The Evolution of States Part 5

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 const.i.tution 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 const.i.tution 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 emanc.i.p.ated slaves obtained full rights of citizens.h.i.+p. 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 ma.s.s of the freemen having not yet tasted of const.i.tutional privilege."[113]

What followed was an evolution of the old conflicting forces on a new const.i.tutional basis, the balance of power and prestige being on the side of the demos and its inst.i.tutions, 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 partners.h.i.+p."[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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 h.e.l.lenistic Empires, and of the Roman Empire, which in turn sank to dissolution before the a.s.saults of newer militarisms.

-- 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 superst.i.tion. 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 superst.i.tious Athenian demos playing the part of the ignorant mult.i.tude 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 h.e.l.lenes 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 fas.h.i.+on; 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 h.e.l.lenedom 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 superst.i.tious.[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 cla.s.ses, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 ma.s.s 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 h.e.l.las: 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 pa.s.sed away because they were ill rooted. n.o.bly 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-h.e.l.lenic 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 enn.o.bling 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-cla.s.s Athenians who served in the fleet were the best disciplined; the middle-cla.s.s 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 statesmans.h.i.+p. 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 a.s.sa.s.sin in sight.

And it is the prevailing consciencelessness, the universal l.u.s.t 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 h.e.l.lenic course, a h.e.l.lenic 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.s 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-a.s.sertion and domination. Thus we have on one hand the Spartan kings, concerned for the well-being of the ma.s.s 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 h.e.l.lenic 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 a.s.sertion 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 mult.i.tude 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, -- 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 acc.u.mulated 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. G.o.dkin, _Problems of Modern Democracy_, 1896, pp.

327-28, as to the recent rise of cla.s.s 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. Schomann, _Griechische Alterthumer_, 2te Aufl. i, 341; Aristotle, _Polity of Athens_, cc. 2, 4, 6; Wachs.m.u.th, _Histor. Antiq. of the Greeks_, -- 33, Eng. tr. 1837, i, 244).]

[Footnote 96: Cp. Schomann, 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 (Schomann, 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, Hulfe 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 cla.s.ses 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, -- 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. Mitch.e.l.l 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.]