separated from her harbours and become in fact an inland city like
Sparta herself. Down they came to the music of flutes, and Athens
consented to become the “ally” (euphemism for “humble servant”) of
Sparta. The moral of it all for imperial cities would seem to be: (1)
the precarious nature of sea-power unless backed very strongly by
purse-power; (2) the danger of having unwilling allies or dependents;
and (3) the impossibility of conducting war by means of public debate in
a democratic assembly. On two occasions near the end of the war and the
century the Athenians had tried experiments in constitutional
revolution. For, indeed, during the closing stages of the war even the
citizens of Athens could see, what was painfully obvious to the rest of
the world, that she was not well governed for the purposes of external
politics. Popular institutions exist for the sake of popular liberties.
There are better ways of maintaining order, if that is your prime
object, and much better ways of securing “efficiency.” Democracy may
“reign”; it cannot “govern”--not, at any rate, without the help of a
trained bureaucracy. Above all, in the conduct of a war a meeting of
citizens in the market-place is the clumsiest deliberative body that can
be conceived. We have seen how ignorant they were when they embarked on
the Sicilian expedition without knowing anything more than interested
parties chose to tell them of the resources of their allies and the
disposition of the other Sicilian Greeks. Besides ignorance, they had
shown hasty passion in condemning the whole male population of Mitylene
to death; they had been ferociously unjust in sentencing their admirals
to death for not stopping to pick up the shipwrecked survivors after the
victory of Arginusæ. They had made childish blunders in strategy, as
when they chose three hostile generals to conduct the Sicilian
expedition, and in statecraft when they refused peace and drove their
cleverest citizen, Alcibiades, over to the side of the enemy. But the
most effective argument of the oligarchic party was based on finance.
With the cessation of the tribute from the allies it became simply
impossible to maintain the host of state functionaries which democracy
developed and demanded. Further, democracy was, as we have seen,
identified with anti-Spartan policy; Sparta would make no terms with
democracy. And, lastly, when the brilliant Alcibiades had been banished
by the democracy, he professed to have the Persian satrap, the universal
paymaster, in his pocket, and he demanded a revolution as the price of
his return. Such were the arguments insinuated by the oligarchs. This
party was working incessantly in clubs and secret societies about whose
methods of organisation we are woefully ignorant. In 411--that is, two
years after the failure of the Sicilian expedition--these intriguers had
their way, and Athens consented to try the experiment of oligarchy
“until the end of the war.” Government henceforth was to be in the hands
of a council of 400, for government by council is the prevailing feature
of oligarchy. But, like most Greek oligarchies, Athens was also to have
a sort of select Assembly, consisting of 5000 of the well-to-do
citizens. The number of 5000 seems to represent the hoplite body of the
Athenian army. Thus Athens was imitating Sparta in limiting citizen
rights to her fully equipped land warriors, and excluding the “naval
mob” who were her real strength in war. As usual in oligarchies, even
this purged Assembly seems to have been for show rather than for use.
The government was, in fact, what it is generally called, a Government
of the Four Hundred. Fortunately for human liberty the experiment was
not a success. It only lasted for three months. The Four Hundred had, it
is true, come rather late upon the stage if they were to bring the war
to a successful conclusion. But they failed to do anything useful, and
their accession to power was marked by a failure at sea and the loss of
Eubœa. Assassination, a pleasantly rare weapon in Greek politics,
removed the leader of the oligarchs, and Athens reverted to democracy.
Once more, however, at the very end of the war, when the city
surrendered, Athens had perforce, at the bidding of
[Illustration: PLATE LXII. GIRL’S HEAD
_Eruckmann_]
Lysander, her conqueror, to revise her constitution in an oligarchic
direction. Once more the sacred laws were thrown into the melting-pot,
and there were elaborate programmes, and discussions as to the precise
form of oligarchy which should be adopted. But while the preliminaries
were going on the administration fell into the hands of a board of
so-called commissioners charged, like Oliver Cromwell, with the revision
of the constitution. Like Oliver these men soon found themselves in a
position of power too good to be lost. They were called the Thirty
Tyrants, and they deserved the name. They ruled with a strong hand,
banished their enemies, disarmed the citizen army, and began a system of
private plunder, with the spears of the Spartan garrison to enforce
their commands. Athens never forgot and never forgave this nightmare of
the Thirty. Most of them were men of talent, some of them were
philosophers and literary men who had sat at the feet of Socrates.
Critias, the Robespierre of the party, quarrelled with Theramenes, its
philosophical Danton, an advocate of the “moderate Constitution,” and
sent him to execution. Before very long, one is glad to know, honest men
(by which term one means, in this instance, democrats) were gathering on
the borders of Attica, and under the leadership of Thrasybulus won their
way home and crushed the “gentle Critias” and his gang for ever.
The year 402 is the year of restored democracy. It is called the
archonship of Eucleides, who is not our Euclid, but another man of the
same name. We hear no more of oligarchy at Athens. Henceforth she is a
democracy, as before and more so. Where Athenians had formerly got cheap
corn they now got it for nothing. Where they had formerly received a fee
of threepence for public duties they now got fourpence-halfpenny.
According to Aristotle more than 20,000 persons were in receipt of State
payment. However much business the company might transact, the
shareholders were determined upon one thing--to pay dividends to one
another, with a bonus in exceptional years. It is hard to say where the
dividends came from. No doubt there was a good deal of commerce and
banking business at the Peiræus, mostly in the hands of half-naturalised
foreigners. The rich were bled unmercifully, so that they tended to
emigrate or grow poor. And yet in the fourth century Athens was steadily
rising in the political scale. A glad day came when her admiral Conon,
with Persian help, was able to rebuild her Long Walls. She started a new
maritime league, under better safeguards, this time, for the allies. She
even recovered something of an empire. She could not afford statues in
ivory and gold, but she built her theatre with stone, laid out a
stadium, and produced many charming works of art. In short, though her
ambitions were curtailed, life was very free and full, and, I believe,
very pleasant, in fourth-century Athens. Her statesmen had to be content
with smaller schemes; they were a good deal concerned with finance:
indeed, it was hard work to make both ends meet. Generals complained
that they got no pay; and now that hired troops were in vogue warfare
was an expensive pastime. The Athenians were rather more hysterical than
before, even more apt to make Byngs of their unsuccessful admirals. They
talked more than ever, and did rather less. But on the whole they were
well governed, and they played a not unimportant part in the warfare and
diplomacy of Greece. The restored democracy was a success.
While Athens is recuperating her strength we may turn aside for a moment
to watch two other States make their successive attempts to hold the
overlordship of Hellas; remembering all the time that the northern
horizon is already dark with the storm that is going to sweep the whole
of ancient Greece into political insignificance.
SPARTA AND THEBES
The first episode of Greek international history in the fourth century
is a Spartan domination, lasting less than thirty years, but generally
considered as one of the imperial experiments of Greece. In addition to
her own permanent hegemony over the
[Illustration:
_Anderson_
FIG. 1. THE MARBLE FAUN, AFTER PRAXITELES
_Anderson_
FIG. 2. THE EROS OF CENTOCELLE
PLATE LXIII]
greater part of Southern and Central Greece, Sparta had now stepped into
the uncomfortable shoes of Athens, and found herself the mistress of
more than a hundred island or seaport “cities.” Now Sparta, as she was
frequently reminded, had gone into the Peloponnesian War as champion of
the liberty of Hellas against a tyrant city. She had gained the day
partly through the virtue of that charming phrase, but I doubt whether
anybody seriously expected her to set the Ionian cities and islands at
liberty. They were not used to liberty, and would not have known what to
do with it. They had utterly lost the habit of fighting or doing
anything but pay for their own safety. They were too lazy and
broad-minded to care very much where their tribute went. None of them
had been enthusiastic about its previous destination. We hear of no
bitter lamentations when they discovered that Sparta was selling them
wholesale back to the Persians. Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes, the
western satraps of the Great King, seem to have been easygoing gentlemen
of normal Eastern calm and duplicity. They were not of the stamp of
conquerors or despots, but they had heaps of money and were adepts at
making and breaking treaties. Sparta both by geography and by habit was
an inland power. She never produced more than one competent admiral, and
that was the man now at the zenith of his power, Lysander. As Sparta had
now inherited a maritime empire, and as she was unable and unwilling to
embark definitely upon a naval career, it became necessary to organise a
system of garrisons and governors in every city under her sway. This
work of organisation fell to Lysander--the nearest equivalent to a Cæsar
that Greece ever produced. The Spartan empire, such as it was, was
Lysander’s handiwork. Of course every state that came into Spartan hands
was forcibly converted to oligarchy. This has often been represented as
another example of Sparta’s tyranny. But a survey of Greece will soon
convince us that oligarchy, and not democracy, is the normal condition
of the Greek _polis_; and, in fact, with a few rare exceptions, it is
only Athens and the states directly under her influence which are
democracies. But Lysander was corrupt, and he entrusted the government
in each town to a group of local aristocrats who had won or purchased
his interest. Thus the states of the Spartan empire were generally
governed by a Council of Ten, working hand in glove with a Spartan
captain and a Spartan garrison. Athens, as we have seen, was also
accustomed to send garrisons where she conquered. But all that we know
of the Spartan temper assures us that the little finger of Sparta was
thicker than the loins of Athens.
Like Pausanias before him, Admiral Lysander became intoxicated with
success. A very little liberty and luxury was enough to bring giddiness
to the ascetic heads of Sparta. Lysander began to think revolutionary
thoughts of a Sparta where men could be rich and free like the rest of
the world. And the infection spread. Sparta was now earning a thousand
talents a year from her empire, and though money was still forbidden at
home, and though Sparta had as yet absolutely no coinage of her own,
private Spartans were unquestionably getting rich quickly. A rich
Spartan was a horrid anomaly: there was nothing that money could buy in
Laconia except land. Hence family estates began to change hands faster,
and the class of landless, therefore voteless, men of Spartan blood
rapidly multiplied. It was Sparta’s boast that she alone in all Greece
had never suffered a revolution. She never came so near it as on the
present occasion, when Lysander with his riches was trying to subvert
the Lycurgean constitution by bribing the Delphic oracle, and the
discontented Inferiors at home were planning a secret rebellion. Both
failed: the conspiracy of Cinadon was detected by the vigilant Ephors
and ruthlessly crushed, while Lysander in playing the part of king-maker
unwittingly made a king who was his equal in ability. Very soon the
conqueror of Athens found himself unnecessary to Sparta, and had to
submit to the indignity of being tried and pardoned.
The new king was Agesilaus, whose long and important career was the
subject of many biographies. He it was who pointed the path of glory to
Alexander by revealing the utter incapacity of the Persians to guard
their treasures. For Sparta had quickly fallen out with the satraps, and
Agesilaus marched about the Phrygian and Lydian coasts gathering plunder
with very little difficulty. One of the biographers of Agesilaus was his
friend and admirer Xenophon, who was concerned in a great adventure
which likewise served to betray the weakness of the Persian empire.
The British schoolboy, fleshing his young teeth upon the “Anabasis” of
Xenophon, struggling in a wilderness of parasangs and paradigms and
puzzling out what Cheirisophos said and where they pitched camp that
night, seldom realises the romantic nature of the enterprise. There was
a dynastic struggle in Persia. Cyrus, a bold and able prince, was
disputing the succession to the throne with the rightful successor,
Artaxerxes. Knowing the weakness of his native troops, Cyrus conceived
the idea of stiffening them with ten thousand hired Greeks, for by now
the use of mercenaries was growing more frequent in the Greek world.
These troops were mostly Spartans, their leader was Clearchus, a
Spartan, and Xenophon of Athens was a volunteer under his command. They
were recruited without knowing the full nature of the enterprise, and it
was only when they found themselves in the heart of Asia that they
learnt to their horror that the objective was the far-distant capital.
At length they reached Cunaxa, near Babylon, where a mighty host opposed
their advance. In the battle Cyrus was killed and the native portion of
his troops fled or surrendered or were slain. But the Greeks had fought
so valiantly that the victorious army of Artaxerxes did not care to
attempt their capture, though the crafty Tissaphernes succeeded in
assassinating their leaders and leading the army astray into the
wilderness. Thus the Ten Thousand found themselves stranded in a hostile
country, without generals and without guides, nearly two thousand miles
from home. But being Greeks, with a proper contempt for the barbarian,
they scorned to lose heart, though the chance of a safe return must
have seemed hopeless. The strong political instinct of the city-state
was their salvation. They resolved themselves into a wandering _polis_,
held assemblies, made speeches, elected generals, with Xenophon among
them, and preserved perfect self-control and discipline. So began the
Catabasis, an immense and dangerous march north-westward, through the
passes of the Taurus and the uplands of Armenia, fighting the wild Kurds
of the hills, struggling with cold and hunger, utterly ignorant of
geography except for the belief that if they went on long enough in the
same direction they would some day reach the sea. Their glad cry of
“Thalassa! Thalassa!” when at last they saw the shining waters of the
Euxine is a cry that has echoed through the ages. Henceforth they were
passing through the series of Greek colonies that fringed the south
coast of the Black Sea. Though many more adventures awaited them and
they were seldom very welcome visitors, yet no fewer than 6000 reached
home, and, we trust, lived happily ever afterwards. Not so much the
fighting as the courage of the march and the sense of discipline make
this one of the finest exploits in Greek history.
As for Xenophon, he retired to spend his leisure and his money close to
his beloved Sparta. Purchasing an estate near Olympia, he devoted his
veteran days to literature and sport. His life in Triphylia is a picture
of the retired sporting colonel of religious and aristocratic
tendencies. He regards his estate as a stewardship for the goddess
Artemis. He builds her a shrine, an altar with a statue of cypress-wood
modelled on the temple and golden statue of Ephesus. Hard by was a river
full of fish, and an orchard, with pasture-lands and upland game
preserves, abounding in wild boars, gazelles, and deer. Every year he
gave a sacrifice to the goddess, and invited his neighbours to the
feast. There would be barley porridge, wheaten loaves, and sweetmeats.
Game had previously been supplied by a day’s hunting on a large scale,
in which Xenophon’s sons conducted the operations and all the neighbours
took part if they liked.
Xenophon is one of the most accomplished and versatile of
[Illustration:
_Brogi_
FIG. 1. HEAD OF A YOUTH
_Mansell and Co._
FIG. 2. WINGED HEAD OF HYPNOS
PLATE LXIV]
minor writers. He wrote, besides his “Anabasis,” a treatise on hunting,
with valuable information on the breeding of horses and hounds; he wrote
memoirs of his beloved but little comprehended master in philosophy,
Socrates, who had been put to death at Athens while Xenophon was on his
expedition; he wrote also perhaps the earliest European work of prose
fiction, in which he sketched the proper training of a prince and a
gentleman, under the title of “The Education of Cyrus”; he wrote a
history of Greece beginning where Thucydides left off and ending with
the downfall of Sparta; among his minor works are treatises on finance,
on the duties of a captain of horse, and a glowing panegyric on the
Spartan constitution. An equally warm indictment of the Athenian
democracy is falsely ascribed to his pen. He was an aristocrat and
philo-Laconian by sympathy, and the democracy of Athens had earned his
displeasure by slaying Socrates and by banishing himself. That was only
natural, seeing that he had taken Spartan service in the field against
her, and she seems very generously to have allowed him to return home
before the end of his life. In his versatile intelligence, his
cosmopolitan habits as a soldier of fortune, in his youthful enthusiasm
for philosophy, and in the journalistic spirit which prompted him to
write pamphlets on any topic which interested him, no less than in his
dislike of democracy, Xenophon is perhaps the most characteristic figure
of the fourth century, though he is too military and too conservative to
be a typical Athenian of any age.
Greece did not, of course, enjoy peace during the thirty years of
Spartan predominance. It could never be said at any point of Greek
history that the land had rest forty years. There was fighting in Asia
Minor against the Persians, and fighting in Greece round the Isthmus, a
tiresome and lengthy struggle with discontented allies, generally called
the Corinthian War. We cannot get a clear conception of the life of a
Greek state unless we realise that peace was an abnormal condition.
During the period of which we are speaking there had been some important
developments in the art of war. As the soldier is the most conservative
of men with the exception of the priest, so next to religion warfare is
the most conservative of human activities. Field tactics had altered
little since the Persian wars. A Greek battle still depended on the
shock of two lines of hoplites, largely a question of weight in impact.
If you could once cut your opponent’s line the victory was yours,
because then you found his right or shieldless side open to your spear.
A Greek soldier with his heavy shield on his left arm could only defend
his front and left. For this purpose the men stood shoulder to shoulder
in a line made as deep as possible, for the sake of weight in the
scrimmage, and, I fear, to prevent the Greek disorder of running away.
It was the secret of Spartan pre-eminence in war that a Spartan hoplite
never thought of running away. But now in this fourth century we enter
upon a scientific age when men are beginning to apply their reason
logically to all the activities of life instead of trusting to habit.
Soldiering, as in the case of the Ten Thousand, is passing over from
amateur patriots to mercenary professionals. It is clear that if new
ideas are to revolutionise the art of war, the supremacy of Sparta is
doomed. Strong arms and thick skulls flourished in the vale of Eurotas.
Sparta had a rude shock when an Athenian condottiere named Iphicrates
cut up a Spartan company of hoplites with a newfangled battalion of his
own training, a body of drilled light infantry. And now in the fullness
of time Bœotia was to produce its man of genius--Epaminondas the Theban.
In 378 Sparta had sold the Ionian cities back to the Great King, who
sent down from Susa a beautiful treaty saying, “King Artaxerxes thinks
it just that Asia Minor and the Ionian islands shall belong to him, and
that the rest of the cities of Greece, both great and small, shall be
independent.” That was really the end of Sparta’s dream of an oversea
empire. She had found it too fatiguing for a land power. Armed with this
treaty, she began to run amuck among her neighbours. She assailed the
Arcadian city of Mantinea and tore it up into villages. One of her
captains marching past Athens made a
[Illustration: PLATE LXV. THE HERMES OF PRAXITELES
_English Photo Co., Athens_]
dash for Peiræus, but was fortunately foiled. Another had played the
same trick on Thebes, this time successfully, for he seized and
garrisoned the citadel. His outrageous performance was approved at home,
but it seems at last to have roused the sluggish spirit of the dwellers
in the Bœotian marshes. There was a delightfully romantic conspiracy
organised from Athens, and a body of Theban patriots liberated their
city. Among the patriots was Pelopidas, a brave and skilful soldier, and
his friend was Epaminondas, one of the greatest men in all history.
Two qualities, in addition to the ordinary human virtues of courage and
wisdom, seem to distinguish Epaminondas: he showed originality even in
the art of war, and he had the broad mental vision which we demand from
statesmen but seldom find in Greeks. I do not see any proof that he
possessed the full spirit of Panhellenism; he was emphatically a Theban
first, whatever he might be afterwards. But he had, it seems, an eye for
an international situation. It is the measure at once of his success and
of his failure that the rise and fall of Thebes is exactly conterminous
with the rise and death of Epaminondas.