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GREEK IMPERIALISM
by
WILLIAM SCOTT FERGUSON
Professor of Ancient History
Harvard University
[Illustration]
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
Copyright, 1913, by William Scott Ferguson
All Rights Reserved
Published September 1913
TO MY MOTHER
PREFACE
This book contains seven lectures, six of which were delivered at the
Lowell Institute in Boston during February, 1913. In the first of them
the main lines of imperial development in Greece are sketched. In the
others I have tried to characterize, having regard rather to clearness
than to novelty or completeness, the chief imperial growths which
arose in Greece during the transformance of city-states from ultimate
to constituent political units. I hope that these discussions of the
theory and practice of government in the empires of Athens, Sparta,
Alexander, the Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Antigonids will be found
useful by the general reader, and especially by the student of politics
and history. The idea I wish particularly to convey, however, is that
there was continuity of constitutional development within the whole
period. The city-state, indeed, reached its greatest efficiency in the
time of Pericles, but the federation of city-states was being still
perfected two hundred years afterwards. In government, as in science,
the classic period was but the youthful bloom of Greece, whereas its
vigorous maturity--in which it was cut down by Rome--came in the
Macedonian time.
Briefly stated, my thesis is this: The city-states of Greece were
unicellular organisms with remarkable insides, and they were incapable
of growth except by subdivision. They might reproduce their kind
indefinitely, but the cells, new and old, could not combine to form
a strong nation. Thus it happened that after Athens and Sparta had
tried in vain to convert their hegemonies over Greece into empires, a
cancerous condition arose in Hellas, for which the proper remedy was
not to change the internal constitutions of city-states, as Plato and
Aristotle taught, but to change the texture of their cell walls so as
to enable them to adhere firmly to one another. With a conservatism
thoroughly in harmony with the later character of the Greek people, the
Greeks struggled against this inevitable and salutary change. But in
the end they had to yield, saving, however, what they could of their
urban separateness, while creating quasi-territorial states, by the use
of the federal system and deification of rulers. These two contrivances
were, accordingly, rival solutions of the same great political problem.
Nothing reveals more clearly the limitations of Greek political theory
than that it takes no account either of them or of their antecedents.
Cambridge, Mass., June, 1913.
CONTENTS
I. IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE
I. DEFINITIONS 1-5
1. Of empire, 1.
2. Of emperor, 3.
3. Of imperialism, 4.
II. THE CITY-STATE 6-19
1. Its origin, 6.
2. Its characteristics, 9.
_a._ Fusion of agricultural, trading, industrial, and commercial
classes, 9.
_b._ Theory of common descent of citizens, 13.
_c._ So-called worship of the dead, 14.
_d._ Educative power of the laws, 16.
_e._ Municipality and nation in one, 17.
III. MEANS OF OBSCURING IMPERIALISM 19-25
1. Symmachia the basis of the Peloponnesian league, 20.
_a._ Support of oligarchies, 21.
2. Stasis, or civil war, 22.
3. Symmachia the basis of the Athenian empire, 23.
_a._ Support of democracies, 23.
_b._ Maintenance of the union, 24.
IV. FAILURE OF HEGEMONIES 25-30
1. The idea of proportionate representation, 27.
V. MEANS OF EVADING IMPERIALISM 30-34
1. Grant of Polity, or citizenship, 30.
2. Grant of Isopolity, or reciprocity of citizenship, 31.
3. Grant of Sympolity, or joint citizenship, 32.
VI. MEANS OF JUSTIFYING IMPERIALISM 34-37
1. Deification of kings, 35.
II. ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY
I. ORIGIN OF THE IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY 38-41
1. Themistocles, 39.
2. Pericles, 41.
II. SIZE AND POPULATION OF ATHENS AND ITS EMPIRE 42-43
III. THE FUNERAL ORATION: THE IDEALS OF PERICLEAN DEMOCRACY 43-48
IV. THE INSTITUTIONS OF DEMOCRACY 49-65
1. Ecclesia and heliæa; their conjoined activity, 49.
2. The council of the 500 and the committees of magistrates, 51.
_a._ The ten prytanies, 52.
_b._ Election by lot; annual tenure of office; rotation, 52, 53, 55.
3. The ecclesia an assembly of high-class amateurs, 57.
_a._ Its use of experts, 58.
_b._ Its choice of a leader: ostracism, 60.
4. The economic basis of democracy, 61.
_a._ The place of slavery: simply a form of capital, 61.
_b._ The object of indemnities: political equality, 64.
V. THE EMPIRE 65-78
1. The advantages of sea power, 66.
2. The demands of the fleet, 68.
3. The complaints made against Athens, 70.
_a._ Misuse of tribute money, 71.
_b._ Misuse of judicial authority, 72.
_c._ Seizure of land in subject territory, 73.
_d._ Extirpation of the best, 74.
4. The destruction of the empire, 75.
III. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE
I. SPARTA IN HISTORY 79-97
1. Crushing of early Spartan culture, 81.
2. The military life of the Spartans, 84.
3. The effect of the Perioec ring-wall, 85, 88.
_a._ The Peloponnesian league: 550-370 B.C., 88.
_b._ The Hellenic league: 405-395 B.C., 89.
4. The hollowness of the Spartan hegemony, 90-95.
_a._ Cinadon, 91.
5. The age of reaction, 96, 97.
_a._ Urban particularism, 96.
_b._ The ancestral constitution, 96.
II. SPARTA AND ATHENS IN POLITICAL THEORY 97-114
1. Plato, 99-107.
_a._ Neglect of History, 99.
_b._ Plato's hatred of democracy, 102.
_c._ His idealization of Sparta, 107.
2. Aristotle, 107-114.
_a._ Relation to history, 108.
_b._ Aristotle's hatred of imperialism, 110, 113.
_c._ Comparison of his Politics with the Prince of Machiavelli, 111.
_d._ Aristotle's failure to let "strength" operate in international
politics, 114.
IV. ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND WORLD-MONARCHY
I. IDEAS RECEIVED BY ALEXANDER FROM HIS PARENTS AND HIS TUTOR
116-123
_a._ Alexander and Philip, 116.
_b._ Alexander and Aristotle, 119, 135, 147.
II. ACTS BY WHICH ALEXANDER DISCLOSED HIS POLICIES 123-148
1. The destruction of Thebes, 123.
2. The visit to Troy, 124.
3. The Gordian knot, 125.
4. The visit to the oasis of Siwah, 126, 139.
5. The burning of the palace of the Persian kings, 129.
6. The discharge of the Greek contingents, 130.
7. _Proskynesis_, 131.
8. The great marriage at Susa, 136.
9. The _proskynesis_ of the city-states, 147.
V. THE PTOLEMAIC DYNASTY
I. HISTORY OF THE PTOLEMIES 149-160
1. Third period of Ptolemaic history: 80-30 B.C., 151.
_a._ Ptolemy the Piper, 152.
_b._ Cleopatra the Great, 152.
2. First period of Ptolemaic history: 323-203 B.C., 155.
_a._ Ptolemy I. Soter: 323-283 B.C., 150, 155.
_b._ Ptolemy II. Philadelphus: 285-246 B.C., 156.
_c._ Ptolemy III. Euergetes: 246-222 B.C., 159, 179.
_d._ Ptolemy IV. Philopator: 222-203 B.C., 160, 179.
II. EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES 160-182
1. Grounds of the imperial policy of the early Ptolemies, 160.
_a._ Pride of possession, 160.
_b._ Checkmating enemies, 161.
_c._ Commercial advantages, 161.
_d._ Domestic policy, 162.
2. Triple theory of Ptolemaic state, 162.
_a._ For Egyptians, 162.
_b._ For Greek city-states, 163.
_c._ For Macedonians, 166.
3. The Ptolemaic army, 167.
_a._ Origin, 168.
_b._ Distribution of, in Egypt, 172.
_c._ Influence of, upon natives, 176.
_d._ Becomes immobile, 242-222 B.C., 179.
_e._ Opened to Egyptians, 180.
4. Second or domestic period of Ptolemaic history, 200-80 B.C., 180.
_a._ Absorption of Greek by native population, 181.
VI. THE SELEUCID EMPIRE
I. HISTORY OF THE SELEUCIDS 183-194
1. Antigonus the One-eyed, creator of the realm, 183.
2. Century and a half of progress, 184-190.
_a._ Seleucus I: 312-281 B.C., 184.
_b._ Antiochus I, Soter: 281-262 B.C., 185.
_c._ Antiochus II, Theos: 262-246 B.C., 185.
_d._ Seleucus II, Callinicus: 246-226 B.C., 186.
_e._ Seleucus III, Soter: 226-223 B.C.
_f._ Antiochus III, The Great: 223-187 B.C., 187.
_g._ Seleucus IV: 187-175 B.C.
_h._ Antiochus IV, The God Manifest: 175-164 B.C., 190, 213.
3. Century of decline: 164-163 B.C., 190.
4. External agents of destruction, 190.
_a._ Rome disarms Seleucids, incites revolt, and keeps alive dynastic
struggles, 190.
_b._ Indo-Scythians (Yue Tchi) occupy East Iran,
192.
5. Internal agencies: revolt of Jews, Parthians, Armenians, 191, 192.
II. POLICY AND PROBLEMS OF THE SELEUCIDS 195-214
1. Seleucus I, heir of Alexander's ideas, 195.
2. Founding of city-states, 196.
3. Priestly communities and feudal states, how treated, 197.
4. Royal villages, how managed, 203, 205.
5. Land either property of king or of city-states, 204.
6. City-states, how far they Hellenized Asia, 206.
7. Relations of king to city-states, 208.
8. Comparison of Syria and Italy, 210.
9. Policy of Antiochus IV: conflict with Jews; submission to
Rome, 212.
VII. THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTIGONIDS
I. RELATION OF MACEDON TO HELLAS 215
II. MACEDONIAN CONTRIBUTION TO ROME 215-216
1. War, 215.
2. Government--a constitutional and not an absolute monarchy, 216.
3. Culture, 216.
III. MACEDONIAN OPPOSITION TO ROME 217-218
IV. EARLY HISTORY OF THE ANTIGONIDS 218-222
1. Antigonus I--the exponent of unity in Græco-Macedonian world, 218.
2. Demetrius Poliorcetes--the adventurer, 219.
3. Antigonus and Demetrius not really kings of Macedon, 220.
V. ANTIGONUS GONATAS 222-234
1. Training got in Greece and Macedon, 222.
2. Peace with Asia and Egypt, 223.
_a._ Inroad of Pyrrhus, 223.
3. Protected Greece from northern barbarians, 224.
4. Governs Greece by "tyrannies," 224.
5. Stoic justification of "tyranny," 225.
6. Ptolemy Philadelphus opposes Antigonus in Greece, 226.
7. Rise of the _ethne_, 228.
8. Struggle with Egypt for sea power, 229.
_a._ Aratus seizes Sicyon: Alexander rebels, 230.
_b._ The Laodicean War saves Antigonus, 231.
_c._ Possessions of Antigonus at end of struggle, 233.
VI. POSITION OF ACHÆA, ÆTOLIA, AND EGYPT AT THE END OF STRUGGLE 234
VII. THE FEDERAL MOVEMENT 235-240
1. _Ethne_ become leagues, 236.
2. The city-state the federal unit, 237.
3. The league lacks an _hegemon_, 238.
4. Monarchical traits, 239.
5. Relation of federal to local authorities, 239.
VIII. DEMETRIUS II 240-241
1. War with Achæans and Ætolians, 241.
IX. FALL OF THE ACHÆAN LEAGUE 241-242
1. Treachery of the Ætolians, 241.
2. Desertion of Egypt, 242.
3. Policy of Antigonus Doson, 242.
4. Cleomenes of Sparta, 242.
X. THE HELLENIC LEAGUE OF ANTIGONUS DOSON 242-245
1. Leagues, not cities, the units, 243.
2. Macedon a unit, 243.
3. League assemblies recognized as sovereign authorities, 244.
4. Military weakness, 244.
XI. PHILIP IV AND THE LEAGUE 245-248
1. The Social War, 246.
2. The Roman peril: speech of Agelaus of Naupactus, 246.
3. End of Hellenic independence, 248.
GREEK IMPERIALISM
GREEK IMPERIALISM
I
IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE
It is my purpose in this opening chapter to define some terms which I
shall have to use repeatedly in the book; to make a somewhat detailed
examination of the character of the Greek states whose political
integrity was threatened by imperialism; to trace the development of
imperialism to its culmination in the divine monarchy of Alexander the
Great and his successors; and, at the same time, to arrange a general
political setting for the topics to be discussed in the six succeeding
chapters.
* * * * *
An empire is a state formed by the rule of one state over other states.
It is immaterial in this connection what form of government the
ruling people prefers. Power may be exercised there by a monarchy, an
oligarchy, or a majority without altering in any essential the relation
of the sovereign to its dependencies. Still less does it matter whether
the subject people is governed by the one, the few, or the many; for
all kinds of governments may exist, and have existed, in dependencies.
Naturally, an empire is compatible with any kind of an administrative
service among both governors and governed. The suzerain may attend
to its affairs with the aid of professional and specially trained
officials, as in a bureaucracy; and a vassal may entrust the details of
its public business to successive fractions of its citizens, as in some
republics: no imperial relation is established unless separate states
or parts of states are involved. But when these are related in a whole
as superiors and inferiors, an empire at once arises.
The relation of inferiority and superiority is, however, essential
in any empire. In modern times this is acknowledged with the utmost
frankness. Upon the higher capacity for government claimed by the
Christian peoples, the Western cultures, or the Anglo-Saxons, as the
case may be, modern pride, greed, or conscience bases its right to
control inferior races. "Take up the white man's burden" is the modern
substitute for the ancient commandment, "Go ye into all the world and
preach the Gospel to every creature." The possession of a better rule
of public life imposes--it is affirmed--a missionary obligation no less
weighty than the possession of a special rule of eternal life.
Less exasperating, perhaps, than this assumption of moral and political
superiority is the candid profession of the right of the stronger.
The right of conquest gives a title which is valid in international
law when every other right is lacking. When superiority is stipulated
to be absent, the product is a federation or something similar from
which the name empire is withheld. When, in course of time, superiority
dies out till a common right eventually embraces subject and sovereign
alike, a new state arises, to which, as in the case of the present-day
British world, the title empire is applied with some impropriety.
There is, however, still another kind of empire. In it the superior
authority is not a people, but an individual. He is called an emperor,
and his family a dynasty. His authority is bestowed, as the present
German Emperor said at Königsberg in 1910, not by "parliaments, and
meetings, and decisions of the peoples, but by the grace of God alone."
He is "a chosen instrument of Heaven," to speak with the same high
authority, and "goes his way without regard to the views and opinions
of the day." An emperor, thus defined, is not properly a part of his
state at all. He stands outside of it, and is equal or superior to it.
He is a state unto himself; and his jurisdiction is not domestic but
imperial, in that he exercises dominion over another state. _L'état
c'est moi_ is an imperfect definition of this kind of empire, however;
for it presumes the absence of political organization and activity
among the subjects of the emperor. It presumes the permanency of the
condition of absolute surrender (_deditio_) which, with the Romans,
prefaced the work of restoration--the reëstablishment of civil rights
within an enlarged state. In actual experience, moreover, a complete
autocracy never exists. The will of every emperor is bound by the
legislation which he has himself enacted, or accepted with the throne
from his predecessor. If responsible to nothing else, he is responsible
to his own past. He may withdraw his charters: he cannot violate them
with impunity.
* * * * *
The policy by which a people or an autocrat acquires and maintains an
empire, we call imperialism. The term is, of course, a legacy from
Rome--a mute witness to the peculiar importance of the Roman empire in
the history of state-building. And, I suppose, it is the policy of Rome
that we think of most instinctively when we allude to imperialism. This
is by no means an accident. For not simply the type, but also many of
the most noteworthy varieties of this kind of policy, are found in the
experience of the Romans; and the course of political progress has been
such that in the triumph of Rome imperialism reached its logical issue
more closely than either before or since in the history of the world.
For the logical issue of a thorough-going imperial policy--one in which
the possession of physical ability may be presupposed--is the formation
of an universal empire. And, in fact, the two most powerful and ardent
imperialists of antiquity, Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar,
aimed to include in their dominions the entire inhabitable world.
This issue was, however, never more nearly reached than in the long
period before and after the Christian era during which only shifting
nomads and intractable Parthians disputed successfully the will of the
Roman Senate and the orders of the Roman emperors. For five hundred
years after the triumph of Constantine the universality of the Roman
empire was as mandatory in men's thinking as was the catholicity of
the Christian Church. "There are many 'empires' in the world to-day,"
says Professor Bury[1] in explaining the coronation of Charlemagne
in 800 A.D., "but in those days men could only conceive of one, the
Roman _imperium_, which was simple and indivisible; two Roman empires
were unimaginable. There might be more than the one emperor; but these
others could only be legitimate and constitutional if they stood to
him in a collegial relation." How thoroughly the Romans impressed the
concept of universality upon the term empire may be judged by the fact
that, in the face of all realities, the Frankish monarchs at Aachen
and the Greek kings at Constantinople ruled as colleagues a Roman
empire which stretched from the borders of Armenia to the shores of the
Atlantic.
Transcendent as is the imperial achievement of the Romans, and
unrivaled as is the political sagacity with which they consolidated
their power and made it enduring, it must still be recognized that
they were the heirs, in war, diplomacy, and government, of the Greeks,
their predecessors. They worked with greater power and with larger
units than did the Spartans and the Athenians. They benefited by
the brilliant inventions and the costly errors of the Macedonians
whose kingdoms they destroyed. But their success simply brought to a
culmination the imperial movement in which Sparta, Athens, and Macedon
were worthy co-workers. It is our task in this series of essays to
examine in turn the imperial experiments by which the Greeks not only
won a field for the display of their own talents, but also prepared the
way for the unification of the ancient world in the empire of Rome.
* * * * *
I alluded a moment ago to the smallness of the units with which the
imperial policy of Sparta and Athens had to deal. Before proceeding in
the latter part of this chapter to trace the development of the forms
by which imperialism was obscured, evaded, and ultimately justified in
Greece, I should like to try to make clear the qualities which rendered
the little Hellenic communities so hard for imperial digestion. In
classic Greece, as in renascence Italy, the city was the state. It
had not always been so; for in the past the land had been at one time
in the possession of rudimentary nations, called _ethne_. But in the
classic epoch these loose organisms persisted only in certain backward
regions in the west and north. Elsewhere city-states had everywhere
made their appearance as early as the sixth century B.C.
The circumstances in which these city-states arose are shrouded in the
mystery which surrounds most beginnings. They, accordingly, present all
the better opportunity for the construction of a theory; and perhaps
the theory which had once the greatest vogue is that enunciated by
Fustel de Coulanges in his brilliant book on _The Ancient City_. Of its
main propositions, however,--that each city-state came into being at a
single moment; that it was an artificial structure deliberately modeled
on the preëxistent family; that the family was a religious association
created and organized for the worship of ancestors; that the spirits of
ancestors were the first gods, or, indeed, were gods at all,--not one
has stood the test of a searching inquiry. On the contrary, it seems
established that the city-state was the result of a natural growth, and
that the incidents which accompanied its development, while varied and
numerous, were all manifestations of political progress. Growth in the
direction of a large number of distinct states was natural in Greece in
view of the well-known physical features of the country; but the study
of geography does not explain why these states were cities. For the
true explanation of this phenomenon we must not confine our observation
to Greece. Broadly speaking, high culture is everywhere city-bred, and
the cities have regularly been the leaders in political development.
In Babylonia that was the case, though the urban centres there were
dominated from a very early date by Semitic tribes from the desert.
Free cities, like Tyre and Sidon, were the prime sources of Phoenician
enterprise. The home of Roman law and government was a city, and when
Italy led the world a second time, she was a complex of city-states.
The Hanse towns and the Flemish communes, the chartered cities of
England and France, acquired political liberty or political rights long
before the rest of Central Europe. Where, in fact, the cities have not
been the mother, and the territorial states simply the foster-mother,
of freedom and culture, exceptional conditions have existed--such as
the need of regulating the Nile's overflow in Egypt, and the model and
influence of the Roman empire in Mohammedan and Christian Europe.
The city enables men to coöperate easily. In it ideas and feelings
spread quickly. Life, property, and privileges are there protected by
walls, and, if need be, by street barricades. "Two voices are there,"
wrote Wordsworth in 1807, his vision limited by the peril of England
and Switzerland,--
"one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,
They were thy chosen music, Liberty."
The voice of a city mob--that of Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople,
Florence, or Paris, for example--was generally raucous and often cruel.
But it made tyrants tremble and limited absolutism when the fear of
assassination was powerless.
Fortunately, it is not with the origins, but with the characteristics,
of the Greek city-states that we have to do mainly when we seek to
discover the grounds of their hatred of all imperialistic projects.
Let us, therefore, try to form a concrete impression of the salient
features of the hundreds of little states with which the progressive
parts of Greece were honeycombed at the beginning of the classic
period, in the sixth century B.C. Each political cell, so to speak, had
its nucleus in a walled town and its substance in a small circuit of
grain, pasture, and garden land which the inhabitants of the town owned
and cultivated. Most of the towns were simply hives of farmers. Whether
the farmers were landlords, small proprietors, or peasants; however
much they were divided by lines of social cleavage, they were all able
to meet on the common ground of a single occupation. And every day from
March to November, from the out-cropping of the grass and foliage in
the spring, through the season of the grain harvest, the vintage, and
the picking of the olives, to the fall planting and seeding, the ebb
and flow of agricultural life carried the population of the city to the
country in the morning and back to the city again in the evening.
There were few towns in Greece whose land did not touch the sea;
and from the sea another harvest was gathered. Fishing existed, of
course; but that was not all. Transmarine commerce is never wholly
absent in any maritime country. In Greece it was especially favored
by the difficulties of land transit, and by the excellence of the
highways which the sea laid while carving the country up into a
myriad of islands, head-lands, and estuaries. Hence, by the opening
of the sixth century B.C. a second town had generally appeared on
the coast of each little state when the chief town had developed, as
was commonly the case, a few miles inland. In the new settlement the
tone was set by the sailor-folk and the traders; in the old centre
by the landed proprietors and the peasants. But the landlords were
frequently merchants, and the peasants could easily attach work-places
(_ergasteria_) to their houses--which, though in the towns, were
really farmhouses--and become manufacturers in a small way; while
it was regularly the ambition of a trader or seaman to crown a
successful career by buying a farm, a ranch, or an orchard. There
was, accordingly, a very close connection between urban and agrarian
pursuits and interests.
It is true that with the Greek occupation of the coasts of the
Mediterranean and Black Seas in the seventh century B.C. some Greek
towns, like Miletus, Samos, Corinth, Ægina, Chalcis, and Eretria,
became cities in the modern sense of the term, with commercial and
industrial interests predominant. But even there the advantages of
urban life were within reach of the farmers, as well as of the traders,
artisans, and merchants, since all alike were residents of the city.
The only difference was that life in those cities was more rich and
diversified than elsewhere.
The contrast between life in cities, with its complex social
organization, its playhouses, its excitements, its stimuli to effort
and to vice, its intolerance of oddities in manners and dress, and life
in the country, with its simplicity which degenerates so easily into
brutality, its monotony, its fanaticism in the pursuit of wealth, its
contempt for the effeminacy of the shopkeeper, its piety and sobriety
which easily accord with a longing to see the world and the wickedness
thereof--this contrast which is so distressing an aspect of life in
modern America, was almost entirely absent in classic Greece, at least
among the enfranchised part of the population.
None of the cities was so large as to shut off the view of the country.
After only a few minutes' walk Socrates and his companions might escape
from the noise and confusion of Athens into the cool and fragrant
groves of the suburbs. It was probably only into the biggest of the
Greek cities that the olive trees and the grapevines did not push, as
they and the late-come orange and lemon orchards push into the modern
Greek hamlets. Even in Athens the crowing of the cock sounded the
reveille for almost everybody, and it would never have come into the
mind of an Athenian to suggest, as has been done in Boston, that a zoo
should be stocked first with the common varieties of the domesticated
animals. There is, says a French writer, a flavor of the barnyard
about the comedies of Aristophanes. Yet this is the same Athens in
which there were engaged in the building trades alone, according to
Plutarch, carpenters, moulders, bronze-smiths, stone-cutters, dyers,
veneerers in gold and ivory, painters, embroiderers, embossers,
factors, sailors, pilots, wagon-makers, trainers of yoked beasts,
drivers, rope-makers, weavers, cobblers, road-builders, and miners.
This, too, is the Athens into which, as an ancient Athenian wrote, were
swept, because of its maritime empire, the choice things of Sicily and
Italy, of Cyprus, and Egypt, and Lydia, of Pontus and Peloponnesus,
and many another place besides. When the farmer lived side by side in
Athens, the largest city in the whole Greek world, with the trader
and the artisan, the fusion of town and country must have been still
more complete in the forty-three cities of Crete, the ten cities of
Euboea, and the four cities of Ceos--an island only ten miles broad and
fourteen long. This being the case, economic conditions tended to make
the citizens of each state homogeneous to a degree foreign in modern
experience; for, however rapid be its approach, the age has not yet
arrived in America in which the "country is to be urbanized"; in which,
to speak with a recent essayist,[2] farming is to be "of necessity
a specialized department of urban life"; "the task of agricultural
production is to be taken over by the classes of modern industrial
organization; by the capitalist, the manager and the laborer"; in
which "there is to be a continual shifting of laborers of the poorer
classes back and forth between the town and the country," and "the
distinction implied in the terms 'townsman' and 'countryman' is to be
obliterated."
Whether our essayist be right or wrong in his forecast of the future of
farming in America, we will not stop to discuss. It is enough to point
out that the early age of Greece was such a one as he desiderates; that
then life was exclusively and uniformly urban: with the result that
the entire population of any given city-state could be regarded as
merely a great family. And it not only could be, but it was in fact so
regarded. Were not all citizens descendants of a common ancestor? This
query aristocrats might answer in the negative, mindful of the special
god or demigod of whom each nobleman thought himself the offspring. But
his negative was generally qualified by the admission that he, too,
if he were an Athenian, had Zeus and Apollo--Zeus of the home-stead
and Apollo of the fatherland--as his progenitors; that he, too, like
all his fellow-citizens, was a descendant of Ion and a foster-child of
Athena. The gods and goddesses of the Greeks were their creators in the
literal physical sense of the word. Men projected backward, even to the
age of the gods and heroes, with which the world began, the fact of
paternity to which all animal origins were attributable; and since each
city had its peculiar demigods, from which its citizens were directly
sprung, all its inhabitants were bound to one another by a peculiar tie
of blood.
The family aspect of the Greek city is accentuated by the fact that the
town hall was a town hearth; that the chief subdivisions of citizens
were brotherhoods, and that all permanent associations of them for
public purposes assumed the descent of their several members from
common ancestors, who were naturally gods or demigods. When heroes
had to be discovered, with the help of the Pythian prophetess, to act
as progenitors for the groups of citizens artificially united in the
new electoral divisions which Clisthenes established in Athens in 508
B.C., it is conceivable that popular regard for purity of stock helped
Pericles to enact the notorious law of 451 B.C. limiting citizenship at
Athens to those sprung from the legitimate union of Athenian parents.
Every city in Greece inherited from its distant tribal past a strong
feeling of the kinship of its inhabitants, in comparison with which the
sense of ethnic and racial unity was weak and watery. To destroy the
political identity of a city was like taking human life.
We must make allowance, moreover, in appraising the strength of
local attachments among both Greeks and Romans, for their beliefs as
to the fate of the dead. The ancient world, like modern Japan, was
saturated with the idea that the spirits of departed ancestors needed
the ministrations of the living. Without the meat and drink which the
relatives brought to the grave; without the coins--or the articles of
use and pleasure which money might buy--that were buried with the body;
without the covering of earth that was strewn over the dead, loved ones
might lack life altogether in the underworld, or might lack everything
that made the spirit life tolerable. "The beasts of the field and the
birds of the air," rang the impassioned plea of Tiberius Gracchus[3]
in introducing his agrarian reforms, "have their holes and their
hiding-places, but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy but the
blessings of light and air. Our generals urge their soldiers to fight
for the graves and the shrines of their ancestors. The appeal is idle
and false. You cannot point to a paternal altar. You have no ancestral
tomb. No! you fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others. You
are called the masters of the world: yet there is no clod of earth that
is really yours." Plutarch, with a touch which shows that despite his
modernity he belongs to the civilization which he interprets, tells us
that the Athenians before Salamis were disposed to count victory dear
which was purchased by the desertion of the temples and the tombs of
their fathers. No man who neglected the plot where his dead lay might
hold the chief magistracies in Athens. The soil of his fatherland was
thus in a peculiar sense holy ground to the citizen of a Greek city. He
might leave it, but not to an enemy; and if he were, like Æneas, the
last of his family, he was expected to carry his Lares and Penates
with him. Into a pit dug on the new site every companion of Romulus,
we are told in a legend which merely transfers into the past later-day
practice, threw a morsel of earth brought from his old home land. This
he did not simply from an intensification of the feeling which led the
Scotch girl in the well-known ballad to take with her, when starting
for America, not baggage, but sods from her mother's grave. He did it
from the sentiment which led General Nogi the other day to provide for
the spirits of his ancestors before committing suicide. Thereby the
colonist brought his dead along with him to the new city. The Greeks
and the Romans had, accordingly, a very special reason for local
patriotism. Like the Hebrew Christians, they were "also compassed about
with so great a crowd of witnesses."
We have made our peace with economics by considering first the
effect of occupation and residence in giving to the citizens of each
city-state solidarity of interest and attitude. We have dwelt a little
on the force which beliefs as to their origin and their destiny
hereafter exerted in keeping the city-states apart. We have still to
notice the centrifugal influence on the Greek race of their urban
institutions and politics.
Each city in Greece had its own laws and customs. These were not, as
with us, cold abstractions, but real, ever active, almost living,
personal forces, moulding incessantly their subjects according to
a given model. The citizens of each city had, in fact, a general
family resemblance, due to the imprint set upon them by their social
and political institutions. Cities acquired by this means clear-cut
individualities which were capable of definition, not simply by
narrating their history, but also in terms of physical, intellectual,
and emotional qualities. We may illustrate this point by observing
that the Hellenes created one literary type which we have not borrowed
from them: they wrote the biographies of cities as well as of men.
Their philosophers studied the effects upon urban character of climate,
prevailing winds and pursuits, location with reference to the sun and
the sea, contact with foreigners, and other similar agencies. They
even had specifics which they prescribed for the physiological and
pathological ills of cities, just as our sciolists, on a much more
slender basis of facts, however, diagnose the diseases and classify the
good and evil qualities of nations.
The truth is that cities meant to all the Greeks what (and much
besides) the city and the nation combined mean to those of us who do
not live in the country. They were the source and object at once of
municipal and national pride. The problems which city-states had to
consider and solve were not simply those in which good citizens find it
so hard nowadays to develop a wholesome interest. Questions of police,
education, public works, appointments; conflicts of racial, sectional,
class, and religious ambitions; rivalries with neighboring cities for
commercial, political, and cultural leadership--controversies of
this order are common to all cities in all times and places. But the
politics of the Greek cities had a high seriousness of their own. Each
town had its own foreign policy to determine, its own army to train
and direct, its own church to equip with shrines and deities, its own
gods to honor with games and tragedies. Every move on the complex
chessboard of the Mediterranean world might be pregnant with meaning
to it. On one day it might decide that the time had come to seize
some borderland in dispute with its immediate neighbors. On another
it might conclude an alliance which imposed the obligation to wage a
great war against frightful odds. On another the subject of voting
might be the recognition of a new god or goddess, which, in fact,
was often tantamount to a new creation. And in considering all these
matters citizens were simply doing what their fathers and forefathers
had done from time immemorial. Memories of great actions done in olden
times were preserved by monuments of bronze or marble, and revived
annually by appropriate ceremonies. Legend and fact, blended in an
edifying tradition,--the repository of the yearnings and ideals of dead
generations,--inspired the living to bear themselves worthily in all
national crises. "Love thou thy land with love far-brought from out the
storied past" was an admonition of which Greek cities of the classic
epoch stood in little need. The mischief was that the land which they
loved was not all Greece, but merely the territory of a single town.
The national fanaticism of the countries of modern Europe is probably
more tolerant of foreign interference than was the passionate
patriotism of the little urban units with which the imperial policy of
Athens and Sparta had to deal.
* * * * *
If you were to look at a map of Greece which distinguished the states,
and not the meaningless ethnical or tribal divisions of the people,
you would observe that from the outset Sparta and Athens were destined
to greatness, if by nothing else, by the size and material resources
of their territories. They were, however, themselves city-states, and
inferior to none in the strength with which they held to the conviction
that no greater humiliation could befall them than to have to submit to
the domination of another city or the will of a foreign lord. With what
show of reason, therefore, could they adopt a policy of imperialism?
They had to deal with Greeks, and not with barbarians. Hence they could
not invoke in the interest of their ambition the convenient doctrine
that inferior races need a political guardian.
In estimating the territory of Sparta we have included in it not simply
the land of the citizens which the serfs or Helots tilled for them,
but also the much larger, but less valuable, mass of enveloping land
which belonged to the Periœcs; for the hamlets of the latter were
really Spartan municipalities. It was, moreover, with the resources of
the whole complex that Sparta held the Peloponnesians united under
her leadership for one hundred and eighty years (550-370 B.C.). On the
other hand, it was with the combined strength of the Peloponnesians
that Sparta broke up the Athenian empire in 405 B.C., and widened the
area of her leadership so as to include all Hellas. Thereafter Sparta's
Peloponnesian league was simply the core of a general Hellenic league.
The question is: What position did Sparta occupy in it?
Her legal rights rested solely upon a treaty of alliance (_symmachia_)
which she had struck with each city in the league. But there can be
no doubt that she had often secured the treaty in the first place by
force, and that she interfered thereafter in the local affairs of both
the Peloponnesian and the other Hellenic allies in a way not provided
by its stipulations. But, however outrageous her conduct might be in
fact, it was never formally reprehensible so long as the interference
achieved its object. This was to establish or maintain, first against
tyranny, and later against democracy, an aristocratic government in the
allied cities. Since the aristocrats were always in a minority, they
were bound to invite Spartan intervention for their own defense. Hence
it was only when they failed to retain control of the government that
an ally could regard Sparta's intermeddling as anything but the welcome
act of a friendly power. "Perhaps some one may expostulate," writes
a pamphleteer in 400 B.C. while commending to his fellow-citizens of
Larisa a proposal that they join the Hellenic league;[4] "but Sparta
sets up an oligarchy everywhere. That is true. But it is such a one
as we prayed and yearned for for ages, and lost when we had enjoyed
it for but a brief moment. Just compare the oligarchy they favor with
the one we have already. Where is there a city in their domain, be it
ever so small, in which a third of the population does not take part
in public affairs? It is not by the Lacedæmonians, but by fortune,
that those who have no arms or other capacity for public service are
disfranchised. Their exclusion lasts only so long as their political
worthlessness. How do we stand by comparison? It's my belief that were
we to pray for a constitution we would not ask the gods for a different
one from that which Sparta wishes." To even moderate men who thought as
this speaker did, unruly Spartan garrisons seemed quite compatible with
local autonomy. They came to Larisa at the call of the home authorities
and remained at the disposal of those who called them. Their captains,
the long-haired harmosts, took orders and did not give them. Their
presence involved no suspension of the constitution, no violation of
the laws, no seizure of public revenues. Naturally, the two thirds
who were disfranchised thought differently; but it is a good rule
of international law that a foreign state deal with the Government,
and not with the Opposition. The, mischief of this system, in the
circumstances then existing in Greece, was that it bred civil war
within the cities. "War," says the Larisæan pamphleteer just quoted,
"is conceded to be the greatest of all evils by as much as peace is the
greatest of all blessings. Yet _stasis_, or civil war, as far exceeds
war in the magnitude of its evil as war exceeds peace." The incentive
to stasis was that Athens, with a naval power as irresistible as was
the land power of Sparta, and an equally imposing array of allies,
had long continued to reach out a supporting or encouraging hand to
the two thirds whom Sparta tried to keep down. Athens, too, was the
apostle of a great political idea, "the constitutional equality of the
many," and whenever she succeeded in putting those who believed in this
creed in control of an allied city, or in keeping them in control once
they had the advantage, her interference was formally justifiable or
at least justified. Not she, but the government she upheld, had the
responsibility.
With the outbreak of the great duel for national leadership between
Sparta and Athens which fills the final third of the fifth century
B.C., the war was carried in the form of stasis into every city of
the two confederacies. For the leaders of both the one third and the
two thirds, says Thucydides in a famous passage of his history of the
Peloponnesian War[5] "used specious names, the one professing to
uphold the constitutional equality of the many, the other the wisdom
of an aristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in
name they were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in every way
to overcome each other, they committed the most monstrous crimes;
yet even these were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges,
which they pursued to the very utmost, neither party observing any
definite limits either of justice or public expediency, but both alike
making the caprice of the moment their law. Either by the help of an
unrighteous sentence, or grasping power with the strong hand, they were
eager to satiate the impatience of party spirit. Neither faction cared
for religion; but any fair pretence which succeeded in effecting some
odious purpose was greatly lauded. And the citizens who were of neither
party fell a prey to both; either they were disliked because they held
aloof, or men were jealous of their surviving. Thus stasis gave birth
to every form of wickedness in Greece." The singleness of purpose with
which Sparta made vocational training the aim of her public education
achieved the happy result that she had no men of letters to betray
to posterity damaging secrets of state. Hence no one has done for
her what Thucydides has done for Athens: let us have an insight into
the conscience of the city at the time of its greatness. With brutal
candor Cleon and others in Thucydides' narrative brush aside the formal
justification of the Athenian empire and lay bare the fact that it was
in reality a tyranny, a sovereignty exercised without a moral sanction,
one which self-respecting people had a solemn duty to overthrow. "You
should remember," said Cleon to the Athenians in 427 B.C.,[6] "that
your empire is a despotism exercised over unwilling subjects who are
always conspiring against you; they do not obey in return for any
kindness which you do them to your own injury, but in so far as you are
their mistress; they have no love of you, but they are held down by
force."
Dependence upon Sparta or Athens was, in fact, regarded by none
of their allies except as the less of two evils: the greater was
dependence upon their domestic foes. Hence the tyranny just described
did not arise with the consent of the tyrannized. The allies of Athens
had consented to enter only into alliance (symmachia) with her on
stipulated terms and for a stipulated purpose--protection against
Persia. What they had neglected to stipulate was the time for which
they were to remain allies. Athens, accordingly, denied them the right
to secede, and when particular cities tried none the less to withdraw,
she made the preservation of the union a moral ground for coercion,
and with the aid of such cities as remained faithful, and the fleet
which she kept ready for action by the financial contributions of
all, she forced them back on terms such as a conqueror could dictate.
A new treaty of alliance was, however, the future, as it had been
the ancient, tie. And speaking broadly, we may affirm that in the
city-state world of classic Greece an empire was legally impossible:
what we, and the ancients, looking to realities, call an empire was an
aggregate knit together by treaties, the very formation of which shows
that we have to do, not with a single sovereign, but with a group of
sovereigns. In other words, the city remained the ultimate political
unit. The rule of Athens and Sparta was, strictly speaking, an hegemony
and not an _arche_; a shifting and temporary leadership, and not a
permanent suzerainty. It was a necessity of circumstances assumed to be
exceptional.
* * * * *
Unfortunately, experience showed that the circumstances in which
imperialism was a political necessity recurred constantly. After the
fall of Athens in 404 B.C., a defensive war against the barbarians--the
Macedonians in Thessaly, the Persians in Ionia--served as a
justification to Sparta in employing force to maintain the hegemony
which she had won. But in 387 B.C. the peace known as the "King's
Peace," or the "Peace of Antalcidas," was concluded with Persia,
whereupon it became impossible to use any longer the national cause as
even a pretext for tyranny. The hegemony, however, was not abandoned.
It had to be maintained, it was alleged, to keep the other cities free,
and to this end Persia lent aid to Sparta and Thebes successively. If
an empire could only be prevented by an empire, and national recreancy
to boot, the times were surely out of joint. Such an issue was the
_reductio ad absurdum_ of the system of hegemonies, as both reformers
and statesmen in Greece came speedily to realize.