codes, with a frequency reminding us of the European codes of a hundred
years ago. But as regards citizens there were two mitigations which made
even these severe laws milder and more civilised than most of ours. In
the first place, there was generally facility given to the man who was
condemned to escape over the frontier, and except in cases of great
crimes against the state, extradition was not thought of. Exile was of
course a severe penalty, for it meant living abroad as a foreigner, not
protected by the safeguards that encompassed the citizens around him.
Secondly, the manner in which the death sentence was carried out was
infinitely more humane and polite than our abominable executions. The
case of Socrates is no doubt familiar to you all. He was left free of
chains to talk with his friends and the cup of poison was placed beside
him, to be taken before the setting of the sun. Even the jailor is
represented as a humane and civil man, who carried out his function with
every consideration. I will not deny that these very advanced features
in Greek law were in contrast to some still barbarous survivals; I mean
the torturing of slaves and the severity of making a death sentence
follow on the majority of one in a very large jury. But survivals of
barbarism were but yesterday frequent enough with ourselves.
Let us now turn to the characteristics of the _civil_ law, by which I
mean the laws controlling the holding of property, the making of
contracts, and bequests by testament. I cannot see in the many contracts
we have from Greece, or from Egyptian Greece, when settled by Greece
immigrants, that the general spirit or the accuracy of these documents
differs from those of our day, except that the penalties for breach of
contract seem much severer than ours. In the case of a money obligation,
the debtor who did not repay within a fixed date was commonly fined
fifty per cent. for his delay. There may have been many cases of loans
in kind, _e.g._, of seed corn, where such a penalty was not
unreasonable, for there are things which are very valuable at a certain
season, and which after that must lie useless for many months. But on
the whole I think the Greek idea of keeping a contract was stricter than
ours, and the law more severe. Such was also the case with the Roman
law, which was borrowed from the Greek.
In so cursory a review of a large subject, I can only select one or two
points as illustrations, and speak of them as specimens of the general
enlightenment of the age. I therefore turn to a particular class about
which we now know a great deal, more particularly owing to a large
discovery of documents which I was fortunate enough to make in 1890. It
is the Greek will or testament. Lawsuits concerning such documents also
form the majority of the speeches of Isæus, the collection of which has
been edited with great skill and learning by Mr. William Wyse of Trinity
College, Cambridge. It used to be thought that all this matter of
testament was due to the Romans. It seems now tolerably certain that in
this as in most of the other refinements of life the Romans only
transmitted to us what the Greeks had taught them.
In most early states it is only gradually, and not without some
jealousy, that the individual is permitted to bequeath his property as
he pleases. At first, he is regarded as the member of a clan, to which
his property reverts under certain fixed conditions; later on, the state
controls the division of it among the immediate family of the testator,
and will not permit any passing of it away to strangers, still less to
those who are not citizens. Whether the Greek states ever left absolute
liberty to their citizens in this matter may be doubted, the interest of
the state being much more jealously guarded among these small polities
than among the large modern States, when an occasional misuse of such a
power does no grave public mischief, and only excites moderate censure.
But the whole form of the wills we have in Egyptian papyri, and of which
we have examples in stone inscriptions, such as the record of the will
of one Epicteta who bequeathed her estate to public and religious
objects, is perfectly modern. Here I quote you the usual formula. First
comes the date according to the years of kings or eponymous magistrates.
Then “This is the will of Peisias the Lycian, son of X., of sound mind
and deliberate intention. May it be my lot to live on in health and
manage mine own property, but should anything human happen to me, I
bequeath to my children so much, to my wife such and such things (often
specifying the articles), I set free certain slaves, I set apart money
for religious purposes. And I appoint as executors such and such
people,” in the case of soldiers in Egypt generally the King and Queen
and their children; and then there follow the names of several, often
seven or eight, witnesses.[43] These habits, which imply a settled
society, with ordinary habits and traditions, had spread from Greece to
Greek Egypt three centuries before Christ. There is no doubt that they
spread similarly not only to the west, but throughout Asia Minor and
Syria so far as they were not in these regions already in vogue. I will
only add that if you desire to read how clearly and carefully a long
case involving the claim of a Greek in Egypt against a native
corporation was examined and decided, you will find it in the Papyrus I
of Turin[44] which was published years ago by Amédée Peyron, and which
ought to be republished and made easier of access. We have the whole
final decision of the court extending over many pages of Greek. The
record must have been found intact in the earthen jar in which it was
preserved. It rehearses the fortunes of the case from its outset, forty
years before the decision. It gives the earlier decisions and a summary
of the new evidence adduced; and it sums up the whole and gives judgment
for the native corporation against the Greek with a clearness which
could not be exceeded by the Supreme Court in America. Every word of it
speaks strict law and plain common-sense. It was a case of conflicting
evidence, and this is weighed with absolute fairness. There is not a
word of superstition, of appeals to the providence of the gods or to any
authority beyond that of educated human reason. As such, it is a
document absolutely modern in the highest sense. This then was the tone
of the civil law transmitted by Greece to succeeding centuries.
I now approach a larger subject, and one of even more permanent
interest--the lessons of Greek history regarding the international
relations of adjoining civilised states, or the relations of one
stronger state to others of lesser force or size. The condition of
Greece all through its early history affords an unique field for the
study of international law; for these numerous small cities, as we
regard them, were perfectly distinct polities or states, each living
under its own laws and traditions, and as separate one from the other in
idea as are the capitals of any two modern kingdoms. In practice the
separation was even greater, for intermarriage between their citizens,
or the acquiring of property by citizens of another polity, were against
the spirit of the age, and were generally forbidden by law. The number,
therefore, of treaties, of alliances, of quarrels between these city
states was not only enormous, but offered every variety, so much so that
if you look at any good edition of the earliest European work on this
sort of law, the famous treatise of Hugo Grotius, _De Jure Pacis et
Belli_, you will find that the great body of his illustrations is taken
from Greek history, and acknowledged as Greek in the margin of the
text. Let us approach first the question of war.
Even from Homer’s time, there was a growing feeling which softened the
hardships of war between Hellenic peoples. Poisoned weapons were not
tolerated, and if the prisoners became the slaves of the victors, ransom
was very general, and according to Herodotus there was even an
acknowledged tariff--two _minæ_--accepted throughout Peloponnesus for
the release of such a prisoner. I will not pretend that the wars even of
the Golden Age were not much fiercer and more cruel than the rose-water
campaigns we now carry on, when the wives and children of the enemy are
supported in comfort, and he is accordingly encouraged to prolong a
conflict which only affects his personal convenience. For war is a
shocking thing, and to sweeten it by such amenities is only to enhance
its cost of life and of treasure to the victor. But if you were to
compare Greek wars with those of the earlier centuries of modern Europe,
say the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, you would find the balance of
humanity most decidedly on the side of the Greeks. The non-combatants in
a stormed Greek city, though by the laws of war they became slaves, were
in a far better plight than the unfortunate people of a German town
captured by the Pandurs and Croats of Tilly or Wallenstein. I gladly
turn from this grievous subject. “War,” says Thucydides, “is a stern
taskmaker, and makes men’s hearts as hard as their circumstances.”
Let us enter on a more grateful and more instructive task, the
international relations of Greek states in peace and particularly their
political combinations or alliances for protection against external
dangers. It was obvious that a number of distinct small city-states must
be at the mercy of a strong invading force which could conquer them one
by one, and that therefore combinations and alliances among them were
absolutely necessary. Such combinations could also be made for offensive
purposes, as was the case with the Homeric conception of the Siege of
Troy, and so in after times many Greek theorists actually recommended
this policy as an engine of conquest, the very conquest carried out by
Alexander the Great. But for a long time, alliances were only made for
the moment, and to ward off an imminent danger, and they soon fell to
pieces again, owing usually to the reverting of both parties into a
selfish and jealous policy of isolation. From the seventh century B.C.,
onward, the waxing of the power of Sparta made a sort of
semi-compulsory league among the smaller cities of the Peloponnesus, and
later on, after the crisis of the Persian war was over, the Asiatic
Greeks put themselves under the leadership of Athens. Let me call it by
its technical name, _hegemony_. This was an alliance under a president
state, which was to guide the policy of the league in war, but was not
supposed to interfere with the several polities in peace. You all know
how the leading power gradually encroached upon the liberties of the
allies, who really became subjects paying tribute; and when they
attempted reassertion of their former independence, it was treated by
Athens as revolt, and crushed with military and naval force. The conduct
of Sparta when she succeeded to the hegemony of Greece was in no way
different; perhaps it was harsher, and so we have a vast amount of
protest against the tyranny of these leading states, and their
“enslaving” of the rest of Greece. They on their side pointed to the
necessity of union to prevent foreign domination; they pointed to the
labours and sacrifices the citizens of the leading state had undergone,
to the security of the seas from pirates, to the increase of trade, and
of the reputation of Greek civilisation, all produced by their efforts;
but generally this came in at the end of the argument: that having
acquired their power they intended to keep it.
Here then was a great constitutional question and one still under
dispute in the last century. Supposing that several independent states
combine to promote common objects, and make a solemn league or union; is
it lawful for any one of the contracting parties to withdraw from the
union if it considers its liberties infringed? I need not to take into
account the further complication, when some of the states involved were
created subsequently by and for the union, in fact were daughters and
not mothers of the union. You know how in this country that
constitutional problem was only solved by a great war, and this was but
the echo of the same kind of conflict endemic in Greece. Yet the tone
and temper of the world had changed in the long interval. The creation
and success of many great states led men to appreciate the advantages
thus obtained, and though there was, and still is, a strong sentiment in
favour of small nationalities coerced by the greater--you remember the
sentiment of all the European press during the recent Boer war--yet on
the whole the imperial idea is not unpopular. In Greece it was the
reverse. From the outset to the end, the right of the smaller members
of an union to secede was always maintained in theory and produced fatal
results in practice.
The very same problem assumed a slightly different form when twelve
insignificant Achæan cities combined into the Achæan League which
Polybius has made so famous. The council and governing officers were
elected in an assembly convened in one of the cities, whither all the
members of the League were entitled to go, but which of course only men
of leisure could afford to attend. Moreover each city had one collective
vote, so that numbers were of no direct consequence. The meetings were
confined to three days, and to business prepared for them by the
executive. The whole scheme (which was an early and excellent essay in
Federation, much studied by the founders of the American Union)
shipwrecked on the question whether single states had a right to enter
into separate agreements with powers foreign to the League. Perfect
internal independence was of course essential to Greek ideas, but that
the power of separate alliances with foreign powers should be allowed,
seems to us absurd. Nevertheless the sentiment of the Greeks here as
elsewhere was in favour of this absolute independence, and so the
League was pulled to pieces by the interference of jealous or ambitious
neighbours.
Thus you have a conglomerate of civilised communities, all speaking the
same language and with similar ideals of culture, not separated by
hostile creeds, and with the power, when united, of exercising a
dominant influence upon the world around them; and yet their power and
their development are paralysed by mutual jealousies and constant
quarrels, resulting in frequent and desolating wars. We have no cases in
Europe at all parallel except the condition of Italy in the Renaissance
and of Germany in the middle of the last century. When I was a boy and
we travelled in a carriage through that country (railways had not yet
been introduced) we used in the course of a day to pass through a whole
principality and across a border with custom houses, and a new flag, and
often a new coinage. There were then, I believe, sixty-six reigning
personages--grand dukes, electors, etc.--in Germany. You know how all
were either absorbed or reduced to one empire, or allowed to live on as
vassal states, to use rather a hard word, within the compass of a few
years. That was what happened ultimately in Greece, where the Macedonian
power played a part analogous to that of Prussia, and made itself by a
successful war against a foreign power not only accepted but popular.
The important point in which Greece gives modern nations a further
lesson is this; Revolutionary or extemporised monarchies in such a case
will not succeed. The Greeks, especially in Asia Minor and in Sicily,
where there was danger from foreign powers, had come to the conclusion
that a monarch was necessary to combine them into a strong military and
financial power, and they were therefore again willing to submit
themselves to tyrants or despots, as they had been of old, when they
wanted relief from the internecine disputes between the classes and the
masses. There were some brilliant essays in this direction made, notably
by Dionysius of Syracuse, and by Mausollus of Halicarnassus. But they
failed to found a dynasty, even as the Bonapartes failed, in spite of
their greatness and the benefits they had conferred.
Thus not only the achievements, but the failures of the Greeks may
convey to us valuable lessons, because they constituted a thoroughly
“modern” society and suffered from the weaknesses and vices of such
societies.
As this last statement may seem to some of you a paradox, I proceed in
conclusion to illustrate it, by some observations on the condition of
Greek society as described to us by Aristotle and by Polybius. The
former, in describing his ideal (for he had not yet renounced it) of a
small, well-ordered state, governed in the interest of the majority of
the citizens by good laws and humane rulers, makes it his _sine qua non_
that the middle class shall outweigh in public importance both the
wealthy and the indigent. Now that was exactly the condition which in
the days of Polybius was becoming rarer and rarer, nay, practically
unknown. This was the very class disappearing rapidly from every state
in Greece. And why? The economic conditions were changing, and owing to
the great influx of gold from the East and other causes, living was
becoming dearer every day. Luxuries were also coming to be regarded as
necessities, and so for the poor who had the bribe of large pay and
great license offered them in the mercenary service of Hellenistic
kings, emigration became the rule, and the want of labour turned farming
from the agricultural to the pastoral type. Hence the middle classes,
which had no capital to work large farms, became poorer and the rich
richer and more selfish.
And what was the remedy adopted by the middle classes to maintain
themselves in comfort? An expedient not unknown in this country and for
not very dissimilar reasons. It was the limitation of families, the
avoidance of the duty and cost of bringing up children, so that Polybius
speaks of it as the signal feature of the Greece of his day--the strange
barrenness that had come upon the once prolific inhabitants of the land.
Such a misfortune can be avoided only when great immigration exists, and
even then it results in replacing the old population, the cream of the
country, by the scum gathered from abroad. There were no inducements for
immigration into Greece and so the country which was once teeming with
population sunk into somnolence and decay.
Could I offer you a clearer proof of the modern character of this
civilisation, which had not only a youth and an age of gold, but then a
silver autumn or a Martinmas summer, when Plutarch lived in his little
deserted town, surrounded by a complete and terrible decadence? And it
may not be out of place to remind you that even with many differences of
age, of place, and of circumstances, the same moral causes that produce
decay in one civilisation are likely to produce it in another.
The societies that fell into these vices were not ignorant or
uneducated. The average Greek public was probably better trained in the
knowledge of great ideas and the enjoyment of great literature than any
public nowadays. Grote said very deliberately that the ordinary Attic
citizen who attended the assemblies where Pericles and Theramenes and
Demosthenes spoke, and where many others of like culture joined in the
debate--that such a man was better educated, in the political sense,
than the average member of the House of Commons in his day; and Grote
had attended to the business of that House for ten years of his life. It
was then, moreover, an assembly of English gentlemen, of the middle and
upper classes, with a strong aristocratic flavour. What language would
he have used had he compared his Periclean citizen to the House of
Commons of the twentieth century? But in any case, we may say one thing
with certainty, and it is one of the greatest lessons which the Greeks
have to tell us: Intellectual culture by itself is no certain antidote
to decadence in any society--nay, not even in that of Boston,
Massachusetts.
The moral conditions of refined Attic life in these dying days are best
known from the remains, or from the Latin translations of the society
plays of the famous Menander. The life which Menander portrayed has
been discussed and estimated in a chapter of my _Greek Life and
Thought_, and you will there see at length how trivial, how selfish, how
immoral, how ignoble that life was. If such was indeed the true
character of Attic society in Menander’s days, we may well congratulate
the world that the Macedonian conquerer arose to show the world that
there were greater ideals than to while away one’s time in the rotten
refinements of decadent Athens.
When I wrote that chapter, we were still dependent for our estimate of
Menander and his society in the Latin translations, or adaptations, by
Plautus and Terence, and there were those that thought the Roman
adapters had chosen the trivial side of a society which might be not
only refined but serious and thoughtful. The recent discovery of large
fragments of four plays on a papyrus roll in Egypt has dissipated any
such hopes. The same triviality, the same stupid repetition of vulgar
and immoral plots and topics meet us throughout these scenes. If there
be any moral lesson conveyed by the picture we here have of Attic
society, it is this: that the slave and the prostitute were not only
more intelligent, but less immoral than their masters. In all these
so-called pictures of life, not a single person of the least distinction
appears--not a single philosopher, or politician, or poet, or man of
letters, or benefactor--though we know that the walls of temples and
cities were being covered with panegyrics of leading citizens and their
civic and private virtues. Not a single problem of religious or
political importance is ever discussed. There is not even, in the new
fragments, any wealth of that vulgar proverbial wisdom, or
sententiousness posing as wisdom, which was gathered from the plays of
Menander by diligent collectors, and which, surviving in thousands of
lines, has given him a false importance in the histories of Greek
literature. But here, as elsewhere, the lapse of ages had separated the
wheat from the chaff; the later scholiasts and commentators gathered
from Menander the stray gems, as one might pick from the array of a gay
but stupid lady the real diamonds with which she had adorned her
worthless person.
In relation to Greek politics, which is our subject to-day, this is no
idle digression. For it shows us clearly that the higher society of
Athens had abandoned this great human interest and so had narrowed and
impoverished their spiritual life. It is usual to repeat in our
histories that the growth of the Macedonian power, of the Hellenistic
kings, of the Roman Republic, killed all possibility of any serious
Greek politics, and that in consequence serious men were driven into
anti-social philosophy at home, active men into mercenary service
abroad. In Menander’s day and long after it, there was still plenty of
work for honest and capable men in saving the liberties and the
dignities of their native cities. A century later, Polybius shows how
the total ruin of Greece and the disastrous conquest by Mummius were
mainly produced by the follies and violences of stupid and corrupt
demagogues. But these demagogues were invested with official power by
the votes of those that still practised politics, when the better
classes had retired in disgust. If this disgust dated from Menander’s
time, then we can only reflect that those who have abdicated their
influence in the day of their country’s prosperity, are not likely to
regain it when a crisis comes, and when the masses have found for
themselves other leaders.
I have seen a very similar catastrophe in the Ireland of my own time. I
have seen the old landed gentry, who had long lived a gay, idle,
hospitable life, when their privileges and their properties were
attacked by a dangerous agitation, show such want of public spirit,
such miserable mistrust in one another, such reckless folly in not
spending time, money, and energy in resisting their plunderers, that
they lost the sympathy of all their friends, and while they called on
English influence to protect them, and railed against all concession and
compromise, they have seen their land filched from them by successive
legislative inroads upon their rights, and their fortunes ruined even by
those on whom they relied to defend them. Many a time did I warn those
about me of these inevitable consequences, but there I have seen another
instance, and one which came home to me with poignant regret, of the
miseries induced by mere incompetence. _Quem Deus vult perdere, prius
dementat._
VIII
HIGHER THINKING, PHILOSOPHY, SPECULATIVE AND PRACTICAL THEOLOGY