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Notes -
The most spectacular example of a nation of shopkeepers who nevertheless fought successfully on multiple continents was, of course, the British Empire. Napoleon wasn't the only former world leader who thought that being a nation of shopkeepers would make the British soft, but he was one of the few who thought that despite being smart enough to know better.
But there's a meaningful difference between your capacity to win wars and your actual, underlying values (is what I think @cjet79 is getting at as well).
The British Empire, for instance, was for much of its duration a society that was very internally concerned with progressive values and uplifting its conquered people rather than celebrating grinding them into the dirt (whether they actually accomplished this is of course highly debatable). But if all historians had were the wreckage of ships from the Royal West African Squadron, but no writings, we wouldn't know that the point of all that military capacity was to carry out a moral mission to end slavery. If all historians had from the American intervention in the Vietnam War were cannisters of Agent Orange, but no records of the peace movement at home, we would have a very impoverished, circumscribed understanding of popularity morality at the time and how comfortable society was with violence.
My argument is how do we know we aren't just doing the same thing here - inventing an artificial morality for the Golden Age Greeks based on only being able to see their societies from an extreme distance, and filtered through the cultural values of a later peoples?
@netstack and @HlynkaCG as well.
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Indeed.
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