Part 2

Fortunately, it is not with the origins, but with the characteristics, of the Greek city-states that we have to do mainly when we seek to discover the grounds of their hatred of all imperialistic projects. Let us, therefore, try to form a concrete impression of the salient features of the hundreds of little states with which the progressive parts of Greece were honeycombed at the beginning of the classic period, in the sixth century B.C. Each political cell, so to speak, had its nucleus in a walled town and its substance in a small circuit of grain, pasture, and garden land which the inhabitants of the town owned and cultivated. Most of the towns were simply hives of farmers. Whether the farmers were landlords, small proprietors, or peasants; however much they were divided by lines of social cleavage, they were all able to meet on the common ground of a single occupation. And every day from March to November, from the out-cropping of the grass and foliage in the spring, through the season of the grain harvest, the vintage, and the picking of the olives, to the fall planting and seeding, the ebb and flow of agricultural life carried the population of the city to the country in the morning and back to the city again in the evening.

There were few towns in Greece whose land did not touch the sea; and from the sea another harvest was gathered. Fishing existed, of course; but that was not all. Transmarine commerce is never wholly absent in any maritime country. In Greece it was especially favored by the difficulties of land transit, and by the excellence of the highways which the sea laid while carving the country up into a myriad of islands, head-lands, and estuaries. Hence, by the opening of the sixth century B.C. a second town had generally appeared on the coast of each little state when the chief town had developed, as was commonly the case, a few miles inland. In the new settlement the tone was set by the sailor-folk and the traders; in the old centre by the landed proprietors and the peasants. But the landlords were frequently merchants, and the peasants could easily attach work-places (_ergasteria_) to their houses--which, though in the towns, were really farmhouses--and become manufacturers in a small way; while it was regularly the ambition of a trader or seaman to crown a successful career by buying a farm, a ranch, or an orchard. There was, accordingly, a very close connection between urban and agrarian pursuits and interests.

It is true that with the Greek occupation of the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Seas in the seventh century B.C. some Greek towns, like Miletus, Samos, Corinth, Ægina, Chalcis, and Eretria, became cities in the modern sense of the term, with commercial and industrial interests predominant. But even there the advantages of urban life were within reach of the farmers, as well as of the traders, artisans, and merchants, since all alike were residents of the city. The only difference was that life in those cities was more rich and diversified than elsewhere.

The contrast between life in cities, with its complex social organization, its playhouses, its excitements, its stimuli to effort and to vice, its intolerance of oddities in manners and dress, and life in the country, with its simplicity which degenerates so easily into brutality, its monotony, its fanaticism in the pursuit of wealth, its contempt for the effeminacy of the shopkeeper, its piety and sobriety which easily accord with a longing to see the world and the wickedness thereof--this contrast which is so distressing an aspect of life in modern America, was almost entirely absent in classic Greece, at least among the enfranchised part of the population.

None of the cities was so large as to shut off the view of the country. After only a few minutes' walk Socrates and his companions might escape from the noise and confusion of Athens into the cool and fragrant groves of the suburbs. It was probably only into the biggest of the Greek cities that the olive trees and the grapevines did not push, as they and the late-come orange and lemon orchards push into the modern Greek hamlets. Even in Athens the crowing of the cock sounded the reveille for almost everybody, and it would never have come into the mind of an Athenian to suggest, as has been done in Boston, that a zoo should be stocked first with the common varieties of the domesticated animals. There is, says a French writer, a flavor of the barnyard about the comedies of Aristophanes. Yet this is the same Athens in which there were engaged in the building trades alone, according to Plutarch, carpenters, moulders, bronze-smiths, stone-cutters, dyers, veneerers in gold and ivory, painters, embroiderers, embossers, factors, sailors, pilots, wagon-makers, trainers of yoked beasts, drivers, rope-makers, weavers, cobblers, road-builders, and miners. This, too, is the Athens into which, as an ancient Athenian wrote, were swept, because of its maritime empire, the choice things of Sicily and Italy, of Cyprus, and Egypt, and Lydia, of Pontus and Peloponnesus, and many another place besides. When the farmer lived side by side in Athens, the largest city in the whole Greek world, with the trader and the artisan, the fusion of town and country must have been still more complete in the forty-three cities of Crete, the ten cities of Euboea, and the four cities of Ceos--an island only ten miles broad and fourteen long. This being the case, economic conditions tended to make the citizens of each state homogeneous to a degree foreign in modern experience; for, however rapid be its approach, the age has not yet arrived in America in which the "country is to be urbanized"; in which, to speak with a recent essayist,[2] farming is to be "of necessity a specialized department of urban life"; "the task of agricultural production is to be taken over by the classes of modern industrial organization; by the capitalist, the manager and the laborer"; in which "there is to be a continual shifting of laborers of the poorer classes back and forth between the town and the country," and "the distinction implied in the terms 'townsman' and 'countryman' is to be obliterated."

Whether our essayist be right or wrong in his forecast of the future of farming in America, we will not stop to discuss. It is enough to point out that the early age of Greece was such a one as he desiderates; that then life was exclusively and uniformly urban: with the result that the entire population of any given city-state could be regarded as merely a great family. And it not only could be, but it was in fact so regarded. Were not all citizens descendants of a common ancestor? This query aristocrats might answer in the negative, mindful of the special god or demigod of whom each nobleman thought himself the offspring. But his negative was generally qualified by the admission that he, too, if he were an Athenian, had Zeus and Apollo--Zeus of the home-stead and Apollo of the fatherland--as his progenitors; that he, too, like all his fellow-citizens, was a descendant of Ion and a foster-child of Athena. The gods and goddesses of the Greeks were their creators in the literal physical sense of the word. Men projected backward, even to the age of the gods and heroes, with which the world began, the fact of paternity to which all animal origins were attributable; and since each city had its peculiar demigods, from which its citizens were directly sprung, all its inhabitants were bound to one another by a peculiar tie of blood.

The family aspect of the Greek city is accentuated by the fact that the town hall was a town hearth; that the chief subdivisions of citizens were brotherhoods, and that all permanent associations of them for public purposes assumed the descent of their several members from common ancestors, who were naturally gods or demigods. When heroes had to be discovered, with the help of the Pythian prophetess, to act as progenitors for the groups of citizens artificially united in the new electoral divisions which Clisthenes established in Athens in 508 B.C., it is conceivable that popular regard for purity of stock helped Pericles to enact the notorious law of 451 B.C. limiting citizenship at Athens to those sprung from the legitimate union of Athenian parents. Every city in Greece inherited from its distant tribal past a strong feeling of the kinship of its inhabitants, in comparison with which the sense of ethnic and racial unity was weak and watery. To destroy the political identity of a city was like taking human life.

We must make allowance, moreover, in appraising the strength of local attachments among both Greeks and Romans, for their beliefs as to the fate of the dead. The ancient world, like modern Japan, was saturated with the idea that the spirits of departed ancestors needed the ministrations of the living. Without the meat and drink which the relatives brought to the grave; without the coins--or the articles of use and pleasure which money might buy--that were buried with the body; without the covering of earth that was strewn over the dead, loved ones might lack life altogether in the underworld, or might lack everything that made the spirit life tolerable. "The beasts of the field and the birds of the air," rang the impassioned plea of Tiberius Gracchus[3] in introducing his agrarian reforms, "have their holes and their hiding-places, but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy but the blessings of light and air. Our generals urge their soldiers to fight for the graves and the shrines of their ancestors. The appeal is idle and false. You cannot point to a paternal altar. You have no ancestral tomb. No! you fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others. You are called the masters of the world: yet there is no clod of earth that is really yours." Plutarch, with a touch which shows that despite his modernity he belongs to the civilization which he interprets, tells us that the Athenians before Salamis were disposed to count victory dear which was purchased by the desertion of the temples and the tombs of their fathers. No man who neglected the plot where his dead lay might hold the chief magistracies in Athens. The soil of his fatherland was thus in a peculiar sense holy ground to the citizen of a Greek city. He might leave it, but not to an enemy; and if he were, like Æneas, the last of his family, he was expected to carry his Lares and Penates with him. Into a pit dug on the new site every companion of Romulus, we are told in a legend which merely transfers into the past later-day practice, threw a morsel of earth brought from his old home land. This he did not simply from an intensification of the feeling which led the Scotch girl in the well-known ballad to take with her, when starting for America, not baggage, but sods from her mother's grave. He did it from the sentiment which led General Nogi the other day to provide for the spirits of his ancestors before committing suicide. Thereby the colonist brought his dead along with him to the new city. The Greeks and the Romans had, accordingly, a very special reason for local patriotism. Like the Hebrew Christians, they were "also compassed about with so great a crowd of witnesses."

We have made our peace with economics by considering first the effect of occupation and residence in giving to the citizens of each city-state solidarity of interest and attitude. We have dwelt a little on the force which beliefs as to their origin and their destiny hereafter exerted in keeping the city-states apart. We have still to notice the centrifugal influence on the Greek race of their urban institutions and politics.

Each city in Greece had its own laws and customs. These were not, as with us, cold abstractions, but real, ever active, almost living, personal forces, moulding incessantly their subjects according to a given model. The citizens of each city had, in fact, a general family resemblance, due to the imprint set upon them by their social and political institutions. Cities acquired by this means clear-cut individualities which were capable of definition, not simply by narrating their history, but also in terms of physical, intellectual, and emotional qualities. We may illustrate this point by observing that the Hellenes created one literary type which we have not borrowed from them: they wrote the biographies of cities as well as of men. Their philosophers studied the effects upon urban character of climate, prevailing winds and pursuits, location with reference to the sun and the sea, contact with foreigners, and other similar agencies. They even had specifics which they prescribed for the physiological and pathological ills of cities, just as our sciolists, on a much more slender basis of facts, however, diagnose the diseases and classify the good and evil qualities of nations.

The truth is that cities meant to all the Greeks what (and much besides) the city and the nation combined mean to those of us who do not live in the country. They were the source and object at once of municipal and national pride. The problems which city-states had to consider and solve were not simply those in which good citizens find it so hard nowadays to develop a wholesome interest. Questions of police, education, public works, appointments; conflicts of racial, sectional, class, and religious ambitions; rivalries with neighboring cities for commercial, political, and cultural leadership--controversies of this order are common to all cities in all times and places. But the politics of the Greek cities had a high seriousness of their own. Each town had its own foreign policy to determine, its own army to train and direct, its own church to equip with shrines and deities, its own gods to honor with games and tragedies. Every move on the complex chessboard of the Mediterranean world might be pregnant with meaning to it. On one day it might decide that the time had come to seize some borderland in dispute with its immediate neighbors. On another it might conclude an alliance which imposed the obligation to wage a great war against frightful odds. On another the subject of voting might be the recognition of a new god or goddess, which, in fact, was often tantamount to a new creation. And in considering all these matters citizens were simply doing what their fathers and forefathers had done from time immemorial. Memories of great actions done in olden times were preserved by monuments of bronze or marble, and revived annually by appropriate ceremonies. Legend and fact, blended in an edifying tradition,--the repository of the yearnings and ideals of dead generations,--inspired the living to bear themselves worthily in all national crises. "Love thou thy land with love far-brought from out the storied past" was an admonition of which Greek cities of the classic epoch stood in little need. The mischief was that the land which they loved was not all Greece, but merely the territory of a single town.

The national fanaticism of the countries of modern Europe is probably more tolerant of foreign interference than was the passionate patriotism of the little urban units with which the imperial policy of Athens and Sparta had to deal.

* * * * *

If you were to look at a map of Greece which distinguished the states, and not the meaningless ethnical or tribal divisions of the people, you would observe that from the outset Sparta and Athens were destined to greatness, if by nothing else, by the size and material resources of their territories. They were, however, themselves city-states, and inferior to none in the strength with which they held to the conviction that no greater humiliation could befall them than to have to submit to the domination of another city or the will of a foreign lord. With what show of reason, therefore, could they adopt a policy of imperialism? They had to deal with Greeks, and not with barbarians. Hence they could not invoke in the interest of their ambition the convenient doctrine that inferior races need a political guardian.

In estimating the territory of Sparta we have included in it not simply the land of the citizens which the serfs or Helots tilled for them, but also the much larger, but less valuable, mass of enveloping land which belonged to the Periœcs; for the hamlets of the latter were really Spartan municipalities. It was, moreover, with the resources of the whole complex that Sparta held the Peloponnesians united under her leadership for one hundred and eighty years (550-370 B.C.). On the other hand, it was with the combined strength of the Peloponnesians that Sparta broke up the Athenian empire in 405 B.C., and widened the area of her leadership so as to include all Hellas. Thereafter Sparta's Peloponnesian league was simply the core of a general Hellenic league. The question is: What position did Sparta occupy in it?

Her legal rights rested solely upon a treaty of alliance (_symmachia_) which she had struck with each city in the league. But there can be no doubt that she had often secured the treaty in the first place by force, and that she interfered thereafter in the local affairs of both the Peloponnesian and the other Hellenic allies in a way not provided by its stipulations. But, however outrageous her conduct might be in fact, it was never formally reprehensible so long as the interference achieved its object. This was to establish or maintain, first against tyranny, and later against democracy, an aristocratic government in the allied cities. Since the aristocrats were always in a minority, they were bound to invite Spartan intervention for their own defense. Hence it was only when they failed to retain control of the government that an ally could regard Sparta's intermeddling as anything but the welcome act of a friendly power. "Perhaps some one may expostulate," writes a pamphleteer in 400 B.C. while commending to his fellow-citizens of Larisa a proposal that they join the Hellenic league;[4] "but Sparta sets up an oligarchy everywhere. That is true. But it is such a one as we prayed and yearned for for ages, and lost when we had enjoyed it for but a brief moment. Just compare the oligarchy they favor with the one we have already. Where is there a city in their domain, be it ever so small, in which a third of the population does not take part in public affairs? It is not by the Lacedæmonians, but by fortune, that those who have no arms or other capacity for public service are disfranchised. Their exclusion lasts only so long as their political worthlessness. How do we stand by comparison? It's my belief that were we to pray for a constitution we would not ask the gods for a different one from that which Sparta wishes." To even moderate men who thought as this speaker did, unruly Spartan garrisons seemed quite compatible with local autonomy. They came to Larisa at the call of the home authorities and remained at the disposal of those who called them. Their captains, the long-haired harmosts, took orders and did not give them. Their presence involved no suspension of the constitution, no violation of the laws, no seizure of public revenues. Naturally, the two thirds who were disfranchised thought differently; but it is a good rule of international law that a foreign state deal with the Government, and not with the Opposition. The, mischief of this system, in the circumstances then existing in Greece, was that it bred civil war within the cities. "War," says the Larisæan pamphleteer just quoted, "is conceded to be the greatest of all evils by as much as peace is the greatest of all blessings. Yet _stasis_, or civil war, as far exceeds war in the magnitude of its evil as war exceeds peace." The incentive to stasis was that Athens, with a naval power as irresistible as was the land power of Sparta, and an equally imposing array of allies, had long continued to reach out a supporting or encouraging hand to the two thirds whom Sparta tried to keep down. Athens, too, was the apostle of a great political idea, "the constitutional equality of the many," and whenever she succeeded in putting those who believed in this creed in control of an allied city, or in keeping them in control once they had the advantage, her interference was formally justifiable or at least justified. Not she, but the government she upheld, had the responsibility.

With the outbreak of the great duel for national leadership between Sparta and Athens which fills the final third of the fifth century B.C., the war was carried in the form of stasis into every city of the two confederacies. For the leaders of both the one third and the two thirds, says Thucydides in a famous passage of his history of the Peloponnesian War[5] "used specious names, the one professing to uphold the constitutional equality of the many, the other the wisdom of an aristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in name they were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in every way to overcome each other, they committed the most monstrous crimes; yet even these were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges, which they pursued to the very utmost, neither party observing any definite limits either of justice or public expediency, but both alike making the caprice of the moment their law. Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, or grasping power with the strong hand, they were eager to satiate the impatience of party spirit. Neither faction cared for religion; but any fair pretence which succeeded in effecting some odious purpose was greatly lauded. And the citizens who were of neither party fell a prey to both; either they were disliked because they held aloof, or men were jealous of their surviving. Thus stasis gave birth to every form of wickedness in Greece." The singleness of purpose with which Sparta made vocational training the aim of her public education achieved the happy result that she had no men of letters to betray to posterity damaging secrets of state. Hence no one has done for her what Thucydides has done for Athens: let us have an insight into the conscience of the city at the time of its greatness. With brutal candor Cleon and others in Thucydides' narrative brush aside the formal justification of the Athenian empire and lay bare the fact that it was in reality a tyranny, a sovereignty exercised without a moral sanction, one which self-respecting people had a solemn duty to overthrow. "You should remember," said Cleon to the Athenians in 427 B.C.,[6] "that your empire is a despotism exercised over unwilling subjects who are always conspiring against you; they do not obey in return for any kindness which you do them to your own injury, but in so far as you are their mistress; they have no love of you, but they are held down by force."