on the proper conditions--the internal conditions only--of a _Polity_ in
the Hellenic sense will ever remain a monument of genius, though his
ideal could hardly lead, or be intended to lead, to practical results.
Then we have Xenophon, who in his political romance on the _Education of
Cyrus_ stands half-way between the mere philosopher and the practical
man of the world. The most instructive of all is Aristotle, who, though
he lived to see the old order pass away, and a new departure in the
history of the race, nevertheless confined himself to the traditional
problems, and composed a special book--his _Politics_--on the virtues
and vices of the ordinary Greek polity. The practical side, the
necessary steps to reform and strengthen the leading States of Greece,
especially in their external policy, and in the face of powerful and
dangerous neighbours, we find discussed in the pamphlets of Isocrates
and the public speeches of Demosthenes. It is on the proper place of
these documents, and the weight assigned to them in modern histories,
that I invite the reader's attention.
[Sidenote: Sparta ever admired but never imitated.]
§ 50. I have already mentioned the remarkable fact that though, at every
period of this history, Spartan manners and Spartan laws commanded the
respect and the admiration of all Greece, though the Spartan
constitution had proved stable when all else was in constant flux and
change, still no practical attempt was ever made in older Greek history
to imitate this famous constitution. It shows, no doubt, in the old
Greek legislators, a far keener sense of what was practical or possible
that, instead of foisting upon every new or newly emancipated State the
ordinances which had succeeded elsewhere as a legitimate, slow, and
historic growth, they rather sought to adapt their reforms to the
conditions of each State as they found it. They fully appreciated the
difference between the normal and the exceptional in legislation.
[Sidenote: Practical legislation wiser in Greece than in modern Europe.]
The politicians of modern Europe, who are repeating gaily, and without
any sense of its absurdity, the experiment of handing over the British
parliamentary system to half-civilized and hardly emancipated
populations, and who cry injustice and shame upon those who decline to
follow their advice--these unhistorical and illogical statesmen might
well take lessons from the sobriety of Greek politicians, if their own
common-sense fails to tell them that the forest-tree of centuries cannot
be transplanted; nay, even the sapling will not thrive in ungrateful
soil.
[Sidenote: Sparta a model for the theorists.]
[Sidenote: A small State preferred.]
But although the real rulers of men in Greece saw all this clearly, it
was not so with the theorists, nor indeed were they bound to observe
practical limitations in framing the highest ideal to which man could
attain. Hence we see in almost all the theorists a strong tendency to
make Spartan institutions the proper type of a perfect State. Plato will
not even consider the duties of an imperial or dominating State, he
rather regards large territory and vast population as an insuperable
obstacle to good government. But as a philosopher deeply interested in
the real culture of the mind, perhaps as a theorist deeply impressed
with the haphazard character of the traditional education, he felt that
to intrust an uneducated mob with the control of public affairs was
either to hand over the State to unscrupulous leaders, who would gain
the favour of the crowd by false and unworthy means, or to run the
chance of having the most important matters settled by the caprice of a
many-headed and therefore wholly irresponsible tyrant.
[Sidenote: Plato's successors.]
[Sidenote: Their general agreement,]
Every theorist that followed Plato seems to have felt the same
difficulties, and therefore he and they adopted in the main the Spartan
solution,--first, in limiting the number and condition of those to whom
they would intrust power; secondly, in interfering from the beginning,
more or less, in the education and training of the individual citizen.
They differed as to the amount of control to be exercised,--Plato and
the Stoic Zeno were the most trenchant, and thought least of the value
of individual character;--they differed as to the particular form of the
actual government; whether a small council of philosophic elders, or
some limited assembly of responsible and experienced citizens, or, still
better, one ideal man, the natural king among men, should direct the
whole course of the State.
[Sidenote: (1) especially on suffrage,]
But on the other two points they were firm. First, universal suffrage
had been in their opinion proved a downright failure. And let the reader
remember that this universal suffrage only meant the voting of free
citizens,--slaves never came within their political horizon,--still
more, that the free citizens of many Greek democracies, notably of the
Athenian, were more highly educated than any Parliament in our own
day[121:1].
We now have as an additional document on the same side, the newly
discovered _Polity of the Athenians_[121:2], which, whether it be
really Aristotle's work or not, certainly was quoted as such freely by
Plutarch, and represents the opinions of the early Peripatetic school.
Nothing is stranger in the book than the depreciation of Pericles, as
the founder of the extreme democracy of Athens, and the praise of
Thucydides (son of Melesias), Nicias, and Theramenes, as the worthiest
and best of the later politicians,--Theramenes especially, whose
shiftiness is explained as the opposition of a wise and temperate man to
all extremes, while he was content to live under any moderate
government.[122:1]
[Sidenote: even though their suffrage was necessarily restricted.]
I have already pointed out what important differences in the notions of
democracy--the absence of all idea of representation, of all delay or
control by a second legislative body, of the veto of a constitutional
sovran--make this strong and consistent verdict not applicable by
analogy to modern republics. Not that I reject Hellenic opinion as now
of no value--far from it; but if we argue from analogy, we are bound to
show where the analogy fits, and where it fails,--above all to
acknowledge the latter cases honestly. For we are not advocates pleading
a cause, but inquirers seeking the truth from the successes and the
sufferings of older men of like passions with ourselves.
[Sidenote: (2) Education to be a State affair.]
[Sidenote: Polybius' astonishment at the Roman disregard of it.]
§ 51. Secondly, the education of the citizens should not be left to the
sense of responsibility in parents, or to the private enterprise of
professional teachers, but should be both organized and controlled by
the State[123:1]. So firmly was this principle engrained into Greek
political thinkers that Polybius, who came at the close of all their
rich experience, and whose opinion is in many respects more valuable
than any previous one, expresses his astonishment how the Romans, a
thoroughly practical and sensible people, and moreover eminently
successful, could venture to leave out of all public account the
question of education, and allow it to be solved by each parent as he
thought fit. He pointed out this as the most profound existing contrast
to the notions of Greek thinkers[123:2].
[Sidenote: The practical result in Rome.]
We know very well how the Roman aristocracy in their best days solved
the matter; but we must deeply regret that there are no statistics, or
even information, how the poorer classes at Rome fared in comparison
with the Greeks. National education in Greece was certainly on a far
higher level; but here again we have an old civilization to compare with
a new one, and must beware of rash inferences.
It is, for example, of great importance to note that the Greek State
was essentially a city with its suburbs, where the children lived so
near each other that day-schools could be attended by all. In a larger
State, which implies a population scattered through the country, much
more must be intrusted to parents, since day-schools are necessarily
inadequate[124:1]. This is but one of the differences to be weighed in
making the comparison. To state them all would lead us beyond reasonable
limits.
[Sidenote: Can a real democracy ever be sufficiently educated?]
Still, I take the verdict of the philosophers as well worth
considering,--and, indeed, there is no question which now agitates the
minds of enlightened democrats more deeply than this: How can we expect
uneducated masses of people to direct the course of public affairs with
safety and with wisdom? It is certain that even in the small, easily
manageable, and highly cultivated republics of the Greeks, men were not
educated enough to regard the public weal as paramount, to set it above
their narrow interests or to bridle their passions. Is it likely, then,
that Education will ever do this for the State? Are we following an
_ignis fatuus_ in setting it up as the panacea for the defects of our
communities?
[Sidenote: Christianity gives us a new force.]
§ 52. To these grave doubts there is an obvious but not, I think, a real
rejoinder, when we urge that the position of the Christian religion in
modern education makes the latter a moral force for good far superior to
any devices of legislators.
[Sidenote: Formal religion always demanded by the Greeks.]
While admitting unreservedly the vast progress we have attained by
having the Christian religion an integral part of all reasonable
education, we must urge on the other side that to most people, and at
all times, religion is only a very occasional guide of action, and that
what we have attained with all our preaching and teaching is rather an
acquiescence in its excellence than a practical submission to its
directions. So far as this mere acquiescence in moral sanctions is to be
considered, all Greek legislators took care to inculcate the teaching
and the observance of a State religion, with moral sanctions, and with
rewards and punishments. They knew as well as we do that a public
without a creed is a public without a conscience, and that scepticism,
however consistent with individual sobriety and goodness, has never yet
been found to serve as a general substitute for positive beliefs.
[Sidenote: Real religion the property of exceptional persons.]
But when we come to the case of superior individuals, to whom religion
is a living and acting force, then we have on the Greek side those
splendid thinkers, whose lives were as pure a model as their
speculations were a lesson, to the world. These men certainly did not
require a higher faith to make them good citizens, and were a 'law unto
themselves, showing forth the work of law written in their hearts,' with
a good conscience. The analogy, then, between the old Greek States and
ours as regards education may be closer than is usually assumed by those
who have before them the contrast of religions.
[Sidenote: Greek views on music]
I will mention a very different point on which all the ancient educators
were agreed, and which seems quite strange to modern notions,--I mean
the capital importance of music, on account of its direct effect upon
morals. They all knew that the Spartan pipes had much the same effect as
the Highland pipes have now upon the soldiers who feel them to be their
national expression. Hence all music might be regarded as either
wholesome or unwholesome stimulant, wholesome or unwholesome soothing,
to the moral nature; and not only does the sober Aristotle discuss with
great seriousness and in great detail the question of this influence,
but he agrees with Plato in regarding the State as bound to interfere
and prevent those strains, 'softly sweet in Lydian measure,' which
delighted, indeed, and beguiled the sense, but disturbed and endangered
the morals of men.
[Sidenote: discussed in my _Rambles and Studies in Greece_.]
On this fascinating but difficult subject I have already said my say in
the last chapter of my _Social Life in Greece_[126:1], and I will only
repeat that if the Greeks put too much stress on this side of education
as affecting character, the moderns have certainly erred in the opposite
directions, and are quite wrong in regarding music as an accomplishment
purely æsthetic, as having nothing to say to the practical side of our
nature,--our sensual passions and our moral principles.
[Sidenote: Xenophon's ideal.]
§ 53. It remains for us to note the chief variations between the
positions of the various theorists on the ideal State. Xenophon tells us
his views under the parable of the ideal education and government of a
perfect king. But as he did not conceive such a personage possible in
the Hellenic world, he chooses the great Cyrus of Persia,--a giant
figure remote from the Greeks of his day, and looming through the mists
of legend[127:1]. But he makes it quite plain that he considers the
monarchy of the right man by far the most perfect form of government,
and his tract on the Spartan State shows how he hated democracy, and
favoured those States which reserved all power for the qualified few.
[Sidenote: Aristotle's.]
[Sidenote: Aristotle's Politics ignore Alexander.]
Nor is Aristotle at variance with Xenophon, as both his _Ethics_ and
_Politics_ agree in conviction that there were single men superior to
average society, and intended by Nature, like superior races, to rule
over inferior men. It starts at once to our recollection that Aristotle
had before his mind that wonderful pupil who transformed the Eastern
world, and opened a new era in the world's politics. But no. The whole
of Aristotle's _Politics_ looks backward and inward at the old Greek
State, small, and standing by the side of others of like dimensions,
differing as despotisms, aristocracies, republics will differ, but not
pretending to carry out a large foreign policy or to dominate the world.
[Sidenote: Evidence of the new _Politeia_.]
The recently discovered treatise on the History of the Athenian
Constitution does not give us any further light as to the foreign policy
which Aristotle thought best for a Greek State. Many critics are,
moreover, inclined to deny the genuineness of the work, and a sharp
controversy is now proceeding, in which, strange to say, the Germans are
for the most part ready to accept the work as Aristotle's, while the
English are mostly for its rejection. Against it has been urged (1) its
general style, which in its easy straightforwardness does not remind the
reader of the Aristotle we know; (2) the particular occurrence of a
number of words and phrases not elsewhere extant in the very large
vocabulary of his works; (3) certain inconsistencies not only with the
_Politics_, but with Xenophon, and indeed, with the generally accepted
facts of earlier Greek history. Thus while the political activity of
Themistocles is prolonged, and that of Aristides is exalted beyond the
other extant estimates of these men, that of Pericles is lessened into
second-rate proportions. The praise of Theramenes as a moderate
politician, as a conservative in a very radical moment, affords no
difficulty, for it is not foreign to what we know of Aristotle's views.
These, however, are the main objections urged by the English critics who
have flooded the literary papers with their emendations. On the other
hand, great German scholars,--Gomperz, Wilamowitz von Möllendorf,
Kaibel, and others,--have stoutly maintained that there are no adequate
reasons for doubting the unanimous testimony of later antiquity, proved
as it is by many citations in Plutarch, many more in the Greek
grammarians and lexicographers. They add, that we know little or nothing
of Aristotle's popular style, and that his lost dialogues have been
praised for their easy flow. I do not feel prepared, as yet, to offer an
opinion for or against the treatise--_adhuc sub judice lis est_.
[Sidenote: Alexander was to all the theorists an incommensurable
quantity.]
But in any case the monarchy of Alexander is quite foreign to anything
contemplated in the theories or in the reflections of Aristotle. The
Greek theorist, even such as he was, could not adjust this new and
mighty phenomenon to the laws of Greek human nature. I shall presently
show how other great men of that day manifested the same purblindness;
but I note it here specially in the case of Aristotle's _Politics_,
because it has not been brought out with sufficient emphasis by modern
historians. The one man who made Plato and Aristotle the subjects of
exhaustive studies, George Grote, did not live to complete his account
of Aristotle's theories on the State, and relegated his masterly account
of Plato and Xenophon into a separate book, long difficult to procure,
and more so to master[130:1].
[Sidenote: Mortality of even perfect constitutions.]
[Sidenote: Contrast of Greek and modern anticipations.]
All these theorists, though in close contact with politicians, were
themselves outside the sphere of practical affairs, whether from choice
or compulsion. As they looked upon the changing phases of society which
make up that complicated and various whole called Greek history, they
were led to one general conclusion. No State, however perfectly framed,
however accurately balanced, was intended by Nature to last for ever.
Polities, like individuals, had their youth, development, and decay, and
would in the lapse of time give way to newer growths. In this we find
one of the most curious contrasts between the buoyant, hopeful Greek and
the weary, saddened modern. The former had no hope of the permanent and
indefinite improvement of the human race; the latter adopts it almost as
an historical axiom. Each modern State hopes to escape the errors and
misfortunes which have ruined its predecessors, and makes its
preparations for a long futurity. The Greeks were fuller in their
experience or fainter in their hope; they would have regarded our
expectations as chimerical, and our anticipations as contradicted by all
the past records of human affairs.
FOOTNOTES:
[110:1] The tract _de Repub. Athen._ handed down to us among Xenophon's
works, is now, by general agreement, assigned to some author who lived
earlier, and wrote it before the close of the Peloponnesian war. It does
not, therefore, express the individual opinion of Xenophon, though it is
an attack upon the Athenian democracy by a determined and bitter
aristocrat. Upon the details, cf. my _Gk. Lit._ ii. p. 47.
[111:1] G. G. iii. pp. 221 _sq._
[113:1] +ônêtê mallon ê oikeios.+
[114:1] Cf. on this point Polybius, xi. 13, whom I have quoted in my
_Greek Life and Thought_, p. 416.
[116:1] Cf. the excellent summary in Holm iii. 54-7.
[116:2] Cf. Holm iii. 96 _sqq._
[118:1] That is, the Restoration of its legitimate democracy. Cf. my
_History of Greek Literature_, part ii. cap. v.
[118:2] Roughly speaking, 400-340 B.C.
[121:1] This Professor Freeman has admirably shown in his _History of
Federal Governments_; and it is generally admitted by all competent
scholars.
[121:2] It is perhaps worth calling attention to the fact that the tract
on Athens in the Xenophontic collection has the same title as the
newly-discovered treatise, so that some distinction is necessary in
citing them. For the present the novelty of the Aristotelian book has
cast the older document into oblivion.
[122:1] Cf. +Ath. Pol.+ c. 28. Holm (ii. p. 583) controverts my use of
Plutarch's quotation from this chapter of Aristotle, and thinks that I
had mistranslated the term +beltistos+. The full text now shows that
Holm was mistaken and I was right.
[123:1] It is well to add, lest the reader might be misled by a false
analogy, that this supervision applied to the appointment of teachers,
and the regulation of teaching and of school discipline. The Greeks
would have despised any system such as ours, which limits the State
control to examinations, and which tests efficiency by success in them.
The modern notion of disregarding the moral and social conditions under
which the young are brought up, provided they can answer at a high-class
examination, would have struck them as wicked and barbarous.
[123:2] Cf. the citation in Cicero _de Repub._ iv. 3. 3.
[124:1] The makeshift of boarding-schools was unknown to the ancients,
but at Sparta, young men were kept together even in their hours of
leisure, and away from their homes, so that we must here admit a
qualified exception. But what we know of this separate life is rather
that of a barrack than of a school.
[126:1] Seventh Edition. It had been formerly the last chapter of my
_Rambles and Studies in Greece_.
[127:1] It was an artistic device, to make this paternal despot a
foreign prince, living in a bygone age, of the same kind as the device
of Æschylus to narrate the Persian war from the Oriental side, and make
Darius a capital figure. No Greek or contemporary person could have
sustained the figure of Cyrus in Xenophon's book. I need only remind the
reader that the tract on the Athenian State now preserved among
Xenophon's works is by an unknown author, and therefore an authority
independent of Xenophon.
[130:1] Grote's _Plato and the other Companions of Socrates_, 3 vols.
(Murray, London.) His _Aristotle_ is posthumous and fragmentary, and
does not include the _Politics_. Mr. Jowett's expected Essays on the
_Politics_ may perhaps supply this deficiency.
CHAPTER VIII.
PRACTICAL POLITICS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY.
[Sidenote: The practical politicians.]
§ 54. Let us now pass on to the practical politicians of the day, or to
those who professed to be practical politicians, and see what they had
to propose in the way of improving the internal condition of Greek
society, as well as of saving it from those external dangers which every
sensible man must have apprehended, even before they showed themselves
above the political horizon.
[Sidenote: Isocrates,]
[Sidenote: his anti-Persian policy.]
Let us begin with Isocrates, whose pamphlets, though written with far
too much attention to style, and intended as rhetorical masterpieces,
nevertheless tell us a great deal of what filled the minds of thoughtful
men in his day. He sees plainly that the Greeks were wearing themselves
out with internecine wars and perpetual jealousies, and he opined,
shrewdly enough, that nothing but a great external quarrel would weld
them together into unity, and make the various States forget their petty
squabbles in the enthusiasm of a common conflict against a foreign foe.
He saw plainly enough that the proper enemy to attack was the power of
Asia. For it was ill-cemented and open to invasion; it was really
dangerous to the liberty even of the Hellenic peninsula,--almost fatal
to that of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, and moreover so full of
wealth as to afford an enormous field for that legitimate plunder which
every conqueror then thought his bare due at the hands of the
vanquished.
[Sidenote: No large ideas of spreading Hellenic culture.]
Isocrates had not the smallest idea of raising the Asiatic nations, or
of civilizing them[132:1]. No Greek down to Aristotle, nay, not even
Aristotle himself, ever had such a notion, though he might concede that
isolated men or cities could possibly, by careful and humble imitation
of Hellenic culture, attain to a respectable imitation of it. Isocrates'
plain view of the war policy against Persia was simply this: first, that
the internal quarrels of Greece would be allayed; secondly, that a great
number of poor and roving Greeks would attain wealth and contentment;
thirdly, 'the Barbarians would learn to think less of themselves[132:2].'
[Sidenote: Who is to be the leader of Greece?]
His first proposal was that Athens and Sparta, the natural leaders of
Greece, should combine in this policy, divide the command by a formal
treaty, and so resume their proper position as benefactors and
promoters of all Hellenedom.
But as years went on, the impotence and the strife of these powers made
it only too plain that this was no practical solution; so he turns in an
open letter to Philip of Macedon, who was gradually showing how to solve
the problem of Hellenic unity, and advises him to use his power, not for
the subjugation of the Greeks, but to lead them in a victorious campaign
into Asia.
But in Philip they had already found that common enemy against whom they
should have united, if voluntary union was ever again possible among
them; and their miserable failure to do so showed plainly that the days
of independent States throughout Greece were numbered, and that the
first neighbouring power with organization and wealth was certain to
pluck the over-ripe fruit of Hellenedom.
[Sidenote: Demosthenes another ideal figure in this history.]
§ 55. This brings us by natural transition to Demosthenes, on whose life
and policy it is very necessary to say a few words, seeing that they
have been, like so many other topics in Greek history, distorted by the
specialists, and made the ground of sentimental rhetoric instead of
being sifted with critical care. To utter anything against Demosthenes
thirty years ago was almost as bad as to say a word in old Athenian days
against the battle of Marathon. This battle was so hymned and lauded by
orators and poets that had you suggested its importance in the campaign
to be overrated, had you said that you believed the alleged numbers of
the Persians to be grossly exaggerated, you would have been set down as
an insolent and unpatriotic knave. In the same way the scholars have
laid hold of Demosthenes; they have dwelt not only upon the matchless
force of his eloquence, but upon the grammatical subtleties of his
Greek, till they are so in love with him that whatever is said in his
favour is true, and whatever appears to be against him is false.
As I have not spent the whole of a long life either in commenting on
this great author or in vindicating for him all the virtues under
heaven, I may perhaps be better able than greater scholars to give a
fair estimate of his political merits.
[Sidenote: He sees the importance of a foreign policy for Athens]
[Sidenote: against Persia]
[Sidenote: or Macedonia.]
Demosthenes at the outset of his career saw plainly, like Isocrates,
that a foreign policy was necessary to give not only dignity, but
consistency, to the counsels of Athens; and he too at the outset,
misconceiving the real power of Philip, thought that Persia was the
serious foe[134:1], and should be the object of most importance to
Athenian politicians. Darius Ochus, the last vigorous king of Persia,
had made such military preparations for the reconquest of his rebellious
provinces as to alarm all the Asiatic Greeks and conjure up the phantom
of a new Persian war. But presently the real danger set aside this
bugbear; the activity and military skill of Philip, added to his
discovery or utilization of the Thracian gold mines, made him clearly
the future lord of the Hellenes if he could prevent them from combining
against him for a few years.
[Sidenote: Grote on Demosthenes.]
The narrative of this famous struggle, carried on mainly by the
eloquence of Demosthenes on one side, and the diplomacy of Philip on the
other, forms one of the most attractive pages in history; and nowhere is
it better told than in the eleventh volume of Grote's work. The cause of
Demosthenes naturally attracted the Radical historian[135:1], who sees
in the power of Macedon nothing but the overthrow of democracy, of
discussion, of universal suffrage; and hence the relapse of society into
a condition worse and less developed than what had been attained by all
the labours of great and enlightened reform.
[Sidenote: A. Schäfer on Demosthenes.]
The cause of Demosthenes also attracted Arnold Schäfer, who having
chosen the orator and his works for his own speciality, spent years in
gradually increasing admiration for this choice, till Demosthenes became
for him a patriot of spotless purity and a citizen of such high
principle that all charges against him are to be set down as calumnies.
This enthusiasm has reached so far that if in the collection of law
speeches which the orator composed for pay, and often to support a very
weak case, there are found illogical arguments or inconsistencies with
other speeches on analogous subjects, such flaws are set down as
evidence that the particular speech is spurious, and cannot have
emanated from so noble a character as Demosthenes[136:1].
[Sidenote: Very different estimate of the ancients.]
§ 56. This estimate is totally at variance with the judgment of the
ancients, his contemporaries and immediate successors, who openly
accused, and indeed convicted, him of embezzling money in his public
capacity, as well as of accepting briefs and fees from both sides in a
private litigation.
[Sidenote: Conditions of the conflict]
[Sidenote: made Philip's victory certain.]
To this question of his private character I shall revert. But as regards
the struggle which he carried on for years, not so much against Philip
as against the apathy of his fellow-citizens, it must have been plain
from the beginning that he was playing a losing game. The dislike of
military service in what is called by Grote the 'Demosthenic Athenian'
was notorious; the jealousies of parties within, and of other States
without, hampered any strong and consistent line of action. The gold of
Philip was sure to command, not only at Athens, but at Thebes, at Argos,
in Arcadia, partisans who, under the guise of legitimate opposition,
would carry adjournments, postponements, limitations, of all vigorous
policy. Mercenary troops, which were now in fashion, if not amply paid
and treated with regard to their convenience, became a greater scourge
to their own side than to the enemy. It was therefore quite plain that
Philip must win, though none of us can fail to appreciate and to admire
the persistent and noble efforts of Demosthenes, who is never weary of
urging that if the free States, especially Athens, would do their duty,
and make some sacrifices for the good of Greece, the impending foreign
domination would be indefinitely postponed. But this only means that if
the Athenians had changed their character, and adopted that of another
generation or another race, the issue of the contest might have been
different[137:1].
[Sidenote: Demosthenes fights a losing game.]
This is the sort of up-hill game that Demosthenes played for twenty
years. At first Athens seemed quite the stronger to superficial
observers. But because she was so strong it seemed unnecessary to act
with full vigour. Presently she begins to lose, and Philip to make way.
Even still she can win if she will rouse herself. But soon he makes
further advances, and she is involved in difficulties. Then the
faint-hearted begin to fear, and the disloyal to waver. It is not till
the very end of the struggle, when Athens is in direct danger of
immediate siege, that the whole population wakes up, the traitors are
silenced, and the city, in conjunction with Thebes, makes a splendid
struggle. But the day for victory had long gone by, and Demosthenes has
the bitter satisfaction of at last attaining his full reputation for
wisdom and patriotism because his gloomiest prophecies are fulfilled.
[Sidenote: The blunders of his later policy.]
[Sidenote: Compared with Phocion.]
§ 57. It is from this time onward[138:1] that his public acts seem to
me hardly consistent with common-sense, or with that higher idea of
patriotism which seeks the good of the State at the sacrifice of
personal theories or prejudices. Grote has observed of the other leading
Athenian of that time, the general Phocion, that while his policy of
submission and despair was injurious, nay, even fatal, up to the battle
of Chæronea, this tame acquiescence when the struggle was over was the
practical duty of a patriot, and of decided advantage to his country.
Grote ought to have insisted with equal force that the policy of
resistance and of hope, while highly commendable and patriotic up to the
same moment, was deeply mischievous to the conquered people, and led
them into many follies and many misfortunes. And yet this was the policy
which Demosthenes hugged to the last, and which cost the lives and
fortunes of hundreds of Athenians.
[Sidenote: Old men often ruinous politics.]
I have spoken elsewhere[139:1] of the peculiar mischief to a nation of
having her fortunes at a great crisis intrusted to _old_ men.
Demosthenes was indeed only fifty years of age when the genius of
Alexander showed itself beyond any reasonable doubt. But at fifty
Demosthenes was distinctly an old man. His delicate constitution, tried
by the severest early studies, had been worn in political conflicts of
nearly thirty years' duration; and we may therefore pardon him, though
we cannot forget the fatal influence he exercised in keeping both Athens
and the other Greek cities from joining heartily in the great new
enterprise of the Macedonian king. All the Attic politicians were then
past middle life, with the exception of Hypereides.
[Sidenote: Hellenism despised.]
So then the old republican glories of Athens, the old liberties of the
Greeks, which had been tried and found wanting, were praised and hymned
by all the orators, and the great advent of a new day, the day of
_Hellenism_, was cursed as the setting of the sun of Greece. Modern
scholars, led, as usual, by literary instead of political greatness,
have in general adopted this view; and so strongly do they feel that the
proper history of Greece is now over that they either close their work
with the battle of Chæronea, or add the conquests of Alexander and the
wars of the Diadochi as a sort of ungrateful and irrelevant appendix. On
this subject I have already spoken in connection with the work of
Grote[140:1].
[Sidenote: The author feels he is fighting a losing game against
democracy and its advocates.]
The love of political liberty, and the importance attached to political
independence, are so strong in the minds of the Anglo-Saxon nations that
it is not likely any one will persuade them, against the splendid
advocacy of Grote, that there may be such losses and mischiefs in a
democracy as to justify a return to a stronger executive and a greater
restriction of public speech. Nevertheless, the conviction derived from
a life-long study of Greek history is so strong in me on this question
that I feel compelled to state my opinions. It is all the more a duty as
I hold that one of the greatest lessons of ancient history is to suggest
guiding-posts and advices for the perplexities of modern life. So far
is mankind the same in all places and countries, that most civilized
peoples will stumble upon the same difficulties and will apply the same
experiments to their solution.
[Sidenote: The education of small free States.]
[Sidenote: Machiavelli and Aristotle.]
§ 58. There is no one more convinced than I am that this complex of
small, independent cities, each forming a separate State in the
strictest sense of the term, each showing modifications of internal
constitution, each contending with the same obstacles in varied
ways,--this wonderful political Many-in-one (for they were one in
religion, language, and general culture) afforded an intellectual
education to Greek citizens such as the world has not since experienced.
The _Politics_ of Aristotle is a summary of the theoretical side of that
experience, which could find no parallel till the days of Machiavelli,
whose scheme, if completed by the promised _Repubblica_, would have been
very similar. For his _Principe_ is plainly suggested by the then
re-discovered _Politics_ of Aristotle, which naturally struck the
Florentine statesman with its curiously close and various analogies to
the history of the Italian republics of the Middle Ages.
[Sidenote: Greek democratic patriotism.]
Even far more deeply did the lessons of Athenian political life act upon
the practical character of the citizen, and train him to be a rational
being submitting to the will of the majority, to which he himself
contributed in debate, taking his turn at commanding as well as obeying,
regarding the labours of office as his just contribution to the public
weal, regarding even the sacrifices he made as a privilege,--the outward
manifestation of his loyalty to the State which had made him in the
truest sense an aristocrat among men. Even when he commanded fleets or
armies he did so as the servant of the State; and any attempt to redress
private differences by personal assertion of his rights, other than the
law provided, was regarded as essentially a violation of his civility
and a return to barbarism. To carry arms for personal defence, to
challenge an adversary to mortal combat, to take forcible possession of
disputed property,--these things were greater outrages and greater
violences to civilization at Athens than they are in most of the
civilized countries of the nineteenth century.
[Sidenote: Its splendid results]
To have attained this high level, four centuries before Christ, without
the aid of a really pure system of State religion, without the aid of
that romantic sentiment which is so peculiar to Northern nations, is to
have achieved a triumph which no man can gainsay. Had the Greeks not
been subjected to this splendid training, which radiated from politics
into art and letters, and which stimulated, though it did not create,
that national genius that has since found no rival, all the glories of
Hellenism, all the splendours of Alexander's successors, all the
victories over Western barbarism would have been impossible.
[Sidenote: appear to be essentially transitory,]
[Sidenote: from internal causes.]
§ 59. But when all this is said, and however fully and eloquently it may
be urged, the fact remains that the highest education is not
all-powerful in producing internal concord and external peace. There
seems, as it were, a national strain exercised by a conquering and
imperial democracy, which its members may sustain for a generation or
two, but which cannot endure. The sweets of accumulated wealth and
domestic comfort in a civilized and agreeable society become so
delightful that the better classes will not keep up their own energy.
All work, says Aristotle, to which men submit, is for the purpose of
having leisure; and so there is a natural tendency in the cultivated
classes to stand aside from politics, and allow the established laws to
run in their now accustomed grooves. Hence the field of politics is left
to the poorer, needier, more discontented classes, who turn public life
into a means of glory and of gain, and set to work to disturb the State
that they may satisfy their followers and obtain fuel to feed their own
ambition. To such persons either a successful war upon neighbours, or an
attack upon the propertied classes at home, becomes a necessity.
[Sidenote: The case of America.]
Let me state a modern case. The natural resources of America are still
so vast that this inevitable result has not yet ensued. But whenever a
limit has been reached and the pinch of poverty increases, we may expect
it to arise in the United States. Even the Athenian democracy, when its
funds were low and higher taxes were threatened, hailed with approval
informations against rich citizens, in the hope that by confiscations of
their property the treasury might be replenished.
[Sidenote: The demagogue.]
This is the heyday of the demagogue, who tells the people--the poorer
crowd--that they have a right to all the comforts and blessings of the
State, and that their pleasures must not be curtailed while there are
men of large property living in idle luxury. Such arguments produce
violences instead of legal decisions; the demagogue becomes a tyrant
over the richer classes; the public safety is postponed to private
interests; and so the power of the democracy as regards external foes is
weakened in proportion as the harmony among its citizens is disturbed.
[Sidenote: Internal disease the real cause of decadence.]
[Sidenote: The Greek States all in this condition,]
Such are the changes which Greek theorists regarded as inevitable in a
democracy, and as certain to bring about its ultimate fall. Whatever may
be the case with the great States of modern days, this prognosis was
thoroughly verified in Greek history. It may safely be said that no
State was ever crushed by external adversaries at the period of its
perfection. In every case internal decay has heralded the overthrow from
without. There is no reasonable probability that, had there never been a
Philip or an Alexander, Athens, Sparta, Thebes, or Argos would have
risen into a glorious future and revived the splendours of Leonidas or
of Pericles. We may deeply regret that the maintenance of such
prosperity should seem impossible; we may laud in the strongest words
the condition of things which had once made it actual: but the day for
this splendour was gone by; and far better than the impotence of an
unjust mob, and the chicanery of an unprincipled leader, is the
subjection of all to external control, even with the impairing or
abolishing of universal suffrage.
[Sidenote: as Phocion saw,]
This was evidently the opinion of Phocion, an honourable and experienced
man, whose contempt for the floods of talk in Athens, leading to waste
of time and delay in action, made him the persistent opponent of
Demosthenes, but nevertheless trusted and respected even by the mob whom
he openly despised. We may indeed feel glad that his policy did not
earlier prevail,--we should have lost the speeches of Demosthenes; and
to the after world this loss would not have been compensated, had the
Athenians merely escaped their troubles and lived in peaceful
submission.
[Sidenote: but which Demosthenes ignored.]
Demosthenes says proudly, in a famous passage of his immortal _De
Corona_, that even in presence of his life's failure, even after all he
had attempted had been wrecked by circumstances, he would not recall one
act of his life, one argument in his speeches, no, not by the heroes
that stood the brunt of battle at Marathon, by the memory of all those
who died for their country's liberty!
[Sidenote: The dark shadows of his later years.]
§ 60. We may all applaud this noble self-panegyric, but not the
irritating agitation which he had adopted and continued for fifteen
years against the Macedonian supremacy, and which involved his country
in further distresses, and cost him and his brother-agitators their
lives. For the very means he used to carry on his policy of revolt were
more than doubtful in their honesty, and have thrown a dark shade upon
his memory. The fact is, as I have already said, that while Phocion, the
enemy of the democratic policy, is above all suspicion, both
contemporaries and survivors had their doubts about Demosthenes.
[Sidenote: His professional character as an advocate.]
I need not discuss here the allegation that he made speeches for money
on opposite sides in the successive trials of the same case. The fact
appears to me clear enough, for it is only evaded by his panegyrists
with their stock expedient of declaring one of such opposing speeches,
though accepted by the best ancient critics, to be spurious. But the
morals of the bar from that day to this are so peculiar--I will not say
loose--as to make the layman hesitate in offering an opinion. That a man
should take fees for a case in which he cannot appear, or retain them
when he is debarred by lucrative promotion from appearing for his
client, seems to be consistent with the morality of the modern bar. Why
then try Demosthenes by a severer standard?
[Sidenote: The affair of Harpalus.]
But a larger question arises when we find him arraigned for embezzling a
sum of money brought to Athens by a fugitive defaulter from Alexander's
treasury, and moreover convicted of the embezzlement. The chorus of
modern critics, with a very occasional exception, cry out that of course
the accusation was false, and the verdict simply a political move to
escape the wrath of the formidable Macedonian. But the facts remain, and
this moreover among them, that the principal accuser of Demosthenes was
his brother-patriot Hypereides, who afterwards suffered death for the
anti-Macedonian cause[147:1].
[Sidenote: Was the verdict against Demosthenes just?]
The evidence left to us seems to me not sufficient to overthrow the
Athenian verdict on political grounds, and is certainly not such as to
justify us in acquitting Demosthenes without further consideration. The
real ground, however, which actuates modern historians is quite a
different one from that of the evidence adduced, and is, I think, based
on a historical misprision, a false estimate of the current morals of
the day. I think it well to state the case here; for it is a test case,
and affects many of our judgments of other Greek politicians as well as
of Demosthenes.
[Sidenote: The modern ground of acquittal.]
§ 61. The modern ground of acquittal urged is this, that we cannot for a
moment conceive a pure and high-souled patriot, who had risked all for
the national cause, to have been guilty of taking bribes or embezzling
money. Schäfer indeed distinctly says[148:1] that his judgment is
determined by his estimate of the moral character of its hero; and so
not only weak and illogical speeches, but immoral or dishonest acts, are
simply to be set aside as inconceivable in so lofty and unsullied a
nature. Whether this be a sensible way of writing history, I leave the
reader to decide. What I am now going to urge is this, that in the
morality of Attic politics, taking money privately was not thought
disgraceful, but was, with certain restrictions, openly asserted to be
quite justifiable.
[Sidenote: Morality of politicians expounded by Hypereides.]
Hypereides puts it plainly in his speech in this very case. Seeing that
it was not the practice at Athens to pay salaries to politicians for
their services, the public, he says, was quite prepared that they should
make indirect profits and receive money privately for their work; the
one thing intolerable was that they should take it from the enemies of
their country or to prejudice Athenian interests.
[Sidenote: Modern sentiment at least repudiates these principles.]
In England we have had the good fortune to find rich men of high
traditions to carry on the affairs of the nation, and even where we do
not, or used not, to give salaries, it has been long thought
disgraceful to make politics the source of private gain. How far it was
done or not, in spite of this feeling, we need not inquire. There can be
no doubt that now, at all events, there are large numbers of men
supporting themselves by a parliamentary career; and it is usually said
of America also, that politics are there regarded as a lucrative
profession, and that the men who spend their lives in politics from mere
ambition or from pure patriotism are very rare indeed. Still I think
modern sentiment, theoretically at least, brands these indirect profits
as disgraceful; nor do I think any modern advocate would describe such a
practice as perfectly excusable in the way that Hypereides expresses it.
We are dealing, therefore, with a condition of public morality in which
taking bribes, to put it plainly, was not at all considered a heinous
offence, provided always that they were not taken to injure the State.
You might therefore be a patriot at Athens, and yet make that patriotism
a source of profit.
[Sidenote: As regards practice we have Walpole]
This combination of high and sordid principles seems so shocking to
modern gentlemen that I must remind them of two instances not irrelevant
to the question in hand. In the first place men who were thoroughly
honourable and served their country faithfully, as, for example, Sir
Robert Walpole, have thought it quite legitimate to corrupt with money
those under them and those opposed to them. Though they would scorn to
receive bribes, they did not scruple to offer them; and they have left
it on record that they found few men unwilling to accept such bribes in
some indirect or disguised form.
[Sidenote: and the Greek patriots of our own century.]
Again, if the reader will turn to the narratives of the great War of
Liberation in Greece, which lasted some ten years of this century
(1821-1831), and will study the history of the national leaders who
fought all the battles by sea and land, and contributed far more than
foreign aid to the success of that remarkable Revolution, he will find
that on the one hand they were actuated with the strongest and most
passionate feelings of patriotism, while on the other they did not
scruple to turn the war to their own profit[150:1]. They were klephts,
bandits, assassins. They often took bribes to save the families of
Turks, and then allowed them to be massacred. They made oaths and broke
them, signed treaties and violated them. And yet there is not the
smallest doubt that they were strictly patriots, in the sense of loving
their country, and even shedding their blood for it.
[Sidenote: Analogous to the case of Demosthenes.]
[Sidenote: The end justified the means.]
§ 62. Let us now come back to the case of Demosthenes. At the opening of
his career he would have gladly obtained money and men from Macedon to
use against Persia; for Persia then seemed a danger to Greece. Later on,
his policy was to obtain money from Persia to attack Macedon; and we are
told that in the crisis before Chæronea he had control of large funds of
foreign gold, which he administered as he chose. The one great end was
to break the power of Macedon. And so I have not the smallest doubt that
if he thought the gold of Harpalus would enable him to emancipate
Athens, he was perfectly ready to accept it, even on the terms of
screening Harpalus from any personal danger, provided this did not balk
the one great object in view. Thus the telling of a deliberate lie,
which to modern gentlemen is a crime of the same magnitude as taking a
bribe, is in the minds of many of our politicians justified by urgent
public necessity[151:1]. It is hardly worth while to give instances of
this notorious laxity in European public life. Is it reasonable, is it
fair, to try Demosthenes by a far higher standard?
This is why I contend that it is illogical and unhistorical to argue
that because Demosthenes was an honourable man and a patriot, therefore
he could not have done what he was convicted of doing by the
Areopagus[152:1].
[Sidenote: Low average of Greek national morality.]
At no time was the average morality of the Greeks very high. From the
days of Homer down, as I have shown amply in my _Social Life in Greece_,
we find a low standard of truth and honesty in that brilliant society,
which is gilded over to us by their splendid intellectual gifts. As
Ulysses in legend, Themistocles in early, Aratus in later history are
the types which speak home to Greek imagination and excite the national
admiration, so in a later day Cicero, in a remarkable passage, where he
discusses the merits and demerits of the race[152:2], lays it down as an
axiom that their honesty is below par, and will never rank in court with
a Roman's word.
[Sidenote: Demosthenes above it.]
Exceptions there were, such as Aristides, Socrates, Phocion; but they
never enlisted the sympathy, though they commanded the respect, of the
Greek public. Nay, all these suffered for their honesty. I do not
believe Demosthenes to have been below the average morality of his
age,--far from it; he was in all respects, save in military skill, much
above it: but I do not believe he was at all of the type of his
adversary, Phocion, who was honest and incorruptible in the strictest
modern sense.
[Sidenote: Deep effect of his rhetorical earnestness.]
[Sidenote: The perfection of his art is to be apparently natural.]
The illusion has here again been produced by the perfect art of
Demosthenes, whose speeches read as if he spoke the inmost sentiments of
his mind and laid his whole soul open with all earnestness and sincerity
to the hearer. I suppose there was a day when people thought this
splendid, direct, apparently unadorned eloquence burst from the fulness
of his heart, and found its burning expression upon his lips merely from
the power of truth and earnestness to speak to the hearts of other men.
We know very well now that this is the most absurd of estimates. Every
sentence, every clause, was turned and weighed; the rythm of every
phrase was balanced; the very interjections and exclamations were nicely
calculated. There never was any speaking or writing more strictly
artificial since the world of literature began. But as the most perfect
art upon the stage attains the exact image of nature, so the perfection
of Greek oratory was to produce the effect of earnestness and simplicity
by the most subtle means, adding concealed harmonies of sound, and
figures of thought, by which the audience could be charmed and beguiled
into a delighted acquiescence. This is the sort of rhetorician with whom
we have to deal, and who regarded the simple and trenchant Phocion as
the most dangerous 'pruner of his periods.' To many persons such a
school of eloquence, however perfect, will not seem the strictest
school for plain uprightness in action; and they will rather be
surprised at the eagerness of modern historians to defend him against
all accusations, than at the decisive, though reluctant, condemnation
which he suffered at the hands of his own citizens[154:1]. All the life
of Demosthenes shows a strong theatrical tendency, even as he is said
to have named +hypokrisis+ (the art of delivery) as the essence of
eloquence. It is in this connection that Holm justly finds fault with
the modern critics, who reject indeed the ribaldry of Æschines as
mendacious, but set down that of Demosthenes as a source of sober
history. The scandalous accusations made by all these orators against
their opponents have one distinct parallel in earlier history--the
sallies of the Old Comedy. This kind of political play died out with the
rise of dramatic oratory, which was fully as libellous. Holm's remark is
also worth repeating in this connection, that the dialectical
discussions of the later tragedy were appropriated by the philosophers,
whose dialogues satisfied the strong taste of the Athenians for this
kind of intellectual exercise.
FOOTNOTES:
[132:1] He says indeed in one place (_Panegyr._ p. 51) that Hellenedom
is rather a matter of common culture, than of common race. But nowhere
does he ever acknowledge that foreign races as such can attain this
culture, and he shows the respect of every old-fashioned Hellene for the
Spartans, who belonged to the race, but were devoid of this culture.
[132:2] The texts are all cited in my _History of Greek Literature_, ii.
215, when treating of Isocrates.
[134:1] Cf. the texts in my _Greek Lit._ ii. 2, pp. 87, 105.
[135:1] As it did Niebuhr, who was brought up in the great struggle of
Germany with Napoleon.
[136:1] This absurd feeling has gone so far as to lead Demosthenes'
admirers to blacken the character of all those who opposed him, not only
of Philip of Macedon, but of Eubulus and other Attic politicians. Holm
has very well defended Eubulus (G. G. iii. 252 _sq._), and has also
vindicated Philip from the usual accusations of treachery, cruelty, and
tyranny (_ibid._ 327).
[137:1] I cannot avoid citing a parallel from contemporary history,
which is by no means so far-fetched as may appear to those who have not
studied both cases so carefully as I have been obliged to do. The Irish
landlords, a rich, respectable, idle, uncohesive body, have been
attacked by an able and organized agitation, unscrupulous, mendacious,
unwearied, which has carried point after point against them, and now
threatens to force them to capitulate, or evacuate their estates in the
country. It has been said a thousand times: Why do not these landlords
unite and fight their enemy? They have far superior capital; they have
had from the outset public influence far greater; they have a far
stronger case, not only in law, but in real justice: and yet they allow
their opponents to push them from position to position, till little
remains to be conquered. Even after a series of defeats we tell them
still that if they would now combine, subscribe, select, and trust their
leaders, they could win. And all this is certain. But it is not likely
that they will ever do it. One is fond of his pleasures, another of his
idleness, a third is jealous of any leader who is put forward, a fourth
is trying underhand to make private terms with the enemy. A small and
gallant minority subscribe, labour, debate. They are still a
considerable force, respected and feared by their foes. But the main
body is inert, jealous, helpless; and unless their very character be
changed, these qualities must inevitably lead to their ruin.
[138:1] Holm, in his remarkable estimate of the Greek policy of this
time, goes so far as to say that Demosthenes' efforts even before
Chæronea were mischievous, and that the idea he constantly puts forward,
of making Athens great by weakening her old rivals Sparta and Thebes, is
no better than supporting that old particularism which always made the
Greeks inferior to any powerful or wealthy foreign State. Holm thinks
that a larger and truer policy was that of Isocrates, who would have
loyally accepted the hegemony of Philip, that he might lead the whole
nation against a foreign enemy. We may be able to see things in that
light now, yet I cannot blame Demosthenes, and the patriotic party at
Athens, for neglecting the essay of Isocrates, and desiring to maintain
Athens upon the old lines. But their effort was neither honestly nor
persistently supported by the main body of the Athenians.
[139:1] _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 4.
[140:1] Above, § 10.
[147:1] It is nevertheless not likely that Hypereides was personally
intimate with Demosthenes, for he was not, as is usually stated, his
contemporary, but a man of a younger generation, as I have argued in my
_Greek Lit._ ii. 2, p. 371. I invite the critics either to refute or to
accept the arguments there stated.
I can now cite several scholars of the first magnitude whose estimate of
Demosthenes agrees in almost every detail with what I had argued in my
_History of Greek Literature_. They are H. Weil, in his admirable
edition of Demosthenes (Paris, 1886), and Holm in the third volume of
his History (1891), especially the passage (pp. 247-9), which shows that
there is now a general tendency to judge Demosthenes less leniently than
Grote and Schäfer have done. Beloch, Sittl, Spengel, and other
considerable critics are quoted in his summary. It is no small
satisfaction to me to see the opinions I put forth in the first edition
of _Social Life in Greece_ (1871), which were then treated as paradoxes,
now adopted, quite independently, by a large body of the best critics. I
do not, however, think that they have sufficiently appreciated the low
standard of political honesty at Athens, as compared with ours. This
affords the best apology for Demosthenes' faults. He was, after all, the
child of his time.
[148:1] _Demosthenes_, iii. 239 _et passim_: cf. Curtius, G. G. iii. 774
(note 44).
[150:1] Finlay even goes so far as to say that the islanders of Hydra,
who were certainly the most prominent in the cause of patriotism, were
actuated by no higher motives than despair at the loss of the lucrative
monopoly they had enjoyed of visiting all the ports of Europe during the
great Napoleonic wars under the protection of the neutral flag of
Turkey! The patriotism of these people did not include gratitude.
[151:1] But according to our evidence, Demosthenes did not deny that he
had taken the money; he pleaded as an excuse that he had advanced for
the Theoric Fund, for the benefit of the Athenians, twenty talents, and
that he had recouped himself for this money. This is the plea put into
his mouth by Hypereides (_in Demosth._ 10). Such a defence, which merely
amounted to making the Athenian public an unwitting accomplice, is so
suicidal in Demosthenes' mouth, that I hesitate to accept it as it
stands, though Holm (G. G. iii. 420) does so.
[152:1] All the evidence has been justly weighed by Holm, G. G. iii.
420-4, who comes to the same conclusion which I had put forward twenty
years ago, long before the recent change of opinion concerning
Demosthenes. That the Athenians condemned the orator justly, and to a
moderate penalty, can be demonstrated from his own admissions. Political
expediencies doubtless secured his conviction; they do not prove it to
have been unjust.
[152:2] _Pro Flacco_, cap. iv. _Graeca fides_ was a stock phrase.
[154:1] Cf. now the sensible remarks of Holm, G. G. 501 _sq._, who
criticises this exceedingly studied oratory from the very same
standpoint.
CHAPTER VIII.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT.
[Sidenote: The further course of Greek history.]
§ 63. As I have said already, the death of Demosthenes is the favourite
terminus for the political historians of Greece. But let us not grow
weary,--let us survey the fortunes of the race for some centuries more,
touching upon those turning-points or knotty points where it seems that
the evidence has not been duly stated or weighed.
[Sidenote: Droysen's _Geschichte des Hellenismus_.]
In approaching the work and the character of Alexander, we come upon a
new authority among modern historians, whom we have not yet encountered.
Droysen, who unfortunately devoted the evening of his life to Prussian
history, employed his brilliant abilities for years in researches upon
the history of Alexander and of his immediate successors. His latest
work on this period is no doubt the fullest and best to which we can
refer, and it seems a very great omission that it has not been as yet
translated into our language.
[Sidenote: This period much neglected by English historians.]
[Sidenote: Nature of our authorities.]
This is more specially to be desired as we have no great English history
of these times. It is but another instance of what has been so often
urged in these pages. Greek history has been in the hands of people
with literary and scholastic interests. So long as there are great
authors to be translated, explained, panegyrized, all the most minute
events are recorded and discussed with care; but as soon as we come to
an epoch certainly not less important in human affairs, perhaps more
decisive than any that had gone before in shaping the future history of
the world, we are deserted by our modern historians, because the Greeks
had lost that literary excellence which makes their earlier records the
proper training for the schoolboy and the collegian[156:1]. We are now
reduced to Diodorus, Plutarch, Arrian, Strabo, for our materials, and
there are those who think that the moral splendour and unfailing
interest of the famous _Parallel Lives_ do not atone for the want of
Attic grace and strength which marks the decadence of Greek prose
literature. Yet surely to the genuine historian, to whom all these
records are merely sources of information on the course of affairs and
the characters of men, literary perfection should only be an agreeable
accident, an evidence, if you like, of that day's culture, not a gauge
to test the pre-eminence of one century or one nation over another.
[Sidenote: Alexander's place in history still disputed.]
§ 64. Accordingly, the character of Alexander and his work have not yet
been sufficiently weighed and studied to afford us a perfectly clear
picture, which might carry conviction to the majority of readers, and
finally fix his place in history. As I said above[157:1], Grote's
picture of him--the only recent study of the period in England previous
to my own _Alexander's Empire_ and _Greek Life and Thought_--is so
manifestly unfair that no candid judge will be satisfied with it. If any
other writer had used against Demosthenes or Pericles such evidence as
Grote cites and believes against Alexander, the great historian would
have cried shame upon him, and refuted his arguments with the high
satisfaction of supporting an unanswerable case.
[Sidenote: Grote's unfairness in accepting evidence against him.]
Thus, for example, Grote finds in Q. Curtius, a late, rhetorical, and
very untrustworthy Latin historian of Alexander, theatrical details of
Alexander's cruelties to the heroic defender of Gaza, or the mythical
descendants of the Milesian Branchidæ who had settled in Inner
Asia,--details unknown to Arrian, unknown apparently to the Athenians of
the day, and fairly to be classed with the king's adventures among the
Amazons or in the land beyond the Sun. Yet these stories have their
distinct effect upon Grote's estimate of Alexander, whom he esteems
hardly a Hellene, but a semi-barbarian conqueror, of transcendent
military abilities, only desirous of making for himself a great Oriental
despot-monarchy, with a better and more efficient military and civil
organization, but without any preparations for higher civilization.
[Sidenote: Droysen's estimate.]
The estimate of Droysen is nearer the truth, but still not strictly the
truth itself[158:1]. To him the Macedonian is a political as well as a
military genius of the highest order, who is educated in all the views
of Aristotle, who understands thoroughly that the older forms of
political life are effete, that small separate States require to be
united under a strong central control. He even divines that the wealth
and resources of Asia require regeneration through Greek intelligence
and enterprise, and therefore the 'marriage of Europe and Asia,' of
which the manifest symbol was the wholesale matrimony of his officers
with Persian ladies, was the real aim and goal of all his achievements.
As such Alexander is more than the worthy pupil of Aristotle, and the
legitimate originator of a new and striking form of civilization.
[Sidenote: Tendency to attribute calculation to genius.]
[Sidenote: Its spontaneity.]
§ 65. There is, I think, a great tendency, whenever we come to estimate
a great and exceptional genius, to regard him as manifesting merely a
higher degree of that conscious ability called talent, or cleverness.
It is much easier to understand this view of genius than to give any
rational account of its spontaneity, its unconscious and unreflective
inspirations, which seem to anticipate, and solve without effort,
questions laboriously answered by the patient research or experiment of
ordinary minds[159:1]. We talk of 'flashes of genius.' When these
flashes come often enough, and affect large political questions, we have
results which baffle ordinary mortals, and are easily mistaken either
for random luck or acute calculation.
[Sidenote: Alexander's military antecedents.]
If I am right, Alexander started with few definite ideas beyond the
desire of great military conquests. On this point his views were
probably quite clear, and no doubt often reasoned out with his early
companions. He had seen the later campaigns of Philip, and had
discovered at Chæronea what the shock of heavy cavalry would do against
the best infantry the Greek world could produce. In his very first
operations to put down revolt and secure his crown, he had made trial of
his field artillery, and of the marching powers of his army through the
difficult Thracian country. He therefore required no Aristotle to tell
him that with the combined arms of Greece and Macedonia he could conquer
the Persian Empire. His reckless exposure of his life at the Granicus
and at Issus may indeed be interpreted as the divine confidence of a
genius in his star, but seems to me nothing more than a manifest defect
in his generalship, counterbalanced to some extent by the enthusiasm it
aroused in his household troops.
[Sidenote: He learns to respect Persian valour and loyalty.]
But it also taught him a very important lesson. He had probably quite
underrated the high qualities of the Persian nobles. Their splendid
bravery and unshaken loyalty to their king in all the battles of the
campaign, their evident dignity and liberty under a legitimate sovran,
must have shown him that these were indeed subjects worth having, and
destined to be some day of great importance in checking Greek discontent
or Macedonian insubordination. The fierce and stubborn resistance of the
great Aryan barons of Sogdiana, which cost him more time and loss than
all his previous conquests, must have confirmed this opinion, and led to
that recognition of the Persians in his empire which was so deeply
resented by his Western subjects.
[Sidenote: He discovers how to fuse the nations in Alexandria.]
§ 66. His campaigns, on the other hand, must have at the same time
forced this upon his mind, that the deep separation which had hitherto
existed between East and West would make a homogeneous empire
impossible, if pains were not taken to fuse the races by some large and
peaceful process[160:1]. This problem was the first great political
difficulty he solved; and he solved it very early in his career by the
successful experiment of founding a city on the confines of the Greek
seas and the Asiatic continent, into which Jews and Egyptians crowded
along with Greeks, and produced the first specimen of that composite
Hellenistic life which soon spread over all his empire.
[Sidenote: His development of commerce.]
[Sidenote: Diffusion of gold.]
This happy experiment, no doubt intended as an experiment, and perhaps
the easiest and most obvious under the circumstances, must have set
Alexander's mind into the right groove. Further advances into Asia
showed him the immense field open to conquest by his arms, and also by
the higher culture and enterprise of Greeks and Jews. He must have felt
that in the foundation of chains of cities peopled by veterans and
traders he would secure not only a military frontier and military
communications, but _entrepôts_ for the rising trade which brought new
luxuries from the East, and new inventions from the West. Two distinct
causes tended largely to promote this commerce, the vigorous maintenance
of peace and security on roads and frontiers, and still more the
dissemination of a vast hoard of gold captured in the Persian
treasuries. This hoard, amounting to several millions of our money, not
only stimulated trade by its mere circulation, but afforded the merchant
a medium of exchange as superior in convenience to baser metals as
bank-notes are to gold. The new merchant could pay out of his girdle in
gold as much as his father had paid out of a camel's load in silver or
copper. I have no doubt the Jews were the first people to profit by
these altered circumstances, and thus to attain that importance from
Rhodes to Rhagæ which comes to light so suddenly and silently in the
history of the Diadochi.
[Sidenote: Development of Alexander's views.]
[Sidenote: His romantic imagination.]
[Sidenote: No pupil of Aristotle.]
These changes seem to me to have dawned gradually, though quickly, upon
the powerful mind of the conqueror, and to have transformed him from a
young knight-errant in search of fame into a statesman facing an
enormous responsibility. His intense and indefatigable spirit knew no
repose except the distraction of physical excitement; and unfortunately,
with the growth of larger views, his love of glory and of adventure was
not stilled. No cares of State or legislative labours were able to
quench the romance of his imagination and the longing to make new
explorations and new conquests. This is the feature which legends of the
East and West have caught with poetic truth; they have transformed the
visions of his fancy into the chronicle of his life. But all that he did
in the way of real government, of practical advancement in civilization,
of respecting and adjusting conflicting rights among his various
subjects, seems to me the result of a rapid practical insight, a large
comprehension of pressing wants and useful reforms, not the working out
of any mature theory. Hence I regard it as nonsense to call the
politician and the king in any important sense the pupil of Aristotle.
There is hardly a point in the _Politics_ which can be regarded as
having been adopted in the Macedonian settlement of the world. The whole
conditions of this problem and its solution were non-Hellenic,
non-speculative, new.
[Sidenote: His portentous activity.]
§ 67. It is quite possible that some of Alexander's most successful
ordinances were not fully understood by himself, if what I have said
above of the spontaneous action of genius be true. But certainly many of
them were clearly seen and really planned. What astonishes us most is
the supernatural quickness and vigour of the man. He died at an early
age, but we may well question whether he died young. His body was hacked
with wounds, worn with hard exercise and still harder drinking. His mind
had undergone a perpetual strain. We feel that he lived at such a rate
that to him thirty years were like a century of ordinary life.
[Sidenote: Compare with Napoleon,]
[Sidenote: and Cromwell.]
[Sidenote: Use of artillery.]
It is a favourite amusement to compare the great men of different
epochs, who are never very similar, for a great genius is an individual
belonging to no class, and can neither be copied nor replaced.
Nevertheless it may be said that Napoleon shows more points of
resemblance than most other conquerors to the Macedonian king. Had he
died of fever on his way to Russia, while his Grand Army was unbroken,
he would have left a military reputation hardly inferior to Alexander's.
He won his campaigns by the same rapidity in movement, the same resource
in sudden emergencies. But if Alexander's strategy was similar to that
of Napoleon, his tactics on the battlefield bear the most curious
resemblance to those which Cromwell devised for himself under analogous
circumstances. Both generals saw that by organizing a heavy cavalry
under perfect control, and not intended for mere pursuit, they could
break up any infantry formation then possible. Both accordingly won all
their battles by charges of this cavalry, while the enemy's cavalry,
often equally victorious in attack, went in wild pursuit, and had no
further effect in deciding the contest. It is even the case that both
chose their right wing for their own attack, and used their infantry as
the defensive arm of the action. This curious analogy, which seems never
to have been noticed, only shows how great minds will find out the same
solution of a difficulty, whenever like circumstances arise. It is in
the use of field artillery, which Alexander brought to bear in quite a
novel way upon the northern barbarians in his first campaign, that we
should probably find, were our evidence more complete, a resemblance to
the tactics which Napoleon employed at Waterloo, attacking with cavalry
and artillery together, in a manner which appeared strange even to
Wellington.
But the analogy to Napoleon holds good beyond the battlefield. Although
both conquerors commenced their career as soldiers, both showed
themselves indefatigable in office-work of a peaceful kind, and
exceedingly able in the construction of laws. Napoleon imposed, if he
did not originate, the best code in modern Europe, and he is known to
have worked diligently and with great power at its details.
[Sidenote: Vain but not envious.]
Both showed the same disagreeable insistence upon their own superiority
to other men, whose rivalry they could not brook. But Alexander sought
to maintain it by exalting himself to a superhuman position, Napoleon by
degrading his rivals with the poisoned weapons of calumny and lies. The
falsehoods of Napoleon's official documents have never been surpassed.
Alexander did not sink so low; but the assertion of divinity seems to
most of us moderns a more monstrous violation of modesty, and a flaw
which affects the whole character of the claimant.
[Sidenote: His assumption of divinity questioned.]
§ 68. So strongly is this felt that an acute writer, Mr. D. C. Hogarth,
has endeavoured to show[165:1] that this too was one of the later fables
invented about Alexander, and that the king himself never personally
laid claim to a divine origin. The criticism of the evidence in this
essay is excellent, and to most people will seem convincing.
Nevertheless, after due examination of the matter, I am satisfied that
the conclusion is wrong, and there is good reason to think that the
visit to the temple of Ammon was connected with the policy of deriving
Alexander's origin from that god. The very name Alexandria, given at
that moment to his new foundation, was a formation only hitherto known
in connection with a god's name. The taunt of his soldiers at Babylon,
that he should apply to his father Ammon, is perfectly well attested,
and implies that his claim to divinity was well known in the army.
[Sidenote: An ordinary matter in those days.]
But to my mind a greater flaw in this able essay is the assumption that
for a Greek or Macedonian to claim divine origin was as odious and
ridiculous as for a modern man to do so. It is only yesterday that men
held in Europe the theory that monarchy was of divine origin. In Egypt
and the East it was quite the common creed that the monarchs themselves
were such.[166:1] The new subjects of the Macedonian king would have
thought it more extraordinary that he should not have claimed this
descent than that he should; and in Egypt especially the belief that the
king was the son of a god and a god himself did not conflict with the
assertion of his ordinary human parentage. This is a condition of
thought which we cannot grasp, and cannot therefore realize; but
nevertheless the fact is as certain as any in ancient history.
[Sidenote: Perhaps not asserted among the Greeks.]
The assertion, therefore, of divinity in the East was an ordinary piece
of policy which Alexander could hardly avoid; the writer I have quoted
has, however, shown strong reasons to doubt that he ever claimed it in
Greece, though individual Greeks who visited his Eastern court at once
perceived it in the ceremonial of his household, and though his soldiers
taunted him with it during their revolt at Babylon. But this after all
is a small matter. He probably knew better than any of his critics how
to impress his authority upon his subjects; and whether it was from
vanity or from policy or from a contempt of other men that he insisted
upon his own divinity, is now of little consequence.
FOOTNOTES:
[156:1] Hence Fynes Clinton's third volume of _Fasti_, now fifty years
old, is still by far the most complete collection of materials for
studying later Hellenism. He not only gives all manner of out-of-the-way
texts in full, but also a very excellent sketch of each of the
Hellenistic monarchies, with dates and other credentials. Considering
the time of its appearance (1845), it may be regarded as one of the
finest monuments of English scholarship.
[157:1] Cf. § 10.
[158:1] With the usual zeal of a specialist, who not only makes a hero
his own, but defends him against every criticism, Droysen even justifies
Alexander's introduction of the Oriental obeisances at his court. As
Holm observes, such ceremonies, in themselves impolitic as regards free
subjects, were quite inconsistent with the familiarities of the
drinking-parties, which Alexander would not deny himself. A Persian King
would have understood this, not so a Macedonian. The latest estimate,
that of Holm (iii. 403 _sq._), appears to me also far the best. Yet he
too, seems to attribute too much consciousness to the youthful
Alexander.
[159:1] Thus Timoleon set up in his house a shrine to +Automatia+, the
spontaneous impulse which had led him to many brilliant successes. Cf.
my _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 110.
[160:1] We hear of the complaints of Macedonians and Greeks. The
complaints of the Persians have not been transmitted to us; but as they
were certainly more just and well-founded, and as the king was living in
their midst, where he could not but hear them, are we rash in asserting
that they must have been fully as important in influencing his decision?
Could the many Persian princesses, married to high Macedonian officers,
and their native retinues, have been satisfied or silenced without large
concessions?
[165:1] In the _Historical Review_ for 1887, pp. 317, _sqq._
[166:1] It is to be noted that the Achæmenid kings, though asserting for
themselves a Divine origin, did not claim to be gods. I think the first
Greek who received in his lifetime supra-human honours was Lysander, who
was flattered by altars, &c., in Asia Minor after his great victory.
CHAPTER IX.
POST-ALEXANDRIAN GREECE.
[Sidenote: Tumults of the Diadochi:]
[Sidenote: their intricacy;]
§ 69. The period which follows the death of Alexander is one so
complicated with wars and alliances, with combinations and defections,
with reshapings of the world's kingdoms[168:1], with abortive efforts at
a new settlement, that it deters most men from its study, and has
certainly acted as a damper upon the student who is not satisfied with
the earlier history, but strives to penetrate to the closing centuries
of freedom in Greece. There is very little information upon it, or
rather there are but few books upon it, to be found in English.
Thirlwall has treated it with his usual care and justice; and to those
who will not follow minute and intricate details, I have recently given,
in my _Greek Life and Thought_, a full study of the social and artistic
development which took place in this and the succeeding periods of
Hellenism in Greece and the East. Hertzberg's and Droysen's histories,
the one confined in space to Greece proper, the other in time to the
fourth and third centuries B.C., are both thorough and excellent works.
Holm's final volume, which will include the same period, is not yet
accessible, so that I cannot notice it.
[Sidenote: their wide area.]
[Sidenote: The liberation of Greece.]
A great part of this history was enacted, not in Greece, or even in
Greek Asia Minor, but in Egypt, in Syria, in Mesopotamia, and even in
Upper Asia. The campaigns which determined the mastery over Greece were
usually Asiatic campaigns, and each conqueror, when he arrived at
Athens, endeavoured to enlist the support of Greece by public
declarations of the freedom, or rather the emancipation, of the Greeks.
This constant and yet unmeaning manifesto, something like the Home Rule
manifestoes of English politicians, is a very curious and interesting
feature in the history of the _Diadochi_, as they are called, and
suggests to us to consider what was the independence so often proclaimed
from the days of Demetrius (306 B.C.) to those of the Roman T.
Flamininus (196 B.C.), and why so unreal and shadowy a promise never
ceased to fascinate the imagination of an acute and practical people.
[Sidenote: Spread of monarchies.]
[Sidenote: The three Hellenistic kingdoms.]
For, on the other hand, it was quite admitted by all the speculative as
well as the practical men of the age that monarchy was not only the
usual form of the Hellenistic State, but was the only means of holding
together large provinces of various peoples, with diverse traditions and
diverse ways of life. From this point of view the monarchy of the
Seleucids in Hither Asia, and that of the Antigonids over the Greek
peninsula, are far more interesting than the simpler and more
homogeneous kingdom of the Ptolemies in Egypt[170:1]. For the Greeks in
Egypt were never a large factor in the population. They settled only two
or three districts up the country; they shared with Jews and natives the
great mart of Alexandria, and even there their influence waned, and the
Alexandria of Roman days is no longer a Hellenistic, but an Egyptian
city. The persecutions by the seventh Ptolemy, who is generally credited
with the wholesale expulsion of the Greeks, would only have had a
transitory effect, had not the tide of population been setting that way;
the persecutions of the Jews in the same city never produced the same
lasting results. The Syrian monarchy stands out from this and even from
the Macedonian as the proper type of a Hellenistic State. Unfortunately,
the history of Antioch is almost totally lost, and the very vestiges of
that great capital are shivered to pieces by earthquakes. Of its
provinces, one only is tolerably well-known to us, but not till later
days, through the _Antiquities_ of Josephus, and the _New
Testament_[171:1].
[Sidenote: New problems.]
§ 70. How did the Greeks of Europe and of Asia accommodate themselves to
this altered state of things, which not only affected their political
life, but led to a revolution in their social state? For it was the
emigrant, the adventurer, the mercenary, who now got wealth and power
into his hands, it was the capitalist who secured all the advantages of
trade; and so there arose in every city a moneyed class, whose interests
were directly at variance with the mass of impoverished citizens.
Moreover the king's lieutenant or agent was a greater man in the city
than the leading politician. Public discussions and resolutions among
the free men of Athens or Ephesus were often convincing, oftener
exciting, but of no effect against superior forces which lay quietly in
the hands of the controlling Macedonian.
[Sidenote: Politics abandoned by thinking men,]
We may then classify the better men of that day as follows. First there
was a not inconsiderable number of thoughtful and serious men who
abandoned practical politics altogether, as being for small States and
cities a thing of the past, and only leading to discontent and
confusion. These men adopted the general conclusion, in which all the
philosophical schools coincided, that peace of mind and true liberty of
life were to be obtained by retiring from the world and spending one's
days in that practice of personal virtues which was the religion of a
nation that had no creed adequate to its spiritual wants.
[Sidenote: except as a purely theoretical question,]
[Sidenote: with some fatal exceptions.]
Nevertheless among other topics of speculation these men sometimes
treated of politics; and when they did condescend to action, it was to
carry out trenchant theories, and to act on principle, without regard to
the terrible practical consequences of imposing a new order of things on
a divided or uneducated public. The Stoic philosophers, in particular,
who interfered in the public life of that day, were dangerous
firebrands, not hesitating at the murder of an opponent; for were not
all fools criminal, and was not he that offended in one point guilty of
all? Such men as the Sphærus who advised the _coup d'état_ of the
Spartan Cleomenes[172:1], and the Blossius who stimulated the Gracchi
into revolution, and the Brutus who mimicked this sort of thing with
deplorable results to the world in the murder of Cæsar,--all these were
examples of the philosophical politician produced by the Hellenistic
age.
[Sidenote: Dignity and courage of the philosophers]
[Sidenote: shown by suicide.]
But if there were mischievous exceptions, we must not forget that the
main body of the schools kept alive in the Greek mind a serious and
exalted view of human dignity and human responsibility,--above all,
they trained their hearers in that noble contempt for death which is
perhaps the strongest feature in Hellenistic as compared with modern
society; for there can be no doubt that Christian dogmas make cowards of
all those who do not live up to their lofty ideal. The Greeks had no
eternal punishment to scare them from facing death, and so we find whole
cities preferring suicide to the loss of what they claimed as their
rightful liberty[173:1]. People who do this may be censured; they cannot
be despised.
[Sidenote: Rise of despots on principle.]
§ 71. Secondly, most philosophers had become so convinced of the
necessity of monarchy, if not of the rule of one superior spirit, as
better than the vacillations and excitements of a crowd, that many of
their pupils considered themselves fit to undertake the duty of
improving the masses by absolute control; and so we have a
recrudescence, in a very different society, of those tyrants whose
merits and defects we have already discussed at an earlier stage in this
essay[173:2]. The long series of passages from essays _That Monarchy is
best_, which we may read in the commonplace book of Stobæus[173:3], is
indeed followed by a series of passages _On the Censure of Tyranny_; but
the former is chiefly taken from Hellenistic philosophical tracts,
whereas the latter is drawn wholly from older authors, such as Xenophon,
who lived in the days of successful republics.
[Sidenote: Probably not wholly unpopular.]
Even the literary men, who are always anti-despotic in theory, confess
that many of these later tyrants were good and worthy men; and the fact
that Gonatas, the greatest and best of the Antigonids, constantly
'planted a tyrant' in a free State which he found hard to manage, proves
rather that this form of government was not unacceptable to the
majority, than that he violated all the deepest convictions of his
unmanageable subjects for the sake of an end certain to be balked if he
adopted impolitic means. The force of imitation also helped the creation
of tyrannies in the Greek cities; for were not the Hellenistic
monarchies the greatest success of the age? And we may assume that many
sanguine people did not lay to heart the wide difference between the
requirements of the provinces of a large and scattered empire, and those
of a town with a territory of ten miles square.
These then were phenomena which manifested themselves all over the
peninsula,--aye, even at times at Athens and Sparta, though these cities
were protected by a great history and by the sentimental respect of all
the world from the experiments which might be condoned in smaller and
less august cities.
[Sidenote: Contemptible position of Athens and Sparta in politics,]
[Sidenote: except in mischievous opposition to the new federations,]
§ 72. But despite these clear lessons, the normal condition of the old
leaders of the Greek world was hardly so respectable as that of the
modern tyrannies. It consisted of a constant policy of protest, a
constant resuscitation of old memories, an obsolete and ridiculous claim
to lead the Greeks and govern an empire of dependencies after the manner
of Pericles or Lysander. The strategic importance of both cities, as
well as their hold upon Greek sentiment, made it worth while for the
great Hellenistic monarchs to humour such fancies; for in those days the
means of defending a city with walls or natural defences were still far
greater than the means of attack, even with Philip's developments of
siege artillery,--so that to coerce Athens or Sparta into absolute
subjection by arms was both more unpopular and more expensive than to
pay political partisans in each, who could at least defeat any active
external policy. But if from this point of view these leading cities
with all their dignity had little influence on the world, from another
they proved fatal to the only new development of political life in
Greece which had any promise for small and separate States. And this
brings us to the feature of all others interesting to modern readers,--I
mean the experiment of a federation of small States, with separate
legislatures for internal affairs, but a central council to manage the
external policy and the common interests of all the members.
[Sidenote: whose origin was small and obscure.]
§ 73. This form of polity was not quite new in Greece or Asia Minor, but
had remained obscure and unnoticed in earlier and more brilliant times.
We may therefore fairly attribute to the opening years of the third
century B.C. its discovery as an important and practical solution of the
difficulty of maintaining small States in their _autonomy_ or
independence as regards both one another and the great Powers which
threatened to absorb them.
[Sidenote: The old plan of a sovran State not successful.]
The old idea had been to put them under the _hegemony_, or leadership,
of one of the great cities. But these had all abused the confidence
reposed in them. Athens, Sparta, Thebes, had never for one moment
understood the duty of ruling in the interests, not only of the
governing, but of the governed. The Athenian law, by which
subject-cities could seek redress before the courts of Athens, had been
in theory the fairest; and so Grote and Duruy have made much of this
apparent justice. But the actual hints we find of individual wrong and
oppression, and the hatred in which Athens was held by all her
dependencies or allies, show plainly that the democratic theory, fair as
it may seem in the exposition of Grote, did not work with justice.
Accordingly, we find both in northern and in southern Greece the
experiment of federations of cities attaining much success, and
receiving much support in public opinion.
[Sidenote: The leading cities stood aloof from this experiment.]
[Sidenote: Athens and the Ætolians]
It is most significant that these new and powerful federations were
formed outside and apart from the leading cities. Neither Athens nor
Sparta, nay, not even Thebes, and hardly even Argos, would condescend to
a federation where they should have only a city vote in conjunction with
other cities; and so the new trial was deprived both of their advice
and of the prestige of their arms and arts. If, for example, both Athens
and Thebes, but especially the former, had joined the Ætolian League of
wild mountaineers, who had wealth and military power, but no practice in
the peaceful discussion and settlement of political questions, they
would probably have influenced the counsels of the League for good, and
saved it from falling into the hands of unprincipled mercenary chiefs,
who regarded border wars as a state of nature, and plunder as a
legitimate source of income.
But Athens stood sullenly aloof from this powerful organization,
remembering always her long-lost primacy, and probably regarding these
mountaineers as hardly Hellenes, and as unworthy to rank beside the
ancient and educated States, which had once utilized them as mere
semi-barbarous mercenaries. And yet the Ætolians were the only Greeks
who were able to make a serious and obstinate struggle for their
liberties, even against the power of Rome.
[Sidenote: or the Achæans.]
§ 74. But if to have rude Ætolians as co-equal members of a common
council would have been too bitter a degradation for Athens, why not
ally herself to the civilized and orderly Achæans? For the Achæan
cities, though insignificant heretofore, had old traditions, legendary
glories; and in later times Sicyon especially had been a leading centre,
a chosen home for the fine arts. When Corinth and Argos were forced to
join this League, why should Athens stand aloof? Yet here was the
inevitable limit, beyond which the Achæan League could never obtain a
footing. It stopped with the Isthmus, because no arguments could ever
induce Athens to give it her adhesion[178:1].
[Sidenote: Sparta and the Achæans.]
Within the Peloponnesus the case was even worse; for here Sparta was
ever the active opponent of the Achæan League, and sought by arms or by
intrigues to separate cities and to make any primacy but her own
impossible. Thus the Leagues had to contend with the sullen refusal or
the active opposition of the principal Powers of Greece; and if, in
spite of all that, they attained to great and deserved eminence, it only
shows how unworthy was the opposition of those States whose narrow
patriotism could not rise beyond their own susceptibilities. This it was
which made the success of the experiment from the first doubtful.
[Sidenote: A larger question.]
[Sidenote: What right has a federation to coerce its members?]
§ 75. But there was a constitutional question behind, which is one of
the permanent problems of statecraft, and therefore demands our earnest
attention. The mode of attack upon the Leagues, especially upon the
constitutional and orderly Achæan League, adopted by Macedon, Sparta,
and Athens, was to invite some member to enter upon separate
negotiations with them, without consulting the common council of the
federation. And time after time this move succeeded, till at last the
interference of the Romans in this direction sapped the power and
coherence of the League.
[Sidenote: Disputed already in the Delian Confederacy by Athens and the
lesser members.]
[Sidenote: Duruy's attitude on this question.]
The same kind of difficulty had occurred long before under the old
dominations of Sparta, Athens, and Thebes; but I did not refer to it
before, because this is the proper place to bring the problem in all its
bearings before the reader. Under the Athenian supremacy many members
had voluntarily entered into the Delian Confederacy; others had done so
either under protest, or for some special object, such as the clearing
of the Ægean from Persian occupation. Presently, when the particular
object was fulfilled, and when the Athenian tax-gatherers insisted upon
the tribute which was spent on public, but Athenian, objects, the
separate members declared their right to secede, and revolted whenever
they had the power. The Athenians argued that the peace and prosperity
of the Ægean had been secured by the common effort of the Confederacy
and by the zeal and self-sacrifice of Athens. They denied that each
member which had so long profited by the arrangement had a right to
secede, and in any case they declared that they would coerce the
seceder. In Duruy's chapter on the passage of the Delian Confederacy
into the Athenian empire[179:1] he shows little sympathy for the
individual members and their hardships, and justifies Athens in her
aggressive policy. In a mere passing note he compares the case of the
North against the South in the late American Civil War. But as he has
not argued out the problem, I may be of service to the reader in
discussing it here.
[Sidenote: Greek sentiment very different.]
It was to this dispute that the real origin of the Peloponnesian war is
to be traced. And though most people thought Athens quite justified in
holding what she had obtained, and not surrendering the empire which had
cost such labour and returned in exchange such great glory, yet the
general feeling of the Greek world was distinctly in favour of the
seceder,--in favour of the inalienable right of every city to reassert
its autonomy as a separate State[180:1], not only with communal
independence, but with perfect liberty to treat as it chose with
neighbouring States. Whenever, therefore, this conflict between
Imperialism and Particularism arose, public sympathies sided with the
assertion of local independence.