Hellespontine, Insular, Ionian, and Carian, with a total population
of perhaps, 2,000,000. It formed a complex of islands, peninsulas,
and estuaries, the most remote extremities of which were distant two
hundred or two hundred and fifty miles from Athens. The highways of
this empire were the land-locked channels and lakes which make up the
Ægean Archipelago. Their greatest length in normal circumstances was
a continuous voyage of about eight days. On the other hand, no land
way of more than a single day's march need be traversed by an Athenian
expedition aimed at any of its subject cities. Without the control
of the sea the empire was, accordingly, unthinkable. This absent,
the district fell at once into more than four hundred fragments, the
thousand "cities" from which, according to the comedian Aristophanes,
the Athenians gathered tribute.
The Athenian sphere of naval operations and of political and commercial
interests reached far beyond the frontiers of the empire. It included
points like Sicily, Egypt, Phoenicia, and the Euxine, distant over six
hundred miles from the Piræus. An Athenian fleet might thus require the
best part of a month to reach its destination. The world which had to
take careful account of the Athenian naval power in all its political
and military calculations, the world which Athens under Pericles sought
to dominate, must have had a population of over 20,000,000.
If, then, we take into account the ratio of dominant, subject, and
foreign elements, and also the time consumed in reaching with ships,
orders, or explanations, the outer limits of authority, the magnitude
of Athens's imperial undertaking will stand comparison with that of
England in modern times.
* * * * *
In Sparta the gravestone of a citizen was inscribed regularly with his
name alone. No epitaph was needed there to tell the tale of a life; for
the life of one citizen was the well-known life of all. If, however, a
man had died for his country, two words, ἑνπολἑμω, "in war," expressed
with laconic brevity his ground of distinction.
For those who fell in battle Athens set apart a public cemetery near
the Dipylon Gate, and at the end of every campaign a commemorative
service was held there in honor of the year's crop of martyrs. A
man high in public esteem voiced the nation's gratitude for the
sacrifice. On such an occasion, at the end of the first year of the
Peloponnesian War, Pericles reversed the normal procedure, and, instead
of expatiating on the merits of the fallen, he explained in an eloquent
speech why Athens was worthy of loyalty unto death. Thucydides heard
his words, and, perhaps many years afterwards, reproduced them as best
he could in the famous _Funeral Oration_.
The statesman did not linger long over the legendary glories of Athens.
Her alleged boons to humanity--grain, the norms of civilized life, the
drama; the services, that is to say, upon which the later Athenians
dwelt with special pride--had no meaning for him. Two things their
ancestors had done: they had defended their country successfully,
and had transmitted to their descendants a free state. "And if these
were worthy of praise,"[20] proceeds his splendid exordium, "still
more were our fathers, who added to their inheritance, and after
many a struggle transmitted to us their sons this great empire. And
we ourselves assembled here to-day, who are still most of us in the
vigor of life, have chiefly done the work of improvement, and have
richly endowed our city with all things, so that she is sufficient for
herself both in peace and war. Of the military exploits by which our
various possessions were acquired, or of the energy with which we or
our fathers drove back the tide of war, Hellenic or Barbarian, I will
not speak; for the tale would be long and is familiar to you. But ... I
should like to point out by what principles of action we rose to power,
and under what institutions and through what manner of life our empire
became great."
In these words of Pericles I should like you to find stated the theme
of my second chapter. And were it not that Pericles left unexplained,
what the Athenians whom he addressed knew without explanation, the
social and political forms by which they realized their ideals, I might
absolve my task by one long quotation. I might transcribe the whole
_Oration_ and have done with it.
That being inexpedient, I cannot do better than present, using again
Pericles's own words as a sort of text, the main principles of Athenian
policy. But in passing I may be permitted to observe that were our
knowledge of Athens dependent solely upon the _Funeral Oration_; had we
to form our idea of political life in fifth-century B.C. Greece from it
alone, we might still infer a unique epoch in the history of mankind.
Fortunately, that is not the case. The "tooth of time and razure of
oblivion" have spared the Parthenon and its matchless sculptures, the
noble tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles, and the undying charm of
Herodotus. Ideals are always grounded in some measure in realities. At
the least they stand to them as the "perfect round" to the "broken
arc." Even in Plato's psychology the mind needs to be sharpened by
observation and reflection before, as in a flash of light, the glimpse
of the divine idea suddenly appears. Hence, were the affirmations of
the _Funeral Oration_ unsupported by contemporary monuments of similar
spirit, they would still be helpful revelations of Athenian democracy.
And this conclusion, as I hope to show, rests not upon logical
inference alone, but also upon the evidence of minute research.
* * * * *
"It is true," said Pericles,[21] "we are called a democracy, for the
administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But
while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private
disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized, and when a
citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public
service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit.
Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be
the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public
life, and in our private intercourse we are not suspicious of one
another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do
not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant.
While we are thus unconstrained in our private intercourse, a spirit
of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing
wrong by respect for authority and for the laws, having an especial
regard to those ordained for the protection of the injured as well as
to those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the
reprobation of the general sentiment.... Wealth we employ not for talk
and ostentation, but when there is a real use for it. To avow poverty
with us is no disgrace: the true disgrace is in doing nothing to avoid
it. An Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes
care of his own household; and even those of us who are engaged in
business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who
takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless but as a useless
character; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges
of a policy. The great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not
discussion but the want of that knowledge which is gained by discussion
preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before
we act and of acting too.... And we have not forgotten to provide for
our weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games
and sacrifices throughout the year; at home the style of our life is
refined; and the delight which we daily feel in all these things helps
to banish melancholy. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits
of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other
countries as freely as of our own.... We are lovers of the beautiful,
yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of
manliness.... To sum up: I say that Athens is the school of Hellas,
and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the
power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the
utmost versatility and grace. This is no passing and idle word, but
truth and fact; and the assertion is verified by the position to which
these qualities have raised the state.... And we shall assuredly not
be without witnesses; there are mighty monuments of our power which
will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages; we shall not
need the praises of Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may
please for the moment, although his representation of the facts will
not bear the light of day. For we have compelled every land and every
sea to open a path for our valor, and have everywhere planted eternal
memorials of our friendship and of our enmity."
* * * * *
Such were the proud claims of the great Athenian statesman. Of art
there was said no word except in so far as art was embodied in the
monuments of empire. Music and the drama are alluded to, but in the
same breath with athletic contests, as the relaxation of overworked
men. The speaker has no apology to make for democracy. He gloried in
imperialism. Had he met Plato in Elysium--Plato who was born in the
year after Pericles's death, and both embodied and expressed the higher
ideals of a later generation of Athenians--he would have disdained to
reply to the philosopher's accusation that he had filled the city with
traders and shops and ships and dockyards and such rubbish, instead of
with righteousness and justice.
* * * * *
Taking the _Funeral Oration_ as my text, I should like to explain at
this point by what institutions the principles of Periclean democracy
and imperialism were converted into facts.
It was in the _ecclesia_, or general assembly, and in the _heliæa_,
or popular courts of justice, that sovereign power was vested in
Athens.[22] The heliæa demanded of its jurors only that they should
be citizens in good standing, but each year it drew according to need
from a specially constituted list of 6000. So, too, of the 50,000
citizens who might attend the ecclesia, 6000 were regarded as a quorum
when a quorum was required, and commonly an even smaller number was
present. Meetings of the ecclesia were held either in the city or at
the harbor; hence the urban element tended to dominate. Stated meetings
occurred four times a month, but others might be called by the generals
or the council. Various panels of from 401 to 2001 jurymen each might
be allotted to tribunals on every day of the year which was not set
aside for a public festival or preëmpted by a meeting of the ecclesia.
Usually poor men of advanced years, such as were unsuited for more
active work and were satisfied with the indemnity of two obols[23] per
day, volunteered for registration among the 6000 jurors.
The work of Parliament was divided between the ecclesia and the heliæa;
for legislation in the strict sense of the term could be enacted only
by the joint action of the two bodies.[24] Administrative decrees,
moreover, by means of which the ecclesia disposed of all important
public business, and which might differ from laws only in a formal
way, could be suspended at the initiative of individuals and were
incontestable only when passed on, as to constitutionality or public
expediency, by the heliæa. The men who sat in the heliæa were but
common citizens like those who voted in the ecclesia; but they came to
sit in judgment on both laws and decrees by the accident of the lot
and not because of any particular interest in the questions concerned.
In other words, the courts could not be packed with partisans as the
meetings of the ecclesia commonly were. This fact, together with the
delay which necessarily occurred, protected the state against the
verdict of a chance majority, which was in fact usually a minority
of all the citizens. There was no such thing in Athens as the final
settlement of controversial matters by a single popular vote.
The heliæa acted as sovereign in one further particular. Upon it
devolved the duty of determining whether the magistrates and
councilors observed the laws and conducted themselves honestly during
their years of office. It was to the sworn assembly of the Athenians,
accordingly, that all those engaged in civil administration were
responsible. The ecclesia, on the other hand, had the right to impeach
and dismiss those officials who, being given discretionary powers,
abused them.
The main work of the heliæa was of course to settle domestic and
imperial litigation. As we shall see, the judicial power of the heliæa
gave it a large measure of political control over all the subject
cities of Athens.
The heliæa was the brake on the democratic machine: the ecclesia
was the dynamo. The intent of the Athenians was that all political
decisions of importance should be reached, after full debate, by the
ecclesia. It was, however, obvious that an assembly of from five to
fifty thousand men would proceed with disastrous slowness if all
matters, great and small, were laid before it, or even if it considered
only significant affairs, but considered them without previous
examination and formulation. Perversion of modern democracies results
most notably from the usurpation of power on the part of those who sift
proposals for popular reference. Athens had to guard against a similar
danger. Hence the harbinger of democracy, Clisthenes, created for it
one of the most peculiar _probuleutic_, or deliberative, bodies which
ever had the handling of large affairs. This was the council of the
Five Hundred.
It was constituted anew each year and was made an exact miniature of
the ecclesia which it was to serve. Every ward and township of Attica,
to the number of one hundred and over, first eliminated such of its
members as had not yet reached their thirtieth year or had already
served two terms in the council, and then selected by lot from among
the rest the councilor or councilors to which it was entitled on the
basis of population. Accordingly, each successive council had from
two hundred and fifty to five hundred new and inexperienced members.
Not desire or fitness but pure chance determined its personnel. Every
section, interest, and class of Attica--if we exclude young men between
eighteen and thirty--was adequately represented in it. There was,
therefore, a general presumption that it would take the same view of
public questions as the ecclesia; that it would do a disservice to its
own members should it foster their temporary rights as councilors at
the expense of their lifelong rights as members of the ecclesia; that
it would, in other words, labor to the best of its ability to present
to the ecclesia a well-considered and sufficiently inclusive programme
of business. Otherwise, the heliæa had to be faced at the end of the
twelve months.
A committee of five hundred impresses us as little less unwieldy than
an assembly of five thousand. Clisthenes was of the same opinion.
Hence he divided his council into ten sections, or prytanies, of fifty
members each, and arranged that each prytany should act for the
whole for thirty-six days in an order determined by lot at the latest
possible moment. The prytany was constituted in such a way that it was
a miniature of the council, just as the council was a miniature of
the ecclesia. The lot, again applied at the latest possible moment,
determined, furthermore, which of its fifty members should be its
chairman, and be present with one third of his colleagues in the
council chamber for the single twenty-four hours for which he served.
The same man was chairman of the council at its daily session, and
he also presided at the ecclesia, should a meeting of the citizens
be held on his day of office. A chance nomination for a single day's
service, at a time not previously known, was, Clisthenes thought,
a sufficient safeguard of council and ecclesia against successful
scheming, conspiracy, collusion, or other interference with the popular
will on the part of the chairman. He was mistaken; and the later
democracy took the further precaution of requiring the chairman to
relinquish the presidency at the meetings of the council and ecclesia
to a board of nine men chosen by lot for that specific purpose from the
non-officiating prytanies of the council. One of the nine, designated
likewise by lot, was given the special honor and responsibility of
putting the motions and declaring the votes.
Only proposals which originated in a council thus organized came before
the ecclesia; but there they might be discussed _ad libitum_, emended,
accepted, rejected, or referred back to the council; and it was even
possible during their consideration to substitute for the resolution
of the council an entirely different bill, or to move that the council
bring in a proposition at the next meeting on an altogether irrelevant
matter. It was the deliberate intention of the Athenians that the
ecclesia should consider everything it wanted to consider.
The management of civil administration, subject to the constant
direction of the ecclesia and the watchful supervision of the
council,--which in this matter also acted for the body of which it
was a miniature,--was entrusted to a multitude of committees, each
composed normally of ten members. Aristotle, in his _Constitution of
the Athenians_, specifies the duties of twenty-five such committees
and estimates at seven hundred the number of citizens engaged annually
in domestic administration. The work of each committee was definitely
circumscribed by law and formed a small bundle of routine matters. The
committees may be thought of as standing drawn up in a long line for
the council to inspect. Had they been placed one behind the other in
files, the rear committee being responsible to the one before it and so
on down to the front, the council would have come into direct contact
only with a few powerful committees. Such committees, however, must
have proved impossible for inexperienced councilors to manage. Besides,
while the councilors, as agents of the ecclesia, and subject to its
commands, might properly hold all the civil magistrates to a monthly
accounting, it was not thought in accord with democracy that one group
of citizens who happened to hold one civil office should have under
their direction another group of citizens also engaged temporarily on
public work. Though all the committees were thus on the same plane, and
recognized only the council as their common superintendent, the work
that they did was by no means of equal dignity or importance. It ranged
all the way from managing the scavengers to managing the Great Dionysia.
All committees were reconstituted annually. No man could be a member of
the same committee twice in his lifetime. At the end of his year each
magistrate was required to render an indescribably minute accounting
of his public acts, first to specially appointed auditing committees,
and finally to the heliæa. It was an easy matter to get an office in
Athens, but a very difficult task to get honorably rid of it. For
the lot was used to select the requisite number of members for each
committee from among the citizens thirty years old or older who had
not disqualified themselves by earlier service. The theory that one
citizen was as competent as another for public office was thus put into
practice. Every office was refilled annually by a chance group of new
and necessarily inexperienced men.
While defining constitutions Aristotle lays down the condition
for a thorough-going democracy that all citizens should hold
governmental positions in turn. On this theory, there should have
been an approximate agreement between the number of places in Athens
and the number of citizens reaching their thirtieth year annually.
That, however, was not the case. Even if we assume that men were
councilors only once and held only one magistracy in their lifetime,
we need to include some of the seven hundred (?) imperial posts in our
calculation, and regard them, too, as subject to the conditions of
tenure assumed for domestic positions, in order to reach the required
total of about thirteen hundred. This is, naturally, an unwarranted
and unworkable series of assumptions. It is, however, reasonable to
suppose that the majority of Athenian citizens, and practically all
of those who made a habit of attending the meetings of the ecclesia
held a _deme_, or municipal, position, let us say, in their youth; a
post in the council or in the domestic or imperial administration in
their maturity; and a place in the register of the six thousand jurors
in their advancing years. Recall, now, that three hundred and sixty
of the five hundred councilors had to preside at meetings of fifty
and five hundred men, and, if chance willed, at one of from five to
fifty thousand also; observe that magistrates had not only to know the
duties of their office,--which included the reception and preparation
of some kind of cases for submission to a panel of jurors, over which
they had, moreover, to preside,--but had also to keep accounts which
they must defend in a law court; reflect that jury service involved
acting as judge and jury in both domestic and imperial litigation,
and it will appear that the knowledge of reading and writing which
Clisthenes presupposed in all citizens would not have carried a man
far in the age of Pericles; he must then have had a working knowledge
of parliamentary forms, he must have had the view of administration
which comes of being on the inside of the wicket; he must have been so
conversant with the law and legal procedure that he could assume heavy
personal responsibility for the legality of all bills proposed by him
and could argue his own cases when acting as plaintiff or defendant in
a law suit. It was a proverb in Athens that "office will show the man."
We may be sure that most men took some pains in advance that it did not
show them wholly incompetent. It must have left them with a new insight
into public affairs. It is fair to say that, as a consequence of all
this, the normal town meeting of the Athenians was, from one point of
view, an assembly of experts, while viewed differently it possessed
simply a high level of amateur attainment, comparable, perhaps, with
that Mr. H.G. Wells postulates in his socialistic Utopia.
* * * * *
The office assigned by Pericles to this assembly of high-class amateurs
was to choose the best among divergent policies proposed to it by
citizens of exceptional endowment. The ecclesia by no means closed
the door in the face of such real experts as it possessed. Thus it
did not leave it to the council to draw up the specifications for the
construction of the naval arsenals or any similarly technical job, but
it could and did delegate such tasks to men of special competence. Nor
was it so doctrinaire as to entrust the command of its expeditions or
the conduct of its diplomacy to chance persons; but it both elected
its generals, reëlected them as often as it cared to, and gave them
special rights of calling and canceling meetings of the ecclesia and
of laying proposals directly before them. It was, accordingly, aware
of the difficulty and danger which it faced in settling questions of
foreign policy, where the elements involved, being the resources,
aims, sentiments, and traditions of other states, far transcended the
knowledge of the common citizen; and where error might mean irreparable
disaster; where, in fact, error _did_ mean irreparable disaster.