Part 6

The charge is more serious that in order to enjoy "the steady receipt of salaries throughout the year derived from the court fees"; to "manage the affairs of the subjects while seated at home without the expense of naval expeditions"; to "preserve the partisans of democracy and ruin its opponents"; to boost the business of hotel keepers and such ilk in Athens, and to win for the common citizens the flattery and consideration that would be shown otherwise only to generals and ambassadors, the Athenians "compelled the allies to voyage to Athens in order to have their cases tried." For it seems clear that the law courts at Athens were usually so clogged with litigation that the gain in having a model code of law and in escaping the fierce partisanship of the local tribunals was largely neutralized by the added expense and humiliation. The real justification of the practice was that it obviated the necessity of sending out naval expeditions.

In the third place Athens took from the allies lands and settled them with impecunious Athenians; but in payment therefor reductions of tribute were given. On the other hand, thousands from the allied cities migrated to Athens, and, while not escaping military or financial service, or obtaining Athenian citizenship, they were cordially welcomed, and enjoyed to the full the commercial and industrial advantages of the metropolis. Again, Athenians often found it less profitable to invest capital in Attic land, which was exposed to hostile attack, than in lands on the islands of the empire, which the fleet protected. Hence there were many Attic farmers in the subject territory, their right to own foreign real estate being secured by commercial treaties. There was accordingly economic give and take, the military preponderance of Athens being, however, responsible for the result that the Athenians abroad were often policemen, the allies in Athens, hostages.

In all three instances of alleged misbehavior, it must be admitted that the defense offered by the Athenian apologists simply added insult to injury in the view of a majority of the subjects. But for them Athens, arrogant or conciliatory, malefactor or benefactor, was always a foreign governor to be gotten rid of at any cost. Such uncompromising sentiments time alone could alter, and to secure the benefits of time Pericles endeavored to avoid an Hellenic war. His policy of peace after 446 B.C. was, therefore, the sound policy of an imperialist.

The general ground on which contemporaries criticized the Athenian régime was that under it every assistance was given by the state to the least cultivated portion of the inhabitants both of Athens and of its four hundred and twenty subject cities, at the expense of the most intelligent and cultivated elements; that the highest goal of endeavor was moral and intellectual mediocrity. There may be some truth in this contention. The case would be more conclusive, however, if the tendency of the critics to identify intelligence with wealth and cultivation with birth were less obvious. If the point be granted, we must accept the opinion of those historians who affirm that Athens was great in this age despite, and not because of, its democracy. Personally, I do not believe that this was so. I cannot admit that extirpation of the best was practiced in an age in which ideas were created and forms were perfected for their literary and artistic expression which have been the wonder and despair of the men of the highest cultivation from that day to this. Does it not seem like irony that a régime is charged with promoting mediocrity under which rose Sophocles, Herodotus, Phidias, Pericles, Euripides, Hippocrates, Socrates, and Thucydides? Much more important than the leveling tendency of the democracy was the facility it afforded for men of ability both to rise to the top and to find there a sympathetic and critical audience. So much for democracy.

The empire stands approved by the fact that the sharpest accusation now made against the democracy is that it failed to make the empire enduring. On this point the last word--unless it be that no political order has ever been enduring, and that those which have lasted the longest have been generally of the least worth--was said by Thucydides[33] over twenty-three hundred years ago, and I present in conclusion his masterly account of the circumstances which led to the downfall of the Athenian Empire:--

"During the peace while Pericles was at the head of affairs he ruled with prudence; under his guidance Athens was safe, and reached the height of her greatness in his time. When the war began, he showed that here, too, he had formed a true estimate of the Athenian power. He survived the commencement of hostilities two years and six months; and, after his death, his foresight was even better appreciated than during his life. For he had told the Athenians that if they would be patient and would attend to their navy, and not seek to enlarge their dominions while the war was going on, nor imperil the existence of the city, they would be victorious; but they did all that he told them not to do, and in matters which seemingly had nothing to do with the war, from motives of private ambition and private interest they adopted a policy which had disastrous effects in respect both of themselves and of their allies; their measures, had they been successful, would have brought honor and profit only to individuals, and, when unsuccessful, crippled the city in the conduct of the war. The reason of the difference was that he, deriving authority from his capacity and acknowledged worth, being also a man of transparent integrity, was able to control the multitude in a free spirit; he led them rather than was led by them; for, not seeking power by dishonest arts, he had no need to say pleasant things, but, on the strength of his own high character, could venture to oppose and even to anger them. When he saw them unseasonably elated and arrogant, his words humbled and awed them; and when they were depressed by groundless fears, he sought to reanimate their confidence. Thus Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact ruled by her greatest citizen. But his successors were more on an equality with one another, and, each struggling to be first himself, they were ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of affairs to the whims of the people. Such weakness in a great and imperial city led to many errors, of which the greatest was the Sicilian expedition; not that the Athenians miscalculated their enemy's power, but they themselves, instead of consulting for the interests of the expedition which they had sent out, were occupied in intriguing against one another for the leadership of the democracy, and not only grew remiss in the management of the army, but became embroiled, for the first time, in civil strife. And yet, after they had lost in the Sicilian expedition the greater part of their fleet and army, and were distracted by revolution at home, still they held out three years not only against their former enemies, but against the Sicilians who had combined with them, and against most of their own allies who had risen in revolt. Even when Cyrus, the son of the King, joined in the war and supplied the Peloponnesian fleet with money, they continued to resist, and were at last overthrown, not by their enemies, but by themselves and their own internal dissensions."

A summarization such as this, in style austere and authoritative, in content the product of penetrating insight and wonderful sense for political realities, not only bears witness to the greatness of Thucydides; when it is contrasted with similar analyses in Plato and Aristotle it testifies to the loss of power for sustained historical thinking which Greece suffered when men of genius were no longer enriched by the experience which came through living in a state like the imperial democracy of Athens. Not the least of its merits is its self-restraint. Having concluded that the reckless rivalries of her would-be leaders and the reckless dissensions of her citizens ruined Athens, he refrains from assigning a cause for the spirit of lawlessness. It is not Thucydides, but Alcibiades, who declared that democracy was "manifest folly"; not he, but Cleon, who reiterated that "a democracy cannot manage an empire." Thucydides does not despair of democracy. In the case of Athens it was less the unsoundness of the "majority" than the selfishness of the "remnant" that caused the nation to perish. For the demoralization of their leaders, however, the Athenians themselves held Socrates responsible, meaning to incriminate the Sophistic movement. Who shall say that they were wrong? And who shall hold democracy responsible for the evils of the Sophistic movement?

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. _Von des attischen Reiches Herrlichkeit_ (1877). In _Reden und Vorträge_, pp. 27 _ff._

2. Jebb, R.C. _The Age of Pericles_ (1889). In _Essays and Addresses_, pp. 104 _ff._

3. Meyer, Eduard. _Geschichte des Altertums_, IV (1901).

4. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. _Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen_ (1910): C. _Die athenische Demokratie_, pp. 95 _ff._

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

6. Cavaignac, E. _Histoire de l'Antiquité_, II: _Athènes_ (480-330), (1912).

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 18: Pages 27 _ff._]

[Footnote 19: Delbrück, _Die Perserkriege und die Burgunderkriege_, pp. 137 _ff._; Beloch, _Griechische Geschichte_, I (1893), p. 368, n. 3.]

[Footnote 20: Thucy., II, 36, 2.]

[Footnote 21: Thucy., II, 37 _ff._]

[Footnote 22: For the following sections see especially Aristotle's _Constitution of the Athenians_.]

[Footnote 23: Seven cents, equal in purchasing power to thirty-five cents perhaps.]

[Footnote 24: Greenidge, _Greek Constitutional History_ (1896), pp. 170 _ff._]

[Footnote 25: See particularly Ed. Meyer, _Die Sklaverei im Altertum_ (_Kleine Schriften_, pp. 169 _ff._).]

[Footnote 26: Pseudo-Xenophon, _State of the Athenians_, II, 10. (The translation used here and elsewhere, with a few modifications, is that of Dakyns.)]

[Footnote 27: Pseudo-Xenophon, _State of the Athenians_, II, 2 _ff._]

[Footnote 28: Pseudo-Xenophon, _State of the Athenians_, I, 2.]

[Footnote 29: Plut., _Pericles_, XI, 4.]

[Footnote 30: _Const. of the Athenians_, 24, 3.]

[Footnote 31: Bury, J.B., _A History of Greece_ (1900), p. 355.]

[Footnote 32: Plut., _Pericles_, 12. (Translated by Perrin.)]

[Footnote 33: Thucy., II, 65, 5 _ff._]

III

FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE

A curious legend about the Spartans arose in the age that followed the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. It was then reported that they were the kinsmen of the Jews. According to one version of the story, Judæa was founded by a Spartan named Judæus, who had accompanied the god Dionysus from Thebes on his triumphal progress through Asia. According to another account, the Spartans were descendants of Abraham, the strongest of the children of Israel having migrated to Greece at the time Moses led the remainder out of Egypt to the land of Canaan.[34]

This absurd legend, of which the Greek origin is unmistakable, seems to have been responsible for a certain _rapprochement_ between the two peoples. Despite the first book of the Maccabees, which affirms the contrary, it is, indeed, impossible that Areus I, king of Sparta between 308 and 264 B.C., wrote to Onias I, Jewish high priest, demanding and offering a community of goods, and that Jonathan Maccabæus, one hundred and fifty years afterwards, sent greetings to the Spartans, together with the word that the Jews "at all times without ceasing both in their feasts and other convenient days remembered them in the sacrifices which they offered, and in their prayers, as reason was, and as it becameth them to think upon their brethren."[35] Nothing is more unlikely than that the Spartans volunteered to divide their "cattle" and property with the Jews only a short time before they crushed with great bloodshed a communistic movement among their own citizens, unless it be the thought that the prayers and offerings of the Jews went up continually to Jehovah for the prosperity of heathen who were also backsliders. Nevertheless, that communications were actually established between the Judæa of Onias and Jonathan and the Sparta of Areus and Menalcidas, we cannot doubt; and, indeed, we have still other evidences that the alleged community of origin was turned to account by the Jews. There was evidently a considerable Jewish settlement in Sparta.

When we seek to discover the reason for this strange conjunction of the warrior community by the Eurotas and the religious community by the Jordan, we are helped by observing that in another Hellenistic legend the Jews are made the kinsmen of the gymnosophists, or naked philosophers, of India. The Greek mind was at this time fascinated by the great problem of subordinating the species of things to their proper genera, of perceiving the types by means of which individual objects became intelligible parts of a cosmos. It was the age of Aristotle and Theophrastus, Menander and the New Comedy, of idealistic portraiture. Hence the temptation was irresistible to bring into family relationship the various societies of men in which the principle of caste dominated; to regard it as unessential that in Judæa the people were there to support the priests, in Laconia to support the soldiers, in India to support the Brahmans. In each case there was found an odd community, in which, so far at least as the state could accomplish it, all human interests were subordinated to one, be it war and preparation for war, religious practices of a ritualistic character, or theosophical speculation.

Had the Greeks known it, there was a further analogy of an external sort between the Spartans and the Jews which they would have delighted to establish. For at about the same time that a richly diversified national life was narrowed down in Judæa to a single interest under the stress of complete preoccupation with the means of regaining Jehovah's favor for his chosen people, Sparta ruthlessly compressed and crushed a many-sided and progressive culture to the end that her citizens might become trained soldiers, having but one esprit, the esprit de corps of a professional army.

Prior to 580 B.C. Sparta was the home of poets and musicians. It was for a chorus of Spartan maidens, the élite of the noble families, that Alcman wrote the exquisite lines on the breathless calm of nature which Goethe has made familiar to all lovers of poetry. In hollow Lacedæmon--a valley rich with vegetation suggestive of bountiful harvests, down which the steel-gray Eurotas runs, swift and turbulent, over its rocky bottom, and over which rise on either side the snow-capped ridges of Taygetus and Parnon, their slopes resonant with the songs of the nightingales in the mating season--in this secluded spot, whose haunting beauty is a joy forever to all who have seen it, there was reared a famous temple of Athena, "Athena of the Brazen House," at a time when in Athens itself the city's protecting goddess had to be content with a crude, primitive sanctuary.

All this, and much besides, was observed, and the proper inferences drawn, by Eduard Meyer twenty years ago;[36] so that the amazement with which the English archæologists, who have excavated in Laconia during the past five or six years, report their remarkable "finds" is a source of no little amusement to the wary. They have discovered that prior to 580 B.C. Sparta was the maker of a kind of artistic pottery which was known and imitated in far-distant Cyrene and Tarentum; that she then had trade relations with Egypt and Lydia; that "combs, toilet-boxes, elaborate pins and bronze ornaments, seals, necklaces, and gold and ivory gewgaws" were made and used--witnesses _for_ "a golden age of Spartan art," _against_ the puritanical spirit traditionally attributed to early and middle Sparta.[37]

In Athens, as we have seen, supremacy in art and literature was attained by making universal among citizens the spirit and culture of the aristocracy, the whole people, thus ennobled, being supported on the shoulders of the tributary allies and enriched by the commercial advantages of maritime empire. The development of Sparta was directly the reverse of this. There the aristocracy, whose exuberance of life and responsiveness to sensuous impressions are attested with sufficient certainty, was destroyed in the sixth century B.C.

This century was one of repression in Greece generally; whence some historians have called it the epoch of the Greek Reformation. It is the time of the "Seven Wise Men," from one of whom came the Delphian motto "nothing in excess," a time in which the riotous joy of living and the fresh spontaneity of the so-called Ionian Renascence were subdued by a force, which might have been everywhere a blight,--as in Sparta,--but which in fact, when later the inspiration of the great Persian War came, exerted the gentle restraint which marks the classic in Greek art and letters. In this perilous period the aristocracy of Sparta perished, and with it the ideals and accomplishments of which it had been the exponent.

The instrument of repression of all that was superior to the average in Spartan life was the college of the five ephors, which Cicero compares with the tribunate in Rome. The ephors acquired such power that they made the continuance of even the kingship dependent upon the submission of the kings to their authority; and upon the kings, as upon all others, they enforced the new rules of law of which they were the living expositors.

The development of Sparta, like the development of Rome, from aristocratic to republican government is characterized by the absence of tyrants. The fact is that the tribunate in the one case and the ephorate in the other was tyranny in commission, the division of its powers between ten and five annually changing officers respectively having proved to be a sufficient safeguard against the concentration of executive power in the person of a single individual, be he an inherited king robbed of monarchical rights or an ambitious demagogue aiming at their restoration.

The new rules of law which the ephors enforced prescribed in minute detail the life of the citizen from the moment of his birth to the time of his death. They were the regulations of a military school in which war alone was taught, of military barracks when war was already declared. From seven years of age to sixty the entire energies of the male half of the population were directed toward being prepared for war. Boys and men drilled and hunted, learned to use their weapons and campaigned, danced and exercised, ate in the "messes" year in and year out, and never escaped the watchful eyes of trainers, subalterns, officers, and ephors.

No one in Sparta had to make his own way in life. His whole course was mapped out for him before he was born. No citizen had any business cares; for all trade and industry were tabooed, and the lands which he inherited he could not sell. Neither could he buy those of another. The agricultural laborers were serfs, the sullen and recalcitrant Helots, of whom there were fifteen to every Spartan; the clothing and weapons were made by the contented and tractable Perioecs, who outnumbered the Spartans five to one, and formed with their one hundred hamlets and their contiguous territories an insulating band round Helots and Spartans alike. Iron money was the only local currency, though silver had, of course, to be given in payment for the articles which were imported from abroad. These, however, were reduced to a minimum, and such foreigners as made their way through the wall of Perioecs were rounded up at intervals and forcefully expelled.

All the pretty things of their earlier life, the Spartans chose to do without. Coarse fare and unlovely houses, piazzas devoid of statues and inclosed in unsightly and flimsy public buildings; no theatres, no new music, no new ideas of any kind; mothers who gave up their little children and their grown sons without flinching; wives who violated fundamental instincts that their offspring might be more perfect; homeless boys who went half-naked winter and summer, slept in pens in the open air like cattle and got their food and living by their wits; girls who would hardly have known their brothers, brides who would hardly have recognized their husbands, mothers who would hardly have been able to distinguish their own sons, were it not that there were less than five thousand brothers, husbands, and sons in all--of such was the new Sparta, to whose citizens the ephors issued the annual command "to shave their mustaches and obey the laws." Long-haired and tangly-bearded, in groups of about fifteen each, they lounged and ate and slept in the three hundred tents, or barracks, which lined Hyacinth Street. There they kept their long spears and their armor.[38] Thence, clad in their scarlet cloaks, they issued in time of danger or of war to take their places, group by group, in the five carefully drilled regiments of which the Spartan phalanx was composed. Quietly, at an appointed hour in a single night, the whole army might steal away without confusion, trailing after it, on occasion, thirty-five thousand Helots to attend to the commissariat. Five thousand Perioec hoplites might follow at its heels, and with machine-like precision, to the sound of flutes played in the austere Dorian mode, ten thousand Lacedæmonian soldiers might advance into battle against foemen who were always comparatively ill-organized, and who often fled before a single blow was struck.

The secret of this strange perversion of the natural life of man is to be found in the declaration of war annually made by the ephors upon the Helots. They could not follow it up by a campaign waged in regular fashion; for that would have been to destroy their own serfs. But they picked out young soldiers, and sent them about among the Helots, with instructions to strike down secretly all who seemed restless or over-ambitious. The chief centre of Helot disaffection, at least in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., was on the far side of Mount Taygetus, in Messenia. There the yoke of serfdom chafed more than elsewhere, not least because those whose estates the Helots of Messenia tilled for one half the yield lived beyond the snow-capped ridge which shuts in that country on the east. The Messenians aspired to regain their lost independence. The Helots of the Eurotas Valley had no such ambition. They were, therefore, slower to revolt against injustice; but their aim, when an insurrection _did_ come, could be nothing less than the extermination of their masters, or at least an exchange of position with them. Moreover, their very proximity to the five villages which constituted the unwalled city of Sparta, and the very weight of their numbers made the Spartans live in ever-present fear of a massacre. Constant preparedness for war was, accordingly, a simple mandate of self-preservation.

* * * * *

The Spartans thought it unwise that any of their serf-tilled estates should lie in or outside the ring of Perioec land. It would not do to have fuses, so to speak, of Helots running through the wall to the outside world, or to have masses of Helots beyond the wall, exposed directly to foreign manipulation. Hence the formation of the Perioec ring set definite limits to the territory of Sparta. It could be enlarged in but one way--the widening of the ring by the reduction of more and more outlying states to the status of Perioecs. And it was in this way that the Spartan dominions were in fact enlarged in the seventh century B.C.[39]