later chapter we shall have occasion to note how Plato and Aristotle,
with a blind faith in the power of education and of legislation, aimed
to divert citizens from work to leisure and from war to peace, and
both to eradicate the greed for land and money and to restrict the
natural increase of population to which they traced the imperialistic
spirit. Some of the statesmen followed their lead. Others, however,
conceding that unity was demanded for the preservation and spread of
civilization, and that the world needed not fewer but more Greeks,
either, like the great publicist Isocrates, advocated an hegemony on
the old lines but endowed with stability through being based on general
consent, or favored one of several new devices for welding cities into
a permanent territorial state. Respect for progress bids us to view at
this point somewhat narrowly these unitarian movements.
The position attained by Thebes in Greece after her victory over Sparta
at Leuctra in 371 B.C. was simply an hegemony of the earlier model--the
reoccupation of lines proved twice already to be untenable.[7] On the
other hand, the position occupied by Thebes in Boeotia prior to 387
B.C. was clearly anticipatory of what the future was to bring to Greece
as a whole. Boeotia was thereby blocked off into six districts,[8] one
(Thebes) with four electoral divisions, two (Orchomenus and Thespiæ)
with two each, and three with one apiece. Six of the ten city-states of
Boeotia--the six little lake cities--were confined to two of the eleven
divisions. This was a setback to them and a boon to Thebes, seeing that
each division furnished one of the eleven Boeotarchs who formed the
executive of the league, sixty of the six hundred and sixty councillors
who formed the Boeotian synod, and its corresponding share of the
league judges. Thebes thus became the Prussia of Boeotia, and in return
for the political advantages which it gained and four elevenths of the
revenues which it received, it undertook to provide four elevenths of
the soldiers and four elevenths of the taxes. In this way the burdens
and the advantages of the league were distributed according to the
population and wealth of the different parts of the country. That was
equitable; and since the city-states, though thrust into the background
and held responsible for decisions in the making of which they had
often little influence, formed a single _ethnos_ and spoke a single
dialect, they were evidently fairly well satisfied. As the league was
constituted, Thebes was forced to struggle with Orchomenus and Thespiæ
for the control of the six little lake cities. In this she was normally
successful--so successful, in fact, that in 387 B.C. Sparta, while
enforcing the King's Peace, dissolved the league in order to destroy
her influence. It was not revived when Thebes reunited Boeotia (377-371
B.C.), and under Epaminondas we may more properly speak of Boeotia as a
single city-state like Attica than as a league of city-states.
Though sacrificed at home to the ambition of Thebes, the Boeotian
league maintained a high prestige abroad. Some of its institutions
had been transferred to Athens during the revolution of 411 B.C., and
others had been adopted in Arcadia after they had been set aside in
Boeotia. Moreover, and this is an important historical connection which
the wonderful epigraphical researches of Adolph Wilhelm[9] enable us
to establish, the Boeotian league reappears _mutatis mutandis_ in the
organization imposed upon all Greece by Philip of Macedon after his
crowning victory at Chæronea in 338 B.C. For if we equate Philip and
the Committee of Public Safety with the eleven Boeotarchs, the synod
of Corinth with the Boeotian synod of six hundred and sixty, and the
districts into which Hellas, including Macedon and excluding only
Sparta, was divided for federal purposes, with the six districts which
had existed in Boeotia, it is evident that the political system used
by Philip for organizing the Greeks was borrowed from Boeotia no less
than the military system with which he conquered them. It was not for
nothing that the king of Macedon had spent his youth as a hostage in
Thebes.
Characteristic of the Boeotian league and of Philip's Hellenic league
is the synod. It was in each a strictly representative body. Its
members were apportioned to the area constituting the league in such a
way that the larger states had several representatives and the smaller
states had one representative between them; while in the Hellenic
league neighboring states and federated states were treated as a unit
and given proportional representation. That this made all but the
largest state--Macedon--the largest state's inferiors and subordinated
many city-states to the federal districts to which they belonged,
is obvious. And in this case loss of local liberty was compensated
for very imperfectly by the consideration that what the constituent
states surrendered the Hellenic synod, which met at Corinth, gained.
The national appeal was far weaker than the ethnic appeal had been in
Boeotia. The liberty lost had indeed been a bane and not a blessing.
After 338 B.C. the cities could no longer enjoy the excitement of
waging private wars and fomenting revolutions. No longer were they free
to be enemies of Philip. Henceforth they must contribute the quota of
horsemen, hoplites, light-armed troops, and sailors for which their
representation in the synod obligated them, or pay a heavy fine for
every day their contingents were absent from the national levy. The
synod completed its organization by choosing Philip its _hegemon_
by land and sea, and selected as its executive board a Committee of
Public Safety which seemingly had its sessions at Pydna. The committee
the confederates probably welcomed as a possible champion of their
interests. The unwelcome organ of the league, and the one for which
there was no parallel in Boeotia, was the hegemon. Subordination to
a synod was offensive enough to city-states which regarded complete
independence as alone ideal. It was intolerable to them to submit to
a synod which its hegemon, Philip of Macedon, controlled,--one which
could never have any one but the contemporary king of Macedon as its
hegemon. The hegemony of Macedon was sugar-coated, but it was none the
less an hegemony, and, as such, illegal and unacceptable.[10]
A notable start in the direction of uniting city-states legally in a
larger whole had been made by Athens during the epoch of her empire.
She had then founded many colonies (_cleruchies_), which, though
organized as separate cities, retained for their residents citizenship
in Athens. Why not grant citizenship (_polity_) to the inhabitants of
other cities as well? There were some, and among them the comedian
Aristophanes,[11] who canvassed this idea. "Let us assume," he says,
"that our city is a heap of wool, and that each of our allied cities
is a fleck of wool. Let us take all the wool and spin it into yarn,
and weave the yarn into a great blanket with which to protect our lord
Demos against the cold." But for this drastic measure the times were
not ripe. It was altogether repugnant to the pride of the Athenians
to share with everybody advantages which they had sacrificed so much
to acquire; and there was little in the advantages thus diluted to
compensate other cities for the at least partial loss of identity
which they were bound to sustain on acquiring Athenian citizenship.
In the one instance in which this course was taken, the Samians, to
whom Athens gave her full civic rights in the supreme agony of the
Peloponnesian War, had both earned them and come to appreciate them by
sacrificing their own territory rather than desert their ally.
Another less heroic expedient for bringing about a permanent _entente_
between cities was the grant of _isopolity_, or reciprocity of
citizenship. In certain cases this was the concession of the passive
rights of citizenship (_civitas sine suffragio_) to all citizens of a
particular city who should take up residence in, or even merely visit,
the territory of the grantor. Thus circumscribed, however, it amounted
simply to an exchange of commercial privileges, and proved barren of
political consequences in that each city reserved to itself complete
control of its own policy, thus rendering impossible any advance in
state building. It remained for the Romans to render this institution
fruitful to an astonishing degree by making the legal exercise of Roman
citizenship independent of migration to Rome.
Substantially the same result was achieved by the Greeks through what
they termed _sympolity_, or joint citizenship. This was possessed from
of old by rudimentary nations, like the Achæans and the Ætolians,[12]
among whom the towns and hamlets had never become independent and
self-sufficient political units; so that the inhabitants were Achæans
from Ægium, or Achæans from Cerynia, or Achæans from some other
of the ten so-called cities of which the Achæan nation or league
was constituted. In like fashion the Ætolian hamlets had a double
citizenship. An essential part of this scheme, evidently, was that each
city had an equal voice in the election of the officials of the league
and in the settlement of all federal matters. And so satisfactory a
safeguard of urban autonomy did this prove to be that in the last half
of the third century B.C. city after city in the Peloponnesus outside
the ancient limits of Achæa took the irrevocable step of acquiring
Achæan citizenship in addition to its own; while in Central Greece
the Ætolians by fair means or foul bestowed a dual citizenship upon
all their neighbors. Athens and Sparta alone persisted in their
isolation, the former on the strength of an international guarantee
of autonomy, the latter in stubborn reliance upon its own powers.
The other city-states entrusted to an international board, not for a
definite or indefinite term of years, but for all future time, complete
control of their foreign relations. Each city put permanently the
international authority between itself and the outside world, thus
escaping individual danger by the surrender of individual diplomacy.[13]
In this way arose what by the general consent of historians and jurists
is the most perfect state which antiquity produced. The antinomy
between the city-state and the imperial spirit which had existed for
centuries was reduced to a minimum by the nice balance of the federal
system.
There were defects in the Achæan and Ætolian leagues which their
statesmen did not remove. "Equality," says Aristotle, "is just, but
only between equals." The cities which had an equal voice in the
international board, like the modern nations which cast a vote each at
the Hague Congress, were unequal in population and in wealth.
The Achæans and Ætolians came nearer than any ancient republicans to
entrusting power to representatives; but, besides creating a large
legislative council, constituted in successive years, in the one case,
of different fractions of the citizens of each city, and in the
other, of deputies apportioned to the constituent cities according
to their size, they showed the ingrained distrust held by all Greeks
for oligarchy by requiring the reference to a general assembly of all
matters of high importance.
How to satisfy the just claims of those whom distance or lack of
leisure prevented from coming to the meeting-place, they did not
discover.
However, it was not these institutional imperfections which prevented
the unification of Hellas in a single federation. For this result
could not now be achieved by any triumph of political science.
Antigonus Doson (229-221 B.C.) whose name ought not to be unknown where
Callicratidas, Agesilaus, Iphicrates, and Phocion are household words,
attempted with equal skill and generosity to combine the new federal
idea with the old idea of a representative national congress meeting
at Corinth under the hegemony of the king of Macedon;[14] but the best
that can be said of the combination he made is that despite its great
promise and possibilities it proved unacceptable to Hellas, and hence
ineffective.[15] The situation had now got beyond the control of the
Greek people. It may, perhaps, be realized best, if we imagine that
the European nations of to-day, weakened politically by continuous
emigration and incessant conflicts, economically, by the withdrawal
of industry and commerce to more favorably situated districts
under European control, let us say in the East, were to pool their
diplomatic and military interests, and entrust them, not to a European
parliament, but to warring Latin and Teutonic parliaments, and were to
take this step only to escape the Russian peril and when America was
already thundering at their shores, if that be imaginable, coming with
irresistible might, at once to save and to destroy.
To describe how the Roman republic emancipated Greece from Macedon,
impressed her will upon the Greek kingdoms of the East, and built
up a universal empire of diverse fragments, lies beyond the scope
of this book. We may note simply that to some cities she gave her
citizenship, or polity, thus destroying their identity altogether; that
to others she gave isopolity, or reciprocity of citizenship, and with
it the local advantages preserved in Greece by sympolity, or joint
citizenship, thus creating the municipality and organizing wards, so to
speak, of the city of Rome all over Italy; that some (the _socii_, or
Italian allies) she bound to herself by irrevocable treaties till she
was forced to give them municipal status, and others (the "friends,"
_amici_, or the "friends and allies," _amici et socii_, in what later
became the provinces) by understandings or temporary treaties till she
had familiarized herself with deification of rulers, which was the
Greek method of legalizing absolutism.
A word on this strange institution and I have finished this survey of
the expedients devised by the Greeks to obscure, evade, and finally
to justify imperialism. The Greek method of legalizing despotism was
Alexander the Great's genial adaptation to state building of an idea
which his tutor, Aristotle, had developed in his _Politics_.[16] It was
a means of uniting cities or provinces in an indissoluble whole while
preserving, on the one hand, the superiority and freedom of action of
the suzerain, be it an emperor or a republic, and, on the other hand,
the self-respect of the inferior states, without which their status
was politically intolerable. Deification of rulers did the impossible:
it reconciled completely the antinomy between the city-state and
imperialism. It resolved the antagonism into two harmonious duties; the
duty of the ruler to command and of the subject to obey.
To Alexander the Great governments have been in serious debt for over
two thousand years. From him to Kaiser Wilhelm II runs an unbroken
line. So long as the world had many gods and did not believe in the
supernatural power of any of them, there was no religious difficulty
in adding to its stock another such deity in the person of the living
monarch. With the decadence of polytheism, however, a slight change was
necessary. In Constantine's time god-kings suffered the same fate as
other pagan gods; but with a difference. The heathen gods became devils
or were metamorphosed into saints.
The kings became men chosen for their high office by God, Most High.
Crowned, usually by their predecessors, and anointed by God's priests,
the patriarchs, they governed by divine right and acknowledged
responsibility only to their Creator.[17] In a less ecclesiastical
world, as in modern Prussia, the kings crown themselves. But with these
later developments we have no concern in this book. I shall endeavor,
however, in chapters III-VI, to trace the growth of deification in the
world-monarchy of Alexander the Great, and to make clear the purpose it
served in the empires of the Ptolemies and Seleucids.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. de Coulanges, Fustel. _La cité antique_^7 (1879).
2. Busolt, G. _Die griechischen Staats- und Rechtsaltertümer_,^2
(1892). In Müller's _Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft_,
IV, 1.
3. Schömann-Lipsius. _Griechische Alterthümer_,^4 II (1892).
4. Francotte, H. _La Polis grecque_ (1907).
5. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. _Staat und Gesellschaft der
Griechen_ (1910). In Hinneberg's _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_. Teil II,
Abteilung IV, 1.
6. Zimmern, Alfred. _The Greek Commonwealth_ (1911).
7. Keil, Bruno. _Griechische Staatsaltertümer_ (1912). In Gercke and
Norden's _Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft_, pp. 297 _ff._
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: _A History of the Eastern Roman Empire_, pp. 319 _f._]
[Footnote 2: _Atlantic Monthly_, Oct., 1912, vol. cx, pp. 517 _ff._]
[Footnote 3: Plutarch, _Ti. Gracch._ 9; cf. Greenidge, _A History of
Rome_, p. 111.]
[Footnote 4: [Ηρωζου]Περι Πολιτειαϛ, 30 (Ed. Drerup). With
characteristic conservatism the English scholars, Adcock and Knox
(_Klio_, 1913, pp. 249 _ff._), uphold the attribution of this pamphlet
to Herodes Atticus.]
[Footnote 5: Thucy., III, 82, 8. (The translation used here and
elsewhere in the book is that of Jowett.)]
[Footnote 6: Thucy., III, 37, 2.]
[Footnote 7: The same is true of the second Athenian empire. The
confederation from which it grew had no reason to outlast the occasion
which had called t into existence--the "tyranny" of Sparta. It was,
therefore, by design at least, a temporary, and not a permanent, union.]
[Footnote 8: _Hellenica Oxyrhyn._, II, 2-4.]
[Footnote 9: _Attische Urkunden_, I Teil. (Sitzb. d. Akad. in Wien.
Phil.-hist. Klasse. 165, 6, 1911).]
[Footnote 10: It was revived on much less objectionable terms by
Antigonus Doson. See below, page 34 and chapter VII.]
[Footnote 11: _Lysistrata_, 579 _ff._]
[Footnote 12: See below, chapter VII.]
[Footnote 13: See below, chapter VII.]
[Footnote 14: See above, page 30.]
[Footnote 15: See below, chapter VII.]
[Footnote 16: See especially Ed. Meyer, _Kleine Schriften_, 283 _ff._,
and below, chapter IV.]
[Footnote 17: Bury, J.B., _The Constitution of the Later Roman Empire_
(1910), pp. 10 _ff._, 36.]
II
ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY
No form of government, or profession of political idea, saves a
state from imperialism. Even this country, which is dedicated, as
is no other of the modern great powers, to the concept of popular
sovereignty; which uprears the structure of its state upon a belief in
the essential equality of men, and treats, or at least aims to treat,
as comparatively negligible the differences created by birth and race,
education and religion, property and occupation;-even this idealistic
republic has become an empire in our own time and almost without our
perceiving it. M. Bouché-Leclercq has given a prominent place in his
_Leçons d'histoire romaine_[18] to the discomforting doctrine that
the Romans conquered the world in spite of themselves--a debatable
question, as he himself shows. It is not our sense of truth that is
gratified when we are told that the beatitude, "Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth," designates the English. Yet Seeley
has maintained the thesis that the British empire was secured in a
"prolonged fit of national absence of mind." Unwittingly, it seems, the
modern foster-mother of liberal institutions has become the mistress of
countless millions.
There never was a people which made the principle that all its citizens
were equal a more live reality than the Athenians made it; and no state
to my knowledge was more cunningly contrived to insure the government
of the people than was theirs. Yet they became imperialists with ardor
and conviction, and with this much of logical consequence, that, while
they believed in democracy for everybody, they did not doubt that the
Athenians had earned the right to rule both Greeks and barbarians by
the acquisition of superior culture. Equality among its citizens Athens
carefully distinguished from equality among all men.
The foundations of Athenian democracy and empire were laid by
Themistocles, whose figure moves weird and gigantic through the golden
mist in which Herodotus has enveloped the great Persian War. And it
was this genial statesman, to whose unerring skill in discerning the
course of coming events the austere historian Thucydides pays a rare
tribute, who mapped out for his city the foreign policy by which it
had the best chance of realizing its imperial ambition. Let it use its
great fleet, which by fifteen years of persistent advocacy he had led
the Athenians to build, as its arm of offense, and its impregnable
walls, which he had enabled the Athenians to construct despite the
treacherous opposition of Sparta, as a bulwark of defense and a basis
for timely advance against its powerful continental rivals. Let it
utilize the wave of democratic fervor then sweeping through Greece to
consolidate its power within the Confederacy of Delos and to undermine
and eventually to overthrow the leadership which Sparta, by the support
of dying mediæval aristocracies, had hitherto possessed in Hellenic
affairs. Let it make peace on advantageous terms with Persia; use the
liberty thus secured to break the power of Sparta, and, on the basis of
a consolidated Hellas, strike boldly for Athenian dominion of the world.
It seems almost incredible that a clear-headed man should have
entertained a programme of such magnitude. But we must remember that
never had human beings more clearly performed the obviously miraculous.
_We_ know, on the authority of a German military expert,[19] that, had
the host which followed Xerxes to Athens numbered the 5,283,220 men
attributed to it by Herodotus "without taking count of women cooks,
concubines, eunuchs, beasts of burden, cattle, and Indian dogs," its
rear guard must have been still filing out of Sardis while its van was
vainly storming Thermopylæ. But what Herodotus reports is what the
Athenians believed. They had met and routed the might of all Asia. They
had mastered in fair fight the conquerors of all other peoples. The
world was theirs: it was merely a question of taking possession.
Themistocles had, accordingly, to reckon with a national
self-confidence which knew no bounds. And this had been increased by
famous victories of Cimon over the Persians, and a revolt of the Helots
which disclosed the fatal weakness of Sparta, when in 461 B.C. the
task of conducting the fierce current of national energy, first for
fifteen years (461-446 B.C.) in a heroic, but fruitless, struggle by
sea and land against the Greeks and Persians simultaneously, and then
for fifteen further years (446-431 B.C.) in the prosecution of glorious
works of peace, fell upon the broad shoulders of Pericles, Xanthippus's
son.
It is conceded that there is no taskmaster so ruthless as one's own
will. The impulse to action during this strenuous epoch came from
the Athenian people itself, not from its chief statesman. That fact
does not, however, diminish the credit of Pericles. The golden age
of Greece is, properly speaking, a golden age of Athens, and to its
birth many things contributed; but decisive among them, in addition to
the intensity of national life already alluded to, was an unrivaled
facility for great leaders to get into effective contact with the
masses under conditions in which there was the fullest opportunity for
men in general to use their natural powers to the utmost. This happy
combination of creative genius and receptive multitude arose in the
main from the democratic institutions of Athens; but, for the public
and private wealth without which Athenian democracy proved unworkable,
and for the imaginative stimulus which enterprises of great pitch and
moment alone give, the possession of empire was, perhaps, essential.
* * * * *
In the age of Pericles, Athens was a city with a population of about
150,000. Attica, the territory of the Athenians, had an approximately
equal number of inhabitants. Of the 300,000 thus accounted for, about
one third was servile and one sixth foreign. The free and franchised
population made up one half of the total, and yielded about 50,000
males of military age.