CHAPTER I

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THE EVOLUTION OF STATES

AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH POLITICS

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._

ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD.

NEW ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD.

WINNOWINGS FROM WORDSWORTH.

WALT WHITMAN: An Appreciation.

MONTAIGNE AND SHAKESPEARE. (Second Edition, with additional Essays on

cognate subjects.)

BUCKLE AND HIS CRITICS: a Sociological Study.

THE SAXON AND THE CELT: a Sociological Study.

MODERN HUMANISTS: Essays on Carlyle, Mill, Emerson, Arnold, Ruskin, and

Spencer. (Fourth Edition.)

THE FALLACY OF SAVING: a Study in Economics.

THE EIGHT HOURS QUESTION: a Study in Economics. (Second Edition.)

THE DYNAMICS OF RELIGION: an Essay in English Culture-History.

By "M.W. Wiseman."

A SHORT HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT, Ancient and Modern. (Second Edition:

2 vols.)

PATRIOTISM AND EMPIRE. (Third Edition.)

STUDIES IN RELIGIOUS FALLACY.

WRECKING THE EMPIRE.

A SHORT HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.

CHRISTIANITY AND MYTHOLOGY. (Second Edition.)

CRITICISMS. 2 vols.

TENNYSON AND BROWNING AS TEACHERS.

ESSAYS IN ETHICS.

ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGY. 2 vols.

LETTERS ON REASONING. (Second Edition.)

DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE "TITUS ANDRONICUS"?

PIONEER HUMANISTS: Essays on Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza,

Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Gibbon, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

TRADE AND TARIFFS.

COURSES OF STUDY.

CHAMBERLAIN: A STUDY.

PAPERS FOR THE PEOPLE.

CHARLES BRADLAUGH. By Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner. Part II. by J.M.R.

PAGAN CHRISTS: Studies in Comparative Hierology. (Second Edition,

Revised and Expanded.)

THE MEANING OF LIBERALISM.

THE

EVOLUTION OF STATES

AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH POLITICS

BY

J.M. ROBERTSON

LONDON:

WATTS & CO.,

17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.

1912

"The sociologist has three main quests--first, he must try to discover

the conditions that determine mere aggregation and concourse. Secondly,

he must try to discover the law that governs social choices--the law,

that is, of the subjective process. Thirdly, he must try to discover

also the law that governs the natural selection and the survival of

choices--the law, that is, of the objective process."

--_Professor Giddings._

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE vii

PART I.

POLITICAL FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY

CHAP. I.--THE SUBJECT-MATTER 1

II.--ROMAN POLITICAL EVOLUTION 8

III.--GREEK POLITICAL EVOLUTION 36

IV.--THE LAWS OF SOCIO-POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT 54

PART II.

ECONOMIC FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY

CHAP. I.--ROMAN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION 75

II.--GREEK ECONOMIC EVOLUTION 98

PART III.

CULTURE FORCES IN ANTIQUITY

CHAP. I.--GREECE 121

II.--THE SARACENS 146

III.--ROME 158

EPILOGUE--A GENERAL VIEW OF DECADENCE 170

PART IV.

THE CASE OF THE ITALIAN REPUBLICS

NOTE ON LITERATURE 181

CHAP. I.--THE BEGINNINGS 183

II.--THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EVOLUTION 209

III.--THE POLITICAL COLLAPSE 233

PART V.

THE FORTUNES OF THE LESSER EUROPEAN STATES

CHAP. I.--IDEAS OF NATIONALITY AND NATIONAL GREATNESS 257

II.--THE SCANDINAVIAN PEOPLES 264

III.--THE HANSA 286

IV.--HOLLAND 291

Sec. 1. The Rise of the Netherlands 293

Sec. 2. The Revolt against Spain 301

Sec. 3. The Supremacy of Dutch Commerce 310

Sec. 4. Home and Foreign Policy 318

Sec. 5. The Decline of Commercial Supremacy 321

Sec. 6. The Culture Evolution 325

Sec. 7. The Modern Situation 328

V.--SWITZERLAND 331

Sec. 1. The Beginnings of Union 332

Sec. 2. The Socio-Political Evolution 338

Sec. 3. The Modern Renaissance 347

VI.--PORTUGAL 355

Sec. 1. The Rise and Fall of Portuguese Empire 355

Sec. 2. The Colonisation of Brazil 361

PART VI.

ENGLISH HISTORY TILL THE CONSTITUTIONAL PERIOD

CHAP. I.--BEFORE THE GREAT REBELLION 369

II.--THE REBELLION AND THE COMMONWEALTH 414

III.--FROM THE RESTORATION TO ANNE 436

IV.--INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION 458

CONCLUSION 468

INDEX 473

PREFACE

The following treatise is an expansion, under a new title, of one

originally published (1900) under the name of _An Introduction to

English Politics_. Several friendly reviewers of that work objected, not

unjustly, that its title was something of a misnomer, or at least an

imperfect indication of its contents. It had, as a matter of fact,

originated remotely in a lecture delivered as preliminary to a course on

"Modern English Politicians" (from Bolingbroke to Gladstone), the aim of

the prefatory address being to trace in older politics, home and

foreign, general laws which should partly serve as guides to modern

cases, or at least as preparation for their scientific study; while the

main course dealt with modern political problems as they have arisen in

the careers and been handled by the measures of modern English

statesmen. It was that opening exposition, developed into an essay, and

published as a series of magazine articles, that had been further

expanded into this treatise, by way of covering the ground more

usefully; and the original name is therefore retained as a sub-title.

It is perhaps unnecessary to explain that the book makes no pretension

to being a complete or systematic treatment of political history, or of

political forms and theories. The object in view from the first has

been, not the technical anatomy or documentary history of institutions,

but the bringing into light of the ruling forces in all political life,

ancient and modern alike. It seeks to help the reader to fulfil the

precept of Montaigne: "_Qu'il ne luy apprenne pas tant les histoires

qu'a en juger._"

Since it was first written, there has been so much fresh sociological

study of history that I need not repeat the justification originally

offered for my undertaking. Alike as to ancient and modern history, the

effort of scholars is now more and more towards comprehension of

historic causation in terms of determining conditions, the economic

above all; so much so that I have profited somewhat in my revision from

various recent works, and might with more leisure have done so more

fully. Revised as it is, however, the book may serve to expound views of

history which are still not generally accepted, and to call in question

fallacious formulas which seem to me still unduly common.

On any view, much remains to be done before the statement of historic

causation can reach scientific thoroughness; and it may well be that

some of my theories will incur modification. All I claim for them is

that they are made in the light of a study of the concrete process; and

I am satisfied that fuller light is to be obtained only in that

direction. In the end, doubtless, conflicts of historical interpretation

will turn upon problems of psychology. A contemporary German expert of

distinction, Prof. Lamprecht, in his able lectures on the problem _What

is History?_ (Eng. trans. 1905), lays it down that the main problem of

every scientific history of mankind is the "deducing from the history of

the most important communities of men the evolution of the breadth of

consciousness"; and again that "the full historical comprehension of a

single change or of a single phenomenon, with their historical

significance, can only be acquired from the most general principles;

that is to say, from the application of the highest universal-historical

categories." If I understand Prof. Lamprecht aright, he here means

simply that we properly understand the motivation of men in the past in

terms of our own psychosis, conceived as in touch only with their data.

This seems to me substantially sound. But on the other hand I doubt the

utility of his apparent purpose of explaining modern historic

developments in terms of special psychic changes or movements in

communities, considered as forces. That way seems to lie reversion to

the old and vain device of explaining the course of nations in terms of

their "characters."

In any case, however, we have Prof. Lamprecht's avowal that "It would be

a study of great value to establish, by comparative work in universal

history, what are the constantly recurring economic factors of each

period which are so uniformly followed by the development of other

higher intellectual values." That is as full a recognition of the

"economic factor" as I am concerned to contend for, if it be understood

that economic motives are on the one hand recognised as affecting social

action in general, and on the other that varying forms of social

machinery react variously on intellectual life. Upon such hypotheses the

following inquiry proceeds; to such conclusions it leads.

Obviously all critical exposition, historical or other, is an attempt to

influence the psychic processes of the reader, to make him "feel" this

and "think" that; and in this sense any resulting change of conduct

means the play of "the psychic factor." But that is only another way of

saying that the psychic factor is conditioned by material circumstances,

by knowledge, and by ignorance. To insist on the perpetual social

significance of all three is the general aim of this book.

_September, 1912._

PART I

POLITICAL FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY

CHAPTER I

THE SUBJECT MATTER

Sec. 1

Politics, in its most general and fundamental character, is the strife

of wills on the ground of social action. As international politics is

the sum of the strifes and compromises of States, so home politics is

the sum of the strifes and compromises of classes, interests, factions,

sects, theorists, in all countries and in all ages. In studying it,

then, we study the evolution of an aggregate, a quasi-organism, in terms

of the clashing forces of its units and of their spontaneous

combinations.

This may seem too obvious and simple a truth to need formal telling; and

yet no truth is more often missed or set aside by writers who deal with

political history. The past course of nations, when it is sought to be

explained at all, is by two writers out of three accounted for by

certain supposed qualities of character in the given nation as a whole,

instead of by the specially conditioned play of forces common to all

peoples.[1] For instance, M. Taine, in the preface to the first volume

of his fascinating work, _Les origines de la France contemporaine_, goes

about to justify his own political indifferentism by stating that in

eighty years his country had thirteen times changed its constitution.

"_We_," he says, have done this; and "_we_ have not yet found that which

suits _us_."[2] It is here implied that a body of men collectively and

concurrently seeking for a fixed constitution have failed, and that the

failure is discreditable--that those who thus seek and fail have been

badly employed. It is by implication denied that successive changes of a

constitution may fitly be regarded as a process of growth and healthy

adjustment of parts: the ideal of political health is assumed to be a

state of fixity. Thus does indifferentism, naturally if not necessarily,

miss the point of view from which itself is to be studied as one of the

forces whose conflict the true historian ought to analyse.

There is no national "we" aiming collectively at a fixed and final

constitution; nor are the successive constitutions of France as such

more significant of failure or permanent harm than the successive

changes in the professedly unchanged constitution of Great Britain,

though the violent kinds of change are as such harmful. If M. Taine had

but applied with rigour the logic he once before prescribed, soundly if

wittily, for all problems alike, he could not have begun his history

with that delusive abstraction of a one-minded community, failing to

achieve "their" or "its" purpose. "_Je n'en sais rien_," he remarks with

a shrug, over the protest of M. Royer-Collard that certain scientific

reasoning will make Frenchmen revolutionary; "_est-ce qu'il y a des

Francais?_"[3] In dead earnest he now assumes that France consists just

of the single species "Frenchmen," whose constitution-building is a

corporate attempt to build a French house to live in; when all that is

truly historical in his own book goes to show clearly enough that French

constitutions, like all others, are products of ever-varying and

conflicting passions and interests of sets of people in France who are

"Frenchmen" merely when they happen to act in concert against other

geographical groups. At no moment were all of the French people

consenting parties to any one of the thirteen constitutions. Then there

was no collective failure.

Of course M. Taine knew this well enough in his capacity of narrator;

but as teacher he could not escape from the rut dug for his thought by

his fatalism. He must needs make the synthetic abstraction of "we,"

which excludes the political analysis essential to any practical

explanation; and it inevitably followed that his generalisations were

merely pseudo-biological, and not what is most wanted in

history--sociological truth rooted in psychology and biology. In

denuding himself alike of hopes and fears, M. Taine really gave the

great illustration of the truth of his own penetrating comment on

Merimee,[4] that he who will be duped by nothing ends in being the dupe

of his distrust. He will not be duped by this ideal or that; he will not

care enough for any to have a strong wish to see it realised; and so he

comes to be duped by the wish to disprove all, to work down all

sociology to the plane of cynical pseudo-biology. The enthusiastic

amateur can show it, can convict the critic of hearing only the devil's

advocate in every moral process,[5] and of becoming at length the

historic oracle of those, of all readers, who are most alien to his

philosophy.

Such an outcome, in the work of such a critic, is vividly instructive.

At worst, indeed, he has a positive value as the extremest reactionist

against the merely partisan method of history, which is almost all we

have had in England since the French Revolution, down to the other day.

After M. Taine has passed, fools' paradises must needs fall in market

value. But when the devil's advocate has made his round, we must still

plough and eat, and the paradises must just be laid out for new sowing.

The evil of theoretical extremes is not so much their falsehood as their

irrelevance. If we are to instruct each other in conduct, it must be in

terms of sympathies and antipathies; and if we are to profit by a study

of politicians, who are among the most generally typical of men, and of

politics, which is the expression of so much of life, we must go about

it as humanists and not as fatalists.

Sec. 2

Humanity, however, will not suffice to save us from false philosophy if,

as humanists, we seek to gain our polemical ends by M. Taine's didactic

methods. He, naturally so much of an analyst, took to pseudo-synthesis

when he wished with little labour to discredit certain popular

aspirations. But pseudo-synthesis is the favourite expository process of

many men with ardent aspirations, and of many writers who are friendly

enough to the aspirations of their fellows. By pseudo-synthesis I mean

that process, above exemplified, of "cooking" an intricate moral problem

by setting up one or more imaginary entities, to whose volition or

potency the result is attributed. It was the method of medieval science;

and it is still popular among the experts as well as the amateurs of

historical science. It was the ordinary expedient of Comte, in whose

pages history becomes a Jonsonian masque of personified abstractions;

and Buckle too often resorts to it. But hear a learned and judicious

English Liberal, not to be suspected of doctrinary extravagance:--

"As in time past Rome had sacrificed domestic freedom that she

might be the mistress of others, so now" [in the later Empire] "to

be universal she, the conqueror, had descended to the level of the

conquered" [in respect of Caracalla's edict giving to all subjects

of the Empire the rights of Roman citizenship]. "But the sacrifice

had not wanted its reward. From her came the laws and the language

that had overspread the world; at her feet the nations laid the

offerings of their labour; she was the head of the Empire and of

civilisation."[6]

The "she" of this passage I take to be as purely imaginary an entity as

Phlogiston; and it is not easy to see how a method of explanation which

in physical science is found worse than barren can give any edification

in the study of history. To say nothing of the familiar explanation that

Caracalla's sole motive in conferring the citizenship on the provincials

was the desire to lay on them corresponding taxes,[7] the proposition

has no footing in political actualities. "Rome's self-abnegation that

she might Romanise the world"[8] expresses no fact in Roman volition,

thought, or deed; it is not the mention of a sentiment which swayed

men's action, but the attempt to reduce a medley of actions to the

semblance of a joint volition. There was no "Rome" capable of

"self-abnegation" and susceptible of "reward." Why, then, should it be

said? It is said either because the writer permits himself to fill in a

perspective with a kind of pigment which he would not employ in his

foreground, or because he is still too much under the sway of old

methods when he is generalising conventional knowledge instead of

analytically reaching new.[9] Either way the lapse is only too

intelligible. And if an innovating expert, dealing with old facts, runs

such risks, great must be those run by plain people when they seek to

attain a generalised knowledge of facts which are the battle-ground of

current ideals. Only by perpetual analysis can we hope partly to escape

the snare of the pseudo-synthetic, the traps of rhetoric and exegetic

fiction.

Sec. 3

The term "pseudo-synthesis" implies, of course, that there may be a true

synthesis. What is necessary to such synthesis is that there shall have

been a preliminary analysis; but a synthesis once justly made is the

greatest of helps to new analyses. Now there is one such which may

safely be brought to bear on the study of practical politics, because it

is an axiom alike of inorganic physics and of biology, and a commonplace

of human science, though seldom used as a means of historic

generalisation. This is the simple principle that all energy divides

ostensibly into forces of attraction and of repulsion.

[The principle thus stated should be compared with the theorem of

Kant as to the correlative forces of sociability and unsociability

(_Idee zu einer allgemein Geschichte_), and the important and

luminous formula of Professor Giddings, that all sociological

processes, properly so called, turn upon "consciousness of kind"

(_Principles of Sociology_, 1896, 3rd ed. pp. 17-19, and Preface;

and in earlier writings by Professor Giddings, there mentioned).

The scientific value of that formula is obvious; but other ways of

stating the case may still serve a purpose. The view in the text I

find to have been partly anticipated by Shaftesbury, _Essay on the

Freedom of Wit and Humour_, 1709, pt. iii, Sec. 2 (_Characteristics_,

ed. 1733, i, pp. 111-12), who is followed by Eusebe Salverte, _De

la Civilisation depuis les premiers Temps historiques_, 1813, p.

53. Shaftesbury even anticipates in part the formula of Professor

Giddings in the passage: "If anything be natural, in any Creature

or any Kind, 'tis that which is preservative of the Kind itself,"

and in the sequel. As Professor Giddings traces (pref. to 3rd ed.

p. x) the first suggestion of his "consciousness of kind" to Adam

Smith's _Theory of the Moral Sentiments_, which is certainly in

the line of descent from Shaftesbury, there may really be a causal

connection.]

That principle obviously holds of the relations of men in society as it

does of their muscular action and of their moral and intellectual life;

and so fundamental is the fact that when we study human history in view

of it, we find it more and more difficult to suppose that it will ever

cease to hold. That is to say, it is almost impossible to conceive state

of life in which the forces of attraction and repulsion shall not

operate energetically in the moral and intellectual relations of human

beings. From the primitive and the barbaric stages in which the sight of

an alien moves the savage to such destructive rage as is seen in some

dogs at the sight of others, or in which a difference of personal odour

rouses a no less spontaneous repulsion--as in Chinese against Europeans,

or in Europeans against Chinese[10]--down to the fierce battle in

self-governing countries over every innovating law, or that strife of

opinion in which these lines play their part, the clash of opposing

tendencies is perpetual, ubiquitous, inevitable. And so difficult is it

to conceive any cessation that at once many observers leap from the

general principle to the particular conclusion that all the _modes_ in

which the action and reaction, the attractions and repulsions of

individuals and groups, have operated in the past must needs operate in

the future. They conclude, that is, that the particular phenomenon of

WAR, above all, is chronic, and can never definitely disappear. Thus M.

Zola, looking around him and finding strife everywhere, decides that all

the past _forms_ of strife are inevitably recurrent.[11] It may be well

at the outset to insist that the general principle involves no such

particular necessity.

War is simply a form in which the instincts of attraction and repulsion

have operated in human societies during ages in which certain

psychological and physiological types have been normal. It may very well

recur, with growing infrequency, for a long time to come; but it is not

rationally to be regarded as a necessary function of the grand

biological forces. What does seem certain is a different thing--that the

forces of attraction and repulsion will always operate in _some_ form;

and that the very fact of their finding less expression in the mode of

physical strife will imply their coming into play in other modes, such

as the strife of ideals, doctrines, and class interests as they are

expressed in politics without bloodshed. The general law is that the

forces of attraction and repulsion, as exhibited in human thought or

feeling, run during the earlier stages of growth in channels which may

be broadly regarded as animal; and that when altered political and

social conditions partly or wholly close these channels, the biological

forces open for themselves new ones.

War is precisely the blindest, the least rational, the least human of

all the forms of human conflict, inasmuch as it is the collective

clashing of communities whose members, divided among themselves by many

real differences of interest, bias, and attraction, are set against each

other, as wholes--if by anything higher than animal pugnacity--either by

the mere ideals or appetites of rulers or leaders, or by more or less

imaginary differences of interest, seen under the moral illusion of the

most primitive of social instincts--the _sensus gregis_. As evolution

proceeds, the blind form may be expected to disappear, and the more

reasoned forms--that is, the inter-social and intellectual--to develop.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: It is one of the shortcomings of Buckle that, though he at

least once (_Introd. to Hist. of Civ. in Eng._, Routledge's ed. p. 352)

recognises the futility of explaining history in terms of national

character, he repeatedly lapses to that method, and speaks of peoples as

if they were of one will, bent, and mind. (Ed. cited, edit. notes pp.

354, 385, 540, 553, 558, 719, etc.). See below, pt. iii, ch. iii, second

note, as to Eduard Meyer.]

[Footnote 2: Similarly De Tocqueville begins _L'ancien regime et la

revolution_ with "_Les Francais ont fait...._" (Avant-Propos, 2e ed. p.

5), and makes the successors of the Revolutionists "_les memes

Francais_" (p. 12). Soon he makes the Revolution an entity (p. 35).

Compare with Taine's passage the programme of the first number of Le

Play's _La Reforme Sociale_, 1881 (cited by H. Higgs, _Quarterly Journal

of Economics_, Boston, July, 1890, p. 418), which might almost have been

written by Taine. In the case of Le Play the ideal of a

quasi-patriarchal order, very stable and very fixed, led to an attitude

resembling at points that of Taine. It is easy to see how the natural

recoil from political turmoil has, since the French Revolution,

developed successive schools such as those of Saint Simon, Comte, and Le

Play, all aiming at stability and order, all seeking to elbow out the

cosmic force of Change. In Taine's case the result was an acceptance of

Spencer's "administrative nihilism."]

[Footnote 3: _Les philosophes classiques du XIXe siecle en France_,

3ieme ed. p. 37.]

[Footnote 4: _Lettres de Prosper Merimee a une Inconnue_, pref. _end_.

When, however, M. Taine wrote on Sainte-Beuve's death (1869), he laid

down, as one of the necessities of the search for "the true truth," this

very determination "to be the dupe of nothing and nobody, above all of

oneself" (_Derniers Essais_, p. 52). Years before an acute critic had

said of his literary criticism: "M. Taine, at bottom, let us say it with

bated breath, is the dupe of himself when he supposes himself to have

given a rigorous formula, an exact definition, a chemical analysis of

his author" (Frederic Morin, _Les hommes et livres contemporains_, 1862,

p. 33). Compare the brochure of Professor Edouard Droz, _La critique

litteraire et la science_, 1893, discussed in the present writer's _New

Essays towards a Critical Method_, 1897, p. 13 _sq._]

[Footnote 5: See _Napoleon et ses detracteurs_, par le Prince Napoleon,

p. 13, and _passim_.]

[Footnote 6: Professor Bryce, _The Holy Roman Empire_, 8th ed. p. 7.]

[Footnote 7: Gibbon, ch. vi (Bohn ed. i, pp. 201, 212-13). In the same

way, Julius Caesar, and the triumvirs after him, were in their day moved

to extend citizenship in Italy because of the falling-off in the free

Roman population. Widened citizenship meant a wider field for Italian

recruiting. At that time the extension involved not taxation, but

immunities; but, according to Cicero, Antony received great sums from

the Sicilians in payment for the privilege he conferred upon them. _Ad

Atticum_, xiv, 12; _Philipp._ ii, 36.]

[Footnote 8: Bryce, p. 9.]

[Footnote 9: A different explanation holds in the case of Hegel,

who--after very pointedly affirming that "nothing great in the world has

been accomplished without passion" (_Leidenschaft_), in the sense of

individual interest and self-seeking aim, and that "an individual is

such and such a one, not a man in general, for that is not an existence,

but one in particular" (_Philos. der Geschichte_, 2te Aufl. p.

30)--proceeds to express historical processes in terms of universal

spirit, abstract universality, and so forth. Here the trouble is the

cherished tendency to verbal abstraction.]

[Footnote 10: Cp. Professor H.A. Giles, _The Civilisation of China_,

1911, pp. 214-15. Smell appears to be an insuperable bar to any general

association of "whites" with "blacks," and it probably enters into many

racial repugnances. Compare the curious device of Lombard women to set

up by an artificial bad smell a repugnance on the part of their alien

suitors such as they themselves may have felt. Gummere, _Germanic

Origins_, 1892, p. 138.]

[Footnote 11: Cited by Tolstoy, _The Kingdom of God is Within You_, ch.

vi, end.]

CHAPTER II

ROMAN POLITICAL EVOLUTION

Sec. 1

A survey of the ancient history best known to us may help to make

clearer the fatality of strife and the impossibility of solving it save

by transcending the physical plane. The habit of summing up all Roman

history as so many planned actions of "the Romans," or of "Rome," is in

singular contrast with the imbroglio of the records. In the social stage

discovered to us by the analysis of the oldest known institutions,

"early" Rome is already an artificial political organism, far removed

from the simple life of tribal barbarism.[12] There are three tribes;

the very name of tribe, it may be, comes from the number three[13] in

the flection _tribus_; and the subdivisions are fixed by the numbers

three and ten.[14] Behind the artificial "tribe" is a past in which, it

may be, a group of villages forms the _pagus_ or settlement.[15]

Already privilege and caste are fully established, even between classes

of freemen; and only by inference can we reach the probable first bases

of civic union among the ruling caste. They were clearly a caste of

conquerors. Their _curiae_, apparently the oldest form of group after the

family or the clan,[16] are artificially arranged, numbering thirty,

each _curia_ containing nominally a hundred _gentes_, each _gens_

nominally ten families.

Eduard Meyer (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 511) decides for the

view of L. Lange, that the historic appellation of Roman citizens,

_Quirites_, derives from _curia_. The ancients had several theories

as to the name. One (Festus) was that the Sabine goddess Curis gave

her name to the Sabine town Cures (cp. Athene, Athenai), whence,

according to the legend, had come a band under Titus Tatius, who

conquered the Capitoline and Quirinal hills, and had for tribe-god

Quirinus. Cp. Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 82. Mommsen (Eng. tr. 1862, i,

57, 78, _notes_) has secured currency for the other tradition,

argued for by F.W. Newman (_Regal Rome_, 1852, pp. 55-56), that the

root is the Sabine word _curis, quiris_, a spear. For this somewhat

unplausible theory there is support in the fact that in the cognate

Gaelic _coir_, pronounced quir, means a spear, and that there is

derived thence _curiadh_, a warrior. Mommsen is followed by

Merivale, _General History of Rome_, 5th ed. p. 13; and Greenidge,

_Roman Public Life_, p. 33. Pott and Becker, who derived _Quirites_

from _curia_, explain the latter word as _co-viria_, the band of

warriors. And as the view that "Athene" comes from "Athenai," not

_vice versa_, has the stronger claims to acceptance, the more

acceptable presumption is that "Curis" and Quirinus evolved from

the _curia_. If _Quirites_ meant spearmen, how could Caesar be

understood to cow mutineers by simply addressing them as Quirites

[= citizens]? The curia theory is supported by the facts that "the

Roman constitutional tradition ... makes the division into curies

alone originate with the origin of the city"; that it "appears as

an essential part of the Latin municipal system;" and that of all

the old divisions it seems to be the only one that "really

fulfilled important functions in the primitive constitutional

organisation" (Mommsen, B. i, ch. v, pp. 73-75).

These _curiae_ may be conceived as derived from inner tribal or clan

groups formed in the conquering stage, since they are ostensibly united

by their collective or curial _sacra_, the rites for which the grouped

_gentes_--who each have their private _sacra_--assemble in a special

place, under a special priest. They still retain the usage of a common

banquet,[17] the earliest form of collective religion known to us.[18]

Apart from the members of the _curiae_ are the conquered _plebs_,[19]

"the many" not enslaved, but payers of tribute; without share in the

_curiae_ or vote in the _comitia_, or assembly, and without part in the

curial or other _sacra_.

On this head there has been some gratuitous confusion. Schwegler

(i, 621 _sq._) gives convincing reasons for the view that in early

times the plebs were not members of the _curiae_. Cp. Ihne, as

cited, pp. 110, 127; and Fustel de Coulanges, p. 278 _sq._ Meyer

(ii, 513, 521) asserts, on the contrary, without any specification

of periods, that the _curiae_ included plebeians as well as

patricians. The contradiction seems to arise out of inattention to

chronology, or a misreading of Mommsen. That historian rightly sets

forth in his history (B. ii, ch. i; Eng. trans. ed. 1862, i,

264-65) that the plebs were not admitted into the _comitia curiata_

before the "Servian" period; adding that these bodies were "at the

same time" almost totally deprived of their prerogatives. In his

_Roemisches Forschungen_, 1864, i, 144 _sq._, he shows that they

were admitted in the "_historic_ period"--when the _comitia_ in

question had ceased to have any legal power, and when, as he

elsewhere states, the admission "practically gave little more than

the capacity for adrogation" (_Roemisches Staatsrecht_, Bd. iii,

Abth. i, p. 93). Here again he states that "to equal rights in the

curies, especially to the right of vote in the comitia, the

plebeians attained only in the later times" (_Id._ p. 72). Yet

Professor Pelham, in asserting (p. 21; cp. p. 46) that "the

_primitive_ Roman people of the thirty _curiae_ included all the

freemen of the community, _simple as well as gentle_," gives the

note: "The view here taken on the vexed question of the purely

patrician character of the _curiae_ is that of Mommsen (_Roem.

Forschungen_, vol. i)."

When this error is corrected, the question ceases to be vexed.

Schwegler has disposed of the blunder of Dionysius, who ascribes to

the plebeians a share in the _curiae_ from the beginning; and it is

not disputed that they were allowed to enter when the _comitia

curiata_ had been practically superseded by the _comitia

centuriata_. It is to be noted that the denial of the inclusion of

the plebeians in the original _curiae_ does not apply to the

_clientes_, whose status, though non-patrician, had been different

from that of the true plebs. M. Delaunay, who argues that the

plebeians were all along admitted to the _curiae_, adds the

qualification: "Doubtless not the entire mass of the plebeians, but

only those who were ... attached to the gentes" (Robiou et

Delaunay, _Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome_, 1884, i, 21). But

who were these _gentilitia_ if not the _clientes_? (cp. _loc. cit._

p. 26).

The _populus_ at this stage, then, is not "the people" in the

modern sense; it is the aggregate of the privileged _curiae_, and

does not include the plebs,[20] which at this stage is not even

part of the army. But a separate quasi-plebeian class, the

_clientes_ of the patricians, are in a state of special dependence

upon the latter, and in a subordinate fashion share their

privileges.

The _clientes_ have very much the air of being primarily the

servile or inferior part of the early clan or _gens_, as distinct

from its "gentlemen." Cp. Burton, _Hist. of Scotland_, viii,

524-25, as to the lower and the higher (duniewassal) orders in the

Scottish Highland clans. "In the old life of the _pagus_ and the

_gens_ the weaker sought the protection of the stronger by a

willing vassalage" (Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, p. 6). The

_clientes_ are the nominal as distinct from the real "family" of

the chief or _patronus_. M. Delaunay (_Les Institutions de

l'ancienne Rome_, as cited, i, 27) thinks with Mommsen (so also

Dupond, pp. 20-21) that they were mainly freedmen, but gives no

evidence. As to the meaning and etymology of the word (_clientes_

from _cluere_ or _cliere_, "to listen" or "obey"), cp. Newman,

_Regal Rome_, p. 49; Ortolan, p. 29; Mommsen, _Roemisches

Staatsrecht_, III, i, 1887, p. 63. The theory that the plebeians

were all _clientes_ (Ortolan, pp. 25, 27) seems untenable, though

Mommsen (_Staatsrecht_, III, i, 63) pronounces that "all

non-patricians were clients"; and Meyer (ii, 521) appears to

acquiesce. Only in theory can the mass of the plebs have been

clients at any time. Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, pp. 277-78. The

_clientes_, it seems clear, were as such admitted to the _comitia_,

whereas the plebs were not. See the citations of Fustel de

Coulanges from Livy, ii, 56-64; also iii, 14 (Dupond, p. 22, doubts

the fact). On any view, the _clientela_ rapidly dwindled, passing

into the plebs (cp. Dupond, p. 23; Livy, vi, 18). As to its early

status see Fustel de Coulanges, p. 273 _sq._ Ortolan, after

representing all plebeians as clients, speaks (p. 31) of plebeians

belonging to no gens (so Aulus Gellius, x, 20).

Wealth is not yet a matter of land-owning--the main element of

property is cattle;[21] and the bulk of the land is _ager

occupatorius_, a great "common" on which all men's cattle feed.

The voteless free plebeian has simply his home and homestead, "toft

and croft," the latter being two yokes (= five roods) of land, on

which he raises the grain and olives and vegetables that feed his

household.[22] This goes to his heir. Here arises another problem.

E.W. Robertson (as last cited) decides that the "two yokes" can

have been only "the homestead, and could not have included the farm

or property attached to it." The _heredium_, he holds, following

Pliny (_Hist. Nat._, xix, 19), and citing Livy (vi, 36), was only

in the _hortus_, the house and garden, "and not in the arable or

pasture land." But surely the arable was on a different footing

from the pasture land (_ager compascus_). Corn was not grown in

common, unless it were by the _gentes_ (Mommsen, vol. i, pp. 38,

72, 193). The solution seems to be that given by Greenidge, that as

"the _heredium_ consisted only of two _jugera_ (Festus, p. 53), an

amount obviously insufficient for the maintenance of a family,"

"there must have been _ager privatus_ as well, owned by some larger

unit, and this unit would naturally have been the gens" (_Roman

Public Life_, p. 15).

Among general historians of Rome Mommsen seems to be the first to

note this circumstance, and he gives neither details nor evidence.

Schwegler, discussing (i, 619) the theory of Puchta that there was

no private property in Rome before the "arrival" of the plebs,

admits that among the ancient Germans the land was yearly

apportioned among the groups as such, but finds that "Roman

tradition tells of nothing of the kind." (So Greenidge, p. 15.) In

any case, Mommsen, while insisting that "the fields (_sic_) of the

gentes (_Geschlechts-Genossen_) in the earliest period lay

together" (_Staatsrecht_, III, i, 24; cp. p. 94), admits that such

gentile ownership had at an early stage disappeared (_frueh

verschwundenen_). There was then no communal tillage in the

historic period. Cincinnatus, in the legend, returns to the plough

on his own croft. Further, the early complaints cited by Livy as to

the "two yokes" being "hardly enough to raise a roof on or to make

a grave in" were addressed by the tribunes on behalf of plebeians

to patricians who each had above five hundred yokes. The non-client

plebeians then had no share in the land of the _gentes_ or clans,

being themselves in large part dispossessed by conquest.

Meyer (ii, 519) pronounces that the plot of two yokes was, "of

course, no farm, but a kitchen-garden," adding: "It is also the

personal land of the small farmers and day-labourers who look after

the lands of the large landholders, not the original private

holding in contrast to the mark belonging in common to the _gens_

(_Geschlecht_) or commune (_Gauverband_)." But on the previous page

Meyer says that "the land was settled not by the _gentes_, but

communally (_genossenschaftlich_) by unions of equal freemen." If

these, then, were the _curiae_ (the Mark, says Meyer in this

connection, did _not_ belong to the _gentes_), they did not include

the plebs; and we come back to the datum that the free plebeian had

no means of support save his five roods and what beasts he had on

the public pasture. The pasture-land, again, is surmised by Mommsen

(ch. xiii, p. 201) to have been small in area relatively to the

arable-land communally owned and cultivated by the _gentes_ or

clans--a proposition irreconcilable with the evidence as to the

quantity of cattle. As to the two yokes of land, Schwegler decides

(i, 618) that it was "nowise inadequate" as arable-land, in view of

the extraordinary fruitfulness of Italy, and, further, of the

circumstance that "the free burghers had also the use of the common

land" (for pasture). We are to remember that Italian land could

yield two crops in a year. (Niebuhr, _Lebensnachrichten_, ii, 245,

cited by Schwegler.)

On the general problem as to why or how the land once communally

tilled ceased to be so, we have still no better light than the old

generalisation of Hobbes in reply to his own question: "Upon what

impulsives, when all was equally every man's in common, men did

rather think it fitting that every man should have his inclosure?"

"I found," he puts it, "that from a community of goods there must

needs arise contention whose enjoyment should be greatest, and from

that contention all kind of calamities must unavoidably ensue."

[Epistle Dedicatory to _Philosophical Rudiments concerning

Government and Civil Society_ (translation of _De Cive_), 1651. Cp.

Goldwin Smith, _The United States_, 1893, p. 23.]

The patrician, of course, had a larger homestead, at least "four yokes"

in the earlier stages; later seven; later still twenty-five.[23] But the

patricians were "a class of occupying landholders rather than

proprietary landowners."[24] The "public land" was literally so, save in

so far as the patricians would have the ampler (and often untaxed or

low-rented) use of it for their much larger herds;[25] or, it may be,

for cultivation by their clients or slaves. _Heredia_, however, were

saleable, and herein lay one usual path to the dispossession and

enslavement of freemen; while at all stages there went on that pressure

of population on means of subsistence which underlies all economic

history.

Thus far, however, mere conquest has done less to impoverish and enslave

the mass than the economic process is to do later. The conquerors,

probably highland herdsmen to begin with, take estates for themselves,

but leave the mass of the conquered in possession or use of land for

which they pay tribute, and upon which they can independently live.[26]

And thus far they live mainly as small pastoral farmers.[27]

Trade and artisanship were for long but slightly developed, and were

mainly in the hands of slaves, dependent "clients," or foreigners; and

artisans and aliens were not admitted into the legions.[28] The ruling

caste occupied, potentially[29] if not constantly, the city proper, the

two or three fortified hills[30] on which at this stage it stands. They

were certainly not the founders. The Palatine and the Quirinal hills had

been occupied by Latins and Sabines respectively long before the time

traditionally assigned to the "founding" of Rome; and there were

communities there before them. Modern excavators trace many successive

strata of civilisation before that which we call the Roman; and the

probability is that the Romans of history, like the kindred Sabines,

conquered a previous city "aristocracy" of kindred race, whose place and

possessions they took. The previous inhabitants had presumably grown

weak for self-defence by reason of some such disintegrating economic

evolution as was soon to affect the conquerors themselves. Such a

disintegration may well have taken place in the case of Alba Longa, of

which the prior supremacy seems entirely credible.[31] But before Alba

Longa there had been a civilisation[32] on the Roman hills which perhaps

outwent in economic evolution anything attained in the Roman period

until the last century of the Republic.

This was already inferred in the eighteenth century by Ferguson

(_History of the Roman Republic_, 1783, ch. i, _note_; perhaps

following Maffei [1727], cited by Schwegler, i, 807), from the

nature of the remains of the great _cloacae_, which he held could

not have been built by any of the early Roman kings. That view is

since adopted by various authorities; see Middleton's _Remains of

Ancient Rome_, 1892, i, 104-107; and Robiou et Delaunay, _Les

Institutions de l'ancienne Rome_, 1884, vol. ii, ch. i, Sec. 1. Cp.

Merivale, _General History of Rome_, pp. 9-11; Burton, _Etruscan

Bologna_, 1876, pp. 170-74. Livy (i, 38) ascribes great _cloacae_ to

the legendary Tarquin the elder. Professor Ettore Pais, on the

other hand, confidently decides that the _cloaca maxima_ belongs to

the republican period, and dates it about 170 B.C. In any case, we

know that an ante-Roman civilisation underlies the historic, and

may now decide with Mr. Mahaffy that "as civilisation of some kind

was vastly older on the Hill of Troy than any of us had imagined,

so the site of every historic city is likely to have been the

habitation of countless generations" (_Survey of Greek Civ._ 1897,

p. 28).

Sec. 2

There had in fact been a "decline and fall of Rome" before the Rome we

know began to be. Relatively to their predecessors, the early Romans

were even as the northerners who in a later age were to capture historic

Rome--vigorous barbarians beginning a new era on a footing of fraternity

in conquest; and the condition of their early success as State-builders

seems to have been precisely the joining of several tribe-groups in a

real federation,[33] securing local peace as between the hill-holders.

It has been said that Rome grew up without any known aid from men of

political genius such as Solon.[34] But men of genius have counted for

something in all stages of upward human evolution. The guiders of early

Rome are lost in a cloud of myth and fable; but some man or men of civic

faculty there must have been to shape tendency, though doubtless a main

factor in the early union was the simple _collocation_ of the hills

first fortified. Granting that Servius Tullius is a mythical king, the

elaborate constitution assigned to him stood for _some_ planning by able

men, and has several main points in common with that given to Athens by

Solon.

Whatever were the part played by individual leaders, Roman or Etruscan,

there clearly came into play in early Rome as in Athens the important

factor of mixture of stocks. Romans and Sabines united to begin with;

and the conquered plebs, destined later to enter the constitution and

share in all the civic offices, represented some such source of

recuperation to the Roman aristocracy as did the Saxons to that of

England after the Norman Conquest. If we add the probable factor of an

Etruscan element, Rome is to be conceived as standing for a ruling class

of more various faculty than was to be found in any of the rival

communities singly. The progressive absorption of the most enterprising

of the plebeians was again, probably, an exception to the rule of Italic

life as to that of other races, so that in following the class struggles

of Rome we are to note not so much the violence of the process as the

fact that, so far as it went, it was relatively fortunate. And its

success, again, is conceivably due to the fact, among others, that from

an early period the region of the seven defensible hills was a refuge or

centre for men breaking away from the other Italian communities, where

conservatism held firm.

Behind the legend of the flocking of all manner of "broken men" to the

standard of Romulus lies the probability that the ancient "asylum"

behind the Capitol brought a variety of types to the place; and as in

Athens so in Rome, such variety of stock might well raise the level of

faculty. But it was a faculty for aggression. Given the initial

federation of Romans and Sabines, the one general force of comity or

cohesion, apart from the more public cults, is the bond of mere

collective antagonism to other communities. The total polity is one of

war; and never in the history of civilisation has that ground of comity

long averted the economic process by which social inequality deepens and

widens. It is thus entirely credible that, through this economic

process, which we shall trace later, the early Roman polity came to a

pass at which its conquest by Etruscan "kings" was welcomed by the

plebs, sinking into poverty or held in outlawry under primitive

"capitalistic" exploitation. There is no clear historic record of the

process; but all the better evidence goes to prove its occurrence.[35]

The most plausible theory of the constitution ascribed to Servius

Tullius is that it was imposed by Etruscan conquerors. The earlier

Romans had been quasi-sacerdotally ruled by priest-kings of the

primitive type, "kings of the sacrifice," whose religious powers were

balanced by the secular interest of the patrician heads of

families--themselves priests of their family cults. The "Servian"

constitution put down the _rex sacrificulus_, divided the city into four

tribes, and its territory into twenty-six districts, each under a

headman or headmen. The city at the same time was in part new walled,

and the seven hills united; while the mass of the free population were

divided into five classes according to their property, and enrolled for

military purposes in 193 "centuries." In the first and richest class

were forty centuries of men above forty-six for the defence of the city,

and forty of younger men for service in the field; while the second,

third, and fourth classes were divided into twenty centuries each, and

the fifth class into thirty. The poorest of all were grouped in a

separate century, the "Proletarians," or "breeders," without military

duties; and the trumpeters, armourers, and carpenters in four more. New

assemblies, the _comitia centuriata_, were formed, in which all members

of the centuries shared, the old _comitia curiata_ being thus virtually

superseded. The military organisation was made the basis of a fiscal

one, in which the classes were taxed on the capital value of their

property. As freedom from direct taxation was the mark of the ancient

"free" communities in general, the whole arrangement seems to be one

that only a conqueror could have imposed; and the tradition ran that

Servius was regarded as the friend of the poor, who made his birthday an

annual festival.

But plebeian distress was probably not the sole, perhaps not the

primary, factor in the convulsion. All along, the process of inequality

had gone on among plebeians and patricians alike, some of the former

rising to wealth and some of the latter sinking to relative poverty.

Thus arises in effect the struggle of a "middle class" to share the

political and social privileges of the "upper"; and there is reason to

think that the Etruscan conquest was furthered by rich plebeians as

against the patricians. The new constitution was what the Greeks called

a "timocracy," or "rule of property"; and though in respect of the

_comitia centuriata_ plebeians were admitted to the franchise, it was

under such provisions as to voting that the richer classes easily held

the balance of power.[36] At the same time the patricians retained the

religious power of the old kings, as custodians of the ritual

mysteries--a great source of dominion. Thus the crisis was only

temporarily relieved, and the struggle was renewed again and again, both

under and after the kings. We can broadly divine that the anti-patrician

rule of the king, who would rely on the plebs, unified against him the

patricians or "free" citizens, who sought to keep down the masses;

while, on the other hand, the increasing outlaw plebs was unified by its

sheer need.[37]

As to the rule of the kings, whether native or Etruscan, no exact

knowledge is now possible. We can but trace some of their functions in

certain constitutional forms. Thus the Senate, or Council of the Elders,

appears to have been the council of the king, selected by him, but

capable of nominating his successor.[38] Whatever were its original

function, it became in time the supreme power in the State, growing

alike in numbers and in power, overruling or eclipsing the _comitia

curiata_, _comitia centuriata_, and other bodies in which the general

mass, first of patrician citizens and later of enfranchised plebeians,

were enrolled.[39] But it is not through the complicated archaeology of

the Roman constitution, latterly compiled with such an infinity of

scholarly labour, that the nature of Roman evolution is really to be

known. The technique of the system resulted from an endless process of

compromise among social forces; and it is in the actual clash and play

of those forces, as revealed in the simple records, that the human

significance of it all is to be felt. In this way we substitute for a

vague and false conception of unitary growth one of perpetual strife of

classes, interests, and individualities.

In the doubtful transition period, as the tradition goes, it is in the

time of discontented plebeian subjection, after the expulsion of the

king (510 B.C.), that the Etruscan enemy captures the city (497); and

the surmise that the battle of Lake Regillus was not really a Roman

victory[40] is partly strengthened by the fact that soon after it there

occur the division into twenty-five tribes, the tumults of the nexi, and

the successful Secession of the Plebs, ending in their incorporation,

with two tribunes to represent their interests (494). There is a clear

presumption that only from a weakened patriciate, forced to seek union,

could the plebs have won their tribunate and enfranchisement. On the

other hand, it is after victories over the Volscians that the consul

Spurius Cassius, who had proposed to divide among landless men the land

conquered from the Hernicans, is said to have been executed (485) by the

triumphant aristocracy; and it is in another period of security, when

the Veientines and Sabines are depressed (473), that the tribune Cneius

Genucius is murdered for having ventured to bring a consular to trial.

Always we are in presence of a brutal caste, in the main utterly

selfish, some of whose members are at all times as prone to the use of

the dagger as an Italian _camorra_ of our own day. Yet it is by the

forcing of concessions on this caste that the Roman polity is kept

vigorous and adaptable in comparison with those of the surrounding

States which Rome subordinated or overran.

While Rome thrives, a new project for popular law reform is defeated

(462); and it is after Cincinnatus, according to the legend, barely

saves the State (458) that the tribunes are raised from five to ten, and

the land is divided among the poor (456); though at the same time

decemvirs are appointed and the conservative Twelve (at first Ten)

Tables are drawn up (451-450). Thus partially strengthened, the plebs

are able soon to force the abdication of the decemvirate (449) by the

old menace of their withdrawal; and for a time the commonalty

sufficiently holds its own, getting (445) the right of marriage with

patricians, and (444) the institution of military tribunes with consular

power;[41] though fresh distribution of land is prevented, and the

patricians learn to divide the tribunes against each other. Thus class

dissension goes on till the Gauls capture the city (390), multitudes of

the Romans flying to Veii. Then it is that the plebeian party, after the

Gauls have gone, are willing to transfer the seat of government to Veii;

and the threat would doubtless win them some concessions in the

rebuilding of Rome. But population always blindly increases; and the

cancer of poverty spreads, despite the chronic planting of colonies in

subject territory. Manlius is executed for trying to relieve debtors;

but some land is reluctantly distributed. New wars create new popular

distress, and new colonies fail to relieve it. At length the Licinian

laws, relieving debtors and limiting estates, are proposed (376), and

after nine years of agitation are passed at the crisis (367) at which

the Gauls (who themselves had in the meantime undergone dissensions)

again attack Rome; while the powers of the consuls (limited in 443 by

the appointment of two Censors) are now further limited by the creation

of a Praetor (patrician) and of Curule _aediles_, alternately taken from

the two strata.

This makes a temporary palliation, and in time the now privileged

plebeians[42] lean to the patrician side and status; while fresh wars

with Hernicans, Gauls, Etruscans, and Samnites check class strife, and

the patricians recover preponderance, passing a law (358) to check "new

men." This is immediately followed by counter measures, limiting

interest to ten per cent. and putting a five per cent. tax on

manumissions; but the eternal distress of debtors is renewed, and a vain

attempt is made to meet it (352) by State loans, and again by reducing

interest to five per cent. (347). Increase of plebeian poverty again

causes reactions, and after a mutiny futile laws are passed prohibiting

interest altogether (342); the dictator Publilius carries popular

political laws (339) checking the power of the Senate, and debtors are

once more protected (326). After many wars, checking all domestic

progress, popular distress causes a last Secession of the Plebs (287)

and new political concessions to them; but still wars multiply, till all

Italy is Romanised (266). The now mixed warlike aristocracy of birth,

wealth, and office monopolises power in the Senate; and the residual

plebs gradually ceases to be a distinct moral force, its last great

struggle being made under the Gracchi, to whom it gives no valid

support.

If we consider this evolution purely as a play of domestic political

forces, we recognise it from first to last as a simple conflict of class

needs and interests, partially modified at times by movements of true

public spirit on the part of such men as the patricians who supported

the Licinian laws, and such men as the Gracchi. The State-organism is

the result of the struggles and pressures of its elements. What happened

in the chronic readjustments was never a democratisation of the State,

but at most an institutional protection of the poorer plebeians, and an

admission of the richer to something like equal status with the

optimates. Never was the "people" really united by any common home

interest beyond the need of extorting some privileges. Only to that

extent were the richer plebeians at one with the poorer; and there can

be little doubt that as soon as the former secured the privileges they

craved they tended to abuse them as the patricians had done. There was

no _personnel_ adequate to the effective working of the Licinian laws in

face of a perpetual process of conquest which infallibly evoked always

the instinct of acquisition, and never the science which might have

controlled it. The early division of the State-territory into

twenty-five tribes (495), of whom twenty-one were rural, determined the

limitation of the political problem to the simple sharing of land; and

every effort of public-spirited men to arrest the aggregation of lands

in the hands of a few meant a convulsive explosion of resistance by the

wealthy.

From the Polonian prattle of Cicero to his son we can gather how all

schemes of reconstruction were viewed by the ruling class, whether in

retrospect or prospect. The slaying of Tiberius Gracchus by Scipio

Nasica is a standing theme of praise;[43] the lesson of the course of

things social towards a steep sunderance of "haves" and "have-nots" is

angrily evaded. Cicero knew as well as any the need for social

reconstruction in Rome;[44] and he repeatedly records the sagacity of

Lucius Marcus Philippus, who had been tribune and consul in Cicero's

boyhood. As consul, Philippus had resisted the attempts of M. Livius

Drusus to reform the Senate and provide for the poorer citizens and the

Italians; but inasmuch as he had during his tribuneship avowed the fact

that there were not left two thousand men in the State who owned

property, Cicero denounces the avowal as pernicious.[45] The ideal

aristocratic course was to resist all political change and slay those

who attempted it--Drusus as the Gracchi before him. It was as a

consummation of that policy that there exploded the so-called Marsian or

Social War, in which Rome and the Italian States around her grappled and

tore for years together like their ancestors of the tribal period;

whereafter Marians and Sullans in turn rent Rome, till Sulla's iron

dictatorship, restoring class supremacy, marked the beginning of the end

of self-governing institutions, and prepared for the day of autocracy,

which was not to come without another agony of long-protracted civil

war. It is the supreme proof of the deadliness of the path of conquest

that for most Romans the end of Roman "freedom" was a relief.

Sec. 3

The effect of continuous foreign war in frustrating democracy is here

plain. On the one hand, the peasant-farmers are reduced to debt and

slavery by their inability to farm their lands in war-time, while the

patrician's lands are worked by his slaves. On the other hand, their

distress is met by a share in the lands conquered; and after the

soldiers are allowed pay (406 B.C.) they are more and more ready to join

in conquest. Not only is popular discontent put off by the prospect of

foreign plunder, but the perpetual state of aggressive war, while

tending first to pauperise most of the small cultivators who make the

army, breeds a new public spirit on a low plane, a sinister fraternity

of conquest. Ethics must needs worsen throughout the State when the

primitive instinct of strife developed into a policy of plunder; and

worsened ethics means a positive weakening of a society's total

strength. There is no lesson that men are slower to learn--and this

naturally, because they see the success of unjust conquest--yet there

is no truth easier to prove from history. Early Rome was strong as

against strong enemies, because not only were its people hardily bred,

but the majority were on the whole satisfied that they had just laws:

the reciprocal sense of recognised _rights_ sustained public spirit at

the possible maximum. But the rights are thoroughly selfish at best; and

it is the diversion of their selfishness to the task of continuous

conquest that "saves" the community from early dissolution, preserving

it for the life of dominion, which in turn destroys the old forces of

cohesion, and leaves a community fit only for subjection to a military

autocracy. The society of mutual selfish rights has a measure of

cohesion of its own, up to the point of conflict between the "haves" and

the "have-nots." An outwardly similar cohesion can, indeed, be sustained

for a time by mere concurrence in piracy; but it lies in the very nature

of society that union so engineered, cohesion so secured, is fleeting.

Men whose main discipline is the practice of tyranny over aliens become

simply incapable of strict reciprocity towards kin, and there must ensue

either internecine strife or the degradation of the weaker elements, or

a sequence of these results.

This is what happened in Rome. One of the first political signs of the

contagion of the life of rapine in the later Republic is the growth of

public bribery as a means to further wealth. Administrative posts being

the chief of these means, candidates for them set about buying votes in

the modern manner.[46] As early as 432 B.C. the law against canvassing

by candidates[47] (_lex de ambitu_) suggests the recognition of

electoral corruption; and later there followed a whole series of futile

vetoes--futile because the social conditions grew always morally worse.

The _lex AEmilia Baebia_ (182 B.C.) forbade all money gifts by candidates;

and twenty-three years later another law decreed that offenders should

be exiled. This also failing, there followed the _leges tabellariae_,

establishing the ballot (139-137). Still the disease persisted, because

there was no stop now possible to the career of conquest, which had

undermined the very instincts whereon law depends; and on the

treacherous struggle for place and pelf by way of bribery there

supervened the direct grapple over the ill-gotten gains. The Roman

ruling class had evolved into a horde of filibustering fortune-hunters,

as did the Greeks under and after Alexander; and the political sequels

of despotism and civil war were substantially the same.

The process was gradual, and the phenomena are at times apt to delude

us. When a political machinery was set up that conduced to systematic

and extending warfare in which the commonwealth was often at stake, the

community had a new albeit fatal bond of cohesion, and the destructive

or repulsive energies for generations found a wide field outside of the

State. It is when the aristocratic Republic, succeeding finally in the

long struggle with Carthage for the wealth of Sicily and Spain and the

control of the Mediterranean, has further overrun Greece and pretty well

exhausted the immediate fields of conquest, that the forces of repulsion

again begin to work destructively within the body politic itself, and

men and classes become the fools of their animosities. The wars of

faction, the popular propaganda of the Gracchi, the murderous strifes of

Marius and Sulla, the rivalries of Pompey and Crassus, Conservatives and

Democrats, Caesar and Pompey, the pandemonium on Caesar's death, all in

turn represent the renewed operation within the State of the crude

energies of cohesion and strife which had been so long employed in

foreign war. And the strife is progressively worse, because the

materials are more complex and more corrupt. The aristocracy are more

arrogant and hardened, the free farmer class has in large part

disappeared, and the populace are more debauched.[48]

The perpetual wars had multiplied slaves; and the slaves added a new and

desperate element to the social problem. It was the proof of the fatal

lack in Rome of vital ethical feeling--or, let us say, of social

science--that this deadly iniquity was never effectually recoiled from,

or even impugned as it had been, before Aristotle, among the more highly

evolved of the Greeks.[49] As wealth and luxury, pride and power

accumulated, the usage of slave labour spread ever further and ate ever

deeper into the population, brutalising alike the enslaved and the free.

It was doubtless a partial recognition of this that motived, in

Cicero's day, the large number of affranchisements of slaves

(Wallon, _Hist. de l'Esclavage_, ii, 409). But fresh enslavements

went on; the amelioration consisted in the brevity of the period of

enslavement in cases of good conduct. And the evil was in the main

a product of conquest. It is fairly established by Dureau de la

Malle (_Econ. polit. des Romains_, 1840, vol. i, liv. ii, ch. 2)

that down to the second Punic War Roman slaves were few. They would

be for the most part _nexi_, victims of debt. As conquests

multiplied prisoners, the class increased rapidly. Broadly

speaking, the house servants were all slaves, as were the bulk of

the shepherds in the great _latifundia_, the crews of the galleys,

and many of the artisans. The total number has doubtless been

greatly exaggerated, both in ancient and modern times, as has been

the population of the imperial city. Athenaeus is responsible for

many wild estimates. (Cp. Letronne, as cited by Dureau, liv. ii,

ch. 4.) Dureau arrives by careful calculation at an estimate of an

Italian population of some five millions about the year 529 A.U.C.,

of whom some two and three quarter millions were free and some two

and a quarter millions were slaves or _metaeci_, aliens without

political rights (i, 296). The population of Rome as late as

Aurelian he puts at between 500,000 and 600,000 (i, 368). (See

Prof. Bury's note in his ed. of Gibbon, iii, 308, for different

views. Gibbon, Bunsen, and Hodgkin put the figure at about a

million.) The exact proportion of slaves to free is not of the

essence of the problem. A society with nine slaves for every eleven

free was sufficiently committed to degeneration.

But the fatality of war was as irresistible as the fatality of plebeian

degradation; and the collapse of the slave war in Sicily (132), and the

political movement of the Gracchi, alongside of the new warlike triumphs

in Spain and Southern Gaul (121--the first great successes since the

fall of Carthage), illustrate the general principle that a ruling class

or house may always reckon on checking domestic criticism and popular

self-assertion by turning the animal energies of the people to animal

strife with another nation, in which case union correlates with strife.

Wars imply comradeship and the putting aside of domestic strife for the

time being; and a war with Illyria was made the pretext for suspending

the operation of the new land law passed by the elder Gracchus when the

younger later sought to carry it out. The triumphs of Marius, again,

over Jugurtha and the Cimbri availed nothing to unify the parties in the

State, or to secure his own. In democratising the army by drawing on a

demoralised _demos_, he did but make it a more facile tool for the

general, a thing more detached from the body politic.[50] The tendency

of all classes in Rome to unite against the claims of the outside

Italians was from the first a stumbling-block to the democrats within

Rome; and the final identification of the popular interest, in the

period of Marius and Sulla, with an anti-Roman policy among the Marians,

gave to Sulla, strong in the prestige of recent conquest, the position

of advantage, apart from his own strength. Further, as Montesquieu very

justly notes, civil wars turn an entire nation into soldiers, and give

it a formidable advantage over its enemies when it regains unity.[51]

But this again is only for a time; there is no enduring society where

there is no general sense of reciprocal justice among free men; and

systematic militarism and plunder are the negation of moral reciprocity.

One partial exception, it is true, must be made. In the early days of

the Republic the poor soldier stood to lose his farm by his patriotism.

Soon the fighters had to be paid; and from the day of Marius onwards

Roman commanders perforce provided for their veterans--so often their

accomplices in the violation of their country's laws and liberties. The

provision was made on the one hand by donations from the loot, on the

other by grants of land taken from others, it might be in Italy itself.

Sulla so rewarded his sworders; the triumvirs took the land of eighteen

Italian towns to divide among their legionaries.[52] To the end the

emperors had constantly to provide for their time-expired men by

confiscations. Thus did empire pay for its instrument.

Sec. 4

The animal energies themselves, in time, are affected by domestic

conditions; and when Caesar comes on the scene Rome is visibly far on the

way to a state of things such as had long before appeared in older

civilisations[53]--a state of things commonly but rather loosely called

degenerate, in which the animal energies are grown less robust, and the

life therefore in some respects more civilised. Such a course had been

run in Italy long before the rise of Rome, notably in Etruria, where,

after a conquest of aborigines by a small body of invaders,[54] who were

in touch with early Greek culture, the civilisation remains at that

archaic stage while Greek civilisation continues to progress.[55] There,

with a small aristocracy lording it over a people of serfs,[56] progress

of all kinds was arrested, and even the religion of the conquerors

assimilated to that of the aborigines.[57] In the Rome of Caesar we see,

after much fluctuation, with a more complex and less enfeebled structure

of population, the beginnings of the same fixation of classes; while, at

the same time, there has been such psychological variation as can begin

to give new and ostensibly higher channels to the immanent forces of

union and strife. This is the social condition that, given the required

military evolution, above all lends itself to imperialism or absolute

monarchy; which system in turn best maintains itself by a policy of

conquest, so employing the animal energies and keeping up the cohesive

force of militarist pride throughout all classes. Even now, of course,

in a semi-enslaved populace, as in a slave population pure and

simple,[58] there were possibilities of insurrection; and it was at

length empirically politic for the emperors to give the populace its

daily bread and its daily games, as well as to keep it charmed with the

spectacle of conquest. The expedient of doles of food did not at once

condemn itself by dangerously multiplying mouths, because, although it

was only in the upper classes that men commonly refused to marry and

have legitimate children, population was now restrained by the

preventive checks of vice, city life, and wholesale abortion,[59] which

are so much more effective--alike against child and mother[60]--than the

random resort to infanticide, though that too had greatly increased.[61]

On the other hand, as the field of practicable conquest again approaches

exhaustion and no sufficiently strong rival arises to conquer the

conquerors, nothing can hinder that people of all classes, having no

ideals tending to social and intellectual advance, and no sufficient

channel for the instinct of union in the politics of the autocracy,

shall find some channels of a new kind.[62] These are opened in due

course, and take the shape especially of religious combinations or

churches. Such modes had appeared even in the earlier stages of civic

disintegration, when the semi-private or sectarian cults had begun to

compete successfully with the public or civic. They did so by appealing

more freshly and directly to the growths of emotional feeling (the

outcome in part of physiological modification)[63] which no longer found

outlet in primary forms, such as warfare and primitive revelry. After

having themselves consented in times of panic to the introduction of

several cults in the name of the public interest, the ruling classes,

instinctively conservative by the law of their existence, take fright at

the startling popularity of the unofficial Bacchic mysteries, and decide

to stamp out the movement.[64] But the attempt is futile, the causal

conditions remaining; and soon Judaism, Osirianism, Mithraism, the

worships of Attis, Adonis, Bacchus, Isis, Serapis, all more or less

bound up with divination and sorcery, make way in the disintegrating

body politic.[65] The wheel of social evolution had, so to speak, "gone

full circle" since the first Roman _curia_, the basis of the State,

subsisted as groups with their special _sacra_, finding in these their

reason for cohering. Decadent Rome, all other principles of subordinate

cohesion having been worked out, resolves itself once more into groups

similarly motived. But the principle is newly conditioned, and the

_sacra_ now begin the struggle for existence among themselves. The rise

of Christianity is simply the success of a system which, on a good

economic foundation, copied from that of the Jewish synagogues,

assimilates the main attractions of similar worships, while availing

itself of exoteric and democratic as well as esoteric methods. It thus

necessarily gains ground among the multitude, rich as well as poor;[66]

and its ultimate acceptance by the autocrat was due to the very

exclusiveness which at first made it intolerable. Once diffused widely

enough to set up the largest religious organisation in the Empire, it

became the best possible instrument of centralisation and control, and

as such it was accepted and employed.[67]

And now again we see how inevitably the force of attraction correlates

with the force of repulsion. The new channels of the spirit of union,

being dug not by reason but by ignorance, become new channels for the

reverse flow of the spirit of strife; and as sectarian zeal spreads, in

the absence of openings, good or bad, for public spirit, there arise new

forms of domestic hate and struggle. Crude religious fervours,

excluding, or arising in lack of, the play of the saner and higher forms

of thought and feeling, beget crude antipathies;[68] and Christianity

leads back to bloody strifes and seditions such as had not been seen

since the fall of the Republic. There is not intellectuality enough to

raise men above this new superinduced barbarism of ignorant instinct;

half of the old Christendom, disintegrated like the old politics, is

overrun by a more robust barbarism that adopts a simpler creed; and the

new barbaric Christendom exhibits in its turn all the modes of operation

of the biological forces that had been seen in the old.

Sec. 5

Thus far we have considered Roman evolution in terms of a moral estimate

of the reactions of classes. But lest we lose sight of the principle of

total causation, it is fitting to restate the process in terms of that

conception, thus explaining it non-morally. We may view Rome, to begin

with, as a case of the unique aggrandisement of a State in virtue of fit

conditions and institutions. Thus (1) the comparatively uncommercial

situation of the early Latins, leaving them, beyond cattle-breeding and

agriculture, no occupation save war for surplus energy, and no readier

way of acquiring wealth;[69] (2) the physical collocation of a group of

seven defensive hills, so close that they must be held by a federated

group;[70] (3) the ethnic collocation of a set of tribe groups of nearly

equal vigour and ardour, strengthening each other's sinews by constant

struggling; (4) the creation (not prescient, but purely as a provision

against kingship) of the peculiar institution of the annual

consulate,[71] securing a perpetuity of motive to conquest and a

continuous flow of administrative energy;[72] (5) the peculiar need,

imposed by this very habit of all-round warfare, for accommodation

between the ruling and ruled classes, and for the safeguarding of the

interests of the latter by laws and franchises; (6) the central position

of Rome in Italy, enabling her to subdue it piecemeal; and finally (7)

the development by all these means of a specialist aristocracy,

habitually trained to administration[73]--all these genetic conditions

combined to build up the most remarkable military empire the world has

ever seen. They obtrude, it is clear, half of the explanation of the

fact that the Romans rose to empire where the much more early civilised

Greek cities of Italy did not.

Of the latter fact we still receive the old explanation that it came of

"the habit, which had ever been the curse of Hellenism, of jealous

separation and frequent war between town and town, as well as internal

feuds in the several cities themselves."[74] But this is clearly no

_vera causa_, as these symptoms are duplicated in the history of Rome

itself. The determining forces must, then, be looked for in the special

conditions. The Greeks, indeed, brought with them the tradition of the

separate City-State; but just as the cities remained independent in

Greece by reason of natural conditions,[75] so the Greek cities of Italy

remained isolated and stationary at a certain strength, because their

basis and way of life were commercial, so that while they restricted

each other's growth or dominance they were in times of peace mutually

nutritive. They wanted customers, not plunder. For the Romans plunder

was the first social need after agriculture, and as they began they

continued. When Jugurtha learned that anything could be had of the

Romans for gold, he had but read an open secret.

Of course, the functions that were originally determined by external

conditions came in time to be initial causes--the teeth and claws, so to

speak, fixing the way of life for the body politic. The upper-class

Romans became, as it were, the experts, the specialists of war and

empire and administration. Until they became wholly demoralised by

habitual plunder, they showed, despite their intense primeval

superstition of citizenship,[76] a degree of sagacity in the

conciliation of their defeated rivals which was a main cause of their

being able to hold out against Hannibal, and which contrasts markedly

with the oppressive and self-defeating policy of imperial Carthage,

Athens, and Sparta. Their tradition in part was still that of conquering

herdsmen, not wholly turned into mere exploiters of humanity. Pitted

against any monarch, they were finally invincible, because a

still-growing class supplied their administrators, as the swarming

provinces supplied their soldiers, and because for all alike war meant

plunder and new lands, as well as glory. Pitted against a republic like

Carthage, even when its armies were led by a man of genius, they were

still insuppressible, inasmuch as Carthage was a community of traders

employing mercenaries, where Rome was a community in arms, producing

generals as Carthage produced merchants. Mithridates failed in turn, as

Hannibal failed. The genius of one commander, exploiting passive

material, could not avail against the accumulated faculty for

organisation in the still self-renewing Roman patriciate.[77]

Carthage had, in fact, preceded Rome on the line of the evolution of

class egoism. Herself an expression of the pressure of the social

problem in the older Semitic world, she began as a colony, staved off

domestic strife by colonies, by empire, and by doles,[78] and was

already near the economic stage reached only centuries later by the

Roman Empire. Save for Rome, her polity might have endured on the

imperialist basis for centuries; but, as it was, it was socially

exhausted relatively to the task and the danger, depending as it did on

hired foreign troops and coerced allies. It is idle to speak, as men

still do, of Hannibal's stay in Capua as a fatal mistake.[79] Had

Hannibal taken Rome, the ultimate triumph of the Romans would have been

just as certain. Their State was bound to outlast the other, so long as

it maintained to any extent its old basis of a fecund rural population

of free cultivators, supplying a zealous soldiery, headed by a

specialised class equally dependent on conquest for all advancement. For

the trading Carthaginians, war was, beyond a certain point, a mere act

of self-defence; they could not have held and administered Italy had

they taken it. The supreme general could last only one lifetime; the

nation of warriors still yielded a succession of captains, always

learning something more of war, and raising the standard of capacity as

the progress of machinery widens the scope of all engineers.

The author of a recent and meritorious _History of Rome_, Mr.

Shuckburgh, is satisfied to quote (p. 231) from Polybius, as

explaining the fall of Carthage, the generalisation that "Italians

as a nation are by nature superior to Phoenicians and Libyans,

both in strength of body and courage of soul"; and to add: "That is

the root of the matter, from which all else is a natural growth."

This only leaves us asking: "What was the natural root of the

alleged physiological superiority?" There must have been reasons.

If they were "racial" or climatic, whence the later implied

degeneration of the Romans in body or soul, or both? We are driven

to the explanation lying in polity and institutions, which it

should have been Mr. Shuckburgh's special aim to give, undertaking

as he does to deal with "the state of the countries conquered by

the Romans." And such explanations are actually offered by Polybius

(vi, 53).

Sec. 6

And yet the deterioration of the Roman State is visibly as sure a

sequence as its progress. Nothing that men might then have proposed

could save it. In Cicero's day the Senate had become a den of thieves.

The spectacle of the wealth of Lucullus, taken in Napoleonic fashion

from the opulent East, set governor after governor elsewhere upon a

course of ruthless extortion which depraved Rome as infallibly as it

devastated the subject States.

Roman exploitation of conquest began in the relatively moderate fashion

of self-supporting victors willing to live and let live. Sicily was at

first (210) taxed by Marcellus in a fashion of which Livy makes

boast;[80] and after the suppression of the slaves' revolt in 131 B.C.,

the system was further reformed. Seventeen towns, retaining their lands,

paid a fixed tax to the Republic; eight were immune, save for an annual

contribution of 800,000 _modius_ of wheat for free doles in Rome; and

the rest of the island paid a tenth of all produce, as under Hiero.[81]

Later, the realms of the kings of Macedonia, Pergamos, and Bithynia, and

the lands of Cyrene and Cyprus, were made the public patrimony of the

conquering State. Sardinia, Spain, North Africa, and Asia were in

general taxed a tenth of their produce of all kinds. As the exploitation

went on, individual governors added to all this regular taxation a vast

irregular plunder on their own account; and nearly every attempt to

impeach them was foiled by their accomplices in the Senate.[82] Verres

in Sicily, Fonteius in Southern Gaul, Piso in Macedonia, Appius in

Cilicia, Flaccus in Asia Minor, wrung infinite gold and loot

immeasurable from the victim races by every device of rapacious

brigandage, trampling on every semblance of justice, and then devised

the ironic infamy of despatching corrupted or terrorised deputations of

citizens to Rome to testify to the beneficence of their rule.[83]

It was a riot of robbery in which no public virtue could live. To

moralise on the scarcity of Catos is an ill way of spending time if it

be not recognised that Catos had latterly become as impossible as eaters

of acorns in the upper grades of the ever-plundering State. Cato himself

is a product of the last vestiges of the stage before universal

conquest; and he begins to show in his own later years all the symptoms

of the period of lawless plutocracy. To yearn for a series of such

figures is to ask that men shall be capable of holding doggedly by an

ethic of honest barbarism while living the lives of pirates and slavers,

according no moral sympathy to the larger world of aliens and slaves,

yet cherishing a high public spirit for the small world of the patrician

State. The man himself was a mere moral anomaly; and in Cato the

Younger, dreaming to the last of a loyal republican life, but always

ready at his fellow-citizens' behest to go and beat down the rights or

liberties of any other State,[84] we have the paternal bias reproduced

in an incurable duality. He sought for honour among thieves, himself

being one. Concerning the Catonic attitude towards the "degeneration" of

Roman patrician life in the age of conquest, it has been truly said that

"the policy of shameless selfishness which was pursued by the Roman

Senate during this period, and reached its climax in their abominable

conduct towards the unhappy, prostrate city of Carthage--the frivolous

wars, tending to nothing but aggrandisement and enrichment, waged by

Rome continuously after the second Punic War--destroyed the old Roman

character[85] far more effectually than Grecian art and philosophy could

ever have done. Henceforth there was a fearful increase in internal

corruption, immorality, bribery, an insatiable eagerness for riches,

disregarding everything else and impudently setting aside laws, orders

of the Senate, and legal proceedings, making war unauthorised,

celebrating triumphs without permission, plundering the provinces,

robbing the allies."[86] And the ideal of conquest inspired it all.

We have only to ask ourselves, What was the administrative class to do?

in order to see the fatality of its course. The State must needs go on

seeking conquest, by reason alike of the lower-class and the upper-class

problem. The administrators must administer, or rust. The moneyed men

must have fresh plunder, fresh sources of profit. The proletaries must

be either fed or set fighting, else they would clamour and revolt. And

as the frontiers of resistance receded, and new war was more and more a

matter of far-reaching campaigns, the large administering class at home,

men of action devoid of progressive culture, ran to brutal vice and

frantic sedition as inevitably as returned sailors to debauch; while the

distant leader, passing years of camp life at the head of professional

troops, became more and more surely a power extraneous to the Republic.

When a State comes to depend for its coherence on a standing army, the

head of the army inevitably becomes the head of the State. The Republic

passed, as a matter of course, into the Empire, with its army of

mercenaries, the senatorial class having outlived the main conditions of

its health and energetic stability; the autocracy at once began to

delete the remaining brains by banishing or slaying all who openly

criticised it;[87] and the Empire, even while maintaining its power by

the spell of its great traditional organisation, ran through stage after

stage of civic degeneration under good and bad emperors alike, simply

because it had and could have no intellectual life commensurate with its

physical scope. Its function involved moral atrophy. It needs the

strenuous empiricism of a Mommsen to find ground for comfort in the

apparition of a Caesar in a State that must needs worsen under Caesars

even more profoundly than it did before its malady gave Caesar his

opportunity.

Not that the Empire could of itself have died as an organism. There are

no such deaths in politics; and the frequent use of the phrase testifies

to a hallucination that must greatly hamper political science. The

ancient generalisation[88] to the youth, maturity, and decrepitude and

death of States is true only in respect of their variations of relative

military and economic strength, which follow no general rule.

The comparison of the life of political bodies to that of

individuals was long ago rightly rejected as vicious by Volney

(_Lecons d'Histoire_, 1794, 6ieme Seance), who insisted that

political destruction occurred only through vices of polity,

inasmuch as all polities have been framed with one of the three

intentions of _increasing_, _maintaining_, or _overthrowing_. The

explanation is obscure, but the negation of the old formula is

just. The issue was taken up and pronounced upon to the same effect

in the closing chapter of C.A. Walckenaer's _Essai sur l'histoire

de l'espece humaine_, 1798. (Professor Flint, in his _History of

the Philosophy of History_, cites Walckenaer, but does not mention

Volney's _Lecons_.) Le Play, in modern times, has put the truth

clearly and strongly: "At no epoch of its history is a people

fatally doomed either to progress or decline. It does not

necessarily pass, like an individual, from youth to old age" (cited

by H. Higgs in _American Quarterly Journal of Economics_, July,

1890, p. 428). It is to be regretted that Dr. Draper should have

adhered to the fallacy of the necessary decay and death of nations

in his suggestive work on the _Intellectual Development of Europe_

(ed. 1875, i, 13-20; ii, 393-98). He was doubtless influenced by

the American tendency to regard Europe and Asia as groups of "old

countries." The word "decay" may of course be used with the

implication of mere "sickness," as by Lord Mahon in the opening

sentence of his _Life of Belisarius_; but even in that use it gives

a lead to fallacy.

Had there been no swarming and aggressive barbarians, standing to later

Rome as Rome had done to Carthage--collectively exigent of moral

equality as Romans had once been, and therefore conjunctly mighty as

against the morally etiolated Italians--the Western Roman Empire would

have gone on just as the Eastern[89] so long did, just as China has so

long done--would have subsisted with little or no progress, most factors

of progress being eliminated from its sphere. It ought now to be

unnecessary to point out that Christianity was no such factor, but

rather the reverse, as the history of Byzantium so thoroughly proves. No

Christian writer of antiquity, save perhaps Augustine[90] in a moment of

moral aspiration, shows any perception of the political causation of

the decay and fall of the Empire.[91] The forces of intellectual

progress that did arise and collapse in the decline and the Dark Ages

were extra-Christian heretical forces--Sabellian, Arian, Pelagian,

anti-ritualistic, anti-monastic, Iconoclastic. These once deleted,

Christianity was no more a progressive force among the new peoples than

it was among the old; and the later European progress demonstrably came

from wholly different causes--new empire, forcing partial peace; Saracen

contact, bringing physics, chemistry, and mathematics; new discovery,

making new commerce; recovery of pagan lore, making new speculation;

printing, making books abundant; gunpowder, making arms a specialty; and

the fresh competition and disruption of States, setting up fruitful

differences, albeit also preparing new wars. To try to trace these

causes in detail would be to attempt a complete sociological sketch of

European history, a task far beyond the scope of the present work;

though we shall later make certain special surveys that may suffice to

illustrate the general law. In the meantime, the foregoing and other

bird's-eye views of some ancient developments may illustrate those of

modern times.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: Cp. A. Schwegler, _Roemische Geschichte_, 1853, i, 610-615;

Pelham, _Outlines of Roman History_, 1893, p. 25. When Professor Ferrero

(_Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans. 1907, i, 5) pronounces

that "The Romans were a primitive people without the defects peculiar to

a primitive people," he sets up a needless mystification. They had the

defects of their own culture stage, which was far beyond that of

"primitives" in the general sense of the term. They were "semi-civilised

barbarians," with a long past of institutional life.]

[Footnote 13: It might be an interesting inquiry whether a grouping by

threes could have arisen from a primary union of two exogamous clans.]

[Footnote 14: Schwegler, i, 616. The origin of _tribus_ from _three_ is

not an accident special to the Romans. Among the Spartans and Dorians

likewise there were three stocks (cp. K.O. Mueller, _The Dorians_, Eng.

tr. 1830, i, 35-37; Fustel de Coulanges, _La Cite antique_, 8e edit. p.

135, note 2); and the great number of Greek epithets in which "three" or

"thrice" enters is a proof of the special importance anciently attached

to the number. Cp. K.D. Huellmann, _Ursprung der roemischen Verfassung

durch Vergleichungen erlaeutert_, 1835, p. 24.]

[Footnote 15: Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, 1901, p. 1.]

[Footnote 16: Pelham, p. 20; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 132, _sq._;

Schwegler, i, 610, 615; Ihne, _Early Rome_, 1897, p. 108; Ortolan,

_Hist. de la Legislation romaine_, ed. Labbe, 1880, pp. 35, 36.]

[Footnote 17: Schwegler, i, 611, following Dionysius. Cp. Meyer, ii,

514.]

[Footnote 18: Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, pp. 13, 24, 132, 179; Robertson

Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, 1889, pp. 245, 247, 251, etc.; Jevons,

_Introd. to the History of Religion_, ch. xii.]

[Footnote 19: Cp. Schwegler, i, 628; Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 107; Dupond,

_Magistratures romaines sous la Republique_, 1877, p. 19. The source of

the plebs is one of the vexed points of Roman origins; and the view that

they were primarily a conquered population is not yet generally

accepted. See Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, 1894, p. 44. The true

solution seems to be that the plebs were always being added to in

various ways--by aliens, by "broken men," by discarded clients, and by

fugitives. Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, p. 279.]

[Footnote 20: Schwegler, i, 621-28, 636-38; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 277.

Note the expression _populo plebique_ in Livy, xxix, 27; Cicero, _Pro

Murena_, i; Macrobius, _Saturnalia_, i, 17. Ortolan (endorsed by Labbe)

argues (work cited, p. 31) that _populus plebsque_ no more implies

separation than _senatus populusque_. But this argument destroys itself.

The Senate as such _was_ distinct from the populus, as having

_auctoritas_, while the populus had only _potestas_. The phrase then was

not a pleonasm. By this very analogy _populus plebsque_ implies a vital

legal distinction. Niebuhr, who first made the facts clear (cp. his

_Lectures_, Eng. trans. ed. 1870, p. 107), followed Vico, who was led to

the true view by knowledge of the separateness of the _popolo_ from the

_commune_ in the Italian republics.]

[Footnote 21: Schwegler, i, 619; E.W. Robertson, as cited, p. xxvii. Yet

the constant tradition is that not only did the mass of the people live

mainly on farinaceous food and vegetables, but the upper classes also in

the early period ate meat only on festival days. Cp. Guhl and Koner,

_The Life of the Greeks and Romans_, Eng. trans., pp. 501-2; Pliny,

_H.N._, xviii, 3, 19; Ramsay, _Roman Antiquities_, 1851, p. 437. The

cattle then were presumably sold to the people of the Etruscan and

Campanian cities. Professor Ferrero leaves this problem in a state of

mystery. The early Romans, he writes, had "few head of cattle" (i, 2);

but land capture, he admits, meant increase (p. 5); and at the time of

the Roman Protectorate over all Italy (266 B.C.) he recognises "vast

wandering herds of oxen and sheep, without stable or pen" (p. 9),

conducted by slave shepherds. On such lands there must have been a

considerable amount of cattle-breeding at a much earlier period. On the

other hand, noting that the Romans early imported terracottas and metals

from Etruria, Phoenicia, and Carthage, "besides ivory-work and

ornaments, perfumes for funerals, purple for the ceremonial robes of the

magistrates, and a few slaves" (p. 3), Professor Ferrero lightly affirms

that "it was not difficult to pay for these in exports: timber for

shipbuilding, and salt, practically made up the list."]

[Footnote 22: Cp. Schwegler, i, 451, 617-19; ii, 108; E.W. Robertson,

_Historical Essays in connection with the Land, the Church, etc._, 1872,

pp. xxvi-vii, 244.]

[Footnote 23: E.W. Robertson, as cited, pp. 243-44; Schwegler, i,

617-19.]

[Footnote 24: E.W. Robertson, p. xxv.]

[Footnote 25: Schwegler, i, 619, and refs.; Robertson, pp. 244-45;

Ferrero, i, 9; Greenidge, _Rom. Pub. Life_, p. 35.]

[Footnote 26: Cp. E.W. Robertson, as cited, p. xxv.]

[Footnote 27: Schwegler, i, 629; Robertson, p. xxvii.]

[Footnote 28: Schwegler, i, 620 and refs.]

[Footnote 29: Mommsen (ch. xiii. i, 200) puts this point in some

confusion, making the patricians live mostly in the country. Meyer (ii,

521) seems to put a quite contrary view. Greenidge (_History of Rome_,

1904, p. 11) agrees with Mommsen, putting town houses as a development

of the second century B.C.]

[Footnote 30: According to Niebuhr (_Lectures_, xv; Eng. trans. ed.

1870, p. 81) and Mommsen (ch. iv), the Palatine and the Quirinal. (But

cp. Greenidge, p. 2.) The Palatine was probably the first occupied by

Romans. Schwegler, i, 442. Cp. Merivale, _General History of Rome_, 5th

ed. p. 3, as to its special advantages. The Quirinal was held by the

Sabines. Cp. Koch, _Roman History_, Eng. trans. p. 2.]

[Footnote 31: Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 82.]

[Footnote 32: Presumably "Pelasgian." Cp. K.O. Mueller, _The Dorians_,

Eng. trans. i, 15; Schwegler, i, 155 _sq._]

[Footnote 33: Perhaps the result of a partial conquest. Cp. Mommsen,

vol. i, ch. 6, _ad init._, as to the precedence of the Palatine priests

over those of the Quirinal.]

[Footnote 34: So Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 5.]

[Footnote 35: Cp. Pelham, ch. iii. Ihne, who argues that the narratives

concerning the Etruscan kings are no more trustworthy than those as to

their predecessors, recognises that Pliny's record of the humiliating

conditions of peace imposed on the Romans by Porsenna "would not have

been made if the fact of the subjugation of Rome by an Etruscan king had

not been incontestable" (_Early Rome_, p. 79; cp. pp. 85-86).]

[Footnote 36: Cp. Merimee, _Etudes sur l'histoire romaine_, t. i,

_Guerre sociale_, 1844, p. 352 _sq._; Mommsen, B. ii, ch. i (i, 265).]

[Footnote 37: Cicero (_De Officiis_, ii, 12) and Sallust (cited by

Augustine, _De Civ. Dei_, iii, 16) preserved the belief (accepted by

Niebuhr) that the oppression of the poor by the rich had been restrained

under the kings. Cp. Mahaffy (_Problems in Greek History_, pp. 81-83;

Social _Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p. 83) and Wachsmuth (_Hist. Antiq. of

the Greeks_, Eng. tr. i, 416) as to Greek despots. And see Schwegler,

_Roemische Geschichte_, ii, 203, as to the weakness of Rome through

class-strifes after the expulsion of the kings.]

[Footnote 38: Greenidge, pp. 47-48; Mommsen, i, 72.]

[Footnote 39: Greenidge, pp. 147, 262, 273.]

[Footnote 40: Niebuhr, _Lect._ xxv, 3rd Eng. ed. p. 134. So Ihne, _Early

Rome_, p. 80; and also Schwegler, ii, 200. Mommsen takes the traditional

view. Cp. Shuckburgh (_History of Rome_, p. 71), who remarks that the

battle was at least not a decisive victory. Meyer (_Geschichte des

Alterthums_, ii, 812) gives no verdict.]

[Footnote 41: The demand for the admission of plebeians to the consulate

was thus met on the patrician plea that religion vetoed it. Only in 367

was it enacted that one of the two consuls should always be a plebeian.]

[Footnote 42: Plebeians first admitted to the Quaestorship, 421 B.C.; to

the Military Tribuneship, 400; to the Consulate, 367; to the

Dictatorship, 356; to the Censorship, 351; to the Praetorship, 337. This

left the patricians in possession of the important privilege of

membership of the sacred colleges. But that, in turn, was opened to

plebeians in 300 or 296.]

[Footnote 43: _De Officiis_, i, 22, 30.]

[Footnote 44: _Ad Atticum_, i, 19.]

[Footnote 45: _De Officiis_, ii, 21.]

[Footnote 46: See Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, iv, 272-76, for

some interesting details; and refs. in Merimee, _Guerre Sociale_, p.

22.]

[Footnote 47: Livy, iv, 25.]

[Footnote 48: A writer in many respects instructive (W. Warde Fowler,

_The City State of the Greeks and Romans_, 1893, p. 194), in pursuance

of the thesis that "the Romans" had an "innate political wisdom" and an

"inborn genius" for accommodation, speaks of the process of democratic

self-assertion and aristocratic concession as "leaving no bad blood

behind," this when social disease was spreading all round. The theorem

of "national genius" will suffice to impair any exposition, however

judicious otherwise. And this is the fundamental flaw in the argument of

Bagehot in _Physics and Politics_. Though he notes the possibility of

the objection that he is positing "occult qualities" (p. 24), he never

eliminates that objection, falling back as he does on an assumed "gift"

in "the Romans" (p. 81), instead of asking how an activity was evoked

and fostered.]

[Footnote 49: Cp. the _Politics_, i, 6.]

[Footnote 50: Cp. Professor Pelham's _Outline of Roman History_, 1893,

p. 197; Merimee, _Guerre Sociale_, pp. 217, 220.]

[Footnote 51: _Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains,

et de leur decadence_, ch. xi. He refers to the many cases in point in

modern European history.]

[Footnote 52: Dio Cassius, xlvii, 14; xlviii, 6; Appian, _Bell. Civ._

iv, 3; v, 5, 22.]

[Footnote 53: See below, p. 30, as to Carthage.]

[Footnote 54: Schwegler, _Roemische Geschichte_, i, 269.]

[Footnote 55: _Idem_, i, 272-73.]

[Footnote 56: See Livy, xxxiii, 36, as to the _conjuratio servorum_

throughout Etruria in 557 A.U.C.]

[Footnote 57: Schwegler, i, 270, 275.]

[Footnote 58: Compare the slave wars of Rome in Sicily with the modern

disorders (1892) in the same region, and with Aristotle's testimony as

to the constant tendency of the slave populations in Greece to conspire

against their owners (_Politics_, ii, 9).]

[Footnote 59: Juvenal, _Sat._ vi, 368, 593-96; Ovid, _Amor_. 1. ii,

elegg. 13, 14. It is uncertain whether among the ancients any prudential

preventive check was thought of. On the whole question see Malthus'

fourteenth chapter. Malthus, however, omits to notice that the Romans

probably learned the arts of abortion from the Greeks, Egyptians, and

Syrians.]

[Footnote 60: Ovid speaks of the many women killed, _Amor._ ii. xiv,

38.]

[Footnote 61: Malthus cites Tacitus, _De Mor. Germanorum_, c. 19;

Minucius Felix, c. 30; Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xxix, 4.]

[Footnote 62: Cp. Shaftesbury, _Characteristics_, Treatise ii, pt. iii,

Sec. 2 (i, 114). Guizot seems to find the process surprising: "Singulier

phenomene! C'est au moment ou l'Empire se brise et disparait, que

l'Eglise chretienne se rallie et se forme definitivement. L'unite

politique perit, l'unite religieuse s'eleve" (_Histoire de la

civilisation en France_, ed. 1874, i, 339). He does not recognise the

case as one of cause and effect. Of course, the fall of the State is not

necessary to set up new combinations. It suffices that men should be

without political influence or national consciousness--_e.g._, the

secret societies of China in recent times.]

[Footnote 63: An inquiry, or series of inquiries, into the physiological

side of social and political development is obviously necessary, and

must be made before sociology can on this side attain much scientific

precision. I know, however, no general treatise on the subject except an

old essay on _Changes Produced in the Nervous System by Civilisation_,

by Dr. Robert Verity (2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1839). This is suggestive,

but, of course, tentative. Cp. Ferrero, _Greatness and Decline of Rome_,

Eng. trans, i, 298-99.]

[Footnote 64: Livy, xxxix, 8-18. See below, pt. iii. ch. iii.]

[Footnote 65: Cp. Salverte, _De la Civilisation_, p. 52.]

[Footnote 66: The subject is discussed in the author's essay on

Mithraism in _Pagan Christs_.]

[Footnote 67: M. Hochart (_Etudes d'histoire religieuse_, 1890, ch. ix)

argues that Constantine was never really converted to Christianity; and

this is perhaps the best explanation of his long postponement of his

baptism.]

[Footnote 68: Compare episodes in the history of the Salvation Army in

England (1890), where that body was seen prepared to practise continuous

fighting. It had no thought of "Christian" conciliation.]

[Footnote 69: Various causes, the chief being probably Greek piracy, had

caused in pre-Roman Etruria a decay of the original seaports. See

Schwegler, _Roemische Geschichte_, i, 273.]

[Footnote 70: On this cp. Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 6; and Mommsen, ch.

iv.]

[Footnote 71: This may have been set up in imitation of the Carthaginian

institution of _Suffetae_, which would be well known to the Etruscans of

the monarchic period, who had much traffic with Carthage. E. Meyer,

_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 701. But it may also be explained by

the simple fact that the original army was divided into two legions

(_id._ ii, 812).]

[Footnote 72: On this see Montesquieu, _Grandeur des Romains_, c. 1. No

one has elucidated so much of Roman history in so little space as

Montesquieu has done in this little book, which Buckle rightly set above

the _Esprit des Lois_. (Cp. the eulogy of Taine, in his _Tite-Live._)

Its real insight may perhaps best be appreciated by comparing it with

the modern work of M. Charles Gouraud, _Histoire des Causes de la

Grandeur de l'Angleterre_ (1856), in which it will be hard to find any

specification of real causes.]

[Footnote 73: The specification of this detail is one of the items of

real explanation in Mr. Warde Fowler's scholarly and sympathetic account

of the development of the Roman City-State (work cited, c. viii). He

credits the Romans with an "innate genius" for combination and

constitutionalism as compared with the Greeks, not noticing the fact

that Roman unity was in the main a matter of conquest of non-Romans by

Romans; that the conquest was furthered by the Roman institutions; that

the institutions were first, so to speak, fortuitously shaped in favour

of systematic war and conquest by the revolt against kingship; that war

and conquest, again, were taken to almost inevitably as the main road to

wealth; and that the accommodations of later times were forced on the

upper classes by the career of warfare, to which domestic peace was

indispensable. (Cp. Hegel as to the element of coercion and patrician

policy in the Roman social system. _Philos. der Gesch._, Theil iii,

Abschnitt i, Kap. i.) See below, Sec. 6, as to the very different

conditions of the Greek City-States.]

[Footnote 74: E.S. Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, 1894, p. 16.]

[Footnote 75: See below, ch. iii, _end_; ch. iv, Sec. 2 (_c_).]

[Footnote 76: Cp. Livy, viii, 3-5.]

[Footnote 77: Cp. Ferrero, _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans,

i, 240.]

[Footnote 78: Cp. Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 11; vi, 5.]

[Footnote 79: Already in Montesquieu's _Grandeur des Romains_ it is

pointed out that for Hannibal's soldiers, loaded with plunder, anywhere

was Capua. Montesquieu rightly observes that the stock phrase on that

head is one of the things everybody says because it has once been said.

And it is repeated still.]

[Footnote 80: Livy, xxv, 40.]

[Footnote 81: Cicero, _In Verrem_, iii, 6; iv, 65; v, 21, 22.]

[Footnote 82: Sallust, _Bell. Jugurth._, c. 36.]

[Footnote 83: Cicero, _In Verrem_, iii, 20, 38, 81; v, 34; _In

Pisonem_,34-36; _Pro Flacco_, 12; _Pro Fonteio_, 5; _Pro lege Manilia_,

13. See the record in Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. polit. des Romains_,

1840, vol. ii, liv. iv, ch. 8. Cp. Ferrero, i, 113-14, 183.]

[Footnote 84: Cp. Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, ii. 78-81, and

Merivale, _General History of Rome_, pp. 299-300, as to the plunder and

annexation of Cyprus. "Whether the annals of British India contain so

foul a crime," writes Long, "I leave those to determine who know more of

Indian affairs than I do."]

[Footnote 85: An admission that national "character" is not a connatural

or fixed bias, but a simple function of variables.]

[Footnote 86: Teuffel, _Hist. of Roman Literature_, ed. Schwabe, Eng.

trans. i, 122 (Sec. 91).]

[Footnote 87: See the process traced in W.A. Schmidt's _Geschichte der

Denk und Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und

des Christenthums_, 1847.]

[Footnote 88: Polybius, vi, 51. See below, ch. iv, Sec. 1 (11).]

[Footnote 89: I am aware that Mr. Bury protests against this division;

but his own difficulty in calling the middle (Byzantine) Empire the

"later Roman Empire," while implicitly accepting the "Holy" Empire as

_another_ "later Roman Empire," is the best proof that the established

nomenclature is the most convenient. Nobody is misled by it. A

compromise might perhaps be made on the form "Greek Empire," contended

for by M. Sathes (_Monumenta Historiae Hellenicae_, i, pref. p. 5),

following on M. Rambaud.]

[Footnote 90: As cited below, pt. v, ch. i.]

[Footnote 91: Salvian, for instance, sees in the barbarian irruption a

punishment of Christian sins; he never dreams of asking the cause of the

Christian and pre-Christian corruption. Prudentius, again, is a thorough

imperialist. See the critique and citations of M. Boissier, _La Fin du

Paganisme_, ii, 136-141,407. Origen had set the note a century before

Constantine (_Contra Celsum_, viii, 68-72).]

CHAPTER III

GREEK POLITICAL EVOLUTION

The politico-economic history of Greece has been less cleared up than

that of Rome, by reason not only of the greater complexity of the

problem, but of the predominance of literary specialism in Greek

studies.

The modern Greek historian, Paparrigopoulo, has published in French

an _Histoire de la Civilisation hellenique_ (Paris, 1878), which

condenses his learned Greek work in five volumes; but the general

view, though sometimes suggestive, is both scanty and superficial

as regards ancient Greek history, and runs to an unprofitable

effort at showing the "unity" of all Hellenic history, Pagan and

Christian, in terms of an assumed conception of Hellenic character.

The posthumous _Griechische Culturgeschichte_ of Jakob Burckhardt

(1898) throws little light on social evolution. Trustworthy,

weighty, and lucid, like all Burckhardt's work, it is rather a

survey of Greek moral conditions than a study of social

development, thus adding something of synthesis to the previous

scholarly literature on the subject without reducing the phenomena

to any theory of causation. It includes, however, good studies of

vital social developments, such as slavery, to which Grote and

Thirlwall paid surprisingly little attention, and which Mahaffy

handles inadequately. This is also to be studied in W.R.

Patterson's _Nemesis of Nations_ (1907)--with some caution as

regards the political generalisations.

Since the first edition of the present work there has appeared, in

Dr. G.B. Grundy's _Thucydides and the History of his Age_ (1911) a

new recognition of the fundamental character of economic conditions

in Greek as in other history. Dr. Grundy, finding no academic

precedent for his sociological method, has urged as new truths

propositions which for economic historians are or should have been

axioms. The result, however, is a really stimulating and valuable

presentment of Greek history in terms of causal forces.

The chapters on Greece in Dr. Cunningham's _Western Civilisation_

(1898), though they contain not a few explanations of Greek

culture-phenomena on the old lines, in terms of themselves, are

helpful for the purposes of the present inquiry, since they really

study causation, as do Meyer's _Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung des

Alterthums_ and some other recent German treatises, of which Dr.

Cunningham makes use.

Much use, however, remains to be made of these and previous expert

studies. Boeckh's great work on the _Public Economy of the

Athenians_, which, though containing economic absurdities, hardly

deserves even in that regard the strictures passed on it by the

first English translator (Sir G.C. Lewis, 1828; 2nd ed. 1842;

superior American ed. tr. from 2nd German ed. by A. Lamb, 1857),

has not very fruitfully affected the later historians proper. The

third German edition by Fraenkel, 1886, typifies the course of

scholarship. It corrects details and adds a mass of _apparatus

criticus_ equal in bulk to the whole original work, but supplies no

new ideas. Heeren's section on Greece in his _Ideen_, etc.,

translated as a _Sketch of the Political History of Ancient Greece_

(1829), and also as part of Heeren's _Thoughts on the Politics_,

etc., of _the Ancient World_, is too full of early misconceptions

to be well worth returning to, save for its general view. On the

other hand, Grote's great _History of Greece_, though unmatched in

its own species, and though a far more philosophical performance

than that of Mitford (which Professor Mahaffy and the King of

Greece agree in preferring for its doctrine), is substantially a

narrative and critical history on the established lines, and does

not aim at being more than incidentally sociological; and that of

Bishop Thirlwall, though in parts superior in this regard, is

substantially in similar case. At several points, indeed, Grote

truly illuminates the sociological problem--notably in his view of

the reactions between the Greek drama and the Greek life. Of the

German general histories, that of Holm (Eng. tr. 4 vols. 1894-98)

is a trustworthy and judicious embodiment of the latest research,

but has no special intellectual weight, and is somewhat needlessly

prolix. The history of Dr. Evelyn Abbott, so far as it has gone,

has fully equal value in most respects; but both leave the need for

a sociological history unsatisfied. Mr. Warde Fowler's _City State

of the Greeks and Romans_ (1893) points in the right direction, but

needs following up.

Apart from Burckhardt and Cunningham, the nearest approach yet made

to a sociological study of Greek civilisation is the series of

works on Greek social history by Professor Mahaffy (_Social Life in

Greece_; _Greek Life and Thought from the Age of Alexander to the

Roman Conquest_; _The Greek World under Roman Sway_; _Problems of

Greek History_; and _Survey of Greek Civilisation_). These learned

and brilliant volumes have great value as giving more vivid ideas

of Greek life than are conveyed by any of the regular histories,

and as constantly stimulating reflection; but they lack method,

omit much, and abound regrettably in capricious and inconsistent

dicta. The _Survey_ is disappointing as emphasising rather than

making good the defects of the previous treatises. G.F.

Hertzberg's _Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der

Roemer_ (1866), and indeed all his works on Greek history, are

always worth consulting.

Some help may be had from the volume on Greece in the _Industrial

History of the Free Nations_ by W.T. M'Cullagh (1846); but that

fails to throw any light on what should have been its primary

problem, the rise of Greek industry, and is rather sentimental than

scientific in spirit. For later Greece, Finlay (_History of Greece

from its Conquest by the Romans_, revised ed. 7 vols. 1877) becomes

illuminating by his interest in economic law, though he holds

uncritically enough by some now exploded principles, and exhibits

some religious prejudice. His somewhat entangled opening sections

express his difficulties as a pioneer in sociological

history--difficulties only too abundantly apparent in the following

pages. Professor J.B. Bury's _History of the Later Roman Empire_ (2

vols. 1889) is an admirable work; but it does not attempt, save

incidentally, to supersede Finlay in matters economic.

Sec. 1

The political history of ancient Greece, similarly summarised, will

serve perhaps even better the purpose of illuminating later evolution.

That history has served historian after historian as a means of modern

polemic. The first considerable English historians of Greece, Gillies

and Mitford, pointed to the evil fate of Greek democracy as a conclusive

argument against countenancing democracy now; never stopping to ask

whether ancient monarchies had fared any better than the democracies.

And it is perfectly true that present-day democracies will tend to bad

fortune just as did the ancient unless they bottom themselves more

firmly and guide themselves by a deeper political science. It will not

suffice that we have rejected the foundation of slavery, on which all

the Greek polities rested. The strifes between the demos and the

aristocracy in the Greek City-States would have arisen just as surely,

though more slowly, if the demos, instead of being an upper-grade

populace owning slaves, had included the whole mass of the artisan and

serving class.[92] Where population increases at anything like the

natural animal rate, and infanticide is not overwhelming, poverty must

either force emigration or breed strife between the "have-nots" and the

"haves," barring such continuous stress of war as suffices at once to

thin numbers and yield conquerors the lands of the slain losers. During

some centuries the pressure was in part relieved by colonisation, as had

already happened among the Phoenicians;[93] the colonies themselves in

turn, with their more rapid evolution, developing the inevitable strife

of rich and poor more quickly and more violently than the mother

cities.[94] Among these, it was when that relief seemed to be exhausted

that strife became most dangerous, being obscurely perceived to be a

means to advancement and prosperity for individuals, as well as for the

State which could extort tribute or plunder from the others. War,

however, limits agriculture, so that food supply is kept proportionately

small; and with peace the principle of population soon overtakes lost

ground; so that, though the Greek States like others tended to gain in

solidarity under the stimulus of foreign war, the pressure of poverty

was always breeding fresh division.

If we take up Grecian history after the settling down of the prehistoric

invasions, which complicated the ordinary process of rupture and

fission, that process is seen occurring so frequently, and in so many

different States, that there can be no question as to the presence of a

general sociological law, not to be counteracted in any community save

by a radical change of conditions. Everywhere the phenomena are broadly

the same. The upper class ("upper" in virtue either of primary

advantages or of special faculty for acquiring wealth) attains to

providing for its future by holding multitudes of poorer citizens in

debt--the ancient adumbration of the modern developments of landlordism,

national debts, and large joint-stock enterprises, which yield

inheritable incomes. In early times, probably, debt led as often to

adult enslavement in Greece as in Rome;[95] but in a world of small and

warring City-States, shaken by domestic division, constantly making

slaves by capture and purchase, and always exposed to the risk of their

insurrection, this was too dangerous a course to be long persisted

in,[96] and the creditor was led to press his mortgaged debtor in other

ways. The son or the daughter was sold to pay the father's dues, or to

serve in perpetual payment of interest; and the cultivator's share was

ever at the lowest point. The pressure increases till the mass of

debtors are harassed into insurrection, or are used by an adventurer to

establish himself as despot.[97] Sometimes, in later days, the documents

of debt are publicly destroyed;[98] sometimes the land is divided

afresh.[99] Landholders burdened with debt would vote for the former

course and resist the latter;[100] and as that was clamoured for at

Athens in early times, it may be presumed that in some places it was

resorted to. Sometimes even a refunding of interest would be insisted

on.[101] Naturally such means of rectification availed only for a

moment; the despot stood a fair chance of being assassinated; the

triumphant demos would be caballed against; the exiled nobles, with the

cold rage of Theognis in their hearts, would return; and the last state

of the people would be worse than the first; till again slackened

vigilance on one side, and intolerable hardship on the other, renewed

the cycle of violent change.

In the course of ages there was perforce some approach to

equipoise;[102] but it was presumably at the normal cost of a definite

abasement of the populace;[103] and it was by a famous stroke of

statecraft that Athens was able so to solve her first great crisis as to

make possible some centuries of expanding democratic life. The name of

Solon is associated with an early crisis (594 B.C.) in which debt and

destitution among the Athenian demos (then still for the most part small

cultivators, for whom the city was a refuge fortress, but as a rule no

longer owning the land they tilled) brought matters to the same point as

was marked in Rome by the Secession of the Plebs. The Athenian oligarchy

was very much like the Roman; and when the two sides agreed to call in

Solon as arbitrator it was with a fairly general expectation that he

would take the opportunity to become tyrant. The people knew him to be

opposed to plutocratic tyranny; the nobles and traders, anxious for

security, thought him sure to be their friend; and both sorts had small

objection to such a one as "despot." But Solon, a noble of moderate

means, who had gained prestige in the wars of Athens with her

neighbour, Megara, and some knowledge of life as a travelling trader,

brought to his problem a higher vision than that of a Roman patrician,

and doubtless had a less barbarous stock to deal with. Later ages,

loosely manipulating tradition, ascribed to him a variety of laws that

he cannot have made;[104] but all the records concur in crediting him

with a "Seisachtheia," a "shaking-off-of-burdens," and a healing of the

worst of the open wounds of the body politic. All existing mortgages

were cancelled; all enslavement for debt was abolished; Athenians who

had been sold into alien slavery were bought back (probably by a

contribution from relieved debtors[105]); and the coinage was

recast--whether or not by way of reducing State payments is not clear.

Grote (ii, 471), while eulogising Solon's plan as a whole, accepts

the view that he debased the money-standard; while Boeckh

(_Metrologie_, ch. 15) holds him to have further altered the

weights and measures. For the former view there is clear support in

Plutarch (_Solon_, c. 15), and for the latter in the lately

recovered Aristotelian _Polity of Athens_ (c. 10). But when Messrs.

Mitchell and Caspari, in their abridgment of Grote (p. 45), declare

that the latter document makes clear that the coinage measure was

solely for the promotion of trade, and entirely independent of the

Seisachtheia (so also Bury, p. 183), they unduly stress the

evidence. The document, which is hardly Aristotelian in structure,

proceeds doubtfully on tradition and not upon record; and there may

be some truth in the old view of Androtion (Plut. c. 15), that

Solon only reduced the rate of interest while altering the

money-standard. The point is really obscure. Cp. Abbott, _Hist. of

Greece_, i, 407-8; Grote, ii, 472-76; Meyer, ii, 651-52; Cox, _Gen.

Hist. of Greece_, 2nd ed. pp. 76-79. So far are we from exact

knowledge that it is still a moot point whether the tenant

_Hektemorioi_ or "Sixth-men" _paid_ or _received_ a sixth part of

their total product. Cp. Mitchell and Caspari, abr. of Grote, p.

14, _note_; Cox, _Gen. Hist. of Greece_, 2nd ed. p. 77; Bury,

_Hist. of Greece_, ed. 1906, p. 181; Meyer, ii, 642; Abbott, _Hist.

of Greece_, i, 289.

While the burdened peasants and labourers were thus ostensibly given a

new economic outlook on life, they were further humanised by being given

a share in the common polity. To the Ecclesia or "Congregation" of the

people Solon gave the power of electing the public magistrates; and by

way of controlling somewhat the power of the Areopagus or Senate, he

established a "pre-considering" Council or "Lower House" of Four

Hundred, chosen from all save the poor class, thus giving the State

"two anchors." And though the executive was in the hands of the

aristocracy, subject only to popular election, the burdens of the

community were soundly adjusted by a new or improved classification of

citizens according to their incomes ("timocracy"), which worked out

somewhat as a graduated income-tax, whether by way of a money-rate or in

respect of their share in military duties and public "liturgies," which

had to be maintained by the richer citizens.

As to this vexed question, see Boeckh, _Staatsaushaltung der

Athener_, B. iv, c. 5 (Grote's ref. wrong), as expounded and

checked by Grote (ii, 485-88). Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari, in

their abridgment of Grote (pp. 22, 49, _notes_), reject the whole

interpretation (which is reached by a combination of ancient data,

Plutarch [c. 18] telling nothing as to taxation). But they adduce

only the negative argument that "as we know that Peisistratos, the

champion of the poorer classes, subsequently levied a uniform tax

of five or ten per cent., it is absurd to suppose that the highly

democratic principle of a sliding-scale had been previously adopted

by Solon. Peisistratos would not have dared to attempt a reaction

from a sliding-scale income-tax to a sort of poll-tax." To this it

might be replied that the "flat rate" of Peisistratos--which ought

to modify the conception of him as the "friend of the poor"--may

have been an addition to previous taxes; and that the division of

citizens into income-classes must have stood for _something_ in the

way of burdens. The solution would seem to be that these were not

regular money taxes. "Regular direct taxes were as little known in

free Athens as in any other ancient State; they are the marks of

absolute monarchy, of unfreedom" (Meyer, ii, 644). "Seemingly, it

was not until later times that this distribution of classes served

the purposes of taxation" (Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_,

Eng. tr. p. 40). But already the cost of certain public services,

classed under the head of "liturgies," was laid upon the rich; and

there may well have been a process of collective contribution

towards these at a time when very rich citizens cannot have been

numerous.

Doubtless the graduated income-tax would have been unworkable in a

systematic way, though in the "Servian" timocracy of early Rome a

_tributum_ seems to have been imposed on the classes (Livy, ii, 9).

At yet other points Solon prepared the ground for the democratic

structure of the later Athenian polity. By overthrowing the sacrosanct

power of the aristocratic priestly houses, who had aggrandised

themselves by it like the nobles of early Rome, he prevented the growth

of a hierocracy. By constituting out of all the citizens, including the

Thetes or peasant cultivators, a kind of universal jury-court, out of

which the panels of judges were to be taken by lot, he put the people on

the way of becoming a court of appeal against the upper-class archons,

who recruited the Areopagus. "The constitution of the judicial courts

(_Heliaia_) out of the whole people was the secret of democracy which

Solon discovered. It is his title to fame in the history of the growth

of popular government in Europe."[106]

The whole reform was indeed a great achievement; and so far definitive

that from that time forward Athens needed no further resort to

"Seisachtheia" or to alteration of the money-standard. Solon had in fact

eliminated the worst disruptive force at work in the community--the

enslavement of the debtor; a reform so radical,[107] when considered as

one man's work, that to note its moral limits may seem to imply

blindness to its value. Henceforth, on the lines of the democracy which

he made possible, Athenians were so far homogeneous that their slaves

were aliens. Beyond that point they could not rise; after Solon, as

before, they were at daggers drawn with neighbouring Statelets, and to

the end it remained tolerable to them to enslave the men of other

Greek-speaking communities. Floated over the first reef by Solon, they

never found a pilot to clear the second--the principle of group-enmity.

Upon that the Hellenic civilisation finally foundered.

Even in respect of what he achieved, Solon received but a chequered

recognition in his own time. The peasantry had expected him to divide

the land among them;[108] and when they found that the abolition of

enslavement for debt did not mean much less stress of life, they were

ready to forfeit all the political rights he had given them for some

more tangible betterment.

The simple fact that a generation later Peisistratos was able to become

tyrant in the teeth of the aged Solon's vehement opposition is

intelligible only as standing for the feeling of many of the common

people that through a _tyrannos_ alone could their interests be

maintained against the perpetual conspiracy of the upper class to

overreach them.[109] It may be that Solon had alienated the rural folk

by his concern for commerce, which would be likely to mean the

encouragement of imports of food.[110] Peisistratos, we know, was the

leader of the _Diakrioi_, the herdsmen and crofters of the uplands, and

was "accounted the most thorough democrat" as against the landlords of

the plains (_Pediaioi_), led by Lycurgos, and the traders of the coast

(_Paraloi_), led by Megacles.[111] The presumption is that by this time

the fertile plain-lands were largely owned by rich men, who worked them

by hired labour; but the nature of the conflicting forces is not now to

be clearly ascertained. The credit given afterwards to Peisistratos for

maintaining the Solonian laws points to an understanding between him and

the people;[112] and their acceptance of him in Solon's despite suggests

that they even identified the latter with the failure of his laws to

secure them against further aristocratic oppression.

Nonetheless, Solon's recasting of the political structure of the State

determined the future evolution. As Athens grew more and more of an

industrial and trading city, her people reverted more and more surely to

the self-governing ideal; albeit the Solonian constitution preserved the

unity of the State, keeping all the people of Attica "Athenians." The

rule of Peisistratos was twice upset, and that of his house in all did

not last much above fifty years. When the last member was driven out by

Kleisthenes (510 B.C.), the constitution was re-established in a more

democratic form than the Solonian; all freemen of Attica became burghers

of Athens; and thousands of unenfranchised citizens and emancipated

slaves obtained full rights of citizenship. For better and for worse,

republican Athens was made--a new thing in the ancient world, for

hitherto "democratical government was a thing unknown in Greece--all

Grecian governments were either oligarchical or despotic, the mass of

the freemen having not yet tasted of constitutional privilege."[113]

What followed was an evolution of the old conflicting forces on a new

constitutional basis, the balance of power and prestige being on the

side of the demos and its institutions, no longer on that of a

land-owning and dominant aristocracy. But the strife never ceased.

Kleisthenes himself found "the Athenian people excluded from everything"

once more, and, "being vanquished in the party contest with his rival,

took the people into partnership."[114] The economic tendencies of all

civic life reproduced the hostility again and again. One of the most

remarkable of the laws of Solon was that which disfranchised any citizen

who in a "stasis" or seditious feud stood aloof and took no side.[115]

He had seen the risks of such apathy in the attempt of Kylon, in his

youth, to become despot of Athens; and his fears were realised when

Peisistratos seized power. The law may have helped to promote

public-spirited action; but in the nature of things it was hardly

necessary when once democracy was established. Again and again the demos

had to fight for its own hand against the cliques who sought to restore

oligarchy; and apathy was not likely to be common. The perpetual

generation of fresh poverty through rapid increase of population, and

the inevitable resort to innovating fiscal and other measures to relieve

it, sufficed to provide grounds of class strife while free Athens

endured.

It lies on the face of Aristotle's _Politics_, however, that even if the

population difficulty had been solved otherwise than by exodus, and even

if the Athenians could have guarded against class strife among

themselves, the fatality of war in the then civilised world would have

sufficed to bring about political dissolution. As he profoundly

observes, the training of a people to war ends in their ruin, even when

they acquire supremacy, because their legislators have not "taught them

how to rest."[116] Add the memorable testimony of Thucydides concerning

the deep demoralisation wrought by the Peloponnesian War--a testimony

supported by every page of the history of the time. Even the sinister

virtue of uniting a people within itself was lacking to the perpetual

warfare of the Greeks: the internal hatreds seemed positively to worsen

in the atmosphere of the hatreds of the communities. But while the

spirit of strife is universal, peoples are inevitably trained to war;

and even if the Greek States could have so far risen above their

fratricidal jealousies as to form a stable union, it must needs have

turned to external conquest, and so run the downward course of the

post-Alexandrian Hellenistic Empires, and of the Roman Empire, which in

turn sank to dissolution before the assaults of newer militarisms.

Sec. 2

Nothing can save any democratic polity from the alternatives of insane

strife and imperial subjection but a vital prosperous culture, going

hand in hand with a sound economy of industry. The Greek democracies in

their different way split on the rock that wrecked the Roman Republic:

there was (1) no general mental development commensurate with the

political problems which arose for solution, and (2) there was no

approach to a sound economics. The first proposition will doubtless be

denied by those who, nourished on the literature of Greece, have come to

see in its relative excellence, the more confidently because of the

abiding difficulty of mastering it, the highest reach of the faculties

of thought and expression. But this judgment is fundamentally astray,

because of the still subsisting separation, in the literary mind, of the

idea of literary merit from the idea of scientific sanity. Men

themselves too often vowed to the defence and service of a mythology are

slow to see that it was not for nothing that the Athenian people

bottomed its culture to the last on myth and superstition. Yet a little

reflection might make it clear that the community which forced Socrates

to drink the hemlock for an alleged and unproved scepticism, and

Anaxagoras to fly for a materialistic hypothesis concerning the sun,

could have no political enlightenment adequate to the Athenian needs. We

see the superstitious Athenian demos playing the part of the ignorant

multitude of all ages, eager for a master, incapable of steadfast

self-rule, begging that the magnificent Alcibiades, who led the sacred

procession to Eleusis in despite of the Spartans near at hand, shall put

down his opponents and reign at Athens as king[117]--this after he had

been exiled by the same demos on a charge of profane parody of the

Eleusinian mysteries, and sacerdotally declared accursed for the

offence.[118] A primitive people may stumble along in primitive

conditions by dint of elementary political methods; but a civilised

people with a complex political problem can solve it only by means of a

correspondingly evolved science. And the Athenian people, with their

purely literary and aesthetic culture, never as a body reached even a

moderate height of ethical and scientific thought,[119] or even any such

general aesthetic well-being as we are apt to credit them with. Moderns

think of them, as the great song of Euripides has it, "lightly lifting

their feet in the lucid air,"[120] and are indulgently ready to take by

the letter the fine panegyric of the Athenian polity by Pericles,[121]

forgetting that statesmen in all ages have glorified their State, always

making out the best case, always shunning discouragement for their

hearers, and making little account of evil. But Burckhardt, after his

long survey, decides with Boeckh that "the Hellenes were more unhappy

than most men think;"[122] and the saying holds good of their political

and intellectual life above all things.

Our more idealising scholars forget that the philosophy of the

philosophers was a specialism, and that the chance of hearing a tragedy

of Sophocles or a comedy of Aristophanes was no training in political

conduct for a people whose greatest philosopher never learned to see the

fatality of slavery. On the economic side, Periclean Athens was nearly

as ill founded as aristocratic Rome. Citizens often with neither

professions nor studies, with no ballasting occupation for head or hand;

average men paid from the unearned tribute of allied States to attend to

affairs without any fundamental study of political conditions; citizens

whose work was paid for in the same fashion; citizens of merely

empirical education, for whom politics was but an endless web of

international intrigue, and who had no higher ideal than that of the

supremacy of their own State in Hellenedom or their own faction in the

State--such men, it is now easy to see, were incapable of saving Athens,

much less of unifying Greece. They were politically raised to a

situation which only wise and deeply instructed men could fill, and they

were neither wise nor deeply instructed, however superior their

experience might make them relatively to still worse trained

contemporaries, or to populations living under a systematic despotism.

On some of the main problems of life the majority had thought no further

than their ancestors of the days of the kings. The spell of religion had

kept them ignorant and superstitious.[123] In applied ethics they had as

a body made no progress: the extension of sympathy, which is moral

advance, had gone no further than the extortion of civic status and

power by some new classes, leaving a majority still enslaved. Above all,

they could not learn the lesson of collective reciprocity; could not see

the expediency of respecting in other communities the liberty they

prized as their own chief good. Athens in her turn "became an imperial

or despot city, governing an aggregate of dependent subjects all without

their own active concurrence, and in many cases doubtless contrary to

their own sense of political right.... But the Athenians committed the

capital fault of taking the whole alliance into their own hands, and

treating the allies purely as subjects, without seeking to attach them

by any form of political incorporation or collective meeting and

discussion--without taking any pains to maintain community of feeling or

idea of a joint interest--without admitting any control, real or even

pretended, over themselves as managers. Had they attempted to do this,

it might have proved difficult to accomplish--so powerful was the force

of geographical dissemination, the tendency to isolated civic life, and

the repugnance to any permanent extramural obligations, in every Grecian

community. But they do not appear to have ever made the attempt. Finding

Athens exalted by circumstances to empire, and the allies degraded into

subjects, the Athenian statesmen grasped at the exaltation as a matter

of pride as well as profit. Even Pericles, the most prudent and

far-sighted of them, betrayed no consciousness that an empire without

the cement of some all-pervading interest or attachment, although not

practically oppressive, must nevertheless have a natural tendency to

become more and more unpopular, and ultimately to crumble in

pieces."[124]

In fine, a democracy, the breath of whose nostrils is justice,

systematically refused to do as it would be done by; and as was Athens,

so were the rest of the Greek States. When the Athenians told the

protesting Melians, in effect, that might is right,[125] they did even

as Sparta and Thebes had done before them.[126] Hence the instinct of

justice was feeble for all purposes, and the domestic strife of factions

was nearly as malignant and animalised as in Borgian Italy. Mother

cities and their colonies fought more destructively with each other than

with aliens; Athens and Syracuse, Corinth and Corcyra, strove more

malignantly than did Greek with barbarian. It was their rule after a

victory to slay their prisoners.[127] Such men had not learned the

secret of stable civic evolution; animal instinct was still enthroned

against law and prudence. Unearned income, private and public; blindly

tyrannous political aggression; ferocious domestic calumny; civic and

racial disruption--these were the due phases and fruits of the handling

of a great political problem by men who in the mass had no ideals of

increasing knowledge, of growing tolerance, of widening justice, of

fraternity.[128] Stoic and Epicurean wisdom and righteousness came too

late to save free Hellas: they were the fruits of retrospect in

decadence. The very art and literature which glorified Athens were in

large part the economic products of impolicy and injustice, being

fostered by the ill-gotten wealth accruing to the city from her

tributary allies and subject States, somewhat as the art of the great

period in Italy was fed by the wealth of the Church and of the merchant

princes who grew by the great river of trade. In the one case as in the

other, there was no polity, no science, equal to the maintenance of the

result when the originating conditions disappeared. Greek art and

letters passed away because they were ill rooted. Nobly incorrupt for

himself, Pericles thus fatally fostered a civic corruption that no

leader's virtues could countervail, and his policy in this regard was

probably the great force of frustration to his scheme for a pan-Hellenic

congress at Athens, to promote free trade and intercourse.[129]

For various views on this matter cp. Heeren, Eng. tr. of Researches

on the _Political History of Ancient Greece_, pp. 129-34;

Thirlwall, _History of Greece_, ch. xviii (1st ed. iii, 62-70);

Grote, iv, 490-504; Abbott, _History of Greece_, i, 405-9; Holm,

_History of Greece_, Eng. tr. ii, 268, note 8 to ch. xvii (a

vindication). Grote, who vindicates the policy of Pericles with

much care, endorses the statesman's own plea that his use of the

confederate treasure in ennobling the city gave her a valuable

prestige. But even to the Athenian opposition this answer was

indecisive, for, as Grote records, the argument of Thucydides was

that Athens was "disgraced in the eyes of the Greeks" by her use of

the treasure. This meant that her prestige was fully balanced by

hatred, so that the civic gain was a new danger.

Not that matters would have gone a whit better if, as our Tory

historians used retrospectively to prescribe, democracy had been

permanently subverted by aristocracy. No other ideal then in vogue would

have produced even so much "good life" as was actually attained. We know

that the rich and the great in the Greek cities were the worst citizens,

in the sense of being the least law-abiding; and that the lower-class

Athenians who served in the fleet were the best disciplined; the

middle-class hoplites less so; and the rich men who formed the cavalry

the least orderly of all.[130] Above all, the aristocrats were cruel and

rapacious when in power as the demos never were, even when they had

overthrown the guiltiest of their tyrants.[131] The leading aristocrats

were simply weaker versions of the demagogues, making up for their

weakness by their cruelty; and nothing can be more misleading than to

take the account given of Kleon by Aristophanes for even a semblance of

the truth. The great humorist saw nothing as it really was: his very

genius was as it were a many-faceted mirror that could reflect no whole,

and left his practical judgment worth less than that of any of the men

he ridiculed. Kleon is to be conceived as a powerful figure of the type

of a New York Tammany "Boss," without culture or philosophy, but shrewd,

executive, and abounding in energy. The aristocrats were but slighter

egoists with a varnish of education, as far as he from a worthy

philosophy. And the philosophers _par excellence_, Plato and Aristotle,

were equally incapable of practical statesmanship. The central truth of

the entire process is that free Greece fell because her children never

transcended, in conception or in practice, that primary ethic of egoism

in which even love for one's country is only a reflex of hate for

another people. This is clear in the whole play of the astounding

hatreds of Athenians for Athenians through every struggle of Athens for

her life. The treasons of Alcibiades are evoked and amply balanced by

the murderous plots of his fellows against him: every figure in the line

of leaders, from Solon's self, is hated by some hetairia; the honest

Anytus, the perfect type of brainless conservatism sitting in the chair

of sociological judgment, can be appeased only by the slaying of

Socrates; and to the end the egoisms of Demosthenes, AEschines, and

Isocrates are at grapple, with the national assassin in sight.

And it is the prevailing consciencelessness, the universal lust to

tyrannise, that really consummates the political dissolution. It was not

the battle of Chaeronea that made an end of Greek independence. That

disaster would have been retrieved like others if only the Greeks had

persistently cared to retrieve it. They fell because they took the bribe

of empire. Philip held it out at once by his offer of facile terms to

Athens: he was planning in his own way what the pragmatic Isocrates took

for the ideal Hellenic course, a Hellenic war of conquest against

Persia; and it was that very war, made by Alexander, that transformed

the Greeks into a mere diluvium of fortune-hunters, turning away from

every ideal of civic stability and dignity to the overrunning of alien

populations and the getting of alien gold. Given the process of historic

determination, moral bias becomes a fatality; and when it is fixed,

"'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus." Republican Greece passed

away because there were no more republican Greeks, but only a rabble of

imperialists. Here again appears the fatality of their past: it was the

sombre memory of unappeasable civil strife, of eternal inequality and

envy and class attrition, that made the new promise so dazzling; any

future seemed fairer than the recent past. But it was through the

immediate bait to their cupidity that the Greeks were led out of their

old man-making life of turbulent counterpoise, the sphere of free

equals, into the new unmanning life of empire, the sphere of slaves.

They were easy victims. The men of Aristotle's day had once more before

their eyes, in the squalid drama of Philip's house--in the spectacle of

alienated wife and son deriding and hating the laurelled conqueror and

exulting in his murder--the old lesson of autocracy, its infallible

dishonour, its depravation, its dissolution of the inmost ties of

cordial life. But any countervailing ideal that still lived among them

was overborne by the tide of triumphant conquest; and, with Aristotle

and Plato in her hand, Greece turned back to the social ethic of the

Heraclidae.

And when once the Circean cup of empire had been drained by the race,

there was no more returning to the status of republican manhood. The new

self-governing combination of cities which arose in Achaia after the

disintegration of Alexander's empire might indeed conceivably have

reached a high civilisation in time; but the external conditions, as

summed up in the existence of Rome, were now overwhelmingly

unfavourable. The opportunity for successful federalism was past. As it

was, the Achaian and AEtolian Leagues were but politic unions as much for

aggression as for defence, even as the Spartan reformers, Agis and

Cleomenes, could never rise above the ideal of Spartan self-assertion

and domination. Thus we have on one hand the Spartan kings, concerned

for the well-being of the mass of the people (always excepting the

helots) as a means to restore Spartan pre-eminence; and on the other

hand the Achaian federation of oligarchies, hating the doctrine of

sympathy for the demos as much as they hated Sparta--the forces of union

and strife always repelling the regimen of peace, to say nothing of

fraternity. The spectacle of Cleomenes and Philopoemen at deadly odds

is the dramatic summary of the situation; the ablest men of the later

Greek age could not transcend their barbarian heredity.

The statement of Freeman (_History of Federal Government in Greece

and Italy_, ed. 1893, p. 184) that a federal system in Greece was

"utterly impossible," is true in the bare philosophic sense that

that was impossible which did not happen; but such a proposition

would hold equally true of anything else that did not happen at a

given time; and it merely creates confusion to affirm it of one

item in particular. Pericles schemed something like a federal

union;[132] and had his practice been in accord with his ideal, it

might conceivably have been at least tried. M. Fustel de Coulanges

well points out how the primary religious conception of the ancient

City-State expelled and negatived that of a composite State (_La

Cite antique_, l. iii, ch. xiv, p. 239); that is a process of

rational explanation. But unless we conceive the "failures" of the

past as lessons to be profited by, there can be neither a social

nor a moral science. Freeman, however, actually proceeds to say

that Greek federation was utterly undesirable--an extraordinary

doctrine in a treatise devoted to studying and advocating

federalism. On the principles thus laid down, Dr. Freeman's

denunciation of Austria and France in modern times is irrational,

since that which has happened in these countries is that which

alone was possible; and the problem as to the desirable is

hopelessly obscured.

To say that "Greece united in a federal bond could never have

become the Greece" we admire (_id._ p. 184), is only to vary the

verbalism. Granted that Hellenic greatness _as we know it_ was

"inseparably limited to the system of independent city

commonwealths," it remains a rational proposition that had the

Greek cities federated they could have developed their general

culture further than they actually did, though the special

splendour of Periclean Athens could not in that case have been so

quickly attained. And as the _fall_ of Greece is no less

"inseparably linked" with the separateness of the States, Dr.

Freeman's proposition suggests or implies an assertion of the

desirableness of that fall. Mr. T. Whittaker, in his notable essay

on _The Liberal State_ (1907, pp. 70-72), rightly puts it as a

fatality of the Greek State that it could neither enter into nor

absorb a larger community, but recognises this as a failure to

solve the great problem. When, however, he writes that "the free

development of Athens as an autonomous State would have been

restricted by a real federation in which other States had a voice

of their own," he partly sets up the difficulty created by Freeman.

Wherein would Athens have suffered as to freedom?

The lesson for modern democracies from the story of the ancient is thus

clear enough. To flourish, they must have peace; they must sooner or

later practise a scientific and humane restraint of population--the

sooner the better, as destruction of surplus population is always going

on, even with emigration; they must check inequality, which is the

fountain of domestic dispeace; and they must maintain a progressive and

scientific culture. And the lesson is one that may now be acted on as it

never could have been before. There is no longer a reserve of fecund

barbarism ready to overwhelm a civilisation that ceases to be

pugnacious; and the civilised States have it in their own power to

submit their quarrels to bloodless arbitrament. The inveterate strifes

of the Greeks belong to a past stage of civilisation, and were in any

case the product of peculiar geographical conditions, Greece being

physically divided, externally among islands, and internally into a

multitude of glens, which in the days of City-State life and primitive

means of communication preserved a state of cantonal separateness and

feud, just as did the physical conditions of the Scottish Highlands in

the days before effective monarchic rule.

This permanent dissociation of the City-States was only a more

intractable form of the primary divisions of the districts. Thus in

Attica itself the divisions of party largely followed the

localities: "There were as many parties among them as there were

different tracts of land in their country"--the mountain-dwellers

being democratic, while the plain-dwellers were for an oligarchy,

and the coast-dwellers sought a mixed government. (Plutarch,

_Solon_, cc. 13, 29; Aristotle, _Polity of Athens_, c. 13.) See the

question further discussed below, ch. iv, Sec. 2 (_c_).

Indeed, the fulness of the autonomous life attained by the separate

cities was a psychological hindrance to their political union, given the

primary geographical sunderance. Thus we have in the old Amphictyonic

councils the evidence of a measure of peaceful political attraction

among the tribes before the cities were developed;[133] yet on those

ancient beginnings there was no political advance till the rise of

formal federalism in the AEtolian and Achaian Leagues after the death of

Alexander. And that federalism was not ethically higher than the spirit

of the ancient Amphictyonic oath, preserved by AEschines. The balance of

the forces of separateness and political wisdom is to be conceived in

terms of a given degree of culture relatively to a given set of physical

conditions. Happily the deadlock in question no longer subsists for

civilised States.

Again, there is now possible a scientific control of population, without

infanticide, without vice, without abortion. There has been attained a

degree of democratic stability and enlightenment which given peace,

permits of a secure gradual extension of the principle of equality by

sound machinery. And there is now accumulated a treasury of seminal

knowledge which makes possible an endless intellectual progress, the

great antiseptic of political decay, provided only that the foregoing

conditions are secured. This is, in brief, the programme of progressive

democracy.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 92: Cp. Mr. Godkin, _Problems of Modern Democracy_, 1896, pp.

327-28, as to the recent rise of class hatred in the United States.]

[Footnote 93: Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 142.]

[Footnote 94: "Freedom flourishes in colonies. Ancient usages cannot be

preserved ... as at home.... Where every man lives by the labour of his

hands, equality arises, even where it did not originally exist" (Heeren,

_Pol. Hist. of Greece_, Eng. tr. p. 88. Cp. Bagehot, _Physics and

Politics_, p. 99). Note, in this connection, the whole development of

Magna Graecia. Sybaris was "perhaps in 510 B.C. the greatest of all

Grecian cities" (Grote, part ii, ch. 37). As to the early strifes in the

colonies, cp. Meyer, ii, 681.]

[Footnote 95: Such was the legal course of things before Solon (Grote,

ii, 465-66; Ingram, _History of Slavery_, p. 16; cp. Schoemann,

_Griechische Alterthuemer_, 2te Aufl. i, 341; Aristotle, _Polity of

Athens_, cc. 2, 4, 6; Wachsmuth, _Histor. Antiq. of the Greeks_, Sec. 33,

Eng. tr. 1837, i, 244).]

[Footnote 96: Cp. Schoemann, i, 114; Burckhardt, _Griechische

Culturgeschichte_, i, 159; Meyer, _Gesch. des Alterthums_, ii, 642. In

the historic period the majority of slaves are said to have been of

non-Greek race (Schoemann, i, 112; Burckhardt, i, 158). But this is said

without much evidence. The custom was to kill adult male captives and

enslave the women and children. Men captives who were spared by the

Athenians were put to slavery in the mines (Burckhardt, citing

Polyaenus, II, i, 26).]

[Footnote 97: _E.g._ Telys at Sybaris, Theagenes at Megara, and Kypselus

at Corinth, in the sixth century B.C.; and Klearchus at Herakleia in the

fourth (Grote. ii, 414, 418; iv, 95; x, 394). Compare the appeals made

to Solon by both parties to make himself despot (Plutarch, _Solon_, c.

14).]

[Footnote 98: As at Sparta under Agis IV (Plutarch, _Agis_, c. 13;

Thirlwall, c. lxii, 1st ed. viii, 142). The claims were restored at

Agis's death (_id._ p. 163).]

[Footnote 99: As by Cleomenes, soon after (_id._ p. 164).]

[Footnote 100: _E.g._ Agesilaus in the same crisis.]

[Footnote 101: As at Megara (Grote, ii, 418).]

[Footnote 102: See Grote, ii, 381, as to the general development.]

[Footnote 103: But cp. Grote, ii, 420, as to the case of Megara.]

[Footnote 104: Grote, ii, 490-94.]

[Footnote 105: Cp. Meyer, ii, 651.]

[Footnote 106: Bury, pp. 183-84.]

[Footnote 107: Eduard Meyer writes of Solon (ii, 649) that "aller

Radicalismus liegt ihm fern"; and, two pages later, as to the freeing of

the peasantry, that "Hier konnte nur ein radicales Mittel, ein Bruch des

formellen Rechts, Huelfe bringen."]

[Footnote 108: Grote (ii, 471) finds this incredible; it is hard to see

why. Plutarch (14, 16) is explicit on the point; so also the _Athenian

Polity_, c. 11.]

[Footnote 109: Friends of Solon's in the upper classes took advantage of

a disclosure of his plans to buy up land in advance, escaping full

payment under his law cancelling debts (Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 15;

Aristotle, _Athenian Polity_, c. 6). See Plutarch, c. 16, as to the

moderation and popularity of Peisistratos.]

[Footnote 110: See below, pt. ii, ch. ii, Sec. 1.]

[Footnote 111: Plutarch, _Solon_, 13, 29.]

[Footnote 112: As to his tactic in building up a party see Busolt,

_Griech. Gesch._ 1885, i, 550-53. But the panegyric of Peisistratos as a

ruler by Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari (abr. of Grote, p. 58) is

extravagant. The tyrant is there extolled for the most primitive device

of the ruler seeking popularity, the remission of taxes to individuals.]

[Footnote 113: Grote, ii, 468, 496.]

[Footnote 114: Herodotus, v, 66-69.]

[Footnote 115: Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 24.]

[Footnote 116: Bk. vii, c. 15.]

[Footnote 117: Plutarch, _Alcibiades_, c. 34.]

[Footnote 118: Grote, ch. 46.]

[Footnote 119: Cp. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, iv, Sec. 446.]

[Footnote 120: Rev. A.S. Way's translation of Euripides, _Medea_,

829-30.]

[Footnote 121: Thucydides, ii, 40.]

[Footnote 122: _Griechische Culturgeschichte_, i, 11; cp. ii, 386-88,

394, etc. And see Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 727-29, 734,

etc. For an able counter-pleading, see the essay of Mr. Benn, "The

Ethical Value of Hellenism," in _Intern. Jour. of Ethics_, April, 1902,

rep. in his _Revaluations, Historical and Ideal_, 1909.]

[Footnote 123: Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, _La cite antique_, ed. 1880, pp.

260-64; E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 728.]

[Footnote 124: Grote, iv, 489-90.]

[Footnote 125: Thucydides, v, 85 _sq_.]

[Footnote 126: Cp. Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. Sec.

66.]

[Footnote 127: Grote, iv, 539. Cp. Thirlwall, i, 181-83.]

[Footnote 128: The view here set forth is fully borne out by the

posthumous _Griechische Culturgeschichte_ of Burckhardt. Cp. i, 249-57.]

[Footnote 129: Plutarch, _Pericles_, c. 17.]

[Footnote 130: Xenophon, _Memorabilia_, iii, 5, 18. Cp. Grote, iv, 465.

As Grote goes on to show, the same general statement holds good of Rome

after her victory over Carthage, of the Italian Republics, and of the

feudal baronage in England and elsewhere.]

[Footnote 131: Grote, vi, 315-17, 518, rightly insists on the moderation

of the people after the expulsions of the Four Hundred and the Thirty

Tyrants.]

[Footnote 132: Plutarch, _Pericles_, c. 17; Grote, iv, 510; T. Davidson,

_The Parthenon Frieze_, 1882, pp. 82-128.]

[Footnote 133: Grote, pt. ii, ch. ii (ed. 1888, ii, 173-78); Freeman,

_History of Federal Government_, ed. 1893, p. 103.]

CHAPTER IV

THE LAWS OF SOCIO-POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

Sec. 1

The word "progressive," however, raises one of the most complex issues

in sociology. It would be needless to point out, were it not well to

anticipate objection, that the foregoing summaries are not offered as a

complete theory of progress even as commonly conceived, much less as

sufficing to dismiss the dispute[134] as to what progress is, or what

basis there is for the modern conceptions bound up with the word. Our

generalisations proceed on the assumption--not of course that human

affairs must constantly improve in virtue of some cosmic law, but--that

by most men of any education a certain advance in range of knowledge, of

reflection, of skill, of civic amenity, of general comfort, is held to

be attainable and desirable; that such advances have clearly taken place

in former periods; and that the due study of these periods and of

present conditions may lead to a further and indefinitely prolonged

advance. Conceiving progress broadly as occurring by way of rise in the

quantity and the quality of pleasurable and intelligent life, we beg the

question, for the purposes of this inquiry, as against those who may

regard such a tendency with aversion, and those who may deny that such

increase ever takes place. Taking as proved the evolution of mankind

from lower forms of animal life, we conceive such evolution as

immeasurably slow in the period before the attainment of agriculture,

which may serve as the stage at which what we term "civilisation"

begins. Only with agriculture begins the "civitas," as distinct from the

horde or tribe. Thenceforth all advance in arts and ethics, no less than

in political co-ordination, counts as "civilisation." The problem is,

how to diagnose advance.

All of us, roughly speaking, understand by progress the moving of things

in the way we want them to go; and the ideals underlying the present

treatise are easily seen, though it does not aim at an exhaustive survey

of the conditions and causes of what it assumes to be progressive forms

or phases of civilisation. To reach even a working theory, however, we

have to make, as it were, cross-sections in our anatomy, and to view the

movement of civilisation in terms of the conditions which increase men's

stock of knowledge and extend their imaginative art. To lay a

foundation, we have to subsume Buckle's all-important generalisation as

to the effect of food and life conditions in differentiating what we may

broadly term the primary from the secondary civilisation. Thus we think

from "civilisation" to _a_ civilisation.

Buckle drew his capital distinction, so constantly ignored by his

critics, between "European" and "non-European" civilisations. This

broadly holds good, but is a historical rather than a sociological

proposition. The process of causation is one of life conditions;

and the first great steps in the higher Greek civilisation were

made in Asia Minor, in contact with Asiatic life, even as the

earlier civilisations, such as the "Minoan" of Crete, now being

traced through recovered remains, grew up in contact with both

Egypt and the East. (Cp. Prof. Burrows, _The Discoveries in Crete_,

1907, chs. v, ix.) The distinction here made between "primary" and

"secondary" civilisations is of course merely relative, applying as

it does only to the historic period. We can but mark off the known

civilisations as standing in certain relations one to another. Thus

the Roman civilisation was in reality complex before the conquest

of Greece, inasmuch as it had undergone Italo-Greek and Etruscan

influences representing a then ancient culture. But the Roman

militarist system left the Roman civilisation in itself

unprogressive, and prevented it from being durably fertilised by

the Greek.

Proceeding from general laws to particular cases, we may roughly say

that:--

(1) Primary civilisations arise in regions specially favourable to the

regular production of abundant food, and lying inland, so as not to

offer constant temptation to piratical raids. (Fertile coast land is

defensible only by a strong community.)

(2) Such food conditions tend to maintain an abundant population,

readily lending itself to exploitation by rulers, and so involving

despotism and subordination. They also imply, as a rule, level

territories, which facilitate conquest and administration, and thus also

involve military autocracy.

The general law that facile food conditions, supporting large

populations in a primary civilisation, generate despotisms, was

explicitly put in the eighteenth century by Walckenaer (_Essai sur

l'histoire de l'espece humaine_, 1798, l. v, ch. iv, p. 198).

Montesquieu, whose reasonings on climate and soil tend to be

fanciful and non-economic (cp. Volney, _Lecons d'Histoire_, 6ieme

seance; and Buckle, Routledge's ed. pp. 24, 468-69), noted the fact

that sterile Attica was relatively democratic, and fertile

Lakedaimon aristocratic; and further (following Plutarch) decides

that mountaineers tend to be democratic, plain-dwellers subject to

rulers, and coast-dwellers something midway between (_Esprit des

Lois_, l. xviii, ch. i). He is right in his facts, but misses the

economic explanation. The fact that mountaineers as such are not

easy to conquer, doubtless counts for a good deal. See it touched

on in Gray's unfinished poem on the _Alliance between Government

and Education_, written before the appearance of the _Esprit des

Lois_, and stopped by Gray on the ground that "the Baron had

forestalled some of his best thoughts" (Gray's _Works_, ed. 1821,

p. 274). The point is discussed more fully in Dr. Dunbar's _Essays

on the History of Mankind_, 1780, Essay vi.

(3) If the nation with such conditions is well aloof from other nations,

in virtue of being much more civilised than its near neighbours, and of

being self-sufficing as regards its produce, its civilisation (as in the

cases of China and Incarial Peru and ancient Egypt) is likely to be

extremely conservative. Above all, lack of racial interbreeding involves

lack of due variation. No "pure" race ever evolved rapidly or highly.

Even the conservative primary civilisations (as the Egyptian, Chinese,

and Akkadian) rested on much race mixture.

As Dr. Draper has well pointed out (_Intellect. Develop. of

Europe_, ed. 1875, i, 84-88), the peculiar regularity of Egyptian

agriculture, depending as it did on the Nile overflow, which made

known in advance the quantity of the crops, lent itself especially

to a stable system of life and administration. The long-lasting

exclusion of foreigners there, as in China and in Sparta, would

further secure sameness of culture; and only by such causes can

special unprogressiveness anywhere arise. Sir Henry Maine's

formula, marking off progressive and unprogressive civilisations as

different species, is merely verbal, and is not adhered to by

himself. (The point is discussed at some length by the present

writer in _Buckle and his Critics_, pp. 402-8.) Maine's distinction

was drawn long ago by Eusebe Salverte (_De la Civilisation depuis

les premiers temps_, 1813, p. 22, _seq._), who philosophically goes

on to indicate the conditions which set up the differentiation;

though in later references (_Essai sur les noms d'hommes_, 1824,

pref. p. ii; _Des Sciences occultes_, 1829, pref. p. vi) he recurs

to the empirical form of his proposition, which is that adhered to

by Maine.

(4) When an old civilisation comes in steady contact with that of a race

of not greatly inferior but less ancient culture, physically so situated

as to be much less amenable to despotism (that is, in a hilly or

otherwise easily defensible region), it is likely so to fecundate the

fresher civilisation that the latter, if not vitiated by a bad political

system, will soon surpass it,[135] provided that the latter community in

turn is duly crossed as regards its stock, and that the former has due

resources.

(5) In other words, a primitive but not barbarous people, placed in a

region not highly fruitful but not really unpropitious to human life, is

the less likely to fall tamely under a despotism because its population

is not so easily multiplied and maintained;[136] and such a people, when

physiologically variated by a mixture of stocks, and when mentally

fecundated by contact with older civilisations, tends to develop what we

term a secondary civilisation, higher in all respects than those which

have stimulated it.[137]

(6) A very great disparity in the culture-stages of meeting races,

however, is as unfavourable to the issue of a higher civilisation from

their union as to a useful blending of their stocks.[138] Thus it fares

ill with the contact of higher and lower races even in a climate equally

favourable to both; and where it is favourable to the latter only, there

is likely to be no immediate progress in the lower race, while in the

terms of the case the higher will deteriorate or disappear.[139]

(7) Where a vigorous but barbarian race overruns one much more

civilised, there is similarly little prospect of immediate gain to

progress, though after a period of independent growth the newer

civilisation may be greatly fecundated by intelligent resort to the

remains of the older.

The cases of China and the Roman Empire may serve as illustrations.

They were, however, different in that the northern invasion of Rome

was by relatively considerable masses, while the Tartar conquerors

of China were easily absorbed in the vast native population.

(8) Where, again, independent States at nearly the same stage of

civilisation, whether speaking the same or different languages, stand in

a position of commerce and rivalry, but without desperate warfare, the

friction and cross-fertilisation of ideas, together with the mixture of

stocks, will develop a greater and higher intellectual and artistic life

than can conceivably arise in one great State without great or close

rivals, since there one set of ideals or standards is likely to overbear

all others, with the result of partly stereotyping taste and opinion.

This point is well put by Hume as to Greece, in his essay _Of the

Rise of the Arts and Sciences_ (1752); and after him by Gibbon, ch.

53, Bohn ed. vi, 233; Cp. Heeren, _Pol. Hist. of Ancient Greece_,

Eng. tr. p. 42; Walckenaer, _Essai_ cited, p. 338; Ferguson, _Essay

on the History of Civil Society_, 1767, pp. 182, 183; Dunbar,

_Essays on the History of Mankind_, 1780, pp. 257, 271; Goguet, _De

l'origine des lois, des arts, et des sciences_, 1758, iii Epoque,

L. ii, ch. 2; Salverte, _De la Civilisation_, 1813, pp. 83-88;

Grote, _History of Greece_, pt. ii, ch. i, ed. 1888, ii, 156;

Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, i, 75. Grote brings out very

clearly the "mutuality of action and reaction" in the case of the

maritime Greeks as compared with the others and with other nations.

See also Hegel, _Philos. der Geschichte_, Th. ii, Absch. i (ed.

1840, p. 275). Hegel, besides noting the abstract element of

geographical variety, points to the highly mixed character of the

Greek stocks, especially in Attica. So Salverte, as cited. The same

principle is rightly put by Guizot (_Hist. de la civilisation en

France_, i, lecon 2), and accepted by J.S. Mill (_On Liberty_, ch.

iii, end), as a main explanation of the intellectual progress of

modern Europe. It is therefore worth weighing as regards given

peoples, by those who, like Mr. Bryce, see nothing but harm in the

subdivision of Germany after the Thirty Years' War (_Holy Roman

Empire_, 8th ed. p. 346). Against the undoubted evils connected

with the partition system ought to be set the intellectual gains

which latterly arose from it when the intellectual life of Germany

had, as it were, recovered breath.

(9) Thus, while an empire with a developed civilisation may communicate

it to uncivilised conquered peoples not too far below its own

anthropological level, the secondary civilisation thus acquired is in

its nature less "viable," less capable of independent evolution, than

one set up by the free commerce of trading peoples. The most rapid

growths of civilisation appear always to have occurred by way of the

multiplying of free contacts among trading communities, and among the

free colonies of such.[140] The "money economy" they introduced was a

great instrument of social and industrial evolution;[141] and on such

city civilisations the ancient empires themselves seem always to have

proceeded.[142]

(10) Every phase of civilisation has its special drawbacks, so that

great retrogression may follow on great development, especially when

adventitious sources of wealth are the foundation of a luxurious

culture. In some cases a great development may be dependent on an

exhaustible source of wealth, as in the case of Britain's coal supply,

the empire of ancient Rome, the primacy of the Pope before the

Reformation, or even the Periclean empire of Athens, and the trade

monopolies of Venice, the Hansa Towns, and the Dutch Republic.

(11) The expression "decay" as applied to a people, however, has only a

relative significance: used absolutely, it stands for a delusion.

Economic conditions may worsen, and military power decline; but such

processes imply no physiological degeneration. All the "dead"

civilisations of the past were _overthrown or absorbed by military

violence_; and there is no known case of a nation physically well placed

dying out.

Professor W.D. Whitney, who is usually so well worth listening to,

fails to recognise this fact in his interesting essay on "China and

the Chinese" (_Oriental and Linguistic Studies_, 2nd series). He

declares that "according to the ordinary march of events in human

history, the Chinese empire should have perished from decay, and

its culture either have become extinct or have passed into the

keeping of another race, more than two thousand years ago. It had

already reached the limit to its capacity of development" (p. 88).

Similarly Ratzel pronounces (_History of Mankind_, Eng. tr. 1896,

i, 26) that "Voltaire hits the point when he says Nature has given

the Chinese the organ for discovering all that is _useful_ to them,

but not for going _any further_." Voltaire never penned such a

"bull." He wrote (_Essai sur les moeurs_, Avant-Propos, ch. i),

"Il _semble_ que la Nature ait donne," and "_necessaire_," not

"useful." Even that has a touch of paralogism; but the great

essayist goes on to suggest two causes for Chinese

conservatism--their ancestral piety and the nature of their method

of writing. The first is a pseudo-explanation; the second is a

_vera causa_, though only one of those involved. The German

specialist of to-day is really further from the scientific point of

view than the French wit of the middle of the eighteenth century,

going on as he does to decide that "defect in their endowments"

causes the mediocrity of the Chinese, and "also is the sole cause

of the rigidity in their social system."

This is a vain saying; and it is no less vain to go on to ask, as

Professor Whitney does, what has become of Egypt, of the

Phoenicians and Hebrews, of the Persians, of Greece and Rome, and

of Spain. The answer is easy. Egypt was conquered, and the old race

still reproduces itself, in vassalage. The "Pelasgic" civilisation

of ancient Greece was absorbed by the Greek invaders. The

"Mycenaean" and "Minoan" civilisations, as seen in ancient Troy and

"Minoan" Crete, were conquered and partly absorbed. The

Phoenicians and Hebrews were destroyed or absorbed. The Persians

are at present retrograde, but may rise again.[143] Rome and Greece

were successively overrun by barbarism. Spain, like Italy,

retrograded, but, like Italy, is on the path of regeneration. In

all these cases the process of causation is obvious. No nation dies

or disappears save by violence; and, given the proper conditions,

all races are capable of progress indefinitely. China, though

unprogressive in comparison with a European State, has changed in

many respects within two thousand years--nay, within twenty.[144]

Professor Whitney adopts an empirical convention, and accordingly

misses any real elucidation of the problem of Chinese sociology,

which he assumes to solve (p. 87) by saying we must look for our

explanations "deep in the foundations of the national character

itself." That is to say, the national character is determined by

the national character.

It is surely time that this palaeo-theological fashion of explaining

human affairs were superseded by the more fruitful method of

positive science, even as regards China, which is perhaps the worst

explained of all sociological cases. Like others, it had been

intelligently taken up by sociologists of the eighteenth century

before the conservative reaction (see the _Esprit des Lois_, vii,

6; viii, 21; x, 15; xiv, 8; xviii, 6; xix, 13-20; Dunbar's

_Essays_, as cited, pp. 257, 258, 262, 263, 321; and Walckenaer,

_Essai_ cited, pp. 175, 176); but that impetus seems to have been

thus far almost entirely lost. Voltaire's fallacy is remembered and

his truth ignored; and the methods of theology continue to be

applied to many questions of moral science after they have been

wholly cast out of physics and biology. The old "falsisms" of

empirical politics are repeated even by professed biologists when

they enter on the field of social science. Thus we have seen them

accepted by Dr. Draper, and we find Professor Huxley (_Evolution

and Ethics_, Romanes Lecture for 1893, p. 4) rhetorically putting

"that successive rise, apogee, and fall of dynasties and states

which is the most prominent topic of civil history," as

scientifically analogous to the process of growth and decay and

death in the human organism. Any comparative study of history shows

the analogy to be spurious. Professor Whitney was doubtless

influenced, like Dr. Draper, by the American habit of regarding

European and ancient civilisations as necessarily decrepit because

"slow" and "old." Cp. Draper as cited, ii, 393-98.

In the cases above dealt with, however, and in many others, there is

seen to have been _intellectual_ decay, in the sense of, first, a

cessation of forward movement, and, next, a loss of the power to

appreciate ideas once current. A common cause of such paralysis of the

higher life is the malignant action of dogmatic religious systems, as in

the cases of Persia, Jewry, Byzantium, Islam, Spain under Catholicism,

and Scotland for two centuries under Protestantism. Such paralysis by

religion may arise alike in a highly-organised but isolated State like

Byzantium, and in a semi-civilised country like Anglo-Saxon

England.[145] The special malignity of dogma in these cases is itself of

course a matter for analysis and explanation. Other cases are partly to

be explained by (_a_) the substitution of systematic militarism, always

fatal to progressive culture, for a life of only occasional warfare,

favourable to study among the leisured class.[146] But (_b_) there is

reason to surmise a further and profoundly important cause of

intellectual retrogression in the usage which develops the culture of a

people for the most part in one sex only. The thesis may be ventured

that whereas vigorous and creative brains may arise in abundance in a

young civilisation, where the sexes are physiologically not far removed

from the approximate equality of the semi-barbarous stage, the

psychological divergence set up by mentally and physically training the

males and not the females is likely to be unfavourable to the breeding

of mentally energetic types.

(12) Whether or not the last hypothesis be valid, it is clear that the

co-efficient or constituent of intellectual progress in a people, given

the necessary conditions of peace and sufficient food, is multiplication

of ideas; and this primarily results from international contact, or the

contact of wholly or partly independent communities of one people.

Multiplication of arts and crafts is of course included under the head

of ideas. But unless the stock of ideas is not merely in constant

process of being added to among the studious or leisured class, but

disseminated among the other classes, stagnation will take place among

these, and will inevitably infect the educated class.

De Tocqueville, balancing somewhat inconclusively, because always

_in vacuo_, the forces affecting literature in aristocratic and

democratic societies, says decisively enough (_Democratie en

Amerique_, ed. 1850, ii, 62-63) that "Toute aristocratie qui se met

entierement a part du peuple devient impuissante. Cela est vrai

dans les lettres aussi bien qu'en politique." This holds clearly

enough of Italian literature in the despotic period. Mr. Godkin's

criticism (_Problems of Modern Democracy_, p. 56) that "M. de

Tocqueville and all his followers take it for granted that the

great incentive to excellence, in all countries in which excellence

is found, is the patronage and encouragement of an aristocracy," is

hardly accurate. De Tocqueville puts the case judicially enough, so

far as he goes; and Mr. Godkin falls into strange extravagance in

his counter statement that there is "hardly a single historical

work composed prior to the end of the last [eighteenth] century,

except perhaps Gibbon's, which, judged by the standard that the

criticism of our day has set up, would not, though written for the

'few,' be pronounced careless, slipshod, or superficial."

Tillemont, by the testimony of Professor Bury, was a more thorough

worker in his special line than Gibbon. It would be easy to name

scores of writers in various branches of history in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries whom no good critic to-day would call

careless or slipshod; and if Hume and Robertson, Clarendon and

Burnet, be termed superficial, the "standard" will involve a

similar characterisation of most historical writers of our own day.

As regards present-day literary productions, De Tocqueville and Mr.

Godkin alike omit the necessary economic analysis.

(13) In the intellectual infectiousness of all class degradation,

properly speaking, lies the final sociological (as apart from the

primary ethical) condemnation of slavery. The familiar argument that

slavery first secured the leisure necessary for culture, even were it

wholly instead of being merely partially true, would not rebut the

censure that falls to be passed on slavery in later stages of

civilisation. All the ancient States, before Greece, stood on slavery:

then it was not slavery that yielded her special culture. What she

gained from older civilisations was the knowledge and the arts developed

by _specialisation_ of pursuits; and such specialisation was not

necessarily dependent on slavery, which could abound without it. It was

in the special employment, finally, of the exceptionally large _free_

population of Athens that the greatest artistic output was reached.[147]

In later periods, the slave population was the great nucleus of

superstition and anti-culture.

Inasmuch, then, as education is in only a small degree compatible with

toilsome poverty, the betterment of the material conditions of the

toiling class is essential to progress in ideas. That is to say,

continual progress implies gradual elimination of class inequality, and

cannot subsist otherwise. At the same time, a culture-class must be

maintained by new machinery when leisured wealth is got rid of.[148]

(14) Again, it follows from the foregoing (4-10) that the highest

civilisation will be that in which the greatest number of varying

culture-influences meet,[149] in the most happily-crossed stock, under

climatic conditions favourable to energy, on a basis of a civilisation

sufficiently matured.[150] But in order to the effectual action of such

various culture-influences through all classes of the nation in which

they meet, there is needed a constant application of social or political

regimen. In the lack of that, a great conflux of culture-forces may miss

fruition. A mere fortuitous depression of the rich class, and elevation

of the poor, will not suffice to place a society on a sound or even on

an improved footing. Such a change occurred in ancient Athens after

Salamis, when the poorer sort, who had constituted the navy,

flourished[151] as against the richer, who had been the land soldiery,

and whose lands had been ravaged. But the forces of disintegration

played afresh. Yet again, transient financial conditions, such as those

of Italy before the Reformation, of Holland until the decline of its

fishing and trade, and of Venice until its final commercial decay, may

sustain a great artistic life, art having always depended on private or

public demand. Thus with a change in the geographical course of trade, a

great phase of culture-life may dwindle. So many and so complex are the

forces and conditions of progress in civilisation.

Sec. 2

It will readily be seen that most of the foregoing propositions have

direct reference to well-known facts of history. Thus (_a_) ancient

Egypt represents a primary civilisation, marked indeed by some

fluctuations connected with dynastic changes which involved mixture of

stocks, but on the whole singularly fixed; while ancient Greek

civilisation was emphatically a secondary one, the fruit of much

race-mixture and many interacting culture-forces, all facilitated by the

commercial position and coast-conformation of Hellas.

This view is partly rejected by Grote in two passages (pt. i, chs.

xvi, xvii, ed. 1888, i, 326, 413) in which he gives to the

"inherent and expansive force" of "the Greek mind" the main credit

of Greek civilisation. But his words, to begin with, are confused

and contradictory: "The transition of the Greek mind from its

poetical to its comparatively positive stage was self-operated,

accomplished by its own inherent and expansive force--_aided

indeed, but by no means either impressed or provoked_ from

without." In the second place, there is no basis for the denial of

"impression or provocation" from without. And finally, what is

decisive, the historian himself has in other passages acknowledged

that the Greeks received from Asia and Egypt just such

"provocation" as is seen to take place in varying degrees in the

culture-contacts of all nations (chs. xv, xvi, pp. 307, 329). Of

the contact with Egypt he expressly says that it "enlarged the

range of their thoughts and observations." His whole treatment of

the rise of culture, however, is meagre and imperfect relatively to

his ample study of the culture itself. Later students grow more and

more unanimous as to the composite character of the Greek-speaking

stock in the earliest traceable periods of Hellenic life (cp. Bury,

_History of Greece_, ed. 1906, pp. 39-42, and Professor Burrows,

_The Discoveries in Crete_, 1907, p. 144), and the consequent

complexity of the entire Hellenic civilisation. The case is

suggestively put by Eduard Meyer (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii,

155) in the observation that while the west coast of Greece had as

many natural advantages as the eastern, it remained backward in

civilisation when the other had progressed far. "_Here there lacked

the foreign stimulus_: the west of Greece is away from the source

of culture. Here, accordingly, primitive conditions continued to

rule, while in the east a higher culture evolved itself.... Corinth

in the older period played no part whatever, whether in story or in

remains." The same proposition was put a generation ago by A.

Bertrand, who pointed out that the coasts of Elis and Messenia are

"incomparably more fertile" than those of Argolis and Attica

(_Etudes de mythologie et d'archeologie grecques_, 1858, pp.

40-41); and again by Winwood Reade in _The Martyrdom of Man_ (1872,

p. 64): "A glance at the map is sufficient to explain why it was

that Greece became civilised before the other European lands. It is

nearest to those countries in which civilisation first arose ...

compelled to grow towards Asia as a tree grows towards the light."

But to this generalisation should be put the qualifying clause

(above, p. 55) that fertile coasts when developed are defensible

only by a strongly organised community. Thus an early exploitation

of Elis and Messenia would be checked by piracy.

The question as to the originality of Greek culture, it is

interesting to note, was already discussed at the beginning of the

eighteenth century. See Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_, Misc. iii,

ch. i.

(_b_) The Greek land as a whole, especially the Attic, was only

moderately fertile, and therefore not so cheaply and redundantly

populated as Egypt.

The bracing effect of their relative poverty was fully recognised

by the Greeks themselves. Cp. Herodotus, vii, 102, and Thucydides,

i, 123. See on the same point Heeren, _Political History of Ancient

Greece_, Eng. tr. pp. 24-33; Thirlwall, _History of Greece_, small

ed. i, 12; Duncker, _Gesch. des Alterthums_, iii, ch. i, Sec. 1;

Wachsmuth, _Hist. Antiq. of the Greeks_, Sec. 8; Duruy, _Hist.

Grecque_, 1851, p. 7; Grote, part ii, ch. i (ed. 1888, ii, 160);

Boeckh, _Public Economy of Athens_, B. i, c. 8; Niebuhr,

_Lectures_, li (Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 265); Mahaffy, _Rambles and

Studies in Greece_, 4th ed. pp. 137, 164-67. Dr. Grundy

(_Thucydides and the History of his Age_, 1911, p. 58 _sq._) lays

stress on the fertility of the valleys, but recognises the

smallness of the fertile areas.

(_c_) Hellas was further so decisively cut up into separate cantons by

its mountain ranges, and again in respect of the multitude of the

islands, that the Greek districts were largely foreign to each

other,[152] and their cultures had thus the advantage of reacting and

interacting, as against the disadvantage of their incurable political

separateness--that disadvantage in turn being correlative with the

advantage of insusceptibility to a despotism.

The effect of geographical conditions on Greek history is discussed

at length in Conrad Bursian's essay, _Ueber den Einfluss des

griechischen Landes auf den Charakter seiner Bewohner_, which I

have been unable to procure or see; but I gather from his

_Geographie von Griechenlands_ that he takes the view here set

forth. Cp. Senior's _Journal kept in Turkey and Greece_, 1859, p.

255, for a modern Greek's view of the state of his nation,

"divided into small districts by mountain ranges intersecting each

other in all directions without a road or canal"; the deduction

from the same perception made by the young Arthur Stanley

(Prothero's _Life of Dean Stanley_, 1-vol. ed. p. 143); and the

impression retained from his travels by M. Bertrand, _Etudes de

mythologie et d'archeologie grecques_, 1858, p. 199.

The profound importance of the geographical fact has been

recognised more or less clearly and fully by many writers--_e.g._,

Hume, essay Of the _Rise and Progress of the Arts and the Sciences_

(ed. 1825 of _Essays_, i, 115-16); Gillies, _History of Greece_,

1-vol. ed. p. 5; Heeren, as cited, pp. 35, 75; Duncker, as last

cited, also ch. iii, Sec. 12 (2te Aufl. 1860, p. 601); Duruy, ch. i;

Cox, _General History of Greece_, bk. i, ch. i; Thirlwall, ch. x;

Wachsmuth, Eng. tr. i, 87; Comte, _Cours de Philosophie Positive_,

Lecon 53ieme; Grote, pt. ii, ch. i (ii, 155); Finlay, _History of

Greece_, Tozer's ed. i, 28; K.O. Mueller, _Introd. to Scientific

Mythology_, Eng. tr. p. 179; Hegel, as last cited; Hertzberg,

_Geschichte von Hellas und Rom_, 1879 (in Oncken's series), i, 9;

Winwood Reade, _The Martyrdom of Man_, 1872, p. 65 sq.; Bury,

_History of Greece_, ed. 1906, pp. 2-4; Fyffe (very explicitly),

_Primer of Greek History_, p. 8--but it is strangely overlooked by

writers to whom one turns for a careful study of causes. Even

Grote, after having clearly set forth (ii, 150) the predetermining

influence of land-form, attributes Greek divisions to the

"character of the race," which even in this connection, however, he

describes as "splitting _by natural fracture_ into a multitude of

self-administering, indivisible cities" (pt. ii, ch. 28,

beginning); and Sir George Cox, after specifying the geographical

factor, speaks of it as merely "fostering" a love of isolation

_resulting_ from "political creed." Freeman (_History of Federal

Government_) does not seem to apply the geographical fact to the

explanation of any phase of Greek history, though he sees in Greece

(ed. 1893, pp. 92, 554) "each valley and peninsula and island

marked out by the hand of nature for an independent being," and

quotes (p. 559) Cantu as to the effect of land-form on history in

Italy. In so many words he pronounces (p. 101) that the love of

town-autonomy was "inherent in the Greek mind." Mr. Warde Fowler

(_City-State of the Greeks and Romans_) does not once give heed to

the geographical conditions of causation, always speaking of the

Greeks as lacking the "faculty" of union as compared with the

Latins, though the Eastern Empire finally showed greater cohesive

power than the Western. Even Mr. Fyffe (_Primer_ cited, p. 127),

despite his preliminary recognition of the facts, finally speaks of

the Greeks as relatively lacking in the "gift for government."

The same assumption is made in Lord Morley's _Compromise_ (ed.

1888, p. 108) in the allusion to "peoples so devoid of the

sovereign faculty of political coherency as were the Greeks and

the Jews." Lord Morley's proposition is that such peoples may

still evolve great civilising ideas; but though that is true, the

implied thesis as to "faculty" weakens even the truth. The case of

the Jews is to be explained in exactly the same way as that of the

Greeks, the face of Palestine being disjunct and segregate in a

peculiar degree. Other "Semites," living in great plains, were

united in great monarchies. The sound view of the case as to Rome

is put by Hertzberg: "Soll man im Gegensatze zu der hellenischen

Geschichte es in kuerzester Fassung bezeichnen, so kann man etwa

sagen, die italische Landesnatur stellte der Ausbildung eines

grossen _einheitlich_ geordneten Staates durchaus nicht die

gewaltigen Hindernisse entgegen, wie das in Griechenland der Fall

war" (_Gesch. von Hellas und Rom_, ii, 7). Cp. Shuckburgh, _History

of Rome_, 1894, p. 9, as to "the vast heights which effectually

separate tribes." Dr. Cunningham puts it (_Western Civilisation_,

i, 152, 160) that Roman expansion in Italy came of the need to

reach a true frontier of defence, in the lack of physical barriers

to the early States. (So Lord Cromer, _Anc. and Mod. Imperialism_,

1910, p. 19.) It seems more plausible to say that all of the States

concerned were positively disposed to conquest, and that the

physical conditions of Italy made possible an overrunning which in

early Greece was impossible.

The theory of "faculty," consistently applied on Mr. Fowler's and

Lord Morley's lines, would credit the French with an innate gift of

union much superior to that of the Germans--at least in the modern

period--and the Chinese with the greatest "faculty" of all. But the

long maintenance of one rule over all China is clearly due in large

part to the "great facility of internal intercourse" (Davis, _The

Chinese_, Introd.) so long established. The Roman roads were half

the secret of the cohesion of the Empire. Dr. Draper suggests,

ingeniously but inaccurately, that Rome had strength and permanence

because of lying east and west, and thus possessing greater racial

homogeneity than it would have had if it lay north and south

(_Intel. Devel. of Europe_, _i_, 11). On the other hand,

mountainous Switzerland remains still cantonally separate, though

the pressure of surrounding States, beginning with that of Austria,

forced a political union. Compare the case of the clans of the

Scottish Highlands down to the road-making period after the last

Jacobite rising. See the principle discussed in Mr. Spencer's

_Principles of Sociology_, i, Sec. 17.

It may be well, before leaving the subject, to meet the important

criticism of the geographical principle by Fustel de Coulanges (_La

Cite antique_, liv. iii, ch. xiv, p. 238, edit. 1880). Noting that

the incurable division of the Greeks has been attributed to the

nature of their land, and that it has been said that the

intersecting mountains established lines of natural demarcation

among men, he goes on to argue: "But there are no mountains

between Thebes and Plataea, between Argos and Sparta, between

Sybaris and Crotona. There were none between the towns of Latium,

or between the twelve cities of Etruria. Physical nature has

doubtless some influence on the history of peoples, but the beliefs

of men have a much greater. Between two neighbouring cities there

was something more impassable than a mountain--to wit, the series

of sacred limits, the difference of cults, the barrier which each

city set up between the stranger and its Gods."

All this, so far as it goes, is substantially true, but it does not

at all conflict with the principle as above set forth. Certainly

all cities, like all tribes, were primarily separatist; though even

in religious matters there was some measure of early peaceful

inter-influence, and a certain tendency to syncresis as well as to

separateness. (Cp. K.O. Mueller, _Dorians_, Eng. tr. i, 228.) But

the principle is not special to the cities of Greece. Cities and

tribes were primarily separatist in Babylonia and in Egypt. How,

then, were these regions nevertheless monarchised at an early

period? Clearly by reason of the greater invitingness and

feasibility of conquest in such territories--for their unification

was forcible. The conditions had thus both an objective and a

subjective, a suggestive and a permissive force, both lacking in

Greece. Again, the twelve cities of Etruria _formed a league_. If

they did so more readily and effectually than the Greeks, is not

the level character of their territory, which made them

collectively open to attack, and facilitated intercourse, one of

the obviously probable causes? No doubt the close presence of

hostile and alien races was a further unifying force which did not

arise in Greece. Etruria, finally, like Latium, was unified by

conquest; the question is, Why was not Greece? There is no answer

save one--that in the pre-Alexandrian period no Greek State had

acquired the military and administrative skill and resources needed

to conquer and hold such a divided territory. Certainly the

conditions conserved the ideal of separateness and non-aggression

or non-assimilation, so that cities which had easy access to each

other respected each other's ideal. But here again it was known

that an attempt at conquest would probably lead to alliances

between the attacked State and others; and the physical conditions

prevented any State save Macedonia from becoming overwhelmingly

strong. To these conditions, then, we always return, not as to sole

causes, but as to determinants.

(_d_) In Egypt, again, culture was never deeply disseminated, and before

Alexander was hardly at all fecundated by outside contact. In Greece

there was always the great uncultured slave substratum; and the arrest

of freedom, to say nothing of social ignorance, female subjection, and

sexual perversion, ultimately kept vital culture stationary. In Rome,

militarism and the multiplication of the slave class, along with the

deletion of the independent and industrious middle class, made

progressive culture impossible, as surely as it broke down

self-government. In all cases alike, over-population, not being met by

science, either bred poverty or was obviated by crime and vice.

The so-called regeneration of Europe by the barbarian conquest, finally,

was simply the beginning of a long period of corrupted and internecine

barbarism, the old culture remaining latent; and not till after many

centuries did the maturing barbaric civilisation in times of compulsory

peace reach the capacity of being fecundated by the intelligent

assimilation of the old. But after the Renaissance, as before, the

diseases of militarism and class privilege and the political subjection

caused a backthrow and intellectual stagnation, which was assisted by

the commercial decline brought upon Italy; so that in the feudal period,

in one State after another, we have the symptoms of, as it were, senile

"decay" and retrogression.[153] In all cases this is to be set down

proximately to the deficit of new ideas, and in some to excess of

strife, which exhausted spare energy among the leisured class, deepened

the misery of the toilers, and normally prevented the intelligent

intercourse of peoples. It is become a commonplace of historical

philosophy that the Crusades wrought for good inasmuch as they meant

fresh communication between East and West. Yet it may be doubted whether

much more was not done through the quiet contacts of peace between

Saracen and Christian in Western Europe, and by the commerce with the

East which preceded the Crusades,[154] than by the forced intercourse

following on religious war. In any case, the transition from quasi-decay

to progress in Christendom is clearly due to the entrance of new ideas

of many species from many directions into the common stock; Greek

letters, Saracen physics, and new geographical discovery all combining

to generate thought.

The case of Japan, again, compares with both that of ancient Greece and

that of modern Europe. Its separate civilisation, advantageously placed

in an archipelago, drew stimulus early in the historic period from that

of China; and, while long showing the Chinese unprogressiveness in other

respects, partly in virtue of the peculiar burdensomeness of the

Chino-Japanese system of ideograms, it made remarkable progress on the

side of art. The recent rapid industrial development (injurious to the

artistic life) is plainly a result of the European and American

contact; and if only the mechanism of reading and writing be made

manageable on the European lines, and the snare of militarism be

escaped, the Japanese civilisation may develop mentally as much as it is

doing industrially and in military organisation.

It suffices the practical political student, then, to note that progress

is thus always a matter of intelligible causation; and, without

concerning himself about predicting the future or estimating the sum of

possibilities, to take up the tasks of contemporary politics as all

other tasks are taken up by practical men, as a matter of adaptation of

means to ends. The architect and engineer have nothing to do with

calculating as to when the energy of the solar system will be wholly

transmuted. As little has the politician to do with absolute estimates

of the nature of progress. All alike have to do with the study of laws,

forces, and economics.

Sec. 3

We may now, then, set forth the all-pervading biological forces or

tendencies of attraction and repulsion in human affairs as the main

primary factors in politics or corporate life, which it is the problem

of human science to control by counteracting or guiding; and we may

without further illustration set down the principal modes in which these

instincts appear. They are, broadly speaking:--

(_a_) Animal pugnacities and antipathies of States or peoples,

involving combinations, sanctified from the first by religion, and

surviving as racial aspirations in subject peoples.

(_b_) Class divisions, economically produced, resulting in class

combinations and hostilities within a State, and, in particular,

popular desire for betterment.

(_c_) The tendency to despotism as a cure for class oppression or

anarchy; and the spirit of conquest.

(_d_) The beneficent lure of commerce, promoting intercourse,

countered by the commercial jealousies of States.

(_e_) Designs of rulers, giving rise to popular or aristocratic

factions--complicated by questions of succession and loyalism.

(_f_) Religious combinations, antipathies, and ambitions,

international or sectarian. In more educated communities, ideals of

government and conduct.

In every one of these modes, be it observed, the instinct of repulsion

correlates with the instinct of attraction. The strifes are the strifes

of combinations, of groups or masses united in themselves by sympathy,

in antipathy to other groups or masses. The _esprit de corps_ arises

alike in the species, the horde, the tribe, the community, the class,

the faction, the nation, the trade or profession, the Church, the sect,

the party. Always men unite to oppose; always they must love to hate,

fraternise to struggle.

The analogies in physics are obvious, but need not here be dwelt

upon. There is a risk of losing concrete impressions, which are

here in view, in a highly generalised statement of cosmic

analogies. But it may be well to point out that a general view will

perfectly reconcile the superficially conflicting doctrines of

recent biologists, as to "progress by struggle" and "progress by

co-operation." Both statements hold good, the two phases being

correlatives.

I have said that it is extremely difficult to imagine a state of society

in which there shall be no public operation of any one of these forces.

I am disposed to say it is impossible, but for scientific purposes

prefer to put simply the difficulties of the conception. A cessation of

war is not only easily conceivable, but likely; but a cessation of

strife of aspiration would mean a state of biological equilibrium

throughout the civilised world. Now, pure equilibrium is by general

consent a state only momentarily possible; and the state of dissolution

of unions, were that to follow, would involve strife of opinion at least

up to a certain point. But just as evolution is now visibly towards an

abandonment of brute strife among societies, so may it be reasonably

expected that the strife of ideals and doctrines within societies,

though now perhaps emotionally intense in proportion to the limitation

of brute warfare, will gradually be freed of malevolent passion as

organisms refine further. Passion, in any case, has hitherto been at

once motive-power and hindrance--the omnipresent force, since all ideas

have their correlative emotion. A perception of this has led to some

needless dispute over what is called the "economic theory" of history;

critics insisting that men are ruled by non-economic as well as economic

motives.[155] The solution is perfectly simple. Men are proximately

ruled by their passions or emotions; and the supremacy of the economic

factor consists in its being, for the majority, the most permanent

director or stimulant of feeling. Therefore, the great social

rectification, if it ever come, must needs be economic.

Certainly, on the principle laid down, there is a likelihood that strife

of ideals and doctrines may be for a time intensified by the very

process of social reform, should that go to lessen the stress of the

industrial struggle for existence. It is easy to see that England has in

the past hundred and twenty years escaped the stress of domestic strife

which in France wrought successive revolutions, not so much by any

virtue in its partially democratic constitution as by the fact that on

the one hand a war was begun with France by the English ruling classes

at an early stage of the first revolution, and that on the other hand

the animal energies of the middle and lower classes were on the whole

freer than those of the French to run in the channels of industrial

competition. People peacefully fighting each other daily in trade, not

to speak of sports, were thereby partly safeguarded from carrying the

instincts of attraction and repulsion in politics to the length of

insurrection and civil war. When the strife of trade became congested,

the spirit of political strife, fed by hunger, broke out afresh, to be

again eased off when the country had an exciting foreign war on hand. So

obvious is this that it may be the last card of Conservatism to play off

the war spirit against the reform spirit, as was done with some

temporary success in England by Beaconsfield, and as is latterly being

done by his successors.[156] The climaxing movement of political

rationalism is evidently dependent on the limitation of the field of

industrial growth and the absence of brute warfare. And if, as seems

conceivable, political rationalism attains to a scientific provision for

the well-being of the mass of the people, we shall have attained a

condition in which the forces of attraction and repulsion, no longer

flowing freely in the old social channels, may be expected to dig new

ones or deepen those lately formed. The future channels, generally

speaking, would tend to lie in the regions of political, ethical, and

religious opinion; and the partial disuse of any one of these will tend

to bring about the deepening of the others.

But this is going far ahead; and it is our business rather to make

clear, with the help of an analysis of analogous types of civilisation,

what has happened in the modern past of our country. The simple general

laws under notice are universal, and will be found to apply in all

stages of history, though the interpretation of many phases of life by

their means may be a somewhat complex matter.

For instance, the life of China[157] (above discussed) and that of India

may at first sight seem to give little colour to the assumption of a

constant play of social attraction and repulsion. The "unprogressiveness

of Asia" is dwelt on alike by many who know Asia and many who do not.

But this relative unprogressiveness is to be explained, like European

progress, in terms of the conditions. China is simply a case of

comparative culture-stability and culture-isolation. The capital

condition of progress in civilisation has always been, as aforesaid, the

contact of divergent races whose independent culture-elements, though

different, are not greatly different in grade and prestige. Now, the

outside contacts of China, down till the eighteenth century, had been

either with races which had few elements of civilisation to give her,

like the Mongols, or with a civilisation little different from or less

vigorous than her own, like that of India. Even these contacts counted

for much, and Chinese history has been full of political convulsions,

despite--or in keeping with--the comparative stagnation of Chinese

culture. (On this see Peschel, _Races of Men_, Eng. tr. pp. 361-74. Cp.

Huc, _Chinese Empire_, Eng. tr. ed. 1859, p. xvii; Walckenaer, _Essai

sur l'histoire de l'espece humaine_, 1798, pp. 175, 176; and Maine,

_Early History of Institutions_, pp. 226, 227). The very pigtail which

for Europe is the symbol of Chinese civilisation is only two hundred

years old, having come in with the Mantchoo dynasty; and the policy of

systematically excluding foreigners dates from the same period (Huc, p.

236). "No one," writes Professor Flint, "who has felt interest enough in

that singular nation to study the researches and translations of

Remusat, Pauthier, Julien, Legge, Plath, Faber, Eitel, and others, will

hesitate to dismiss as erroneous the commonplace that it has been an

unprogressive nation" (_History of the Philosophy of History_, vol. i,

1893, p. 88).

China was in fact progressive while the variety of stocks scattered over

her vast area reacted on each other in virtue of variety of government

and way of life:[158] it was when they were reduced under one imperial

government that unity of state-system, coupled with the exclusion of

foreign contacts, imposed stagnation. But the stagnation was real, and

other factors contributed to its continuance. The fecundity of the soil

has always maintained a redundant and therefore a poor and ignorant

population--a condition which we have described as fatal to progress in

culture if not counteracted, and which further favours the utter

subjection of women and the consequent arrest of half the sources of

variation. Mencius, speaking to the rulers of his day (3rd c. B.C.),

declared with simple profundity that "They are only men of education

who, without a certain livelihood, are able to maintain a fixed heart.

As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood it follows that

they will not have a fixed heart. And if they have not a fixed heart

there is nothing they will not do in the way of self-abandonment, of

moral deflection, of depravity, and of wild license" (Legge, _Life and

Works of Mencius_, 1875, p. 49). That lesson the rulers of China could

not learn, any more than their European congeners.

We cannot, therefore, accede to Professor Flint's further remark that

"The development and filiation of thought is scarcely less traceable in

the history and literature of China than of Greece"--that is, if it be

meant that Chinese history down till our own day may be so compared with

the history of pagan Greece. The forces of fixation in China have been

too strong to admit of this. The same factors have been at work in

India, where, further, successive conquests, down till our own, had

results very similar to those of the barbarian conquest of the Roman

Empire. Yet at length, next door to China, in Japan, there has rapidly

taken place a national transformation that is not to be paralleled in

the world's history; and in India the Congress movement has developed in

a way that twenty years ago was thought impossible.[159] And while these

things are actually happening before the world's eyes, certain

Englishmen vociferate more loudly than ever the formula of the

"unchangeableness of Asia." A saner, though still a speculative view, is

put forth by Mr. C.H. Pearson in his work on _National Character_. It

was anticipated by--among others--M. Philarete Chasles. See his

_L'Angleterre politique_, edit. 1878, pp. 250, 251. And Walckenaer, over

a hundred years ago (_Essai_ cited, p. 368), predicted the future

civilisation of the vast plains of Tartary.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 134: On this may be consulted a suggestive paper by Mr. Lowes

Dickinson in the _Free Review_, April, 1894, and an instructive study by

Mr. T. Whittaker, "A Critical Essay on the Philosophy of History," in

his _Essays and Notices_, 1895. Cp. Spencer, "Progress: Its Law and

Cause," in _Essays_, vol. i.]

[Footnote 135: This also is posited by Dunbar, _Essays_ cited, pp. 230,

233.]

[Footnote 136: This again, as well as the general importance of

culture-contacts, is noted by Walckenaer, _Essai_ cited, pp. 202-3.]

[Footnote 137: This was seen in antiquity. Julian, at least, pointed to

the fashion in which the Greeks had perfected studies the rudiments of

which they had received from other peoples (_apud_ Cyrill, v. 8); and

Celsus had said it before him (Origen, _Contra Celsum_, i. 2).]

[Footnote 138: See some just remarks by Bagehot in _Physics and

Politics_, pp. 67-69, proceeding on Quatrefages, as to the varying

success of given race-mixtures in different regions, in terms of the

difference of the physical environment. Compare Schaeffle, _Bau und

Koerper de Socialen Lebens_, 1875-8, ii, 468.]

[Footnote 139: Cp. Dunbar, as cited, p. 211, and Bagehot, as cited, p.

71. In such cases as those of British India and French Algiers the

exception is only apparent, the European control being kept up by annual

drafts of new men.]

[Footnote 140: _E.g._ the ancient AEgean civilisation, as seen in

"Minoan" Crete; the colonies of the Phoenicians; those of the Greeks

in Asia Minor, Italy, and Sicily; the medieval Italian Republics; the

Hansa towns; those of the Netherlands; and the United States.]

[Footnote 141: See Dr. Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, pp. 73, 74,

83-86, 94-97, etc., for an interesting development of this principle.

Cp. Prof. Ashley, _Introduction to Economic History_, 1888-93, i, 43,

and Hildebrand, as there cited. The originality of Hildebrand's ideas on

this point has perhaps been overrated by Ochenkowski and others. Smith

recognised the main facts (_Wealth of Nations_, bk. i, c. iv). See also

the passage from Torrens cited by M'Culloch in his essay on "Money,"

_Treatises_, ed. 1859, pp. 9, 10.]

[Footnote 142: _E.g._ Babylonia, Egypt, Alexander's empire, and Rome.]

[Footnote 143: This was written before the recent revolution.]

[Footnote 144: Since this was written China has undergone her new

birth.]

[Footnote 145: Cp. Pearson's _History of England during the Early and

Middle Ages_, i, 312, and H.W. C. Davis, _England under the Normans and

Angevins_, 1905, pp. 1, 2, 47.]

[Footnote 146: Japan now runs a grave risk of such retrogression.]

[Footnote 147: Cp. Cunningham's _Western Civilisation_, i, 109.]

[Footnote 148: The point is argued at greater length by the author in an

article on "The Economics of Genius" in the _Forum_, April, 1898 (rep.

in _Essays in Sociology_, vol. ii).]

[Footnote 149: Cp. Tiele, _Outlines of the History of Religion_, Eng.

tr. pp. 205, 207, and the present writer's _Short History of

Freethought_, 2nd ed. i, 122-24.]

[Footnote 150: The civilisations of North America and the English

"dominions," while showing much diffusion of average culture, produce

thus far relatively few of the highest fruits because of social

immaturity and the smallness of their culture class.]

[Footnote 151: Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 12; v, 4.]

[Footnote 152: Grote (ii, 150) argues that the need to move the cattle

between high and low grounds promoted communication between "otherwise

disunited villages." But that would be a small matter. The essential

point is that, whatever the contacts, the communities remained alien to

each other.]

[Footnote 153: See Stubbs, _Const. Hist. of England_, 4th ed. iii,

632-33, as to England in the fifteenth century; and Michelet, Introd. to

_Renaissance_ (vol. vii of _Hist. de France_).]

[Footnote 154: See below, pt. vi, ch. i, Sec. 2.]

[Footnote 155: This discussion also goes back for at least two

centuries. See Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_, Misc. iii, ch. i (vol.

iii, pp. 137, 152).]

[Footnote 156: Note, in this connection, the tactic of Mr. Balfour in

the election struggle of 1909-10.]

[Footnote 157: This was written, of course, before the recent uprising.]

[Footnote 158: Cp. Professor Giles, _The Civilisation of China_, pp.

1-19, as to the little-recognised diversity of Chinese speech, stock,

and climate.]

[Footnote 159: Since these words were written China in turn has had her

new birth, vindicating the doctrine above set forth.]

PART II

ECONOMIC FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY

CHAPTER I

ROMAN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION

By singling out one set of the forces of aggregation and disintegration

touched on in the foregoing general view, it is possible to get a more

concrete idea of what actually went on in the Roman body politic. It is

always useful in economic science, despite protests to the contrary, to

consider bare processes irrespectively of ethical feeling; and the

advantage accrues similarly in the "economic interpretation of

history."[160] We have sufficiently for our purpose considered Roman

history under the aspects of militarism and class egoism: it remains to

consider it as a series of economic phenomena.

This has been facilitated by many special studies. Gibbon covers

much of the ground in chapters 6, 14, 17, 18, 29, 35, 36 and 41;

and Professor Guglielmo Ferrero sheds new light at some points in

his great work, _The Greatness and Decline of Rome_ (Eng. trans. 5

vols. 1907-1911), though his economics at times calls for revision.

Cp. Alison on "The Fall of Rome," in _Essays_, 1850, vol. iii (a

useful conspectus, though flawed by some economic errors);

Spalding's _Italy and the Italian Islands_, 3rd ed. 1845, i,

371-400; Dureau de la Malle, _Economie politique des Romains_,

1840, t. ii; Robiou et Delaunay, _Les Institutions de l'ancienne

Rome_, 1888, vol. iii, ch. 1; Fustel de Coulanges, _Le Colonat

romain_, etc.; Finlay, _History of Greece from its Conquest by the

Romans_, ed. 1877, ch. i, Sec.Sec. 5-8; Long, _Decline of the Roman

Republic_, vol. i, 1864, chs. xi, xii, xx (a work full of sound

criticism of testimonies); W.T. Arnold, _Roman Provincial

Administration_, 1879; Brooks Adams, _The Law of Civilisation and

Decay_, 1897, ch. i; and Dr. Cunningham's _Western Civilisation_,

vol. i, 1899. Among many learned and instructive German treatises

may be noted the Preisschrift of R. Poehlmann, _Die Uebervoelkerung

der antiken Grossstaedte_, Leipzig, 1884. Special notice is due to

the recent work of W.R. Patterson, _The Nemesis of Nations_,

1907--a valuable study of slavery.

As we have first traced them, the Romans are a cluster of agricultural

and pastoral tribes, chronically at war with their neighbours, and

centring round certain refuge-fortresses on one or two of the "Seven

Hills." Whether before or after conquest by monarchic Etruscans, these

tribes tended normally to fall into social grades in which relative

wealth and power tended to go together. The first source of subsistence

for all was cattle-breeding and agriculture, and that of the richer was

primarily slave labour, a secondary source being usury. Slaves there

were in the earliest historic times. But from the earliest stages wealth

was in some degree procured through war, which yielded plunder in the

form of cattle,[161] the principal species of riches in the ages before

the precious metals stood for the command of all forms of wealth. Thus

the rich tended to grow richer even in that primitive community, their

riches enabling them specially to qualify themselves for war, so getting

more slaves and cattle, and to acquire fresh slave labour in time of

peace, while in time of war the poor cultivator ran a special risk of

being himself reduced to slavery at home, in that his farm was untilled,

while that of the slave-owner went on as usual.[162] Long before the

ages described as decadent, the lapse of the poor into slavery was a

frequent event. "The law of debt, framed by creditors, and for the

protection of creditors, was the most horrible that has ever been known

among men."[163] When the poorer cultivator borrowed stock or seed from

the richer, he had first to pay a heavy interest; and when in bad years

he failed to meet that liability he could be at once sold up and finally

enslaved with his family, so making competition all the harder for the

other small cultivators. As against the plainly disintegrating action of

such a system, however, wars of conquest and plunder became to some

extent a means of popular salvation, the poorer having ultimately their

necessary share in the booty, and, as the State grew, in the conquered

lands. Military expansion was thus an economic need.

In such an inland community, commerce could grow but slowly, the

products being little adapted for distant exchange. The primitive

prejudice of landholders against trade, common to Greece and Rome, left

both handicraft and commerce largely to aliens and pariahs.[164] The

traders, as apart from the agriculturists and vine-and olive-growers,

would as a rule be foreigners, "non-citizens," having no political

rights; and their calling was from the first held in low esteem by the

richer natives, were it only because in comparison it was always apt to

involve some overreaching of the agriculturist,[165] which as between

man and man could be seen to be a bad thing by moralists who had no

scruples about usury and enslavement for debt. And as the scope of the

State increased from age to age, the patrician class found ready to its

hand means of enrichment which yielded more return with much less

trouble than was involved in commerce. The prejudice against trade was

no bar to brigandage.

On the other hand, the first practical problem of all communities,

taxation, was intelligently faced by the Roman aristocracy from the

outset. The payment of the _tributum_ or occasional special tax for

military purposes was a condition of the citizen franchise, and so far

the patricians were all burdened where the unenfranchised plebeians were

not. But this contribution "was looked upon as a forced loan, and was

repaid when the times improved."[166] And there were other

compensations. The use of the public pastures (which seem at one time to

have been the sole source of the State's revenue[167]), and the

cultivation of public land, were operations which could be so conducted

as to pay the individual without paying the State. It is clear that

frauds in this connection were at all times common: the tithes and rents

due on the _ager publicus_ were evaded, and the land itself appropriated

wherever possible by the more powerful, though still called public

property.[168] "The poorer plebeian, therefore, always strove to have

conquered lands divided, and not kept as _ager publicus_; while the

landless men who got allotments at a distance were inclined to regard

their migration as an almost equal grievance. If the rich men, they

argued, had not monopolised the public pastures with their herds, and

treated the lands which they leased at a nominal rental as their own,

there would have been enough land at home to divide among those who had

been ruined while serving their country in arms."[169]

But as the sphere of conquest widened, another economic phase

supervened. Where newly conquered territory was too distant to tempt any

save the poorest citizens, or to be directly utilised by the rich, it

could still be made _ager publicus_ and rented to its own inhabitants;

and the collection of this and other exactions from subject provinces

gradually grew to be a main source of Roman wealth. For the mere

cattle-looting of the early days there was substituted the systematic

extortion of tribute. "In antiquity conquest meant essentially the power

to impose a tribute upon the conquered";[170] and "until the time of

Augustus the Romans had maintained their armies by seizing and

squandering the accumulated [bullion] capital hoarded by all the nations

of the world."[171] Meanwhile the upper classes were directly or

indirectly supported by the annual tribute which from the time of the

conquest of Greece was drawn solely from the provinces. Paulus Emilius

brought from the sack of Hellas so enormous a treasure in bullion, as

well as in objects of art, that the exaction of the _tributum_ from

Roman citizens, however rich, was felt to have become irrational; and

henceforth, until Augustus re-imposed taxation to pay his troops, Italy

sponged undisguisedly on the rest of the Empire.[172] Caesar's

expeditions were simply quests for plunder and revenue; and the reason

for his speedy retreat from Britain, for which there have been framed so

many superfluous explanations, is plainly given in the letter of Cicero

in which he tells of the news sent him from Britain by his brother--"no

hope of plunder."[173] But the supreme need was a regular annual

tribute, preferably in bullion, but welcome as corn. On the one hand the

exacted revenue supported the military and the bureaucracy; on the other

hand, the business of collecting taxes and tribute was farmed out in the

hands of companies of _publicani_, mainly formed of the so-called

knights, the _equites_ of the early days; in whose hands rich senators,

in defiance of legal prohibition, placed capital sums for

investment,[174] as they had previously used foreigners, who were free

to take usury where a Roman was not. Of such money-makers Gallia

Provincia was already full in the days of Cicero.[175] Roman

administration was thus a matter of financially exploiting the Empire in

the interest of the Roman moneyed classes;[176] and the ruthless skill

with which the possibilities of the situation were developed is perhaps

even now not fully realised. The Roman financier could secure a tribute

upon tribute by lending to a subject city or State the money demanded of

it by the government, and charge as much interest on the loan as the

borrowers could well pay. We know that the notoriously conscientious

Brutus, of sacred memory, thus lent, or backed a friend who lent, money

to tribute-payers at 48 per cent., or at least demanded 48 per cent. on

his loans, and sought to use the power of the executive to extort the

usury.[177]

All this, we are to remember, went on without any furtherance of total

domestic wealth-production. When corn-growing fell off, irrecoverably

depressed by the unearned import from the richer soils of tributary

provinces, there was a transference, partly economic, partly luxurious,

of agricultural labour to vine-and olive-culture, and a wholesale

turning of arable land to pasture. Some export of wine and olives

followed, though the rich Romans tended to drink the wines of Greece.

But Italy had ceased to be self-supporting. The produce she imported was

far in excess of her power of export;[178] so that in sheer

factitiousness the revenue of Rome is without parallel in history.

Modern England, which has grown rich by burning up its coal in

manufacture or selling it outright, but in the process has acquired a

share in the national and municipal debts of all other countries--England

is stable in comparison. While it lasts, the coal educes manufactures,

which also earn imports and constitute loans. So with the recent

exploitation of German iron; though in that case there has been much

of sheer national waste in the wholesale export of iron at "dumping"

prices in times of trade depression. But the history of Rome

was a progressive paralysis of Italian production; and the one way in

which the administration can be said to have counteracted the

process--as apart from the spontaneous resort to vine-and olive-culture

and to slave manufactures--was by forcing more-or-less unprofitable

mining for gold and silver wherever any could be got, thus giving what

stimulus can be given to demand by the mere placing of fresh bullion on

the market. Roman civilisation was thus irrevocably directed to an

illusory end, with inevitably fatal results. Bullion had come to

standfor public wealth, and wars were made for mines as well as for

tribute, Spain in particular being prized for her mining resources. As a

necessary sequence, therefore, copper money was ousted by silver (B.C.

269), and silver finally, after a long transition period, by gold, about

the time of Severus.[179] The silver had been repeatedly debased when

the treasury was in difficulties;[180] and in the later days of the

Empire it seems to have been base beyond all historic parallel,[181]

though a large revenue was extorted till the end. Between revenue and

tax-farming profits and the yield of the mines, the Roman moneyed class

must indeed have spent a good deal, so long as the tributaries were not

exhausted. But their economic demand was mainly for--(_a_) foods,

spices, wines, cloths, gems, marbles, and wares produced by the more

prosperous provinces; (_b_) expensive forms of food, fish, and fowl,

raised chiefly on the estates run by their own class; (_c_) some wares

of home production; and (_d_) _services_[182] from artists, architects,

master craftsmen, slaves, mimes, parasites, and meretrices, whose

economic demand in turn would as far as possible go in the same

directions.

As for the mass of the town people, slave or free, which ought on

common-sense principles to have been employed either in industry or on

the land, it was by a series of hand-to-mouth measures on the part of

the government, and by the operation of ordinary self-interest on the

part of the rich class, made age by age more unproductive industrially

and more worthless politically. Despite such a reform as the Licinian

law of 367 B.C.,[183] which for a time seems to have restored a yeoman

class to the State and greatly developed its fighting power, the forces

of outside competition and of capitalism gradually ousted the yeomen

cultivators all over Italy, leaving the land mainly in the hands of the

patricians and financiers of the city, who exploited it either by slave

labour or by grinding down the former cultivators as tenants. Even on

this footing, a certain amount of industry would be forced on the towns.

But not only was that also largely in the hands of slave-masters, with

the result that demotic life everywhere was kept on the lowest possible

plane: the emperors gradually adopted on humane grounds a policy which

demoralised nearly all that was left of sound citizenship.

As of old, monarchy in the hands of the more rational and conscientious

men tended to seek for the mass of the people some protection as against

the upper class; and the taxes and customs laid on by Augustus, to the

disgust of the Senate, were an effort in this direction. But this was

rather negative than positive protection, and the effort inevitably went

further. In the last rally of what may be termed conscientious

aristocratic republicanism, such as it was, we find Caius Gracchus, as

tribune, helping the plebs by causing grain to be sold at a half or a

fourth of its market value--an expedient pathetically expressive of the

hopeless distance that then lay between public spirit and social

science. Both of the Gracchi sought by violent legal measures to wring

the appropriated public lands from the hands of the rich, with the

inevitable result of raising against themselves a host of powerful

enemies. The needed change could not be so effected. But even if it had

been, it could not have endured. The Greek advisers of Tiberius

Gracchus, Blossius of Cumae and Diophanes of Mitylene,[184] looked solely

to redistribution, taking for granted the permanence of slavery, the

deadliest of all inequalities. The one way, if there were any, in which

the people could be saved was by a raising of their social status; and

that was impossible without an arrest of slavery and a cessation of

extorted tribute. But no Roman thinker save the Gracchi and their

predecessors and imitators seems ever to have dreamt of the former, and

no one contemplated the latter remedy. Least of all were the Roman

ruling class likely to think of either; and though Tiberius Gracchus did

avowedly seek to substitute free for slave labour,[185] and wrought to

that end; and though Caius Gracchus did in his time of power employ a

large amount of free labour on public works, one such effort counted for

nothing against the normal attitude of the patriciate. In order to fight

the Senate he had to conciliate the _publicani_ and money-lenders as

well as the populace, and the reforms of the two brothers came to

nothing.[186]

There is no record that in the contracts between the treasury and the

companies of _publicani_ any stipulation was ever made as to their

employing free labour, or in any way considering the special needs of

the populations among whom they acted.[187] Thus a mere cheapening of

bread could do nothing to aid free labour as against capitalism using

slaves. On the contrary, such aids would tend irresistibly to multiply

the host of idlers and broken men who flocked to Rome from all its

provinces, on the trail of the plunder. Industrial life in Rome was for

most of them impossible, even were they that way inclined;[188] and the

unceasing inward flow would have been a constant source of public danger

had the multitude not been somehow pacified. The method of free or

subsidised distribution of grain,[189] however, was so easy a way of

keeping Rome quiet, in the period of rapidly spreading conquest and

mounting tribute, that in spite of the resistance of the moneyed

classes[190] it was adhered to. Sulla naturally checked the practice,

but still it was revived; and Caesar, after his triumph in Africa, found

the incredible number of 320,000 citizens in receipt of regular doles of

cheapened or gratis corn. He in turn, though he had been concerned in

extending it,[191] took strong measures to check the corrosion, reducing

the roll to 150,000;[192] but even that was in effect a confession that

the problem was past solution by the policy, so energetically followed

by him, of re-colonising in Italy, Corinth, Carthage, Spain, and Gaul.

And if Caesar sought to limit the gifts of bread, he seems to have

outgone his predecessors in his provision of the other element in the

popular ideal--the circus; his shows being bloodier as well as vaster

than those of earlier days.[193] A public thus treated to sport must

needs have cheap food as well.

Of this policy, the economic result was to carry still further the

depression of Italian agriculture. The corn supplied at low rates or

given away by the administration was of course bought or taken in the

cheapest markets--those of Sardinia and Sicily, Egypt, Africa, and

Gaul--and importation once begun would be carried to the utmost lengths

of commercialism. Italian farms, especially those at a distance from

the capital,[194] could not compete with the provinces save by still

further substituting large slave-tilled farms for small holdings, and

grinding still harder the face of the slave. When finally Augustus,[195]

definitely establishing the system of lowered prices and doles,

subsidised the trade in the produce of conquered Egypt to feed his

populace, and thus still further promoted the importation of the

cheapest foreign grain, the agriculture of a large part of Italy, and

even of parts of some provinces, was practically destroyed.

It has been argued by M'Culloch (_Treatises and Essays: History of

Commerce_, 2nd ed. p. 287, _note_) that it is impossible that the

mere importation of the corn required to feed the populace--say a

million quarters or more--could have ruined the agriculture of

Italy. This expresses a misconception of what took place. The doles

were not universal, and the emperors naturally preferred to limit

themselves as far as possible to paying premiums for the

importation and cheap sale of corn. (Cp. Suetonius, _Claudius_, c.

19, and the Digest, iii, 4, 1; xiv, i, 1, 20; xlvii, ix, 3, 8; l,

v, 3, etc.) All of the conquered provinces, practically, had to pay

a tithe of their produce; and where corn was specially cheap it

would be likely to come to Rome in that form. (Cp. Dureau de la

Malle, _Econ. polit. des Romains_, ii, 424 _sq._) Many of the

patrician families, besides, owned great estates in Africa, and

they would receive their revenues in produce. Egyptian, Sardinian,

Sicilian, and African corn could thus easily undersell Italian for

ordinary consumption. For the rest, the produce of Egypt would be a

means of special revenue to the emperor. Cp. M'Culloch's own

statement, p. 291.

Prof. Ferrero (_Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans. ii,

App. A) has independently (but in agreement with Weber and

Salvioli) carried M'Culloch's thesis further, and has opposed the

view that the "competition" of Sicilian and African wheat "was the

cause of the agricultural depression from which Italy began to

suffer in 150 B.C." His own theory is the singular one that the

"depression" was caused by "the increased cost of living" arising

out of luxurious habits! This untenable and indeed unintelligible

conclusion he ostensibly reaches by a series of arguments that are

alternately incoherent and rotatory, of propositions some of which

are rebutted by himself, and of assumptions that are plainly

astray. The dispute may be condensed thus:--

(1) "In antiquity," the Professor begins, "each district consumed

its own wheat"; yet he goes on to mention that in the fifth and

fourth centuries B.C. Attica was "obliged to import, even in good

seasons, between 12,000,000 and 15,000,000 bushels." This

contradiction he appears to think is saved by the addendum that

"the amount in question is a very small one, compared with the

figures of modern commerce." Naturally it is, Athens being a small

State compared with those of to-day. But the contradiction stands

unresolved. And it follows that larger towns, not placed in

fruitful "districts," would have proportionally larger imports.

(2) "Moreover," writes the Professor, "while the industrial

countries of to-day seek so far as possible to check the import of

cereals by protective duties, Athens used every expedient of war

and diplomacy to render the supply of imported corn both regular

and abundant." It is startling to find a professor of history, a

sociological historian, unaware that Britain, Belgium, and Holland

have no import duties on corn. (The most exclusive State in that

matter is Portugal, which, with no pretensions to be an industrial

State, prohibits corn imports altogether.)

(3) More plausibly, Prof. Ferrero argues that the policy of Athens

proves that "corn was not easily transported for sale beyond the

local market." But the efforts of the Athenians "to obtain the

mastery of the Black Sea, and especially of the Bosphorus, _in

order to capture the corn trade for themselves_, or to entrust it,

on their own conditions, to whom they pleased," proves that the

difficulties of transport were mainly those set up by hostile

States or pirates, and that--as the Professor admits--the fertile

Crimea, with its sparse population, yielded an easy surplus for

export.

(4) All this, however, is only partially relevant to the question

of the supplies of Rome from Sicily, Sardinia, Africa, and Spain in

the second century B.C. Did such supplies come, or did they not? As

the Professor admits, they were "vital" to the Roman military

policy; and "she had immense granaries at her disposal whenever she

required them." But such sources of supply meant a certain large

normal production; and this would enter Italy in time of peace. If

it was purposely maintained in view of the needs of war-time, so

much the more surely would it undersell Italian wheat, raised on a

less fruitful soil. In no other way could Sicily and Africa yield

either annual tribute to Rome or rents to Roman owners of land in

those countries. The first effect of the importation would be to

add the pressure of lowered prices to the discouragement already

offered to private cultivators by the inducements of loot in war,

fleecings in administration of newly conquered countries, commerce,

and usury. Of this discouragement the sequel would be the attempt

to run by slave labour the large estates in which the old farms

were merged. But slave labour is apt to be bad labour, and

agriculture could not thereby be restored.

(5) The thesis that agriculture was _depressed_ by high cost of

living (= high prices for agricultural products) it is not easy to

treat with seriousness. The simple fact is that sea-carriage to

Rome from Sicily, Spain, and Africa must have been cheaper than

land carriage from most parts of Italy to the capital. As Prof.

Ferrero notes, food prices in the valley of the Po were very

low--obviously because cost of carriage either to Rome or to the

southern seaports deterred export.

(6) Prof. Ferrero's fallacy is capped by his proposition that "the

economic crisis from which Italy has been suffering during the last

twenty years is due to the increased cost of living occasioned by

the introduction, from 1848 onwards, of the industrial civilisation

of England and France into an old agricultural society." The

confusion here defies analysis. Suffice it to say that the high

cost of living in modern Italy is due to tariffs and high taxation.

Sugar is dear there not because Italians consume it

luxuriously--they do not and cannot--but because a particularly

unintelligent policy of Protection causes them to pay for beetroot

sugar produced in a country ill-suited to the growth of beetroot.

Living costs more in Germany, France, and the United States than in

Britain, not because those countries have only recently become

"luxurious," but because they heavily tax imports. Costs of living

in Rome certainly rose as Romans raised their standards of

consumption; but their importation of corn from conquered provinces

kept food prices lower than they would have been otherwise; and

Italian agriculture was largely abandoned in favour of easier ways

of making money.

Prof. Ferrero supplies a partial confutation of his economic theory

by his own account (i, 311) of how, in the time of Pompey, "once

more the precious metals were _cheap and abundant_" after a time of

scarcity, and the decadent slave system of agriculture was

superseded by new forms of production. (See above, p. 79, _note_.)

But abundant bullion means high prices for produce, which the

Professor has declared to be a cause of depression! As to the new

production, the process certainly cannot have taken place with the

rapidity which his description suggests. "The hideous

slave-shelters or compounds [_ergastula_], with their gangs of

forced labourers, vanished from the scene, together with the huge

desolate tracts of pasture where they had spent their days [?], to

be replaced by vineyards, olive-groves, and orchards, now planted

in all parts of the peninsula, ... estates on which the new slave

immigrants contentedly cultivated the vine or the olive, or bred

animals for the stable or transport, under the direction of a Greek

or Oriental bailiff; ... pleasant cottages of landlords, who farmed

their own holdings with the help of a few slaves." All this cannot

have happened in the time of Pompey. But in any case, inasmuch as

bullion was rife, prices in general must have been high, yet

without "depression"; and the new demand for wine and olives, in

the terms of the case, made their cultivation remunerative. But

"huge pastures" cannot have been "replaced" by vineyards and

olive-groves; and Italian agriculture did not in imperial times

become again the thing it had been.

It was not that, as Pliny put it in the perpetually quoted phrase,[196]

the _latifundia_, the great estates, had ruined Italy and began to ruin

the provinces; it was that, first, the fertile conquered provinces,

notably Sicily, undersold Italy; whereafter the economically advantaged

competition of Egypt, as imperially exploited, and of the African

provinces, undersold the produce of most of the other regions, and would

have done so equally had their agriculture remained in the hands of

small farmers. The _latifundia_ were themselves effects of the policy of

conquest and annexation. The theory that "those large pastoral estates,

and that slave-cultivation, which had so powerful and so deleterious an

influence over Italian husbandry and population, may be principally

ascribed to the confiscations and the military colonies of Sulla and his

successors," is clearly wide of the mark.

So M'Culloch, _Treatises and Essays: Colonial System of the

Ancients_, p. 426. No doubt agriculture went rapidly from bad to

worse in the convulsions of Sulla's rule, when whole territories

passed into the hands of his partisans. These would be bent on the

use of slave labour, and would take to the forms of production

which gave them the best money return. On the other hand, in an age

of chronic confiscation of whole areas, steady men were not likely

to be attracted to the land. See Prof. Pelham's _Outlines_, p. 213;

Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. polit. des Romains_, vol. ii, liv. iii,

ch. 22.

Large capitalistic estates were beginning to arise in Attica in the time

of Solon, and were normal in the time of Xenophon.[197] In Carthage,

where they likewise arose in due economic course, they do not seem to

have hurt agriculture, though worked by slave labour;[198] and, on the

other hand, the Roman military colonies were an attempt, albeit vain, to

restore a free farming population. In Italy the disease was older than

Sulla. When Tiberius Gracchus was passing through Etruria on his way

from Spain, fifty years before the rule of Sulla, he saw no free

labourers, but only slaves in chains.[199] The true account of the

matter is this: that if Italy had not conquered Sicily, North Africa,

Egypt, and the other fertile provinces, their competition could not have

come to pass as it did; for any imports in that case would have had to

be paid for by exports, and Italy had nothing adequate to export. It was

the power to exact tribute, or otherwise the appropriation of conquered

territory as estates by the nobles,[200] that upset the economic

balance. Not merely in order to support the policy of cheap or free

food--which was extended to other large Italian cities--but because corn

was the staple product of Sicily and Egypt and North Africa, the tribute

came in large measure in the form of foods; and in so far as it came in

bullion, the coin had to be speedily re-exported to pay for further food

and for the manufactures turned out by the provinces, and bought by the

Italian rich. Save in so far as rich amateurs of agriculture went on

farming at small profit or at a loss,[201] Italy produced little beyond

olives and wine and cattle,[202] and ordinary wares for home

consumption. Industrially considered, the society of the whole peninsula

was thus finally a mere shell, doing its exchanges mainly in virtue of

the annual income it extorted from provincial labour, and growing more

and more worthless in point of character as its vital basis grew more

and more strictly factitious. It would be accurate to say of the Empire,

as represented by part of Italy and the capital, that it was a vast

economic simulacrum. The paternal policy of the emperors,[203] good and

bad, wrought to pretty much the same kind of result as the egoism of the

upper classes had done; and though their popular measures must have

exasperated the Senate, that body had in general to tolerate their

well-meaning deeds as it did their crimes.[204]

We may perhaps better understand the case by supposing a certain

economic development to take place in England in the distant future. At

present we remain, as we are likely long to remain, economically

advantaged or beneficed for manufacture by our coalfields, which are

unequalled in Europe, though Germany, through the invention which made

her phosphoric iron workable, has a larger store of the chief industrial

metal. In return for our coal and manufactures and our shipping

services, we import foods and goods that otherwise we could not pay for;

and the additional revenue from British investments in foreign debts and

enterprises further swells the food and raw material import, thus

depressing to a considerable extent _our_ agriculture under a system of

large farms. When in the course of centuries the coalfields are

exhausted, unless it should be found that the winds and tides can be

made to yield electric power cheaply enough, our manufacturing

population will probably dwindle. Either the United States will

supersede us with their stores of coal, or--if, as may well be, their

stores are already exhausted by a vaster exploitation--China may take

the lead. The chief advantage left us would be the skill and efficiency

of our industrial population--an important but incalculable factor.[205]

A "return to the land," if not achieved beforehand, might in that case

be assumed to be inevitable; but should Australian, Indian, and North

and South American wheat-production continue (as it may or may not) to

have the same relative advantages of soil, our remaining city

populations would continue to buy foreign corn; and the land might still

be largely turned to pasture. That remaining city population, roughly

speaking, would in the terms of the case consist of (_a_) those persons

drawing incomes from foreign investments; (_b_) those workmen,

tradesmen, and professional people who could still be successfully

employed in manufactures, or whom the interest-drawing classes employed

to do their necessary home-work, as the Romans perforce employed to the

last many workmen and doctors and scribes, slave or free; (_c_) those

who might earn incomes by seafaring; and (_d_) the official

class--necessarily reduced, like every other. Until the incomes from

foreign investments had in some measure disappeared, the country could

not gravitate down to an economically stable recommencement in

agriculture.

We need not consider curiously whether things would or will happen in

exactly this way: the actual presumption is that before coal is

exhausted the whole social structure will be modified; and it is

conceivable that the idle class may have been eliminated. But we are

supposing a less progressive evolution for illustration's sake. Suffice

it that such a development would be in a measure economically analogous

to what took place in ancient Rome. If the upper-class population of

such a hypothetical future in England, instead of receiving only

dividends from foreign stocks and pensions from the revenue of India,

were able to extort an absolute tribute from India and other dominions,

the parallel would be so much the closer. What held together the Roman

Empire so long was, on the one hand, the developed military and

juridical organisation with its maintaining revenue, and on the other

hand the absence of any competent antagonist. Could a Mithridates or an

Alexander have arisen during the reign of one of the worse emperors, he

might more easily have overrun the Roman world than Rome did Carthage.

As it was, all the civilised parts of the Empire shared its political

anaemia; and indeed the comparative comfort of the Roman peace, with all

its burden of taxation, was in many of the provinces a sufficient though

precarious ground for not returning to the old life of chronic warfare,

at least for men who had lost the spirit of reasoned political

self-assertion.

Under good emperors, the system worked imposingly enough; and Mommsen,

echoing Gibbon, not unwarrantably bids us ask ourselves whether the

south of Europe has ever since been better governed than it was under

the Antonines.[206] The purely piratical plunder carried on by governors

under the Republic was now, no doubt, in large measure restricted. But,

to say nothing of the state of character and intellect, the economic

evisceration was proceeding steadily alike under good emperors and bad,

and the Stoic jurists did but frame good laws for a worm-eaten society.

So long as the seat of empire remained at Rome, drawing the tribute

thither, the imperial system would give an air of solidity to Italian

life; but when the Roman population itself grew cosmopolitanised in all

its classes, taking in all the races of the Empire, the provinces were

in the terms of the case as Roman as the capital; and there was no

special reason, save the principle of concentration, why the later

emperors should reside there. Where of old the provincial governors had

extorted from their subjects fortunes for themselves, to be spent in

Rome like the public tribute, they would now tend to act as permanent

dwellers in their districts.[207] Once the palace was set up elsewhere,

the accessories of administration inevitably followed; and the

transference of official and other population would partly balance the

restriction of food supply caused by the deflection of Egyptian

corn-tribute to Constantinople--a loss that had to be made good by a

drain on Libya and Carthage.[208] But when under Valentinian and Valens

the Empire came to be definitely divided, the western section, whose

main source of revenue was the African province, speedily fell into

financial straits. Valentinian had on his hands in the ten years of his

reign three costly wars--one to recover Britain, one to repel the

Alemanni from Gaul, one to recover Africa from Firmus; and it was

apparently the drain on revenue thus set up, aggravated by an African

famine,[209] that drove Gratian on his accession to the step of

confiscating the revenues of the pagan cults.[210] So great was the

State's need that even the pagan Eugenius could not restore the pagan

revenues. Thenceforth the financial decay headed the military; and we

shall perhaps not be wrong in saying that the growth of medieval Italy,

the new and better-rooted life which was to make possible the

Renaissance, obscurely began when Italy, stripped of Gaul and Spain and

Africa, and cut off from the East, which held Egypt, was deprived of its

unearned income, and the populace had in part to turn for fresh life to

agriculture and industry. The flight of the propertied families at each

successive sack of Rome by Goth and Vandal must have left freedom to

many, and room for new enterprise to the more capable, though in some

districts there seems to have been absolute depopulation. And while

Italy thus fell upon a wholesomer poverty,[211] the provinces would be

less impoverished.

Some of the ruin, indeed, has not been remedied to this day. Part of the

curse of conquest was the extension of the malarious area of Italian

soil, always considerable. The three temples to the Goddess Fever in

Rome were the recognition of a standing scourge, made active by every

overflow of the Tiber; and pestilent areas were common throughout the

land. But when the great plain of Latium was well peopled, the feverous

area was in constant process of reduction by agriculture and drainage;

and the inhabitants had become in large part immune to infection.[212]

In the early, the "Social" and the later civil wars it was devastated

and depopulated to such an extent that Pliny[213] could enumerate

fifty-three utterly eliminated stocks or "peoples," and could cite the

record of thirty-three towns which had stood where now were the Pontine

marshes.[214] As early as 340 B.C. the land round Rome was counted

unhealthy, so that veterans were loth to settle on it;[215] but

population went back instead of forward. It is thus true that the

malaria of the Campagna and other districts was an ancient trouble;[216]

but it was the perpetual march of conquest, for ever sending forth to

more attractive soils the stocks who might have re-peopled and recovered

it, that made that and so much more of Italy fixedly pestilential down

to modern times. Thus the paralysis of Italian production by conquest

was a twofold process, direct and indirect.

In ancient as in later times, doubtless, attempts were made to bring

back to human habitation the stricken deserts that stained Italy like a

leprosy. Thus Caesar sought early to repeople Campania from the idle

populace of Rome.[217] But to maintain steady cultivation in unhealthy

regions there was needed an immune stock, and that was reproducible only

by the old way of savage, self-preserving persistence on the part of

hardy and primitive rustics working their own land. The new imported

stocks, slave or free, wilted away before the scourge of fever; and the

"principle of population," weakened in the spring, failed to surmount

the resistance of Nature. Under the early Empire the labour needed for

the culture of the Campagna had to be brought in annually from distant

districts; and when the invading Goths in the fifth century devastated

the whole area there was no energy left to recover it.

[The theories once current as to ancient knowledge of prophylactics

in the shape of perfumes and the habitual use of woollen clothing

may be dismissed as fanciful. The rational conclusion is that the

early races developed a relative immunity, which was possessed

neither by the eastern stocks imported in the period of conquest

nor by the later invading Teutons. It is noteworthy, however, that

at all times the dwellers in the tainted areas learned something of

the necessary hygiene. See Dureau de la Malle, as cited. His

investigation is interesting as showing how, in the early decades

of the nineteenth century, long before Pasteur, biology had reached

the perception that fevers come of an organic infection. It was

doubtless such knowledge that led the Romans to burn their dead.]

There remains the question, What is the precise economic statement of

the final collapse? It is easy to figure that in terms of _(a)_

increasing barbarian enterprise, stimulated by the personal experience

of the many barbarians who served the Empire, and of _(b)_ increasing

moral weakness on the part of the whole administrative system. And

doubtless this change in the balance of military energy was decisive.

When utter weaklings sat by heredity in the imperial chair, at best

contemptuously tolerated by their alien officers, the end was

necessarily near. The most incurable disease of empire was just empire;

ages of parasitism had made the Roman ruling class incapable of

energetic action; and the autocracy had long withheld from citizens the

use of arms. But the long subsistence of the Eastern Empire as

contrasted with the Western proves that not only had the barbarians an

easier task against Italy in terms of its easiness of invasion, but the

defence was there relatively weaker in terms of lack of resources. This

lack has been wholly or partly explained by quite a number of

writers[218] as a result of a failure in the whole supply of the

precious metals--a proposition which may be understood of either a

falling-off in the yield of the mines or a general withdrawal of bullion

from the Empire. It is difficult to see how either explanation can

stand. There was already an immense amount of bullion in the Empire, and

a general withdrawal could take place only by way of export to the

barbarian east in return for commodities.[219] But the eastern provinces

of the Empire were still in themselves abundantly productive, and after

the fall of Rome they continued to exhibit industrial solvency. No doubt

the plunder of Rome by Alaric (409-10) greatly crippled the west, and

the loss of Gaul and Spain was worse; but while the Empire retained

Africa it had a source of real revenue. The beginning of the end, or

rather the virtual end, came with the conquest of the African province

by the Vandals (430-40). In 455 came the sack of Rome by the Vandals,

whereafter there remains only a shadow of the Roman Empire, till

Odoaker, dismissing Augustulus, makes himself king of Italy.

As for the falling-off in the yield of the Spanish mines, to which some

writers seem to attribute the whole collapse, it could only mean that

the Roman Government at length realised what had been as true before

and has been as true since, that _all_ gold-mining, save in the case of

the richest and easiest mines, separately considered, or of groups of

mines which have been acquired at less cost than went to find and open

them, is carried on at a loss as against the standing competition of the

great mass of precious metal above-ground at any moment, the output of

unknown barbarian toil and infinite slave labour, begun long before the

age of written history.[220] When it was reluctantly realised that the

cost of working either the gold or the silver mines was greater to the

State than their product,[221] they would be abandoned; though under a

free government private speculators would have been found ready to risk

more money in reopening them immediately. As a matter of fact, the

Spanish mines were actually worked by the Saracens in the Middle Ages,

and have been since. The Romans had made the natural blunder of greed in

taking all gold and silver mines into the hands of the State,[222] where

speculative private enterprise would have gone on working them at a

loss, and so adding--vainly enough--to the total bullion in circulation,

on which the State could levy its taxes. Even as it was, when they were

losing nothing, but rather checking loss, by abandoning the mines, a

falling-off in revenue from one source could have been made good by

taxation if the fiscal system had remained unimpaired, and if the former

income of Italy had not been affected by other causes than a stoppage of

mining output.

If the mere cessation of public gold-mining were the cause of a general

weakening of the imperial power, and by consequence the cause of the

collapse in Italy, it ought equally to have affected the Eastern Empire,

which we know to have possessed a normal sufficiency of bullion all

through the Dark and Middle Ages, though it had no mines left.[223] The

fact is that, when Valentinian and Valens divided the Empire between

them, the former chose the western half because he shared the delusion

that the Spanish mines were a greater source of real wealth than the

fruitful provinces of the east. Those could always procure the bullion

they required, because they had produce to exchange for it. Gold mines

even of average fertility could have availed no more; and if Italy had

remained agriculturally productive she could have sustained herself

without any mines.

Dr. Cunningham, in his study of the economic conditions of the

declining Empire, appears to lay undue stress on the factor of

scarcity of bullion, and does not duly recognise the difference of

progression between the case of Italy and that of the east. "The

Roman Empire," he writes (p. 187, _note_), lacked both treasure and

capital, "and _it perished_." When? The eastern seat of the Empire

survived the western by a thousand years. "It seems highly

improbable," he argues again (p. 185), "that the drain of silver to

the east, which continued during the Middle Ages, was suspended at

any period of the history of the Empire." But such a drain (which

means a depletion) cannot go on for twelve hundred years; and it

was certainly not a drain of silver to the east that ruined the

Byzantine Empire. Finlay's dictum (i, 52) that the debasement of

the currency between Caracalla and Gallienus "annihilated a great

part of the trading capital in the Roman Empire and rendered it

impossible to carry on commercial transactions, not only with

foreign countries but even with distant provinces," is another

erroneous theorem.

It seems clear that the Italian collapse occurred as it did because,

after the fall of the three great possessions, Gaul, Spain, and Africa,

there was left only the central State, made impotent by long parasitism

to meet the growing barbarian pressure. Italy in the transition period

can have yielded very little revenue, though Rome had for the barbarians

plenty of hoarded plunder; and the country had long ceased to yield good

troops. Gaul itself had been monstrously taxed; and it must have been no

less a prudent than a benevolent motive that led Julian to reduce to

L2,000,000 the revenue of L7,000,000 extorted by Constantine and

Constantius.[224] The greater the depression in the sources of income,

and the greater the costs of the frontier wars, the harder became the

pressure of the fiscal system, till the burdens laid on the upper

citizens who formed the curia[225] put them out of all heart for

patriotic action, and drove many to flight, to slavery, or the cloister.

Towards the end, indeed, there was set up a rapid process of economic

change which substituted for slaves a class of serfs, _coloni_,

_adscriptitii_, and so on, who though tied to the land paid a rent for

it and could keep any surplus; but under this system agriculture was

thus far no more a source of revenue than before. Latterly the very wine

of Italy grew worthless, and its olives decayed;[226] so that in once

fruitful Campania, "the orchard of the south," Honorius in the year 395

had to strike from the fiscal registers, as worthless, more than three

hundred thousand acres of land[227]--an eighth of the whole province.

After the ruinous invasions of Rhadagast and Alaric, fresh remissions of

taxation had to be given, so that as the danger neared the defence

weakened.[228] In the east, again, there was no impulse to succour the

falling west; and indeed there was not the ability. The fiscal power of

the Emperor was inelastic; his revenues, extorted by cruel pressure,

needed careful husbanding; his own world needed all his attention; and

the eastern upper class of clerics and officials were not the people to

strain themselves for the mere military retention of Britain or Gaul or

Italy, as Rome would have done in the republican period, or as the

emperors would have done before the period of decentralisation. For the

rich agricultural provinces of Africa they did strive with success when

Belisarius overthrew the Vandals; and in that age, when Italy had once

more become revenue-yielding through the revival of her agriculture, it

was worth the while of the east to reconquer Italy also; but the old

spirit of resolute dominion and aggression was gone. Armies could still

be enrolled and generalled if there was pay for them; but the pay

failed, not because bullion was lacking, but because the will and power

to supply and apply it in the old fashion was lacking. The new age,

after Theodosius, looked at these matters in a different light--the

light of commercial self-interest and Christian or eastern disregard for

Roman tradition and prestige. The new religion, Christianity, was a

direct solvent of imperial patriotism in the old sense, transferring as

it did the concern of serious men from this world to the next, and from

political theory to theological. In Italy, besides, the priesthood could

count on making rather more docile Christians of the invaders than it

had done of the previous inhabitants; so that Christian Rome, once

overrun, must needs remain so.

[Finlay (ed. cited i, 294) suggests that "probably the knowledge

which the Emperor Justin and his cabinet must have possessed of the

impossibility of deriving any revenue from the agricultural

districts of Italy offers the simplest explanation of the

indifference manifested at Constantinople to the Lombard invasion."

But he had already noted (p. 236, _note_) that a great revival of

agriculture took place in the reign of Theodoric. Then it could

only be through the exhaustion of the subsequent wars that Italy

was incapable of yielding a revenue. The true explanation of

Justin's inaction is probably not indifference but impotence, the

Empire's resources being then drained.

After the invasion of the Lombards the clergy and Senate of Rome

had to send a large sum in bullion to induce the Emperor Maurice to

listen to their prayers for help. Still the help could not be

given, though, save in the case of the coast towns (see below, p.

188), tribute was paid to Byzantium till the final breach between

Rome and Leo the Iconoclast. (Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 114.)

Guizot (_Histoire de la Civilisation en France_, 13e ed. i, 75, 76)

notes the fundamental difference in the attitude of the Church

under the old and eastern emperors and under the Teutonic rule.

Symonds (_Renaissance in Italy_, 2nd ed. i, 43) thinks this was a

result of Theodoric's not having made Rome his headquarters, and

his having treated it with special respect. But the clergy of Gaul

at once gained an ascendency over the Frankish kings, and the popes

would probably have done as well with resident emperors as with

absentees. Their great resource was that of playing one Christian

monarch against another--a plan not open to the patriarch of

Constantinople.]

That the Empire could still at a push raise armies and find for them

generals who could beat back the barbarians was sufficiently shown in

the careers of Stilicho and Aetius and Belisarius; but the extreme

parsimony with which Justinian supported his great commander in Italy is

some proof of the economic difficulty of keeping up, even in a period of

prudent administration,[229] a paid force along the vast frontiers of

what had been Hadrian's realm. Only as ruled by one central system,

inspired by an ideal of European empire, and using the finance and force

of the whole for the defence of any part, could that realm have been

preserved; and when Diocletian, while holding mechanically by the ideal

of empire, began the disintegration of its executive, he began the

ending of the ideal. The creation of an eastern capital was now

inevitable; and when once the halving of the Empire had become a matter

of course, the west, hollow at the core, was fated to fall. We should

thus not be finally wrong in saying that "the Roman idea" died out

before the Western Empire could fall; provided only that we recognise

the economic and other sociological causation of the process.

It remains to note, finally, that the process cannot possibly be

explained by the theory that the Eastern Empire was successfully unified

by Christianity, and that the Western remained divided by reason of the

obstinate adherence of the Roman aristocracy to Paganism. The framer of

this theory confutes it by affirming that in Greece "the popular element

... by its alliance with Christianity, infused into society the energy

which saved the Eastern Empire," while admitting that in Italy also the

"great body of the [city] population" had embraced Christianity. Surely

the popular Christian element ought to have saved Italy also if it were

the saving force. Italy was essentially Christian in the age of

Belisarius: if there was any special element of disunion it was the

mutual hatred of Arians and Athanasians and other sects, which had

abundantly existed also in the east, where it finally furthered the

Saracen conquest of the Asiatic provinces and Egypt,[230] but as

regarded the central part of the Empire was periodically got rid of by

the suppression of all heresy.[231] Eastern unification, such as it was,

had thus been the work, not of "Christianity," or of any sudden spirit

of unity among the Greeks, but of the Imperial Government, which in the

East had sufficient command of, and needed for its own sake to use, the

resources that we have seen lost to Italy.[232] As for the established

religion, it was the insoluble conflict of doctrine as to images that

finally, in the reign of Leo the Iconoclast, arrayed the Papacy against

the Christian Emperor, and completed the sunderance of Greek and Latin

Christendom; while in the East the patriarch of Jerusalem became the

minister of the Moslem conquerors in the seventh century, as did the

patriarch of Constantinople in the fifteenth.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 160: The phrase of Professor Thorold Rogers, whose application

of the principle, however, does not carry us far.]

[Footnote 161: Dr. Cunningham overlooks this form of gain-getting by

war, when he says that the early Romans had no direct profit from it

(_Western Civilisation_, i, 154), but mentions it later (p. 157). Prof.

Ferrero likewise overlooks it when (Eng. tr. i, 4) he specifies "timber

for shipbuilding and salt" as practically the whole of the exportable

products of the early Romans. Once more, who consumed their cattle?]

[Footnote 162: Cp. Bury, _History of the Later Roman Empire_, i, 26,

following Von Ihering.]

[Footnote 163: Macaulay, _Lays of Ancient Rome_, pref. to _Virginia_.

Cp. Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 80-81.]

[Footnote 164: Cp. Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. polit. des Romains_, vol.

ii, liv. iv, ch. 9.]

[Footnote 165: Cp. Cicero, _De Officiis_, i, 42.]

[Footnote 166: Mommsen, B. i, ch. v. Eng. tr. i, 80.]

[Footnote 167: Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xviii, 3]

[Footnote 168: E. Meyer (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 518), alleges

a common misconception as to the _ager publicus_ being made a subject of

class strife; but does not make the matter at all clearer. Cp. Niebuhr,

_Lectures on the History of Rome_, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. pp. 153-54, 407,

503.]

[Footnote 169: Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, pp. 93, 94. Cp. Long,

_Decline of the Roman Republic_, ch. xii, and Pelham, pp. 187-89, as to

the frauds of the rich in the matter of the public lands.]

[Footnote 170: W.T. Arnold, _Roman Provincial Administration_, 1879, p.

26.]

[Footnote 171: Finlay, _History of Greece_, Tozer's ed. i, 39.]

[Footnote 172: When Julius Caesar abolished the public revenue from the

lands of Campania by dividing them among 20,000 colonists, the only

Italian revenue left was the small duty on the sale of slaves (Cicero,

_Ep. ad Atticum_, ii, 16).]

[Footnote 173: _Ep. ad Atticum_, iv, 15 (16).]

[Footnote 174: Cp. Niebuhr, _Lectures on Roman History_, Eng. tr. 1-vol.

ed. pp. 227, 449; Gibbon, Bohn ed. iii, 404; v, 74-75.]

[Footnote 175: _Orat. pro M. Fonteio_, v. Cp. Long, _in loc._

(_Orationes_, 1855, ii, 167).]

[Footnote 176: Dr. Cunningham, preserving the conception of Rome as an

entity with choice and volition, inclines to see a necessary

self-protection in most Roman wars; yet his pages show clearly enough

that the moneyed classes were the active power. He distinguishes (p.

161) "public neglect" (of conquered peoples) from "public oppression."

But the public neglect was simply a matter of the control of the

exploiting class, who were the effective "public" for foreign affairs.

Compare his admissions as to their forcing of wars and their control of

justice, pp. 163, 164.]

[Footnote 177: The fullest English account of the matter is given by

Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, iv, 423-27, following Savigny.

Cp. Plutarch's account of the doings of the _publicani_ in Asia

(_Lucullus_, cc. 7, 20). Lucullus gave deadly offence at Rome by his

check on their extortions, as P. Rutilius Rufus had done before him

(Pelham, _Outlines of Roman History_, 1893, pp. 198, 283; Ferrero, i,

183). The lowest rate of interest charged by the _publicani_ seems to

have been 12 per cent. (Niebuhr, _Lectures_, 1-vol. ed. p. 449). We

shall find the same rates current in Renaissance Italy.]

[Footnote 178: Cp. R. Poehlmann, _Die Uebervoelkerung der antiken

Grossstaedte_, 1884, pp. 14-15, 29-30. Prof. Ferrero (_Greatness and

Decline of Rome_, Eng. tr. i, 123-27; ii, 131-36) affirms a restoration

of Italian "prosperity" from 80 B.C. onwards, by way first of a general

cultivation of the vine and the olive by means of Oriental slaves used

to such culture, and later of slave manufactures in the towns. But the

evidence falls far short of the proposition. The main items are that

about 52 B.C. Italy began to export olive oil, and that certain towns

later won repute for pottery, textiles, arms, and so on. On the new

agriculture cp. Dureau de la Malle, i, 426-27.]

[Footnote 179: W.W. Carlile, _The Evolution of Modern Money_, 1901, pp.

46, 48.]

[Footnote 180: Cp. M'Culloch, _Essays and Treatises_, 2nd ed. pp. 58-64,

and refs.]

[Footnote 181: Cp. Hodgkin, _The Dynasty of Theodosius_, 1889, pp.

19-20. From Severus onwards the silver coinage had in fact become "mere

_billon_ money," mostly copper. Carlile, as cited.]

[Footnote 182: On this cp. Poehlmann, _Die Uebervoelkerung der antiken

Grossstaedte_, p.37, and Engel, as there cited.]

[Footnote 183: As to the probable nature of this much-discussed law see

Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, i, chs. xi and xii. Cp. Niebuhr,

_Lect._ 89.]

[Footnote 184: Plutarch, _Tiberius Gracchus_, c. 8.]

[Footnote 185: As Long remarks (i, 171), it does not appear what

Tiberius Gracchus proposed to do with the slaves when he had put freemen

in their place. Cp. Cunningham, p. 150.]

[Footnote 186: Cp. Pelham, _Outlines_, pp. 191-92; Ferrero, ch. iii.]

[Footnote 187: Robiou et Delaunay, _Les institutions de l'ancienne

Rome_, 1888, iii, 18.]

[Footnote 188: Cp. Juvenal, iii, 21 _sq._; 162 _sq._]

[Footnote 189: For the history of the practice, see the article

"Frumentariae Leges," in Smith's _Dictionary of Antiquities_.]

[Footnote 190: The first step by Gracchus does not seem to have been

much resisted (Merivale, _Fall of the Roman Republic_, p. 22; but cp.

Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, i, 262), such measures having

been for various reasons resorted to at times in the past (Pliny, _Hist.

Nat._ xviii, 1; Livy, ii, 34); but in the reaction which followed, the

process was for a time restricted (Merivale, p. 34).]

[Footnote 191: It seems to have been he who, as consul, first caused the

distribution to be made gratuitous. See Cicero, _ad Attic._ ii, 19, and

_De Domo Sua_, cc. 10, 15. The Clodian law, making the distribution

gratuitous, was passed next year.]

[Footnote 192: Suetonius, _Julius_, c. 41.]

[Footnote 193: Dio Cassius, xliii, 24.]

[Footnote 194: It must have been the relative dearness of land transport

that kept the price of corn so low in Cisalpine Gaul in the time of

Polybius, who describes a remarkable abundance (ii, 15).]

[Footnote 195: Suetonius, _Aug._ cc. 40, 41.]

[Footnote 196: _Hist. Nat._ xviii, 7 (6).]

[Footnote 197: Cp. his _Economicus_, chs. 5, 9, 11, 20, etc.]

[Footnote 198: Meyer, _Gesch. des Alterthums_, iii, 682 (Sec. 379).]

[Footnote 199: Plutarch, _Tiberius Gracchus_, c. 8.]

[Footnote 200: _E.g._, in the provinces of Africa (Gibbon, Bohn ed. iii,

445) and Sicily (Pelham, _Outlines_, p. 121).]

[Footnote 201: Cp. Pliny, as last cited.]

[Footnote 202: The Italians consumed large quantities of pork, mainly

raised in the north (Polybius ii, 15; xii. fr. 1). Aurelian began a pork

as well as a wine and oil ration for the Romans (Vopiscus, _Aurelianus_,

35, 47); and under Valentinian III the annual consumption in the city of

Rome was 3,628,000 lbs., there being then a free distribution to the

poor during five months of the year. Gibbon calculates that it sold at

less than 2d. per lb. (Bohn ed. iii, 417-18.)]

[Footnote 203: Cp. Spalding, _Italy and the Italian Islands_, i, 372-75,

392, 398; Merivale, _History_, c. 32; ed. 1873, iv, 42; M'Culloch, as

cited, pp. 286-92; Finlay, _History of Greece_, i, 43; Gibbon, Bohn ed.

iii, 418; Dill, _Roman Society in the Last Years of the Roman Empire_,

2nd ed. p. 122 and refs.; and Blanqui, _Histoire de l'economie

politique_, 2e ed. i, 123, as to the progression of the policy of

feeding the populace. Cp. also Suetonius, _in Aug._ c. 42.]

[Footnote 204: There is, however, reason to surmise that the murder of

Pertinax was planned, not by the praetorians who did the deed, but by the

official and moneyed class who detested his reforms. See them specified

by Gibbon, ch. iv, _end_.]

[Footnote 205: It is noteworthy that in the United States the New

England region, producing neither coal nor iron, neither cotton nor

(latterly) wheat, continues to retain a manufacturing primacy as against

the South, in virtue of the (in part climatic) industry and skill of its

population.]

[Footnote 206: Mommsen, _History of Rome_, Eng. tr. large ed. v, 5

(_Provinces_, vol. i); Gibbon, ch. iii, near end (Bohn ed. i, 104); cp.

Mahaffy, _The Greek World under Roman Sway_, p. 397; Milman, _History of

Christianity_, Bk. I, ch. vi; Renan, _Les Apotres_, ed. 1866, p. 312;

and Hegewisch, as cited by Finlay (i, 80, _note_), who protests that the

favourable view cannot be taken of the state of Greece and Egypt. Mr.

Balfour (_Decadence_, 1908, p. 18) chimes in with Mommsen and the rest.]

[Footnote 207: Cp. Pelham, _Outlines_, p. 473.]

[Footnote 208: Gibbon, ch. xvii; Bohn ed. ii, 194, and _notes_.]

[Footnote 209: Symmachus speaks of a famine about the time of the

confiscation of the temple revenues. Ep. x, 54.]

[Footnote 210: Valentinian had resumed those temple revenues which had

been restored by Julian, but went no further, though he vetoed the

acquisition of legacies by his own church. That Gratian's step was

rather financial than fanatical is proved by his having at the same time

endowed the pagan rhetors and grammarians as a small religious _quid pro

quo_. Beugnot, _Hist. de la destr. du paganisme en occident_, 1835, i,

478.]

[Footnote 211: There was a fresh relapse after Theodoric, in the ruinous

wars between Justinian and the Goths and Franks. Revival began in the

north under the Lombards, and was stimulated in the south after the

revolt of Gregory II against Leo the Iconoclast, which made an end of

the payment of Italian tribute to Byzantium. (Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 127,

372, 377.)]

[Footnote 212: Cp. Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. polit. des Romains_, ii,

24 _sq._]

[Footnote 213: _Hist. Nat._ iii, ix, 16.]

[Footnote 214: _Id. ib._ 6.]

[Footnote 215: Livy, vii, 38.]

[Footnote 216: Mommsen, i, 36. Mommsen does not deny the deterioration.]

[Footnote 217: Sueton. _Julius_, c. 20.]

[Footnote 218: _E.g._ Jacob, _Hist. Inq. into the Prod. and Consump. of

the Precious Metals_, 1831, i, 221 _sq._]

[Footnote 219: Cp. Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xii, 18 (41).]

[Footnote 220: Cp. Del Mar, _History of the Precious Metals_, 1880,

pref. p. vi; _Money and Civilisation_, 1886, introd. p. ix.]

[Footnote 221: Cp. Polybius, cited by Strabo, iii, ii, Sec. 10; Jacob,

_Hist. of the Precious Metals_, i, 176.]

[Footnote 222: Cp. Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. pol. des Romains_, ii,

441; Merivale, _History_, iv, 44.]

[Footnote 223: Jacob, as cited, i, 179.]

[Footnote 224: Gibbon, ch. xvii, Bohn ed. ii, 237. Cp. Prof. Bury's note

in his ed., and Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. polit. des Romains_, i, 301

_sq._]

[Footnote 225: On this form of oppression cp. Guizot, _Essais sur

l'histoire de France_, i; his note on Gibbon, Bohn ed. ii, 234; Dill,

_Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire_, B. iii, ch.

2; and Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, pp. 188, 189.]

[Footnote 226: Spalding, _Italy_, i, 398, following Symmachus.]

[Footnote 227: Gibbon, ch. xvii, Bohn ed. ii, 237, citing _Cod.

Theodos._ xi, 28, 2. Cp. Dill, pp. 259-60.]

[Footnote 228: Cp. Dill, as cited, p. 260.]

[Footnote 229: Anastasius in his reign of twenty-seven years had saved

an enormous treasure, whence it is arguable that Justinian's straits

were due to bad management. But while he enlarged the expenditure,

chiefly for military purposes, he also enlarged the revenue by very

oppressive means, and practised some new economies. The fact remains

that where Anastasius could hoard with a non-imperialist policy,

Justinian, re-expanding the Empire, could not. See Gibbon, ch. 40,

_passim_. Non-military expenditure could not account for the final

deficit in Justinian's treasury. Even the great church of San Sofia does

not seem to have cost above L1,000,000. _Id._ Bohn ed. iv, 335.]

[Footnote 230: "Here [in Egypt], as in Palestine, as in Syria, as in the

country about the Euphrates, the efforts of the Persians could never

have been attended with such immediate and easy success but for the

disaffection of large masses of the population. This disaffection rested

chiefly on the religious differences" (Bury, _History of the Later Roman

Empire_, ii, 214). Compare Gibbon, ch. 47, Bohn ed. v, 275; and Mosheim,

_Eccles. Hist._, 5 Cent, pt. ii, ch. ii, Sec.Sec. 2, 4, 5 (Reid's ed. pp.

179-81). As to the welcoming of the Saracens in Egypt by the

Monophysites, see Gibbon, ch. 51, Bohn ed. vi, 59-60. Cp. Sharpe, _Hist.

of Egypt_, 6th ed. ii, 371; Milman, _Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii,

213; Finlay, i, 370-71.]

[Footnote 231: _E.g._ the _tome_ of St. Leo, the Laws of Marcian, the

_Henoticon of Zeno_, and the laws of Justinian; and the _ecthesis_ and

_typus_ of Heraclius and Constans II--all retailed by Gibbon, ch. 47.]

[Footnote 232: Finlay immediately afterwards (p. 139) declares of the

choice of Byzantium by Constantine as his capital that "its first effect

was to preserve the unity of the Eastern Empire." The admission is

repeated on p. 140, where the whole credit of the stand made by the East

is given to the administration. Cp. also the explanations as to Italy on

p. 235, and as to Byzantium on p. 184. The theory of p. 138 is utterly

unsupported, and on p. 289 it is practically repudiated once for all.

Cp. finally, pp. 217, 276, 298, 309, 328, 329, 347, 348, and pp. 361 and

371. On p. 276 we have the explicit admission that the hostility to the

Roman Government throughout the East [in the sixth century] was

everywhere connected with an opposition to the Greek "clergy."]

Chapter II

GREEK ECONOMIC EVOLUTION

Sec. 1

In republican Greece, as in republican Rome, we have already seen the

tendency to the accumulation of wealth in few hands, as proved by the

strifes between rich and poor in most of the States. A world in which

aristocrats were finally wont to take an oath to hate and injure the

demos[233] was on no very hopeful economic footing, whatever its glory

in literature and art. Nor did the most comprehensive mind of all the

ancient world see in slavery anything but an institution to be defended

against ethical attack as a naturally right arrangement.[234] In view of

all this, we may reasonably hold that even if there had been no

Macedonian dominance and no Roman conquest, Greek civilisation would not

have gone on progressing indefinitely after the period which we now mark

as its zenith--that the evil lot of the lower strata must in time have

infected the upper. What we have here briefly to consider, however, is

the actual economic course of affairs.

For the purposes of such a generalisation, we may rank the Greek

communities under two classes: (1) those whose incomes, down through the

historic period, continued to come from land-owning, whether with slave

or free labour, as Sparta; and (2) those which latterly flourished

chiefly by commerce, whether with or without military domination, as

Athens and Corinth. In both species alike, in all ages, though in

different degrees as regards both time and place, there were steep

divisions of lot between rich and poor, even among the free. Nowhere,

not even in early "Lycurgean" Sparta, was there any system aiming at the

methodical prevention of large estates, or the prevention of poverty,

though the primitive basis was one of military communism, and though

certain sumptuary laws and a common discipline were long maintained.

Grote's examination (pt. ii, ch. vi; ed. cited, ii, 308-30) of

Thirlwall's hypothesis (ch. viii; 1st ed. i, 301, 326) as to an

equal division of lands by Lycurgus, seems to prove that, as

regards rich and poor, the legendary legislator "took no pains

either to restrain the enrichment of the former or to prevent the

impoverishment of the latter"--this even as regards born Spartans.

As to the early military communism of Sparta and Crete, see Meyer,

_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, Sec. 210; and as to the economic

process see Fustel de Coulanges, _Nouvelles recherches sur quelques

problemes d'histoire_, 1891, pp. 99-118.

Athens, on the other hand, was so situated as to become a place of

industry and commerce; and from about the time of her great land-crisis,

solved by Solon, her industrial and commercial interests determined her

economic development. It follows from the success of Peisistratos that

the mass of the people, blind to the importance of the political rights

conferred upon them, were conscious of no such betterment from Solon's

"shaking-off-of-burdens" as could make them averse to the rule of a

"tyrant" who even laid upon them a new tax. The solution may perhaps lie

in points of fiscal policy to which we have now no clear clue. Of Solon

it is recorded[235] that he made a law against the export of any food

produce of Attica save oil--the yield of the olive. This implied that of

that product only was there in his opinion a redundancy; and we have it

from the same source that he "saw that the soil was so poor that it

could only suffice for the farmers," and so "gave great honour to

trade," and "made a law that a son was not obliged to support his father

if his father had not taught him a trade."[236] Himself a travelled

merchant, he further recognised that "merchants are unwilling to

despatch cargoes to a country which has nothing to export"; and we are

led to infer that he encouraged on the one hand the export of

manufactures, _plus_ oil, and on the other the importation of corn and

other food. In point of fact, grain was already being imported in

increasing quantity from the recently colonised lands of Sicily and the

Crimea;[237] and if the imports were free or lightly taxed the inland

cultivators would have a local grievance in the depression of the prices

of their produce.

The town and coast-dwellers, on the other hand, found their account in

the carriage and development of manufactures--vases, weapons, objects of

art--which, with the oil, and latterly the wine export, bought them

their food from afar. Athens could thus go on growing in a fashion

impossible to an agricultural community on the same soil; and could so

escape that fate of shrinkage in the free class which ultimately fell

upon purely agricultural Sparta. The upshot was that, after as before

Solon, Athens had commercial interests among her pretexts for war, and

so widened the sphere of her hostilities, escaping the worst forms of

"stasis" in virtue of the expansibility of commerce and the openings for

new colonisation which commerce provided and widened. But colonisation

there had to be. Precisely by reason of her progressiveness, her

openness to the alien, her trade and her enterprise, Attica increased in

population at a rate which enforced emigration, while the lot of the

rural population did not economically improve, and the probable change

from corn-growing to olive-culture[238] would lessen the number of

people employed on the land. Even apart from the fact of the popular

discontent which welcomed the _tyrannis_ of Peisistratos, we cannot

doubt that Solon's plans had soon failed to exclude the old phenomena of

poverty. The very encouragement he gave to artisans to immigrate,[239]

while it made for the democratic development and naval strength of

Athens, was a means of quickening the approach of a new economic crisis.

And yet he seems to have recognised the crux of population. The

traditional permission given by the sage to parents to expose infants,

implicitly avows the insoluble problem--the "cursed fraction" in the

equation, which will not disappear; and in the years of the approach of

Peisistratos to power we find Athens sending to Salamis (about 570) its

first _kleruchie_, or civic colony-settlement on subject territory--this

by way of providing for landless and needy citizens.[240] It was the

easiest compromise; and nothing beyond compromise was dreamt of.

[The statement that Solon by law permitted the exposure of infants

is made by Malthus, who gives no authority, but is followed by

Lecky. The law in question is not mentioned by Plutarch, and I do

not find it noticed by any of the historians. It is stated,

however, by Sextus Empiricus (_Hypotyp_. iii, 24) that Solon made a

law by which a parent could put his child to death; and this

passage, which is cited by Hume in his _Essay on the Populousness

of Ancient Nations_, is doubtless Malthus's authority. Nothing

nearer to the purpose is cited by Meursius in his monograph on

Solon; but this could very well stand as a permission of

infanticide, especially seeing that the practice is presumptively

prehistoric. Petit writes: "Quemadmodum liberos tollere in patris

erat positum potestate, ita etiam necare et exponere, idque, meo

judicio, non tam moribus quam lege receptum fuit Athenis" (_Leges

Atticae_, fol. 219, ed. Wesseling, 1742). Grote (ii, 470, _note_)

pronounces that the statement of Sextus "cannot be true, and must

be copied from some untrustworthy authority," seeing that Dionysius

the Halicarnassian (ii, 26) contrasts the large scope of the

_patria potestas_ among the Romans with the restrictions which all

the Greek legislators, Solon included, either found or introduced.

Dr. Mahaffy (_Social Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p. 165) believes "the

notion of exposing infants from _economical_ motives not to have

prevailed till later times" than the seventh century B.C., but he

gives no reason for fixing any date. We may take it as certain that

while the laws of Lycurgus, like the Roman Twelve Tables, enjoined

or permitted the destruction of sickly or deformed infants, the

general Greek usage allowed exposure. The express prohibition of it

at Thebes (AElian, _Var. Hist._ ii, 7) implies its previous

normality there and elsewhere (cp. however, Aristotle, _Pol._ vii,

16); and the _sale_ of children by their (free) parents was further

permitted, except in Attica (Ingram, _History of Slavery_, p. 16);

while even there a freeman's children by a slave concubine were

slaves.]

On the other hand, the laws even of Sparta, framed with a view to the

military strength of the State considered as the small free population,

were ultimately evaded in the interests of property-holding, till the

number of "pure Spartans" dwindled to a handful.[241] Under a system of

primogeniture, with a rigid severance between the upper class and the

lower, there could in fact be no other outcome. Here, apart from the

revolts of the helots and the chronic massacres of these by their lords,

which put such a stamp of atrocity on Spartan history,[242] the stress

of class strife seems to have been limited among the aristocracy, not

only by systematic infanticide, but by the survival of polyandry,

several brothers often having one wife in common.[243] Whether owing to

infanticide, or to in-breeding, or to preventives, families of three and

four were uncommon and considered large, and special privileges offered

to the fathers.[244] As always, such devices failed against the

pressures of the main social conditions. All the while, of course, the

_perioikoi_ and the enslaved helots multiplied freely; hence the policy

of specially thinning down the latter by over-toil[245] as well as

massacre. In other States, where the polity was more civilised, many

observers perceived that the two essential conditions of stability were

(_a_) absolute or approximate equality of property, and (_b_) restraint

of population, the latter principle being a notable reaction of reason

against the normal practice of encouraging or compelling marriage.[246]

Aristotle said in so many words that to let procreation go unchecked "is

to bring certain poverty on the citizens; and poverty is the cause of

sedition and evil";[247] and he cites previous publicists who had sought

to solve the problem. Socrates and Plato had partly contemplated it; and

the idealist, as usual, had proposed the more brutal methods;[248] but

Aristotle, seeing more clearly the population difficulty, perhaps on

that account is the less disposed towards communism.

As medical knowledge advanced, it seems certain, the practice of

abortion must have been generally added to that of infanticide in

Greece, as later in Rome. See Aristotle, _Politics_, vii, 16;

Plutarch, _Lycurgus_, c. 3; and Plato, _Theaetetus_, p. 149

(Jowett's trans. iv, 202), as to the normal resort to abortion. The

Greeks must have communicated to the Romans the knowledge of the

arts of abortion, as they did those of medicine generally. But it

does not appear that with all these checks population really fell

off in Greece until after the time of Alexander. Before that time

it may very well have fallen off in Athens when she lost her

position as sovereign and tribute-drawing State. The tribute would

tend to maintain a population in excess of the natural amount. Dr.

Mahaffy (_Rambles and Studies in Greece_, 4th ed. p. 11--a passage

not squared with the data in _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 328,

558) accepts the old view of a general and inexplicable

depopulation. One of the _loci classici_ on that head, in the

treatise _On the Cessation of Oracles_ (viii) attributed to

Plutarch but probably not by him, is searchingly examined by Hume

at the close of his essay _Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations_,

and the critic comes to the conclusion that the extreme decay there

asserted cannot have taken place. He was in all probability right

in arguing that the number of slaves in Attica had been enormously

exaggerated in the figures of Athenaeus (cp. Cunningham, _Western

Civilisation_, i, 109, note). There is reason to conclude, however,

that Hume was unduly incredulous on some points. Strabo (refs. in

Thirlwall, viii, 460) had found an immense decay of population in

Greece more than a century before Plutarch; and his details prove a

process of shrinkage which must have lasted long. In any case, a

relative depopulation took place after the conquests of Alexander,

from the operation of socio-economic causes, which are indicated by

Finlay (_History of Greece_, Tozer's ed. i, 15; cp. Mahaffy, _Greek

Life and Thought_, p. 328, and _The Greek World under Roman Sway_,

1890, p. 218). Broadly speaking, the Greeks went to lands where

wealth was more easily acquired than in their own. Further

depopulation took place under the Romans, partly from direct

violence and deportation, partly from fiscal pressure, partly from

the economic causes already noted.

Thirlwall, in his closing survey, proceeding on Polybius,[249]

confidently decides that the main cause of depopulation was domestic and

moral. Such a theory cannot be sustained. Polybius evidently had no

clear idea of the facts, since he asserts that "in our time" and

"rapidly" there took place in Greece a "failure of offspring" (or

"dearth of children"), which left cities desolate and land waste; and

goes on to ascribe it to habits of luxury, which either kept men from

marrying or made them refuse to rear more than a few of their children.

The whole theorem is haphazard. Cities and lands could not have been so

depopulated.[250] There must have been, in addition to slaughter, a

drain of population to lands where the conditions were more

advantageous. Nor is there any good reason for believing that

child-exposure had suddenly and immensely increased. Thirlwall says that

marriages were "unfruitful"; but this is not the statement of Polybius.

It is true that paederasty would count for much in lowering character;

but it had been common in Greece centuries before the time of Polybius,

and had not affected fecundity. As we have seen,[251] fecundity fell in

Sparta for other reasons.

As between Sparta and Athens, the main difference was that Athenian life

was for a long period more or less expansive, while that of Sparta, even

in the period of special vigour, was steadily contractive, as regarded

quantity and quality of "good life." At Sparta, as above noted, the

normal play of self-interest in the governing class brought about a

continuous shrinkage in the number of enfranchised citizens and of

those holding land, till there were only 700 of the former and 100 of

the latter--this when there were still 4,500 adult Spartans of "pure"

descent, and 15,000 Laconians capable of military service. Even of the

hundred landowners many were women, the estates having thus evidently

aggregated by descent through heiresses.[252] It mattered little that

this inner ring of rich became, after the triumph over Athens and in the

post-Alexandrian period, as luxurious as the rest of Greece:[253] the

evil lay not in the mode of their expenditure, but in the mode of their

revenue. Agis IV and his successor Cleomenes thought to put the

community on a sound footing by abolition of debts and forcible division

of the land; but even had Agis triumphed at home or Cleomenes maintained

himself abroad, the expedient could have availed only for a time.

Accumulation would instantly recommence in the absence of a scientific

and permanent system.

Schemes for promoting equality had been mooted in Greece from an

early period (see Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 6, 7, 8). Thus,

"Pheidon the Corinthian, one of the oldest of legislators, thought

that the families and number of citizens ought to continue the

same." Phaleas of Chalcedon proposed to keep fortunes and culture

equal; and Hippodamus the Milesian had a system of equality for a

State of 10,000 persons. Some States, too, put restraints on the

accumulation of land. But, save for transient successes, such as

that of Solon at Athens, and of the compromise at Tarentum (see

Aristotle, v, 5; and Mueller, _Dorians_, Eng. tr. ii, 184-86), there

was no adequate adjustment of means to ends, as indeed there could

not be. Aristotle's own practical suggestions show the hopelessness

of the problem.

In the commercial cities, where industry was encouraged and wealth

tended to take the form of invested capital, it could not readily get

into so few hands; and as commerce developed and the investments were

more and more in that direction, there would arise an idle rich class

which could be best got at by way of taxation. In such communities,

though the division and hostility of rich and poor were as unalterable

as in Sparta, there was more elasticity of adjustment; so that we see

maritime and trading communities like Heracleia and Rhodes maintaining

their oligarchic government, with vicissitudes, down into the Roman

period,[254] somewhat as Venice in a later age outlasted the other

chief republics of Italy. The ruin of Corinth, though indirectly

promoted by class strifes,[255] need not have occurred but for the Roman

overthrow.[256]

As regards Athens, it is necessary to guard against some misconceptions

concerning the life conditions even of the Periclean period. Public

buildings apart, it was not a rich or rich-looking city; on the

contrary, partly by reason of the force of democratic sentiment, its

houses were mostly mean, the well-to-do people presumably having their

better houses in the country, where the land was now mostly owned by

them. After the destruction of the city by Xerxes (480 B.C.), the first

need was felt to be its refortification on a larger scale, even

sepulchres as well as the remains of private houses being made to yield

materials for the walls.[257] At the same time the Piraeus and Munychia

were walled on a still greater scale--the whole constituting a public

work of extraordinary scope, rapidly carried through by the co-operation

of the whole of the citizens. The further gradual rebuilding of the

city, as well as the fresh flocking of the foreign trading population to

the now safe Piraeus, would help, with the public works of Pericles, to

set up the conditions of general prosperity which prevailed before the

Peloponnesian war.[258] According to Demosthenes, the public men of the

generation of Salamis had houses indistinguishable from those of

ordinary people, whereas in the orator's own day the statesmen had

houses actually finer than the public buildings.[259] This would be the

natural result of the control of the confederate treasure resulting from

the Athenian supremacy. But Dicaearchus belongs to the same period, and

his account represents the mass of the city as poor in appearance, the

houses small and with projecting stairways, and the streets

crooked.[260] We know further from Xenophon that there were many empty

spaces, some of them doubtless made by the customary destruction of the

houses of those ostracised. There was thus a considerable approach to a

rather straitened equality among the mass of the town-dwelling free

citizens, who, despite the meanness of their houses, had luxuries in the

form of the public baths and gymnasia.

Before Salamis, again, the revenue drawn from the leases of the silver

mines of Laurium had been equally divided among the enfranchised

citizens--an arrangement which had yielded only a small sum to each,

but which represented a notable adumbration of a communal system, with

the fatal implication of a basis in slavery.[261] The devotion of this

fund[262] to the building of a navy was the making of the Athenian

maritime power; whence in turn came the ability of Athens to extort

tribute from the allied States, and therewith to achieve relatively the

greatest and most effective expenditure on public works[263] ever

attempted by any government. It was this specially created demand for

and endowment of the arts and the drama that raised Athens to the

artistic and literary supremacy of the ancient world, and, by so

creating a special intellectual soil, prepared the ensuing supremacy of

Athenian philosophy.[264] But the Periclean policy of endowment went far

beyond even the employment of labour by the State on the largest scale;

it set up the principle of supplying something like an income to

multitudes of poorer free citizens--an experiment unique in history. The

main features of the system were: (1) Payments for service to the

members of the Council of Five Hundred; (2) payments to all jurors, an

order numbering some six thousand; (3) the _theorikon_ or allowance of

theatre money to all the poorer citizens; (4) regular payments to the

soldiers and sailors; (5) largesses of corn, or sales at reduced prices;

(6) sacrificial banquets, shared in by the common people; (7) the

sending out of "kleruchies," or bodies of quasi-colonists, who were

billeted on the confederate cities, to the number of five or six

thousand in ten years. Without taking the _a priori_ hostile view of the

aristocratic faction, who bitterly opposed all this--a view endorsed

later by Plato and Socrates--the common-sense politician must note the

utter insecurity of the whole development, depending as it did

absolutely on military predominance.[265] The mere cessation of the

expenditure on public works at the fall of Athens in the Peloponnesian

war was bound to affect class relations seriously; and parties, already

bitter, were henceforth more decisively so divided.[266]

In the second period of Athenian ascendency, after the fall of the

Thirty Tyrants and of Sparta, when the virtual pensioning of citizens

begun by Pericles had been carried to still further lengths,[267] we

find Xenophon, the typical Greek of culture and military experience,

proposing a financial plan[268] whereby Athens, instead of keeping up

the renewed practice of oppressing the confederate cities in order to

pay pensions to its own poorer citizens, should derive a sufficient

revenue from other sources. In particular he proposed (1) the

encouraging of foreigners to settle in the city in larger numbers, by

exempting them from military service and from all forms of public

stigma, and by giving them the waste grounds to build on. The taxes they

would have to pay as aliens would serve as revenue to maintain the

citizens proper. (2) A fund should be established for the encouragement

of trade which in some unexplained way should yield a high interest,

paid by the State, to all investors. (3) The State should build inns,

shops, warehouses, and exchanges, chiefly for the use of the foreigners,

and so further increase its revenue. (4) It should build ships for the

merchant trade, and charter them out upon good security. (5) Above all,

it should develop by slave labour the silver mines of Laurium, to the

yield of which there was no limit. The public, in fact, might there

employ thrice as many slaves as the number of citizens; and it should

further set about finding new mines.

We have here the measure of the Athenian faculty to solve the democratic

problem as then recognised. The polity of Pericles was bound to perish,

alike because it negated international ethics and because it had no true

economic basis. The comparatively well-meaning plan of Xenophon could

not even be set in motion, so purely fanciful is its structure. The

income of the poorer citizens is to come from the taxes and rents paid

by foreigners, and from mines worked by slave labour; the necessary army

of slaves has to be bought as a State investment. It is as if the Boers

of the Transvaal had proposed to live idly in perpetuity on the dues

paid by the immigrants, all the while owning all the mines and drawing

all the profits. It is hardly necessary to say, with Boeckh,[269] that

the thesis as to the yield of the mines was a pure delusion; and that

the idea of living on the taxation of foreigners was suicidal.[270] The

old method, supplemented perforce by some regular taxation of the

taxable citizens, and by the special exaction of "liturgies" or payments

for the religious festival drama and other public services from the

rich, was maintained as long as might be; industry tending gradually to

decay, though the carrying trade and the resumed concourse of foreigners

for a time kept Athens a leading city. Never very rich agriculturally,

the middle and upper classes had for the rest only their manufactures

and their commerce as sources of income; and as the manufactures were

mostly carried on by slave labour, and were largely dependent on the

State's control of the confederate treasure, the case of the poorer free

citizens must necessarily worsen when that control ceased. About 400

B.C. the Athenians had still a virtual monopoly of the corn trade of

Bosporus, on which basis they could develop an extensive shipping, which

was a source of many incomes; but even these would necessarily be

affected by the new regimen which began with the Macedonian conquest.

The attempt of Boeckh (bk. i, ch. viii) to confute the ordinary

view as to the poverty of the Attic soil cannot be maintained. (See

above, p. 99.) Niebuhr (_Lectures on Roman History_, Eng. tr. 3rd

ed. p. 264) doubtless goes to the other extreme in calling the

Greeks bad husbandmen. Compare the contrary view of Cox, _General

History_, 2nd ed. p. 4. But even good husbandry on a poor soil

could not compete with the output of Bosporus and Egypt. And in the

Peloponnesian war Attic agriculture sank to a low level (Curtius'

_History_, Eng. tr. iv, 71; bk. v, ch. ii).

As to the incomes made in the Bosporus corn-trade, cp. Grote, x,

410, 412, 413. When it became possible thus to draw a revenue from

investment, the Athenian publicists rapidly developed the

capitalist view that the lending of money capital is the support of

trade. See Demosthenes, as cited by Boeckh, bk. i, ch. ix.

Sec. 2

In the economic readjustments, finally, which followed on the rise and

subdivision of the empire of Alexander, Greece as a whole took a

secondary place in the Hellenistic world, though Macedonia kept much of

its newly acquired wealth. While commerce passed with industry and

population to the new eastern cities, the remaining wealth of Greece

proper would tend to pass into fewer hands,[271] thus _pro tanto_

narrowing more than ever the free and cultured class, and relatively

enlarging that of the slaves.

[Boeckh (bk. i, ch. viii) dwells on the variety of manufactures,

and here gives a juster view than does Dr. Mahaffy, who (_Social

Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p. 406) oddly speaks of the lack of

machinery as making "any large employment of hands in manufacture

impossible." But the main manufacture, that of arms, was peculiarly

dependent on the Athenian command of the confederate treasure; and

it does not appear that the other manufactures were a source of

much revenue till just before the period of political decline, when

other causes combined to check Athenian trade. By that time the

aristocratic class had weakened in their old prejudice against all

forms of commerce (Mahaffy, as cited; Boeckh, as cited), which had

hitherto kept it largely in the hands of aliens, this long after

the time when, at Corinth and other ports, the ruling class had

been constituted of the rich traders; and after the special efforts

of Solon to encourage and enforce industry. Apart from this

prejudice, which in many States put a political disability on

traders, commerce had always been hampered by war and bad policy.

Dr. Mahaffy (_Social Life_, p. 405) somewhat over-confidently

follows Heeren and Boeckh in deciding that none of the Greek trade

laws were in the interests of particular trades or traders; but

even if they were not, they none the less hampered all commerce.

Cp. Boeckh, bk. i, ch. ix. As Hume observed, the high rates of

profit and interest prevailing in Greece show an early stage of

commerce. Cp. Boeckh, bk. i, chs. ix, xxii.]

Those who had not shared in the plunder of Asia, to begin with, would

find themselves badly impoverished, for the new influx of bullion would

raise all prices. It is notable, on the other hand, that philosophy,

formerly the study of men with, for the most part, good incomes, and

thence always associated more or less with the spirit of

aristocracy,[272] was now often cultivated by men of humble status.[273]

The new rich then appear to have already fallen away somewhat from the

old Athenian standards; while the attraction of poorer men was

presumably caused in part by the process of endowment of the philosophic

schools begun by Plato in his will--an example soon followed by

others.[274] It is probable that as much weight is due to this economic

cause as to that of political restraint in the explanation of the

prosperity of philosophy at Athens at a time when literature was

relatively decaying.

The Roman conquest, again, further depressed Greek fortunes by absolute

violence, hurling whole armies of the conquered into slavery,[275] and

later setting up a new foreign attraction to the Greeks of ready wit and

small means. They presumably began to flock to Rome or Egypt or Asia

Minor as the conditions in Greece worsened; and that process in turn

would be promoted by the gradual worsening of the Roman financial

pressure. It is notable that a rebellion of Attic slaves occurred in 133

B.C., synchronously with the first slave-rising in Sicily--a proof of

fresh oppression all round.[276] The Romans had retained the Greek

systems of municipal government, and had begun by putting on light

taxes.[277] But these surely increased;[278] and the Mithridatic war, in

which Athens had taken the anti-Roman side, changed all for the worse.

Sulla took the city after a difficult siege, massacred most of the

citizens, and entirely destroyed the Piraeus; whereafter Athens

practically ceased for centuries to be a commercial centre. Corinth,

which had been razed to the ground by Mummius, was ultimately

reconstructed by Caesar as a Roman colony, and secured most of what

commerce Greece retained. Twenty years before, Pompey had put down the

Cilician pirates, a powerful community of organised freebooters that had

arisen out of the disbanding of the hired forces of Mithridates and

other Eastern monarchs on the triumph of the Romans, and was further

swelled by a large inflow of poverty-stricken Greeks. While it lasted,

it greatly multiplied the number of slaves for the Roman market by

simple kidnapping.

[The great mart for such sales was Delos, which was practically a

Roman emporium (Strabo, bk. xiv, c. v, Sec. 1). Mahaffy (_Greek World

under Roman Sway_, p. 154) regards the pirates as largely

anti-Roman, especially in respect of their sacking of Delos. But

previously they sold their captives there; and Dr. Mahaffy (p. 7)

recognises the connection. The pirates, in short, became anti-Roman

when the Romans, who had so long tolerated them as slave-traders

(as the rulers of Cyprus and Egypt had done before), were driven to

keep them in check as pirates.]

Thus all the conditions deteriorated together; and the suppression of

the pirate state found Greece substantially demoralised, the prey of

greedy proconsuls, poor in men, rich only in ancient art and in wistful

memories. In the civil wars before and after Caesar's fall, Greece was

harried by both sides in turn; and down to the time of Augustus

depopulation and impoverishment seem to have steadily proceeded under

Roman rule.[279] Every special contribution laid on the provinces by the

rulers was made an engine of confiscation; citizens unable to pay their

taxes were sold as slaves; property owners were forced to borrow at

usurious rates in the old Roman fashion; and the parasitic class of

so-called Roman citizens, as such free of taxation, tended to absorb the

remaining wealth.[280] This wealth in turn tended to take the shape of

luxuries bought from the really productive provinces; and the fatality

of the unproductive communities, lack of the bullion which they in a

double degree required, for the time overtook Greece very much as it

overtook Italy. Both must have presented a spectacle of exterior

splendour as regarded their monuments and public buildings, and as

regarded the luxury that was always tending to concentrate in fewer

hands, usurers plundering citizens and proconsuls plundering usurers;

but the lot of the mass of the people must have been depressed to the

verge of endurance if depopulation had not spontaneously yielded relief.

As it was, the Greek populations would tend to consist more and more of

the capitalistic, official, and parasitic classes on the one hand, and

of slaves and poor on the other.[281]

The general depopulation of subject Greece is thus perfectly

intelligible. The "race" had not lost reproductive power; and even its

newer artificial methods of checking numbers were not immeasurably more

active than simple infanticide or exposure had been in the palmy days.

In the ages of expansion the whole Hellenic world in nearly all its

cities and all its islands swarmed with a relatively energetic

population, who won from conditions often in large part unpropitious a

sufficiency of subsistence on which to build by the hands of slaves a

wonderful world of art. To these conditions they were limited by racial

hostilities; everywhere there was substantial though convulsive

equipoise among their own warring forces, and between those of their

frontier communities and the surrounding "barbarians." The conquest of

Alexander (heralded and invited by the campaign of the Ten Thousand) at

one blow broke up this equipoise: organised Greek capacity, once

forcibly unified, triumphed over the now lower civilisations of Egypt

and the East, and Greek population at once began to find its economic

level in the easier conditions of some of the conquered lands. They

flocked to Egypt and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin as they do at

the present time, for similar economic reasons. Nothing could now

restore the old conditions; but the Roman conquest and tyranny forced on

the disintegration till Greece proper was but the glorious shell of the

life of the past, inhabited by handfuls of a semi-alien population,

grown in a sense psychically degenerate under evil psychic conditions.

In the lower strata of this population began the spread of Christianity,

passing sporadically from Syria to the Greek cities, as at the same time

to Egypt and Rome. A new conception of life was generated on the plane

that typified it.

Sec. 3

It is a great testimony to the value of sheer peace that in the Roman

Empire of the second century, with an incurable economic malady, as it

were, eating into its nerve centres, and with no better provision for

the higher life than the schools of rhetoric and the endowments of the

Greek philosophic chairs, there was yet evolved a system of law and

administration which, even under the frightful chances of imperial

succession, sustained for centuries a vast empire, and imposed itself as

a model on the very barbarism that overthrew it. And it is this system

which connects for us the life conditions of Greece as the Romans held

it, with its artistic shell almost intact despite all the Roman

plunder,[282] and those of the strangely un-Hellenic Greek-speaking

world which we know as Byzantium, with its capital at Constantinople.

The economic changes in this period can be traced only with difficulty

and uncertainty; but they must have been important. The multiplication

of slaves, which was a feature of the ages of the post-Alexandrian

empires, the Roman conquest, and the Cilician pirate state, would

necessarily be checked at a certain stage, both in town and country, by

the continued shrinkage of the rich class. Agriculture in Greece, as in

Italy, could not compete with that of Egypt; and slave-farming, save in

special cultures, would not be worth carrying on. In the towns, again,

the manufactures carried on by means of slaves had also dwindled

greatly; and the small wealthy class could not and would not maintain

more than a certain number of slaves for household purposes. The records

of the religious associations, too, as we shall see, seem to prove that

men who were slaves in status had practical freedom of life, and the

power of disposing of part of their earnings; whence it may be inferred

that many owners virtually liberated their slaves, though retaining a

legal claim over them. In this state of things population would

gradually recover ground, albeit on a low plane. The type of poor

semi-Greek now produced would live at a lower standard of comfort than

had latterly been set for themselves by the more educated, who would

largely drift elsewhere; and a home-staying population living mainly on

olives and fish could relatively flourish, both in town and country. On

that basis, in turn, commerce could to some extent revive, especially

when Nero granted to the Greeks immunity from taxation.[283] We are

prepared then, in the second century, under propitious rulers like

Hadrian and the Antonines, to find Greek life materially improved.[284]

The expenditure of Hadrian on public works, and the new endowments of

the philosophic schools at Athens by the Antonines, would stimulate such

a revival; and the Greek cities would further regain ground as Italy

lost it, with the growth of cosmopolitanism throughout the Empire. While

domestic slavery would still abound, the industries in Athens under the

imperial rule would tend to be carried on by freedmen.

A further stimulus would come from the overthrow of the Parthian empire

of the Arsacidae by Artaxerxes, 226 A.C. The Arsacidae, though often at

war with the Romans, still represented the Hellenistic civilisation,

whereas the Sassanidae zealously returned to the ancient Persian

religion, the exclusiveness of which would serve as a barrier to Western

commerce,[285] even while the cult of Mithra, Hellenised to the extent

of being specially associated with image-worship, was spreading widely

in the West. Commerce would now tend afresh to concentrate in Greece,

the Indian and Chinese trade passing north and south of Persia.[286] The

removal of the seat of government from Rome by Diocletian, greatly

lessening the Italian drain on the provinces, would still further assist

the Greek revival after the Gothic invasion had come and gone. Thus we

find the larger Greek world in the time of Constantine grown once more

so important that in the struggle between him and Licinius his great

naval armament, composed chiefly of European Greeks, was massed in the

restored Piraeus. The fleet of Licinius, made up chiefly by Asiatic and

Egyptian Greeks, already showed a relative decline on that side of the

Empire's resources.[287] When, finally, Constantine established the new

seat of empire at Byzantium, he tended to draw thither all the streams

of Greek commerce, and to establish there, as the centre of the revenues

of the Eastern Empire, some such population as had once flourished in

Rome; with, however, a definite tendency to commerce and industry in the

lower class population as well as in the middle class. To the government

of this population was brought the highly developed organisation of the

later Pagan Empire, joined with an ecclesiastical system from which

heresy was periodically eliminated by the imperial policy, aided by the

positive intellectual inferiority of the new Greek-speaking species.

There was prosperity enough for material life; and the political and

religious system was such as to prevent the normal result of prosperity,

culture, from developing independently. The much-divided Greek world had

at last, after countless convulsions, been brought to a possibility of

quasi-inert equilibrium, an equilibrium which enabled it to sustain and

repel repeated and destructive irruptions of northern barbarism,[288]

and on the whole to hold at bay, with a shrunken territory, its

neighbouring enemies for a thousand years.

Sec. 4

We have passed, then, through a twilight age, to find a new civilised

empire ruled on the lines of the old, but with a single, albeit

much-divided religion, and that the Christian, all others having been

extirpated not by persuasion but by governmental force, after the new

creed, adapting itself to its economic conditions, had secured for

itself and its poor adherents, mainly from superstitious rich women, an

amount of endowment such as no cult or priesthood possessed in the days

of democracy. This process of endowment itself originated, however, in

pagan practice; for in the days of substitution of emotional Eastern

cults for the simpler worships of early Hellas, there had grown up a

multitude of voluntary societies for special semi-religious,

semi-festival purposes--_thiasoi_, _eranoi_, and _orgeones_, all

cultivating certain alien sacrifices and mysteries, as those of

Dionysos, Adonis, Sabazios, Sarapis, Cotytto, or any other God called

"Saviour."[289] These societies, unlike the older Hellenic associations

of the same names[290] for the promotion of native worships, were freely

open to women, to foreigners, and even to slaves;[291] they were

absolutely self-governing; the members subscribed according to their

means; and we find them flourishing in large numbers in the age of the

Antonines,[292] when the old state cults were already deserted, though

still endowed. They represent, as has been said, the reappearance of the

democratic spirit and the gregarious instinct in new fields and in lower

strata when general and practical democracy has been suppressed. In some

such fashion did the Christian Church begin, employing the attractions

and the machinery of many rival cults. Its final selection and

establishment by the Empire represented in things religious a process

analogous to that which had forcibly unified the competing republics of

Greece in one inflexible and unprogressive organisation. Nothing but

governmental force could have imposed doctrinal unity on the chaos of

sects into which Christianity was naturally subdividing; but the power

of conferring on the State Church special revenues was an effective

means of keeping it practically subordinate.

The historian who has laid down the proposition that religious unity was

the cause of the survival of the Eastern Empire when the Western

fell,[293] has made the countervailing admission that between Justinian

and Heraclius there was an almost universal centrifugal tendency in the

Byzantine State, which was finally overcome only by "the inexorable

principle of Roman centralisation,"[294] at a time when it was nearly

destroyed by its enemies and its own dissentient forces.[295] Province

after province had been taken by the Persians in the East; Slavs and

Avars were driving back the population from the northern frontiers, even

harrying the Peloponnesus; discontent enabled Phocas to dethrone and

execute Maurice (602 A.C.); and Phocas in turn was utterly defeated by

the Persian foe; when Heraclius appeared, to check the continuity of

disaster, and to place the now circumscribed Empire on a footing of

possible permanence. But it is important to realise how far the economic

and external conditions conduced to his success, such as it was.

Hitherto the populace of Constantinople had been supported, like that of

imperial Rome, by regular allowances of bread to every householder,

provided from the tributary grain supplies of Egypt. The Persian

conquest of Egypt in the year 616 stopped that revenue; and the

emperor's inability to feed the huge semi-idle populace became a cause

of regeneration, inasmuch as the State was forcibly relieved of the

burden, and many of the idlers became available for the army about to be

led by the emperor against the menacing Persians. He was reduced,

however, to the expedient of offering to continue the supply on a

payment of three pieces of gold from each claimant, and finally to

breaking that contract; whereafter, on his proposing to transfer his

capital to Carthage to escape the discontent, the populace and the

clergy implored him to remain, and thus enabled him to exact a large

loan from the latter,[296] and to dominate the nobility who had hitherto

hampered his action. The victories of Heraclius over the Persians,

however, only left the eastern and Egyptian provinces to fall under the

Arabs; the first financial result of his successes having been to tax to

exasperation the recovered lands in order to repay the ecclesiastical

loan with usury; and the circumscribed Empire under his successors could

not, even if the emperors wished, resume the feeding of the mass of the

citizens. Constantinople, though still drawing some tribute from the

remaining provinces in Italy, was thus perforce reduced to a safe

economic basis, even as the people in general had been coerced into

united effort by the imminent danger from Persia.

From this time forward, with many vicissitudes of military fortune, the

contracted Byzantine State endured in virtue of its industrial and

commercial basis and its consequent maritime and military strength,

managed with ancient military science against enemies less skilled. The

new invention of "Greek fire," like all advances in the use of missiles

in warfare, counted for much; but the decisive condition of success was

the possession of continuous resources. Justinian, among many measures

of mere oppression and restriction, had contrived to introduce from the

far East the silk manufacture, which for the ancient and medieval

European world was of enormous mercantile importance. Such a staple,

and the virtual control of the whole commerce between northern and

western Europe and the East, kept Byzantium the greatest trading power

in Christendom until the triumph of the Italian republics. Even the

Saracen conquests in Asia and Africa did not seriously affect this

source of strength; for the Saracen administration, though often wise

and energetic, was in Egypt too often convulsed by civil wars to permit

of trade flourishing there in any superlative degree. The Byzantines

continued to trade with India by the Black Sea and Central Asian route;

and their monopolies and imposts, however grievous, were relatively

bearable compared with the afflictions of commerce under other powers.

As of old, the Greeks or Greek-speaking folk were the traders of the

Mediterranean, the Saracen navy never reaching sufficient power to check

them; and when finally its remnants took to piracy, they served rather

to cut off all weaker competition than to affect the preponderating

naval power of the Empire.

In this period of prevailing commercial vigour, from the sixth to the

eleventh century, the life of the Greek Empire was substantially civic,

the rural districts remaining desolate, and agriculture extremely

feeble,[297] though the Sclavonian immigrants who now inhabited the

Peloponnesus[298] must have lived by that means. Under such

circumstances the towns would be fed by imported grain, presumably that

of the Crimea; but as they did not grow in size, at least in the case of

the capital, their industrial prosperity must have largely depended on

the restriction of population, whether by vice, preventive checks,

misery, or the sheer unhealthiness of city life, which at the present

day prevents so many Eastern cities from maintaining themselves save by

influx from the country.[299] It is misleading to point to the legal

veto on infanticide as a great Christian reform without taking these

things into account. The presumption is that misery, vice,

child-exposure, and abortion, rather than prudence, kept the poor

population within the limits of subsistence.

Mr. Oman (_Byzantine Empire_, p. 145) takes the popular view as to

the reformative effect of Christianity. He goes on to describe

Constantine as providing for the children of the destitute to

prevent their exposure, but does not mention that the same thing

had been done under the Antonines, and that Constantine permitted

the finder of an exposed child to enslave it. The punishment of all

exposure as infanticide, under Valentinian, was only an adoption of

the pagan practice at Thebes (AElian, _Var. Hist._ ii, 7). But in

spite of all enactments, under Christian as under pagan rule,

exposure and positive infanticide continued, though Christian

sentiment never gave it the toleration exhibited in the drama of

Menander. As to the historic facts, cp. Lecky, _Hist. of European

Morals_, 6th ed. ii, 24-33.

Broadly speaking, it was inevitable that in such a population as is

pictured for us by Chrysostom--a multitude profoundly ignorant,

superstitious, excitable, sensuous--all the vices of the

Graeco-Roman period should habitually flourish, while poverty must

have been normally acute after the stoppage of regular free bread.

On the general moral environment, cp. the author's _Short History

of Freethought_, 2nd ed. i, 249-50.

It is necessary, in the same way, to substitute an accurate for a

conventional view as to the treatment of slaves under the Christian

Empire. We are still told[300] that the Christian doctrine or

implication of religious equality had the effect first of greatly

modifying the evils of slavery and finally of abolishing it. Research

proves that the facts were otherwise. We have already seen how economic

causes partially limited slavery before Christianity was heard of; and

in so far as the limitation was maintained,[301] the efficient causes

remain demonstrably economic.[302] Indeed, no other causes can be shown

to have existed. Not only is slavery endorsed in the Gospels,[303] and

treated by Paul as not merely compatible with but favourable to

Christian freedom on the part of the slave,[304] but the early

Christians, commonly supposed to have been the most incorrupt, held

slaves as a matter of course.[305] In the laws of Justinian not a word

is said as to slavery being opposed to either the spirit or the letter

of Christianity; and the only expressions that in any degree deprecate

it are in terms of the Stoic doctrine of the "law of nature,"[306] which

we know to have been already current in the time of Aristotle,[307] and

to have become widespread in the age of the Antonines, under Stoic

auspices. That "law of nature," however, was never allowed to override a

definite law of society; and the Christian influence on the other hand

set up a new set of arguments for slavery.[308] Among the Christian

Visigoths, slaves who married without authority from their masters were

forcibly separated; and the slave who dared to marry a free-woman was

burnt alive with his wife; while "the bishops were among the largest

slave-holders in the realm; and baptised Christians were bought and sold

without a blush by the successors of St. Paul and Santiago."[309] It

cannot even be said of the Byzantines, any more than of the Protestants

of the southern United States of fifty years ago, that they were more

humane to their slaves than the earlier pagans had been; for we find

Christian Byzantine matrons causing their slave-girls to be tied up and

brutally flogged;[310] even as we have the testimony of Salvian to the

atrocities committed by Christian slave-owners in Gaul.[311] The

admission that the Church, even when encouraging laymen to free their

slaves, insisted on retaining its own,[312] is the proof that the urging

force was not even then doctrinal, but the perception that the Church's

secular interests were served by the growth of an independent population

outside its own lands.[313] The spirit of the Justinian code, despite

its allusion to the law of nature, and the spirit of the enactments of

the early Councils of the Church, are alike opposed to any idea of

spiritual equality between bond and free.

On the other hand, the simple restriction of conquest limited the

possibilities of slavery for Byzantium. Captives were enslaved to the

last,[314] but of these there was no steady supply. In the rural

districts, again, the fiscal conditions made for at least nominal

freedom, as is shown by the historian who has most closely analysed the

conditions:--

"The Roman financial administration, by depressing the higher

classes and impoverishing the rich, at last burdened the small

proprietors and cultivators of the soil with the whole weight of

the land-tax. The labourer of the soil then became an object of

great interest to the treasury, and ... obtained almost as

important a position in the eyes of the fisc as the landed

proprietor himself. The first laws which conferred any rights on

the slave are those which the Roman government enacted to prevent

the landed proprietors from transferring their slaves, engaged in

the cultivation of lands assessed for the land-tax, to other

employments which, though more profitable to the proprietor of the

slave, would have yielded a smaller or less permanent return to the

imperial treasury.[315] The avarice of the imperial treasury, by

reducing the mass of the free population to the same degree of

poverty as the slaves, had removed one cause of the separation of

the two classes. The position of the slave had lost most of its

moral degradation, and [he] occupied precisely the same political

position in society as the poor labourer from the moment that the

Roman fiscal laws compelled any freeman who had cultivated lands

for the space of thirty years to remain for ever attached, with his

descendants, to the same estate.[316] The lower orders were from

that period blended into one class; the slave rose to be a member

of this body; the freeman descended, but his descent was necessary

for the improvement of the great bulk of the human race, and for

the extinction of slavery. _Such was the progress of civilisation

in the Eastern Empire._ The measures of Justinian which, by their

fiscal rapacity, tended to sink the free population to the same

state of poverty as the slaves, really prepared the way for the

rise of the slaves _as soon as any general improvement took place

in the condition of the human race_."[317]

For the rest, it cannot be supposed that the "freedom" thus constituted

had much actuality. Sons of soldiers and artisans were held bound to

follow their father's profession, as in the hereditary castes of the

East,[318] and none of the fruits of freedom are to be traced in

Byzantine life. Still, the fact remains that the commercial and

industrial life sustained the political, and that the political began

definitely to fail when the commercial did. Constantinople could hardly

have collapsed as it did before the Crusaders if its commerce had not

already begun to dwindle through interception by Venice and the Italian

trading cities. As soon as these were able to trade directly with the

East they did so, thus withdrawing a large part of the stream of

commerce from Byzantium; and when, finally, they acquired the secret of

her silk manufacture, her industrial revenue was in turn undermined. On

the economic weakening, the political followed; and the Eastern Empire

finally fell before the Turks, very much as the Western had fallen

before the Goths.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 233: Aristotle, _Politics_, v, 9.]

[Footnote 234: _Id._ i, 2.]

[Footnote 235: Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 24.]

[Footnote 236: _Id._ c. 22. Cp. Dr. Grundy, _Thucydides and the History

of his Age_, 1911, p. 66, as to Solon's evident purpose of promoting

manufactures.]

[Footnote 237: Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. p. 38.

Cp. Meyer, ii, 644.]

[Footnote 238: Cp. Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, i (1898), 100-2.]

[Footnote 239: Grote, ii, 504. Hitherto Athens was far behind other

cities, as Corinth, in trade. The industrial expansion seems to begin in

Solon's time (Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 22; Busolt, _Griechische

Geschichte_, i, 501).]

[Footnote 240: Busolt, as cited, i, 549-50. The details, many of them

from lately recovered inscriptions, are full of interest. Cp. Grote, ii,

462.]

[Footnote 241: Plutarch, _Agis._ c. 5; Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 9;

Thirlwall, viii, 133.]

[Footnote 242: The arguments of K.O. Mueller (Dorians, Eng. tr. b. iii,

c. 3, Sec.Sec. 3-5) in discredit of the received view, though not without

weight, have never carried general conviction. Cp. Maisch, _Manual of

Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. p. 17.]

[Footnote 243: See the recovered passage of Polybius (xii, 6, ed.

Hultsch) cited (from Mai, _Nov. Collect. Vet. Scriptor._ ii, 384) by

Mueller (_Dorians_, Eng. tr. ii, 205). Cp. M'Lennan, _Kinship in Ancient

Greece_, Sec. 2.]

[Footnote 244: Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, c. 9. On Aristotle's

unhesitating assumption (ii, 10) as to the normality and the effects of

paederasty, cp. the refutation of Mueller, _Dorians_, Eng. tr. b. iv, c.

4, Sec.Sec. 6-8; and as to the real causes of decline of population, see b.

iii, c. 10, Sec. 2. Primogeniture was a main factor. As the propertied

class, of whom Aristotle speaks, became small through accumulations,

which often went to heiresses, the whole statistic as to births is

narrow and dubious. But it is safe to decide that the decline of the

pure Spartan population was not a result of vice, any more than the

normal dwindling of the numbers of modern aristocracies. It should be

remembered that younger sons would be likely to have illegitimate

offspring among the helots, if not among the _perioikoi_. The selfish

aristocracy thus wrought for its own class extinction.]

[Footnote 245: Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 22.]

[Footnote 246: See refs. in Fustel de Coulanges, _La cite antique_, 1.

iii, ch. xviii, p. 265.]

[Footnote 247: Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 6.]

[Footnote 248: Cp. the _Republic_, v, and the _Laws_ (bks. v, xi;

Jowett's tr. 3rd ed. v, pp. 122, 313) with the _Politics_, vii, 16.]

[Footnote 249: _Fr. Vat._ xxxvii, 9.]

[Footnote 250: Cp. Hume, essay cited, as to the slight effect of the

exposure check in China.]

[Footnote 251: Above, p. 101.]

[Footnote 252: Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 9; Plutarch, _Agis_, c. 7.]

[Footnote 253: Athenaeus, citing Phylarchus, iv, 20.]

[Footnote 254: Grote, x, 402; Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 457;

_Greek World under Roman Sway_, p. 237; M'Culloch, _Treatises and

Essays_, ed. 1859, pp. 276-78.]

[Footnote 255: Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 452.]

[Footnote 256: M'Culloch, as cited, p. 275.]

[Footnote 257: Thucydides, i, 93.]

[Footnote 258: Grote, iv, 341, 342.]

[Footnote 259: Citations in Boeckh, bk. i, ch. 12.]

[Footnote 260: Boeckh, bk. i, ch. 12. Cp. De Pauw, _Recherches

philosophiques sur les Grecs_, 1787, i, 55-60.]

[Footnote 261: See E. Ardaillon, _Les mines du Laurion dans

l'antiquite_, 1897, ch. v.]

[Footnote 262: The mines of Laurium, though anciently worked by the

"Pelasgi," do not figure in Athenian history till the beginning of the

fifth century B.C. Ardaillon, pp. 126-27.]

[Footnote 263: As to the enormous cost in labour and money of such

buildings as the Propylaea and the Parthenon, cp. Mahaffy, _Survey of

Greek Civilisation_, p. 143, and M'Cullagh, _Industrial History of the

Free Nations_, 1846, i, 166, 167.]

[Footnote 264: "Before the Persian war Athens had contributed less than

many other cities, her inferiors in magnitude and in political

importance, to the intellectual progress of Greece. She had produced no

artists to be compared with those of Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, AEgina,

Laconia, and of many cities both in the eastern and western colonies.

She could boast of no poets so celebrated as those of the Ionian and

AEolian Schools. But ... in the period between the Persian and the

Peloponnesian wars both literature and the fine arts began to tend

towards Athens as their most favoured seat" (Thirlwall, vol. iii, ch.

xviii, pp. 70, 71). "Never before or since has life developed so richly"

(Abbott, ii, 415). Cp. Holm, Eng. tr. ii, 156, 157.]

[Footnote 265: This view appears to be substantially at one with the

reasoning of Dr. Cunningham (_Western Civilisation_, pp. 112-23). I must

dissent, however, from his apparent position (pp. 119-21) that it was

the _mode_ of the expenditure that was wrong, and that Athens might have

employed her ill-gotten capital "productively" in the modern economic

sense. The cases of Miletus and Tyre, cited by him, seem to be beside

the argument.]

[Footnote 266: Plutarch, _Pericles_, c. 11.]

[Footnote 267: Cp. Thirlwall, small ed. iii, 67.]

[Footnote 268: _On the Revenues._]

[Footnote 269: As cited, bk. iv, ch. xxi.]

[Footnote 270: Boeckh's arguments, denounced by Lewis, need not be

adhered to; but the whole theorem is so fantastic that Lewis's general

vindication of it is puzzling (Trans. pref. xv, _note_).]

[Footnote 271: See Hertzberg, _Geschichte Griechenlands unter der

Herrschaft der Roemer_, Theil ii, Kap. 2, p. 200, as to the vast estates

now acquired by a few.]

[Footnote 272: In Magna Graecia, in particular, the whole Pythagorean

movement had such associations in a high degree. Note the frequency of

names beginning anax (= king or chief) in the history of early

Greek philosophy.]

[Footnote 273: Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 136.]

[Footnote 274: _Idem_, pp. 145-49; Gibbon, Bohn ed. iv, 352.]

[Footnote 275: _E.g._, the whole population of Corinth; and 150,000

inhabitants of Epirus.]

[Footnote 276: Cp. Finlay, i, 23.]

[Footnote 277: They exacted from Macedonia only half the tribute it had

paid to its kings; but there is a strong presumption that it was too

impoverished after the war to pay more.]

[Footnote 278: "The extraordinary payments levied on the provinces soon

equalled, and sometimes exceeded, the regular taxes" (Finlay, i, 39).

Cp. Mahaffy, _Greek World under Roman Sway_, pp. 145, 156, 159, 161,

162.]

[Footnote 279: Cp. Hertzberg, _Gesch. Griechenlands unter der Herrsch.

der Roemer_, Th. i, Kap. 5, pp. 486-91.]

[Footnote 280: Finlay, i, 45, 46, 74.]

[Footnote 281: "We stand [1st c. A.C.] before a decayed society of very

rich men and slaves" (Mahaffy, _Greek World_, p. 268).]

[Footnote 282: Finlay, i, 73. But cp. Frazer, _Pausanias_, 1900, p. 4,

as to the decay in the second century.]

[Footnote 283: This was soon withdrawn by Vespasian, but apparently with

circumspection. In the first century A.C. the administration seems to

have been unoppressive (Mahaffy, _Greek World_, pp. 233, 237).]

[Footnote 284: Hertzberg (_Gesch. Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der

Roemer_, Th. ii, Kap. 2, p. 189) rejects the statement of Finlay that

Greece reached the lowest degree of misery and depopulation under the

Flavian emperors ("about the time of Vespasian" is the first expression

in the revised ed. i, 80). But Finlay contradicts himself: cp. p. 66.

Hertzberg again (iii, 116) speaks of a "furchtbar zunehmende sociale

Noth des dritten Jahrhunderts" at Athens, without making the fact clear.

See below.]

[Footnote 285: This is noted by Finlay (i, 143) in regard to the later

surrender of a large Mesopotamian territory by Jovian to Shapur II, when

the whole Greek population of the ceded districts was forced to

emigrate.]

[Footnote 286: Cp. Finlay, i, 264, 267-69.]

[Footnote 287: Finlay, i, 141. See p. 142 as to the recognition of the

military importance of Greece by Julian.]

[Footnote 288: Cp. Finlay, i, 161. as to the ruin wrought at the end of

the fourth century by Alaric; and pp. 253, 297, 303, 316, as to that

wrought in the sixth century by Huns, Sclavonians, and Avars.]

[Footnote 289: Soteriaotai is one of the group-names preserved.]

[Footnote 290: They are already seen established in the laws of Solon.]

[Footnote 291: Foucart, _Des associations religieuses chez les Grecs_,

1873, pp. 5-10.]

[Footnote 292: They may have begun as early as the Peloponnesian war

(Foucart, p. 66).]

[Footnote 293: Finlay, i, 85-86, _notes_.]

[Footnote 294: _Id._ i, 289.]

[Footnote 295: _Id._ p. 309; cp. pp. 328, 329.]

[Footnote 296: A fair idea of the facts may be had by combining the

narratives of Gibbon, Finlay, and Mr. Oman (_The Byzantine Empire_, ch.

x). Gibbon and Mr. Oman ignore the threat to make Carthage the capital;

Gibbon ignores the point as to the stoppage of the grain supply; Finlay

ignores the Church loan; Mr. Oman (p. 133) represents it as voluntary,

whereas Gibbon shows it to have been compulsory (ch. 46. Bohn ed. v,

179, _note_). Mr. Bury alone (_History of the Later Roman Empire_, 1889,

ii, 217-21) gives a fairly complete view of the situation. He specifies

a famine and a pestilence as following on the stoppage of the grain

supply.]

[Footnote 297: Finlay, i, 425.]

[Footnote 298: _Id._ ii, 37.]

[Footnote 299: Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, p. 12.]

[Footnote 300: Oman, as cited, pp. 147, 148. The conventional claim, as

made by Robertson and echoed by Guizot, was partly disallowed even by

Milman, and countered by the clerical editor of the Bohn ed. of Gibbon

(ii, 50-54). But such conventional formulas are always subject to

resuscitation.]

[Footnote 301: Finlay (i, 81) writes that "at this favourable

conjuncture Christianity stepped in to prevent avarice from ever

recovering the ground which humanity had gained." This clearly did not

happen, and his later chapters supply the true explanation.]

[Footnote 302: Finlay later says so in so many words (ii, 23, 220),

explicitly rejecting the Christian theory (see also p. 321). This

historian's views seem to have modified as his studies proceeded, but

without leading him to recast his earlier text.]

[Footnote 303: Luke xvii, 7-10, Gr. The translation "servant" is, of

course, an entire perversion.]

[Footnote 304: 1 Cor. vii, 21-24. The phrase unintelligibly garbled as

"use it rather" clearly means "rather remain a slave." "even" being

understood in the previous clause. This was the interpretation of

Chrysostom and most of the Fathers. See the Variorum Teacher's Bible,

_ad loc_. Cp. the whole first chapter of Larroque, _De l'esclavage chez

les nations chretiennes_, 2nd edit. 1864; and the forcible passage of

Frederic Morin, _Origines de la Democratie_, 3e edit. 1865, pp. 384-86.

As Morin points out, the Church has never passed a theological

condemnation of slavery. On the other hand, it was expressly justified

by Augustine (_De Civ. Dei_, 1. xix, c. 15) as a divinely ordained

punishment for sin; and by Thomas Aquinas (_De regimine principum_, ii,

10) as being further a stimulus to bravery in soldiers. He cannot have

seen the Histories of Tacitus, where (ii, 4) civil wars are declared to

have been the most bloody, _because_ prisoners were not to be enslaved.]

[Footnote 305: Athenagoras, _Apology for Christianity_, c. 35;

Chrysostom, _passim_.]

[Footnote 306: _Instit. Justin._ I, iii, Sec. 2, 4; v.]

[Footnote 307: _Politics_, i, 3.]

[Footnote 308: Cp. Michelet, _Hist. de France_, vol. vii, _Renaissance_,

note du Sec. v. Introd. (ed. 1857, pp. 155-57). Michelet argues that the

Christian influence was substantially anti-liberationist.]

[Footnote 309: U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, Hume's ed. i, 116, 407.]

[Footnote 310: Chrysostom. 15th Hom. in Eph. (iv, 31); cp. 11th Hom. in

1 Thess. (v. 28).]

[Footnote 311: "Cum occidunt servos suos, jus putant esse, non crimen.

Non solum hoc, sed eodem privilegio etiam in execrando impudicitiae caeno

abutuntur" (_De gubernatione Dei_, iv).]

[Footnote 312: See below, pt. iv, ch. ii.]

[Footnote 313: Cp. the whole of Larroque's second chapter.]

[Footnote 314: So Mr. Oman admits, p. 148.]

[Footnote 315: _Cod. Theod._ xi, 3. 1, 2; _Cod. Justin._ xi, 47.]

[Footnote 316: _Cod. Justin._ xi, 47, 13 and 23. [A clear retrogression

to quasi-slavery for the freemen.]]

[Footnote 317: Finlay, i, 200, 201. Cp. p. 153.]

[Footnote 318: _Id._ ii, 27, and _note_. Cp. Dill, as cited, p. 233.]

PART III

CULTURE FORCES IN ANTIQUITY

CHAPTER I

GREECE

Sec. 1

It is still common, among men who professedly accept the theory of

evolution, to speak of special culture developments, notably those of

sculpture and literature in Greece, art in medieval Italy, and

theocratic religion in Judea, as mysteries beyond solution. It may be

well, then, to consider some of these developments as processes of

social causation, in terms of the general principles above outlined.

[A rational view was reached by the sociologists of the eighteenth

century, by whom the question of culture beginnings was much

discussed--_e.g._, Goguet's _De l'origine des lois, des arts, et

des sciences_, 1758; Ferguson's _Essay on the History of Civil

Society_, 1767; and Hume's essay on the _Rise and Progress of the

Arts and Sciences_. At the end of the century we find the solution

scientifically put by Walckenaer: "Ainsi le germe de genie et des

talens existe dans tous les tems, mais tous les tems ne sont pas

propres a le faire eclore" (_Essai sur l'histoire de l'espece

humaine_, 1798, 1. vi, ch. xx, _Des siecles les plus favorables aux

productions de genie_, pp. 348, 349). In England forty years later

we find Hallam thus exemplifying the obscurantist reaction: "There

is only one cause for the want of great men in any period--nature

does not think fit to produce them. They are no creatures of

education and circumstances" (_Literature of Europe_, pt. i, ch.

iii, Sec. 35). A kindred though much less crude view underlies Sir

Francis Galton's argument in _Hereditary Genius_. Cp. the present

writer's paper on "The Economics of Genius," in _The Forum_, April,

1898 (rep. in _Essays in Sociology_, vol. ii), and the able essay

of Mr. Cooley, there cited. My esteemed friend, Mr. Lester Ward

(_Dynamic Sociology_, ii, 600, 601), seems to me, as does Mill

(_System of Logic_, bk. vi, ch. iv, Sec. 4; cp. Bain, _J.S. Mill_, p.

146), to err somewhat on the opposite side to that of Hallam and

Galton, in assuming that faculty is nearly equal in all, given only

opportunity.]

And first as to Greece. As against the common conception of the Hellenic

people as "innately" artistic, it may be well to cite the judgment of an

artist who, if not more scientific in his method of reaching his

opinion, has on the whole a better right to it in this case than has the

average man to his. It is a man of genius who writes[319]: "A favourite

faith, dear to those who teach, is that certain periods were especially

artistic, and that nations, readily named, were notably lovers of art.

So we are told that the Greeks were, as a people, worshippers of the

beautiful, and that in the fifteenth century art was ingrained in the

multitude....Listen! There never was an artistic period. There never was

an Art-loving nation." This, which was sometime a paradox, is when

interpreted one of the primary truths of sociology.

Our theorist goes on to describe the doings of the first artist, and the

slow contagion of his example among men similarly gifted, till the

artistic species had filled the land with beautiful things, which were

uncritically used by the non-artistic; "and the Amateur was unknown--and

the Dilettante undreamed of." Such is the artist's fairy tale of

explanation. The probable fact is that the "first artists" in historic

Greece were moved to imitative construction by samples of the work of

foreigners. If, on the other hand, we decide that the "race" had evolved

relatively high artistic capacities before it reached its Greek or Asian

home,[320] it will still hold good that the early AEgean evolution owed

much to ancient Oriental and Egyptian example. The Greeks as we know

them visibly passed from primitive to high art in all things. Having

first had fetish Gods of unshapen stone, they made Gods in crudely human

shape, at first probably of wood, later of stone. So with vases,

goblets, tables, furniture, and ware of all sorts, all gradually

developing in felicity of form up to a certain point, whereafter art

worsened. What we require to know is the why of both processes.

_Pace_ the artist, it is clear that artistic objects were multiplied

mainly because they were in steady economic demand. The shaping impulse

is doubtless special, and in its highest grades rare; but there must

also have been special conditions to develop it in one country in the

special degree. That is to say, the faculty for shaping, for design, was

oftener appealed to in Greece than elsewhere, and was allowed more

freedom in the response, thus reaching new excellence. The early Greeks

can have had no very delicate taste, satisfied as they were with statues

as primitive as the conventional Assyrian types they copied.

Prof. Burrows, in his valuable work on _The Discoveries in Crete_

(1907), somewhat confuses one of his problems by assuming that, on

a given chronological view, the creators of the early AEgean

civilisation were "the most progressive and artistic part of the

race" (p. 193). No such assumption can be valid on any chronology.

Every "part" of a race, broadly speaking, has the same total

potentialities. The determinants are the special _evocative_

conditions, which may be either culture contacts or economic

fostering. A rational view of the growth of Greek art is put by Dr.

Mahaffy, despite his endorsement of Mr. Freeman's extravagant

estimate of Athenian intelligence:--"However national and diffused

it [art] became, this was due to careful study, and training, and

legislation, and not to a sort of natural compulsion.... As natural

beauty was always the exception among Greek men, so artistic talent

was also rare and special" (_Social Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p.

430). All the remains, as well as every principle of sociological

science, go to support this view of the case. When Reber asserts

(_Hist. of Ancient Art_, Eng. tr. 1883, p. 264) that "the very

first carvings of Greece had a power of development which was

wanting in all the other nations of that period," he is setting up

an occult principle and obscuring the problem. The other nations of

_that period_ were not in progressive stages; but some of them had

progressed in art in their time. And many of the "very first" Greek

works--that is, of the "historic" period, as distinguished from the

"Minoan"--are enormously inferior to some very ancient Egyptian

work.

The development of taste was itself the outcome of a thousand steps of

comparison and specialisation, art growing "artistic" as children grow

in reasonableness and in nervous co-ordination. And the special

conditions of historic Greece were roughly these:--

(1) The great primary stimulus to Greek art, science, and thought,

through the contact of the early settlers in Asia Minor with the remains

of the older Semitic civilisation,[321] and the further stimuli from

Egypt.

(2) Multitude of autonomous communities, of which the members had

intercourse as kindred yet critical strangers, emulous of each other,

but mixing their stocks, and so developing the potentialities of the

species.

(3) Multitude of religious cults, each having its local temples, its

local statues, and its local ritual practices.

(4) The concourse in Athens, and some other cities, of alert and capable

men from all parts of the Greek-speaking world,[322] and of men of other

speech who came thither to learn.

(5) The special growth of civic and peaceful population in Attica by the

free incorporation of the smaller towns in the franchise of Athens.

Athens had thus the largest number of free citizens of all the Greek

cities to start with,[323] and the maximum of domestic peace.

(6) The maintenance of an ideal of cultured life as the outcome of these

conditions, which were not speedily overridden either by (_a_)

systematic militarism, or (_b_) industrialism, or (_c_) by great

accumulation of wealth.

(7) The special public expenditure of the State, particularly in the age

of Pericles, on art, architecture, and the drama, and in stipends to the

poorer of the free citizens.

Thus the culture history of Greece, like the political, connects vitally

from the first with the physical conditions. The disrupted character of

the mainland; the diffusion of the people through the AEgean Isles; the

spreading of colonies on east and west, set up a multitude of separate

City-States, no one of which could decisively or long dominate the rest.

These democratic and equal communities reacted on each other, especially

those so placed as to be seafaring. Their separateness developed a

multitudinous mythology; even the Gods generally recognised being

worshipped with endless local particularities, while most districts had

their special deities. For each and all of these were required temples,

altars, statues, sacred vessels, which would be paid for by the

public[324] or the temple revenues, or by rich devotees; and the

countless myths, multiplied on all hands because of the absence of

anything like a general priestly organisation, were an endless appeal to

the imitative arts. Nature, too, had freely supplied the ideal medium

for sculpture and for the finest architecture--pure marble. And as the

political dividedness of Hellenedom prevented even an approach to

organisation among the scattered and independent priests, so the

priesthood had no power and no thought of imposing artistic limitations

on the shapers of the art objects given to their temples. In addition to

all this, the local patriotism of the countless communities was

constantly expressed in statues to their own heroes, statesmen, and

athletes. And in such a world of sculpture, formative art must needs

flourish wherever it could ornament life.

We have only to compare the conditions in Judea, Persia, Egypt, and

early Rome to see the enormous differentiation herein implied. In

Mazdean Persia and Yahwistic Judea there was a tabu on all divine

images, and by consequence on all sculpture that could lend itself to

idolatry.[325] (This tabu, like the monotheistic idea, was itself the

outcome of political and social causation, which is in large part

traceable and readily intelligible.) In Italy, in the early historic

period, outside of Etruria, there had been no process of culture-contact

sufficient to develop any of the arts in a high degree; and the relation

of the Romans to the other Italian communities in terms of situation and

institutions[326] was fatally one of progressive conquest. Their

specialisation was thus military or predaceous; and the formal

acceptance of the deities of the conquered communities could not prevent

the partial uniformation of worship. Thus Rome had nearly everything to

learn from Greece in art as in literature. In Egypt, again, where

sculpture had at more than one time, in more than one locality, reached

an astonishing excellence,[327] the easily maintained political

centralisation[328] and the commercial isolation made fatally for

uniformity of ideal; and the secure dominion of the organised

priesthood, cultured only sacerdotally, always strove to impose one

stolid conventional form on all sacred and ritual sculpture,[329] which

was copied in the secular, in order that kings should as much as

possible resemble Gods. Where the bulk of Greece was "servile to all the

skyey influences," physically as well as mentally, open on all sides to

all cultures, all pressures, all stimuli, Egypt and Judea and Persia

were relatively iron-bound, and early Rome relatively inaccessible.

Finally, as militarism never spread Spartan-wise over pre-Alexandrian

Greece, and her natural limitations prevented any such exploitation of

labour as took place in Egypt, the prevailing ideal in times of peace,

at least in Attica, was that of the cultured man, kalokagathos,

supported by slave labour but not enormously rich, who stimulated art as

he was stimulated by it. Assuredly he was in many cases a dilettante, if

not an amateur, else had art been in a worse case.

It is to be remembered that in later Greece, from about the time of

Apelles, all free children were taught to draw (Pliny, _Hist. Nat._

xxxv, 36, 15); and long before, the same authority tells us, art

was taken up by men of rank. The introduction of painting into the

schools at Sicyon took place about 350 B.C., and thence the

practice spread all over Hellas. Aristotle, too (_Politics_, v

[viii], 3), commends the teaching of drawing to children, noting

that it enables men to judge of the arts and avoid blunders in

picture-buying--though he puts this as an inferior and incidental

gain. Thus the educated Greeks were in a fairly good sense all

dilettanti and amateurs. On the whole subject see K.J. Freeman,

_Schools of Hellas_, 1908, pp. 114-17.

Sec. 2

In literature Greek development is as clearly consequent as in art. The

Homeric poems are the outcome of a social state in which a class of

bards could find a living by chanting heroic tales to aristocratic

households. Lyric genius is indeed something specially incalculable; and

it is startling to realise that about the time of the rude rule of

Peisistratos at Athens, Sappho in Lesbos was not merely producing the

perfect lyrics which to this day men reckon unmatched, but was the

centre of a kind of school of song. But Lesbos was really the home of an

ancient culture--"the earliest of all the AEolic settlements, anterior

even to Kyme"[330]--and Sappho followed closely upon the lyrists

Pittakos and Alkaios. So that here too there is intelligible causation

in environment as well as genius. In other directions it is patent. The

drama, tragic and comic alike, was unquestionably the outcome of the

public worship of the Gods, first provided for by the community, later

often exacted by it from rich aspirants to political power. Greek drama

is a clear evolution, on the tragic side, from the primitive ritual of

Dionysos, Beer-God or Wine-God; individual genius and communal fostering

combining to develop a primitive rite into a literary florescence.[331]

For all such developments special genius is as a matter of course

required, but potential genius occurs in all communities in given forms

at a given culture stage; and what happened in Athens was that the

special genius for drama was specially appealed to, evoked, and

maintained. AEschylus in Egypt and Aristophanes in Persia must have died

with all their drama in them. Further, as Grote has so luminously

shown,[332] the juridical life of Athens, with its perpetual play of

special pleading in the dikasteries, was signally propitious to the

spirit of drama. The constant clashing and contrast of ethical points of

view, the daily play of eristic thought, was in itself a real drama

which educated both dramatists and audience, and which inevitably

affected the handling of moral problems on the stage. Athens may thus be

said to have cultivated discussion as Sparta cultivated "Laconism"; and

both philosophy and drama in Greece are steeped in it. Myths thus came

to be handled on the stage with a breadth of reflection which was

nowhere else possible.

Historiography, science, and philosophy, again, were similarly fostered

by other special conditions. Abstract and physical science began for

Greece in the comparison and friction of ideas among leisured men,

themselves often travelled, living in inquisitive communities often

visited by strangers. What Egypt and Syria and Phoenicia had to give

in medical lore, in geometry, and in astronomy, was assimilated and

built upon, in an atmosphere of free thought and free discussion, whence

came all manner of abstract philosophy, analytical and ethical. Plato

and Aristotle are the peaks of immense accumulations of more primitive

thought beginning on the soil laid by Semitic culture in Asia Minor;

Socrates was stimulated and drawn out by the Athenian life on which he

didactically reacted; Hippocrates garnered the experience of many

medical priests. History was cultivated under similar conditions of

manifold intercourse and intelligent inquisitiveness. Herodotus put down

the outcome of much questioning during many travels, and he had an

appreciative public with similar tastes.[333] The manifold life of

Hellas and her neighbours, Egypt, Persia, Syria, was an endless ground

for inquiry and anecdote. The art of writing, acquired long before from

Phoenicia, was thus put to unparalleled uses; and at length the theme

of the Peloponnesian war, in which all the political passions of Hellas

were embroiled for a generation, found in Thucydides a historian

produced by and representative of all the critical judgment of the

critical Athenian age. Plutarch, in a later period, condenses a library

of lesser writers.

Thus in respect of every characteristic and every special attainment of

Greek life we can trace external causation, from the geographical

conditions upwards, without being once tempted to resort to the

verbalist explanation of "race qualities" or "national genius." If

Hellas developed otherwise than Phoenicia from any given date onwards,

the causes lay either in the environment or in the set previously given

to Phoenician life by its special antecedents, which in turn were

determined by environment. To suppose that "the Greeks" started

primordially with a unique connatural bent to a relatively "ideal"

method of life, preferring culture to riches and art to luxury, is to

entail the further assumption of a separate biological evolution from

the pre-human stage. To put the problem clearly, let us say that if we

suppose the ancestors of the Greeks three millenniums before Homer to

have been planted in Australia, with none of the domesticable animals

which have played so decisive a part in the development of human

societies, there is no good reason to think that the "race" would have

risen to any higher levels than had been reached by the Australian

aborigines at the time of their discovery by Europeans. One of the most

remarkable things about those aborigines is their disproportionately

high cranial capacity, which seems compatible with a mental life that

their natural environment has always precluded. Many plain traces of

gross primeval savagery remain in Greek literature and religion; and to

credit all Greek progress to a unique racial faculty is to turn the back

upon all the accumulating evidence which goes to show that from the

first entrance of the Greeks into Greece they blended with and

assimilated the culture of the races whom they found there.[334] The

futility of the whole racial thesis becomes evident, finally, the moment

we reflect how unequal Greek culture was; how restricted in Hellas, how

special to Athens was it on the intellectual side when once Athens had

reached her stature; how blank of thought and science was all Hellenic

life before the contact of Semitic survivals in Ionia; how backward were

many sections of the pagan Hellenic stock to the last; and how backward

they have been since the political overturn in antiquity.

The vitiating concept of racial genius appears incidentally, but

definitely, in Dr. Cunningham's contrast of Phoenicians and

Greeks as relatively wealth-seekers and culture-seekers, ingrained

barbarians and ingrained humanists (_Western Civilisation_, pp. 72,

73, 98, 99, etc.), and in his phrase as to the persistent

"principles which the Greek and the Phoenician respectively

represented." The antithesis, it is here maintained, is spurious.

Many Greeks were in full sympathy with the Phoenician norm; many

Phoenicians must have been capable of delighting in the Greek

norm had they been reared to it. At a given period the

Phoenicians had a higher life than the Greeks; and had the

Phoenicians evolved for ages in the Greek environment, with an

equivalent blending of stocks and cross-fertilisation of cultures,

they could have become all that the Greeks ever were. The assertion

that when we see "the destruction and degradation of human life in

the march of material progress, we see what is alien to the Greek

spirit" (_id._ p. 99) will not bear examination. Greek slavery,

like every other, was just such a degradation of human life. And to

speak of a "consciousness of her mission" on the part of "Athens"

(_id._ pp. 72, 73) is to set up a pseudo-entity and a moral

illusion.

It is remarkable that even among students well abreast of

evolutionary thought there is still a strong tendency to think of

Greek civilisation in terms of some occult virtue of "Hellenic

spirit," something unique in social phenomena, something not to be

accounted for like the process of evolution in other races. Thus so

accomplished and critical a thinker as Prof. Gilbert Murray seems

to account for every Greek advance beyond savagery as a result of

"Hellenism." _E.g._, "Human sacrifice, then, is one of the

barbarities which Hellenism successfully overcame" (_The Rise of

the Greek Epic_, 1907, p. 16); "Solved by the progressive, or, I

may say, by the Hellenic spirit" (_Id._ p. 25). In this way the

discrediting and abandonment of the use of poisoned arrows in the

"Homeric" period (_Id._ pp. 120-21) seems to be ascribed either to

the Homeric or to the Hellenic "spirit."

Now, Mr. Murray himself incidentally notes (p. 121) that poisoned

weapons are forbidden in the Laws of Manu; and it might be pointed

out that even among the barbaric and ill-advantaged Somali, when

visited by Burton fifty years ago, the use of poisoned arrows was

already restricted to "the servile class" (_First Footsteps in East

Africa_, ed. 1910, p. 45; cp. p. 74). The use of poisoned arrows,

in short, is common in savagery, and is transcended by all races

alike when they rise some way above that level. The "Hellenes," to

start with, were savages like the rest, and rose like others in

virtue of propitious conditions. So with human sacrifice. According

to Herodotus, the Egyptians had abandoned it before the Greeks.

Shall we describe the Egyptian progress as a matter of "Egypticism"

or "the Egyptian spirit"?

Defences of the Greeks, such as that made so ably by Mr. Murray

against the aspersions cast upon "Paganism" by uncritical

Christians, are to be sympathetically received in the light of

their purport; but the true historical method is surely not to

exhibit the historic Greeks as "antitheses" to "the pagan man" of

modern anthropology, but to show Christians how they and their

creed have evolved from savagery even as did the Greeks. (Cp. the

author's _Christianity and Mythology_, 2nd ed. p. 77 _sq._, as to

the pro-Hellenic handling of Greek phenomena by other scholars.)

Should the general line of causation here set forth be challenged, it

will suffice, by way of test, to turn to the special case of Sparta. If

it were "Greek character" that brought forth Greek art, letters, and

science, they ought to have flourished in Greek Sparta as elsewhere. It

is, however, the notorious historic fact that during all the centuries

of her existence, after the pre-Lycurgean period, Sparta contributed to

the general deed of man virtually nothing, either in art or letters, in

science or philosophy.

The grounds for holding that choral poetry flourished pre-eminently

at Sparta (see K.O. Mueller, _History of the Dorians_, Eng. tr. ii,

383) are not very strong. See Busolt, _Griechische Geschichte_,

1885, i, 158, 159, for what can be finally said on this head. Ernst

Curtius (_Griechische Geschichte_, 1858, i, 240) writes on this

subject as a romantic enthusiast. Burckhardt (_Griechische

Culturgeschichte_, i, 116-19) examines the subject with his usual

care, but decides only that the Spartans employed music with a

special eye to military education. And Mueller acknowledges that

though many Spartan lyrists are named, "there has not been

preserved a single fragment of Spartan lyric poetry, with the

exception of Alkman's," the probable reason being "a certain

uniformity and monotony in their productions, such as is perceived

in the early works of art." On the whole question cp. K.J.

Freeman's _Schools of Hellas_, chs. i and xi.

In the story of Hellas, Sparta stands almost alone among the peoples as

yielding no foothold to the life of the mind, bare of nearly all memory

of beauty,[335] indigent in all that belongs to the spirit, morally

sterile as steel. Yet "the Dorians of Laconia are perhaps the only

people in Greece who can be said to have preserved in any measure the

purity of their Greek blood."[336] Before such a phenomenon the dogma of

race-character instantly collapses, whereas in terms of the reaction of

conditions the explanation is entirely adequate. As thus:--

1. Sparta was by situation one of the most secluded of the Greek States.

In the words of Euripides, it was "hollow, surrounded by mountains,

rugged, and difficult of access to an enemy."[337] Compared in

particular with Athens, it was not only landward and mountain-walled,

but out of the way of all traffic.[338]

2. From the first the Spartans were balanced in a peculiar degree by the

strength of the Achaians, who were in the Peloponnesus before them, the

hostilities between the invaders and the older inhabitants lasting

longer in the valley of the Eurotas than anywhere else.[339] The Spartan

militarism was thus a special product of circumstances, not a result of

Doric "character," since other Dorian communities did not develop it.

3. Being thus so little open to commercial influence, and so committed

to a life of militarism, Sparta was susceptible of a rigidity of

military constitution that was impossible elsewhere in the Hellenic

world, save to some extent in the similarly aristocratic and undeveloped

communities of Thessaly and Crete, each similarly noted for

unintellectuality. Whatever be the political origins of these societies,

it is clear that that of Sparta could not have been built up or

maintained save under conditions of comparative isolation.

Grote, always somewhat inclined to racial explanations, argues (ed.

1888, ii, 262), as against K.O. Mueller, who had still stronger

leanings of the kind, that the Spartans were not the "true Doric

type," in that their institutions were peculiar to themselves,

distinguishing them "not less from Argos, Corinth, Megara,

Epidaurus, Sikyon, Korkyra, or Knidus, than from Athens or Thebes."

This is doubtless true as against Mueller (cp. Kopstadt, cited by

Grote; Cox, _General History of Greece_, 1877, p. 28; and Menard,

_Histoire des Grecs_, 1884, pp. 218, 221), but the suggestion that

the Spartans varied in respect of being _less_ "Doric" is equally

astray. Grote goes on to note that "Krete was the only other

portion of Greece in which there prevailed institutions in many

respects analogous, yet still dissimilar in those two attributes

which form the real mark and pinch of Spartan legislation--viz.,

the military discipline and rigorous private training. There were

doubtless Dorians in Krete, but we have no proof that these

peculiar institutions belonged to them more than to the other

inhabitants of the island." The argument cuts both ways. If it was

not definitely "Dorian" to have such institutions, neither was it

un-Dorian. As Cox observes (p. 30), the Spartan constitution in its

earlier stages "much resembled the constitution of the Achaians as

described in the _Iliad_." Equally arbitrary seems Grote's argument

(i, 451) that "the low level of taste and intelligence among the

Thessalians, as well as certain points of their costume,

assimilates them more to Macedonians or Epirots than to Hellenes."

He notes the equally low level of taste and intelligence among the

Spartans, who as a rule could not read or write (ii, 307), and to

whom he might as well have assimilated the Thessalians as to the

Macedonians. In all cases alike culture conditions supply the true

explanation. All through Greece, barring Sparta, stocks were

endlessly mixed. M. Menard well points out in reply to Mueller that

it is impossible to associate types of government with any of the

special "races"--that as against Sparta there were "Ionian

aristocracies at Marseilles and at Chalkis, and Dorian democracies

at Tarentum and Syracuse," while most of the Greek cities had by

turns aristocratic and democratic constitutions.

4. As regards Sparta, the specialisation of all life on the military

side developed a spirit of peculiar separateness and arrogance,[340]

which clinched the geographical influence. Where Greeks of all States

were admitted to the Eleusinian festivals, Sparta kept hers for her own

people.[341] This would limit her literary mythology, and by consequence

her art.

Among the names of Greek sculptors only three belong to Sparta, and

these are all of the sixth century B.C., the beginning of the

historic period. After that, nothing. See Radford's _Ancient

Sculpture_, Chron. List at end. Thus Sparta positively retrogressed

into militarism. "There is evidence in the character of Alkman's

poetry that he did not sing to a Sparta at all resembling the

so-called Sparta of Lycurgus" (Mahaffy, _Problems in Greek

History_, p. 77; cp. Burckhardt, _Griechische Culturgeschichte_, i,

117).

5. Not only does military specialism preclude, so far as it goes, more

intellectual forms of activity: it develops in the highest degree the

conservative spirit[342] when thoroughly rooted in law and custom. Nor

is it any more favourable to moral feeling in general.[343]

As offset to all this it may be urged that the middle unenfranchised

class (the _Perioikoi_) in Sparta, the _Penestai_ in Thessaly, and the

ordinary citizens in Crete, were in some ways superior types to part of

the similar classes of Attica; while the slaves, as having some military

life, were, despite the flavour of the name "Helot," above the

average.[344] But even if that were so, it would not affect the problem

as to culture development, and its solution in terms of the primary and

secondary conditions of life for the given communities.

It is to be noted that in Crete, less isolated by nature and way of

life than either Sparta or Thessaly, less rigidly militarised than

they and more democratic in constitution, there were more stirrings

of mind. Epimenides, the author of the famous saying that the

Cretans were always "liars, evil beasts, idle gluttons," was

himself a distinguished Cretan. But Crete on the whole counts for

very little in Greek culture-history. Cp. K.J. Freeman, _Schools of

Hellas_, p. 38.

Sec. 3

Such being, in brief, the process of the building up of culture for

Greece, it remains to note the causes of the process of retrogression,

which also connects broadly with the course of politics. Indeed, the

mere expansion of Hellenistic life set up by the empire-making of

Alexander might alone account for a complete change in the conditions

and phases of Greek civilisation. In the new Hellenistic world wealth

and power were to be won with ease and with amenity[345] where of old

there was only an alien barbarism, or at least a society which to the

cultured Greek was barbaric. When such cities as Alexandria and Antioch

beckoned the Greek scholar of small means, impoverished Athens could

hardly retain him. Her extorted revenue in her most powerful

period,[346] as we saw, was the source of her highest flight of artistic

splendour; and even after the Peloponnesian War, with greatly lessened

power, Athens was the most desirable dwelling-place in Hellas. After

Alexander, all this was insensibly changed: Athens, though for a time

filled with Greeks enriched by the plunder of Persia, must needs

gradually dwindle to the point at which the slight natural advantages of

her soil, industry, and situation would maintain her; and the life of

ideas, such as it finally was, passed inevitably to Alexandria, where it

was systematically encouraged and protected, in the fashion in which

well-meaning autocrats do such things. But while these new developments

were not inconsiderable, and included some rare felicities, they were on

the whole fatally inferior to the old, and this for reasons which would

equally affect what intellectual life was left in Greece proper.

The forces of hindrance were political and psychological;[347] and they

operated still more powerfully under the Romans than under the

successors of Alexander. The dominance of the Greeks over the other

races in the eastern provinces did not make them more than a class of

privileged tools of Rome; and they deteriorated none the less.[348] When

for the stimulating though stormy life of factious self-government there

was substituted the iron hand of a conqueror, governing by military

force, there was need of a new and intelligent discipline if the mental

atmosphere were not to worsen. All civilisation, in so far as it

proceeds from and involves a "leisured class," sets up a perpetual risk

of new morbid phases. Men must have some normal occupation if their life

is to be sound; and where that occupation is not handicraft it can be

kept sound and educative only by the perpetual free effort of the

intelligence towards new truth, new conception, and new

presentment.[349] Nor can this effort conceivably take place on any wide

scale, and with any continuity, save in a community kept more or less

generally alert by the agitation of vital issues. For a generation or

two after Alexander, it is true, there is no arrest in the production

of good philosophic minds among the Greeks; indeed, the sudden forcing

back of all the best remaining minds on philosophy, as the one mental

employment left to self-respecting men of leisure,[350] raised the

standards of the study, and led to the ethical systems of Epicurus and

Zeno, certainly fit in their way to stand beside those of Plato and

Aristotle. So, too, the thrusting back of the drama (which in the hands

of Aristophanes had meddled audaciously with every public question) on

the study of private life, developed in the highest degree the domestic

and psychological bent of the later comedy,[351] very much as the

autocracy has developed the novel in contemporary Russia. But the

schools of Epicurus and Zeno, both of which outlasted in moral credit

and in moral efficacy that of Plato,[352] and the new comedy of

Menander, alike represent the as yet unexhausted storage of the mental

energy generated by the old political life; and the development is not

prolonged in either case. Evidently something vital was lost: only a

renewal of the freer life could make possible a continuous advance in

intellectual power.

On this it is important to insist, as there are plausible grounds for

contrary inferences, which are often drawn. All supposed exceptions to

the law, however, will be found on analysis to be apparent only. A

tyranny may indeed give economic encouragement to art and culture, and a

republic may fail to do so; but the work of the tyranny is inevitably

undone or kept within a fixed limit by its own character; while, if the

free community be but fairly well guided, its potentialities are

unlimited. This is the solution of much modern dispute between the

schools of _laissez-faire_ and protection. A Velasquez, who might

otherwise have been condemned to seek his market with coarser wares, may

develop to perfection at the court of an autocrat of fine taste; but

even he partly depends for his progress on intelligent communion, which

the autocrat in this case chances to yield him. And from Velasquez

onward there is no progress. So, in autocratic Assyria, sculpture

reaches a certain point and becomes for ever conventionalised. In Egypt

it conforms more or less exactly to the general stereotyping of life. We

may grant, with some emphatic qualifications, that in some cases "with

the tyrant _began_ the building of large temples, ... the patronage of

clever handicrafts, the promoting of all the arts,"[353] and that he may

have patronised men of letters; but as regards the temples it is certain

that in Hellas he was not the chief temple-builder; and it is also quite

certain that the tyrant never evolved a single generation of important

writers, thinkers, and artists, any more than of intelligent,

self-respecting, and self-governing citizens. The latter constituted, in

fact, the necessary nutritive soil for the former in the communities of

antiquity.[354] It has been said[355] that "at the end of the third

century of Rome, when its inhabitants had hardly escaped from the hands

of Porsena, Syracuse contained more men of high genius than any other

city in the world. These were collected at the court of the first Hiero,

during his short reign of ten years, and among them were the greatest

poets of the age: Pindar ... Simonides ... AEschylus." This is true; but

Hiero had not been the means of evolving the powers of any one of the

three. Pindar is manifestly the product of the diversified life of the

free States; Simonides, though much patronised by aristocrats, began to

"find himself" as a chorus teacher at Carthea in Ceos, won countless

prizes at the Greek festivals,[356] and spent only the latter part of

his life with Hiero; AEschylus is the product of the Attic theatre. Not

the tyranny, but democracy, had been the _alma mater_. It is true that

Athens after AEschylus played the "despot city" in finance, but she so

far preserved at home the democratic atmosphere, in which, according to

Demosthenes, slaves had more freedom of speech than citizens in many

other places.[357] Lesbos had her oscillations between oligarchy and

despotism; but the group in which Sappho stood was that of Pittakos and

Alkaios--the elected ten-years dictator who finally laid down his

dictatorship, and the fierce singer who assailed him. Not in the "Roman

peace" of a fixed despotism did Lesbian song reach its apex.

The old problem of the culture-value of the tyrant has been raised

afresh by Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari, in their abridgment of

Grote's _History of Greece_. Grote's enthusiasm for democracy, they

contend, "undoubtedly prevented him from doing full justice to much

that was good in the non-democratic governments of Greece,"

notably "in his estimate of the so-called 'tyrants' of the Greek

world and in his attitude towards the Macedonian Empire" (pref. to

work cited, p. xv). Part of their discussion is beside the case,

and proves only their general hostility to Grote as "a

rationalist," to whom "every problem was a matter for rational

discussion" (p. xiii). They first assert that Grote's chapter

heading, "Age of the Despots," is "subtly misleading," inasmuch as

there were despots at various periods in Greek history--as has been

insisted by Professor Mahaffy. Then they avow that "this fact is

mentioned by Grote himself," and that he "quite properly

distinguishes" between the early and the late tyrannies.

The counter-claim is first put in the propositions (1) that an

early Greek "tyranny" was in effect "a union of one powerful

personality with the poorer and hitherto unrepresented classes,"

favourable to individual life among the latter; and (2) that the

tyrants by preserving peace and giving the people individual

freedom of life promoted "the accumulation of wealth and the

extension of trade at home and abroad, and enriched the Greek mind

by familiarising it with the natural and artistic products of other

lands" (p. xvii). There is really nothing here that Grote denied;

nor do the critics attempt to show that he denies it. Grote

actually said, before them, that "the demagogue despots are

interesting as the first evidence of the growing importance of the

people in political affairs. The demagogue stood forward as

representing the feelings and interests of the people against the

governing few.... Even the worst of the despots was more formidable

to the rich than to the poor; and the latter may perhaps have

gained by the change...." (_History_, pt. ii, ch. ix, ed. 1888, ii,

397). As regards the case of Peisistratos, on which Messrs.

Mitchell and Caspari chiefly found their plea, Grote notes that his

"was doubtless practically milder" than the average despotism, but

that "cases of this character were rare." And to _this_ thesis,

which is backed by an overwhelming mass of Greek testimony, from

Herodotus to Aristotle and Plato, the critics offer no kind of

answer.

They do, however, claim for "the tyrants" in general that "in the

first place their orderly government provided _for the first time_

the conditions which are essential to artistic and literary

production. Secondly, it was their policy to foster in all possible

ways everything that contributed to the magnificence of the

States." If it be meant to include under the head of _tyrannoi_ the

early feudal chieftains before whom the bards chanted, the issue is

merely confused. If not, the proposition is untenable. If again it

be argued that the Mausoleum was a finer thing than the Parthenon,

or quite as well worth having, the real issue is missed.

It is significant that Grote's anti-rationalistic critics make no

attempt to gauge the respective effects of "tyrannic" and

democratic or oligarchic rule on the _inner_ life of men, which is

what Grote chiefly considered. Neither is this, the vital issue,

once faced in the essay of Hegewisch "On the Epoch of Roman History

most Fortunate for the Human Race" (French trans. by Solvet, 1834),

or in the encomiums of Gibbon, Mommsen, and Renan, before cited (p.

89, _note_). As has been shown above, there is no instance of a new

and great intellectual development taking its rise or visibly going

forward (save as at Alexandria under the Ptolemies) under the

auspices of even a good despot in antiquity; though such a despot

might at times usefully preserve the peace and cherish writers and

artists. Here, then, is a sociological clue that should be

followed. The reasonable inference seems to be that democratic

conditions, other things being equal, tend most to elicit human

faculty.

And where in modern times certain of the less democratic nations may be

said to have developed certain forms of culture more widely and

energetically than do certain of the more democratic States--as Germany

her learned class, in comparison with France and England and the United

States; or modern Russia in comparison with the States in the matter of

the higher fiction--it can easily be shown (1) that these developments

arise not in virtue of but in reaction against autocracy, and (2) that

they were possible only in virtue of the evocative influence of

communities living more freely. Modern communities differ vitally from

the ancient in that printing has created a species of intercourse which

overleaps all political and geographical restrictions, so that a

politically tyrannised community can yet receive and respond to the

stimulus of another. But the stimulus is still indispensable. Thus the

intellectual expansion of France after the death of Louis XIV[358] drew

germinally from the culture of the England of the day; and that of

Germany later in the century was equally a sequence from that and from

the ferment in France. Given the cluster of independent States, each

with its court and its university, which made up the Germany of the

period, the revived spirit of free thought bore the more and the better

fruit because of the multitude of the reactions involved in the

circumstances. For the time, the slackened and lightened petty

autocracies counted for intellectual democracy, though even Kant was

made to feel the pressure of censorship. It was not regal or ducal rule

that made Lessing or Herder or Schiller or Goethe; and it was not mere

kingly encouragement that bred scholars like Hermann and Wachsmuth and

Buttmann and Bekker and Boeckh and Heeren and Ottfried Mueller. The

school of Tuebingen was the outcome of a movement that proximately began

in English Deism; and even the personal bias of Frederick counted for

much less in the evolution than the general contagion of European

debate. In the University of Berlin, organised after Jena, the inspiring

principle was that of intellectual freedom; and the moving spirits took

express pains to guard against the tyranny of convention which they saw

ruling in the universities of England. For the rest, the production of a

very large class of scholarly specialists in Germany was made possible

primarily by the number of universities set up in the days of

separatism, and secondarily by the absence of such economic conditions

(all resting on possession of coal and maritime situation) as drew

English energy predominantly to industry and commerce. It is true that

if a democratic society to-day does not make express economic provision

for a scholarly and cultured class, it is likely to lack such, because

the leisured or idle class in all countries grows less capable of, and

less inclined to, such intellectual production as it contributed to the

serious literature of England during the nineteenth century. But such

economic provision has been still more necessary in monarchic

communities. Finally, at every stage Germany has been reacted upon by

France and England; and it is notable that while, in the last

generation, under a strengthening militarism and imperialism, the number

of trained German specialists was maintained, the number of Germans able

to stir and lead European thought fell off.[359]

In the same way the phenomenon of a group of great novelists in the

autocratic Russia of our own age is no fruit of autocracy, save in the

sense that autocratic government checks all other forms of criticism of

life, all liberal discussion, and so drives men back on artistic forms

of writing which offer no disturbing social doctrine. And the artistic

development itself is made possible only by the culture previously or

contemporaneously accumulated in other and freer communities, from whose

mental life the cultivated Russian draws his. It was to some extent a

similar restrictive pressure that specially developed the drama in

France under the Third Empire. Apart from the peculiar case of the

Italian cities of the Renaissance, discussed hereinafter, the most that

can be said for the "tyrant" in modern Europe is that Richelieu and

Colbert promoted science in France; that the German principalities of

the eighteenth century fostered music at their courts; that George III

did much for Handel in England; and that the King of Bavaria did still

more for Wagner. On the other hand, the system of national and municipal

theatres on the Continent was an essential adjunct even in this regard;

and the mere comparative freedom accorded to the drama in Elizabethan

England, at a time when surplus intellectual energy lacked other

stimuli, sufficed to develop that art in one generation to a degree

never so speedily reached elsewhere, save in republican Athens. Where

the "tyrant" is most useful is in such a civilisation as that of the

Saracens, for which autocracy is the only alternative to anarchy, and

where, on a basis of derived culture, he can protect and rapidly further

the useful arts and all manner of special studies. But even he cannot

command a great intellectual art, or an inwardly great literature.[360]

It will hardly be pretended that the freethinking which went on in

Moslem Persia and Spain in the eighth and later centuries was evoked by

the Caliphs, though some of them for a time protected it. The Ptolemies

for a while fostered science at Alexandria; but under Roman rule--surely

as tyrannous--it died out. And even under the Ptolemies science was a

hothouse plant which never throve in the open.

It is clear, then, that first the rule of Alexander and his successors,

and later the rule of Rome, over Greece and the Graecised East, put a

check on the intellectual forces there, against which there was no

counteractive in existence. There remained no other free communities

whose culture could fecundate that of the Greek and other cities held in

tutelage.

The city of Rhodes, which recovered its independence at the death

of Alexander, and maintained its self-government down till the

Roman period, was, in point of fact, latterly distinguished for its

art (Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 334-38), thus

illustrating afresh the value of free life as an art stimulus; but

its pre-eminently commercial activity, as in the case of Corinth,

and as later in the case of Venice, kept it relatively

undistinguished in literature. Rich merchants commissioned pictures

and statues, but not philosophies or books. Holm (Eng. trans. iv,

492) calls Rhodes a _seat_ of philosophy, etc., naming Theophrastus

and Eudemus. But they both studied and settled at Athens.

From the whole history there emerges the demonstration of what might

reasonably be put _a priori_--that for a whole community, once

self-governing, to acquiesce in an all-embracing foreign despotism meant

the settling of lethargy on half of its mental life.[361] What the

thinkers left in Greece _could_ do was to lend philosophic ideas and

method to the jurists at work on the problem of adapting Roman law to

the needs of a world-empire, and this was done to good purpose; but it

was the last genuine task that the circumstances permitted of. To

discuss vitally the problems of politics would have meant challenging

the despotism. There remained, it is true, philosophy and the arts; and

these were still cultivated; but they finally subsisted at the level of

the spirit of a community which felt itself degenerate from its past,

and so grew soon hopelessly imitative. No important work, broadly

speaking, can ever be done save by men who, like the most gifted Greeks

of the palmy days (innovating in drama and improving on the science of

the foreigner), feel themselves capable of equalling or transcending the

past;[362] and that feeling seems to have become impossible alike for

the students and the sculptors of Greece soon after the Macedonian

conquest, or at least after the Roman. Plato and Pheidias, Aristotle and

Praxiteles, AEschylus and Epicurus, figured as heights of irrecoverable

achievement; and the pupillary generations brooded dreamily over Plato

or drew serenity from Epicurus as their bent lay, and produced statues

of alien rulers, or of the deities of alien temples, where their

ancestors had portrayed heroes for the cities and Gods for the shrines

of Greece. Beneath the decadence of spirit there doubtless lay, not

physiological decay, as is sometimes loosely assumed, but a certain

arrest of psychological development--an arrest which, as above

suggested, may be held to have set in when the life and culture of the

"family women" in the Greek cities began decisively to conform to the

Asiatic standard, the men cultivating the mind, while the women were

concerned only with the passive life of the body. In this one matter of

the equal treatment of the sexes Sparta transcended the practice of

Athens, her narrow intellectual life being at least the same for both;

and to this element of equilibrium was probably due her long maintenance

of vigour at the level of her ideal.

[As, however, the Spartan women, whatever their training, could not

finally live the martial life of the men, the results of their

chiefly animal training were not exemplary. See the question

vivaciously discussed by De Pauw, _Recherches philosophiques sur

les Grecs_, 1787, ptie. iv, sect. x, Sec. 1--a work which contains

many acute observations, as well as a good many absurdities. The

Spartan women, it appears, were in a special degree carried away by

the Bacchic frenzy. Aelian, _Var. Hist._ iii, 42. Cp. Aristotle,

_Politics_, ii, 9 (and other testimonies cited by Hermann, _Manual

of the Political Antiquities of Greece_, Sec. 27, 12), as to their

general licence.]

The arrested psychological development, it need hardly be added, would

tend to mean not merely unoriginal thinking among those who did think,

but finally a shrinkage of the small number of those who cared greatly

for thinking. Even in the independent period, the mental life of Greece

drew perforce from a relatively small class--chiefly the leisured middle

class and the exceptional artificers or slaves who, in a democratic

community, could win culture by proving their fitness for it. Under the

Roman rule the endowed scholars (sophists) and artists alike would tend

to minister to Roman taste, and as _that_ deteriorated its ministers

would. Rome, it is easy to see, went the downward intellectual way in

the imperial age with fatal certainty; and her subject States

necessarily did likewise at their relative distance. Finally, when

Christianity became the religion of the Empire, all the sciences and all

the fine arts save architecture and metal-work were rapidly stupefied,

the Emperor vetoing free discussion in the fifth century, and the Church

laying the dead hand of convention on all such art as it tolerated, even

as the priesthood of Egypt had done in their day. It is positively

startling to trace the decline of the fine arts after the second

century. On the arch of Constantine, at Rome, all the best sculpture is

an appropriation from the older arch of Trajan: under the first

Christian emperor there are no artists capable of decently embellishing

his monument in the ancient metropolis. All the forms of higher faculty

seem to have declined together; and as the decay proceeded the official

hostility to all forms of free thought strengthened.

[See Finlay, _History of Greece_, as cited, i, 284-85, as to the

veto on discussion by Theodosius. In the next century Justinian

suppressed the philosophic schools at Athens. Finlay, in one

passage (i, 221), speaks of them as nearly extinct before

suppression; but elsewhere (pp. 277-81) he gives an entirely

contrary account. There are too many such contradictions in his

pages. Cp. Hertzberg, _Geschichte Griechenlands seit dem Absterben

des antiken Lebens_, 1876, i, 78-84.]

By the time of Constantine, even the coinage had come to look like that

of a semi-barbarian State; and thought, of course, had already stagnated

when Christianity conquered the "educated" classes. But these classes

themselves were speedily narrowed nearly to those of the priests and the

bureaucracy, save in so far as commerce maintained some semi-leisure.

Barbarian invasion and imperial taxation combined in many districts to

exterminate the former leisured and property-owning class. It is indeed

an exaggeration to say that "the labourer and the artisan alone could

find bread ... and, with the extinction of the wealthy and educated

classes, the local prejudices of the lower orders became the law of

society."[363] But the last clause is broadly true. In this society the

priest, with his purely pietistic tastes and knowledge, became the type

and source of culture.

A cultured modern Greek apologist of the Byzantine Empire[364] has

anxiously sought to combine with the thesis that Christianity is a

civilising force, the unavoidable admission that Byzantine civilisation

was intellectually stationary for a thousand years. It is right that

every possible plea for that ill-famed civilisation should be carefully

attended to, even when it takes the form of reminding us[365] that after

all the sixth century produced Procopius and Agathias; the seventh,

George of Pisidia; the eighth, John of Damascus; the ninth, Photius; and

so on--one man or two per century who contrived to be remembered without

being annalised as emperor. Of rather more importance is the item that

Christian Constantinople at one point, following Egyptian and Roman

precedent, improved on the practice of heathen Athens, in that the women

of the imperial court and of the upper classes seem to have received a

fair share of what culture there was.[366] It is further a matter of

bare justice to note that Byzantium had all along to maintain itself

against the assaults of Persia, of Islam, of barbarism, heathen and

Christian, and of Latin Christendom. But there must all the same be made

the grieving admission that "We certainly do not find in the Byzantine

authors the same depth and originality which mark the ancient writers

whom they copied";[367] and that this imitation "was unhappily the

essential weakness of Byzantine literature." That is to say, the

intelligence of the Christian Empire, like that of the Greece of the

post-Macedonian and the Roman domination, looked back to pagan Athens as

to an irrecoverable greatness. In that case, if we are to assume

comparative equality of culture between the sexes, there is no escape

from the conclusion that Christianity was in itself a force of fixation

or paralysis, the subsequent counteraction of which in Europe was a

result of many causes--of any cause but the creed and lore itself. The

creed, in fact, was a specific cause of isolation, and so of

intellectual impoverishment. As was well said by Gibbon, the mental

paralysis of the Byzantines was "the natural effect of their solitary

and insulated state."[368] The one civilisation from which Byzantium

might latterly have profited--the Saracen--was made tabu by creed, which

was further the efficient cause of the sunderance of Byzantine and

Italian life.

Had the external conditions, indeed, permitted of the maintenance of the

earlier manifold Empire of Constantine, the mere conditions of social

diversity which prepared the countless strifes of speculative sects in

Egypt and Syria might have led to intellectual progress, were it only by

arousing in the more rational minds that aversion to the madness of all

the wrangling sects which we detect in Procopius.[369] The disputes of

the Christians were indeed the most absurd that had ever been carried on

in the Greek tongue; and in comparing the competing insanities it is

hard to imagine how from among themselves they could have evoked any

form of rational thought. But as in Northern Europe in a later age, so

in the Byzantine Empire, the insensate strifes of fanatics, after

exhausting and decimating themselves, might have bred in a saner

minority a conviction of the futility of all wars of creed--this if only

external peace could have been secured. But the attacks, first of Persia

and later of Islam, both determined religious enemies, with whom, on

Christian principles, there could be no fruitful intercourse, shore away

all the outlying and diversified provinces, leaving to Byzantium

finally only its central and most homogeneous section, where the power

of the organised Church, backed by a monarchy bent on spiritual as on

political unity, could easily withstand the slight forces of

intellectual variation that remained. The very misfortunes of the

Empire, connected as they were with so many destructive earthquakes and

pestilences,[370] would, on the familiar principle of Buckle, deepen the

hold of superstition on the general mind. On the other hand, the final

Christianising of the Bulgarian and Slav populations on the north, while

safeguarding the Empire there, yielded it only the inferior and

retarding culture-contact of a new pietistic barbarism, more childish in

thought than itself. We can see the fatality of the case when we

contemplate the great effort of Leo the Isaurian in the eighth century

to put down image-worship by the arm of the executive. No such effort

could avail against the mindless superstition of the ignorant mass,

rich[371] and poor, on whom the clerical majority relied for their

existence. A Moslem conqueror, with outside force to fall back upon,

might have succeeded; but Leo was only shaking the bough on which he

sat.[372] It seems clear that the Iconoclastic emperors were politically

as well as intellectually progressive in comparison with the orthodox

party. The worshipped images which they sought to suppress were

artistically worthless, and they aimed at an elevation of the people.

"If the Iconoclastic reformers had had their way, perhaps the history of

the agricultural classes would have been widely different. The abolition

of the principle which the first Christian emperors had adopted, of

nailing men to the clod, was part of the programme which was carried out

by the Iconoclastic emperors and reversed by their successors."[373]

Thus did it come about that Christian Byzantium found the rigid

intellectual equilibrium in which it outlasted, at a lower level of

mental life, the Caliphate which sought its destruction, but only to

fall finally before the more vigorous barbarism of the Turks.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 319: Whistler, _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_, 1890, pp.

138, 139.]

[Footnote 320: Cp. Prof. Burrows, _The Discoveries in Crete_, 1907, ch.

xi; Bury, _History of Greece_, 1906, p. 65. "The supreme inspiration,"

says Bury, "came to their minstrels on Asiatic soil."]

[Footnote 321: E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii. 533-36; A.R.

Hall, _The Oldest Civilisation of Greece_, 1901, pp. 31, 32. Cp. the

author's _Short History of Freethought_, i, 122-27; and Von Ihering's

_Vorgeschichte der Indo-Europaeer_, Eng. trans. ("The Evolution of the

Aryan"), p. 73. Von Ihering's dictum is the more noteworthy because it

counters his primary assumption of race-characters.]

[Footnote 322: Cp. Galton. _Hereditary Genius_, ed. 1892, p. 329. The

contrast between the policy of Athens, before and after Solon, and that

of Megara, which boasted of never having given the citizenship to any

stranger save Hercules (Wachsmuth, Eng. tr. i, 248), goes far to explain

the inferiority of Megarean culture.]

[Footnote 323: "No other Greek city possessed so large an immediate

territory" [as distinct from subject territory, like Laconia] "or so

great a number of free and equal citizens" (Freeman, _History of Federal

Government_, ed. 1893, p. 22, _note_). And the number was greatly

swelled "after Athens had in 477 taken the lead in the Delian Maritime

League" (Maisch, _Greek Antiquities_, Sec. 28), so that in 451 it was felt

necessary again to limit citizenship to men born of Athenian parents.]

[Footnote 324: Cicero (_in Verrem_ ii, 59) testifies to the zeal of

Greek cities in buying paintings and statues in his day, and their

unwillingness to sell.]

[Footnote 325: The result is a marked poverty of power in such sculpture

as the Persians had. It is in every respect inferior to the Assyrian

which it copies. See Reber, _History of Ancient Art_, Eng. tr. 1883, pp.

121-28.]

[Footnote 326: See above, p. 28.]

[Footnote 327: See Maspero, _Manual of Egyptian Archaeology_, Eng. tr.

1895, pp. 215, 226, 235, 236, 240, etc.]

[Footnote 328: See above, p. 56.]

[Footnote 329: See Maspero, as cited, pp. 212, 214, 231, etc., as to the

religious influence. M. Maspero recognises several movements of

renaissance and reaction through the ages.]

[Footnote 330: Grote, iii, 21-22.]

[Footnote 331: Cp. Haigh, _The Tragic Drama of the Greeks_, 1896, ch. i;

Miss Harrison, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_, 2nd ed.

1908, ch. viii.]

[Footnote 332: Pt. ii, ch. 67.]

[Footnote 333: See Holm's suggestion, cited by Mahaffy, _Problems of

Greek History_, p. 92, _note_, as to the value of Herodotus to the

_traders_ of his day. Holm also suggests, however, that the political

service rendered by Herodotus to the Athenians was felt by them to be

important, as giving them new light on Egypt and the East (Eng. tr. ii,

290, 291). The reward paid to Herodotus would greatly stimulate further

historical research.]

[Footnote 334: Cp. Bury, _History of Greece_, pp. 7, 33-34.]

[Footnote 335: The Spartan women were indeed reputed the most beautiful,

doubtless a result of their healthier life. As for the works of "art"

claimed by Mueller (_The Dorians_, ii, 25-26) for Sparta, they are simply

objects of utility, and were by his own avowal (p. 24) the work of

non-Spartan Laconians, aliens, or slaves, "since no Spartan, before the

introduction of the Achaean constitution, was allowed to follow any

trade." No one disputes that other Dorian cities, notably Sikyon, did

much for art--another proof that "race" has nothing to do with the

matter.]

[Footnote 336: Bury, _History of Greece_, ed. 1906, p. 59.]

[Footnote 337: Cited in Strabo, bk. viii, ch. v, Sec. 6.]

[Footnote 338: Cp. Mueller, i, 80. Mueller notes that the Corinthians were

"nearly singular among the Doric States" in esteeming trade, their

experience of its productiveness "having taught them to set a higher

value upon it" (work cited, ii, 24).]

[Footnote 339: Cp. Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. Sec. 11;

K.O. Mueller, _The Dorians_, i, 105, 203.]

[Footnote 340: The native Spartans were positively forbidden to go

abroad without special leave, nor were strangers permitted to settle

there (Grote, ii, 306; Wachsmuth, i, 248).]

[Footnote 341: Grote, iii, 294, and _note_.]

[Footnote 342: Cp. Dr. Mahaffy's remark on post-Alexandrian Sparta,

"where five ignorant old men were appointed to watch the close adherence

of the State to the system of a fabulous legislator" (_Greek Life and

Thought from the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest_, 1887, p. 3).]

[Footnote 343: Macaulay, in his youthful review of Mitford

(_Miscellaneous Writings_, ed. 1868, p. 74), draws up a long indictment

against the Spartans in the matter of bad faith and meanness. It is only

fair to remember that some similar charges can be laid against others of

the Greek States.]

[Footnote 344: Grote, ii, 204. But cp. Aristotle (_Politics_, ii, 9) and

Plutarch (_Lycurgus_, c. 27), who agrees with the saying of Plato and

others (cp. Mueller, _Dorians_, Eng. tr. ii, 43, _note_) that in Sparta a

free man was most a freeman, and a slave most a slave. And see Schoemann,

_Alterthuemer_, i, 362. Hume (_On Populousness_) cites Xenophon,

Demosthenes, and Plautus as proving that slaves were exceptionally well

treated at Athens, and this is borne out by the Athenian comedy in

general (cp. Maisch, _Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. Sec. 32). But the fact

remains that at Athens slaves, male and female, were frequently tortured

to make them give evidence against their masters, who in turn were free

to kill them for doing so (Mahaffy, _Social Life in Greece_, pp.

240-41). And Aristotle takes for granted that they were substantially

inferior in character to freemen.]

[Footnote 345: Cp. Finlay, _History of Greece_, Tozer's ed. i, 15;

Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 4, 105.]

[Footnote 346: Fifth century B.C.]

[Footnote 347: Holm (Eng. tr. iv, 595-98) misses half the problem when

he argues that the Greek cities under the Romans were nearly as free and

self-governing as are to-day those of Switzerland, the United States, or

the German Empire. The last-named may perhaps approximate at some

points; but in the other cases the moral difference is inexpressible.

The Greek cities under the Romans were _provincialised_, and their

inhabitants deprived of the powers of _State_ government which they

formerly possessed. Their whole outlook on life was changed.]

[Footnote 348: Cp. Finlay, i, 76.]

[Footnote 349: In artistic handicraft, of course, such daily renewal of

creative intelligent effort is of great importance to mental health; and

the complete lack of it, as in the conventional sculpture of Egypt,

tells of utter intellectual stagnation. In the least artistic crafts,

however, it is not so essential a condition of sound work.]

[Footnote 350: Cp. Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 4, 10, 15,

131-38, 144.]

[Footnote 351: The change was not so immediately dependent on the

Alexandrian regime as Droysen implies (_Geschichte Alexanders des

Grossen_, 3te Aufl. p. 367): the New Comedy had been led up to by the

Middle Comedy, which already tended to withdraw from burning questions

(cp. K.O. Mueller, _Lit. of Ancient Greece_, Eng. tr. pp. 436-41); but

the movement was clearly hastened.]

[Footnote 352: Cp. Mackintosh, _On the Progress of Ethical Philosophy_,

4th ed. p. 29; Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 6th ed. i, 128.]

[Footnote 353: Mahaffy, _Problems of Greek History_, p. 85; _Survey of

Greek Civilisation_, pp. 87, 99, 117; _Social Life in Greece_, 3rd ed.

pp. 83, 137, 440. Cp. the remark of Thirlwall, ch. xii (1st ed. ii,

125), that the tyrants "were the natural patrons of the lyrical poets,

who cheered their banquets, extolled their success," etc.]

[Footnote 354: Holm on this head makes an admission (iii, 168) which

countervails the remark last above cited from him. Noting the prosperity

of art in Asiatic Greece, he writes: "Art as a rule flourishes--we do

not say, reaches its highest point, _for that is impossible without

freedom_--where wealth is to be found combined with good taste. And good

taste is a gift which even tyrants may possess, and semi-barbarians

acquire."]

[Footnote 355: Professor Spalding, _Italy and the Italian Islands_, i,

117, 118.]

[Footnote 356: K.O. Mueller, _History of Greek Literature_, 1847, pp.

208, 210.]

[Footnote 357: Schoemann, _Griechische Alterthuemer_, ii, 362.]

[Footnote 358: The questions of the previous expansion under Richelieu

and Mazarin, and of the decay in the latter part of Louis's reign, are

discussed, _apropos_ of the _laissez-faire_ argument of Buckle, in the

author's _Buckle and his Critics_, pp. 324-39.]

[Footnote 359: An interesting corroboration of the above general view

was presented in an article on the state of German art in the _Century

Magazine_ for July, 1898. The writer thus described the position of

German art under the Kaiser's patronage: "Moved by the best of

intentions, the Emperor is not very successful in his efforts to

encourage art. They smack too much of personal tastes and one-man power.

Menzel is perhaps a favourite, not because of his great Meissonnier-like

skill in illustrations, but because he is the draftsman and painter of

the period of Frederick the Great. The Emperor is really honouring his

own line rather than the artist when he covers him with rewards.... It

is not by making sketches for the Knackfusses to carry out that the

Emperor will raise art in Prussia from its present stagnation, but by

allowing the dangerous breath of liberty to blow through the art world.

The fine arts are under the drill-sergeant, and produce recruits who

have everything except art in them. It is too much to say that this is

the Emperor's fault; but it is true that so long as he insists upon

running things artistic, no one else can, or will--and the artists

themselves least of all."]

[Footnote 360: Cp. Mill, _Liberty_, ch. iii, People's ed. p. 38.]

[Footnote 361: Cp. J.S. Mill's analysis of "benevolent despotism" in ch.

iii of his _Representative Government_.]

[Footnote 362: Prof. Mahaffy (_Greek Life and Thought_, p. 112)

attributes the same sense of superiority to the men of the period of the

earlier successors of Alexander. This could well be, and such a feeling

would serve to inspire the great art works of the period in question.

Cp. Thirlwall (vii, 120) as to the sense of new growth set up by the

commercial developments of the Alexandrian world.]

[Footnote 363: Finlay. _History of Greece_, i. 186. Cp. p. 185.]

[Footnote 364: D. Bikelas. _Seven Essays on Christian Greece_,

translated by the Marquess of Bute, 1890.]

[Footnote 365: Work cited, p. 103.]

[Footnote 366: Work cited, pp. 97-98; Finlay, _History of Greece_, iv,

351-52. That this was no Christian innovation becomes clear when we

compare the status of women in Egypt and imperial Rome. Cp. Mahaffy,

_Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 173-74. And see his _Greek World under

Roman Sway_, p. 328, as to pre-Christian developments.]

[Footnote 367: Bikelas, p. 104.]

[Footnote 368: Ch. 53, Bohn ed. vi, 233. Cp. Finlay, ii, 4, 217, as to

the internal forces of routine.]

[Footnote 369: _De bello Gothico_, i, 3. Cp. Gibbon, ch. 47, note, Bohn

ed. v, 243; and Prof. Bury's App. to his ed. of Gibbon, iv, 516.]

[Footnote 370: Finlay, _History of Greece_, i, 224-25; Gibbon, ch. 43,

end.]

[Footnote 371: "The degrading feature of the end of the seventh century

... was the ignorant credulity of the richer classes" (Bury, _History of

the Later Empire_, ii, 387). Cp. Gibbon, ch. 54, Bohn ed. vi, 235.]

[Footnote 372: Cp. Bury, as cited, ii, 521.]

[Footnote 373: Bury, App. 12 to ed. of Gibbon, v, 531.]

Chapter II

THE SARACENS

While Byzantine civilisation thus stagnated, the Saracen civilisation

for a time actually gained by contact with it, inasmuch as Byzantium

possessed, if it could not employ, the treasures of old Hellenic science

and philosophy. The fact that such a fructification of an alien

civilisation could take place while the transmitting community showed no

similar gain, is tolerably decisive as to _(a)_ the constrictive force

of religious systems under certain conditions, and _(b)_ the nullity of

the theory of race genius. Yet these very circumstances have been made

the ground of a preposterous impeachment of the "Semitic" character in

general, and of the Arab in particular.

Concerning no "race" save the Celtic has there been more unprofitable

theorising than over the Semitic. One continental specialist after

another[374] has explained Semitic "faculty" in terms of Semitic

experience, always to the effect that a nation has a genius for becoming

what it becomes, but only when it has become so, since what it does not

do it has, by implication, no faculty for doing.[375] The learned

Spiegel, for instance, in his work on the antiquities of Iran,

inexpensively accounts for the Jewish opposition to sculpture as a

matter of race taste,[376] without even asking how a practice to which

the race was averse had to be forbidden under heavy penalties, or why

the same course was held in Aryan Persia. Connecting sculpture with

architecture, he pronounces the Semites averse to that also; and as

regards the undeniable building tendencies of the Babylonians, he argues

that we know not "how far entirely alien models were imitated by the

Semites."[377] Only for music does he admit them to have any independent

inclination; and their lack of epos and drama as such is explained, not

by the virtual inclusion of their epopees and early dramatic writings in

their Sacred Books, and the later tabu on secular literature, but by

primordial lack of faculty for epos and drama. The vast development of

imaginative fiction in the _Arabian Nights_ is credited bodily to the

"Indo-Germanic" account, because it has Hindu affinities, and took place

in Persia; and, of course, the Semites are denied a mythology, as by M.

Renan, no question being raised as to what is redacted myth in the

Sacred Books. For the rest, "the Semite" is not fitted to shine in

science, being in all his branches "almost totally devoid of

intellectual curiosity," so that what philosophy and science he has are

not "his own"; and he is equally ill-fitted for politics, wherein,

having no political idea save that of the family, he oscillates between

"unlimited despotism and complete anarchy."[378] Apart from music, his

one special faculty is for religion.

Contemporary anti-Semitism may fairly be surmised to underlie in part

such performances in pseudo-sociology, which, taken by themselves, set

up a depressing suspicion that numbers of deeply learned specialists

contrive to spend a lifetime over studies in departments of the history

of civilisation without learning wherein the process of civilisation

consists. On Spiegel's method--which is that of Mommsen in dealing with

the early culture-history of Rome--the Germanic nations must be adjudged

to be naturally devoid of faculty for art, architecture, drama,

philosophy, science, law, and order, since they had none of those things

till they got them in the Middle Ages through the reviving civilisation

of the Mediterranean and France. And as the Greeks certainly received

their first impulse to philosophy and science through contact with the

survivals of the old Semitic civilisations in Ionia, they in turn must

be pronounced to have "neither a philosophy nor a science of their own";

while the Spartans were no less clearly devoid of all faculty for the

epic and the drama. It is the method of Moliere's doctors, with their

_virtus dormitivus_ of opium, applied to sociology.

The method, nevertheless, is steadily popular, and is no less freely

applied to the phenomena of Arab retrogression than to those of

imperfect development in the Semitic life of antiquity, with some

edifying results as regards consistency. Says a French medical writer:--

"There is no such thing as an original Arab medical science. Arab

medical science was a slavish imitation from the Greek. And the

same remark is true of all the sciences. The Arabs have never been

inventors. They are enthusiasts, possessed with a passion for

anything new, which renders their enthusiasm itself evanescent. And

in consequence of this incapacity for perseverance, they soon

forgot the lessons in medical science which they had once acquired

from the Greeks, and have fallen back into a state of the most

absolute ignorance."[379]

The method by which Arab defects are here demonstrated from the arrest

of Arab civilisation is a simple extension of that by which Spiegel

demonstrates the original deficiencies of the ancient Semites, and

Mommsen the incapacity of the Latins to do what they did not do. A

certain race or nation, having at one time attained a considerable

degree of civilisation, and afterwards lost it, is held to have thus

shown a collective incapacity for remembering what "it" or "they" had

learned. The "they" here is the correlative of M. Taine's "we"--a

pseud-entity, entirely self-determining and strictly homogeneous. The

racial misfortune is set down to a fault pervading the whole national

character or intellect, and peculiar to it in comparison with other

national characters. Conditions count for nothing; totality of inherited

character, acting _in vacuo_, is at once the summary and the judgment.

Anyone who has followed the present argument with any assent thus far

will at once grant the futility of such doctrine. "The Arabs" had

neither more nor less collective faculty of appreciation and oblivion

than any other equally homogeneous people at the same culture-stage. It

is quite true that they had not an "original medical science." But

neither have any other historical "they" ever had such. The Greeks

certainly had not. The beginnings of medical knowledge for all mankind

lay of necessity in the primeval lore of the savage; and the nations

which carried it furthest in antiquity were just those who learned what

others had to give, and improved upon it. The Greeks must have learned

from Asia, from Egypt,[380] from Phoenicia; and the Romans learned

from the Greeks. The Arabs, coming late into the sphere of the higher

civilisation, and crossing their stock in the East with those of Persia,

in the West with the already much-mixed stocks of Spain, passed quite as

rapidly as the Greeks had done from the stage of primitive thought in

all things to one of comparative rationality as regards medicine and

the exact sciences; and this not in virtue of any special "enthusiasm"

for new ideas, but by the normal way of gradual collection of

observations and reflection upon them, in communities kept alert by

variety of intercourse, and sufficiently free on the side of the

intellectual life. Such was the state of the Saracens in Persia and

Spain in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries; and their social

evolution before and after is all a matter of natural sequence, not

proceeding upon any peculiarity of collective character, but

representing the normal reactions of character at a given culture-stage

in special political circumstances.

What is peculiar to the Saracen civilisation is its sudden origin

(taking Islam as a history by itself)[381] under conditions reached

elsewhere only as climax in a long evolution. The rise of Islam has the

twofold aspect of a barbarian campaign of plunder and a crusade of

fanaticism; and though the prospect and the getting of plunder were

needed to ripen the fanaticism to full bloom,[382] the latter was

ultimately a part of the cementing force that turned a horde into a

community. The great facilitating conditions for both were the feeble

centralised system maintained by the Christianised Empire, and the

disintegrating force of Christianity as a sectarian ferment. In Egypt,

for instance, the hatred between rival schools of Christian metaphysic

secured for the Arabs an unresisted entrance into Alexandria.[383] It

needed only a few generations of contact with higher culture in a richer

environment to put the Saracens, as regards art and science, very much

on a level with the stagnating Byzantines; and where the latter,

possessed of their scientific and philosophical classics, but imprisoned

by their religion, made no intellectual progress whatever, the former,

on the same stimulus, progressed to a remarkable degree. There has been

much dispute as to the exact measure of their achievements; but three

things are clear: (1) that they carried the mathematics of astronomy

beyond the point at which it had been left by the Greeks; (2) that they

laid the foundations of chemistry; and(3) that they intelligently

carried on surgery and medicine when the Byzantines, having early in the

Christian period destroyed the Asklepions, which were in some degree

the schools of the medicine of antiquity, had sunk to the level of using

prayers and incantations and relics as their regular means of cure.

Curiously enough, too, the Saracens had the merit, claimed for the

Byzantines, of letting their women share rather freely in their culture

of all kinds.[384] What is more, the later Saracens of Spain, whatever

the measure of their own scientific progress, were without question a

great seminal force in the civilisation of Western Christendom, which

drew from them its beginnings in mathematics, philosophy, chemistry,

astronomy, and medicine, and to some extent even in literature[385] and

architecture,[386] to say nothing of the effect on the useful arts of

the contact of the Crusaders with the Saracens of the East.

As to Arab medicine, see Withington, as cited, pp. 139, 170; and

Sprengel, _History of Medicine_, French tr. vol. ii (1815), pp.

262-64--a passage which contradicts Sprengel's previous

disparagements. Compare p. 343. The _histoire particuliere_ in this

chapter (v of Sect. 6) generally countervails the hostile

summaries. Sprengel proceeded on the prejudice (i, 215) that there

was no "rational science" anywhere before the Greeks; as if there

were not many irrational elements in the science not only of the

Greeks but of the moderns. A much better qualified historian of

Arab medicine, Dr. Lucien Leclerc, writes (_Histoire de la medecine

arabe_, 1876, i, 462) that in the eleventh century "the medical

productions [of the Arabs] continue to develop an independent

aspect, and have already a certain stamp of originality. Already

the Arabs feel themselves rich on their own footing. We see

appearing certain writings not less remarkable for the novelty of

the form than for the value of the substance." Again, Dr. Ernst von

Meyer, the historian of chemistry, sums up (_Hist. of Chemistry_,

M'Gowan's tr. 2nd ed. p. 28), that "the germs of chemical knowledge

attained to a marvellous growth among the Arabians." It may be

noted that there is record of a hospital in Bagdad at the beginning

of the ninth century, and that there were many there in the tenth

(Leclerc, i, 559).

A rational argument is brought against Semitic "faculty" by Dr.

Cunningham, it should be admitted, in the contention that the

Phoenicians figured poorly as copyists of Greek art (_Western

Civilisation_, p. 69, following Renan). But this argument entirely

ignores the element of time that is needed to develop any art in

any civilisation. The Phoenician civilisation was overthrown

before it had time to assimilate Greek art developments, which

themselves were the work of centuries even in a highly favourable

set of conditions. Noeldeke, though less unscientific than Spiegel,

partly follows him in insisting that Phoenician architecture

copied Egyptian, and that the later Semites copied the Greek, as if

the Greeks in turn had not had predecessors and guides. Starting

with the fixed fallacy that the Semites were "one-sided," he

reasons in a circle to the effect that their one-sidedness was

"highly prejudicial to the development of science," while compelled

to admit the importance of the work of the Babylonians in

astronomy. (_Sketches from Eastern History_, Eng. tr. pp. 15-18.)

It is now current doctrine that "for nearly eight centuries, under her

Mohammedan rulers, Spain set to all Europe a shining example of a

civilised and enlightened State. Her fertile provinces, rendered doubly

prolific by the industry and engineering skill of her conquerors, bore

fruit an hundredfold. Cities innumerable sprang up in the rich valleys

of the Guadalquivir and the Guadiana.... Art, literature, and science

prospered as they prospered nowhere else in Europe. Students flocked

from France and Germany and England to drink from the fountain of

learning which flowed only in the cities of the Moors. The surgeons and

doctors of Andalusia were in the van of science; women were encouraged

to devote themselves to serious study; and the lady doctor was not

unknown among the people of Cordova. Mathematics, astronomy and botany,

history[?], philosophy and jurisprudence[?] were to be mastered in

Spain, and Spain alone. The practical work of the field, the scientific

methods of irrigation, the arts of fortification and shipbuilding, the

highest and most elaborate products of the loom, the graver and the

hammer, the potter's wheel and the mason's trowel, were brought to

perfection by the Spanish Moors."

See Stanley Lane-Poole, _The Moors in Spain_, pref. It could be

wished that Mr. Lane-Poole had given English readers, as he so well

could, a study of Saracen civilisation, instead of a "Story of the

Nation" on the old lines. For corroboration of the passage see

Dozy, _Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne_, 1861, iii, 109, 110;

Prescott, _History of Ferdinand and Isabella_, Kirk's ed. 1889, pp.

186-88, 192, 195-99; Draper, _Intellectual Development of Europe_,

ed. 1875, ii, 30-53; Sismondi, _Historical View of the Literature

of the South of Europe_, Eng. tr. i, 50-54, 64-68, 76-84, 89. Cp.

Seignobos, _Histoire de la Civilisation au Moyen Age_, 3e ed. pp.

48-62; Gebhart, _Origines de la Renaissance en Italie_, 1879, pp.

185-89; Bosworth Smith, _Mohammed and Mohammedanism_, 2nd ed. pp.

217, 286; Noeldeke, as cited, p. 105; Bouterwek, as cited, i, 3;

Baden-Powell, _History of Natural Philosophy_, 1834, pp. 94-104;

U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, Hume's ed. 1900, vol. i, ch. 16.

All this being so, the course of deciding that the Arabs retrogressed

because "they" were impatient and discontinuous is on a level with the

thesis that nature has a horror of a vacuum. The Arab civilisation was

arrested and anchylosed by forces which in other civilisations operated

in exactly the same modes. The first great trouble was the element of

perpetual domestic strife, which was uncured by the monarchic system,

since every succession was liable to dispute. Under such conditions just

government could not flourish; and Moslem taxation always tended to be

suicidally unscrupulous.[387] Disputes of succession, indeed, wrought

hardly more strife among the Saracens than has taken place among Greeks

and Romans, and Christians of all nations, down to modern times; even

the ecclesiastical and feudal doctrine of legitimacy, developed by the

Latin and Greek Churches, having failed to prevent dynastic wars in

Christendom. But the Saracens, neighboured everywhere by Christians who

bore them a twofold hostility, had peculiar need of union, and ran

special risks from dissension; and in Spain their disunion was their

ruin. At the same time their civilisation was strangled intellectually

by a force which, though actually in operation in Christendom also, was

there sufficiently countered by a saving condition which the Saracens

finally lacked. The force of constriction was the cult of the Sacred

Book; the counteracting force in Christendom was diversity and friction

of governments and cultures--a condition which passed out of the Saracen

equation.

How fatally restrictive the cult of the completed Sacred Book can be is

obvious in the history of Byzantium. It was in terms of the claims of

the Christian creed that the Eastern Emperors proscribed pagan

philosophy and science, reducing the life of the whole Eastern world as

far as possible to one rigid and unreasoned code. That the mental life

of Italy and France was relatively progressive even in the Middle Ages

was substantially due--(1) to Saracen stimulus, and (2) to the friction

and ferment set up by the diversity of life in the Italian republics,

and the Italian and French and German universities. Byzantium was in

comparison a China or an Egypt. The saving elements of political

diversity, culture competition, and culture contact have in later Europe

completed the frustration of the tendency of church, creed, and Bible

to destroy alike science and philosophy. In Islam, on the other hand,

the arresting force finally triumphed over the progressive because of

the social and political conditions. (1) The political field, though

stormy, finally lacked diversity in terms of the universality of the

monarchic principle, which was imposed by the military basis and bound

up with the creed: uniformity of ideal was thus furthered. (2) There was

practically no fresh culture contact possible after the assimilation of

the remains of Greek science and the stimulus of Jewish philosophy; for

medieval Christendom had no culture to give; and the more thoroughly the

Papacy and the Christian monarchy in Spain were organised, the more

hostile they grew to the Moors. (3) The economic stimulus among the

latter tended to be restricted more and more to the religious class,

till that class was able to suppress all independent mental activity.

The last is the salient circumstance. In any society, the special

cultivation of serious literature and the arts and sciences depends on

one or more of three conditions--(_a_) the existence of a cultured class

living on unearned incomes, as in ancient Athens, middle Rome, and

modern England and France; (_b_) public expenditure on art and culture,

as in ancient Athens, Renaissance Italy and modern France, and in the

German university system _par excellence_; or (_c_) the personal concern

of princes and other patrons to encourage ability. In the nature of the

case it was mainly on this last and most precarious stimulus that

Saracen culture depended. Taking it at its zenith, under such rulers as

Haroun Alraschid and El-Mamoun at Bagdad, and Abderrahman III and

Hakam II of Cordova, we find its advance always more or less dependent

on the bounty of the caliph; and even if, like Abderrahman and his

son Hakam, he founded all manner of public and free schools, it depended

on the bias of his successors rather than on public opinion or municipal

custom whether the movement should continue. Abderrahman's

achievement, seen even through Christian eyes, was so manifold as to

constitute him one of the great rulers of all history; but the task of

making Moorish civilisation permanent was one which no series of such

statesmen could have compassed. The natural course of progress would

have been through stable monarchy to constitutionalism. But Christian

barbarism, with its perpetual assault, kept the Saracens forever at the

stage of active militarism, which is the negation of constitutionalism;

and their very refinement was a political danger, no less than their

dynastic strifes.

On the other hand, the continuous stress of militarism was in ordinary

course much more favourable to fanaticism than to free thought; and to

fanaticism the Koran, like the Bible, was and is a perpetual stimulant.

It was as a militant faith that Islam maintained itself; and in such a

civilisation the Sacred Book, which claimed to be the highest of all

lore, and was all the while so easy a one, giving to ignorance and

conceit the consciousness of supreme knowledge without any mental

discipline whatever, was sure of abundant devotees.[388] In an

uninstructed community--and of course the mass of the Saracen population

was uninstructed[389]--the cult of the Sacred Book needs no special

endowment; it can always be depended on to secure revenues for itself,

even as may the medicine-man in an African tribe. To this day the

propagation of the Koran is subscribed for in Turkey as the Bible

Society is subscribed to among ourselves, ignorance earning thus the

felicity of prescribing for human welfare in the mass, and at the same

time propitiating Omnipotence, at the lowest possible outlay of study

and reflection. Enthusiasms which can thus flourish in the twentieth

century were of course abundant in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh;[390]

and thus we find that when a caliph was suspected by the pietists of

caring too little for their lore, he ran the risk of being rebelled

against with a speed and zeal in the ratio of their conviction of divine

knowledge. Islam, unlike the State churches of Greece, Rome, and

England, has democratic rootage in the practice of setting ordinary

laymen to recite the prayers and preach the sermons in the mosques: it,

in fact, resembles Methodism more than any of the established Christian

churches in respect of its blending of clerisy and laity. Such a system,

when thoroughly fanaticised, has enormous powers of turbulence; and in

Moorish Spain we find them early exercised. Abderrahman I, whose

policy of tolerance towards Jews and Christians transcended all previous

Christian practice, and thus won for his realm a great stimulus in the

way of variety of culture-elements and of industry, had kept the

religious class in due control; but his well-meaning son Hisham was

priest-ridden to the last degree; and when his successor Hakam showed an

indisposition to patronise pietists to the same extent they raised

revolt after revolt (806-815), all put down by massacre.

Mr. Lane-Poole notes (p. 73) the interesting fact that the

theologers were largely of Spanish stock, the natives having in

general embraced Islam. Thus the fanaticism of the Berbers was

reinforced by that of the older population, which, as Buckle

showed, was made abnormally devout, not by inheritance of

character, but by the constant effect of terrorising environment,

in the form of earthquakes.

The elements of the situation remained fundamentally unchanged; and when

the Moorish military power began to feel more and more the pressure of

the strengthening Christian foe, it lay in the nature of the case that

the fanatical species should predominate. The rationalistic and

indifferent types would figure as the enemies of their race, very much

as such types would have done in Covenanting Scotland. At length, in the

eleventh century, the weakened Moorish princes had to call in the aid of

the fanatical Almoravides from Barbary; and these, with the full support

of the priesthood and the pious, established themselves at the head of

affairs, reducing everything as far as possible to the standards of the

eighth century.[391] And when the new barbarism in time grew corrupt, as

that of the Goths and Vandals had done in earlier ages, the "Unitarian"

Almohades in turn (twelfth century) overthrew the Almoravides in Spain

as they had already done in Africa, only to be themselves overthrown a

hundred years later by the Christians. Thereafter the curtailed Moorish

power, pent up in Southern Spain, reverted to the spirit of fanaticism

which national failure generates in religious minds; and from the

thirteenth century to the final overthrow at the end of the fifteenth

the intellectual life of Saracen Spain was but a long stagnation.

A civilisation driven back on superstition and fanaticism[392] thus gave

way to a revived barbarism, which itself, after a few centuries of

power, was arrested in its progress by the same order of forces, and has

ever since remained in the rear of European development. A remarkable

exception, indeed, is to be noted in the case of Ibn Khaldun

(1332-1406), who in the narrow world of Tunis attained to a grasp of the

science of history such as no Christian historian up to his time had

remotely approached.[393] Such an intellectual phenomenon sufficiently

disposes of the current formulas about the innate incapacities of "the

Semitic mind." But whether it were that he dared not say what he

thought of the fatal influence of the Sacred Book, or that on that side

he was really, as he is ostensibly, quite uncritical, Khaldun fails, in

his telling survey of Arab decadence, to set forth the decisive

condition of intellectual arrest; and his luminous impeachment of the

civilisation of his race failed to enlighten it.

In Persia the same forces wrought closely similar results. The Greek

stimulus, after working wonders in science and rational thought, failed

to sustain a society that could not politically evolve beyond despotism;

and economic evil and intellectual decay together undermined the empire

of the Caliphs,[394] till the Turks could overrun it as the Christians

did Moorish Spain; they themselves, however, adding no new culture

developments, because under them no new culture contacts were possible.

Of the Moslem civilisation as a whole, it must be said that on the

material side, in Spain and the East, it was such a success as had not

been attained under the Romans previously (though it was exceeded in

Egypt by the Lagids), and has not been reached in Christian Spain since

the fall of Boabdil. Economically, the Moorish regimen was sound and

stable in comparison with that of imperial Spain, which, like Rome,

merely set up a factitious civilisation on the basis of imported bullion

and provincial tribute, and decayed industrially while nominally growing

in empire and power. When the history of Spain from the seventeenth

century onward is compared with that of the Saracens up to their

overthrow, the nullity of explanations in terms of race qualities

becomes sufficiently plain--unless, indeed, it is argued that Moorish

blood is the secret of Spanish decadence. But that surmise too is folly.

Spanish decadence is a perfectly simple sociological sequence;[395] and

a Spanish renascence is not only conceivable, but likely, under

conditions of free science and free thought. Nor is it on the whole less

likely that the Arab stock will in time to come contribute afresh and

largely to civilisation. The one element which can finally distinguish

one race from another--acquired physiological adaptation to a given

climate--marks the Arab races as best fitted for the recovery of great

southern and eastern regions which, once enormously productive, have

since the fall of the Roman and Byzantine Empires been reduced to

sterility and poverty. The Greeks in their recovered fatherland, and the

French in Algeria, have not thus far been much more successful than the

Turks in developing material prosperity. If North Africa, Syria, and

Mesopotamia are again to be rich and fruitful lands, it must be in the

hands of an acclimatised race; and the Arab stocks are in this regard

among the most eligible.

But there is no reason why the Turks should not share in such a

renascence.[396] Their incivilisation is no more a matter of race

character than the decline of the Moors or the backwardness of the

Spaniards: it is the enforced result of the attitude of special enmity

taken up towards the Turkish intruders from the first by all their

Christian neighbours. By sheer force of outside pressure, co-operating

with the sinister sway of the Sacred Book, Turkey has been kept

fanatical, barbarous, uncultured, utterly militarist, and therefore

financially misgoverned. The moral inferiority of the long-oppressed

Christian peoples of the Levant, whose dishonesty was till lately

proverbial, was such as to strengthen the Moslem in the conceit of

superiority; while the need to maintain a relatively great military

force as against dangerous neighbours has been for him a check upon all

endowment of culture. To change all this, it needs that either force or

prudence should so modify the system of government as to give freer

course to industry and ideas; that the military system should be

restricted; and that European knowledge should be brought to bear on

education, till the fettering force of religion is frustrated, as in the

progressive countries of Christendom. For Turkey and Spain, for Moslems

and for Christians, the laws of progress and decadence are the same; and

if only the more fortunate peoples can learn to help instead of

hindering the backward, realising that every civilisation is

industrially and intellectually an aid to every other, the future course

of things may be blessedly different from that of the past. But the

closest students of the past will doubtless be as a rule slow to predict

such a transformation.[397]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 374: Cp. the author's criticism of Dr. Pulszky, in _Buckle and

his Critics_, p. 509.]

[Footnote 375: Thus Milman decides that the Mahommedan civilisation is

"the highest, it should seem, _attainable_ by the Asiatic _type of

mind_" (_Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii, 222). This in the century

which was to witness the renascence of Japan.]

[Footnote 376: _Eranische Alterthumskunde_, 1871, i, 387.]

[Footnote 377: _Id._ p. 388.]

[Footnote 378: _Eranische Alterthumskunde_, p. 389.]

[Footnote 379: Dr. Daremberg, writing on Cairo, "Impressions medicales,"

in the _Journal des Debats_, December 13, 1882, quoted by the K.

Bikelas, as cited, tr. p. 100. Cp. Renan's language as to "l'_esprit_

semitique, sans etendue, sans diversite, sans arts plastiques, sans

philosophie, sans mythologie, sans _vie politique_, sans progres"

(_Etudes d'histoire religieuse_, 1862, p. 67).]

[Footnote 380: This has been disputed; cp. Berdoe, _Origin of the

Healing Art_, 1893, p.72; Withington, _Medical History from the Earliest

Times_, 1894, pp. 21-22. But the Greeks could hardly have resorted to

the Egyptians so much as they admittedly did for mathematical and

astronomical teaching in the early period without learning something of

their medicine. Cp. Berdoe, bk. ii, ch. i, and Kenrick, _Ancient Egypt_,

1850, i, 345-48, as to Egyptian medicine. The passage in the _Odyssey_,

iv, 227-32, is decisive as to its repute in early Greece. Certainly it

was stationary, like everything Egyptian. Whether the Indian and

Egyptian medicine found "neue Bedeutung" in Greek hands, after the fresh

contacts made under Alexander, as is claimed by Droysen (_Geschichte

Alexanders des Grossen_, 3te Aufl. pp. 367-68), is another question.]

[Footnote 381: As to the inferred development of pre-Islamic

civilisation in Arabia, see Deutsch, _Literary Remains_, pp. 91, 123,

124, 313, 314; and Noeldeke, _Sketches from Eastern History_, Eng. tr.

pp. 18, 19.]

[Footnote 382: The first Islamites, apart from the inner circle, were

the least religious. See Renan, _Etudes d'histoire religieuse_, pp.

257-65; and Van Vloten, _Recherches sur la domination arabe_, Amsterdam,

1894, pp. 1, 2, 4, 7. Noeldeke (p. 15) speaks in the conventional way of

the "wonderful intellectual outburst" which made possible the early

triumphs of Islam. The case is really on all fours with that of the

French Revolution--"_la carriere ouverte aux talens_." Cp. Milman,

_Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii, 204, as to the readiness with which

the followers of Moseilama turned to Mahommedanism.]

[Footnote 383: See above, p. 97, _note_ 1.]

[Footnote 384: Prescott, _History of Ferdinand and Isabella_, Kirk's ed.

1889, pp. 187, 188.]

[Footnote 385: Cp. Bouterwek, _History of Spanish and Portuguese

Literature_, Eng. tr. 1823, i, 4, and Sismondi, _Literature of the South

of Europe_, Eng. tr. i, 61, 64, 68, 80-90. As to Arabic study of

linguistics, cp. Noeldeke, p. 17.]

[Footnote 386: Cp. Testa, _History of the War of Frederick I. upon the

Communes of Lombardy_, Eng. tr. p. 100.]

[Footnote 387: Van Vloten, _Recherches sur la domination arabe_,

Amsterdam, 1894, pp. 7-12.]

[Footnote 388: As to the religious zeal of the Berbers in the way of

Moslem dissent, on all fours with the phenomena of Protestantism, see

Lane-Poole, as cited, p. 53.]

[Footnote 389: Dozy (_Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne_, 1861, iii, 109)

decides that "in Andalusia nearly everyone could read and write"; but

even if this were true, which is very doubtful (seeing that on the same

page the historian tells how Hakam founded twenty-three free schools for

the children of the poor in Cordova), the reading would be almost solely

confined to the Koran.]

[Footnote 390: The mere preaching and miracle-working of the Marabouts

among the Berbers set up successively the movements of the Fatimites,

the Almoravides, and the Almohades (Lane-Poole, p. 54).]

[Footnote 391: Concerning the intolerance of this reaction, see Dozy,

iii, 248-54. Cp. iii, 16-21, as to the normal fanaticism of the Moorish

populace.]

[Footnote 392: See Dozy, iii, 286, as to the general lapse from

rationalism to faith.]

[Footnote 393: See the whole estimate of Prof. Flint, _History of the

Philosophy of History_, 1893, pp. 157-71.]

[Footnote 394: Cp. Dugat, _Histoire des philosophes et des theologiens

mussulmans_, 1878, pp. 337-48; Freeman, _History and Conquests of the

Saracens_, p. 124; and the author's _Short History of Freethought_, 2nd.

ed. i, 267-68, 277-79.]

[Footnote 395: See it discussed in _A Short History of Freethought_,

2nd. ed. i, ch. x, Sec. 3; ii, 56 _sq._ And see below, pt. v, ch. iv. Sec. 2.]

[Footnote 396: This was written before 1900.]

[Footnote 397: Deutsch, however (_Literary Remains_, p. 172), predicted

it with confidence.]

CHAPTER III

ROME

The culture conditions of Rome seem to cause no perplexity even to those

who find Greek civilisation a mystery. They are certainly obvious

enough. By reason of the primary natural direction of Roman life to

plunder and conquest, with a minimum of commerce and peaceful contacts,

Roman culture was as backward as that of Greece was forward. The early

Etruscan culture having been relegated to the status of archaeology,

however respectfully treated,[398] and the popular language having

become that of all classes, the republican period had to begin again at

the beginning. Latin literature practically commenced in the third

century B.C., when that of Greece was past its meridian; and the fact

that Lucius Andronicus and Naevius, the early playwrights, were men of

Greek culture, and that Ennius translated the Greek rationalist Evemeros

(Euhemeros), point to the Hellenic origins of Rome's intellectual life.

Her first art, on the other hand, was substantially derived from the

Etruscans, who also laid the simple beginnings of the Roman drama, later

built upon under Greek influence. But even with the Etruscan

stimulus--itself a case of arrested development--the art went no great

way before the conquest of Greece; and even under Greek stimulus the

literature was progressive for only two centuries, beginning to decline

as soon as the Empire was firmly established.

Of the relative poverty of early Roman art, the cause is seen even by

Mommsen to lie partly in the religious environment, religion being the

only incentive which at that culture stage could have operated (and this

only with economic fostering); but the nature of the religious

environment he implicitly sets down as usual to the character of the

race,[399] as contrasted with the character of the Greeks. Obviously it

is necessary to seek a reason for the religious conditions to begin

with; and this is to be found in the absence from early Rome of exactly

those natural and political conditions which made Greece so manifold in

its culture. We have seen how, where Greece was divided into a score of

physically "self-contained" states, no one of which could readily

overrun the others, Rome was placed on a natural career of conquest; and

this at a culture stage much lower than that of Ionic Greece of the same

period. Manifold and important culture contacts there must have been for

Hellenes before the Homeric poems were possible; but Rome at the

beginning of the republican period was in contact only with the other

Italic tribes, the Phoenicians, the Grecian cities, and the Etruscans;

and with these her relations were hostile. In early Ionia, again, Greek

poetry flourished as a species of luxury under a feudal system

constituted by a caste of rich nobles who had acquired wealth by

conquest of an old and rich civilisation. Roman militarism began in

agricultural poverty; and the absorption of the whole energies of the

group in warfare involved the relegation of the arts of song and poetry

to the care of the women and boys, as something beneath adult male

notice.[400] Roman religion in the same way was left as a species of

archaeology to a small group of priests and priestly aristocrats, charged

to observe the ancient usages. It would thus inevitably remain

primitive--that is, it would remain at a stage which the Greeks had

mostly passed at the Homeric period; and when wealth and leisure came,

Greek culture was there to over-shadow it. To say that the Latins

racially lacked the mythopoeic faculty is to fall back on the old plan

of explaining phenomena in terms of themselves. As a matter of fact, the

mere number of deities, of personified forces, in the Roman mythology is

very large,[401] only there is lacking the embroidery of concrete

fiction which gives vividness to the mythology of the Greeks. The Romans

relatively failed to develop the mythopoeic faculty because their

conditions caused them to energise more in other ways.[402]

There is, however, obvious reason to believe that among the Italian

peoples there was at one time a great deal more of myth than has

survived.[403] What is preserved is mainly fragments of the mythology of

one set of tribes, and that in only a slightly developed form. All the

other Italic peoples had been subdued by the Romans before any of them

had come into the general use of letters;[404] and instead of being put

in a position to develop their own myths and cults, or to co-ordinate

the former in the Greek fashion, they were absorbed in the Roman system,

which took their Gods to its pantheon, and at the same time imposed on

them those of Rome. Much of their mythic lore would thus perish, for the

literate Romans had not been concerned to cultivate even their own.

Early Roman life being divided between war and agriculture, and there

being no free literary class to concern itself with the embellishment of

the myths, there subsisted only the simple myths and rituals of

agriculture and folklore, the numerous list of personified functions

connected with all the phases of life, and the customary ceremonial of

augury and invocation in war. The augurs and pontifices were the public

men and statesmen, and they made religion a State function. What occult

lore there was they made a class monopoly--an effectual preventive in

itself of a Hellenic development of myth. Apart from the special sets or

colleges of priests there were specially appointed colleges of

religio-archaeological specialists--first, the six augurs and the five

_pontifices_, then the _duoviri sacris faciundis_, afterwards increased

to ten and to fifteen, who collected Greek oracles and saw to the

Sibylline books; later the twenty _fetiales_ or heralds, and so on.

"These colleges have been often, but erroneously, confounded with the

priesthoods. The priesthoods were charged with the worship of a specific

divinity; the skilled colleges, on the other hand, were charged with the

preservation of traditional rules regarding the more general religious

observances.... These close corporations supplying their own vacancies,

of course from the ranks of the burgesses, became in this way the

depositaries of skilled arts and sciences."[405]

Religion being thus for centuries so peculiarly an official matter of

settled tradition, no unauthorised myth-maker could get a hearing. Even

what was known would be kept as far as possible a corporation

secret,[406] as indeed were some of the mystery practices in Egypt and

Greece. But whereas in Greece the art of sculpture, once introduced, was

stimulated by and reacted on mythology in every temple in every town,

the rigid limitation of early Roman public life to the business of war

would on that side have closed the door on sculpture,[407] even if it

could otherwise have found entrance. The check laid on the efflorescence

of the religious instinct was a double check on the efflorescence of

art. The net result is described with some exaggeration by an eminent

mythologist, in a passage which reduces to something like unity of idea

the tissues of contradiction spun by Mommsen:--

For the Latins their Gods, although their name was legion, remained

mysterious beings without forms, feelings, or passions; and they

influenced human affairs without sharing or having any sympathy

with human hopes, fears, or joys. Neither had they, like the Greek

deities, any society among themselves. There was for them no

Olympos where they might gather and take counsel with the father of

Gods and men. They had no parentage, no marriage, no offspring.

They thus became a mere multitude of oppressive beings, living

beyond the circle of human interests, yet constantly interfering

with it; and their worship was thus as terrible a bondage as any

under which the world has yet suffered. Not being associated with

any definite bodily shapes, they could not, like the beautiful

creations of the Greek mind, promote the growth of the highest art

of the sculptor, the painter, and the poet.[408]

It is necessary here to make some corrections and one expansion. The

statement as to parentage, marriage, and offspring is clearly wrong. Cox

here follows Keightley, whose pre-scientific view is still common.

Keightley admits that the early Latin Gods and Goddesses occur in pairs,

as Saturn and Ops, Janus and Jana; and that they were called _Patres_

and _Matres_.[409] To assert after this that they were never thought of

as generating offspring, merely because the bulk of the old

folk-mythology is lost, is to ascribe uncritically to the Latins an

abstention from the most universal forms of primitive myth-making. The

proposition as to "terrible bondage," again, cannot stand historically;

for, to say nothing of the religions of Mexico and Palestine, and some

of those of India, the Roman life was certainly much less darkened by

creed than has been that of many Christian countries, for instance

Protestant Scotland and Catholic Spain.

[M. Boissier (_La religion romaine_, i, 2) decided that the Romans

were religiously ruled more by fear than hope, and that their

worship consisted chiefly of "timid supplications and rigorous

expiations." Mommsen, on the other hand (ch. xii, p. 191),

pronounces that "the Latin religion was grounded mainly on man's

enjoyment of earthly pleasures." Both statements would be equally

true of all ancient religions. Compare M. Boissier's later remarks,

pp. 21-25, 26, 28, wherein he contradicts himself as does Mommsen.]

As regards, again, the failure of the early Latin pantheon to stimulate

sculpture and poetry, it has to be noticed that sculpture and poetry

tended to make as well as to be made by mythology in Greece. The

argument against the Latin pantheon is in fact an argument in a circle.

If the Latin Gods were not "associated with any definite bodily shapes"

(parentage, marriage, and offspring they certainly _had_), it could only

be when and _because_ they were not yet sculptured. Greek Gods before

they were sculptured would be conceived just as variably. Were _they_

then thought of as formless? The proposition is strictly inconceivable.

Latin Gods must have been imagined very much as were and are those of

other barbarous races, who are notoriously thought of as having sex,

form, and passions. Greek mythology simply reached the art stage sooner.

The cults of Hellas did not start with a mythology full-blown, thereby

creating the arts; the mythology grew step by step with and in the arts,

in a continuous mutual reaction; many Greek myths being really tales

framed to explain the art-figures of other mythologies, Egyptian and

Asiatic. Thus the primitive bareness of the Latin mythology signifies

not a natural saplessness which could give no increase to art, but (1)

loss of lore and (2) a lack of the artistic and literary factors which

record and stimulate higher mythologic growth.

Thus limited in their native culture, the Roman upper class were

inevitably much affected by higher foreign cultures when they met these

under conditions of wealth and leisure. Long before that stage, indeed,

they consulted Greek oracles and collected responses; and they had

informally assimilated before the conquest a whole series of Greek Gods

without giving them public worship.[410] The very Goddess of the early

Latin League, the Aventine Diana, was imaged by a copy of Artemis of

Ephesus, the Goddess of the Ionian League.[411] As time went on the more

psychologically developed cults of the East were bound to attract the

Romans of all classes. What of religious emotion there was in the early

days must have played in large part around the worship which the State

left free to the citizens as individuals--the worship of the _Lares_ and

_Penates_, the cults of the hearth and the family; and in this

connection the primitive mythopoeic instinct must have evolved a great

deal of private mythology which never found its way into literature. But

as the very possession of _Lares_ and _Penates_, ancestral and domestic

spirits, was originally a class privilege, not shared by the landless

and the homeless, these had step by step to be made free of public

institutions of a similar species--the _Lares Praestites_ of the whole

city, festally worshipped on the first day of May, and other _Lares

Publici_, _Rurales_, _Compitales_, _Viales_, and so on--just as they

were helped to bread. Even these concessions, however, failed to make

the old system suffice for the transforming State; and individual

foreign worships with a specific attraction were one by one inevitably

introduced--that of AEsculapius in the year 291 B.C., in a panic about

pestilence; that of Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, in 205: both by

formal decision of the Senate. The manner of the latter importation is

instructive. Beginning the Hannibalic war in a spirit of religious

patriotism, the Senate decreed the destruction of the temples of the

alien Isis and Serapis.[412] But as the war went on, and the devotion

shown to the native Gods was seen to be unrewarded, the Senate

themselves, yielding to the general perturbation which showed itself in

constant resort to foreign rites by the women,[413] prescribed resort to

the Greek sacrificial rites of Apollo.[414] Later they called in the

cult of Cybele from Phrygia;[415] and other cults informally, but none

the less irresistibly, followed.

In all such steps two forces were at work--the readiness of the

plebeians to welcome a foreign religion in which the patricians had, as

it were, no vested rights; and the tendency of the more plastic

patricians themselves, especially the women, to turn to a worship with

emotional attractions. When the plebeians sought admission for their

class to the higher offices of State, they were told with unaffected

seriousness that their men had not the religious qualifications--they

lacked the hereditary gift of reading auspices, the lore of things

sacred.[416] So, when they did force entrance, their alleged blunders in

these matters were exclaimed against as going far to ruin the republic.

This was not a way to make the populace revere the national religion;

and as the population of foreign race steadily increased by conquest and

enslavement, alien cults found more and more hold. "It was always in the

popular quarters of the city that these movements began."[417]

The first great unofficial importation seems to have been the orgiastic

worship of Dionysos, who specially bore for the Romans his epithet of

Bacchus, and was identified with their probably aboriginal _Liber_. This

worship, carried on in secret assemblies, was held by the conservatives

to be a hotbed of vice and crime, and was, according to Livy, bloodily

punished (B.C. 186). So essentially absurd, however, is Livy's childish

narrative that it is impossible to take anything in it for certain save

the bare fact that the worship was put under restrictions, as tending to

promote secret conspiracies.[418] But from this time forward, roughly

speaking, Rome may be said to have entered into the mythological

heritage of Greece, even as she did into her positive treasure of art

work and of oriental gold. Every cult of the conquered Mediterranean

world found a footing in the capital, the mere craving for new

sensations among the upper class being sufficient to overcome their

political bias to the old system. It is clear that when Augustus found

scores of Roman temples in disrepair after the long storms of the civil

wars, it was not that "religion" was out of vogue, but that it was

superseded by what the Romans called "superstition"--something

extraneous, something over and above the public system of rites and

ceremonies. In point of fact, the people of Rome were in the mass no

longer of Roman stock, but a collection of many alien races, indifferent

to the indigenous cults. The emperor's restorations could but give a

subsidised continuity to the official services: what vitally flourished

were the cults which ministered to the new psychological needs of a

population more and more divorced from great public interests, and

increasingly alien in its heredity--the stimulant and hysterical

worships of Adonis, of Attis, of the Lover Goddess coupled with the

first, or the Mourning Mother Goddess with the second, of Isis and

Osiris and their child--rituals of alternate lamentation and rejoicing,

of initiations, austerities, confessions, penances, self-abasement, and

the promise of immortality. On the general soil of devotion thus formed,

there finally grew up side by side Mithraism and Christianity, the rival

religions of the decadence, of which the second triumphed in virtue of

having by far the larger number of adaptations to its environment.

But while Rome was thus at length fully possessed by the spirit of

religious imagination which had so fruitfully stirred the art of Greece,

there ensued no new birth of faculty. It was with the arts as with

literature: the stimulus from Greece was received by a society rapidly

on the way to that social state which in Greece had choked the springs

of progress. In the last generations of the Republic the literary

development was markedly rapid. In the century which saw Rome, after a

terrific struggle, victorious over Carthage and prepared for the grapple

with Macedon, the first practitioners of literature were playwrights, or

slaves, or clients of great men, or teachers like Ennius, who could find

in the now leisured and in part intelligent or at least inquisitive

upper class a sufficient encouragement to a literary career. That class

did not want recitals of the crude folklore of their fathers, so

completely eclipsed by that of Greece, which was further associated with

the literary form of drama, virtually new to the Romans.[419] Drama,

always the form of literature which can best support itself, is the form

most cultivated down till the period of popular abasement and civil

convulsion, though of a dozen dramatists we have only Plautus and

Terence left in anything like completeness; and while the tragedy of

Pacuvius and Attius was unquestionably an imitation of the Greek, it may

have had in its kind as much merit as the comedies that have been

preserved. Even more rapid than the development, however, is the social

gangrene that kills the popular taste; for when we reach the time of

Augustus there is no longer a literary drama, save perhaps for the small

audiences of the wooden theatres, and the private performances of

amateurs;[420] parades and pantomimes alone can attract the mindless

multitude; and the era of autocrats begins on well-laid foundations of

ignorance and artificial incivilisation.

As with the literature of the people, so with that of the lettered

class. In the last generation of freedom, we have in Lucretius and

Catullus two of the great poets of all antiquity, compared with whose

forceful inspiration Virgil and Horace already begin to seem sicklied

o'er with the pale cast of decline. Thenceforth the glory begins to die

away; and though the red blade of Juvenal is brandished with a hand of

power, and Lucan clangs forth a stern memorial note, and Petronius

sparkles with a sinister brilliancy, there is no mistaking the downward

course of things under Caesarism. It is true we find Juvenal complaining

that only the emperor does anything for literature:--

Et spes et ratio studiorum in Caesare tantum.

Solus enim tristes hac tempestate Camoenas

Respexit.[421]

It is the one word of praise he ever gives to the autocrat, be it

Domitian or another; and the commentators decide that only at the

beginning of Domitian's reign would it apply. In effect, the satire is a

description of the Roman upper class as grown indifferent to poetry, or

to any but their own. But it is not on the economic side that the

autocracy and the aristocracy of the Empire are to be specially

indicted. The economic difficulty was very much the same under the

Republic, when only by play-writing could literary men as such make a

living. As Juvenal goes on to say, Horace when he cried Evohe was well

fed, and if Virgil had lacked slave and lodging the serpents would have

been lacking to the fury's hair, and the tongueless trumpet have sounded

nothing great. Lucretius, Catullus, and Virgil were all inheritors of a

patrimony; and Horace needed first an official post and later a patron's

munificence to enable him to live as a poet. The mere sale of their

books could not possibly have supported any one of them, so low were

prices kept by the small demand.[422] What was true of the poets was

still truer of the historians. Thus in the Republic as in the Empire,

the men of letters, apart from the playwrights, tended to be drawn

solely from the small class with inherited incomes. The curse of the

Empire was that even when the sanest emperors, as the Antonines, sought

to endow studies,[423] they could not buy moral or intellectual energy.

The senate of poltroons who crouched before the Neros and Caligulas were

the upper-class version of the population which lived by bread and the

circus; and in that air neither great art nor great thought could

breathe. Roman sculpture is but enslaved Greek sculpture taken into pay;

Latin literature ceases to be Roman with Tacitus. The noble apparition

of Marcus Aurelius shines out of the darkening ages like some unearthly

incarnation, collecting in one life and in one book all the light and

healing left in the waning civilisations; beside the babble of Fronto

his speech is as that of one of the wise Gods of the ancient fantasy.

Henceforth we have but ancillary history, and, in imaginative

literature, be it of Apuleius or of Claudian, the portents of another

age. _Roma fuit._

The last stages of the transition from the pagan to the Middle Ages can

best be traced in the history of the northern province of Gaul.

Subjected to regular imperial administration within a generation of its

conquest by Caesar, Gaul for some centuries actually gained in

civilisation, the imperial regimen being relatively more favourable to

nearly every species of material progress than that of the old

chiefs.[424] The emperors even in the fourth century are found

maintaining there the professorships of rhetoric, language, law,

philosophy and medicine first founded by Marcus Antoninus;[425] and

until finance began to fail and the barbarians to invade, the material

conditions were not retrograde. But the general intellectual life was

merely imitative and retrospective; and the middle and upper classes,

for which the higher schools existed, were already decaying in Gaul as

elsewhere. The old trouble, besides, the official veto on all vital

political discussion--if indeed any appetite for such discussion

survived--drove literature either into mere erudition or into

triviality. On the other hand, the growing Church offered a field of

ostensibly free intellectual activity, and so was for a time highly

productive, in point of sheer quantity of writing; a circumstance

naturally placed by later inquirers to the credit of its creed. The

phenomenon was of course simply one of the passage of energy by the line

of least resistance. Within the Church, to which they turned as did

thoughtful Greeks to philosophy after the rise of Alexander's Empire,

men of mental tastes and moderate culture found both shelter and

support; and the first Gaulish monasteries, unlike those of Egypt and

the East, were, as M. Guizot has noted, places for conference rather

than for solitary life.[426] There, for men who believed the creed,

which was as credible as the older doctrines, there was a constant

exercise for the mind on interests that were relatively real, albeit

profoundly divided from the interests of the community. Thus, at a time

when the community needed all its mental energy to meet its political

need, that mental energy was spent in the discussion of insoluble and

insane problems, of predestination and freewill, of faith and works, of

fasts, celibacy, the Trinity, immortality, and the worship of saints.

Men such as Ambrose and Jerome in Italy, Paulinus, Cassian, Hilary, and

Salvian in Gaul, Chrysostom in the East, and Augustine in the South,

represent as it were the last vibrations of the civilised intelligence;

their energy, vainly spent on what they felt to be great issues, hints

of the amount of force that was still running to waste throughout the

Empire.

Soon, however, and even before the barbarian tide had overflowed the

intellectual world, the fatal principle at the core of the new creed

began to paralyse even the life that centred around that. In a world of

political tyranny, an established church claiming to stand for the whole

of supernatural truth must needs resort to tyranny as soon as it could

wield the weapons. The civil strifes which broke out alike in the

Eastern and the Western Empire in the third and fourth centuries, and

the multitude of sects which rapidly honeycombed the Church, wore so

many more forces of social disintegration; and churchmen, reasoning that

difference of dogma was the ground of civil warfare as well as of war in

the Church, must needs take the course that had before been taken in

politics.

After the original Arian battle had raged itself out in Egypt, Gregory

of Nazianzun at Constantinople, Ambrose at Milan, and Martin at

Tours,[427] fought it over again. One point secured, others were settled

in turn; and as soon as the influence of Augustine set up a prevailing

system of thought, theology was as much a matter of rule and precedent

as government. As we read Augustine's _City of God_, with its strenuous

demonstration that the calamities which men ascribe to the new religion

are the fruit of their own misdeeds, we realise to the full the

dissolution of antiquity. All that is valid in his polemic is the

exposure of the absurdity of the old faiths, long before detected by the

reason of the few, but maintained by believers and unbelievers alike for

reasons of State. The due Nemesis came in the rise of a faith which

first flourished on and promoted an utter disregard of State concerns,

then helped directly to rob the State of the mental energy it most

needed, and finally wrought for the paralysis of what mental energy

itself had attracted. Of constructive truth, of the thought whereby a

State could live, the polemist had much less than was once possessed by

the men who framed or credited the fables he derided. He could destroy,

but could not build up. And so it was with the Church, as regarded the

commonweal. "Of all the various systems of government that have been

attempted on this earth, theocracy, or more properly hierocracy, is

undoubtedly one of the very worst."[428]

But one thing the Church could construct and conserve--the fabric of her

own wealth and power. Hence it came about that the Church, in itself a

State within the State, was one of the three or four concrete survivals

of antiquity round which modern civilisation nucleated. Of the four, the

Church, often treated as the most valuable, was really the least so,

inasmuch as it wrought always more for the hindrance of progress and the

sundering of communities than for advance and unification. The truly

civilising forces were the other three: the first being the body of

Roman law, the product of Roman experience and Greek thought in

combination; and the second, the literature of antiquity, in large part

lost till the time we call the New Birth, when its recovery impregnated

and inspired, though it perhaps also overburdened and lamed, the

unformed intelligence of modern Europe. The third was the heritage of

the arts of life and of beauty, preserved in part by the populations of

the western towns which survived and propagated their species through

the ages of dominant barbarism; in part by the cohering society of

Byzantium. From these ancient germs placed in new soil is modern

civilisation derived.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 398: See E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 703; cp.

A. Schwegler, _Roemische Geschichte_, i, 274-79, as to the survivals. The

reversion of the remaining Etruscan aristocracy in Rome to the language

of the common people, under stress of strife with Etruria, is a

phenomenon on all fours with the abandonment of French by the

upper-class English in the fourteenth century, as a result of hostility

with France.]

[Footnote 399: Even Eduard Meyer decides in this fashion (_Geschichte

des Alterthums_, ii, 530) that to Italy "was denied the capacity to

shape a culture for itself, to energise independently and creatively in

the sphere of art, poetry, religion, and science"--this after expressly

noting (ii, 155) how Greece itself developed only under the stimulus of

alien culture. Compare Sec.Sec. 339, 340 (ii, 533-36).]

[Footnote 400: Mommsen, _History of Rome_, Eng. tr. 1894, i, 285-300

(bk. i, ch. xv).]

[Footnote 401: "No people has ever possessed a vaster pantheon,"

observes M. Boissier, while noting the slightness of the

characterisation (_La religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins_, 4e

edition, i, 8). The lack of characterisation would seem to have

encouraged multiplication.]

[Footnote 402: The fact that the Etruscans, like the other Italian

peoples, remained at the stage of unintellectual formalism (Meyer,

_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 528-29; Schwegler, _Roemische

Geschichte_, i, 273), suffices to show that not in race genius but in

stage and conditions of culture lies the explanation. All early religion

in official hands is formalist--witness the Pentateuch. The preoccupied

Italians left their cults, as did the Phoenicians, to archaeological

officials, while the leisured Greeks carried them into poetry and art

under conditions which fostered these activities.]

[Footnote 403: The point is discussed in the author's _Christianity and

Mythology_, 2nd ed. pp. 74-90; _Pagan Christs_, 2nd ed. pp. 45-46.]

[Footnote 404: Whether or not we accept Mommsen's view (bk. i, c. xiv)

that the use of the alphabet in Italy dates from about 1000 B.C. On this

cp. Schwegler, i, 36.]

[Footnote 405: Mommsen, _History of Rome_, bk. i, ch. xii, Eng. tr. ed.

1868, i. 189. Cp. Boissier, as cited, i, 354, as to the respective

functions of priests and pontiffs.]

[Footnote 406: It is only through fragmentary vestiges (Servius on

Virgil, _Georg._ i, 21; cp. Varro in Augustine, _De civitate Dei_, vi,

7-10) that we know the contents of the book of _Indigitamenta_ kept by

the pontifices. It seems to have been a list, not of the _Dii Indigetes_

commonly so-called, but of all the multitudinous powers presiding over

the various operations of life. See Schwegler, _Roemische Geschichte_, i,

32; Teuffel, _Hist. of Roman Lit._ ed. Schwabe, Eng. trans. 1900, i,

104; Boissier, _La religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins_, i, 4, and

_note_. "I have no doubt," writes Mr. Ward Fowler (_The Religious

Experience of the Roman People_, 1911, p. 168), "that Wissowa is right

in explaining _Indigitamenta_ as _Gebetsformeln_, formulae of invocation;

in which the most important matter, we may add, would be the name of the

deity. See his _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 177 foll." Corssen put this

view before Wissowa.]

[Footnote 407: According to Varro (cited by Augustine, _De civ. Dei_,

iv, 31), the early Romans for 170 years worshipped the Gods without

images.]

[Footnote 408: Rev. Sir G.W. Cox, _Mythology of the Aryan Nations_, ed.

1882, p. 169.]

[Footnote 409: Keightley, _Mythol. of Anc. Greece and Italy_, 1838, pp.

506-7.]

[Footnote 410: Meyer, ii, 531.]

[Footnote 411: Mommsen, ch. 12.]

[Footnote 412: Valerius Maximus, i, 3.]

[Footnote 413: Livy, xxv, 1.]

[Footnote 414: _Id._ xxv, 12.]

[Footnote 415: _Id._ xxix, 10, 14.]

[Footnote 416: Cp. Boissier, as cited, i, 39.]

[Footnote 417: Boissier, i, 346. Cp. Gibbon, ch. 2, Bohn ed. i, 40-41,

and Wenck's note.]

[Footnote 418: Livy, xxxix, 18. The farrago of charges of crime we have

no more reason to credit than we have in regard to the similar charges

made later against the Christians.]

[Footnote 419: Cp. Carl Peter, _Geschichte Roms_, 1881, i, 550.]

[Footnote 420: Cp. Merivale, _History_, small ed. iv, 67-70, and Gibbon,

ch. 31 (Bohn ed. iii, 420).]

[Footnote 421: Sat, vii, 1.]

[Footnote 422: Martial, i, 67, 118; xiii, 3. But cp. Becker, _Gallus_.

Sc. iii, Excur. 3.]

[Footnote 423: Vespasian began the endowment of professorships of

rhetoric (Suetonius, _Vespasian_, 18). As to the Antonines, see Gibbon,

ch. ii, _note_, near end; and cp. Hatch, _Influence of Greek Ideas upon

the Christian Church_, 1900, pp. 38-39; and Boissier, _La Fin du

Paganisme_, i, 166. Vespasian's endowments, it should be noted, were

given only to the professors of rhetoric. The philosophers (presumably

the Stoics, but also the astrologers) he banished, as did Domitian. On

this cp. Merivale, _History_, vol. vii, ch. 60.]

[Footnote 424: Cp. Guizot, _Histoire de la civilisation en France_, 13e

ed. i, 48, 49.]

[Footnote 425: _Id._, pp. 113-15.]

[Footnote 426: _Id._, i, 121, 122.]

[Footnote 427: Guizot (as cited, i, 135) makes much of the fact that

Hilary, Ambrose, and Martin opposed the _capital_ punishment of

heretics. He ignores the circumstance that Martin led an attack on all

the pagan idols and temples of his neighbourhood, in which the peasants

who resisted were slain.]

[Footnote 428: U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, M. Hume's ed. 1900, i,

115.]

EPILOGUE

A GENERAL VIEW OF DECADENCE

We are now, perhaps, in a position to contemplate the wood without being

distracted by the trees, and without forgetting, on the other hand, that

it is an aggregate of trees individually conditioned by aggregation.

The record of Graeco-Roman, as of all other ancient civilisation, with

the partial exception of that of China, is one of a complete

decadence--in this case a twofold decadence: a passing from collective

energy and achievement to collective decrepitude and mental impotence,

from intellectual freedom and force to the dogmatic arrest of thought,

from artistic splendour to the very negation of the finest forms of art.

However we may dispute about the nature of progress, we all agree that

this was decadence. Not even the Christian Greek, the least freethinking

of educated moderns, supposes that the life of his race went upwards

from the time of Constantine. The Italian to this day aspires--by way of

Tripoli, among other things--to bear some comparison with the Roman,

whose "greatness" he envies. Decadence, then, is confessed. It concerns

us, if we would have a historical philosophy at all, to think it all in

terms of general causation.

At the outset, we shall do well to realise that in the long

transmutation there was no day, save those of sudden and dire disaster,

on which the human elements of the State organisms concerned were

collectively conscious of any great change in their way of life. And

days of dire disaster had occurred in the times to which we look back as

those of energetic expansion. Early Rome had been actually captured by

Etruscans, by Gauls; "she" had ostensibly come to the verge of overthrow

by Hannibal a whole era before she was sacked by the Goths; Athens had

been sacked by the Persians long before the Roman invasion. What was the

determining difference in the consciousness of the citizens at the two

epochs? Clearly that between the minds of men wont to "fend for

themselves" collectively and of men wont to be ruled and prescribed for

by a master--a difference, therefore, in power of resistance and of

recovery. And this difference had itself been wrought by long

mutations--from the day of Sulla to the day of Tiberius in Rome, from

the day of Alexander to that of Sulla in Greece. No one generation had

been born in full "freedom," to pass away in complete subordination to

an autocrat. The earlier generations, like the later, had been

habituated to slave-owning, superstition, and the thought of war. The

substantial and fatal change was in the degree of simple average manhood

among the free. National decadence, in a word, is loss of manhood--a

thing not easily lost.

A Conservative statesman of our day, wont to apply analytic criticism

chiefly for partisan purposes, has attempted a comparatively

disinterested analysis of the problem before us, in a short but not

inconsiderate survey of the decadence of the old world. At the outset he

rightly notes the inconsistency with which men still tend to hold by the

old idea of an inevitable ageing and ultimate decrepitude of States and

civilisations, while holding no less confidently to the modern notion,

practically unattained by the ancients, of an inevitable progress.

"Why," he asks, "_should_ civilisations thus wear out and great

communities decay? and what evidence is there that in fact they

do?"[429] It may or may not be by reason of political bias that the

questioner--who indeed avows that he is pursuing one of "those wandering

trains of thought where we allow ourselves the luxury of putting

wide-ranging questions, to which our ignorance forbids any confident

reply"--propounds no clear answer to either query, contenting himself

with suggesting that modern civilisation, in virtue of its strengthening

hold on physical science, stands a chance of escaping the doom that fell

on the old. But such a curtailed answer moves us afresh to seek a more

complete one.

Our questioner, contemplating the "fall" of Rome, argues that the cause

cannot have been even so serious an evil as slavery, which had been in

operation from the beginning. He overlooks the fact that it had greatly

increased in the period of far-reaching conquest,[430] and so misses an

element in the solution. Passing over this, he recognises one proximate

"cause," diminution of population; and he in effect seems to trace to

this source the secondary factor of fiscal collapse--the breaking down

of the tax-paying classes everywhere under the ever-increasing burden of

State exaction. The final fiscal process he oddly describes as "a crude

experiment in socialism." Putting the decay of population and the

increase of burdens together, he pronounces that "they absolutely

require themselves to be explained by causes more general and more

remote"; and his answer--confessedly a mere restatement of the

problem--is just the word "Decadence." The process is simply formulated,

once more, in terms of its name. The questioner does not even take the

further analytical step of asking how the Eastern Empire came to endure

a thousand years longer than the Western; and why the decadence did not

similarly operate there.

If anything has been made out in the foregoing survey, we have got

further than this; and indeed from any point of view the arrest of the

analysis is surprising. Supposing failure of population to be the

central phenomenon, we have obviously to ask: What were the political

differentia of the progressive and the ostensibly declining states of

population? How were the peoples ruled when they were strong, expansive,

and collectively equal to their burdens? Surely the answer is obvious.

Republican Greece and Republican Rome were self-governing communities,

or aggregates of such, supporting themselves by individualist production

of all kinds, breeding beyond and not under the apparent limit of

food-production. When Romanised Italy ceased to produce a sufficiency of

men, she had ceased to produce a sufficiency of things; and this latter

failure, entailing the other, can be shown to have been a direct result

of the exaction of all manner of subsistence from conquered territories.

So far, there is no mystery.

Our querist, however, affirms a diminution of population not only in

Italy but throughout the Empire. Here we must first question the

assertion. Pestilences, such as that of 166 A.C., doubtless visited most

parts of the Empire; but pestilences belong also to the pre-imperial

period, and need not here be specially considered. As to Greece, the

facts have been already given. The depopulation of that, after

Alexander, was primarily a matter of exodus to the richer conquered

lands, where a new Hellenistic civilisation arose under purely monarchic

rule, and therefore unaccompanied by the all-round, self-developing

mental energy which had marked the life of "free" Greece. In Byzantium,

of course, the mental stagnation, under Christian autocracy, was no less

complete. But there is no evidence whatever that after Constantine the

principle of population failed in the Eastern Empire, especially when

that was restricted by the amputation of the tributary territories.[431]

Did population then fail in Gaul and Spain and Africa? If so, when? As

to Gaul, there is evidence that after the conquest population and

productivity increased, though the latter had not previously been

low--witness the loot taken by Caesar at Toulouse. Gaul was certainly

taxed exorbitantly; but Julian, as we saw, prudently lessened the drain;

and Mommsen describes both Gaul and Spain as flourishing in their

Romanised period.[432] They continued, in fact, to be, with North

Africa, the main sources of the revenue of the Western Empire down to

its collapse. Materially, they in some respects went forward, notably in

the case of the region of old Carthage. The element wherein they were

decadent was precisely that of free manhood, everywhere eviscerated by

autocratic and bureaucratic rule. Therefore it was that, like

Britain--similarly productive of revenue in the imperial period--they

were unable to defend themselves against the final barbarian inroads.

Had Honorius carried out his scheme for a measure of Home Rule in

Gaul,[433] and followed it up by a similar scheme for Spain, Italy

indeed might all the sooner have lost her hold on them as milch kine,

but both provinces might conceivably have developed a new life centuries

before they historically did.

The Conservative statesman has in fact, and very naturally, excluded

from consideration the central political factor. Echoing the

Gibbon-Mommsen-Renan thesis as to the excellence of the Antonine

government of the Mediterranean world, he ignores as those writers did

the vital problem: Wherein lies the felicity of a world wholly at the

mercy of the chance of the election of a good emperor by a mercenary

soldiery? To fall back on phrases about the Empire "respecting local

feelings, encouraging local government," and being "accepted by the

conquered as the natural organisation of the world," is merely to burke

the real issue as to the political viability of communities satisfied

with such a system, content to rest the social pyramid forever on its

apex. To say that the conditions of the Empire under the Antonines were

"getting better" is merely to close the eyes to the frightful hazard of

imperial succession. A world absolutely dependent for its

betterment--nay, even for its safe continuance--on the chance of a good

succession of despots is a world doomed by the mere law of variation.

If we will but gauge moral and economic forces in human affairs as we

gauge physical forces in that toil of science of which the Conservative

statesman has learned to recognise the efficacy, we shall deliver

ourselves from the mystery-mongering which he is fain to substitute for

the old shibboleth of "the divine will." To trace causation in a known

civilisation is not to pretend either to understand all social sequences

in all ages or to predict the destinate future: it is but to recognise

the real reactions of human proclivities and procedures which habit and

prejudice have been wont to contemplate uncritically. The late Sir John

Seeley, who at times hardly advances on Kingsley as an interpreter of

history, grappled in his day with our problem; and he too specified the

Antonine age as a notably hopeful period, from which he dates the

decadence:--

"A century of unparalleled tranquillity and virtuous government is

followed immediately by a period of hopeless ruin and dissolution.

A century of rest is followed not by renewed vigour, but by

incurable exhaustion. Some principle of decay must have been at

work; but what principle? We answer: it was a period of sterility

or barrenness in human beings; the human harvest was bad. And among

the causes of this barrenness we find, in the more barbarous

nations, the enfeeblement produced by the too abrupt introduction

of civilisation and universally the absence of industrial habits,

and the disposition to listlessness which belongs to the military

character."[434]

One is tempted to apply the theory of human crops to the case of the

chair of history at Cambridge. Prof. Seeley's theory is an edifying

variant on that of Mr. Balfour. Where one thesis finds the key to all in

the emperor, the other sees failure of the human harvest the moment the

imperial succession goes wrong. And while the Professor offers the

semblance of a reason for the alleged failure in the human breed, it is

really too nugatory for discussion. If the "barbarous nations" alluded

to were Gaul and Spain, they had suffered the "abrupt introduction of

civilisation" more than two hundred years before. Egypt and Syria and

Greece and North Africa had older civilisations than the Roman. Germany

was not decadent. The decay of industrial life in Italy had begun long

before the Empire. As well might we say that a bad human crop there had

preceded the Etruscan conquest, the invasion by Hannibal, and the civil

wars. To cite, as does Prof. Seeley, the pestilence of the year 166 as a

beginning of depopulation, is to ignore the problem of three hundred

years of previous depopulation in Italy, and to set up a misconception

as to the rest of the Empire. According to Gibbon, the long pestilence

of the years 250-265 was the worst of all.[435]

More plausibly, Prof. Seeley goes on to argue that "what the plague had

been to the population, that the _fiscus_ was to industry. It broke the

bruised reed; it converted feebleness into utter and incurable debility.

Roman finance had no conception of the impolicy of laying taxation so as

to depress enterprise and trade. The _fiscus_ destroyed capital in the

Roman Empire. The desire of accumulation languished where the Government

lay in wait for all savings--_locupletissimus quisque in praedam

correptus_. All the intricate combinations by which man is connected to

man in a progressive society disappeared."[436] But this is a finally

excessive description of a process which had been in full swing in the

time of Cicero, and which subsisted for three hundred years after Marcus

Aurelius in the West. A generation after Marcus came the powerful

Severus, whose son Caracalla could find millions of money to build his

immense baths at Rome, still monstrous in their ruins; and seventy years

after Caracalla, Diocletian, wielding the Empire at its utmost

extension, could build still vaster baths for the imperial city at which

he had ceased to dwell. With a debased silver coinage,[437] the emperors

of that day seemed to feel no fatal lack of real revenue, and

maintained, at great cost, huge armies for the control and defence of

their enormous realm.

It is impossible to see why the age of the Antonines should be taken as

a turning point in the Empire's history rather than the age of

Diocletian. That great organiser seems to have partly provoked the

insurrection of the Bagaudae in Gaul by taxation; but the Bagaudae were

a _jacquerie_ oppressed by the nobles, as their fathers had been before

Caesar, and as their posterity was long afterwards; and their wrongs may

as well have been at the hands of their lords as at those of the

autocrat.[438] However that might be, Roman rule in Gaul survived the

revolt of the Bagaudae, yielding a great revenue to Constantine; and at

the time of the fall of Rome Gaul was much more productive than Italy.

All this is beside the case. To say that "the downfall of the Empire is

accounted for" by the _fiscus_[439] is to raise the question whether the

Empire, as such, could have been run by any other method. The Professor

himself pronounces that "Government in its helplessness was driven" to

fiscal oppression. Then fiscal oppression belonged to the nature of the

Empire. Once more we return to the true line of sequence and

explanation. Every step and stage in decadence belonged to the process

of conquest, of confiscation, of subjection of foreign races, who were

made to pay for the vast machinery that kept them subject till they were

unfit for self-defence.

[What is true of the Roman fisc was true till the other day of the

Turkish, another product of militarist imperialism, similarly

collateral with mental stagnation. Depopulation and arrest of

production in the East under Turkish rule are to be explained in

substantially the way in which we have explained them for ancient

Rome. And it is significant that the prospect of regeneration for

Turkey has begun after the amputation of many of the provinces over

which she maintained an alien rule. Her future visibly depends on

the continuance of the processes of self-maintenance and

development of the principle of self-government throughout the

subsisting State.]

There is a danger that, in insisting on the primarily moral causation of

the process of social disease and decay, we may on the one hand relapse

into a delusive sense of moral superiority, and on the other hand fail

to realise how the subjective moral divagation becomes politically

effectual in structural and economic change. It is the understood

process of causation that is alone truly instructive. But the

instruction is deepened in the ratio of our realisation of the decay.

Though it is clear that before Rome many a civilisation had gone to

violent wreck, there is in recorded history no more overwhelming memory

of long triumph and long downfall than that "from the far-distant

morning when a small clan of peasants and shepherds felled the forests

on the Palatine to raise altars to its tribal deities, down to the

tragic hour in which the sun of Graeco-Latin civilisation set over the

deserted fields, the abandoned cities, the homeless, ignorant, and

brutalised peoples of Latin Europe."[440] And this whole tremendous arc

of triumph and decline is to be understood as the historic expression of

the specially conditioned bias of conquest in one people.

The decline is the due sequence of the "rise": everything roots in the

wrong relation of communities throughout the Empire. The extension of

such a social disease as slavery is one of the symptoms, one of the

sequelae, of the central malady.[441] A totally progressive State

eliminates or minimises slavery; a declining one fails to do so. The

economic malady involved affects primarily the dominant or parasitic

State or central part, its condition of parasitism being more deadly

than its draining effect on the others. _Their_ malady lay in their

state of subjugation, which was an impoverishment of character and

political faculty; and thus it came about that the collapse of the

centre of organisation meant the fall of the entire civilisation of

Western Europe before the new barbarism.

Rome had so visibly ruined all that we are apt to forget how the process

of moral and political retrogression had begun in the Greek world long

before. There, however, the Roman conquest was but a consummation; and

the economic and political continuance of the Eastern Empire was

concurrent with a moral and intellectual contraction which was never

recovered from. In a word, varying conditions determined the differences

of continuance and evolution in the two spheres. But the causation is

none the less clear throughout.

It might be supposed that this reverberating lesson could have been read

in only one way--as a warning to the nations against taking the Roman

road of conquest and dominion. And yet it is doubtful whether modern

States have been at all guided by that lesson, as compared with the

extent to which they have been overruled by the sheer difficulty of

repeating the evolution. The problem has been faced by Lord Cromer, a

ripe ruler, in his very scholarly essay on _Ancient and Modern

Imperialism_. The experienced administrator is quite alive to the

analogy between the part played of old by Rome around the Mediterranean

and in Europe, and that played to-day by England in India and, in some

measure, in Egypt. Raised in some degree above the ordinary

hallucination of mere dominion, the confused pride of the average man in

his country's rule over large portions of the earth, the veteran

governor notes that, whereas there was a general acquiescence of the

subject peoples in the imperial rule of Rome, no _imperium_ to-day has

won any such cordial acceptance.[442] Neither France in Algeria and

Tunis nor Britain in India and Egypt is an assimilating and unifying

power. We may note the proximate explanation, which he does not at first

give--to wit, the sundering force of crystallised religious systems. As

he later puts it, following Sir Alfred Lyall, religions make nations,

where the Romans had to deal with tribes.[443] But that need not greatly

affect our view of the political problem, which would remain if the

religious factor were eliminated; and it is over the political problem

that Lord Cromer most significantly balances.

Falling back on the method of fatalism, he pronounces, like others

before him, "that Rome, equally with the modern expansive Powers, more

especially Great Britain and Russia, was impelled onwards by the

imperious and irresistible necessity of acquiring defensible frontiers;

that the public opinion of the world scoffed 2,000 years ago, as it does

now, at the alleged necessity; and that each onward move was attributed

to an insatiable lust for extended dominion."[444] As in all fatalistic

reasoning, we are here faced by radical self-contradiction. The "public

opinion of the world," which Lord Cromer allows to include a large part

of Roman opinion,[445] could not scoff at an "irresistible necessity":

it knew that it was no more irresistibly necessary for A to conquer B

than for B to conquer A; and in ascribing to Rome an "insatiable lust

for extended dominion" it merely credited Rome with an appetite known to

inhere in all States. Rome succeeded in her aim; others failed. Pisa,

overborne by Florence, had in her day overborne other communities. Lord

Cromer has begged the vital question, which is: Can States, or can they

not, live neighbourly? To say that Rome could not because of the

ambitions or menaces of others is idle: the menace was reciprocal.

For practical purposes, of course, the thesis is sometimes adequate all

round, as when France and Britain, face to face in North America and in

India, strove each to oust the other. But at times the plea becomes

visibly farcical, as in the recent case of Russia in the Far East, and

the earlier case of Britain with regard to Afghanistan. We can all

remember the temporary growth of the doctrine of "a scientific

frontier." First you want a river; then you need the territory beyond

the river; then you need the line of hills commanding that territory;

then the territory behind the hills becomes a _sine qua non_.[446] In

this case the doctrine has disappeared with the policy, and _that_

disappeared simply because it failed. The event has proved that the

doctrine was a chimera. And nobody to-day probably will maintain that

Russia lay under an imperious and irresistible necessity to go and be

defeated by the Japanese in Manchuria; or that she could not conceivably

have stopped short of that extremity.

The use sometimes made of the word "cupidity" is apt to obscure the

problem. There is cupidity of power and conquest as well as of

territory, revenue, plunder. Roman cupidity was of all kinds. But so was

that of "the" Greeks. Lord Cromer employs the old false

dichotomy--above discussed--that marks the Greeks as "individualistic"

and the Romans as somehow unitary.[447] As we have seen, the original

Roman City-State was just the same kind of thing as the Greek: it was

opportunity that made "the Romans" expand, whereas "the Greeks," down to

Alexander, remained segregated in their States. What was common and

fatal to both, what led Greece to dissolution and Rome to downfall, was

the primary impulse to combat, the inability to refrain from jealousy,

hate, and war. And for the moderns, seeing this, the problem is, Can

they refrain?

Either we are thus to learn from history, or all history is as a novel

without a purpose. And Lord Cromer, as a man of action, cannot in effect

take this attitude, though he recoils from any clear statement of the

lesson. On the one hand, he makes the most of the differentia between

ancient and modern Imperialism. English rulers in India, he admits,

originally aimed at home revenue, and did for a time practise sheer

plunder;[448] the British rule no longer does either: which is in effect

an admission that one "imperious and irresistible necessity" of the

Roman rule has been successfully resisted--shall we say, by modern

enlightenment? But he will not frankly take the further step and say

that for the ideal of dominion over backward races we should substitute

the ideal of their education and purposive evolution. Rather he makes

the most of the difficulties, enlarging in the familiar fashion on the

dividedness and differentiation of the Indian peoples and the relative

stationariness of Islam: two undeniable propositions, of which the first

is nothing to the purpose, since we are discussing the lines of

progressive policy; while the second merely incurs the rejoinder that

Christendom was long as stationary as Islam, and that Christian

Abyssinia is so still.

As was, indeed, to be expected, Lord Cromer will rather homologate the

whole Roman process, decadence and collapse and all, than pronounce it

what it was, a vast divagation in human progress. Ultimately he does not

even blench at the proposition that the whole ruin "had to" take

place[449] by way of preparing for the civilisation that was to follow,

even as he argues that "the" Romans "had to" undertake fresh wars where

they (on the urging, as he admits, of their wisest men) had sought to

evade further conquest by recognising "buffer States"[450]--as who

should say that whatever course a majority or a Government do take "had

to" be taken. The answer to such reasoning is the mention of the fact,

which he admits, that it was "a supreme principle of the Roman

Government to acknowledge no frontier Power with equal rights."[451] Can

it be still a question whether that principle is to be transcended?

On the final issue as to what the ruling nations "have to" do to-day as

regards the subject peoples, the disinterested student can hardly

hesitate, however the ex-administrator may feel bound to balance. "The

Englishman," Lord Cromer tells us, truly enough as regards the average

citizen, "would be puzzled to give any definite answer" to the question