Warships dripping magic & men slipped up the delta, but Toby didn't so much as fumble his fishing line as they passed. The port at Ulmes had withstood invasions before, swamp rats fading into the marsh, traders slinging enough bribes and bullshit to protect their positions and prestige. It wasn't worth missing a meal over. > 📗 Check out [Eavesdrop: Burnt ships along the path to conquest](https://eleanorkonik.com/eavesdrop/) %% ( [[2021-10-20 Eavesdrop (MF) (DRAFT)]] ) %% for more microfiction in this story chain, and consider leaving a comment if you enjoy it!  ## AFTERWORD I teach a unit about different types of government that were seen in Ancient Greece. There's a section of the unit where we talk about the pros and cons of each of the four "types" of government seen in the Classical Greek world: democracy, oligarchy, tyranny and monarchy. In some senses, we present it as a cycle. Since it's directed at pre-teens, and I only have a couple of days to teach it, I'm forced to oversimplify a bit. Still, there winds up being a certain narrative inevitability to the story of Greek forms of government. It goes something like this: If you start with a democratic system, where rule is shared evenly, inevitably it will be easier for people with more resources to dominate public discourse and decision-making. Eventually, this dominance gets turned into formal power structures, often centered around a familial model. We generally call this "oligarchy," or rule by many. The distinctions between oligarchy and aristocracy are fuzzy, especially in the Greek world, but from a plain-English perspective, oligarchical power tends to be based in money. Aristocracies tend to base their power in armies and land — and are usually organized under a monarch. There are a couple of ways to jump from oligarchy to monarchy, but most of the examples I've seen are relatively unintuitive. Rather than being a situation where powerful families consolidate, or one oligarch monopolizes influence until they gain control, what often seems to happen is that there's a rebellion. These rebellions are typically led by a demagogue who becomes a tyrant. Demagogues are, by definition, political leaders who rile up a base of "ordinary people" instead of having an ideological "platform." Tyrants, in the Greek sense, were rulers who seized power through force instead of via institutional legitimacy. Tyrants tend to either get toppled after a nasty power struggle with oligarchs, or transition into a monarchy when their heir takes power in a way that feels legitimate to the populace. None of this is inevitable, of course, and none of this explains the "monarchy to republic to dictatorship to empire" thing that went on in Rome. It entirely ignores all the types of governments common in Asia and Africa and the Americas, etc. It's really just a mashup of some stuff that sort of happened in Greece a couple thousand years ago, tied off with a neat little bow. I bring it up because the hardest thing for my students to grasp is usually the part where we discuss the pros and cons of each type of government. American culture has hammered the idea of "kings bad, democracy good" so hard that it doesn't even occur to them that the longevity and stability inherent to a particular system might matter. In my opinion, the biggest advantage of monarchy is stability. Sure, sometimes there are civil wars fought over control of the throne and the crown, but when I look at history, I don't see a lot of long-lasting representative republics — I see a bunch of dynasties, and a bunch of loosely organized quasi-democratic groups. Sometimes, when I read think pieces about the "[decline of America](https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/546209-american-decline-perception-or-reality)" ([here's one from 1992](https://hbr.org/1992/07/is-america-in-decline)) I can't help but worry about that. In the end, though, I keep coming back around to a novel I read years ago. I don't remember the title, but it pointed out that most people don't really care who is "in charge" as long as their lives are pretty good. It feels intuitively true that most people value competent government over abstract ethics. Toby is more worried about his next meal than invaders who are literally sailing into his homeland. It hasn't occurred to him to try and warn his neighbors, much less the local government. The civics teacher in me is a little horrified by his blasé attitude. The philosophy major who can't avoid seeing [fierce](https://twitter.com/GeekMelange/status/1473105808066031617) [Twitter](https://twitter.com/jasonsanford/status/1472206346770477058) [debates](https://twitter.com/lbrothers/status/1472207983102894080) about whether it's morally acceptable to attend a science fiction convention in Chengdu because of the actions of the Chinese government (in contrast to the controversies surrounding one [held in America](https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2021/12/2021-hugo-awards-celebrate-imagination-wonder-and-an-arms-manufacturer/) and [sponsored by a defense contractor](https://gizmodo.com/the-hugo-awards-undermined-themselves-being-sponsored-b-1848242415)). She's looking around and wondering how much personal responsibility an individual citizen can and should take for the actions of a democratic government, much less an autocratic one. I don't have a good answer, but it's been on my mind a lot lately, especially after spending the weekend at [Worldcon](https://discon3.org/). It was an incredible experience, but also quite fraught ways I'm still coming to terms with. ## Further Reading - My piece about [Unusual Governments to Take Inspiration From](https://www.sfwa.org/2021/08/10/unusual-governments-to-take-inspiration-from/) (via the Science Fiction Writer's Association) goes into more detail about some of the more interesting forms of government this Afterword was forced to omit.