year when, as he sacrificed one of the appointed sacrifices in behalf
of the city, the soothsayer warned him, saying: 'The gods reveal a
conspiracy of the most fearful character'; and when the king sacrificed
a second time, he said: 'The aspect of the victims is now even yet
more terrible'; but when he had sacrificed for the third time, the
soothsayer exclaimed: 'O Agesilaus, the sign is given to me, even
as though we were in the very midst of the enemy.' Thereupon they
sacrificed to the deities who avert evil and work salvation, and so
barely obtained good omens, and ceased sacrificing. Nor had five
days elapsed after the sacrifices were ended, ere one came bringing
information to the ephors of a conspiracy, and named Cinadon as the
ringleader; a young man robust of body as of soul, but not one of the
peers. Accordingly, the ephors questioned their informant: 'How say
you the occurrence is to take place?' and he who gave the information
answered: 'Cinadon took me to the limit of the market-place, and bade
me count how many Spartans there were in the market-place; and I
counted--king, and ephors, and elders, and others, maybe forty. _But
tell me, Cinadon_, I said to him, _why have you bidden me count them?_
and he answered me: _Those men, I would have you know, are your sworn
foes; and all those others, more than four thousand, congregated there
are your natural allies_. Then he took and showed me in the streets,
here one and there two of our enemies, as we chanced to come across
them, and all the rest our natural allies; and so again running through
the list of Spartans to be found in the country districts, he still
kept harping on that string: _Look you, on each estate one foeman--the
master--and all the rest allies!_' The ephors asked: 'How many do you
reckon are in the secret of the matter?' The informant answered: 'On
that point also he gave me to understand that there were by no means
many in their secret who were prime movers of the affair, but those
few to be depended on; _and to make up_, said he, _we ourselves are in
their secret, all the rest of them--Helots, enfranchised, inferiors,
Perioecs, one and all. Note their demeanor when Spartans chance to be
the topic of their talk. None of them can conceal the delight it would
give him if he might eat up every Spartan raw._' Then, as the inquiry
went on, the question came: 'And where did they propose to find arms?'
The answer followed: 'He explained that those of us, of course, who
are enrolled in regiments have arms of our own already, and as for
the mass--he led the way to the war foundry, and showed me scores and
scores of knives, of swords, of spits, hatchets, and axes, and reaping
hooks. _Anything or everything_, he told me, _which men use to delve
in the earth, cut timber, or quarry stone, would serve our purpose;
nay, the instruments used for other arts would in nine cases out of ten
furnish weapons enough and to spare, especially in dealing with unarmed
antagonists_.' Once more being asked what time the affair was to come
off, he replied his orders were _not to leave the city_."
The ephors, wishing to remove Cinadon from Sparta without suspicion,
sent him on a mission to Aulon. He was to arrest certain persons, and
among them "a woman, the fashionable beauty of the place--supposed
to be the arch-corruptress of all Lacedæmonians, young and old, who
visited Aulon." His escort seized him instead and wrested from him
the names of his accomplices. "His fate was to be taken out forthwith
in irons, just as he was, and to be placed with his two hands and
his neck in the collar, and so under scourge and goad to be driven,
himself and his accomplices, round the city. Thus upon the heads of
those," concludes the pious Xenophon, "was visited the penalty of their
offense."
* * * * *
Beset with dangers such as this, the Spartans had to tread warily.
They drafted Perioecs into their army so as to make it about fifty-six
hundred strong. They picked out Helots, trained and emancipated them,
and used them abroad as soldiers. They took mercenaries into their
service and distributed them according to local needs under Spartan
captains, acting always, however, on requests from local governments.
They got large contingents of troops from their old allies, whom,
however, they left free of tribute, financing their government with a
thousand talents raised annually from the former allies of Athens. With
the funds thus secured they hired rowers and marines for the warships
which their allies furnished and thus patrolled the sea as well as
the land. They got a moral mandate for empire by upholding everywhere
aristocracy, real or sham, against democracy, and by assuming the rôle
of champion of Greece against the barbarians. This did not prevent
them, however, from forming an alliance with Dionysius I,[42] who had
just made himself tyrant of Syracuse, or from working in harmony with
Persia as long as that was possible.
"The growth of Lacedæmon," said Timolaus of Corinth[43] in 394 B.C.,
"seems to me just like that of some mighty river--at its sources small
and easily crossed, but as it further and further advances, other
rivers discharge themselves into its channel, and its stream grows
ever more formidable. So it is with the Lacedæmonians. Take them at
the starting-point and they are but a single community, but as they
advance and attach city after city they grow more numerous and more
resistless. I observe that when people wish to take wasps' nests--if
they try to capture the creatures on the wing, they are liable to be
attacked by half the hive; whereas, if they apply fire to them ere they
leave their homes, they will master them without scathe themselves. On
this principle, I think it best to bring about the battle within the
hive itself, or, short of that, as close to Lacedæmon as possible."
The advice was sound; but the wasps could not be caught at home. It
was not till Athens had beaten the Spartans at sea, and Thebes had
beaten them on land, that Epaminondas reached the hive. He then broke
up the Peloponnesian league, emancipated the Helots of Messenia, and
substituted, for the once considerable power which had saved the
Peloponnesus from serious attack for two hundred years, a multitude of
little city-states such as existed elsewhere in Greece--rather, such as
came to exist elsewhere in European Greece, when, a few years later,
with Epaminondas's death, the supremacy of Thebes ceased, Athens was
abandoned by the states which had joined her against Sparta, and the
empire of Dionysius I in the west dissolved, shortly after his death,
into its constituent parts.
Theoretically, conditions should then have been ideal. In the case
of the Greeks the deep-seated human instinct to compare the present
disadvantageously with the past was not checked by a theory of
evolution conceived as progress, such as misleads many sensible people
nowadays to imagine that the farther back they go the more rudimentary
political and social conditions become. The golden age of the Greeks
lay in "the dark backward and abysm of time." In early days, before
the rise of the Spartan and Athenian empires, every city, so it was
believed, had "lived in peace, free and autonomous, and in secure
possession of its own territory." For more than a century men had
struggled to bring back those blessed times, and now at length their
efforts, it might have seemed, had been crowned with success. Every
city in Greece, great and small, had apparently regained its liberty
and autonomy.
At the same time men had made a persistent effort to reëstablish in
each city "the constitution of the fathers," and under the Spartan
hegemony the favorable opportunity for success in this campaign had
seemingly come. But it then appeared that, apart from the general
understanding that citizenship was to be reserved to those who could
afford to pay taxes and provide themselves with the arms and knowledge
of arms necessary for fighting, no two persons agreed as to what the
"ancestral constitution" was. It proved to be in reality the ideal of
each reformer and each politician, and since the age was one in which
most of the ordinary restraints were lacking as they seldom are in
the history of civilized man, the transition from an unpopular ideal
to a conspiracy was apt to be singularly abrupt. The outcome of the
attempts to restore the urban particularism of mediæval Greece and
the constitutions of the over-praised olden time was unsatisfactory
to everybody. Barren wars of city against city instead of large
enterprises directed by imperial ambitions; an atmosphere murky with
plots and counter-plots, where once there had blown the strong wind
of steady civic progress; and, in addition, national disaster and
humiliation despite manifest military superiority--these were the
bitter fruits of political reaction in Greece during the Spartan
supremacy.
* * * * *
It was in this unhappy age that the science of government was born,
and it bears its birthmark to the present day. The midwife, to use
his own homely figure, was Socrates, whom the Athenians, tarred on by
Aristophanes, put to death "for corrupting the youth and introducing
strange gods." He, of course, denied the accusations, and claimed
that he deserved the honors of a public benefactor for taking men
individually and showing to them how ill they understood the virtues
on which all societies are based, to wit, justice, wisdom, temperance,
and courage. No one, he thought, could make them better citizens except
by promoting truth and dispelling ignorance about these things. His
execution consecrated his mission. It was the sowing of dragon's teeth
from which sprang up armed warriors, of whom the most doughty were
Plato and Aristotle.
The vice of the Socratic school was a noble one--an enormous
overestimate of the value of education. "Truth is the beginning of
every good thing," says Plato,[44] "both to gods and men; and he who
would be blessed and happy, should be from the first a partaker of
the truth, that he may live a true man as long as possible, for then
he can be trusted; but he is not to be trusted who loves voluntary
falsehood and he who loves involuntary falsehood is a fool." There was,
of course, only one truth; which, being discovered, should be taught;
which, being taught, must be acted upon, since, if men really knew what
was right, it was impossible, Plato thought--ignoring the frailty or
obstinacy of the human will--that they should not do it. "Discover the
truth." "Teach it." These are the two Socratic commandments.
I have no intention to make an exposition of the political philosophy
of Plato and Aristotle,[45] but to do something much more modest: to
explain wherein and wherefore they missed the truth in the matter of
Greek imperialism, and to notice some of the historic forces which they
disregarded. If I deal with the _Laws_ rather than the _Republic_ of
Plato, it is because it is his more mature and less imaginative work.
It was upon his immediate present that Plato focused his attention;
to the analysis of its political and moral strength and weakness that
he turned his penetrating intelligence; for its betterment that he
wrote and taught and suffered. The past he peopled with creations
of his own exuberant fancy, of popular misconception, of defective
knowledge. He can be easily convicted of gross historical errors. And
what is more serious; he has no real regard for historical truth and
no sense whatever for the real factors in historical developments.
Without the slightest qualm of conscience, and without taking the least
pains to ascertain the facts, Plato alters the divine and profane
history of his people to make it serve his purpose. And he does this
on principle: "The legislator," he says,[46] "has only to reflect and
find out what belief will be of the greatest public advantage, and
then use all his efforts to make the whole community utter one and
the same word in their songs and tales and discourses all their life
long." To disagreeable things in the sacred story he gives a short
shrift. Since the gods are perfect, every report that tends to tarnish
the lustre of their reputation must be false. The history of mankind
is solved by a similar formula; since justice is the _sine qua non_ of
public and private prosperity and happiness, all reports which affirm
the conjunction of injustice with well-being, or of righteousness with
misfortune, need correction or suppression.[47] History, accordingly,
becomes a happy hunting-ground for edifying stories. It at once ceases
to yield lessons, which, being grounded in the realities of human
experience, are less apropos, perhaps, than the political theorist may
like, but are alone valuable.
Plato's absorption in the present led him to misread not only the past,
but also the future. For the false standard with which he measured
past policies and institutions is not less characteristic than the
false judgment which he formed of the drift of contemporary events.
The future belonged, not, as he dreamed, to the autonomous, archaizing
city-state, but to the movement for their unification which he
condemned. He tried to mend city constitutions when the world required
the creation of larger territorial states. He watched with attention
domestic politics when foreign politics were chiefly worth watching.
A glance at the ideal state portrayed by Plato in the _Laws_[48] shows
in what sense he read his history. His citizens are to have "their
food and clothing provided for them in moderation," the latter through
"entrusting the practice of the arts to others," the former through
getting from the land, which slaves till for a part of the produce, "a
return sufficient for men living temperately." They are to have "common
tables in which the men are placed apart, and near them are the common
tables of their families, of their daughters and mothers, which, day
by day, the officers, male and female, are to inspect." They are not,
however, to live fattening like beasts; for "such a life is neither
just nor honorable, nor can he who lives it fail of meeting his due;
and the due reward of the idle fatted beast is that he should be torn
to pieces by some other valiant beast whose fatness is worn down by
brave deeds and toil."
Naturally, Plato does not wish his ideal citizens to meet such an
ignominious end. He proceeds to prescribe a régime for them in which,
after a most carefully nurtured childhood, three years are spent on
reading and writing, three more on learning to play the lyre, and
others still on the study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and law,
and on the practice of dancing, wrestling, running, hunting, and many
kinds of military exercises. The citizens to be protected from fatty
degeneration in this way are, it should be observed, the women as well
as the men.
The children's stories are prescribed and are unalterable; so are the
music and the dancing and the poetry. The law studied is that of the
commonwealth, with which every citizen is to be inoculated. The moral
and religious ideas are to be fixed, and death is the penalty set for
heterodoxy. Everything is to be made and kept rigid, the number of the
houses, of the farms, of the citizens, of the children, of traders,
artisans, and foreigners, the maximum and minimum wealth of everybody.
In other words, the community which Plato in his old age proposed as a
model is not a thorough-going communism, like that of his more youthful
and more famous _Republic_. It is simply a system of governmental
control carried to its logical extreme--an emended and perfected
edition of Sparta.
That a well-born Athenian, disgusted at the license which resulted from
letting people live as they pleased, should have planned to put all
citizens in an administrative strait-jacket, is not surprising. Many of
us to-day object to a "wide-open town." But that Plato, whose practice
in discussion was "to follow the argument whithersoever it might
lead," should have idealized a state in which freedom of thought and
freedom of speech were denied altogether, shows (even if we make all
allowances for the idea, that, if things were perfect and there was but
one perfection, all changes must be harmful) how unreal and involved in
self-contradiction was the thinking of the best Greeks in this age of
reaction.
The theory of individual liberty, as applied in Athens, had led, in
the economic sphere, thought Plato, to the exploitation of the poor
by the rich, and, in the political sphere, to the exploitation of the
rich by the poor. Plato, therefore, discarded the theory of individual
liberty altogether. He was dominated by a general view of life in which
all the natural human instincts and cravings were harmful. The only
hope for states was that they should educate their best citizens to be
their governors. Plato, accordingly, nailed to the mast the doctrine
of salvation by education, and despaired of all states in which the
carefully trained few of high intellectual capacity did not make the
laws and enforce them. Of all these ideas the Athenian democracy was
the negation, and Plato hated it with the bitterness of a passionate
nature.
That Plato hated the Periclean democracy as a political system is also
intelligible from his hatred of imperialism upon which it was based;
and there are those to-day, who, for the same reason and also because
of a mistaken notion of its dependence upon slavery, find Athenian
democracy justified, if at all, by its fruits; who contemplate its art
and literature with the same mingled feelings with which they view
the hectic beauty of the consumptive. Plato is not of their company.
The fruits he finds even more deleterious than the stock which bore
them. "In music," he writes,[49] meaning thereby poetry interpreted
by the voice with musical accompaniment,--"in music it was that
there first arose the universal conceit of omniscience and general
lawlessness;--freedom came following afterwards, and men, fancying
that they knew what they did not know, had no longer any fear, and the
absence of fear begets shamelessness. For what is this shamelessness,
which is so evil a thing, but the insolent refusal to regard the
opinion of the better by reason of an over-daring sort of liberty?"
Whereto the Spartan who is his interlocutor says: "Very true."
"Consequent upon this freedom," continues the speaker, "comes the
other freedom, of disobedience to rulers; and then the attempt to
escape the control and exhortation of father, mother, elders, and
when near the end, the control of the laws also; and at the very end
there is the contempt of oaths and pledges, and no regard at all for
the gods,--herein they exhibit and imitate the old so-called Titanic
nature, and come to the same point as the Titans when they rebelled
against God, leading a life of endless evils."
The modern critic, even if he endorses the sharp indictment of
Euripides, the poet of the most radical democracy,--that he destroyed
the character of Attic tragedy by introducing into it elements from
melodrama and the operatic concert, by perverting the grand style of
its text and music by vulgar flippancies and incongruous measures,
by substituting for artistic development of characters and plot
disturbing discussions of the woman question and the latest sensations
in philosophy and science, by turning the ancient gods and heroes
into burlesque through having them argue and act like contemporary
sycophants and sophists,--the modern critic, even Professor Shorey,[50]
for example, in his spirited defense of the Sophoclean drama, would
abandon Plato, I fancy, when he makes the drama the fundamental cause
for the decline of Athenian greatness.
In his _Laws_, Plato is dealing with what, chastened by age and
experience, he regarded as correctible things. The lust for private
possessions, for land and home, wife and children, he once placed in
this category, but he does so no longer; and in other respects he makes
wide concessions to human frailties. With greed for wealth, however,
he concluded no truce. It is Greeks, mark you, of whom Plato[51] says:
"Love of wealth wholly absorbs men, and never for a moment allows them
to think of anything but their own private possessions; on this the
soul of every citizen hangs suspended, and can attend to nothing but
his daily gain. Mankind are ready to learn any branch of knowledge,
and to follow any pursuit which tends to this end, and they laugh at
every other.... From an insatiate love of gold and silver, every man
will stoop to any art or contrivance, seemly or unseemly, in the hope
of becoming rich; and will make no objection to performing any action,
holy or unholy and utterly base, if only like a beast he have the power
of eating and drinking all kinds of things, and procuring for himself
in every sort of way the gratifications of his lusts."
Such were the evil conditions of the present when one citizen despoiled
his fellow and every city its neighbor. It had been different in
the past. Before the introduction of luxurious tastes to stimulate
inventions and of coined money to destroy a sense for the natural
limits of wealth, men had "worked in summer, commonly, stripped and
barefoot,[52] but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They fed
on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making
noble cakes and loaves; these they served up on a mat of reeds or on
clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew
or myrtle. And they and their children feasted, drinking of the wine
which they had made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the
praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. They took
care that their families did not exceed their means: having an eye to
poverty or war." But it was not to an age of such rude simplicity that
Plato would recall his contemporaries. He would, indeed, restore the
virtues which existed among the early country folk before the rise
of modern cities and the establishment of the capitalistic régime;
but, while hostile to transmarine commerce, retail trade, industries,
banking, interest, and all other accompaniments of interchange between
cities, which he regarded as generally undesirable and provocative of
wars and conquests, he imagines his ideal people in possession of city
culture and the articles of luxury and convenience secured through
the capitalistic organization. His citizens are, indeed, farmers, but
they are gentlemen farmers, who have their money invested in land and
slaves and live on their dividends, free to devote their leisure to
athletic, intellectual, and other worthy pursuits. They will be free
from greed of wealth because they all possess a competency, which Plato
defines as enough to live "temperately," Aristotle as enough to live
"with liberality and temperance." Neither philosopher thinks of poverty
except as the ordainer of body- and soul-destroying work, work which
degrades those who have to perform it, and makes slavery their natural
condition. Plato and Aristotle would make all tillers of the soil and
workers at the trades and crafts slaves and aliens. They were to exist
simply to provide the conditions of "good living" for their masters
or superiors; whereupon "we must not conceal from ourselves," says
Aristotle,[53] "that a country as large as the Babylonian or some other
of boundless extent will be required if it is to support five thousand
citizens in idleness." Even in America, where, to use the current
formula, ten per cent of the people own ninety per cent of the wealth,
the economic situation proposed as ideal by the most enlightened
reformers of the fourth century B.C. has hardly been reached. Whether
Plato failed to realize that he was condemning nine tenths of people
to perpetual bondage and ignorance; or, realizing it, refused to think
of anything but the perfection of the few, the conclusion is alike
inevitable: he had failed miserably to trace to their historical causes
both the cultural barrenness of Sparta and the astounding fertility of
his own Athens.
Had Aristotle lived in the commonwealth of Plato's _Laws_, he must
have suffered the same fate that Socrates suffered in Athens. For,
though far from ungrateful to his teacher, he was not a docile pupil.
By birth he was a Stagirite, by experience a citizen of the world. He
did not, like Plato, form his youthful impressions in a milieu that
was poisoned with bitterness at a demoralized democracy. The Athens
to which he came as a lad of seventeen was still a democracy, and a
very unhealthy one at that, and for it he had little liking; but his
was a more dispassionate nature than was Plato's. He was not a great
historian.[54] _That_ the discovery in Egypt in 1890 of one of his many
lost historical works has proven clearly; but he was a very learned
man, and perhaps came to as close a comprehension of earlier Greek
history as was possible for a political philosopher who had nothing to
guide him but the unscientific methods then in vogue for investigating
the past.