For the Marxist historian C. L. R. James, “the freedom to do and think as you please, not only in politics but in private life, was the very life‐​blood of the Greeks”; he attributes to Athenian democracy in particular a commitment to “the creative power of freedom and the capacity of the ordinary man to govern.” 1 From a rather different political quarter, arch‐​capitalist philosopher Ayn Rand is similarly enthusiastic, calling Greek civilization “the first human step in recorded history,” and arguing that “a comparative degree of political freedom undercut the power of mysticism and, for the first time, man was free to face an unobstructed universe.” 2

On the other hand, Benjamin Constant and Frédéric Bastiat, two of the leading figures of 19th-century French liberalism, were rather less impressed. In his 1819 essay “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared With That of the Moderns,” 3 Constant contrasted the modern conception of liberty, namely “peaceful enjoyment and private independence,” with the ancient conception of liberty, which he identified as “participation in collective power” – a version of liberty unfortunately all too compatible with “the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community.” While granting that Athens was a partial exception to this rule, allowing “an infinitely greater individual liberty than Sparta or Rome” – a fact he attributes to Athens’ being “of all the Greek republics the most closely engaged in trade” – Constant nevertheless insists that “the individual was much more subservient to the supremacy of the social body in Athens, than he is in any of the free states of Europe today.”

Bastiat, for his part, in “Academic Degrees and Socialism” 4 expressed his dismay at the dominance of “Greco‐​Roman ideas” in university education. The ancients, who glorified warfare, lived off slave labor, and disparaged production and trade – expressing the “prevailing opinion in antiquity that industry is ignoble” – were the worst possible models for modern politics; hence, Bastiat concluded, it was madness to send the youth of the nation, “with the intention of preparing them for labor, peace, and freedom,” to “drink in, and become imbued and saturated with, the feelings and the opinions of a nation of brigands and slaves.”

Each side in this dispute has a point, for the simple reason that classical Greece’s legacy for liberty is mixed and complex. But an examination of Homer and Hesiod, the two most celebrated founders of the Greek poetic tradition, suggests that at least some important currents in Greek thought were not solely dedicated to exalting military glory over peace and industry.

Let’s start with Homer – or “Homer,” the standard name for the purported author of the Iliad and Odyssey, epic poems dramatizing the pivotal events in the Trojan War and its aftermath. Modern scholars view these works as a compilation of earlier oral tradition that began to take its current shape around the 8th century BCE; whether the final product was assembled by a few hands or many remains unclear. Consequently it’s difficult to say how far we can expect a single authorial voice to inform the Homeric corpus. All the same, within the Homeric perspective it is possible to identify a continuous strand of skepticism concerning the worth of martial glory.

“Homer’s” most vivid opposition between the pursuits of war and of peace is found in the depiction of the “two cities” on the shield that the god Hephaistos designs for the Iliad’s central figure, the Greek warrior Achilles: