Greek Imperialism

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GREEK IMPERIALISM

BY

WILLIAM SCOTT FERGUSON

PROFESSOR OF ANCIENT HISTORY
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY WILLIAM SCOTT FERGUSON

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published September 1913_

TO MY MOTHER

PREFACE

This book contains seven lectures, six of which were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston during February, 1913. In the first of them the main lines of imperial development in Greece are sketched. In the others I have tried to characterize, having regard rather to clearness than to novelty or completeness, the chief imperial growths which arose in Greece during the transformance of city-states from ultimate to constituent political units. I hope that these discussions of the theory and practice of government in the empires of Athens, Sparta, Alexander, the Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Antigonids will be found useful by the general reader, and especially by the student of politics and history. The idea I wish particularly to convey, however, is that there was continuity of constitutional development within the whole period. The city-state, indeed, reached its greatest efficiency in the time of Pericles, but the federation of city-states was being still perfected two hundred years afterwards. In government, as in science, the classic period was but the youthful bloom of Greece, whereas its vigorous maturity—in which it was cut down by Rome—came in the Macedonian time.

Briefly stated, my thesis is this: The city-states of Greece were unicellular organisms with remarkable insides, and they were incapable of growth except by subdivision. They might reproduce their kind indefinitely, but the cells, new and old, could not combine to form a strong nation. Thus it happened that after Athens and Sparta had tried in vain to convert their hegemonies over Greece into empires, a cancerous condition arose in Hellas, for which the proper remedy was not to change the internal constitutions of city-states, as Plato and Aristotle taught, but to change the texture of their cell walls so as to enable them to adhere firmly to one another. With a conservatism thoroughly in harmony with the later character of the Greek people, the Greeks struggled against this inevitable and salutary change. But in the end they had to yield, saving, however, what they could of their urban separateness, while creating quasi-territorial states, by the use of the federal system and deification of rulers. These two contrivances were, accordingly, rival solutions of the same great political problem. Nothing reveals more clearly the limitations of Greek political theory than that it takes no account either of them or of their antecedents.

Cambridge, Mass., June, 1913.

CONTENTS

GREEK IMPERIALISM

I

IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE

It is my purpose in this opening chapter to define some terms which I shall have to use repeatedly in the book; to make a somewhat detailed examination of the character of the Greek states whose political integrity was threatened by imperialism; to trace the development of imperialism to its culmination in the divine monarchy of Alexander the Great and his successors; and, at the same time, to arrange a general political setting for the topics to be discussed in the six succeeding chapters.

An empire is a state formed by the rule of one state over other states. It is immaterial in this connection what form of government the ruling people prefers. Power may be exercised there by a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a majority without altering in any essential the relation of the sovereign to its dependencies. Still less does it matter whether the subject people is governed by the one, the few, or the many; for all kinds of governments may exist, and have existed, in dependencies.

Naturally, an empire is compatible with any kind of an administrative service among both governors and governed. The suzerain may attend to its affairs with the aid of professional and specially trained officials, as in a bureaucracy; and a vassal may entrust the details of its public business to successive fractions of its citizens, as in some republics: no imperial relation is established unless separate states or parts of states are involved. But when these are related in a whole as superiors and inferiors, an empire at once arises.

The relation of inferiority and superiority is, however, essential in any empire. In modern times this is acknowledged with the utmost frankness. Upon the higher capacity for government claimed by the Christian peoples, the Western cultures, or the Anglo-Saxons, as the case may be, modern pride, greed, or conscience bases its right to control inferior races. "Take up the white man's burden" is the modern substitute for the ancient commandment, "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature." The possession of a better rule of public life imposes—it is affirmed—a missionary obligation no less weighty than the possession of a special rule of eternal life.

Less exasperating, perhaps, than this assumption of moral and political superiority is the candid profession of the right of the stronger. The right of conquest gives a title which is valid in international law when every other right is lacking. When superiority is stipulated to be absent, the product is a federation or something similar from which the name empire is withheld. When, in course of time, superiority dies out till a common right eventually embraces subject and sovereign alike, a new state arises, to which, as in the case of the present-day British world, the title empire is applied with some impropriety.

There is, however, still another kind of empire. In it the superior authority is not a people, but an individual. He is called an emperor, and his family a dynasty. His authority is bestowed, as the present German Emperor said at Königsberg in 1910, not by "parliaments, and meetings, and decisions of the peoples, but by the grace of God alone." He is "a chosen instrument of Heaven," to speak with the same high authority, and "goes his way without regard to the views and opinions of the day." An emperor, thus defined, is not properly a part of his state at all. He stands outside of it, and is equal or superior to it. He is a state unto himself; and his jurisdiction is not domestic but imperial, in that he exercises dominion over another state. L'état c'est moi is an imperfect definition of this kind of empire, however; for it presumes the absence of political organization and activity among the subjects of the emperor. It presumes the permanency of the condition of absolute surrender (deditio) which, with the Romans, prefaced the work of restoration—the reëstablishment of civil rights within an enlarged state. In actual experience, moreover, a complete autocracy never exists. The will of every emperor is bound by the legislation which he has himself enacted, or accepted with the throne from his predecessor. If responsible to nothing else, he is responsible to his own past. He may withdraw his charters: he cannot violate them with impunity.

The policy by which a people or an autocrat acquires and maintains an empire, we call imperialism. The term is, of course, a legacy from Rome—a mute witness to the peculiar importance of the Roman empire in the history of state-building. And, I suppose, it is the policy of Rome that we think of most instinctively when we allude to imperialism. This is by no means an accident. For not simply the type, but also many of the most noteworthy varieties of this kind of policy, are found in the experience of the Romans; and the course of political progress has been such that in the triumph of Rome imperialism reached its logical issue more closely than either before or since in the history of the world.

For the logical issue of a thorough-going imperial policy—one in which the possession of physical ability may be presupposed—is the formation of an universal empire. And, in fact, the two most powerful and ardent imperialists of antiquity, Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar, aimed to include in their dominions the entire inhabitable world. This issue was, however, never more nearly reached than in the long period before and after the Christian era during which only shifting nomads and intractable Parthians disputed successfully the will of the Roman Senate and the orders of the Roman emperors. For five hundred years after the triumph of Constantine the universality of the Roman empire was as mandatory in men's thinking as was the catholicity of the Christian Church. "There are many 'empires' in the world to-day," says Professor Bury[1] in explaining the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 A.D., "but in those days men could only conceive of one, the Roman imperium, which was simple and indivisible; two Roman empires were unimaginable. There might be more than the one emperor; but these others could only be legitimate and constitutional if they stood to him in a collegial relation." How thoroughly the Romans impressed the concept of universality upon the term empire may be judged by the fact that, in the face of all realities, the Frankish monarchs at Aachen and the Greek kings at Constantinople ruled as colleagues a Roman empire which stretched from the borders of Armenia to the shores of the Atlantic.

Transcendent as is the imperial achievement of the Romans, and unrivaled as is the political sagacity with which they consolidated their power and made it enduring, it must still be recognized that they were the heirs, in war, diplomacy, and government, of the Greeks, their predecessors. They worked with greater power and with larger units than did the Spartans and the Athenians. They benefited by the brilliant inventions and the costly errors of the Macedonians whose kingdoms they destroyed. But their success simply brought to a culmination the imperial movement in which Sparta, Athens, and Macedon were worthy co-workers. It is our task in this series of essays to examine in turn the imperial experiments by which the Greeks not only won a field for the display of their own talents, but also prepared the way for the unification of the ancient world in the empire of Rome.

I alluded a moment ago to the smallness of the units with which the imperial policy of Sparta and Athens had to deal. Before proceeding in the latter part of this chapter to trace the development of the forms by which imperialism was obscured, evaded, and ultimately justified in Greece, I should like to try to make clear the qualities which rendered the little Hellenic communities so hard for imperial digestion. In classic Greece, as in renascence Italy, the city was the state. It had not always been so; for in the past the land had been at one time in the possession of rudimentary nations, called ethne. But in the classic epoch these loose organisms persisted only in certain backward regions in the west and north. Elsewhere city-states had everywhere made their appearance as early as the sixth century B.C.

The circumstances in which these city-states arose are shrouded in the mystery which surrounds most beginnings. They, accordingly, present all the better opportunity for the construction of a theory; and perhaps the theory which had once the greatest vogue is that enunciated by Fustel de Coulanges in his brilliant book on The Ancient City. Of its main propositions, however,—that each city-state came into being at a single moment; that it was an artificial structure deliberately modeled on the preëxistent family; that the family was a religious association created and organized for the worship of ancestors; that the spirits of ancestors were the first gods, or, indeed, were gods at all,—not one has stood the test of a searching inquiry. On the contrary, it seems established that the city-state was the result of a natural growth, and that the incidents which accompanied its development, while varied and numerous, were all manifestations of political progress. Growth in the direction of a large number of distinct states was natural in Greece in view of the well-known physical features of the country; but the study of geography does not explain why these states were cities. For the true explanation of this phenomenon we must not confine our observation to Greece. Broadly speaking, high culture is everywhere city-bred, and the cities have regularly been the leaders in political development. In Babylonia that was the case, though the urban centres there were dominated from a very early date by Semitic tribes from the desert. Free cities, like Tyre and Sidon, were the prime sources of Phœnician enterprise. The home of Roman law and government was a city, and when Italy led the world a second time, she was a complex of city-states. The Hanse towns and the Flemish communes, the chartered cities of England and France, acquired political liberty or political rights long before the rest of Central Europe. Where, in fact, the cities have not been the mother, and the territorial states simply the foster-mother, of freedom and culture, exceptional conditions have existed—such as the need of regulating the Nile's overflow in Egypt, and the model and influence of the Roman empire in Mohammedan and Christian Europe.

The city enables men to coöperate easily. In it ideas and feelings spread quickly. Life, property, and privileges are there protected by walls, and, if need be, by street barricades. "Two voices are there," wrote Wordsworth in 1807, his vision limited by the peril of England and Switzerland,—

"one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,
They were thy chosen music, Liberty."

The voice of a city mob—that of Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, Florence, or Paris, for example—was generally raucous and often cruel. But it made tyrants tremble and limited absolutism when the fear of assassination was powerless.

Fortunately, it is not with the origins, but with the characteristics, of the Greek city-states that we have to do mainly when we seek to discover the grounds of their hatred of all imperialistic projects. Let us, therefore, try to form a concrete impression of the salient features of the hundreds of little states with which the progressive parts of Greece were honeycombed at the beginning of the classic period, in the sixth century B.C. Each political cell, so to speak, had its nucleus in a walled town and its substance in a small circuit of grain, pasture, and garden land which the inhabitants of the town owned and cultivated. Most of the towns were simply hives of farmers. Whether the farmers were landlords, small proprietors, or peasants; however much they were divided by lines of social cleavage, they were all able to meet on the common ground of a single occupation. And every day from March to November, from the out-cropping of the grass and foliage in the spring, through the season of the grain harvest, the vintage, and the picking of the olives, to the fall planting and seeding, the ebb and flow of agricultural life carried the population of the city to the country in the morning and back to the city again in the evening.

There were few towns in Greece whose land did not touch the sea; and from the sea another harvest was gathered. Fishing existed, of course; but that was not all. Transmarine commerce is never wholly absent in any maritime country. In Greece it was especially favored by the difficulties of land transit, and by the excellence of the highways which the sea laid while carving the country up into a myriad of islands, head-lands, and estuaries. Hence, by the opening of the sixth century B.C. a second town had generally appeared on the coast of each little state when the chief town had developed, as was commonly the case, a few miles inland. In the new settlement the tone was set by the sailor-folk and the traders; in the old centre by the landed proprietors and the peasants. But the landlords were frequently merchants, and the peasants could easily attach work-places (ergasteria) to their houses—which, though in the towns, were really farmhouses—and become manufacturers in a small way; while it was regularly the ambition of a trader or seaman to crown a successful career by buying a farm, a ranch, or an orchard. There was, accordingly, a very close connection between urban and agrarian pursuits and interests.

It is true that with the Greek occupation of the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Seas in the seventh century B.C. some Greek towns, like Miletus, Samos, Corinth, Ægina, Chalcis, and Eretria, became cities in the modern sense of the term, with commercial and industrial interests predominant. But even there the advantages of urban life were within reach of the farmers, as well as of the traders, artisans, and merchants, since all alike were residents of the city. The only difference was that life in those cities was more rich and diversified than elsewhere.

The contrast between life in cities, with its complex social organization, its playhouses, its excitements, its stimuli to effort and to vice, its intolerance of oddities in manners and dress, and life in the country, with its simplicity which degenerates so easily into brutality, its monotony, its fanaticism in the pursuit of wealth, its contempt for the effeminacy of the shopkeeper, its piety and sobriety which easily accord with a longing to see the world and the wickedness thereof—this contrast which is so distressing an aspect of life in modern America, was almost entirely absent in classic Greece, at least among the enfranchised part of the population.

None of the cities was so large as to shut off the view of the country. After only a few minutes' walk Socrates and his companions might escape from the noise and confusion of Athens into the cool and fragrant groves of the suburbs. It was probably only into the biggest of the Greek cities that the olive trees and the grapevines did not push, as they and the late-come orange and lemon orchards push into the modern Greek hamlets. Even in Athens the crowing of the cock sounded the reveille for almost everybody, and it would never have come into the mind of an Athenian to suggest, as has been done in Boston, that a zoo should be stocked first with the common varieties of the domesticated animals. There is, says a French writer, a flavor of the barnyard about the comedies of Aristophanes. Yet this is the same Athens in which there were engaged in the building trades alone, according to Plutarch, carpenters, moulders, bronze-smiths, stone-cutters, dyers, veneerers in gold and ivory, painters, embroiderers, embossers, factors, sailors, pilots, wagon-makers, trainers of yoked beasts, drivers, rope-makers, weavers, cobblers, road-builders, and miners. This, too, is the Athens into which, as an ancient Athenian wrote, were swept, because of its maritime empire, the choice things of Sicily and Italy, of Cyprus, and Egypt, and Lydia, of Pontus and Peloponnesus, and many another place besides. When the farmer lived side by side in Athens, the largest city in the whole Greek world, with the trader and the artisan, the fusion of town and country must have been still more complete in the forty-three cities of Crete, the ten cities of Eubœa, and the four cities of Ceos—an island only ten miles broad and fourteen long. This being the case, economic conditions tended to make the citizens of each state homogeneous to a degree foreign in modern experience; for, however rapid be its approach, the age has not yet arrived in America in which the "country is to be urbanized"; in which, to speak with a recent essayist,[2] farming is to be "of necessity a specialized department of urban life"; "the task of agricultural production is to be taken over by the classes of modern industrial organization; by the capitalist, the manager and the laborer"; in which "there is to be a continual shifting of laborers of the poorer classes back and forth between the town and the country," and "the distinction implied in the terms 'townsman' and 'countryman' is to be obliterated."

Whether our essayist be right or wrong in his forecast of the future of farming in America, we will not stop to discuss. It is enough to point out that the early age of Greece was such a one as he desiderates; that then life was exclusively and uniformly urban: with the result that the entire population of any given city-state could be regarded as merely a great family. And it not only could be, but it was in fact so regarded. Were not all citizens descendants of a common ancestor? This query aristocrats might answer in the negative, mindful of the special god or demigod of whom each nobleman thought himself the offspring. But his negative was generally qualified by the admission that he, too, if he were an Athenian, had Zeus and Apollo—Zeus of the home-stead and Apollo of the fatherland—as his progenitors; that he, too, like all his fellow-citizens, was a descendant of Ion and a foster-child of Athena. The gods and goddesses of the Greeks were their creators in the literal physical sense of the word. Men projected backward, even to the age of the gods and heroes, with which the world began, the fact of paternity to which all animal origins were attributable; and since each city had its peculiar demigods, from which its citizens were directly sprung, all its inhabitants were bound to one another by a peculiar tie of blood.

The family aspect of the Greek city is accentuated by the fact that the town hall was a town hearth; that the chief subdivisions of citizens were brotherhoods, and that all permanent associations of them for public purposes assumed the descent of their several members from common ancestors, who were naturally gods or demigods. When heroes had to be discovered, with the help of the Pythian prophetess, to act as progenitors for the groups of citizens artificially united in the new electoral divisions which Clisthenes established in Athens in 508 B.C., it is conceivable that popular regard for purity of stock helped Pericles to enact the notorious law of 451 B.C. limiting citizenship at Athens to those sprung from the legitimate union of Athenian parents. Every city in Greece inherited from its distant tribal past a strong feeling of the kinship of its inhabitants, in comparison with which the sense of ethnic and racial unity was weak and watery. To destroy the political identity of a city was like taking human life.

We must make allowance, moreover, in appraising the strength of local attachments among both Greeks and Romans, for their beliefs as to the fate of the dead. The ancient world, like modern Japan, was saturated with the idea that the spirits of departed ancestors needed the ministrations of the living. Without the meat and drink which the relatives brought to the grave; without the coins—or the articles of use and pleasure which money might buy—that were buried with the body; without the covering of earth that was strewn over the dead, loved ones might lack life altogether in the underworld, or might lack everything that made the spirit life tolerable. "The beasts of the field and the birds of the air," rang the impassioned plea of Tiberius Gracchus[3] in introducing his agrarian reforms, "have their holes and their hiding-places, but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy but the blessings of light and air. Our generals urge their soldiers to fight for the graves and the shrines of their ancestors. The appeal is idle and false. You cannot point to a paternal altar. You have no ancestral tomb. No! you fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others. You are called the masters of the world: yet there is no clod of earth that is really yours." Plutarch, with a touch which shows that despite his modernity he belongs to the civilization which he interprets, tells us that the Athenians before Salamis were disposed to count victory dear which was purchased by the desertion of the temples and the tombs of their fathers. No man who neglected the plot where his dead lay might hold the chief magistracies in Athens. The soil of his fatherland was thus in a peculiar sense holy ground to the citizen of a Greek city. He might leave it, but not to an enemy; and if he were, like Æneas, the last of his family, he was expected to carry his Lares and Penates with him. Into a pit dug on the new site every companion of Romulus, we are told in a legend which merely transfers into the past later-day practice, threw a morsel of earth brought from his old home land. This he did not simply from an intensification of the feeling which led the Scotch girl in the well-known ballad to take with her, when starting for America, not baggage, but sods from her mother's grave. He did it from the sentiment which led General Nogi the other day to provide for the spirits of his ancestors before committing suicide. Thereby the colonist brought his dead along with him to the new city. The Greeks and the Romans had, accordingly, a very special reason for local patriotism. Like the Hebrew Christians, they were "also compassed about with so great a crowd of witnesses."

We have made our peace with economics by considering first the effect of occupation and residence in giving to the citizens of each city-state solidarity of interest and attitude. We have dwelt a little on the force which beliefs as to their origin and their destiny hereafter exerted in keeping the city-states apart. We have still to notice the centrifugal influence on the Greek race of their urban institutions and politics.

Each city in Greece had its own laws and customs. These were not, as with us, cold abstractions, but real, ever active, almost living, personal forces, moulding incessantly their subjects according to a given model. The citizens of each city had, in fact, a general family resemblance, due to the imprint set upon them by their social and political institutions. Cities acquired by this means clear-cut individualities which were capable of definition, not simply by narrating their history, but also in terms of physical, intellectual, and emotional qualities. We may illustrate this point by observing that the Hellenes created one literary type which we have not borrowed from them: they wrote the biographies of cities as well as of men. Their philosophers studied the effects upon urban character of climate, prevailing winds and pursuits, location with reference to the sun and the sea, contact with foreigners, and other similar agencies. They even had specifics which they prescribed for the physiological and pathological ills of cities, just as our sciolists, on a much more slender basis of facts, however, diagnose the diseases and classify the good and evil qualities of nations.

The truth is that cities meant to all the Greeks what (and much besides) the city and the nation combined mean to those of us who do not live in the country. They were the source and object at once of municipal and national pride. The problems which city-states had to consider and solve were not simply those in which good citizens find it so hard nowadays to develop a wholesome interest. Questions of police, education, public works, appointments; conflicts of racial, sectional, class, and religious ambitions; rivalries with neighboring cities for commercial, political, and cultural leadership—controversies of this order are common to all cities in all times and places. But the politics of the Greek cities had a high seriousness of their own. Each town had its own foreign policy to determine, its own army to train and direct, its own church to equip with shrines and deities, its own gods to honor with games and tragedies. Every move on the complex chessboard of the Mediterranean world might be pregnant with meaning to it. On one day it might decide that the time had come to seize some borderland in dispute with its immediate neighbors. On another it might conclude an alliance which imposed the obligation to wage a great war against frightful odds. On another the subject of voting might be the recognition of a new god or goddess, which, in fact, was often tantamount to a new creation. And in considering all these matters citizens were simply doing what their fathers and forefathers had done from time immemorial. Memories of great actions done in olden times were preserved by monuments of bronze or marble, and revived annually by appropriate ceremonies. Legend and fact, blended in an edifying tradition,—the repository of the yearnings and ideals of dead generations,—inspired the living to bear themselves worthily in all national crises. "Love thou thy land with love far-brought from out the storied past" was an admonition of which Greek cities of the classic epoch stood in little need. The mischief was that the land which they loved was not all Greece, but merely the territory of a single town.

The national fanaticism of the countries of modern Europe is probably more tolerant of foreign interference than was the passionate patriotism of the little urban units with which the imperial policy of Athens and Sparta had to deal.

If you were to look at a map of Greece which distinguished the states, and not the meaningless ethnical or tribal divisions of the people, you would observe that from the outset Sparta and Athens were destined to greatness, if by nothing else, by the size and material resources of their territories. They were, however, themselves city-states, and inferior to none in the strength with which they held to the conviction that no greater humiliation could befall them than to have to submit to the domination of another city or the will of a foreign lord. With what show of reason, therefore, could they adopt a policy of imperialism? They had to deal with Greeks, and not with barbarians. Hence they could not invoke in the interest of their ambition the convenient doctrine that inferior races need a political guardian.

In estimating the territory of Sparta we have included in it not simply the land of the citizens which the serfs or Helots tilled for them, but also the much larger, but less valuable, mass of enveloping land which belonged to the Periœcs; for the hamlets of the latter were really Spartan municipalities. It was, moreover, with the resources of the whole complex that Sparta held the Peloponnesians united under her leadership for one hundred and eighty years (550-370 B.C.). On the other hand, it was with the combined strength of the Peloponnesians that Sparta broke up the Athenian empire in 405 B.C., and widened the area of her leadership so as to include all Hellas. Thereafter Sparta's Peloponnesian league was simply the core of a general Hellenic league. The question is: What position did Sparta occupy in it?

Her legal rights rested solely upon a treaty of alliance (symmachia) which she had struck with each city in the league. But there can be no doubt that she had often secured the treaty in the first place by force, and that she interfered thereafter in the local affairs of both the Peloponnesian and the other Hellenic allies in a way not provided by its stipulations. But, however outrageous her conduct might be in fact, it was never formally reprehensible so long as the interference achieved its object. This was to establish or maintain, first against tyranny, and later against democracy, an aristocratic government in the allied cities. Since the aristocrats were always in a minority, they were bound to invite Spartan intervention for their own defense. Hence it was only when they failed to retain control of the government that an ally could regard Sparta's intermeddling as anything but the welcome act of a friendly power. "Perhaps some one may expostulate," writes a pamphleteer in 400 B.C. while commending to his fellow-citizens of Larisa a proposal that they join the Hellenic league;[4] "but Sparta sets up an oligarchy everywhere. That is true. But it is such a one as we prayed and yearned for for ages, and lost when we had enjoyed it for but a brief moment. Just compare the oligarchy they favor with the one we have already. Where is there a city in their domain, be it ever so small, in which a third of the population does not take part in public affairs? It is not by the Lacedæmonians, but by fortune, that those who have no arms or other capacity for public service are disfranchised. Their exclusion lasts only so long as their political worthlessness. How do we stand by comparison? It's my belief that were we to pray for a constitution we would not ask the gods for a different one from that which Sparta wishes." To even moderate men who thought as this speaker did, unruly Spartan garrisons seemed quite compatible with local autonomy. They came to Larisa at the call of the home authorities and remained at the disposal of those who called them. Their captains, the long-haired harmosts, took orders and did not give them. Their presence involved no suspension of the constitution, no violation of the laws, no seizure of public revenues. Naturally, the two thirds who were disfranchised thought differently; but it is a good rule of international law that a foreign state deal with the Government, and not with the Opposition. The, mischief of this system, in the circumstances then existing in Greece, was that it bred civil war within the cities. "War," says the Larisæan pamphleteer just quoted, "is conceded to be the greatest of all evils by as much as peace is the greatest of all blessings. Yet stasis, or civil war, as far exceeds war in the magnitude of its evil as war exceeds peace." The incentive to stasis was that Athens, with a naval power as irresistible as was the land power of Sparta, and an equally imposing array of allies, had long continued to reach out a supporting or encouraging hand to the two thirds whom Sparta tried to keep down. Athens, too, was the apostle of a great political idea, "the constitutional equality of the many," and whenever she succeeded in putting those who believed in this creed in control of an allied city, or in keeping them in control once they had the advantage, her interference was formally justifiable or at least justified. Not she, but the government she upheld, had the responsibility.

With the outbreak of the great duel for national leadership between Sparta and Athens which fills the final third of the fifth century B.C., the war was carried in the form of stasis into every city of the two confederacies. For the leaders of both the one third and the two thirds, says Thucydides in a famous passage of his history of the Peloponnesian War[5] "used specious names, the one professing to uphold the constitutional equality of the many, the other the wisdom of an aristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in name they were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in every way to overcome each other, they committed the most monstrous crimes; yet even these were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges, which they pursued to the very utmost, neither party observing any definite limits either of justice or public expediency, but both alike making the caprice of the moment their law. Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, or grasping power with the strong hand, they were eager to satiate the impatience of party spirit. Neither faction cared for religion; but any fair pretence which succeeded in effecting some odious purpose was greatly lauded. And the citizens who were of neither party fell a prey to both; either they were disliked because they held aloof, or men were jealous of their surviving. Thus stasis gave birth to every form of wickedness in Greece." The singleness of purpose with which Sparta made vocational training the aim of her public education achieved the happy result that she had no men of letters to betray to posterity damaging secrets of state. Hence no one has done for her what Thucydides has done for Athens: let us have an insight into the conscience of the city at the time of its greatness. With brutal candor Cleon and others in Thucydides' narrative brush aside the formal justification of the Athenian empire and lay bare the fact that it was in reality a tyranny, a sovereignty exercised without a moral sanction, one which self-respecting people had a solemn duty to overthrow. "You should remember," said Cleon to the Athenians in 427 B.C.,[6] "that your empire is a despotism exercised over unwilling subjects who are always conspiring against you; they do not obey in return for any kindness which you do them to your own injury, but in so far as you are their mistress; they have no love of you, but they are held down by force."

Dependence upon Sparta or Athens was, in fact, regarded by none of their allies except as the less of two evils: the greater was dependence upon their domestic foes. Hence the tyranny just described did not arise with the consent of the tyrannized. The allies of Athens had consented to enter only into alliance (symmachia) with her on stipulated terms and for a stipulated purpose—protection against Persia. What they had neglected to stipulate was the time for which they were to remain allies. Athens, accordingly, denied them the right to secede, and when particular cities tried none the less to withdraw, she made the preservation of the union a moral ground for coercion, and with the aid of such cities as remained faithful, and the fleet which she kept ready for action by the financial contributions of all, she forced them back on terms such as a conqueror could dictate. A new treaty of alliance was, however, the future, as it had been the ancient, tie. And speaking broadly, we may affirm that in the city-state world of classic Greece an empire was legally impossible: what we, and the ancients, looking to realities, call an empire was an aggregate knit together by treaties, the very formation of which shows that we have to do, not with a single sovereign, but with a group of sovereigns. In other words, the city remained the ultimate political unit. The rule of Athens and Sparta was, strictly speaking, an hegemony and not an arche; a shifting and temporary leadership, and not a permanent suzerainty. It was a necessity of circumstances assumed to be exceptional.

Unfortunately, experience showed that the circumstances in which imperialism was a political necessity recurred constantly. After the fall of Athens in 404 B.C., a defensive war against the barbarians—the Macedonians in Thessaly, the Persians in Ionia—served as a justification to Sparta in employing force to maintain the hegemony which she had won. But in 387 B.C. the peace known as the "King's Peace," or the "Peace of Antalcidas," was concluded with Persia, whereupon it became impossible to use any longer the national cause as even a pretext for tyranny. The hegemony, however, was not abandoned. It had to be maintained, it was alleged, to keep the other cities free, and to this end Persia lent aid to Sparta and Thebes successively. If an empire could only be prevented by an empire, and national recreancy to boot, the times were surely out of joint. Such an issue was the reductio ad absurdum of the system of hegemonies, as both reformers and statesmen in Greece came speedily to realize.

The reformers strove to alter the untoward circumstances, and in a later chapter we shall have occasion to note how Plato and Aristotle, with a blind faith in the power of education and of legislation, aimed to divert citizens from work to leisure and from war to peace, and both to eradicate the greed for land and money and to restrict the natural increase of population to which they traced the imperialistic spirit. Some of the statesmen followed their lead. Others, however, conceding that unity was demanded for the preservation and spread of civilization, and that the world needed not fewer but more Greeks, either, like the great publicist Isocrates, advocated an hegemony on the old lines but endowed with stability through being based on general consent, or favored one of several new devices for welding cities into a permanent territorial state. Respect for progress bids us to view at this point somewhat narrowly these unitarian movements.

The position attained by Thebes in Greece after her victory over Sparta at Leuctra in 371 B.C. was simply an hegemony of the earlier model—the reoccupation of lines proved twice already to be untenable.[7] On the other hand, the position occupied by Thebes in Bœotia prior to 387 B.C. was clearly anticipatory of what the future was to bring to Greece as a whole. Bœotia was thereby blocked off into six districts,[8] one (Thebes) with four electoral divisions, two (Orchomenus and Thespiæ) with two each, and three with one apiece. Six of the ten city-states of Bœotia—the six little lake cities—were confined to two of the eleven divisions. This was a setback to them and a boon to Thebes, seeing that each division furnished one of the eleven Bœotarchs who formed the executive of the league, sixty of the six hundred and sixty councillors who formed the Bœotian synod, and its corresponding share of the league judges. Thebes thus became the Prussia of Bœotia, and in return for the political advantages which it gained and four elevenths of the revenues which it received, it undertook to provide four elevenths of the soldiers and four elevenths of the taxes. In this way the burdens and the advantages of the league were distributed according to the population and wealth of the different parts of the country. That was equitable; and since the city-states, though thrust into the background and held responsible for decisions in the making of which they had often little influence, formed a single ethnos and spoke a single dialect, they were evidently fairly well satisfied. As the league was constituted, Thebes was forced to struggle with Orchomenus and Thespiæ for the control of the six little lake cities. In this she was normally successful—so successful, in fact, that in 387 B.C. Sparta, while enforcing the King's Peace, dissolved the league in order to destroy her influence. It was not revived when Thebes reunited Bœotia (377-371 B.C.), and under Epaminondas we may more properly speak of Bœotia as a single city-state like Attica than as a league of city-states.

Though sacrificed at home to the ambition of Thebes, the Bœotian league maintained a high prestige abroad. Some of its institutions had been transferred to Athens during the revolution of 411 B.C., and others had been adopted in Arcadia after they had been set aside in Bœotia. Moreover, and this is an important historical connection which the wonderful epigraphical researches of Adolph Wilhelm[9] enable us to establish, the Bœotian league reappears mutatis mutandis in the organization imposed upon all Greece by Philip of Macedon after his crowning victory at Chæronea in 338 B.C. For if we equate Philip and the Committee of Public Safety with the eleven Bœotarchs, the synod of Corinth with the Bœotian synod of six hundred and sixty, and the districts into which Hellas, including Macedon and excluding only Sparta, was divided for federal purposes, with the six districts which had existed in Bœotia, it is evident that the political system used by Philip for organizing the Greeks was borrowed from Bœotia no less than the military system with which he conquered them. It was not for nothing that the king of Macedon had spent his youth as a hostage in Thebes.

Characteristic of the Bœotian league and of Philip's Hellenic league is the synod. It was in each a strictly representative body. Its members were apportioned to the area constituting the league in such a way that the larger states had several representatives and the smaller states had one representative between them; while in the Hellenic league neighboring states and federated states were treated as a unit and given proportional representation. That this made all but the largest state—Macedon—the largest state's inferiors and subordinated many city-states to the federal districts to which they belonged, is obvious. And in this case loss of local liberty was compensated for very imperfectly by the consideration that what the constituent states surrendered the Hellenic synod, which met at Corinth, gained. The national appeal was far weaker than the ethnic appeal had been in Bœotia. The liberty lost had indeed been a bane and not a blessing. After 338 B.C. the cities could no longer enjoy the excitement of waging private wars and fomenting revolutions. No longer were they free to be enemies of Philip. Henceforth they must contribute the quota of horsemen, hoplites, light-armed troops, and sailors for which their representation in the synod obligated them, or pay a heavy fine for every day their contingents were absent from the national levy. The synod completed its organization by choosing Philip its hegemon by land and sea, and selected as its executive board a Committee of Public Safety which seemingly had its sessions at Pydna. The committee the confederates probably welcomed as a possible champion of their interests. The unwelcome organ of the league, and the one for which there was no parallel in Bœotia, was the hegemon. Subordination to a synod was offensive enough to city-states which regarded complete independence as alone ideal. It was intolerable to them to submit to a synod which its hegemon, Philip of Macedon, controlled,—one which could never have any one but the contemporary king of Macedon as its hegemon. The hegemony of Macedon was sugar-coated, but it was none the less an hegemony, and, as such, illegal and unacceptable.[10]

A notable start in the direction of uniting city-states legally in a larger whole had been made by Athens during the epoch of her empire. She had then founded many colonies (cleruchies), which, though organized as separate cities, retained for their residents citizenship in Athens. Why not grant citizenship (polity) to the inhabitants of other cities as well? There were some, and among them the comedian Aristophanes,[11] who canvassed this idea. "Let us assume," he says, "that our city is a heap of wool, and that each of our allied cities is a fleck of wool. Let us take all the wool and spin it into yarn, and weave the yarn into a great blanket with which to protect our lord Demos against the cold." But for this drastic measure the times were not ripe. It was altogether repugnant to the pride of the Athenians to share with everybody advantages which they had sacrificed so much to acquire; and there was little in the advantages thus diluted to compensate other cities for the at least partial loss of identity which they were bound to sustain on acquiring Athenian citizenship. In the one instance in which this course was taken, the Samians, to whom Athens gave her full civic rights in the supreme agony of the Peloponnesian War, had both earned them and come to appreciate them by sacrificing their own territory rather than desert their ally.

Another less heroic expedient for bringing about a permanent entente between cities was the grant of isopolity, or reciprocity of citizenship. In certain cases this was the concession of the passive rights of citizenship (civitas sine suffragio) to all citizens of a particular city who should take up residence in, or even merely visit, the territory of the grantor. Thus circumscribed, however, it amounted simply to an exchange of commercial privileges, and proved barren of political consequences in that each city reserved to itself complete control of its own policy, thus rendering impossible any advance in state building. It remained for the Romans to render this institution fruitful to an astonishing degree by making the legal exercise of Roman citizenship independent of migration to Rome.

Substantially the same result was achieved by the Greeks through what they termed sympolity, or joint citizenship. This was possessed from of old by rudimentary nations, like the Achæans and the Ætolians,[12] among whom the towns and hamlets had never become independent and self-sufficient political units; so that the inhabitants were Achæans from Ægium, or Achæans from Cerynia, or Achæans from some other of the ten so-called cities of which the Achæan nation or league was constituted. In like fashion the Ætolian hamlets had a double citizenship. An essential part of this scheme, evidently, was that each city had an equal voice in the election of the officials of the league and in the settlement of all federal matters. And so satisfactory a safeguard of urban autonomy did this prove to be that in the last half of the third century B.C. city after city in the Peloponnesus outside the ancient limits of Achæa took the irrevocable step of acquiring Achæan citizenship in addition to its own; while in Central Greece the Ætolians by fair means or foul bestowed a dual citizenship upon all their neighbors. Athens and Sparta alone persisted in their isolation, the former on the strength of an international guarantee of autonomy, the latter in stubborn reliance upon its own powers. The other city-states entrusted to an international board, not for a definite or indefinite term of years, but for all future time, complete control of their foreign relations. Each city put permanently the international authority between itself and the outside world, thus escaping individual danger by the surrender of individual diplomacy.[13]

In this way arose what by the general consent of historians and jurists is the most perfect state which antiquity produced. The antinomy between the city-state and the imperial spirit which had existed for centuries was reduced to a minimum by the nice balance of the federal system.

There were defects in the Achæan and Ætolian leagues which their statesmen did not remove. "Equality," says Aristotle, "is just, but only between equals." The cities which had an equal voice in the international board, like the modern nations which cast a vote each at the Hague Congress, were unequal in population and in wealth.

The Achæans and Ætolians came nearer than any ancient republicans to entrusting power to representatives; but, besides creating a large legislative council, constituted in successive years, in the one case, of different fractions of the citizens of each city, and in the other, of deputies apportioned to the constituent cities according to their size, they showed the ingrained distrust held by all Greeks for oligarchy by requiring the reference to a general assembly of all matters of high importance.

How to satisfy the just claims of those whom distance or lack of leisure prevented from coming to the meeting-place, they did not discover.

However, it was not these institutional imperfections which prevented the unification of Hellas in a single federation. For this result could not now be achieved by any triumph of political science. Antigonus Doson (229-221 B.C.) whose name ought not to be unknown where Callicratidas, Agesilaus, Iphicrates, and Phocion are household words, attempted with equal skill and generosity to combine the new federal idea with the old idea of a representative national congress meeting at Corinth under the hegemony of the king of Macedon;[14] but the best that can be said of the combination he made is that despite its great promise and possibilities it proved unacceptable to Hellas, and hence ineffective.[15] The situation had now got beyond the control of the Greek people. It may, perhaps, be realized best, if we imagine that the European nations of to-day, weakened politically by continuous emigration and incessant conflicts, economically, by the withdrawal of industry and commerce to more favorably situated districts under European control, let us say in the East, were to pool their diplomatic and military interests, and entrust them, not to a European parliament, but to warring Latin and Teutonic parliaments, and were to take this step only to escape the Russian peril and when America was already thundering at their shores, if that be imaginable, coming with irresistible might, at once to save and to destroy.

To describe how the Roman republic emancipated Greece from Macedon, impressed her will upon the Greek kingdoms of the East, and built up a universal empire of diverse fragments, lies beyond the scope of this book. We may note simply that to some cities she gave her citizenship, or polity, thus destroying their identity altogether; that to others she gave isopolity, or reciprocity of citizenship, and with it the local advantages preserved in Greece by sympolity, or joint citizenship, thus creating the municipality and organizing wards, so to speak, of the city of Rome all over Italy; that some (the socii, or Italian allies) she bound to herself by irrevocable treaties till she was forced to give them municipal status, and others (the "friends," amici, or the "friends and allies," amici et socii, in what later became the provinces) by understandings or temporary treaties till she had familiarized herself with deification of rulers, which was the Greek method of legalizing absolutism.

A word on this strange institution and I have finished this survey of the expedients devised by the Greeks to obscure, evade, and finally to justify imperialism. The Greek method of legalizing despotism was Alexander the Great's genial adaptation to state building of an idea which his tutor, Aristotle, had developed in his Politics.[16] It was a means of uniting cities or provinces in an indissoluble whole while preserving, on the one hand, the superiority and freedom of action of the suzerain, be it an emperor or a republic, and, on the other hand, the self-respect of the inferior states, without which their status was politically intolerable. Deification of rulers did the impossible: it reconciled completely the antinomy between the city-state and imperialism. It resolved the antagonism into two harmonious duties; the duty of the ruler to command and of the subject to obey.

To Alexander the Great governments have been in serious debt for over two thousand years. From him to Kaiser Wilhelm II runs an unbroken line. So long as the world had many gods and did not believe in the supernatural power of any of them, there was no religious difficulty in adding to its stock another such deity in the person of the living monarch. With the decadence of polytheism, however, a slight change was necessary. In Constantine's time god-kings suffered the same fate as other pagan gods; but with a difference. The heathen gods became devils or were metamorphosed into saints.

The kings became men chosen for their high office by God, Most High. Crowned, usually by their predecessors, and anointed by God's priests, the patriarchs, they governed by divine right and acknowledged responsibility only to their Creator.[17] In a less ecclesiastical world, as in modern Prussia, the kings crown themselves. But with these later developments we have no concern in this book. I shall endeavor, however, in chapters III-VI, to trace the growth of deification in the world-monarchy of Alexander the Great, and to make clear the purpose it served in the empires of the Ptolemies and Seleucids.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. de Coulanges, Fustel. La cité antique^7 (1879).

2. Busolt, G. Die griechischen Staats- und Rechtsaltertümer,² (1892). In Müller's Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, IV, 1.

3. Schömann-Lipsius. Griechische Alterthümer,⁴ II (1892).

4. Francotte, H. La Polis grecque (1907).

5. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen (1910). In Hinneberg's Die Kultur der Gegenwart. Teil II, Abteilung IV, 1.

6. Zimmern, Alfred. The Greek Commonwealth (1911).

7. Keil, Bruno. Griechische Staatsaltertümer (1912). In Gercke and Norden's Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft, pp. 297 ff.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A History of the Eastern Roman Empire, pp. 319 f.

[2] Atlantic Monthly, Oct., 1912, vol. cx, pp. 517 ff.

[3] Plutarch, Ti. Gracch. 9; cf. Greenidge, A History of Rome, p. 111.

[4] Ηρὡδου Περι Πολιτεἱας, 30 (Ed. Drerup). With characteristic conservatism the English scholars, Adcock and Knox (Klio, 1913, pp. 249 ff.), uphold the attribution of this pamphlet to Herodes Atticus.

[5] Thucy., III, 82, 8. (The translation used here and elsewhere in the book is that of Jowett.)

[6] Thucy., III, 37, 2.

[7] The same is true of the second Athenian empire. The confederation from which it grew had no reason to outlast the occasion which had called t into existence—the "tyranny" of Sparta. It was, therefore, by design at least, a temporary, and not a permanent, union.

[8] Hellenica Oxyrhyn., II, 2-4.

[9] Attische Urkunden, I Teil. (Sitzb. d. Akad. in Wien. Phil.-hist. Klasse. 165, 6, 1911).

[10] It was revived on much less objectionable terms by Antigonus Doson. See below, page 34 and chapter VII.

[11] Lysistrata, 579 ff.

[12] See below, chapter VII.

[13] See below, chapter VII.

[14] See above, page 30.

[15] See below, chapter VII.

[16] See especially Ed. Meyer, Kleine Schriften, 283 ff., and below, chapter IV.

[17] Bury, J.B., The Constitution of the Later Roman Empire (1910), pp. 10 ff., 36.

II

ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY

No form of government, or profession of political idea, saves a state from imperialism. Even this country, which is dedicated, as is no other of the modern great powers, to the concept of popular sovereignty; which uprears the structure of its state upon a belief in the essential equality of men, and treats, or at least aims to treat, as comparatively negligible the differences created by birth and race, education and religion, property and occupation;-even this idealistic republic has become an empire in our own time and almost without our perceiving it. M. Bouché-Leclercq has given a prominent place in his Leçons d'histoire romaine[18] to the discomforting doctrine that the Romans conquered the world in spite of themselves—a debatable question, as he himself shows. It is not our sense of truth that is gratified when we are told that the beatitude, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," designates the English. Yet Seeley has maintained the thesis that the British empire was secured in a "prolonged fit of national absence of mind." Unwittingly, it seems, the modern foster-mother of liberal institutions has become the mistress of countless millions.

There never was a people which made the principle that all its citizens were equal a more live reality than the Athenians made it; and no state to my knowledge was more cunningly contrived to insure the government of the people than was theirs. Yet they became imperialists with ardor and conviction, and with this much of logical consequence, that, while they believed in democracy for everybody, they did not doubt that the Athenians had earned the right to rule both Greeks and barbarians by the acquisition of superior culture. Equality among its citizens Athens carefully distinguished from equality among all men.

The foundations of Athenian democracy and empire were laid by Themistocles, whose figure moves weird and gigantic through the golden mist in which Herodotus has enveloped the great Persian War. And it was this genial statesman, to whose unerring skill in discerning the course of coming events the austere historian Thucydides pays a rare tribute, who mapped out for his city the foreign policy by which it had the best chance of realizing its imperial ambition. Let it use its great fleet, which by fifteen years of persistent advocacy he had led the Athenians to build, as its arm of offense, and its impregnable walls, which he had enabled the Athenians to construct despite the treacherous opposition of Sparta, as a bulwark of defense and a basis for timely advance against its powerful continental rivals. Let it utilize the wave of democratic fervor then sweeping through Greece to consolidate its power within the Confederacy of Delos and to undermine and eventually to overthrow the leadership which Sparta, by the support of dying mediæval aristocracies, had hitherto possessed in Hellenic affairs. Let it make peace on advantageous terms with Persia; use the liberty thus secured to break the power of Sparta, and, on the basis of a consolidated Hellas, strike boldly for Athenian dominion of the world.

It seems almost incredible that a clear-headed man should have entertained a programme of such magnitude. But we must remember that never had human beings more clearly performed the obviously miraculous. We know, on the authority of a German military expert,[19] that, had the host which followed Xerxes to Athens numbered the 5,283,220 men attributed to it by Herodotus "without taking count of women cooks, concubines, eunuchs, beasts of burden, cattle, and Indian dogs," its rear guard must have been still filing out of Sardis while its van was vainly storming Thermopylæ. But what Herodotus reports is what the Athenians believed. They had met and routed the might of all Asia. They had mastered in fair fight the conquerors of all other peoples. The world was theirs: it was merely a question of taking possession.

Themistocles had, accordingly, to reckon with a national self-confidence which knew no bounds. And this had been increased by famous victories of Cimon over the Persians, and a revolt of the Helots which disclosed the fatal weakness of Sparta, when in 461 B.C. the task of conducting the fierce current of national energy, first for fifteen years (461-446 B.C.) in a heroic, but fruitless, struggle by sea and land against the Greeks and Persians simultaneously, and then for fifteen further years (446-431 B.C.) in the prosecution of glorious works of peace, fell upon the broad shoulders of Pericles, Xanthippus's son.

It is conceded that there is no taskmaster so ruthless as one's own will. The impulse to action during this strenuous epoch came from the Athenian people itself, not from its chief statesman. That fact does not, however, diminish the credit of Pericles. The golden age of Greece is, properly speaking, a golden age of Athens, and to its birth many things contributed; but decisive among them, in addition to the intensity of national life already alluded to, was an unrivaled facility for great leaders to get into effective contact with the masses under conditions in which there was the fullest opportunity for men in general to use their natural powers to the utmost. This happy combination of creative genius and receptive multitude arose in the main from the democratic institutions of Athens; but, for the public and private wealth without which Athenian democracy proved unworkable, and for the imaginative stimulus which enterprises of great pitch and moment alone give, the possession of empire was, perhaps, essential.

In the age of Pericles, Athens was a city with a population of about 150,000. Attica, the territory of the Athenians, had an approximately equal number of inhabitants. Of the 300,000 thus accounted for, about one third was servile and one sixth foreign. The free and franchised population made up one half of the total, and yielded about 50,000 males of military age.

The empire of the Athenians consisted of five provinces, the Thracian, Hellespontine, Insular, Ionian, and Carian, with a total population of perhaps, 2,000,000. It formed a complex of islands, peninsulas, and estuaries, the most remote extremities of which were distant two hundred or two hundred and fifty miles from Athens. The highways of this empire were the land-locked channels and lakes which make up the Ægean Archipelago. Their greatest length in normal circumstances was a continuous voyage of about eight days. On the other hand, no land way of more than a single day's march need be traversed by an Athenian expedition aimed at any of its subject cities. Without the control of the sea the empire was, accordingly, unthinkable. This absent, the district fell at once into more than four hundred fragments, the thousand "cities" from which, according to the comedian Aristophanes, the Athenians gathered tribute.

The Athenian sphere of naval operations and of political and commercial interests reached far beyond the frontiers of the empire. It included points like Sicily, Egypt, Phœnicia, and the Euxine, distant over six hundred miles from the Piræus. An Athenian fleet might thus require the best part of a month to reach its destination. The world which had to take careful account of the Athenian naval power in all its political and military calculations, the world which Athens under Pericles sought to dominate, must have had a population of over 20,000,000.

If, then, we take into account the ratio of dominant, subject, and foreign elements, and also the time consumed in reaching with ships, orders, or explanations, the outer limits of authority, the magnitude of Athens's imperial undertaking will stand comparison with that of England in modern times.

In Sparta the gravestone of a citizen was inscribed regularly with his name alone. No epitaph was needed there to tell the tale of a life; for the life of one citizen was the well-known life of all. If, however, a man had died for his country, two words, ἑν πολἑμω, "in war," expressed with laconic brevity his ground of distinction.

For those who fell in battle Athens set apart a public cemetery near the Dipylon Gate, and at the end of every campaign a commemorative service was held there in honor of the year's crop of martyrs. A man high in public esteem voice the nation's gratitude for the sacrifice. On such an occasion, at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles reversed the normal procedure, and, instead of expatiating on the merits of the fallen, he explained in an eloquent speech why Athens was worthy of loyalty unto death. Thucydides heard his words, and, perhaps many years afterwards, reproduced them as best he could in the famous Funeral Oration.

The statesman did not linger long over the legendary glories of Athens. Her alleged boons to humanity—grain, the norms of civilized life, the drama; the services, that is to say, upon which the later Athenians dwelt with special pride—had no meaning for him. Two things their ancestors had done: they had defended their country successfully, and had transmitted to their descendants a free state. "And if these were worthy of praise,"[20] proceeds his splendid exordium, "still more were our fathers, who added to their inheritance, and after many a struggle transmitted to us their sons this great empire. And we ourselves assembled here to-day, who are still most of us in the vigor of life, have chiefly done the work of improvement, and have richly endowed our city with all things, so that she is sufficient for herself both in peace and war. Of the military exploits by which our various possessions were acquired, or of the energy with which we or our fathers drove back the tide of war, Hellenic or Barbarian, I will not speak; for the tale would be long and is familiar to you. But ... I should like to point out by what principles of action we rose to power, and under what institutions and through what manner of life our empire became great."

In these words of Pericles I should like you to find stated the theme of my second chapter. And were it not that Pericles left unexplained, what the Athenians whom he addressed knew without explanation, the social and political forms by which they realized their ideals, I might absolve my task by one long quotation. I might transcribe the whole Oration and have done with it.

That being inexpedient, I cannot do better than present, using again Pericles's own words as a sort of text, the main principles of Athenian policy. But in passing I may be permitted to observe that were our knowledge of Athens dependent solely upon the Funeral Oration; had we to form our idea of political life in fifth-century B.C. Greece from it alone, we might still infer a unique epoch in the history of mankind. Fortunately, that is not the case. The "tooth of time and razure of oblivion" have spared the Parthenon and its matchless sculptures, the noble tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles, and the undying charm of Herodotus. Ideals are always grounded in some measure in realities. At the least they stand to them as the "perfect round" to the "broken arc." Even in Plato's psychology the mind needs to be sharpened by observation and reflection before, as in a flash of light, the glimpse of the divine idea suddenly appears. Hence, were the affirmations of the Funeral Oration unsupported by contemporary monuments of similar spirit, they would still be helpful revelations of Athenian democracy. And this conclusion, as I hope to show, rests not upon logical inference alone, but also upon the evidence of minute research.

"It is true," said Pericles,[21] "we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized, and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private intercourse we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private intercourse, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for authority and for the laws, having an especial regard to those ordained for the protection of the injured as well as to those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment.... Wealth we employ not for talk and ostentation, but when there is a real use for it. To avow poverty with us is no disgrace: the true disgrace is in doing nothing to avoid it. An Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes care of his own household; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless but as a useless character; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy. The great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not discussion but the want of that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act and of acting too.... And we have not forgotten to provide for our weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games and sacrifices throughout the year; at home the style of our life is refined; and the delight which we daily feel in all these things helps to banish melancholy. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as of our own.... We are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.... To sum up: I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace. This is no passing and idle word, but truth and fact; and the assertion is verified by the position to which these qualities have raised the state.... And we shall assuredly not be without witnesses; there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages; we shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may please for the moment, although his representation of the facts will not bear the light of day. For we have compelled every land and every sea to open a path for our valor, and have everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friendship and of our enmity."

Such were the proud claims of the great Athenian statesman. Of art there was said no word except in so far as art was embodied in the monuments of empire. Music and the drama are alluded to, but in the same breath with athletic contests, as the relaxation of overworked men. The speaker has no apology to make for democracy. He gloried in imperialism. Had he met Plato in Elysium—Plato who was born in the year after Pericles's death, and both embodied and expressed the higher ideals of a later generation of Athenians—he would have disdained to reply to the philosopher's accusation that he had filled the city with traders and shops and ships and dockyards and such rubbish, instead of with righteousness and justice.

Taking the Funeral Oration as my text, I should like to explain at this point by what institutions the principles of Periclean democracy and imperialism were converted into facts.

It was in the ecclesia, or general assembly, and in the heliæa, or popular courts of justice, that sovereign power was vested in Athens.[22] The heliæa demanded of its jurors only that they should be citizens in good standing, but each year it drew according to need from a specially constituted list of 6000. So, too, of the 50,000 citizens who might attend the ecclesia, 6000 were regarded as a quorum when a quorum was required, and commonly an even smaller number was present. Meetings of the ecclesia were held either in the city or at the harbor; hence the urban element tended to dominate. Stated meetings occurred four times a month, but others might be called by the generals or the council. Various panels of from 401 to 2001 jurymen each might be allotted to tribunals on every day of the year which was not set aside for a public festival or preëmpted by a meeting of the ecclesia. Usually poor men of advanced years, such as were unsuited for more active work and were satisfied with the indemnity of two obols[23] per day, volunteered for registration among the 6000 jurors.

The work of Parliament was divided between the ecclesia and the heliæa; for legislation in the strict sense of the term could be enacted only by the joint action of the two bodies.[24] Administrative decrees, moreover, by means of which the ecclesia disposed of all important public business, and which might differ from laws only in a formal way, could be suspended at the initiative of individuals and were incontestable only when passed on, as to constitutionality or public expediency, by the heliæa. The men who sat in the heliæa were but common citizens like those who voted in the ecclesia; but they came to sit in judgment on both laws and decrees by the accident of the lot and not because of any particular interest in the questions concerned. In other words, the courts could not be packed with partisans as the meetings of the ecclesia commonly were. This fact, together with the delay which necessarily occurred, protected the state against the verdict of a chance majority, which was in fact usually a minority of all the citizens. There was no such thing in Athens as the final settlement of controversial matters by a single popular vote.

The heliæa acted as sovereign in one further particular. Upon it devolved the duty of determining whether the magistrates and councilors observed the laws and conducted themselves honestly during their years of office. It was to the sworn assembly of the Athenians, accordingly, that all those engaged in civil administration were responsible. The ecclesia, on the other hand, had the right to impeach and dismiss those officials who, being given discretionary powers, abused them.

The main work of the heliæa was of course to settle domestic and imperial litigation. As we shall see, the judicial power of the heliæa gave it a large measure of political control over all the subject cities of Athens.

The heliæa was the brake on the democratic machine: the ecclesia was the dynamo. The intent of the Athenians was that all political decisions of importance should be reached, after full debate, by the ecclesia. It was, however, obvious that an assembly of from five to fifty thousand men would proceed with disastrous slowness if all matters, great and small, were laid before it, or even if it considered only significant affairs, but considered them without previous examination and formulation. Perversion of modern democracies results most notably from the usurpation of power on the part of those who sift proposals for popular reference. Athens had to guard against a similar danger. Hence the harbinger of democracy, Clisthenes, created for it one of the most peculiar probuleutic, or deliberative, bodies which ever had the handling of large affairs. This was the council of the Five Hundred.

It was constituted anew each year and was made an exact miniature of the ecclesia which it was to serve. Every ward and township of Attica, to the number of one hundred and over, first eliminated such of its members as had not yet reached their thirtieth year or had already served two terms in the council, and then selected by lot from among the rest the councilor or councilors to which it was entitled on the basis of population. Accordingly, each successive council had from two hundred and fifty to five hundred new and inexperienced members. Not desire or fitness but pure chance determined its personnel. Every section, interest, and class of Attica—if we exclude young men between eighteen and thirty—was adequately represented in it. There was, therefore, a general presumption that it would take the same view of public questions as the ecclesia; that it would do a disservice to its own members should it foster their temporary rights as councilors at the expense of their lifelong rights as members of the ecclesia; that it would, in other words, labor to the best of its ability to present to the ecclesia a well-considered and sufficiently inclusive programme of business. Otherwise, the heliæa had to be faced at the end of the twelve months.

A committee of five hundred impresses us as little less unwieldy than an assembly of five thousand. Clisthenes was of the same opinion. Hence he divided his council into ten sections, or prytanies, of fifty members each, and arranged that each prytany should act for the whole for thirty-six days in an order determined by lot at the latest possible moment. The prytany was constituted in such a way that it was a miniature of the council, just as the council was a miniature of the ecclesia. The lot, again applied at the latest possible moment, determined, furthermore, which of its fifty members should be its chairman, and be present with one third of his colleagues in the council chamber for the single twenty-four hours for which he served. The same man was chairman of the council at its daily session, and he also presided at the ecclesia, should a meeting of the citizens be held on his day of office. A chance nomination for a single day's service, at a time not previously known, was, Clisthenes thought, a sufficient safeguard of council and ecclesia against successful scheming, conspiracy, collusion, or other interference with the popular will on the part of the chairman. He was mistaken; and the later democracy took the further precaution of requiring the chairman to relinquish the presidency at the meetings of the council and ecclesia to a board of nine men chosen by lot for that specific purpose from the non-officiating prytanies of the council. One of the nine, designated likewise by lot, was given the special honor and responsibility of putting the motions and declaring the votes.

Only proposals which originated in a council thus organized came before the ecclesia; but there they might be discussed ad libitum, emended, accepted, rejected, or referred back to the council; and it was even possible during their consideration to substitute for the resolution of the council an entirely different bill, or to move that the council bring in a proposition at the next meeting on an altogether irrelevant matter. It was the deliberate intention of the Athenians that the ecclesia should consider everything it wanted to consider.

The management of civil administration, subject to the constant direction of the ecclesia and the watchful supervision of the council,—which in this matter also acted for the body of which it was a miniature,—was entrusted to a multitude of committees, each composed normally of ten members. Aristotle, in his Constitution of the Athenians, specifies the duties of twenty-five such committees and estimates at seven hundred the number of citizens engaged annually in domestic administration. The work of each committee was definitely circumscribed by law and formed a small bundle of routine matters. The committees may be thought of as standing drawn up in a long line for the council to inspect. Had they been placed one behind the other in files, the rear committee being responsible to the one before it and so on down to the front, the council would have come into direct contact only with a few powerful committees. Such committees, however, must have proved impossible for inexperienced councilors to manage. Besides, while the councilors, as agents of the ecclesia, and subject to its commands, might properly hold all the civil magistrates to a monthly accounting, it was not thought in accord with democracy that one group of citizens who happened to hold one civil office should have under their direction another group of citizens also engaged temporarily on public work. Though all the committees were thus on the same plane, and recognized only the council as their common superintendent, the work that they did was by no means of equal dignity or importance. It ranged all the way from managing the scavengers to managing the Great Dionysia.

All committees were reconstituted annually. No man could be a member of the same committee twice in his lifetime. At the end of his year each magistrate was required to render an indescribably minute accounting of his public acts, first to specially appointed auditing committees, and finally to the heliæa. It was an easy matter to get an office in Athens, but a very difficult task to get honorably rid of it. For the lot was used to select the requisite number of members for each committee from among the citizens thirty years old or older who had not disqualified themselves by earlier service. The theory that one citizen was as competent as another for public office was thus put into practice. Every office was refilled annually by a chance group of new and necessarily inexperienced men.

While defining constitutions Aristotle lays down the condition for a thorough-going democracy that all citizens should hold governmental positions in turn. On this theory, there should have been an approximate agreement between the number of places in Athens and the number of citizens reaching their thirtieth year annually. That, however, was not the case. Even if we assume that men were councilors only once and held only one magistracy in their lifetime, we need to include some of the seven hundred (?) imperial posts in our calculation, and regard them, too, as subject to the conditions of tenure assumed for domestic positions, in order to reach the required total of about thirteen hundred. This is, naturally, an unwarranted and unworkable series of assumptions. It is, however, reasonable to suppose that the majority of Athenian citizens, and practically all of those who made a habit of attending the meetings of the ecclesia held a deme, or municipal, position, let us say, in their youth; a post in the council or in the domestic or imperial administration in their maturity; and a place in the register of the six thousand jurors in their advancing years. Recall, now, that three hundred and sixty of the five hundred councilors had to preside at meetings of fifty and five hundred men, and, if chance willed, at one of from five to fifty thousand also; observe that magistrates had not only to know the duties of their office,—which included the reception and preparation of some kind of cases for submission to a panel of jurors, over which they had, moreover, to preside,—but had also to keep accounts which they must defend in a law court; reflect that jury service involved acting as judge and jury in both domestic and imperial litigation, and it will appear that the knowledge of reading and writing which Clisthenes presupposed in all citizens would not have carried a man far in the age of Pericles; he must then have had a working knowledge of parliamentary forms, he must have had the view of administration which comes of being on the inside of the wicket; he must have been so conversant with the law and legal procedure that he could assume heavy personal responsibility for the legality of all bills proposed by him and could argue his own cases when acting as plaintiff or defendant in a law suit. It was a proverb in Athens that "office will show the man." We may be sure that most men took some pains in advance that it did not show them wholly incompetent. It must have left them with a new insight into public affairs. It is fair to say that, as a consequence of all this, the normal town meeting of the Athenians was, from one point of view, an assembly of experts, while viewed differently it possessed simply a high level of amateur attainment, comparable, perhaps, with that Mr. H.G. Wells postulates in his socialistic Utopia.

The office assigned by Pericles to this assembly of high-class amateurs was to choose the best among divergent policies proposed to it by citizens of exceptional endowment. The ecclesia by no means closed the door in the face of such real experts as it possessed. Thus it did not leave it to the council to draw up the specifications for the construction of the naval arsenals or any similarly technical job, but it could and did delegate such tasks to men of special competence. Nor was it so doctrinaire as to entrust the command of its expeditions or the conduct of its diplomacy to chance persons; but it both elected its generals, reëlected them as often as it cared to, and gave them special rights of calling and canceling meetings of the ecclesia and of laying proposals directly before them. It was, accordingly, aware of the difficulty and danger which it faced in settling questions of foreign policy, where the elements involved, being the resources, aims, sentiments, and traditions of other states, far transcended the knowledge of the common citizen; and where error might mean irreparable disaster; where, in fact, error did mean irreparable disaster.

The surest way to avoid error was to pick out a single individual of high character, intelligence, and competence, and give him cordial and resolute support in the policy he advocated. The ecclesia was accordingly a great "contest," or agon, of statesmen. The Athenians believed in competition. A public contest, in which excellence might be displayed and determined, was arranged to encourage effort in every conceivable employment. To digress a little, there was a contest of potters, as we learn from a gravestone on which an unknown affirms by a mighty oath that he was adjudged the first of all the potters of Attica. There were probably contests of painters and sculptors as well. There were contests of horse-breeders—the chariot- and running-races; contests of athletes of all ages in all kinds of physical exercises, of torch-racers on foot and on horseback; there were contests between the successive prytanies of the council, between detachments of cavalry, and between regiments of foot; at each of many festivals there were contests in singing of five choruses of boys and five choruses of men, each fifty voices strong, so that a single festival called for the training of five hundred singers annually and the production of ten new musical compositions; there were contests of rhapsodists in reciting Homer, contests of rhetoricians; above all contests of tragedians and contests of comedians, each tragic contest demanding twelve new plays annually and the participation of one hundred and eighty choral singers and dancers, each comic contest involving six new plays yearly and one hundred and forty-four choral singers and dancers. The rivalry which produces Olympic records and superdreadnaughts nowadays, the Athenians turned to advantage in art and music as well: with the result that the taste and skill of the artisan as well as the sculptor and painter, of the consumer as well as the producer, became well-nigh faultless; that in the hundred years of the empire close to two thousand plays of picked quality were written and staged in Athens, while during the same time from five to six thousand new musical compositions were made and presented. It is estimated that upwards of two thousand Athenians had to memorize the words and practice the music and dance figures of a lyric or dramatic chorus every year. Hence, a normal Athenian audience must have been composed in large part of ex-performers, a fact which students of Sophocles and Aristophanes would do well to bear constantly in mind.

The reward of victory in an athletic or musical contest was the glory and the prize. Great, indeed, was the reward which the victor in the supreme contest, the struggle for political leadership in the ecclesia, obtained. The man to whom the Athenians gave their confidence became stronger than a king. "In form," says Thucydides, "their government was a democracy: in reality it was the rule of their ablest citizen." The man who was vanquished in a chariot-race might be the victor on the next occasion. Not so the victim of a decisive political defeat. His fate was ostracism. That is to say, he was exiled without dishonor or loss of property for ten years. The way was thereby cleared for the victor. By this strange device the Athenians saved themselves for over two generations from the procrastination and uncertainty of distracted counsels. It was ostracism which made possible the uncrowned kingship of Themistocles, Cimon, and Pericles; and when, after the death of Pericles in 429 B.C., this institution failed them utterly, the Athenians were pulled this way and that by rival leaders; till finally, misled by Alcibiades and Cleophon, they were convicted by disaster of being unsound judges of foreign policy.

There is nothing that dies so hard as a well-nurtured delusion. In the romantic-idealizing view of the Greeks which was long current, the Athenians found leisure for art, literature, and philosophy by having all their work done for them by their slaves.[25] By this means, too, they were enabled to devote themselves freely to politics. If this were so, the inference of Calhoun was a sound one, that seen "in its true light" slavery was "the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world." The "first lie" is that the Athenians of the great age, whose dominant characteristic was their vibrant mental and physical activity, were in any sense men of leisure. The few among them who had slaves and other property to the extent of great wealth had to make and manage their own investments. The majority of the farmers had to till the land with their own hands. Many citizens—at least one third of the whole, in all probability—had to earn their living by selling their labor. This they could do easily in the time of the empire. For during that period of rapid commercial and industrial expansion the demand for labor was so great that the price could be regulated only by the constant import of slaves and by a steady stream of immigration from less prosperous parts of Greece. Outside labor served the purpose in Athens which immigrant labor serves in the United States to-day. With its growth grew the need that the material prosperity which occasioned it should endure. The problem of food-supply became progressively acute and the control of the sea was soon seen to be an economic necessity. More than one half of the grain sold on the Athenian market came ultimately from abroad, as did an even larger proportion of the raw materials of Athenian industry. "The Athenians are the only people in the Hellenic and barbarian world," wrote an Athenian aristocrat[26] in about 420 B.C., "who are able to control an abundant supply of raw materials. For if a state is rich in timber for shipbuilding, where will it find a market for it if not with the masters of the sea? If another abounds in iron or bronze or linen yarn, where will it find a market except with the sea-lord? Yet this is the stock from which ships are made in Athens. One city yields timber to her, another iron, a third bronze, a fourth linen yarn, a fifth wax, and so on. Moreover, Athens prevents her rivals from transporting goods to other countries than Attica by the threat of driving them from the sea altogether."

The demands put upon the time of Athenian citizens by the state were enormous, but not such as to cripple economic production. A comparison with modern conditions will make this clear. A little less frequently than once a week the ecclesia met, but the attendance was generally less than one tenth of those qualified. That represents a suspension of work roughly equivalent to our Saturday afternoons and legal holidays. A little oftener than once a week a contest or other public festival occurred, and to these there was, it seems, a pretty general resort. They correspond to our fair-days and Sundays. Preparation for the contests was, perhaps, not more destructive of money-earning time than are our collegiate and university courses. During their nineteenth and twentieth years young Athenians of the upper third trained for the army; but it was not till a century after Pericles's death that universal military service for a similar period was made compulsory—as in modern Europe. We may assume that at least two years of every citizen's life was required for deliberative and administrative work; and, having regard to the imperial service, we may, perhaps, advance this requirement to three. That is an enormous enlargement of modern demands. The same ratio would give the United States two million and a half or three million public employees, exclusive of postmasters and postal clerks, tax-collectors, and day laborers of every description. But a bald comparison of this sort is misleading. Athens regularly employed a committee of ten to do one man's work, with the result that all of them were free to give nine tenths of their time to their private business. The council during the year and the jury courts at its expiry were there to insure the state that, even if his colleagues would let him, any particular official did not neglect his public duties. Nor was the Athenian practice wildly extravagant so long as the magistrate received, not a living salary, but an indemnity equal only to a common workman's daily wage. The Athenians employed four hundred or even two thousand jurors where we employ twelve; but they had neither high salaried judges nor exacting lawyers to pay, since the judicial system worked without either. The juryman's fee, moreover, was a meagre indemnity, comparable to the old-age pension paid in the progressive countries of modern Europe.

The payment of indemnities for service in the council, the magistracies, the jury courts, and for attendance in the theatre, music-hall, and stadion, was a Periclean innovation. He did not intend to create a class of salaried officials; nor yet to make an advance toward communism. His ideal was political, not economic, equality—to enable all, irrespective of wealth or station, to use the opportunities and face the obligations which democracy brought in its train. Like all the great democratic leaders who preceded him, he was a nobleman by birth and breeding, and, like them, he did not doubt for a moment that the culture which ennobled the life of his class would dignify and uplift that of the masses also. To give the workingman the political insight and knowledge of the Eupatrids; to lend to him the grace and elasticity of movement which physical culture gave them; to fill his memory with the noble thoughts set in melodious and stirring words which they got from their intimacy with great poetry; to inspire in him, though a mere artisan, an artist's taste and fervor for formal beauty—that was to bless him with more than leisure. It was to unite the whole people in a community of high ideas and emotions. It was to make them a nation of noblemen. We do not wonder much that in the furtherance of this cause the men of large wealth in Athens volunteered to assume in turn financial and personal responsibility for the support of the theatre, the opera-house, the stadion, and the gymnasia. It was a heavy burden, but, in the absence of a regular property or income tax, generosity became at once a duty and a wise precaution.

A nation of noblemen is a luxury for which somebody has to pay. Athens, in Pericles's memorable phrase, was "the school of Hellas." It was right, he thought, that the Hellenes should sacrifice something for their education. He had tried to make them all contributory allies of Athens, but had failed in the attempt. As a good schoolmaster he was determined, none the less, to hold those "well in hand" whom he had under his care.

The physical means to this end was the control of the sea. The advantages of sea power in warfare, in enabling the holder of it to circumscribe according to his convenience the area of military action, as well as in facilitating mobilization, transport, and communications, were not perceived for the first time by the English Admiralty, much less by Clausewitz and Captain Mahan. They are stated in the clearest terms by a contemporary of Pericles.[27] Here is what he says: "The subjects of a power which is dominant by land have it open to them to form contingents from several small states and to muster in force to battle. But with the subjects of a naval power it is different. As far as they are groups of islands (and the whole world, we may remark in passing, is now simply a magnified Ægean Archipelago) it is impossible for their states to meet together for united action, for the sea lies between them, and the dominant power is master of the sea. And even if it were possible for them to assemble in some single island unobserved, they would only do so to perish of famine. And as to the states subject to Athens which are not islanders, but situated on the continent, the larger are held in check by need and the small ones absolutely by fear, since there is no state in existence which does not depend upon imports and exports and these she will forfeit, if she does not lend a willing ear to those who are masters of the sea. In the next place, a power dominant by sea can do certain things which a land power is debarred from doing; as, for instance, ravage the territory of a superior, since it is always possible to coast along to some point, where either there is no hostile force to deal with or merely a small body; and in case of an advance in force on the part of the enemy they can take to their ships and sail away. Such a performance is attended by less difficulty than that experienced by the army marching along the seaboard to the rescue. Again, it is open to a power so dominating by sea to leave its own territory and sail off on as long a voyage as you please. Whereas the land power cannot place more than a few days' journey between itself and its own territory, for marches are slow affairs; and it is not possible for an army on the march to have food supplies to last for any great length of time. Such an army must either march through friendly territory or it must force a way by victory in battle. The voyager meanwhile has it in his power to disembark at any point where he finds himself in superior force; or, at the worst, to coast by until he reaches either a friendly district or an enemy too weak to resist. Again, those diseases to which the fruits of the earth are liable as visitations from heaven fall severely on a land power, but are scarcely felt by the naval power, for such sicknesses do not visit the whole earth everywhere at once.... There is just one thing which the Athenians lack. Supposing they were the inhabitants of an island, and were still, as now, rulers of the sea, they would have had it in their power to work whatever mischief they liked and suffer no evil in return."

At all costs Athens must retain control of the sea. That meant to keep the fleet constantly in fighting trim. In the effort the Athenians made the most heroic financial and personal sacrifices, demonstrating clearly that popular government need not be self-indulgent. Neither the aristocracy in England nor Napoleon in France was as hard a taskmaster of the people as the majority which ruled in Athens. Between 410 and 402 B.C.—a time of great economic distress—a well-to-do citizen was called upon to expend twenty thousand franks—which are perhaps equal in purchasing power to as many dollars—on what we may call national education and entertainment. His taxes on the account of the fleet amounted in the same years to double as much, or forty-three thousand franks. Great as was the burden of the rich, that of the commons was conceded by their adversaries to have been still greater. "In the first place," writes an aristocrat in about 420 B.C.,[28] "it is only just that the poorer classes and the 'people' of Athens should have the advantage over the men of birth and wealth, seeing that it is the people who man the fleet and put round the city her girdle of power. The steersman, the boatswain, the lieutenant, the look-out-man at the prow, the shipwright—these are the people who engird the city with power far rather than her heavy infantry and men of birth and quality." Plutarch[29] tells us that on a peace footing Athens kept a fleet of sixty ships on the sea for eight months of every year. To man such a squadron 10,200 rowers, 480 officers, and 600 marines would be required. In other words, one quarter of all the citizens of Athens would have lived on their battleships for three quarters of every year. We might believe this report, if it were not contradicted by Aristotle, who in a place, where exaggeration, not reduction, is suspected,[30] makes the fleet of Athens, which was constantly in service in time of war, consist only of twenty guard-ships. Hence one twelfth and not one quarter of all the Athenians were on active naval duty during the sailing season of almost every year. In addition, two thousand men were drafted yearly by lot to serve in garrisons throughout the empire; so that, if these are added to the seven hundred (?) imperial magistrates, and the five hundred guards of the arsenals, nearly another one twelfth of the citizens was involved.

This computation takes no account of the demands of naval warfare. In the Athenian dockyards lay ready for action four hundred battleships, from which the requisite number was selected for each particular expedition. If two hundred and fifty vessels were mobilized, as occasionally happened, nearly fifty thousand additional sailors were required. With the use of every possible citizen Athens could not produce such a number. She commonly did her utmost and called upon the allies for the rest.

It is true that tribute was collected from the allies to enable Athens to build the ships and pay the sailors; but it is also true that, in addition, huge sums were contributed for mobilization expenses by rich Athenians and were advanced for heavy war expenses by the Athenian treasury. And Athens gave freely not only of her money but also of her blood. The death roll of one of the ten corps into which the Athenians were divided for army and navy purposes is extant for the year 459 B.C. "Of the Erechtheid phyle," it runs, "these are they who died in the war, in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, at Halieis, in Ægina, at Megara, in the same year";[31] and one hundred and seventy-two names follow. It was not the year of a great battle, or of an Athenian disaster, yet in it the death rate must have been nearly twice as great as the birth rate; so costly in lives was the empire to its lords in war-time.

On three specific points and on one general ground, contemporaries both within and without Athens assailed the treatment accorded by the Periclean democracy to its subjects. In no instance, however, is the charge of misbehavior established conclusively, though in this matter, as in so many others in the history of Greece, our judgment is dependent upon the point at which we transfer our sympathy from the city-states, which were the bearers of culture in the Greek Middle Ages, to the whole people, for whose progress and independence urban particularism was finally fatal. "Surely Hellas is insulted with a dire insult," declared the opponents of Pericles,[32] "and manifestly subjected to tyranny when she sees that, with her own enforced contributions for the war, we are gilding and bedizening our city, which, for all the world like a wanton woman, adds to her wardrobe precious stones and costly statues and temples worth their millions." To this accusation the proper retort was, not that having provided adequate protection against Persia, Athens was free to spend the money contributed by the subjects in any way she pleased; for the logical inference was then that the contributions were excessive. Pericles may not have cared to be logical, but he could not ignore forms. Had he been able to show, as has been claimed recently, that he used for building purposes only the sixtieth of the tribute, which had been dedicated as the first fruits to Athena, he would never have been attacked at all. Evidently, he spent on Athenian public works much larger sums derived indirectly from the tribute, for which course the defense actually made seems to have been that the money was due Athens for losses sustained during the invasion of Xerxes and for sums advanced to the war fund during the continuance of the struggle with Persia. In any case the tribute paid was a mere bagatelle as compared with what the subjects saved through having no fleets of their own to maintain.

The charge is more serious that in order to enjoy "the steady receipt of salaries throughout the year derived from the court fees"; to "manage the affairs of the subjects while seated at home without the expense of naval expeditions"; to "preserve the partisans of democracy and ruin its opponents"; to boost the business of hotel keepers and such ilk in Athens, and to win for the common citizens the flattery and consideration that would be shown otherwise only to generals and ambassadors, the Athenians "compelled the allies to voyage to Athens in order to have their cases tried." For it seems clear that the law courts at Athens were usually so clogged with litigation that the gain in having a model code of law and in escaping the fierce partisanship of the local tribunals was largely neutralized by the added expense and humiliation. The real justification of the practice was that it obviated the necessity of sending out naval expeditions.

In the third place Athens took from the allies lands and settled them with impecunious Athenians; but in payment therefor reductions of tribute were given. On the other hand, thousands from the allied cities migrated to Athens, and, while not escaping military or financial service, or obtaining Athenian citizenship, they were cordially welcomed, and enjoyed to the full the commercial and industrial advantages of the metropolis. Again, Athenians often found it less profitable to invest capital in Attic land, which was exposed to hostile attack, than in lands on the islands of the empire, which the fleet protected. Hence there were many Attic farmers in the subject territory, their right to own foreign real estate being secured by commercial treaties. There was accordingly economic give and take, the military preponderance of Athens being, however, responsible for the result that the Athenians abroad were often policemen, the allies in Athens, hostages.

In all three instances of alleged misbehavior, it must be admitted that the defense offered by the Athenian apologists simply added insult to injury in the view of a majority of the subjects. But for them Athens, arrogant or conciliatory, malefactor or benefactor, was always a foreign governor to be gotten rid of at any cost. Such uncompromising sentiments time alone could alter, and to secure the benefits of time Pericles endeavored to avoid an Hellenic war. His policy of peace after 446 B.C. was, therefore, the sound policy of an imperialist.

The general ground on which contemporaries criticized the Athenian régime was that under it every assistance was given by the state to the least cultivated portion of the inhabitants both of Athens and of its four hundred and twenty subject cities, at the expense of the most intelligent and cultivated elements; that the highest goal of endeavor was moral and intellectual mediocrity. There may be some truth in this contention. The case would be more conclusive, however, if the tendency of the critics to identify intelligence with wealth and cultivation with birth were less obvious. If the point be granted, we must accept the opinion of those historians who affirm that Athens was great in this age despite, and not because of, its democracy. Personally, I do not believe that this was so. I cannot admit that extirpation of the best was practiced in an age in which ideas were created and forms were perfected for their literary and artistic expression which have been the wonder and despair of the men of the highest cultivation from that day to this. Does it not seem like irony that a régime is charged with promoting mediocrity under which rose Sophocles, Herodotus, Phidias, Pericles, Euripides, Hippocrates, Socrates, and Thucydides? Much more important than the leveling tendency of the democracy was the facility it afforded for men of ability both to rise to the top and to find there a sympathetic and critical audience. So much for democracy.

The empire stands approved by the fact that the sharpest accusation now made against the democracy is that it failed to make the empire enduring. On this point the last word—unless it be that no political order has ever been enduring, and that those which have lasted the longest have been generally of the least worth—was said by Thucydides[33] over twenty-three hundred years ago, and I present in conclusion his masterly account of the circumstances which led to the downfall of the Athenian Empire:—

"During the peace while Pericles was at the head of affairs he ruled with prudence; under his guidance Athens was safe, and reached the height of her greatness in his time. When the war began, he showed that here, too, he had formed a true estimate of the Athenian power. He survived the commencement of hostilities two years and six months; and, after his death, his foresight was even better appreciated than during his life. For he had told the Athenians that if they would be patient and would attend to their navy, and not seek to enlarge their dominions while the war was going on, nor imperil the existence of the city, they would be victorious; but they did all that he told them not to do, and in matters which seemingly had nothing to do with the war, from motives of private ambition and private interest they adopted a policy which had disastrous effects in respect both of themselves and of their allies; their measures, had they been successful, would have brought honor and profit only to individuals, and, when unsuccessful, crippled the city in the conduct of the war. The reason of the difference was that he, deriving authority from his capacity and acknowledged worth, being also a man of transparent integrity, was able to control the multitude in a free spirit; he led them rather than was led by them; for, not seeking power by dishonest arts, he had no need to say pleasant things, but, on the strength of his own high character, could venture to oppose and even to anger them. When he saw them unseasonably elated and arrogant, his words humbled and awed them; and when they were depressed by groundless fears, he sought to reanimate their confidence. Thus Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact ruled by her greatest citizen. But his successors were more on an equality with one another, and, each struggling to be first himself, they were ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of affairs to the whims of the people. Such weakness in a great and imperial city led to many errors, of which the greatest was the Sicilian expedition; not that the Athenians miscalculated their enemy's power, but they themselves, instead of consulting for the interests of the expedition which they had sent out, were occupied in intriguing against one another for the leadership of the democracy, and not only grew remiss in the management of the army, but became embroiled, for the first time, in civil strife. And yet, after they had lost in the Sicilian expedition the greater part of their fleet and army, and were distracted by revolution at home, still they held out three years not only against their former enemies, but against the Sicilians who had combined with them, and against most of their own allies who had risen in revolt. Even when Cyrus, the son of the King, joined in the war and supplied the Peloponnesian fleet with money, they continued to resist, and were at last overthrown, not by their enemies, but by themselves and their own internal dissensions."

A summarization such as this, in style austere and authoritative, in content the product of penetrating insight and wonderful sense for political realities, not only bears witness to the greatness of Thucydides; when it is contrasted with similar analyses in Plato and Aristotle it testifies to the loss of power for sustained historical thinking which Greece suffered when men of genius were no longer enriched by the experience which came through living in a state like the imperial democracy of Athens. Not the least of its merits is its self-restraint. Having concluded that the reckless rivalries of her would-be leaders and the reckless dissensions of her citizens ruined Athens, he refrains from assigning a cause for the spirit of lawlessness. It is not Thucydides, but Alcibiades, who declared that democracy was "manifest folly"; not he, but Cleon, who reiterated that "a democracy cannot manage an empire." Thucydides does not despair of democracy. In the case of Athens it was less the unsoundness of the "majority" than the selfishness of the "remnant" that caused the nation to perish. For the demoralization of their leaders, however, the Athenians themselves held Socrates responsible, meaning to incriminate the Sophistic movement. Who shall say that they were wrong? And who shall hold democracy responsible for the evils of the Sophistic movement?

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. Von des attischen Reiches Herrlichkeit (1877). In Reden und Vorträge, pp. 27 ff.

2. Jebb, R.C. The Age of Pericles (1889). In Essays and Addresses, pp. 104 ff.

3. Meyer, Eduard. Geschichte des Altertums, IV (1901).

4. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen (1910): C. Die athenische Demokratie, pp. 95 ff.

5. Zimmern, Alfred. The Greek Commonwealth (1911).

6. Cavaignac, E. Histoire de l'Antiquité, II: Athènes (480-330), (1912).

FOOTNOTES:

[18] Pages 27 ff.

[19] Delbrück, Die Perserkriege und die Burgunderkriege, pp. 137 ff.; Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, I (1893), p. 368, n. 3.

[20] Thucy., II, 36, 2.

[21] Thucy., II, 37 ff.

[22] For the following sections see especially Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians.

[23] Seven cents, equal in purchasing power to thirty-five cents perhaps.

[24] Greenidge, Greek Constitutional History (1896), pp. 170 ff.

[25] See particularly Ed. Meyer, Die Sklaverei im Altertum (Kleine Schriften, pp. 169 ff.).

[26] Pseudo-Xenophon, State of the Athenians, II, 10. (The translation used here and elsewhere, with a few modifications, is that of Dakyns.)

[27] Pseudo-Xenophon, State of the Athenians, II, 2 ff.

[28] Pseudo-Xenophon, State of the Athenians, I, 2.

[29] Plut., Pericles, XI, 4.

[30] Const. of the Athenians, 24, 3.

[31] Bury, J.B., A History of Greece (1900), p. 355.

[32] Plut., Pericles, 12. (Translated by Perrin.)

[33] Thucy., II, 65, 5 ff.

III

FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE

A curious legend about the Spartans arose in the age that followed the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. It was then reported that they were the kinsmen of the Jews. According to one version of the story, Judæa was founded by a Spartan named Judæus, who had accompanied the god Dionysus from Thebes on his triumphal progress through Asia. According to another account, the Spartans were descendants of Abraham, the strongest of the children of Israel having migrated to Greece at the time Moses led the remainder out of Egypt to the land of Canaan.[34]

This absurd legend, of which the Greek origin is unmistakable, seems to have been responsible for a certain rapprochement between the two peoples. Despite the first book of the Maccabees, which affirms the contrary, it is, indeed, impossible that Areus I, king of Sparta between 308 and 264 B.C., wrote to Onias I, Jewish high priest, demanding and offering a community of goods, and that Jonathan Maccabæus, one hundred and fifty years afterwards, sent greetings to the Spartans, together with the word that the Jews "at all times without ceasing both in their feasts and other convenient days remembered them in the sacrifices which they offered, and in their prayers, as reason was, and as it becameth them to think upon their brethren."[35] Nothing is more unlikely than that the Spartans volunteered to divide their "cattle" and property with the Jews only a short time before they crushed with great bloodshed a communistic movement among their own citizens, unless it be the thought that the prayers and offerings of the Jews went up continually to Jehovah for the prosperity of heathen who were also backsliders. Nevertheless, that communications were actually established between the Judæa of Onias and Jonathan and the Sparta of Areus and Menalcidas, we cannot doubt; and, indeed, we have still other evidences that the alleged community of origin was turned to account by the Jews. There was evidently a considerable Jewish settlement in Sparta.

When we seek to discover the reason for this strange conjunction of the warrior community by the Eurotas and the religious community by the Jordan, we are helped by observing that in another Hellenistic legend the Jews are made the kinsmen of the gymnosophists, or naked philosophers, of India. The Greek mind was at this time fascinated by the great problem of subordinating the species of things to their proper genera, of perceiving the types by means of which individual objects became intelligible parts of a cosmos. It was the age of Aristotle and Theophrastus, Menander and the New Comedy, of idealistic portraiture. Hence the temptation was irresistible to bring into family relationship the various societies of men in which the principle of caste dominated; to regard it as unessential that in Judæa the people were there to support the priests, in Laconia to support the soldiers, in India to support the Brahmans. In each case there was found an odd community, in which, so far at least as the state could accomplish it, all human interests were subordinated to one, be it war and preparation for war, religious practices of a ritualistic character, or theosophical speculation.

Had the Greeks known it, there was a further analogy of an external sort between the Spartans and the Jews which they would have delighted to establish. For at about the same time that a richly diversified national life was narrowed down in Judæa to a single interest under the stress of complete preoccupation with the means of regaining Jehovah's favor for his chosen people, Sparta ruthlessly compressed and crushed a many-sided and progressive culture to the end that her citizens might become trained soldiers, having but one esprit, the esprit de corps of a professional army.

Prior to 580 B.C. Sparta was the home of poets and musicians. It was for a chorus of Spartan maidens, the élite of the noble families, that Alcman wrote the exquisite lines on the breathless calm of nature which Goethe has made familiar to all lovers of poetry. In hollow Lacedæmon—a valley rich with vegetation suggestive of bountiful harvests, down which the steel-gray Eurotas runs, swift and turbulent, over its rocky bottom, and over which rise on either side the snow-capped ridges of Taygetus and Parnon, their slopes resonant with the songs of the nightingales in the mating season—in this secluded spot, whose haunting beauty is a joy forever to all who have seen it, there was reared a famous temple of Athena, "Athena of the Brazen House," at a time when in Athens itself the city's protecting goddess had to be content with a crude, primitive sanctuary.

All this, and much besides, was observed, and the proper inferences drawn, by Eduard Meyer twenty years ago;[36] so that the amazement with which the English archæologists, who have excavated in Laconia during the past five or six years, report their remarkable "finds" is a source of no little amusement to the wary. They have discovered that prior to 580 B.C. Sparta was the maker of a kind of artistic pottery which was known and imitated in far-distant Cyrene and Tarentum; that she then had trade relations with Egypt and Lydia; that "combs, toilet-boxes, elaborate pins and bronze ornaments, seals, necklaces, and gold and ivory gewgaws" were made and used—witnesses for "a golden age of Spartan art," against the puritanical spirit traditionally attributed to early and middle Sparta.[37]

In Athens, as we have seen, supremacy in art and literature was attained by making universal among citizens the spirit and culture of the aristocracy, the whole people, thus ennobled, being supported on the shoulders of the tributary allies and enriched by the commercial advantages of maritime empire. The development of Sparta was directly the reverse of this. There the aristocracy, whose exuberance of life and responsiveness to sensuous impressions are attested with sufficient certainty, was destroyed in the sixth century B.C.

This century was one of repression in Greece generally; whence some historians have called it the epoch of the Greek Reformation. It is the time of the "Seven Wise Men," from one of whom came the Delphian motto "nothing in excess," a time in which the riotous joy of living and the fresh spontaneity of the so-called Ionian Renascence were subdued by a force, which might have been everywhere a blight,—as in Sparta,—but which in fact, when later the inspiration of the great Persian War came, exerted the gentle restraint which marks the classic in Greek art and letters. In this perilous period the aristocracy of Sparta perished, and with it the ideals and accomplishments of which it had been the exponent.

The instrument of repression of all that was superior to the average in Spartan life was the college of the five ephors, which Cicero compares with the tribunate in Rome. The ephors acquired such power that they made the continuance of even the kingship dependent upon the submission of the kings to their authority; and upon the kings, as upon all others, they enforced the new rules of law of which they were the living expositors.

The development of Sparta, like the development of Rome, from aristocratic to republican government is characterized by the absence of tyrants. The fact is that the tribunate in the one case and the ephorate in the other was tyranny in commission, the division of its powers between ten and five annually changing officers respectively having proved to be a sufficient safeguard against the concentration of executive power in the person of a single individual, be he an inherited king robbed of monarchical rights or an ambitious demagogue aiming at their restoration.

The new rules of law which the ephors enforced prescribed in minute detail the life of the citizen from the moment of his birth to the time of his death. They were the regulations of a military school in which war alone was taught, of military barracks when war was already declared. From seven years of age to sixty the entire energies of the male half of the population were directed toward being prepared for war. Boys and men drilled and hunted, learned to use their weapons and campaigned, danced and exercised, ate in the "messes" year in and year out, and never escaped the watchful eyes of trainers, subalterns, officers, and ephors.

No one in Sparta had to make his own way in life. His whole course was mapped out for him before he was born. No citizen had any business cares; for all trade and industry were tabooed, and the lands which he inherited he could not sell. Neither could he buy those of another. The agricultural laborers were serfs, the sullen and recalcitrant Helots, of whom there were fifteen to every Spartan; the clothing and weapons were made by the contented and tractable Periœcs, who outnumbered the Spartans five to one, and formed with their one hundred hamlets and their contiguous territories an insulating band round Helots and Spartans alike. Iron money was the only local currency, though silver had, of course, to be given in payment for the articles which were imported from abroad. These, however, were reduced to a minimum, and such foreigners as made their way through the wall of Periœcs were rounded up at intervals and forcefully expelled.

All the pretty things of their earlier life, the Spartans chose to do without. Coarse fare and unlovely houses, piazzas devoid of statues and inclosed in unsightly and flimsy public buildings; no theatres, no new music, no new ideas of any kind; mothers who gave up their little children and their grown sons without flinching; wives who violated fundamental instincts that their offspring might be more perfect; homeless boys who went half-naked winter and summer, slept in pens in the open air like cattle and got their food and living by their wits; girls who would hardly have known their brothers, brides who would hardly have recognized their husbands, mothers who would hardly have been able to distinguish their own sons, were it not that there were less than five thousand brothers, husbands, and sons in all—of such was the new Sparta, to whose citizens the ephors issued the annual command "to shave their mustaches and obey the laws." Long-haired and tangly-bearded, in groups of about fifteen each, they lounged and ate and slept in the three hundred tents, or barracks, which lined Hyacinth Street. There they kept their long spears and their armor.[38] Thence, clad in their scarlet cloaks, they issued in time of danger or of war to take their places, group by group, in the five carefully drilled regiments of which the Spartan phalanx was composed. Quietly, at an appointed hour in a single night, the whole army might steal away without confusion, trailing after it, on occasion, thirty-five thousand Helots to attend to the commissariat. Five thousand Periœc hoplites might follow at its heels, and with machine-like precision, to the sound of flutes played in the austere Dorian mode, ten thousand Lacedæmonian soldiers might advance into battle against foemen who were always comparatively ill-organized, and who often fled before a single blow was struck.

The secret of this strange perversion of the natural life of man is to be found in the declaration of war annually made by the ephors upon the Helots. They could not follow it up by a campaign waged in regular fashion; for that would have been to destroy their own serfs. But they picked out young soldiers, and sent them about among the Helots, with instructions to strike down secretly all who seemed restless or over-ambitious. The chief centre of Helot disaffection, at least in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., was on the far side of Mount Taygetus, in Messenia. There the yoke of serfdom chafed more than elsewhere, not least because those whose estates the Helots of Messenia tilled for one half the yield lived beyond the snow-capped ridge which shuts in that country on the east. The Messenians aspired to regain their lost independence. The Helots of the Eurotas Valley had no such ambition. They were, therefore, slower to revolt against injustice; but their aim, when an insurrection did come, could be nothing less than the extermination of their masters, or at least an exchange of position with them. Moreover, their very proximity to the five villages which constituted the unwalled city of Sparta, and the very weight of their numbers made the Spartans live in ever-present fear of a massacre. Constant preparedness for war was, accordingly, a simple mandate of self-preservation.

The Spartans thought it unwise that any of their serf-tilled estates should lie in or outside the ring of Periœc land. It would not do to have fuses, so to speak, of Helots running through the wall to the outside world, or to have masses of Helots beyond the wall, exposed directly to foreign manipulation. Hence the formation of the Periœc ring set definite limits to the territory of Sparta. It could be enlarged in but one way—the widening of the ring by the reduction of more and more outlying states to the status of Periœcs. And it was in this way that the Spartan dominions were in fact enlarged in the seventh century B.C.[39]

At the end of this century, however, Sparta came into conflict with cities which, unlike the mountain and maritime hamlets situated roundabout Laconia and Messenia, were too strong and high-spirited to submit to Spartan control. They had, therefore, to be treated leniently, since Sparta could not crush them altogether and would not leave them alone. And the reasons for conciliatory action were strengthened by the fact that Sparta had now to act abroad with a sharp eye to the possibility of a servile insurrection at home. There was never anything mechanical or idealistic in the foreign policy of the ephors. Hence, first with Tegea at about 560 B.C., and thereafter with all the states in the Peloponnesus, excepting Argos and Achæa, Sparta concluded a treaty, the imperialistic aspect of which was that they agreed individually to accept Sparta's leadership in all defensive wars and in offensive wars to which they had assented.

The Peloponnesian league, thus formed, stood for the autonomy and freedom of its members; but Sparta, by championing aristocracies against tyrants and democracies, and using to its own advantage the jealousies of its allies as well as their fears of outside powers, dominated it for one hundred and eighty years, and made it during all that time the main steadying influence in Greek politics. Twice it was enlarged into an Hellenic league, first during the three years of the great Persian invasion (480-478 B.C.), and again for ten years after the dissolution of the Athenian empire (405-395 B.C.). On the earlier occasion, the ephors felt relieved of an intolerable burden when in 477 B.C. the Ægean cities, over four hundred and twenty in number, abandoned Spartan for Athenian leadership. And in the forty-six years that followed, not they but the Athenians were the aggressors. During that epoch of democratic fervor,[40] it was an uphill struggle for the champions of aristocracy to maintain their position; and the war of political principles was even carried into Sparta, when, in 464 B.C., the Helots of Messenia made a last desperate fight for their liberty. The Spartans profited, however, during the last third of the fifth century B.C., by the discredit into which democracy came among cultivated people through the mistakes and excesses of Athens; and at the end of the Peloponnesian War they were again able to make the Peloponnesian league an Hellenic league by incorporating into it Athens and the Ægean cities which they had just "liberated" from Athenian tyranny.

A successful war may strengthen a nation, but not when victory lays upon it a task that is beyond its powers to perform. Such would have been the case had Athens won at Syracuse. Such was the issue of Ægospotami. This we can readily see by examining briefly, first the situation in Sparta, and then the position of Sparta in Hellas, during the existence of her second Hellenic league.

The Spartans of military age now numbered only about two thousand. War had done its part in reducing them to this handful. Close intermarriage had done even more. In the case of large families, the subdivision of lots which then occurred impoverished sons so greatly that they could no longer stand the expense of the military clubs, upon membership in which, however, citizenship depended. So far did the evil implicit in this condition go that brothers refused to divide their inheritance, and possessed not only one house, but one wife in common. Men could neither buy land nor sell it, but they might acquire it by marriage or by gift; and since the rich, then as always, tended to marry among themselves, property, and with it citizenship, remained eventually in the possession of a very few. Much of the land, which was the only wealth, came into the hands of women. A plutocracy thus developed in Sparta as the number of the Spartans diminished; and in this way the domestic situation became still further ominous by the growth in the city of a considerable body of disfranchised and discontented "inferiors" and half-breeds.

The perils which attended this situation are revealed by the following incident as described by Xenophon in his Hellenica:[41]—

"Now Agesilaus (401-360 B.C.) had not been seated on the throne one year when, as he sacrificed one of the appointed sacrifices in behalf of the city, the soothsayer warned him, saying: 'The gods reveal a conspiracy of the most fearful character'; and when the king sacrificed a second time, he said: 'The aspect of the victims is now even yet more terrible'; but when he had sacrificed for the third time, the soothsayer exclaimed: 'O Agesilaus, the sign is given to me, even as though we were in the very midst of the enemy.' Thereupon they sacrificed to the deities who avert evil and work salvation, and so barely obtained good omens, and ceased sacrificing. Nor had five days elapsed after the sacrifices were ended, ere one came bringing information to the ephors of a conspiracy, and named Cinadon as the ringleader; a young man robust of body as of soul, but not one of the peers. Accordingly, the ephors questioned their informant: 'How say you the occurrence is to take place?' and he who gave the information answered: 'Cinadon took me to the limit of the market-place, and bade me count how many Spartans there were in the market-place; and I counted—king, and ephors, and elders, and others, maybe forty. But tell me, Cinadon, I said to him, why have you bidden me count them? and he answered me: Those men, I would have you know, are your sworn foes; and all those others, more than four thousand, congregated there are your natural allies. Then he took and showed me in the streets, here one and there two of our enemies, as we chanced to come across them, and all the rest our natural allies; and so again running through the list of Spartans to be found in the country districts, he still kept harping on that string: Look you, on each estate one foeman—the master—and all the rest allies!' The ephors asked: 'How many do you reckon are in the secret of the matter?' The informant answered: 'On that point also he gave me to understand that there were by no means many in their secret who were prime movers of the affair, but those few to be depended on; and to make up, said he, we ourselves are in their secret, all the rest of them—Helots, enfranchised, inferiors, Periœcs, one and all. Note their demeanor when Spartans chance to be the topic of their talk. None of them can conceal the delight it would give him if he might eat up every Spartan raw.' Then, as the inquiry went on, the question came: 'And where did they propose to find arms?' The answer followed: 'He explained that those of us, of course, who are enrolled in regiments have arms of our own already, and as for the mass—he led the way to the war foundry, and showed me scores and scores of knives, of swords, of spits, hatchets, and axes, and reaping hooks. Anything or everything, he told me, which men use to delve in the earth, cut timber, or quarry stone, would serve our purpose; nay, the instruments used for other arts would in nine cases out of ten furnish weapons enough and to spare, especially in dealing with unarmed antagonists.' Once more being asked what time the affair was to come off, he replied his orders were not to leave the city."

The ephors, wishing to remove Cinadon from Sparta without suspicion, sent him on a mission to Aulon. He was to arrest certain persons, and among them "a woman, the fashionable beauty of the place—supposed to be the arch-corruptress of all Lacedæmonians, young and old, who visited Aulon." His escort seized him instead and wrested from him the names of his accomplices. "His fate was to be taken out forthwith in irons, just as he was, and to be placed with his two hands and his neck in the collar, and so under scourge and goad to be driven, himself and his accomplices, round the city. Thus upon the heads of those," concludes the pious Xenophon, "was visited the penalty of their offense."

Beset with dangers such as this, the Spartans had to tread warily. They drafted Periœcs into their army so as to make it about fifty-six hundred strong. They picked out Helots, trained and emancipated them, and used them abroad as soldiers. They took mercenaries into their service and distributed them according to local needs under Spartan captains, acting always, however, on requests from local governments. They got large contingents of troops from their old allies, whom, however, they left free of tribute, financing their government with a thousand talents raised annually from the former allies of Athens. With the funds thus secured they hired rowers and marines for the warships which their allies furnished and thus patrolled the sea as well as the land. They got a moral mandate for empire by upholding everywhere aristocracy, real or sham, against democracy, and by assuming the rôle of champion of Greece against the barbarians. This did not prevent them, however, from forming an alliance with Dionysius I,[42] who had just made himself tyrant of Syracuse, or from working in harmony with Persia as long as that was possible.

"The growth of Lacedæmon," said Timolaus of Corinth[43] in 394 B.C., "seems to me just like that of some mighty river—at its sources small and easily crossed, but as it further and further advances, other rivers discharge themselves into its channel, and its stream grows ever more formidable. So it is with the Lacedæmonians. Take them at the starting-point and they are but a single community, but as they advance and attach city after city they grow more numerous and more resistless. I observe that when people wish to take wasps' nests—if they try to capture the creatures on the wing, they are liable to be attacked by half the hive; whereas, if they apply fire to them ere they leave their homes, they will master them without scathe themselves. On this principle, I think it best to bring about the battle within the hive itself, or, short of that, as close to Lacedæmon as possible."

The advice was sound; but the wasps could not be caught at home. It was not till Athens had beaten the Spartans at sea, and Thebes had beaten them on land, that Epaminondas reached the hive. He then broke up the Peloponnesian league, emancipated the Helots of Messenia, and substituted, for the once considerable power which had saved the Peloponnesus from serious attack for two hundred years, a multitude of little city-states such as existed elsewhere in Greece—rather, such as came to exist elsewhere in European Greece, when, a few years later, with Epaminondas's death, the supremacy of Thebes ceased, Athens was abandoned by the states which had joined her against Sparta, and the empire of Dionysius I in the west dissolved, shortly after his death, into its constituent parts.

Theoretically, conditions should then have been ideal. In the case of the Greeks the deep-seated human instinct to compare the present disadvantageously with the past was not checked by a theory of evolution conceived as progress, such as misleads many sensible people nowadays to imagine that the farther back they go the more rudimentary political and social conditions become. The golden age of the Greeks lay in "the dark backward and abysm of time." In early days, before the rise of the Spartan and Athenian empires, every city, so it was believed, had "lived in peace, free and autonomous, and in secure possession of its own territory." For more than a century men had struggled to bring back those blessed times, and now at length their efforts, it might have seemed, had been crowned with success. Every city in Greece, great and small, had apparently regained its liberty and autonomy.

At the same time men had made a persistent effort to reëstablish in each city "the constitution of the fathers," and under the Spartan hegemony the favorable opportunity for success in this campaign had seemingly come. But it then appeared that, apart from the general understanding that citizenship was to be reserved to those who could afford to pay taxes and provide themselves with the arms and knowledge of arms necessary for fighting, no two persons agreed as to what the "ancestral constitution" was. It proved to be in reality the ideal of each reformer and each politician, and since the age was one in which most of the ordinary restraints were lacking as they seldom are in the history of civilized man, the transition from an unpopular ideal to a conspiracy was apt to be singularly abrupt. The outcome of the attempts to restore the urban particularism of mediæval Greece and the constitutions of the over-praised olden time was unsatisfactory to everybody. Barren wars of city against city instead of large enterprises directed by imperial ambitions; an atmosphere murky with plots and counter-plots, where once there had blown the strong wind of steady civic progress; and, in addition, national disaster and humiliation despite manifest military superiority—these were the bitter fruits of political reaction in Greece during the Spartan supremacy.

It was in this unhappy age that the science of government was born, and it bears its birthmark to the present day. The midwife, to use his own homely figure, was Socrates, whom the Athenians, tarred on by Aristophanes, put to death "for corrupting the youth and introducing strange gods." He, of course, denied the accusations, and claimed that he deserved the honors of a public benefactor for taking men individually and showing to them how ill they understood the virtues on which all societies are based, to wit, justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage. No one, he thought, could make them better citizens except by promoting truth and dispelling ignorance about these things. His execution consecrated his mission. It was the sowing of dragon's teeth from which sprang up armed warriors, of whom the most doughty were Plato and Aristotle.

The vice of the Socratic school was a noble one—an enormous overestimate of the value of education. "Truth is the beginning of every good thing," says Plato,[44] "both to gods and men; and he who would be blessed and happy, should be from the first a partaker of the truth, that he may live a true man as long as possible, for then he can be trusted; but he is not to be trusted who loves voluntary falsehood and he who loves involuntary falsehood is a fool." There was, of course, only one truth; which, being discovered, should be taught; which, being taught, must be acted upon, since, if men really knew what was right, it was impossible, Plato thought—ignoring the frailty or obstinacy of the human will—that they should not do it. "Discover the truth." "Teach it." These are the two Socratic commandments.

I have no intention to make an exposition of the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,[45] but to do something much more modest: to explain wherein and wherefore they missed the truth in the matter of Greek imperialism, and to notice some of the historic forces which they disregarded. If I deal with the Laws rather than the Republic of Plato, it is because it is his more mature and less imaginative work.

It was upon his immediate present that Plato focused his attention; to the analysis of its political and moral strength and weakness that he turned his penetrating intelligence; for its betterment that he wrote and taught and suffered. The past he peopled with creations of his own exuberant fancy, of popular misconception, of defective knowledge. He can be easily convicted of gross historical errors. And what is more serious; he has no real regard for historical truth and no sense whatever for the real factors in historical developments. Without the slightest qualm of conscience, and without taking the least pains to ascertain the facts, Plato alters the divine and profane history of his people to make it serve his purpose. And he does this on principle: "The legislator," he says,[46] "has only to reflect and find out what belief will be of the greatest public advantage, and then use all his efforts to make the whole community utter one and the same word in their songs and tales and discourses all their life long." To disagreeable things in the sacred story he gives a short shrift. Since the gods are perfect, every report that tends to tarnish the lustre of their reputation must be false. The history of mankind is solved by a similar formula; since justice is the sine qua non of public and private prosperity and happiness, all reports which affirm the conjunction of injustice with well-being, or of righteousness with misfortune, need correction or suppression.[47] History, accordingly, becomes a happy hunting-ground for edifying stories. It at once ceases to yield lessons, which, being grounded in the realities of human experience, are less apropos, perhaps, than the political theorist may like, but are alone valuable.

Plato's absorption in the present led him to misread not only the past, but also the future. For the false standard with which he measured past policies and institutions is not less characteristic than the false judgment which he formed of the drift of contemporary events. The future belonged, not, as he dreamed, to the autonomous, archaizing city-state, but to the movement for their unification which he condemned. He tried to mend city constitutions when the world required the creation of larger territorial states. He watched with attention domestic politics when foreign politics were chiefly worth watching.

A glance at the ideal state portrayed by Plato in the Laws[48] shows in what sense he read his history. His citizens are to have "their food and clothing provided for them in moderation," the latter through "entrusting the practice of the arts to others," the former through getting from the land, which slaves till for a part of the produce, "a return sufficient for men living temperately." They are to have "common tables in which the men are placed apart, and near them are the common tables of their families, of their daughters and mothers, which, day by day, the officers, male and female, are to inspect." They are not, however, to live fattening like beasts; for "such a life is neither just nor honorable, nor can he who lives it fail of meeting his due; and the due reward of the idle fatted beast is that he should be torn to pieces by some other valiant beast whose fatness is worn down by brave deeds and toil."

Naturally, Plato does not wish his ideal citizens to meet such an ignominious end. He proceeds to prescribe a régime for them in which, after a most carefully nurtured childhood, three years are spent on reading and writing, three more on learning to play the lyre, and others still on the study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and law, and on the practice of dancing, wrestling, running, hunting, and many kinds of military exercises. The citizens to be protected from fatty degeneration in this way are, it should be observed, the women as well as the men.

The children's stories are prescribed and are unalterable; so are the music and the dancing and the poetry. The law studied is that of the commonwealth, with which every citizen is to be inoculated. The moral and religious ideas are to be fixed, and death is the penalty set for heterodoxy. Everything is to be made and kept rigid, the number of the houses, of the farms, of the citizens, of the children, of traders, artisans, and foreigners, the maximum and minimum wealth of everybody. In other words, the community which Plato in his old age proposed as a model is not a thorough-going communism, like that of his more youthful and more famous Republic. It is simply a system of governmental control carried to its logical extreme—an emended and perfected edition of Sparta.

That a well-born Athenian, disgusted at the license which resulted from letting people live as they pleased, should have planned to put all citizens in an administrative strait-jacket, is not surprising. Many of us to-day object to a "wide-open town." But that Plato, whose practice in discussion was "to follow the argument whithersoever it might lead," should have idealized a state in which freedom of thought and freedom of speech were denied altogether, shows (even if we make all allowances for the idea, that, if things were perfect and there was but one perfection, all changes must be harmful) how unreal and involved in self-contradiction was the thinking of the best Greeks in this age of reaction.

The theory of individual liberty, as applied in Athens, had led, in the economic sphere, thought Plato, to the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and, in the political sphere, to the exploitation of the rich by the poor. Plato, therefore, discarded the theory of individual liberty altogether. He was dominated by a general view of life in which all the natural human instincts and cravings were harmful. The only hope for states was that they should educate their best citizens to be their governors. Plato, accordingly, nailed to the mast the doctrine of salvation by education, and despaired of all states in which the carefully trained few of high intellectual capacity did not make the laws and enforce them. Of all these ideas the Athenian democracy was the negation, and Plato hated it with the bitterness of a passionate nature.

That Plato hated the Periclean democracy as a political system is also intelligible from his hatred of imperialism upon which it was based; and there are those to-day, who, for the same reason and also because of a mistaken notion of its dependence upon slavery, find Athenian democracy justified, if at all, by its fruits; who contemplate its art and literature with the same mingled feelings with which they view the hectic beauty of the consumptive. Plato is not of their company. The fruits he finds even more deleterious than the stock which bore them. "In music," he writes,[49] meaning thereby poetry interpreted by the voice with musical accompaniment,—"in music it was that there first arose the universal conceit of omniscience and general lawlessness;—freedom came following afterwards, and men, fancying that they knew what they did not know, had no longer any fear, and the absence of fear begets shamelessness. For what is this shamelessness, which is so evil a thing, but the insolent refusal to regard the opinion of the better by reason of an over-daring sort of liberty?" Whereto the Spartan who is his interlocutor says: "Very true."

"Consequent upon this freedom," continues the speaker, "comes the other freedom, of disobedience to rulers; and then the attempt to escape the control and exhortation of father, mother, elders, and when near the end, the control of the laws also; and at the very end there is the contempt of oaths and pledges, and no regard at all for the gods,—herein they exhibit and imitate the old so-called Titanic nature, and come to the same point as the Titans when they rebelled against God, leading a life of endless evils."

The modern critic, even if he endorses the sharp indictment of Euripides, the poet of the most radical democracy,—that he destroyed the character of Attic tragedy by introducing into it elements from melodrama and the operatic concert, by perverting the grand style of its text and music by vulgar flippancies and incongruous measures, by substituting for artistic development of characters and plot disturbing discussions of the woman question and the latest sensations in philosophy and science, by turning the ancient gods and heroes into burlesque through having them argue and act like contemporary sycophants and sophists,—the modern critic, even Professor Shorey,[50] for example, in his spirited defense of the Sophoclean drama, would abandon Plato, I fancy, when he makes the drama the fundamental cause for the decline of Athenian greatness.

In his Laws, Plato is dealing with what, chastened by age and experience, he regarded as correctible things. The lust for private possessions, for land and home, wife and children, he once placed in this category, but he does so no longer; and in other respects he makes wide concessions to human frailties. With greed for wealth, however, he concluded no truce. It is Greeks, mark you, of whom Plato[51] says: "Love of wealth wholly absorbs men, and never for a moment allows them to think of anything but their own private possessions; on this the soul of every citizen hangs suspended, and can attend to nothing but his daily gain. Mankind are ready to learn any branch of knowledge, and to follow any pursuit which tends to this end, and they laugh at every other.... From an insatiate love of gold and silver, every man will stoop to any art or contrivance, seemly or unseemly, in the hope of becoming rich; and will make no objection to performing any action, holy or unholy and utterly base, if only like a beast he have the power of eating and drinking all kinds of things, and procuring for himself in every sort of way the gratifications of his lusts."

Such were the evil conditions of the present when one citizen despoiled his fellow and every city its neighbor. It had been different in the past. Before the introduction of luxurious tastes to stimulate inventions and of coined money to destroy a sense for the natural limits of wealth, men had "worked in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot,[52] but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They fed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they served up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle. And they and their children feasted, drinking of the wine which they had made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. They took care that their families did not exceed their means: having an eye to poverty or war." But it was not to an age of such rude simplicity that Plato would recall his contemporaries. He would, indeed, restore the virtues which existed among the early country folk before the rise of modern cities and the establishment of the capitalistic régime; but, while hostile to transmarine commerce, retail trade, industries, banking, interest, and all other accompaniments of interchange between cities, which he regarded as generally undesirable and provocative of wars and conquests, he imagines his ideal people in possession of city culture and the articles of luxury and convenience secured through the capitalistic organization. His citizens are, indeed, farmers, but they are gentlemen farmers, who have their money invested in land and slaves and live on their dividends, free to devote their leisure to athletic, intellectual, and other worthy pursuits. They will be free from greed of wealth because they all possess a competency, which Plato defines as enough to live "temperately," Aristotle as enough to live "with liberality and temperance." Neither philosopher thinks of poverty except as the ordainer of body- and soul-destroying work, work which degrades those who have to perform it, and makes slavery their natural condition. Plato and Aristotle would make all tillers of the soil and workers at the trades and crafts slaves and aliens. They were to exist simply to provide the conditions of "good living" for their masters or superiors; whereupon "we must not conceal from ourselves," says Aristotle,[53] "that a country as large as the Babylonian or some other of boundless extent will be required if it is to support five thousand citizens in idleness." Even in America, where, to use the current formula, ten per cent of the people own ninety per cent of the wealth, the economic situation proposed as ideal by the most enlightened reformers of the fourth century B.C. has hardly been reached. Whether Plato failed to realize that he was condemning nine tenths of people to perpetual bondage and ignorance; or, realizing it, refused to think of anything but the perfection of the few, the conclusion is alike inevitable: he had failed miserably to trace to their historical causes both the cultural barrenness of Sparta and the astounding fertility of his own Athens.

Had Aristotle lived in the commonwealth of Plato's Laws, he must have suffered the same fate that Socrates suffered in Athens. For, though far from ungrateful to his teacher, he was not a docile pupil. By birth he was a Stagirite, by experience a citizen of the world. He did not, like Plato, form his youthful impressions in a milieu that was poisoned with bitterness at a demoralized democracy. The Athens to which he came as a lad of seventeen was still a democracy, and a very unhealthy one at that, and for it he had little liking; but his was a more dispassionate nature than was Plato's. He was not a great historian.[54] That the discovery in Egypt in 1890 of one of his many lost historical works has proven clearly; but he was a very learned man, and perhaps came to as close a comprehension of earlier Greek history as was possible for a political philosopher who had nothing to guide him but the unscientific methods then in vogue for investigating the past.

By its very nature science is objective. It is not inhuman, but it is deliberately impersonal. In this respect it contrasts sharply with the arts. The greatest artist may be the man who embodies in his verse or stone or colors moods and thoughts which must be in "widest commonalty spread," but which constitute in the aggregate his own self or soul. History is of course a science, but not one of the common type. Unlike the ordinary scientist, the scientific historian has to practice, not self-suppression, but self-expansion. He must become conscious, so far as that is possible, of the prejudices and special interests of his own age, and, divested of them, he must migrate into a strange land in order to bring back thence a report that is at once an unbiased account of what he has seen and a story that is comprehensible to his fellow-citizens, or, at least, to his fellow-historians. He dare not treat the past as one in spirit with the present, or as resolvable into precisely the same factors. He must be alive to the existence of many different pasts leading to the present in no pre-determinable succession, much less progression. The points must make a line, but the line may be of any conceivable curve. Aristotle was far from arriving at a full appreciation of the difficulties of historical inquiry; but, unlike Plato, he took infinite pains to acquire historical knowledge.

He did not idealize the constitutions of the olden times. Since all men then carried daggers, the presumption, he says, is that they needed them and used them. Since conditions where violence reigned must have continued indefinitely, if political change had been prohibited, he finds it good as well as inevitable that laws be modified from time to time. The permanency of those of Sparta is worthy of high praise; but he traces the corruption and decay of the Spartan state to failure to make needed reforms. In general he strikes a much more just balance between Spartan and Athenian achievement than does Plato.

The first test he applies to institutions, such as the family and the state, is their naturalness—their source in the nature of man as that is revealed in his history. He was well aware that a political science that was based upon perfected human nature was, indeed, suited only for "gods and sons of gods"; that the only principles of government which had real value were those which had approved themselves in practice. "All discoveries," he says,[55] "have been already made, although in some cases they have not been combined, and in others, when made, are not acted upon." "The Politics of Aristotle," says a recent writer, "is the one great book on the science of government because it is the only one which is wholly empirical."

That is too high praise. For the Politics of Aristotle differs from the Prince of Machiavelli in other respects, of course, but noticeably in that the Greek has moral ideals, the Italian none. With Aristotle, as with Plato, the state has an ethical purpose. He requires it to justify not only its acts but its existence. Iniquitous governments might exist,—Aristotle's world was full of them, in fact,—and his mind was too curious of all things political for him to leave them out of his observation: he has, indeed, considered minutely the ways and means for the preservation of all kinds of states, and has shown therein that he had as keen an eye for the realities as had Machiavelli himself. But he would never have permitted, much less advised, his legislator to use foul means to establish a just government or fair means to establish an unjust one.

On the establishment of governments, moreover, he spends very little thought. This, however, is with Machiavelli the main matter, as he himself says near the opening of the second part of his work: "The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that when they are well armed they have good laws. I shall leave the laws out of the discussion and shall speak of the arms." Had the Greek heard him he would have scoffed at both the argument and the conclusion. The argument is, of course, sophistical, and the conclusion saved only by the fact that Machiavelli had already considered the political weapons with which rulers should operate. The Politics is a handbook for legislators; the Prince a set of instructions for potentates. For the latter the ways and means of acquiring power was, in Machiavelli's judgment, the all-important thing; whereas the legislator's possession of power is taken for granted by Aristotle, and it is assumed throughout his entire treatment that, if the lawgiver knows the constitution, the laws, and the system of education which are best adapted to the economic, social, and political conditions of his state, he can at once introduce them.

In a measure, therefore, the Prince and the Politics supplement each other, though Aristotle would have been horrified at the idea. For in his thinking, in anything approximating to an ideal world, each city was free to order its internal affairs as it thought best, and, having this liberty, if it was shown what was best, it must, according to the Socratic psychology, immediately adopt it; whereas—to give the devil his due—Machiavelli was actuated, in formulating his precepts for Prince Lorenzo, by the vision of a united Italy, the realization of which by his pupil was to wash away the crimes committed in subjecting to his will the city-states of the peninsula. The conquest of Italy was, accordingly, the goal of the ideal Prince's endeavor; whereas, though Aristotle in one passage of the Politics[56] notes that "if the Greeks were united in a single polity they would be capable of universal empire," he regards such a union as highly undesirable. To him a state that was not a city was a rudimentary and very imperfect state. It ceased to be a state at all when it ceased to be free. Hence a city could have subjects, that is to say, slaves, but not dependencies. And since in his thinking it was natural inferiority alone that justified slavery, and this was found especially among the nations of Asia, and not at all in Greece, no Greek city could rightly enslave the inhabitants of any other Greek city: it could wage war and organize slave raids only against barbarians.

The birthmark which we have noted on Plato is an inheritance from unreasoning hatred of democracy. That which mars above all the political thinking of Aristotle comes from the aversion instinctively felt by his age for imperialism. That this, too, is a disfigurement, we may show in a few concluding remarks. "It is necessary," says Aristotle[57] in concluding his plea that a mixed constitution is best for the common run of states, "it is necessary to begin by assuming a principle of general application, viz., that the part of the state which desires the continuance of the polity ought to be stronger than that which does not"; and he proceeds to point out that "strength" consists neither in numbers, nor property, nor military or political ability alone, but in all of them combined, so that regard has to be taken of "freedom, wealth, culture, and nobility, as well as of mere numerical superiority." Nothing could be more cold and objective than the thinking of Aristotle on this important matter. Yet by an extraordinary oversight he lets "strength" exert a decisive influence within the city-states, while he ignores altogether the effect of varying population, wealth, and political and military ability in determining the relations between them.

The whole of the political thinking of Aristotle is dominated by the idea that the world of men is made up of an infinite procession of inferiors and superiors, the desire to forge ahead being one of the most fundamental instincts of human beings. If an omniscient God were to arrange the inhabitants of each city in a line according to their real "strength," he would place few of them abreast. No Greek betrays more naïvely than Aristotle does the national consciousness of the Hellenes that they stood at the head of the honor roll of peoples. It was, therefore, imperative upon them to conquer the Asiatics; for he finds it to be a beneficent command of nature, issued primarily for the advantage of the weaker, that superiors should rule inferiors.

Among moral philosophers Aristotle is characterized by his refusal to let himself be led astray by a visionary ideal of human equality. Nevertheless, while recognizing that Greek cities, even more than individuals, differed in "strength," he refused to let the "strong" use their advantage. He sets apart the sphere of interurban, that is to say, international, relations as one in which the "universal principle," that superior rule inferior, shall not apply. In a visionary world, the "strong" man, on Aristotle's theory, is a "gentle" man; but in the real world, he is a ruler. Had Aristotle not been blinded by the prejudices of his age against imperialism, he must have seen the necessity that in the real world the "strong" state would also be the ruler. It is one of the enigmas of history that Aristotle was the contemporary and subject of Philip II of Macedon, one of its ironies that he was the tutor of Alexander the Great.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Schömann-Lipsius. Griechische Altertümer,^4 I (1892), pp. 197 ff.

2. Bury, J.B. A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great (1900).

3. Meyer, Eduard. Geschichte des Altertums, V (1902).

4. Niese, B. Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte und Landeskunde Lakedämons: Die lakedämonischen Periöken. In Nachrichten der Gött. Gesell. d. Wissenschaften (1906), pp. 101 ff.

5. Arnim, Hans von. Die politischen Theorien des Altertums (1910).

6. Gomperz, Th. Greek Thinkers, III (1905), IV (1912).

FOOTNOTES:

[34] Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, I³ (1901), pp. 236 f. See notes.

[35] 1 Macc. XII, 11.

[36] Geschichte des Altertums, II¹ (1893), pp. 562 f.

[37] Dickins, Journal of Hellenic Studies, XXXII (1912), p. 12.

[38] Schoemann-Lipsius, Griechische Alterthümer,⁴ 1 (1897), pp. 261 ff.

[39] See particularly Niese, op. cit. in Select Bibliography at end of chapter.

[40] Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, I (1893), pp. 439 ff.

[41] III, 3, 4 ff.

[42] The successive tyrannies in Syracuse and the empires of Syracuse over the West Greeks have been omitted of necessity in this book. They have been examined with particular care by Freeman in his History of Sicily and with particular sympathy by Beloch in his Griechische Geschichte.

[43] Xenophon, Hellenica, IV, 2, 11 ff.

[44] Laws, v, p. 730. (The translation used here and elsewhere in the book is that of Jowett.)

[45] For what is here omitted see the excellent little book by von Arnim, Die politischen Theorien des Altertums.

[46] Laws, II, p. 664.

[47] Laws, II, p. 662.

[48] VII, p. 806.

[49] Laws, III, p. 700. The same initial cause of degeneracy is postulated in Plato's Republic, VIII, p. 546.

[50] Greek Literature (The Columbia University Press, 1912), p. 11.

[51] Laws, VIII, p. 831.

[52] Republic, II, p. 372 b.

[53] Politics, II, 3 (6), 3, p. 1265 a. (The translation used here and elsewhere in the book is that of Welldon: the text that of Immisch.)

[54] Bury, J.B., The Ancient Greek Historians, pp. 182 ff.

[55] Politics, II, 2 (5), 10, p. 1264 a.

[56] VII (IV), 6 (7), 1, p. 1327 b.

[57] Politics, IV (VI), 10 (12), 1, p. 1296 b.