with prudence; under his guidance Athens was safe, and reached the
height of her greatness in his time. When the war began, he showed that
here, too, he had formed a true estimate of the Athenian power. He
survived the commencement of hostilities two years and six months; and,
after his death, his foresight was even better appreciated than during
his life. For he had told the Athenians that if they would be patient
and would attend to their navy, and not seek to enlarge their dominions
while the war was going on, nor imperil the existence of the city, they
would be victorious; but they did all that he told them not to do,
and in matters which seemingly had nothing to do with the war, from
motives of private ambition and private interest they adopted a policy
which had disastrous effects in respect both of themselves and of their
allies; their measures, had they been successful, would have brought
honor and profit only to individuals, and, when unsuccessful, crippled
the city in the conduct of the war. The reason of the difference was
that he, deriving authority from his capacity and acknowledged worth,
being also a man of transparent integrity, was able to control the
multitude in a free spirit; he led them rather than was led by them;
for, not seeking power by dishonest arts, he had no need to say
pleasant things, but, on the strength of his own high character, could
venture to oppose and even to anger them. When he saw them unseasonably
elated and arrogant, his words humbled and awed them; and when they
were depressed by groundless fears, he sought to reanimate their
confidence. Thus Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact
ruled by her greatest citizen. But his successors were more on an
equality with one another, and, each struggling to be first himself,
they were ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of affairs to the whims
of the people. Such weakness in a great and imperial city led to many
errors, of which the greatest was the Sicilian expedition; not that
the Athenians miscalculated their enemy's power, but they themselves,
instead of consulting for the interests of the expedition which they
had sent out, were occupied in intriguing against one another for the
leadership of the democracy, and not only grew remiss in the management
of the army, but became embroiled, for the first time, in civil strife.
And yet, after they had lost in the Sicilian expedition the greater
part of their fleet and army, and were distracted by revolution at
home, still they held out three years not only against their former
enemies, but against the Sicilians who had combined with them, and
against most of their own allies who had risen in revolt. Even
when Cyrus, the son of the King, joined in the war and supplied the
Peloponnesian fleet with money, they continued to resist, and were at
last overthrown, not by their enemies, but by themselves and their own
internal dissensions."
A summarization such as this, in style austere and authoritative,
in content the product of penetrating insight and wonderful sense
for political realities, not only bears witness to the greatness of
Thucydides; when it is contrasted with similar analyses in Plato and
Aristotle it testifies to the loss of power for sustained historical
thinking which Greece suffered when men of genius were no longer
enriched by the experience which came through living in a state like
the imperial democracy of Athens. Not the least of its merits is
its self-restraint. Having concluded that the reckless rivalries of
her would-be leaders and the reckless dissensions of her citizens
ruined Athens, he refrains from assigning a cause for the spirit of
lawlessness. It is not Thucydides, but Alcibiades, who declared that
democracy was "manifest folly"; not he, but Cleon, who reiterated that
"a democracy cannot manage an empire." Thucydides does not despair
of democracy. In the case of Athens it was less the unsoundness of
the "majority" than the selfishness of the "remnant" that caused the
nation to perish. For the demoralization of their leaders, however, the
Athenians themselves held Socrates responsible, meaning to incriminate
the Sophistic movement. Who shall say that they were wrong? And
who shall hold democracy responsible for the evils of the Sophistic
movement?
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. _Von des attischen Reiches
Herrlichkeit_ (1877). In _Reden und Vorträge_, pp. 27 _ff._
2. Jebb, R.C. _The Age of Pericles_ (1889). In _Essays and Addresses_,
pp. 104 _ff._
3. Meyer, Eduard. _Geschichte des Altertums_, IV (1901).
4. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. _Staat und Gesellschaft der
Griechen_ (1910): C. _Die athenische Demokratie_, pp. 95 _ff._
5. Zimmern, Alfred. _The Greek Commonwealth_ (1911).
6. Cavaignac, E. _Histoire de l'Antiquité_, II: _Athènes_ (480-330),
(1912).
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 18: Pages 27 _ff._]
[Footnote 19: Delbrück, _Die Perserkriege und die Burgunderkriege_, pp.
137 _ff._; Beloch, _Griechische Geschichte_, I (1893), p. 368, n. 3.]
[Footnote 20: Thucy., II, 36, 2.]
[Footnote 21: Thucy., II, 37 _ff._]
[Footnote 22: For the following sections see especially Aristotle's
_Constitution of the Athenians_.]
[Footnote 23: Seven cents, equal in purchasing power to thirty-five
cents perhaps.]
[Footnote 24: Greenidge, _Greek Constitutional History_ (1896), pp. 170
_ff._]
[Footnote 25: See particularly Ed. Meyer, _Die Sklaverei im Altertum_
(_Kleine Schriften_, pp. 169 _ff._).]
[Footnote 26: Pseudo-Xenophon, _State of the Athenians_, II, 10. (The
translation used here and elsewhere, with a few modifications, is that
of Dakyns.)]
[Footnote 27: Pseudo-Xenophon, _State of the Athenians_, II, 2 _ff._]
[Footnote 28: Pseudo-Xenophon, _State of the Athenians_, I, 2.]
[Footnote 29: Plut., _Pericles_, XI, 4.]
[Footnote 30: _Const. of the Athenians_, 24, 3.]
[Footnote 31: Bury, J.B., _A History of Greece_ (1900), p. 355.]
[Footnote 32: Plut., _Pericles_, 12. (Translated by Perrin.)]
[Footnote 33: Thucy., II, 65, 5 _ff._]
III
FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE
A curious legend about the Spartans arose in the age that followed the
conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. It was then reported that
they were the kinsmen of the Jews. According to one version of the
story, Judæa was founded by a Spartan named Judæus, who had accompanied
the god Dionysus from Thebes on his triumphal progress through Asia.
According to another account, the Spartans were descendants of Abraham,
the strongest of the children of Israel having migrated to Greece at
the time Moses led the remainder out of Egypt to the land of Canaan.[34]
This absurd legend, of which the Greek origin is unmistakable, seems
to have been responsible for a certain _rapprochement_ between the
two peoples. Despite the first book of the Maccabees, which affirms
the contrary, it is, indeed, impossible that Areus I, king of Sparta
between 308 and 264 B.C., wrote to Onias I, Jewish high priest,
demanding and offering a community of goods, and that Jonathan
Maccabæus, one hundred and fifty years afterwards, sent greetings
to the Spartans, together with the word that the Jews "at all
times without ceasing both in their feasts and other convenient
days remembered them in the sacrifices which they offered, and in
their prayers, as reason was, and as it becameth them to think upon
their brethren."[35] Nothing is more unlikely than that the Spartans
volunteered to divide their "cattle" and property with the Jews only
a short time before they crushed with great bloodshed a communistic
movement among their own citizens, unless it be the thought that the
prayers and offerings of the Jews went up continually to Jehovah for
the prosperity of heathen who were also backsliders. Nevertheless, that
communications were actually established between the Judæa of Onias
and Jonathan and the Sparta of Areus and Menalcidas, we cannot doubt;
and, indeed, we have still other evidences that the alleged community
of origin was turned to account by the Jews. There was evidently a
considerable Jewish settlement in Sparta.
When we seek to discover the reason for this strange conjunction of
the warrior community by the Eurotas and the religious community by
the Jordan, we are helped by observing that in another Hellenistic
legend the Jews are made the kinsmen of the gymnosophists, or naked
philosophers, of India. The Greek mind was at this time fascinated
by the great problem of subordinating the species of things to their
proper genera, of perceiving the types by means of which individual
objects became intelligible parts of a cosmos. It was the age of
Aristotle and Theophrastus, Menander and the New Comedy, of idealistic
portraiture. Hence the temptation was irresistible to bring into family
relationship the various societies of men in which the principle of
caste dominated; to regard it as unessential that in Judæa the people
were there to support the priests, in Laconia to support the soldiers,
in India to support the Brahmans. In each case there was found an odd
community, in which, so far at least as the state could accomplish
it, all human interests were subordinated to one, be it war and
preparation for war, religious practices of a ritualistic character, or
theosophical speculation.
Had the Greeks known it, there was a further analogy of an external
sort between the Spartans and the Jews which they would have delighted
to establish. For at about the same time that a richly diversified
national life was narrowed down in Judæa to a single interest under the
stress of complete preoccupation with the means of regaining Jehovah's
favor for his chosen people, Sparta ruthlessly compressed and crushed a
many-sided and progressive culture to the end that her citizens might
become trained soldiers, having but one esprit, the esprit de corps of
a professional army.
Prior to 580 B.C. Sparta was the home of poets and musicians. It was
for a chorus of Spartan maidens, the élite of the noble families, that
Alcman wrote the exquisite lines on the breathless calm of nature
which Goethe has made familiar to all lovers of poetry. In hollow
Lacedæmon--a valley rich with vegetation suggestive of bountiful
harvests, down which the steel-gray Eurotas runs, swift and turbulent,
over its rocky bottom, and over which rise on either side the
snow-capped ridges of Taygetus and Parnon, their slopes resonant with
the songs of the nightingales in the mating season--in this secluded
spot, whose haunting beauty is a joy forever to all who have seen it,
there was reared a famous temple of Athena, "Athena of the Brazen
House," at a time when in Athens itself the city's protecting goddess
had to be content with a crude, primitive sanctuary.
All this, and much besides, was observed, and the proper inferences
drawn, by Eduard Meyer twenty years ago;[36] so that the amazement with
which the English archæologists, who have excavated in Laconia during
the past five or six years, report their remarkable "finds" is a source
of no little amusement to the wary. They have discovered that prior to
580 B.C. Sparta was the maker of a kind of artistic pottery which was
known and imitated in far-distant Cyrene and Tarentum; that she then
had trade relations with Egypt and Lydia; that "combs, toilet-boxes,
elaborate pins and bronze ornaments, seals, necklaces, and gold and
ivory gewgaws" were made and used--witnesses _for_ "a golden age of
Spartan art," _against_ the puritanical spirit traditionally attributed
to early and middle Sparta.[37]
In Athens, as we have seen, supremacy in art and literature was
attained by making universal among citizens the spirit and culture of
the aristocracy, the whole people, thus ennobled, being supported on
the shoulders of the tributary allies and enriched by the commercial
advantages of maritime empire. The development of Sparta was directly
the reverse of this. There the aristocracy, whose exuberance of life
and responsiveness to sensuous impressions are attested with sufficient
certainty, was destroyed in the sixth century B.C.
This century was one of repression in Greece generally; whence some
historians have called it the epoch of the Greek Reformation. It is the
time of the "Seven Wise Men," from one of whom came the Delphian motto
"nothing in excess," a time in which the riotous joy of living and the
fresh spontaneity of the so-called Ionian Renascence were subdued by a
force, which might have been everywhere a blight,--as in Sparta,--but
which in fact, when later the inspiration of the great Persian War
came, exerted the gentle restraint which marks the classic in Greek
art and letters. In this perilous period the aristocracy of Sparta
perished, and with it the ideals and accomplishments of which it had
been the exponent.
The instrument of repression of all that was superior to the average
in Spartan life was the college of the five ephors, which Cicero
compares with the tribunate in Rome. The ephors acquired such power
that they made the continuance of even the kingship dependent upon the
submission of the kings to their authority; and upon the kings, as upon
all others, they enforced the new rules of law of which they were the
living expositors.
The development of Sparta, like the development of Rome, from
aristocratic to republican government is characterized by the absence
of tyrants. The fact is that the tribunate in the one case and the
ephorate in the other was tyranny in commission, the division of its
powers between ten and five annually changing officers respectively
having proved to be a sufficient safeguard against the concentration
of executive power in the person of a single individual, be he an
inherited king robbed of monarchical rights or an ambitious demagogue
aiming at their restoration.
The new rules of law which the ephors enforced prescribed in minute
detail the life of the citizen from the moment of his birth to the
time of his death. They were the regulations of a military school in
which war alone was taught, of military barracks when war was already
declared. From seven years of age to sixty the entire energies of the
male half of the population were directed toward being prepared for
war. Boys and men drilled and hunted, learned to use their weapons
and campaigned, danced and exercised, ate in the "messes" year in and
year out, and never escaped the watchful eyes of trainers, subalterns,
officers, and ephors.
No one in Sparta had to make his own way in life. His whole course was
mapped out for him before he was born. No citizen had any business
cares; for all trade and industry were tabooed, and the lands which he
inherited he could not sell. Neither could he buy those of another. The
agricultural laborers were serfs, the sullen and recalcitrant Helots,
of whom there were fifteen to every Spartan; the clothing and weapons
were made by the contented and tractable Perioecs, who outnumbered
the Spartans five to one, and formed with their one hundred hamlets
and their contiguous territories an insulating band round Helots and
Spartans alike. Iron money was the only local currency, though silver
had, of course, to be given in payment for the articles which were
imported from abroad. These, however, were reduced to a minimum, and
such foreigners as made their way through the wall of Perioecs were
rounded up at intervals and forcefully expelled.
All the pretty things of their earlier life, the Spartans chose to do
without. Coarse fare and unlovely houses, piazzas devoid of statues
and inclosed in unsightly and flimsy public buildings; no theatres, no
new music, no new ideas of any kind; mothers who gave up their little
children and their grown sons without flinching; wives who violated
fundamental instincts that their offspring might be more perfect;
homeless boys who went half-naked winter and summer, slept in pens in
the open air like cattle and got their food and living by their wits;
girls who would hardly have known their brothers, brides who would
hardly have recognized their husbands, mothers who would hardly have
been able to distinguish their own sons, were it not that there were
less than five thousand brothers, husbands, and sons in all--of such
was the new Sparta, to whose citizens the ephors issued the annual
command "to shave their mustaches and obey the laws." Long-haired and
tangly-bearded, in groups of about fifteen each, they lounged and
ate and slept in the three hundred tents, or barracks, which lined
Hyacinth Street. There they kept their long spears and their armor.[38]
Thence, clad in their scarlet cloaks, they issued in time of danger
or of war to take their places, group by group, in the five carefully
drilled regiments of which the Spartan phalanx was composed. Quietly,
at an appointed hour in a single night, the whole army might steal
away without confusion, trailing after it, on occasion, thirty-five
thousand Helots to attend to the commissariat. Five thousand Perioec
hoplites might follow at its heels, and with machine-like precision,
to the sound of flutes played in the austere Dorian mode, ten thousand
Lacedæmonian soldiers might advance into battle against foemen who were
always comparatively ill-organized, and who often fled before a single
blow was struck.
The secret of this strange perversion of the natural life of man is to
be found in the declaration of war annually made by the ephors upon
the Helots. They could not follow it up by a campaign waged in regular
fashion; for that would have been to destroy their own serfs. But
they picked out young soldiers, and sent them about among the Helots,
with instructions to strike down secretly all who seemed restless or
over-ambitious. The chief centre of Helot disaffection, at least in
the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., was on the far side of Mount
Taygetus, in Messenia. There the yoke of serfdom chafed more than
elsewhere, not least because those whose estates the Helots of Messenia
tilled for one half the yield lived beyond the snow-capped ridge which
shuts in that country on the east. The Messenians aspired to regain
their lost independence. The Helots of the Eurotas Valley had no such
ambition. They were, therefore, slower to revolt against injustice; but
their aim, when an insurrection _did_ come, could be nothing less than
the extermination of their masters, or at least an exchange of position
with them. Moreover, their very proximity to the five villages which
constituted the unwalled city of Sparta, and the very weight of their
numbers made the Spartans live in ever-present fear of a massacre.
Constant preparedness for war was, accordingly, a simple mandate of
self-preservation.
* * * * *
The Spartans thought it unwise that any of their serf-tilled estates
should lie in or outside the ring of Perioec land. It would not do
to have fuses, so to speak, of Helots running through the wall to the
outside world, or to have masses of Helots beyond the wall, exposed
directly to foreign manipulation. Hence the formation of the Perioec
ring set definite limits to the territory of Sparta. It could be
enlarged in but one way--the widening of the ring by the reduction of
more and more outlying states to the status of Perioecs. And it was
in this way that the Spartan dominions were in fact enlarged in the
seventh century B.C.[39]
At the end of this century, however, Sparta came into conflict with
cities which, unlike the mountain and maritime hamlets situated
roundabout Laconia and Messenia, were too strong and high-spirited
to submit to Spartan control. They had, therefore, to be treated
leniently, since Sparta could not crush them altogether and would
not leave them alone. And the reasons for conciliatory action were
strengthened by the fact that Sparta had now to act abroad with a sharp
eye to the possibility of a servile insurrection at home. There was
never anything mechanical or idealistic in the foreign policy of the
ephors. Hence, first with Tegea at about 560 B.C., and thereafter with
all the states in the Peloponnesus, excepting Argos and Achæa, Sparta
concluded a treaty, the imperialistic aspect of which was that they
agreed individually to accept Sparta's leadership in all defensive
wars and in offensive wars to which they had assented.
The Peloponnesian league, thus formed, stood for the autonomy and
freedom of its members; but Sparta, by championing aristocracies
against tyrants and democracies, and using to its own advantage the
jealousies of its allies as well as their fears of outside powers,
dominated it for one hundred and eighty years, and made it during all
that time the main steadying influence in Greek politics. Twice it was
enlarged into an Hellenic league, first during the three years of the
great Persian invasion (480-478 B.C.), and again for ten years after
the dissolution of the Athenian empire (405-395 B.C.). On the earlier
occasion, the ephors felt relieved of an intolerable burden when in
477 B.C. the Ægean cities, over four hundred and twenty in number,
abandoned Spartan for Athenian leadership. And in the forty-six years
that followed, not they but the Athenians were the aggressors. During
that epoch of democratic fervor,[40] it was an uphill struggle for
the champions of aristocracy to maintain their position; and the war
of political principles was even carried into Sparta, when, in 464
B.C., the Helots of Messenia made a last desperate fight for their
liberty. The Spartans profited, however, during the last third of the
fifth century B.C., by the discredit into which democracy came among
cultivated people through the mistakes and excesses of Athens; and
at the end of the Peloponnesian War they were again able to make the
Peloponnesian league an Hellenic league by incorporating into it Athens
and the Ægean cities which they had just "liberated" from Athenian
tyranny.
A successful war may strengthen a nation, but not when victory lays
upon it a task that is beyond its powers to perform. Such would have
been the case had Athens won at Syracuse. Such was the issue of
Ægospotami. This we can readily see by examining briefly, first the
situation in Sparta, and then the position of Sparta in Hellas, during
the existence of her second Hellenic league.
The Spartans of military age now numbered only about two thousand. War
had done its part in reducing them to this handful. Close intermarriage
had done even more. In the case of large families, the subdivision of
lots which then occurred impoverished sons so greatly that they could
no longer stand the expense of the military clubs, upon membership in
which, however, citizenship depended. So far did the evil implicit in
this condition go that brothers refused to divide their inheritance,
and possessed not only one house, but one wife in common. Men could
neither buy land nor sell it, but they might acquire it by marriage
or by gift; and since the rich, then as always, tended to marry among
themselves, property, and with it citizenship, remained eventually in
the possession of a very few. Much of the land, which was the only
wealth, came into the hands of women. A plutocracy thus developed
in Sparta as the number of the Spartans diminished; and in this way
the domestic situation became still further ominous by the growth in
the city of a considerable body of disfranchised and discontented
"inferiors" and half-breeds.
The perils which attended this situation are revealed by the following
incident as described by Xenophon in his _Hellenica_:[41]--