Part 3

Dependence upon Sparta or Athens was, in fact, regarded by none of their allies except as the less of two evils: the greater was dependence upon their domestic foes. Hence the tyranny just described did not arise with the consent of the tyrannized. The allies of Athens had consented to enter only into alliance (symmachia) with her on stipulated terms and for a stipulated purpose--protection against Persia. What they had neglected to stipulate was the time for which they were to remain allies. Athens, accordingly, denied them the right to secede, and when particular cities tried none the less to withdraw, she made the preservation of the union a moral ground for coercion, and with the aid of such cities as remained faithful, and the fleet which she kept ready for action by the financial contributions of all, she forced them back on terms such as a conqueror could dictate. A new treaty of alliance was, however, the future, as it had been the ancient, tie. And speaking broadly, we may affirm that in the city-state world of classic Greece an empire was legally impossible: what we, and the ancients, looking to realities, call an empire was an aggregate knit together by treaties, the very formation of which shows that we have to do, not with a single sovereign, but with a group of sovereigns. In other words, the city remained the ultimate political unit. The rule of Athens and Sparta was, strictly speaking, an hegemony and not an _arche_; a shifting and temporary leadership, and not a permanent suzerainty. It was a necessity of circumstances assumed to be exceptional.

* * * * *

Unfortunately, experience showed that the circumstances in which imperialism was a political necessity recurred constantly. After the fall of Athens in 404 B.C., a defensive war against the barbarians--the Macedonians in Thessaly, the Persians in Ionia--served as a justification to Sparta in employing force to maintain the hegemony which she had won. But in 387 B.C. the peace known as the "King's Peace," or the "Peace of Antalcidas," was concluded with Persia, whereupon it became impossible to use any longer the national cause as even a pretext for tyranny. The hegemony, however, was not abandoned. It had to be maintained, it was alleged, to keep the other cities free, and to this end Persia lent aid to Sparta and Thebes successively. If an empire could only be prevented by an empire, and national recreancy to boot, the times were surely out of joint. Such an issue was the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the system of hegemonies, as both reformers and statesmen in Greece came speedily to realize.

The reformers strove to alter the untoward circumstances, and in a later chapter we shall have occasion to note how Plato and Aristotle, with a blind faith in the power of education and of legislation, aimed to divert citizens from work to leisure and from war to peace, and both to eradicate the greed for land and money and to restrict the natural increase of population to which they traced the imperialistic spirit. Some of the statesmen followed their lead. Others, however, conceding that unity was demanded for the preservation and spread of civilization, and that the world needed not fewer but more Greeks, either, like the great publicist Isocrates, advocated an hegemony on the old lines but endowed with stability through being based on general consent, or favored one of several new devices for welding cities into a permanent territorial state. Respect for progress bids us to view at this point somewhat narrowly these unitarian movements.

The position attained by Thebes in Greece after her victory over Sparta at Leuctra in 371 B.C. was simply an hegemony of the earlier model--the reoccupation of lines proved twice already to be untenable.[7] On the other hand, the position occupied by Thebes in Boeotia prior to 387 B.C. was clearly anticipatory of what the future was to bring to Greece as a whole. Boeotia was thereby blocked off into six districts,[8] one (Thebes) with four electoral divisions, two (Orchomenus and Thespiæ) with two each, and three with one apiece. Six of the ten city-states of Boeotia--the six little lake cities--were confined to two of the eleven divisions. This was a setback to them and a boon to Thebes, seeing that each division furnished one of the eleven Boeotarchs who formed the executive of the league, sixty of the six hundred and sixty councillors who formed the Boeotian synod, and its corresponding share of the league judges. Thebes thus became the Prussia of Boeotia, and in return for the political advantages which it gained and four elevenths of the revenues which it received, it undertook to provide four elevenths of the soldiers and four elevenths of the taxes. In this way the burdens and the advantages of the league were distributed according to the population and wealth of the different parts of the country. That was equitable; and since the city-states, though thrust into the background and held responsible for decisions in the making of which they had often little influence, formed a single _ethnos_ and spoke a single dialect, they were evidently fairly well satisfied. As the league was constituted, Thebes was forced to struggle with Orchomenus and Thespiæ for the control of the six little lake cities. In this she was normally successful--so successful, in fact, that in 387 B.C. Sparta, while enforcing the King's Peace, dissolved the league in order to destroy her influence. It was not revived when Thebes reunited Boeotia (377-371 B.C.), and under Epaminondas we may more properly speak of Boeotia as a single city-state like Attica than as a league of city-states.

Though sacrificed at home to the ambition of Thebes, the Boeotian league maintained a high prestige abroad. Some of its institutions had been transferred to Athens during the revolution of 411 B.C., and others had been adopted in Arcadia after they had been set aside in Boeotia. Moreover, and this is an important historical connection which the wonderful epigraphical researches of Adolph Wilhelm[9] enable us to establish, the Boeotian league reappears _mutatis mutandis_ in the organization imposed upon all Greece by Philip of Macedon after his crowning victory at Chæronea in 338 B.C. For if we equate Philip and the Committee of Public Safety with the eleven Boeotarchs, the synod of Corinth with the Boeotian synod of six hundred and sixty, and the districts into which Hellas, including Macedon and excluding only Sparta, was divided for federal purposes, with the six districts which had existed in Boeotia, it is evident that the political system used by Philip for organizing the Greeks was borrowed from Boeotia no less than the military system with which he conquered them. It was not for nothing that the king of Macedon had spent his youth as a hostage in Thebes.

Characteristic of the Boeotian league and of Philip's Hellenic league is the synod. It was in each a strictly representative body. Its members were apportioned to the area constituting the league in such a way that the larger states had several representatives and the smaller states had one representative between them; while in the Hellenic league neighboring states and federated states were treated as a unit and given proportional representation. That this made all but the largest state--Macedon--the largest state's inferiors and subordinated many city-states to the federal districts to which they belonged, is obvious. And in this case loss of local liberty was compensated for very imperfectly by the consideration that what the constituent states surrendered the Hellenic synod, which met at Corinth, gained. The national appeal was far weaker than the ethnic appeal had been in Boeotia. The liberty lost had indeed been a bane and not a blessing. After 338 B.C. the cities could no longer enjoy the excitement of waging private wars and fomenting revolutions. No longer were they free to be enemies of Philip. Henceforth they must contribute the quota of horsemen, hoplites, light-armed troops, and sailors for which their representation in the synod obligated them, or pay a heavy fine for every day their contingents were absent from the national levy. The synod completed its organization by choosing Philip its _hegemon_ by land and sea, and selected as its executive board a Committee of Public Safety which seemingly had its sessions at Pydna. The committee the confederates probably welcomed as a possible champion of their interests. The unwelcome organ of the league, and the one for which there was no parallel in Boeotia, was the hegemon. Subordination to a synod was offensive enough to city-states which regarded complete independence as alone ideal. It was intolerable to them to submit to a synod which its hegemon, Philip of Macedon, controlled,--one which could never have any one but the contemporary king of Macedon as its hegemon. The hegemony of Macedon was sugar-coated, but it was none the less an hegemony, and, as such, illegal and unacceptable.[10]

A notable start in the direction of uniting city-states legally in a larger whole had been made by Athens during the epoch of her empire. She had then founded many colonies (_cleruchies_), which, though organized as separate cities, retained for their residents citizenship in Athens. Why not grant citizenship (_polity_) to the inhabitants of other cities as well? There were some, and among them the comedian Aristophanes,[11] who canvassed this idea. "Let us assume," he says, "that our city is a heap of wool, and that each of our allied cities is a fleck of wool. Let us take all the wool and spin it into yarn, and weave the yarn into a great blanket with which to protect our lord Demos against the cold." But for this drastic measure the times were not ripe. It was altogether repugnant to the pride of the Athenians to share with everybody advantages which they had sacrificed so much to acquire; and there was little in the advantages thus diluted to compensate other cities for the at least partial loss of identity which they were bound to sustain on acquiring Athenian citizenship. In the one instance in which this course was taken, the Samians, to whom Athens gave her full civic rights in the supreme agony of the Peloponnesian War, had both earned them and come to appreciate them by sacrificing their own territory rather than desert their ally.

Another less heroic expedient for bringing about a permanent _entente_ between cities was the grant of _isopolity_, or reciprocity of citizenship. In certain cases this was the concession of the passive rights of citizenship (_civitas sine suffragio_) to all citizens of a particular city who should take up residence in, or even merely visit, the territory of the grantor. Thus circumscribed, however, it amounted simply to an exchange of commercial privileges, and proved barren of political consequences in that each city reserved to itself complete control of its own policy, thus rendering impossible any advance in state building. It remained for the Romans to render this institution fruitful to an astonishing degree by making the legal exercise of Roman citizenship independent of migration to Rome.

Substantially the same result was achieved by the Greeks through what they termed _sympolity_, or joint citizenship. This was possessed from of old by rudimentary nations, like the Achæans and the Ætolians,[12] among whom the towns and hamlets had never become independent and self-sufficient political units; so that the inhabitants were Achæans from Ægium, or Achæans from Cerynia, or Achæans from some other of the ten so-called cities of which the Achæan nation or league was constituted. In like fashion the Ætolian hamlets had a double citizenship. An essential part of this scheme, evidently, was that each city had an equal voice in the election of the officials of the league and in the settlement of all federal matters. And so satisfactory a safeguard of urban autonomy did this prove to be that in the last half of the third century B.C. city after city in the Peloponnesus outside the ancient limits of Achæa took the irrevocable step of acquiring Achæan citizenship in addition to its own; while in Central Greece the Ætolians by fair means or foul bestowed a dual citizenship upon all their neighbors. Athens and Sparta alone persisted in their isolation, the former on the strength of an international guarantee of autonomy, the latter in stubborn reliance upon its own powers. The other city-states entrusted to an international board, not for a definite or indefinite term of years, but for all future time, complete control of their foreign relations. Each city put permanently the international authority between itself and the outside world, thus escaping individual danger by the surrender of individual diplomacy.[13]

In this way arose what by the general consent of historians and jurists is the most perfect state which antiquity produced. The antinomy between the city-state and the imperial spirit which had existed for centuries was reduced to a minimum by the nice balance of the federal system.

There were defects in the Achæan and Ætolian leagues which their statesmen did not remove. "Equality," says Aristotle, "is just, but only between equals." The cities which had an equal voice in the international board, like the modern nations which cast a vote each at the Hague Congress, were unequal in population and in wealth.

The Achæans and Ætolians came nearer than any ancient republicans to entrusting power to representatives; but, besides creating a large legislative council, constituted in successive years, in the one case, of different fractions of the citizens of each city, and in the other, of deputies apportioned to the constituent cities according to their size, they showed the ingrained distrust held by all Greeks for oligarchy by requiring the reference to a general assembly of all matters of high importance.

How to satisfy the just claims of those whom distance or lack of leisure prevented from coming to the meeting-place, they did not discover.

However, it was not these institutional imperfections which prevented the unification of Hellas in a single federation. For this result could not now be achieved by any triumph of political science. Antigonus Doson (229-221 B.C.) whose name ought not to be unknown where Callicratidas, Agesilaus, Iphicrates, and Phocion are household words, attempted with equal skill and generosity to combine the new federal idea with the old idea of a representative national congress meeting at Corinth under the hegemony of the king of Macedon;[14] but the best that can be said of the combination he made is that despite its great promise and possibilities it proved unacceptable to Hellas, and hence ineffective.[15] The situation had now got beyond the control of the Greek people. It may, perhaps, be realized best, if we imagine that the European nations of to-day, weakened politically by continuous emigration and incessant conflicts, economically, by the withdrawal of industry and commerce to more favorably situated districts under European control, let us say in the East, were to pool their diplomatic and military interests, and entrust them, not to a European parliament, but to warring Latin and Teutonic parliaments, and were to take this step only to escape the Russian peril and when America was already thundering at their shores, if that be imaginable, coming with irresistible might, at once to save and to destroy.

To describe how the Roman republic emancipated Greece from Macedon, impressed her will upon the Greek kingdoms of the East, and built up a universal empire of diverse fragments, lies beyond the scope of this book. We may note simply that to some cities she gave her citizenship, or polity, thus destroying their identity altogether; that to others she gave isopolity, or reciprocity of citizenship, and with it the local advantages preserved in Greece by sympolity, or joint citizenship, thus creating the municipality and organizing wards, so to speak, of the city of Rome all over Italy; that some (the _socii_, or Italian allies) she bound to herself by irrevocable treaties till she was forced to give them municipal status, and others (the "friends," _amici_, or the "friends and allies," _amici et socii_, in what later became the provinces) by understandings or temporary treaties till she had familiarized herself with deification of rulers, which was the Greek method of legalizing absolutism.

A word on this strange institution and I have finished this survey of the expedients devised by the Greeks to obscure, evade, and finally to justify imperialism. The Greek method of legalizing despotism was Alexander the Great's genial adaptation to state building of an idea which his tutor, Aristotle, had developed in his _Politics_.[16] It was a means of uniting cities or provinces in an indissoluble whole while preserving, on the one hand, the superiority and freedom of action of the suzerain, be it an emperor or a republic, and, on the other hand, the self-respect of the inferior states, without which their status was politically intolerable. Deification of rulers did the impossible: it reconciled completely the antinomy between the city-state and imperialism. It resolved the antagonism into two harmonious duties; the duty of the ruler to command and of the subject to obey.

To Alexander the Great governments have been in serious debt for over two thousand years. From him to Kaiser Wilhelm II runs an unbroken line. So long as the world had many gods and did not believe in the supernatural power of any of them, there was no religious difficulty in adding to its stock another such deity in the person of the living monarch. With the decadence of polytheism, however, a slight change was necessary. In Constantine's time god-kings suffered the same fate as other pagan gods; but with a difference. The heathen gods became devils or were metamorphosed into saints.

The kings became men chosen for their high office by God, Most High. Crowned, usually by their predecessors, and anointed by God's priests, the patriarchs, they governed by divine right and acknowledged responsibility only to their Creator.[17] In a less ecclesiastical world, as in modern Prussia, the kings crown themselves. But with these later developments we have no concern in this book. I shall endeavor, however, in chapters III-VI, to trace the growth of deification in the world-monarchy of Alexander the Great, and to make clear the purpose it served in the empires of the Ptolemies and Seleucids.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. de Coulanges, Fustel. _La cité antique_^7 (1879).

2. Busolt, G. _Die griechischen Staats- und Rechtsaltertümer_,^2 (1892). In Müller's _Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft_, IV, 1.

3. Schömann-Lipsius. _Griechische Alterthümer_,^4 II (1892).

4. Francotte, H. _La Polis grecque_ (1907).

5. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. _Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen_ (1910). In Hinneberg's _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_. Teil II, Abteilung IV, 1.

6. Zimmern, Alfred. _The Greek Commonwealth_ (1911).

7. Keil, Bruno. _Griechische Staatsaltertümer_ (1912). In Gercke and Norden's _Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft_, pp. 297 _ff._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: _A History of the Eastern Roman Empire_, pp. 319 _f._]

[Footnote 2: _Atlantic Monthly_, Oct., 1912, vol. cx, pp. 517 _ff._]

[Footnote 3: Plutarch, _Ti. Gracch._ 9; cf. Greenidge, _A History of Rome_, p. 111.]

[Footnote 4: [Ηρωζου]Περι Πολιτειαϛ, 30 (Ed. Drerup). With characteristic conservatism the English scholars, Adcock and Knox (_Klio_, 1913, pp. 249 _ff._), uphold the attribution of this pamphlet to Herodes Atticus.]

[Footnote 5: Thucy., III, 82, 8. (The translation used here and elsewhere in the book is that of Jowett.)]

[Footnote 6: Thucy., III, 37, 2.]

[Footnote 7: The same is true of the second Athenian empire. The confederation from which it grew had no reason to outlast the occasion which had called t into existence--the "tyranny" of Sparta. It was, therefore, by design at least, a temporary, and not a permanent, union.]

[Footnote 8: _Hellenica Oxyrhyn._, II, 2-4.]

[Footnote 9: _Attische Urkunden_, I Teil. (Sitzb. d. Akad. in Wien. Phil.-hist. Klasse. 165, 6, 1911).]

[Footnote 10: It was revived on much less objectionable terms by Antigonus Doson. See below, page 34 and chapter VII.]

[Footnote 11: _Lysistrata_, 579 _ff._]

[Footnote 12: See below, chapter VII.]

[Footnote 13: See below, chapter VII.]

[Footnote 14: See above, page 30.]

[Footnote 15: See below, chapter VII.]

[Footnote 16: See especially Ed. Meyer, _Kleine Schriften_, 283 _ff._, and below, chapter IV.]

[Footnote 17: Bury, J.B., _The Constitution of the Later Roman Empire_ (1910), pp. 10 _ff._, 36.]

II

ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY

No form of government, or profession of political idea, saves a state from imperialism. Even this country, which is dedicated, as is no other of the modern great powers, to the concept of popular sovereignty; which uprears the structure of its state upon a belief in the essential equality of men, and treats, or at least aims to treat, as comparatively negligible the differences created by birth and race, education and religion, property and occupation;-even this idealistic republic has become an empire in our own time and almost without our perceiving it. M. Bouché-Leclercq has given a prominent place in his _Leçons d'histoire romaine_[18] to the discomforting doctrine that the Romans conquered the world in spite of themselves--a debatable question, as he himself shows. It is not our sense of truth that is gratified when we are told that the beatitude, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," designates the English. Yet Seeley has maintained the thesis that the British empire was secured in a "prolonged fit of national absence of mind." Unwittingly, it seems, the modern foster-mother of liberal institutions has become the mistress of countless millions.

There never was a people which made the principle that all its citizens were equal a more live reality than the Athenians made it; and no state to my knowledge was more cunningly contrived to insure the government of the people than was theirs. Yet they became imperialists with ardor and conviction, and with this much of logical consequence, that, while they believed in democracy for everybody, they did not doubt that the Athenians had earned the right to rule both Greeks and barbarians by the acquisition of superior culture. Equality among its citizens Athens carefully distinguished from equality among all men.