treasures of the confederation of the Greek city-states were kept. But in 454 B.C., a few of the debtors came up short on their repayments. These defaults cost the temple dearly, inspiring Pericles to relocate the treasury to Athens.

Needless to say, the Hellens’ propensity for borrowing too much and repaying too little would not be bound by mere geography. Nor, it seems, by the passage of time.

The first default of the Modern Era occurred during the Greek War of Independence. As Americans are lately discovering, on the heels of their costly misadventure in Afghanistan (dubbed the “Graveyard of Empires”), war can be an expensive business… even for the “winning” team. And so it was that, while raging to throw off the yoke of Ottoman rule in 1824, the Greeks ran up debts of nearly half a million pounds… to which was added another 1.1 million pounds the following year. As the War of Independence descended into civil war, the loans went unpaid… all the while accruing interest. (It wasn’t until more than half a century later, in 1878, that the Greek government made good on the debt, which by then had reached the sum of roughly 10 million pounds.)

Nevertheless, Greece did win her independence in the year 1832, an occasion she celebrated by promptly incurring still more debts, this time totaling around 60,000,000 francs, to the governments of Britain, France and Russia. That’s about the time a curious historical figure by the name of Otto Friedrich Ludwig became King of Greece. Still a minor when gifted the throne, the young Bavarian found himself in the difficult position of having simultaneously to satisfy his restless constituents on one hand, who demanded continuous handouts and lavish social programs, and keeping his creditors appeased on the other. No easy task, not even for a great statesman, which, by many accounts, poor Otto was not. In the words of historian Thomas Gallant, the ruling philhellene was “neither ruthless enough to be feared, nor compassionate enough to be loved, nor competent enough to be respected.”

Payments on the loans ceased in 1843, the same year popular rebellion found its way to the Palace of Athens. Otto’s own story ended in exile and death in the year 1862, 16 years before the loans were eventually repaid and the international capital markets again reopened to the country over which he had once ruled.

The river of time might have changed course and flow, but the waters were the same. As before, lenders and borrowers took to their queer, mutually destructive arrangement like drunks to an ouzo bottle. By 1893, debts having risen to familiarly unsustainable levels, the government once again suspended payments on external debt. Five years later, under growing foreign pressure, Greece found herself beholden to a kind of Old School “Austerity Bureau,” bearing the unimaginative title of the International Committee for Greek Debt Management.

Against all natural inclination, the government managed to keep its nose clean until the Great Depression when, in 1932, it joined a queue of other countries in the now-familiar default line. This was to be the longest of the five defaults of the Modern Era and would last until 1964, more than three decades.

All in all, the Greeks have found themselves in default more often than not since becoming an independent state. Economists Reinhart and Rogoff highlighted this ignominious fact in their book, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Between 1800 and the crisis of 2008, according to the authors, Greece spent 50.6% of her time either in outright default or rescheduling her debt. (Only Angola, Ecuador and Honduras spent longer in the proverbial poor house.)

But who knows? Maybe this time really is different? Maybe Greece will learn to live within her means? Maybe America will abandon her hubristic military misadventures abroad? Maybe the feds will ditch their fiat “money” and return instead to a gold standard?

And maybe we’ll all fly off into a golden sunset... on wings made of wax.

Cheers,

Joel Bowman
Agios Nikoloas, Greece ~ August, 2021

P.S. Speaking of the Fall of Nations and the End of Empires... you couldn’t have scripted a more timely conference theme for this weekend’s virtual symposium, hosted by our friends at Classical Wisdom Weekly. 

They’ve gathered together a world class line-up of historians, professors, documentarians and authors to discuss the topic, including...

Best-selling author Niall Ferguson... BBC host Angie Hobbs... renowned classicist Edith Hall... the always thought-provoking Victor Davis Hanson... and plenty more.

And the best part? You can “pay what you want” via their donation option. (Word to any aspiring “patrons of the arts.”)

The British Empire barely lasted two decades after they left Afghanistan, back in 1919... 

The Soviets were done for in under two years, after they fled in defeat in 1988... 

How long will the American Empire last, now that they, too, have vacated the “Graveyard of Empires”? 

Tune in to this weekend’s conference to hear the world’s leading thinkers give their take. Tickets here.