Problems in Greek history Part 10

[Sidenote: No representation in Greek a.s.semblies.]

-- 40. This statement requires some further ill.u.s.tration to the modern reader, who thinks, I suppose rightly, that the surest and most stable of governments is that based upon the free resolve of the whole nation.

But the Athenian imperial democracy was no such government. In the first place, there was no such thing as _representation_ in their const.i.tution. Those only had votes who could come and give them at the general a.s.sembly, and they did so at once upon the conclusion of the debate[98:1]. There was no Second Chamber or Higher Council to revise or delay their decisions; no Crown; no High Court of Appeal to settle claims against the State. The body of Athenian citizens formed the a.s.sembly. Sections of this body formed the jury to try cases of violation of the const.i.tution either in act or in the proposal of new laws.

[Sidenote: No outlying members save Athenian citizens settled in subject towns.]

The result was that all outlying provinces, even had they obtained votes, were without a voice in the government. But as a matter of fact they had no votes, for the States which became subject to Athens were merely tributary; and nothing was further from the ideas of the Athenians than to make them members of their Imperial Republic in the sense that a new State is made a member of the present American Republic.

[Sidenote: Similar defect in the Roman Republic.]

This it was which ruined even the great Roman without any military reverses, and when its domination of the world was unshaken. Owing to the absence of _representation_, the Empire of the Roman Republic was in the hands of the city population, who were perfectly incompetent, even had they been in real earnest, to manage the government of the vast kingdoms their troops had conquered. In both cases the outsiders were governed wholly for the benefit of the city crowd.

[Sidenote: Hence an extended Athenian empire not maintainable.]

The mistakes and the injustices which resulted in the Roman executive were such that any able adventurer could take advantage of the world-wide discontent, and could play off one city faction against the other. It is not conceivable that any other general course of events would have taken place at Athens, had she become the ruler of the h.e.l.lenic world. Her Demos regarded itself as a sovran, ruling subjects for its own glory and benefit; there can, therefore, be no doubt that the external pressure of that widespread discontent which was the primary cause of the Peloponnesian war, would have co-operated with politicians within, if there were no enemies without, and that ambitious military chiefs, as at Rome, would have wrested the power from the sovran people either by force or by fraud.

Hence I contend that the result of the Peloponnesian war even in its largest crisis had little import in the world's history. That the little raids and battles, the capture of a couple of hundred Spartans, or the defeat of twenty ships should still be studied with minuteness, and produce libraries of modern criticism, is due solely to the power of the historian and the just preeminence of the famous language in which he wrote his book.

[Sidenote: The glamour of Thucydides.]

-- 41. This is, I think, the most signal instance on record of the falsification of the proper _perspective_ of history by individual literary genius. It was a commonplace in old days that Achilles and Agamemnon, Ulysses and Diomede, all the famous heroes of the Trojan war, would have died in obscurity and pa.s.sed out of sight but for the voice of the inspired poet. How much truer is it that Phormion and Brasidas, Gylippus and Lamachus would have virtually disappeared from history but for the eloquence of the Attic historian! Pericles would have remained an historic figure, and so does Lysander (who is almost beyond the period), whether any single historian intended it or not. The rest were important in their day and to their city, not beyond these limits. The really great spirits from whom the Athens of that day derives her eternal supremacy, which no Lysander could take away, are, except Pericles, never mentioned in all his work. No one could ever suspect, from this severe and business-like narrative, that the most splendid architects, sculptors, and dramatic poets the world has yet seen were then jostling each other in the streets of Athens.

[Sidenote: His calmness a.s.sumed.]

It seems thankless to complain of what Thucydides has not done, instead of acknowledging what he undertook to do and has performed with extraordinary ability. Never was the history of a long war written with more power, judgment, and, I was going to say, impartiality. But I honestly believe that his book would have been far inferior had it indeed been coldly impartial; and I think Grote has shown, what I have supplemented in my _Greek Literature_, that strong personal feelings underlie the apparent calmness of his decisions[101:1].

[Sidenote: He is backed by the scholastic interest,]

-- 42. This estimate of Thucydides is, however, one which will make its way but slowly in the English cla.s.sical world,--by which I mean that large and important body who teach cla.s.sics to schoolboys and college students,--and the schoolmaster interest so completely commands our literary journals that any opinion which runs counter to scholastic traditions is sure to be set down there also as the outcome of rashness or of ignorance. For Thucydides, in addition to his just influence as a great writer, has enlisted in his favour all those to whom Greek grammar with its intricacies is the most divine of all pursuits.

[Sidenote: on account of his grammatical difficulties.]

If his speakers, as one of them tells us, strove hard to conceal what they had to say under new and startling forms, in order to outrun in smartness the cleverness of their audience, and play a sort of intellectual hide-and-seek with their critics, so Thucydides himself plays hide-and-seek with the grammarians, both ancient and modern. To make out exactly what he means his speakers to say, and to render it with every shade of nicety into modern English, is a task to which many acute men have devoted years, and upon its success very considerable reputations depend. It is but natural that this school, or these schoolmen, should become so enamoured of his intricacies as to love them with a love pa.s.sing the love of women, and consequently to resent bitterly any word of depreciation which affects the importance of their idol.

[Sidenote: He remains the special property of critical scholars.]

Enthusiastic study of any subject is always praiseworthy; the insistence upon minute accuracy, and contempt for slovenliness in writing, are always to be admired and encouraged, for it is to these qualities in the minute scholars that we owe much of our precision in thinking, and still more the sense of clearness and correctness in style. To this cla.s.s, therefore, let Thucydides remain forever the foremost of books; but let them not bully us into the belief that because they have studied his grammar more carefully than any other, they are therefore to decide that he is absolutely faultless as a narrator, and absolutely trustworthy as a historian.

[Sidenote: Herodotus underrated in comparison.]

I have already dealt with this latter point[103:1]; what I am here concerned with is the exaggerated place given in our modern histories to the petty feuds and border-raids of his often tedious chronicle,--tedious only because the events he describes are completely trivial. Herodotus, on the other hand, is apt to be underrated in these modern days. The field he covers is so wide, and the chances of error in observation so great, that it is impossible he should not often be found wrong. But what would our notions of earlier Greece or Asia Minor be without his marvellous prose epic?

[Sidenote: The critics of Thucydides.]

The reader will pardon me for expressing my satisfaction, that this comparative estimate of the two great historians which I published some twenty years ago, and which is still regarded by many of my English critics as a mere paradox, has now become a widely and solidly defined belief among the best German critics. Of course they began by exaggerating the new view. Muller-Strubing especially, as has been freely exposed by his opponents, has advanced from criticism to censure, from censure to contempt of Thucydides. This is of course silly pedantry. Thucydides was a very great historian, and whoever cannot recognize it, shows that he has no proper appreciation for this kind of genius. But let the reader consult the pa.s.sages in which the newest, and perhaps the best, of Greek histories, Holm's, gives a summary of the researches on the contrasted masters of historiography, and he will see that the result is much the same as that which I have long advocated.

Holm argues (ii. pp. 346 _sq._) that Herodotus has been underrated; he argues (_ibid._ pp. 369 _sq._) that Thucydides has been overrated. Let me call particular attention to the details of the latter estimate, as one to which I thoroughly subscribe. But let no one charge me with despising the great Athenian; I believe I appreciate his greatness far better than do his random panegyrists.

-- 43. Let us pa.s.s by antic.i.p.ation to another remarkable case of distorted perspective, likewise due to transcendent literary ability.

[Sidenote: The Anabasis of Xenophon.]

The next great author who has fascinated the world by the grace and vividness of his style is the Athenian Xenophon. In his famous _Anabasis_, or Expedition of the Ten Thousand to a.s.sist the insurgent Cyrus, he has told us the story of what must have happened (on a smaller scale) many times before, of Greek mercenaries being induced by large pay to serve in the quarrels of remote Asiatic sovrans, and finding their patron a.s.sa.s.sinated or defeated. They had then their choice of taking service under his rival (with the chance of being ma.s.sacred), or of cutting their way out of the country to some h.e.l.lenic colony. It seems to have been mainly due to the ability and eloquence of Xenophon that the present very large and formidable body of mercenaries chose and carried out the latter course. His narrative of this Retreat, in which he claims to have played the leading part, is one of the most delightful chapters of Greek history.

[Sidenote: The weakness of Persia long recognized.]

But in all the modern accounts, without exception, both the events and the narrator have a.s.sumed what seem to me gigantic proportions. It is not the least true that the Greeks were dependent upon this source for their knowledge of the weakness of the Persian Empire. The campaigns of Agesilaus in Asia Minor, which were almost synchronous, and not by any means suggested (so far as we know) by the expedition, showed the same facts clearly enough. The military weakness of the Empire was already a commonplace. Its financial power, in the face of the poor and divided Greek States, was the real difficulty in the way of a h.e.l.lenic conquest.

[Sidenote: Reception of the Ten Thousand on their return.]

The manner in which the Ten Thousand were received, upon their return to Greek lands, shows all this plainly enough. Instead of being hailed as pioneers of a new conquest, as heroes who had done what n.o.body dreamed of doing before, they were merely regarded as a very large and therefore very dangerous body of turbulent marauders, who had acquired cohesion and discipline by the force of adversity, and who might make a dangerous attack on any civilized city, unless a little time were gained, during which their strength and harmony would give way to defections, and quarrels among themselves. Their ill-gotten wealth would soon be squandered, and they must then be induced to seek new service separately, and not in such a ma.s.s as to intimidate their employers.

[Sidenote: The army dissipated.]

This is the rational account of what historians often represent as the shabby, or even infamous, conduct of the Lacedaemonians, then the leading power in Greece. The policy they adopted was as prudent as it was successful, and the Ten Thousand melted away as quickly as they were gathered; but we can hardly hope that many of them retired into so innocent and cultivated a leisure as Xenophon did in after years.

[Sidenote: Xenophon's strategy.]

[Sidenote: His real strategy was literary.]

-- 44. So much for the expedition; now a word or two concerning this famous Xenophon. If his expedition had indeed made the figure in the contemporary world that it does in his _Anabasis_ and in modern histories, who can doubt that he would have been recognized as one of the chief military leaders of the age; and, as his services were in the market, that he would have been at once employed, either as a general or as a minister of war, in the memorable campaigns which occupied the Greeks after his return? Why did he never command an army again[106:1]?

Why was he never tried as a strategist against Epaminondas, the rising military genius of the age? The simple fact is that he has told us the whole story of his Retreat from his own point of view; he has not failed to put himself into the most favourable light; and it is more than probable that the accounts given by the other mercenaries did not place him in so preeminent a position. The _Anabasis_ is a most artistic and graceful self-panegyric of the author, disguised under an apparently candid and simple narrative of plain facts, perhaps even brought out under a false name,--Themistogenes of Syracuse,--to help the illusion; nor was it composed at the spur of the moment, and when there were many with fresh memories ready to contradict him, but after the interest in the affair had long blown over, and his companions and rivals were scattered or dead.

[Sidenote: A special favourite of Grote.]

It is of course an excellent text for Grote to develop into his favourite historical sermon, that the broad literary and philosophical culture of the Athenian democracy fitted any man to take up suddenly any important duties, even so special as the management of a campaign.

But however true or false this may be, it is certain that Xenophon's contemporaries did not accept him as a military genius, and that he spent his after years of soldiering in attendance upon a second-rate Spartan general as a volunteer and a literary panegyrist.

[Sidenote: Xenophon on Agesilaus and Epaminondas.]

[Sidenote: Injustice of the h.e.l.lenica.]

-- 45. For in me the suspicion that Xenophon may have been guilty of strong self-partiality in the _Anabasis_ was first awakened by the reflection that his later works show the strongest partiality for his patron, and the most n.i.g.g.ardly estimate of the real master of them all, the Theban Epaminondas. If instead of spending his talents in glorifying the Spartan king--a respectable and no doubt able but ordinary personage, he had undertaken with his good special knowledge to give us a true account of the military performances of Epaminondas, then indeed he would have earned no ordinary share of grat.i.tude from all students of the world's greatness. He was in the rare position of being a contemporary, a specialist, standing before the greatest man of the age, and capable of both understanding his work and explaining it to us with literary perfection; yet his _h.e.l.lenica_ is generally regarded as a work tending to diminish the achievements of the Theban hero[108:1].

Happily we have here means to correct him, and to redress the balance which he has not held with justice. Shall we believe that when he had no one to contradict him, and his own merits to discuss, he is likely to have been more strictly impartial?

[Sidenote: Yet Xenophon is deservedly popular.]

Xenophon will never cease to be a popular figure, and most deservedly; for he added to the full education of an Athenian citizen in general intelligence, in politics, and in art, the special training given by the conversations of Socrates, and the tincture of occasional abstract thinking. But this was only a part of his education. He learned knowledge of the world and of war by travel and exciting campaigns, and completed his admirable and various training by a close intimacy with the best and most aristocratic Spartan life, together with that devotion to field-sports which is so far more gentlemanly and improving than training for athletics. In the whole range of Greek literature he appears the most cultivated of authors, in his external life he combines everything which we desire in the modern gentleman, though his superficiality of judgment and lesser gifts place him far below Thucydides, or even Polybius.

FOOTNOTES:

[92:1] Mr. Sayce will not admit even this, and indeed the habit of appropriating previous work, which Greek literary honesty seems to have allowed, must naturally offend an original inquirer like Mr. Sayce, whose ideas are so often pilfered without acknowledgment. But Greek historians seldom name their authority unless they are about to differ from it, and criticise or censure it. It is for this reason that I distrust the usual enumeration of Herodotus' travels (e.g. Busolt, G. G.