Daily Inspiration Quote by J. M. Roberts

Athens often gets sold as the cradle of democracy; Roberts yanks the camera toward the cash register. His line is a cold reminder that imperial projects don’t need to be imposed on a public. They can be enthusiastically co-signed when the benefits feel broadly distributed and the costs feel remote.

The phrasing does sly work. “Genuinely popular” punctures any comforting idea that empire was merely an elite vanity. Roberts isn’t describing manipulation so much as alignment: ordinary Athenians “would expect to share in its profits,” not necessarily as individual profiteers but “indirectly and collectively” through wages, tribute-funded building programs, jury pay, festivals, and the general upward drift of civic life bankrolled by an extraction economy. That adverb pileup makes the moral evasion legible: if the gain arrives as public goods, it doesn’t feel like looting; it feels like prosperity.

Then comes the political magic trick: “not to have to bear its burdens.” Empire’s burdens can be outsourced to subject allies, to enslaved labor, to distant garrisons, to the abstractions of maritime power. The Athenian citizen gets the identity and the dividends, while the risk is displaced onto others - until it can’t be, until rebellions, wars, and fiscal strain force the bill back home.

Contextually, Roberts is pushing against romantic classicism. He’s reading Athenian democracy not as an antidote to domination but as a system capable of normalizing it, especially when voters can rationalize empire as a communal entitlement. The subtext lands uncomfortably now: popularity is not innocence, and “collective” benefit can be the most effective camouflage for collective complicity.