deliberately impersonal. In this respect it contrasts sharply with the
arts. The greatest artist may be the man who embodies in his verse or
stone or colors moods and thoughts which must be in "widest commonalty
spread," but which constitute in the aggregate his own self or soul.
History is of course a science, but not one of the common type. Unlike
the ordinary scientist, the scientific historian has to practice, not
self-suppression, but self-expansion. He must become conscious, so far
as that is possible, of the prejudices and special interests of his
own age, and, divested of them, he must migrate into a strange land
in order to bring back thence a report that is at once an unbiased
account of what he has seen and a story that is comprehensible to his
fellow-citizens, or, at least, to his fellow-historians. He dare not
treat the past as one in spirit with the present, or as resolvable
into precisely the same factors. He must be alive to the existence of
many different pasts leading to the present in no pre-determinable
succession, much less progression. The points must make a line, but the
line may be of any conceivable curve. Aristotle was far from arriving
at a full appreciation of the difficulties of historical inquiry; but,
unlike Plato, he took infinite pains to acquire historical knowledge.
He did not idealize the constitutions of the olden times. Since all men
then carried daggers, the presumption, he says, is that they needed
them and used them. Since conditions where violence reigned must have
continued indefinitely, if political change had been prohibited, he
finds it good as well as inevitable that laws be modified from time to
time. The permanency of those of Sparta is worthy of high praise; but
he traces the corruption and decay of the Spartan state to failure to
make needed reforms. In general he strikes a much more just balance
between Spartan and Athenian achievement than does Plato.
The first test he applies to institutions, such as the family and the
state, is their naturalness--their source in the nature of man as that
is revealed in his history. He was well aware that a political science
that was based upon _perfected_ human nature was, indeed, suited only
for "gods and sons of gods"; that the only principles of government
which had real value were those which had approved themselves in
practice. "All discoveries," he says,[55] "have been already made,
although in some cases they have not been combined, and in others, when
made, are not acted upon." "The _Politics_ of Aristotle," says a recent
writer, "is the one great book on the science of government because it
is the only one which is wholly empirical."
That is too high praise. For the _Politics_ of Aristotle differs
from the _Prince_ of Machiavelli in other respects, of course, but
noticeably in that the Greek has moral ideals, the Italian none.
With Aristotle, as with Plato, the state has an ethical purpose. He
requires it to justify not only its acts but its existence. Iniquitous
governments might exist,--Aristotle's world was full of them, in
fact,--and his mind was too curious of all things political for him to
leave them out of his observation: he has, indeed, considered minutely
the ways and means for the preservation of all kinds of states, and
has shown therein that he had as keen an eye for the realities as
had Machiavelli himself. But he would never have permitted, much
less advised, his legislator to use foul means to establish a just
government or fair means to establish an unjust one.
On the establishment of governments, moreover, he spends very little
thought. This, however, is with Machiavelli the main matter, as he
himself says near the opening of the second part of his work: "The
chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are
good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the
state is not well armed, it follows that when they are well armed
they have good laws. I shall leave the laws out of the discussion
and shall speak of the arms." Had the Greek heard him he would have
scoffed at both the argument and the conclusion. The argument is, of
course, sophistical, and the conclusion saved only by the fact that
Machiavelli had already considered the political weapons with which
rulers should operate. The _Politics_ is a handbook for legislators;
the _Prince_ a set of instructions for potentates. For the latter the
ways and means of _acquiring_ power was, in Machiavelli's judgment, the
all-important thing; whereas the legislator's possession of power is
taken for granted by Aristotle, and it is assumed throughout his entire
treatment that, if the lawgiver knows the constitution, the laws, and
the system of education which are best adapted to the economic, social,
and political conditions of his state, he can at once introduce them.
In a measure, therefore, the _Prince_ and the _Politics_ supplement
each other, though Aristotle would have been horrified at the idea.
For in his thinking, in anything approximating to an ideal world, each
city was free to order its internal affairs as it thought best, and,
having this liberty, if it was shown what was best, it must, according
to the Socratic psychology, immediately adopt it; whereas--to give the
devil his due--Machiavelli was actuated, in formulating his precepts
for Prince Lorenzo, by the vision of a united Italy, the realization of
which by his pupil was to wash away the crimes committed in subjecting
to his will the city-states of the peninsula. The conquest of Italy
was, accordingly, the goal of the ideal Prince's endeavor; whereas,
though Aristotle in one passage of the _Politics_[56] notes that "if
the Greeks were united in a single polity they would be capable of
universal empire," he regards such a union as highly undesirable. To
him a state that was not a city was a rudimentary and very imperfect
state. It ceased to be a state at all when it ceased to be free.
Hence a city could have subjects, that is to say, slaves, but not
dependencies. And since in his thinking it was natural inferiority
alone that justified slavery, and this was found especially among the
nations of Asia, and not at all in Greece, no Greek city could rightly
enslave the inhabitants of any other Greek city: it could wage war and
organize slave raids only against barbarians.
The birthmark which we have noted on Plato is an inheritance from
unreasoning hatred of democracy. That which mars above all the
political thinking of Aristotle comes from the aversion instinctively
felt by his age for imperialism. That this, too, is a disfigurement,
we may show in a few concluding remarks. "It is necessary," says
Aristotle[57] in concluding his plea that a mixed constitution is best
for the common run of states, "it is necessary to begin by assuming
a principle of general application, viz., that the part of the state
which desires the continuance of the polity ought to be stronger than
that which does not"; and he proceeds to point out that "strength"
consists neither in numbers, nor property, nor military or political
ability alone, but in all of them combined, so that regard has to
be taken of "freedom, wealth, culture, and nobility, as well as of
mere numerical superiority." Nothing could be more cold and objective
than the thinking of Aristotle on this important matter. Yet by an
extraordinary oversight he lets "strength" exert a decisive influence
_within_ the city-states, while he ignores altogether the effect of
varying population, wealth, and political and military ability in
determining the relations _between_ them.
The whole of the political thinking of Aristotle is dominated by the
idea that the world of men is made up of an infinite procession of
inferiors and superiors, the desire to forge ahead being one of the
most fundamental instincts of human beings. If an omniscient God were
to arrange the inhabitants of each city in a line according to their
real "strength," he would place few of them abreast. No Greek betrays
more naïvely than Aristotle does the national consciousness of the
Hellenes that they stood at the head of the honor roll of peoples. It
was, therefore, imperative upon them to conquer the Asiatics; for he
finds it to be a beneficent command of nature, issued primarily for the
advantage of the weaker, that superiors should rule inferiors.
Among moral philosophers Aristotle is characterized by his refusal
to let himself be led astray by a visionary ideal of human equality.
Nevertheless, while recognizing that Greek cities, even more than
individuals, differed in "strength," he refused to let the "strong"
use their advantage. He sets apart the sphere of interurban, that
is to say, international, relations as one in which the "universal
principle," that superior rule inferior, shall not apply. In a
visionary world, the "strong" man, on Aristotle's theory, is a "gentle"
man; but in the real world, he is a ruler. Had Aristotle not been
blinded by the prejudices of his age against imperialism, he must have
seen the necessity that in the real world the "strong" state would
also be the ruler. It is one of the enigmas of history that Aristotle
was the contemporary and subject of Philip II of Macedon, one of its
ironies that he was the tutor of Alexander the Great.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Schömann-Lipsius. _Griechische Altertümer_,^4 I (1892), pp. 197
_ff._
2. Bury, J.B. _A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the
Great_ (1900).
3. Meyer, Eduard. _Geschichte des Altertums_, V (1902).
4. Niese, B. _Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte und Landeskunde Lakedämons:
Die lakedämonischen Periöken._ In _Nachrichten der Gött. Gesell. d.
Wissenschaften_ (1906), pp. 101 _ff._
5. Arnim, Hans von. _Die politischen Theorien des Altertums_ (1910).
6. Gomperz, Th. _Greek Thinkers_, III (1905), IV (1912).
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 34: Schürer, _Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter
Jesu Christi_, I^3 (1901), pp. 236 _f._ See notes.]
[Footnote 35: 1 Macc. XII, 11.]
[Footnote 36: _Geschichte des Altertums, II^1_ (1893), pp. 562 _f_.]
[Footnote 37: Dickins, _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, XXXII (1912), p.
12.]
[Footnote 38: Schoemann-Lipsius, _Griechische Alterthümer_,^4 1 (1897),
pp. 261 _ff_.]
[Footnote 39: See particularly Niese, _op. cit._ in Select Bibliography
at end of chapter.]
[Footnote 40: Beloch, _Griechische Geschichte_, I (1893), pp. 439 _ff_.]
[Footnote 41: III, 3, 4 _ff._]
[Footnote 42: The successive tyrannies in Syracuse and the empires of
Syracuse over the West Greeks have been omitted of necessity in this
book. They have been examined with particular care by Freeman in his
_History of Sicily_ and with particular sympathy by Beloch in his
_Griechische Geschichte_.]
[Footnote 43: Xenophon, _Hellenica_, IV, 2, 11 _ff._]
[Footnote 44: _Laws_, v, p. 730. (The translation used here and
elsewhere in the book is that of Jowett.)]
[Footnote 45: For what is here omitted see the excellent little book by
von Arnim, _Die politischen Theorien des Altertums_.]
[Footnote 46: _Laws_, II, p. 664.]
[Footnote 47: _Laws_, II, p. 662.]
[Footnote 48: VII, p. 806.]
[Footnote 49: _Laws_, III, p. 700. The same initial cause of degeneracy
is postulated in Plato's _Republic_, VIII, p. 546.]
[Footnote 50: _Greek Literature_ (The Columbia University Press, 1912),
p. 11.]
[Footnote 51: _Laws_, VIII, p. 831.]
[Footnote 52: _Republic_, II, p. 372 _b_.]
[Footnote 53: _Politics_, II, 3 (6), 3, p. 1265 _a_. (The translation
used here and elsewhere in the book is that of Welldon: the text that
of Immisch.)]
[Footnote 54: Bury, J.B., _The Ancient Greek Historians_, pp. 182 _ff._]
[Footnote 55: _Politics_, II, 2 (5), 10, p. 1264 _a_.]
[Footnote 56: VII (IV), 6 (7), 1, p. 1327 _b_.]
[Footnote 57: _Politics_, IV (VI), 10 (12), 1, p. 1296 _b_.]
IV
ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND WORLD MONARCHY
Alexander the Great was born in 356 B.C. His mother, Olympias, was a
half-civilized Molossian princess whose fresh beauty, revealed at a
wild religious fête on mystic Samothrace, had caught the roving fancy
of Philip of Macedon. Their union had the further attraction to Philip
that it might bring Epirus under his suzerainty.
Philip wished his wife to be his chief concubine rather than his
consort. Olympias, a proud and passionate woman, chafed at her
husband's marital infidelities, and had the will and courage to revolt
and act for herself when Philip set her aside in 337 B.C. She cannot be
acquitted of guilty knowledge of the murder of Philip which occurred a
year later at the marriage arranged by him between her daughter and her
brother. The act was timed to assure the accession of her son, who was
its chief beneficiary.
"My father," Alexander is reported to have said twelve years later to
his mutinous Macedonian soldiers,[58] "found you nomadic and poor.
Clad in sheepskins, you tended your meagre herds on the mountains, and
had to fight grievously for them against the Illyrians, Triballi,
and Thracians on your borders. He gave you cloaks to wear in place of
hides, he led you down from the hills into the plains, he made you
the match in battle of the barbarians who dwelt near you; so that you
depended for your safety thenceforth, not on the inaccessibility of
your country, but on your own valor. He taught you to live in cities;
he appointed good laws and customs for your governance. He made you
lords, instead of slaves and subjects of those barbarians by whom
you and your possessions had long been harried. The greatest part of
Thrace he annexed to Macedon. By seizing the most suitable points on
the seacoast, he threw open your country to commerce. He gave you the
chance to work your mines in safety. The Thessalians, before whom
you had cowered, half dead with fright, he taught you to conquer,
and by humbling the Phocians he made your road into Greece, hitherto
narrow and difficult, broad and easy. To such a degree did he lower
the Athenians and the Thebans, who had ever been ready to fall upon
Macedon,--and herein had he my help,--that, instead of your paying
tribute to Athens and taking orders from Thebes, it was to us in turn
that they went for protection. Into the Peloponnesus he passed and set
matters to rights there; and, being appointed commander-in-chief of
united Greece in its projected war against Persia, he achieved this
high distinction, not so much for himself as for the commonwealth of
Macedonia."
The words are not those of the great king himself: they are at the
best a paraphrase of the ideas expressed by him on the occasion; at
the worst they are the free invention of an historian concerned only
with having Alexander say what the situation seemed to him to demand.
However that may be, they are a good account of the wonderful work
which Alexander, as a boy and young man, saw his father accomplish
for Macedon. "What a man we had to fight," said Demosthenes,[59] his
great enemy. "For the sake of power and dominion he had an eye put
out, his shoulder broken, an arm and a leg injured. Whatever limb
fortune demanded, that he gave up, so that the remnant of his body
might live in glory and honor." "Taking everything into account," says
Theopompus,[60] the far from generous contemporary historian of his
achievements, "Europe has never produced the like of Philip, the son of
Amyntas."
The court of Philip was rough and boorish. Revels, disgraced by
drunkenness and debauchery, interrupted the king's wars and amours.
In Pella men behaved like Centaurs and Læstrygonians, sneered the
fastidious Athenians; and the frenzy which wine inspired in Philip,
religion inspired in Olympias. In wild abandon she let herself be
possessed with the spirit of the god, Dionysus, and roamed the hills at
night in the company of other women equally intoxicated, brandishing
the thyrsus and the "wreathèd snake," shouting with ecstasy. Hers
was the religion which William Vaughn Moody, with poetic license,
singled out in the splendid _Prelude_ to his _Masque of Judgment_ as
characteristic of the world into which Christ was born. It was really
abhorrent to the best Greek feeling, and was repressed with stern
cruelty by Rome.
Passion, fierce and generous, the main source of heroic action, was
bred in the bone of Alexander. His imagination, naturally fervent, was
fed by tales of his ancestor Achilles which he heard at his mother's
knee, and fired by the vistas opened out to it by the exploits of
his father. At thirteen Philip gave him Aristotle as his tutor, and
during the formative years of his youth he studied poetry with this
great teacher. The poetry was Greek, not Macedonian. In it were found
the ideals of the people to which Alexander belonged in spirit and
in blood, if not in nationality; thence came the ideas tinged with
emotion which fasten themselves like barbed arrows in the memory of
the learner--the ideas of right and wrong, of heroism and tenderness,
of regard for parents and for duties; as Plato would say, of justice,
wisdom, temperance, and courage--which color all subsequent thinking
and constitute character. The Greeks have still something to teach us
as to the educative power of great poetry.
The commandments of Homer, whom Aristotle never ceases to cite in his
philosophical works, went over into the flesh and blood of Alexander,
and in him Achilles, the youthful hero of the Iliad, became in a real
sense incarnate. Next after Homer, Alexander rated and knew the Attic
tragedians, the continuators and improvers of Homer, according to
Aristotle, who, therefore, bases his _Poetics_ largely upon tragedy, as
being the highest form of dramatic art.
There can be no question of the influence of Aristotle in determining
the literary interest and taste of Alexander. It seems also clear
that the young prince came at least to know, and probably to share,
his teacher's curiosity as to natural history; for he afterwards sent
specimens back from Asia for Aristotle's botanical and zoölogical
collections. This being the case, it seems incredible that he should
have received from him no instruction in politics; that Aristotle, the
pupil of Plato, who had himself gone to Sicily to educate the young
Dionysius II for his high place, should have failed to communicate
to the future ruler of Macedon and of Greece the ideas which he had
formed as to the best kind of government. We can imagine the thousand
opportunities which their three years of close association in the
country seat at Mieza offered for the discussion of politics: how
Aristotle explained that virtue or merit or political capacity, or
however the elusive Greek word _arete_ be translated, gave the best
claim to leadership, and that the best of all forms of government
was that in which the man of the highest virtue ruled; "that," to
use his own words,[61] "wherever there is, as it happens, a whole
family or an individual so superior in virtue to all the rest that
the virtue of this individual or family exceeds that of all others in
the state, in that case it is but just that this family should enjoy
a regal or supreme position and that this individual should be king.
For ... this is not only in accordance with the principle of justice
usually alleged by the founders of polities, whether aristocracies,
oligarchies, or democracies, in all of which the claim to rule is
dependent on superiority, although the superiority is not the same;
but it accords also with the theory we laid down before. For assuredly
it is not proper to put to death or outlaw or even ostracize this
preëminent individual or to require him to become a subject in his
turn.... The only alternative is that they should yield him obedience,
and that he should be supreme, not on the principle of alternation,
but absolutely.... It will be a wrong," he urged,[62] "to treat him as
worthy of mere equality, when he is so vastly superior in virtue and
political capacity, for any person so exceptional may well be compared
to a deity upon the earth." Again and again, in season and out of
season, often doubtless to the annoyance of the impatient young prince,
who feared lest his father's victories should leave him nothing to do,
Aristotle[63] must have harped on the theme that "man is naturally a
city-dwelling animal and that one who is not a native of a city, if
the cause of his isolation be natural and not accidental, is either
a superhuman being or low in the scale of civilization, as he stands
alone like a 'blot' on the backgammon board. The 'clanless, lawless,
hearthless' man so bitterly described by Homer is a case in point; for
he is naturally a native of no city and a lover of war." We can imagine
the philosopher insisting that just as city life was synonymous with
civilized life, so city was synonymous with state; that the highest
of all human activities, the exercise of political functions, was
destroyed the moment a city became dependent upon an outside power;
that subjects could not exist permanently unless the conquered were
natural inferiors like the Asiatics; that it was, however, to the
interest of such persons that they should be ruled by their superiors,
in the case of Asiatics, by the Greeks. Such were the oft-repeated
maxims of the political philosopher in whose age Philip rejoiced, it
is said,[64] "that his son was born, since his teaching would make
him worthy of his father and equal to the position to which he was to
succeed." Such was the literary and political education of Alexander:
his military training and his knowledge of affairs he got in the
unrivaled school of his father; but in this connection it is well to
remember the admission of Napoleon:[65] "War is a singular art; I can
assure you that fighting sixty battles taught me nothing I did not know
at the first one. The essential quality of the general is firmness,
and that is a gift from heaven."
It is not my purpose to give a biographical sketch of Alexander, nor
yet to tell the story of his marvelous conquests, or to estimate the
consequences of his work on the later course of history. I have had in
mind while preparing this chapter first to emphasize such features in
his family and education as help to explain his political thinking, and
then, somewhat in Plutarch's fashion, to pick up such incidents in his
career as show concretely how precisely he aimed to organize his world
empire.
* * * * *
Where the political sagacity of Alexander stood forth most
conspicuously, according to Napoleon, was in the skill with which he
appealed to the imagination of men. Love of symbolism was ingrained
in his nature. By an act which he went deliberately out of his way to
perform he contrived again and again to illumine an entire situation,
to drive home a lesson, to reveal a policy. In a way it was a kind
of advertising; a means of conveying to the world at large in an
unmistakable manner the will and attitude of the monarch. But it was
more than that. It was the application in the world of politics of a
mode of expression with which the Greeks were familiar in the world of
the plastic arts.