Problems in Greek history Part 11

ii. 90 _sq._), which a.s.sumes that whatever lands he describes he must himself have seen. I feel sure that he borrowed a great deal, even a great many bare facts, from other books. But I call attention with pleasure to the suggestion of Holm (ii. 330), who shows that with the extended trade relations of Periclean Athens, information upon Pontus, Persia, and Egypt was of great practical value, and that the story of the ten talents reward given him by the Athenians may point to a real reward for his valuable reports, which were most important to their 'Foreign Office.' Hence the great and immediate popularity of his work.

Holm feels as I do, that Herodotus has been underrated, in comparison with Thucydides (G. G. ii. 346).

[96:1] ii. 11, 12, 16-20.

[96:2] I call it the work of Aristotle, in spite of the many critical doubts expressed in England, for I cannot ignore the persistent citations of Plutarch and of many good Greek grammarians and antiquarians, who express no word of doubt, nor do the peculiarities of style seem to me to prove anything more than carelessness in revision, or perhaps the work of a pupil under the master's direction. Cf. -- 53.

[98:1] Cicero specially mentions this as a grave defect in Greek democracies, and compares it with the Roman precaution of making the voting by tribes or centuries a formal act at a distinct time. Here is this important and little-known pa.s.sage (_pro Flacco_, cap. vii.): 'Nullam enim illi nostri sapientissimi et sanctissimi viri vim concionis esse voluerunt; quae scisceret plebes, aut quae populus juberet, summota concione, distributis partibus, tributim et centuriatim descriptis ordinibus, cla.s.sibus, aetatibus, auditis auctoribus, re multos dies promulgata et cognita, juberi vetarique voluerunt. _Graecorum autem totae respublicae sedentis concionis temeritate administrantur._' The Roman safeguards were, however, quite insufficient, as the course of history proved. The Athenians also had some safeguards, especially in preparing resolutions for the a.s.sembly by a previous council; but these too were almost useless.

[101:1] Cf. my _Hist. Gk. Lit._ ii. 1, chap. 5.

[103:1] Above, -- 28.

[106:1] Some of the historians note navely enough, that the performance of Xenophon is very wonderful, seeing he had never learned the art of war, or commanded in any previous campaign. Wonderful indeed, but was it a real fact? Holm, who seems to me really awake to the common-sense difficulties which seldom strike learned men, feels this, but accounts for it (iii. 182) in a very surprising way. I may premise that Xenophon is perhaps his favourite authority, whom he defends against all attacks with great spirit. His answer to the question why Xenophon never again commanded an army, is this: He could have, but he would not, because he was exiled from his native city, and despised the career of a mercenary chief! In other words a very ambitious young man, who had deliberately chosen the profession of foreign adventure, when he had succeeded and shown his transcendent powers, stops short because he despises that profession. Is not this most improbable? Had Xenophon brought home with him a really first-rate reputation, he would not have been required to fight the battles of his native city as a mercenary leader: he would very soon have recovered himself in popularity, and have become a leading Athenian. It was not therefore because he could and would not, but because he would and could not, that he retired into obscurity.

There is no reason to think he had excited any great or lasting odium at Athens. We hardly know for certain why he was banished.

[108:1] This is stoutly denied by Holm, G. G. iii. 15, and 181 _sq._, who cites Breitenbach's Edition and Stern's researches in support of his opinion. He regards Xenophon as perfectly impartial to others throughout his _h.e.l.lenica_. Whether he was so to himself in the _Anabasis_ is of course another question, which Holm has not touched. It may be perfectly true, as Holm insists, that not a single false statement has ever been proved against the author of the _h.e.l.lenica_, but does this demonstrate that he was impartial? It is in the selection, in the suppression, in the marshalling of his facts; it is in his _perspective_ that disguised partiality seems to have been shown.

CHAPTER VI.

POLITICAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY B.C.

[Sidenote: Literary verdict of the Greeks against democracy.]

-- 46. What may most properly make the modern historian pause and revise his judgment of the Athenian democracy, is the evident dislike which the most thoughtful cla.s.ses, represented by these great historians, and by the professed pupils of Socrates, displayed to this form of society[110:1]. We are now so accustomed to histories written by modern Radicals, or by men who do not think out their politics, that we may perhaps be put off with the plea that the democracy which these authors and thinkers disliked and derided, and which some of them tried to overthrow, was a debased form of what had been established under Pericles, and that it was the accidental decay or the accidental abuses of democracy which disgusted them, whereas its genuine greatness had been clearly manifested by the great century of progress which had now come sadly to a close.

[Sidenote: Vacillation of modern critics.]

[Sidenote: Grote's estimate of Pericles]

Ernst Curtius, a German _savant_ of the highest type, has so little thought out this subject that on one page we find him saying that the voluntary submission of the people to a single man, Pericles, was a proof of the high condition of their State; whereas on another he says their voluntary submission to a single man, Cleon, is a proof of its degeneracy. But we can hardly expect any real appreciation of the working of a democracy from a German professor brought up in the last generation. Indeed his inconsistencies, and his hypotheses of decay and regeneration in the Athenian Demos at various moments, are ably dissected by Holm in a valuable appendix to his chapter on Athens in 360 B.C.[111:1] But our dealing is rather with Grote, who knew perfectly the conditions of the problem. He argues that Cleon, on the whole, and without military ability, tried to carry out the policy of Pericles, and that the policy of Pericles was a sound and far-seeing one, which would have preserved Athens through all her dangers, had she steadily adhered to it.

-- 47. I have already discussed at length the narrow basis of the Athenian imperial democracy, and expressed my judgment that even great successes would soon have brought about its fall.

[Sidenote: compared with Plato's.]

[Sidenote: The war policy of Pericles.]

But I join issue with Grote, and side with Plato, in thinking that the policy of Pericles, even within the conditions imposed upon him by the circ.u.mstances just mentioned, was so dangerous and difficult that no cautious and provident thinker could have called it secure. Plato goes so far as to say that Pericles had made the Athenians lazy, frivolous, and sensual. Without actually indorsing this, we are warranted by the course of history to say that the hope of holding a supremacy by merely keeping up with all energy and outlay a naval superiority already existing and acknowledged, was truly chimerical. Pericles thought that by making the city impregnable--which was then, against the existing means of attack, quite feasible--and by keeping the sea open, he could amply support his city population and make them perfectly independent even of the territory of Attica. While they could derive money and food from their subjects and their commerce, they might gather in the rural population from the fields, and laugh at the enemy from their walls until his means were exhausted, or he was compelled to retreat for the purpose of protecting his own coasts against a hostile fleet.

[Sidenote: His miscalculations.]

Thucydides tells us in affecting language how this experiment actually turned out,--what was the misery of the country people crowded into the city without proper houses or furniture, sleeping in sheds and nooks of streets; what was the rage of the farmers when they saw their homesteads go up in flames, and the labour of years devastated with ruthless completeness. Pericles had not even reckoned with the immediate effects of his singular policy. Still less had he thought of the sanitary consequences of overcrowding his city, which must in any case have produced fatal sickness, and therefore deep indignation among those who suffered from its visitation, even though no one could have antic.i.p.ated the frightful intensity of the plague which ensued.

[Sidenote: He depended on a city population against an army of yeomen.]

But a far larger and more philosophical objection may be based upon the consideration that no city population, trusting mainly to money for a supply of soldiers and sailors, is likely to hold its own permanently against an agricultural population fighting, not for pay, but for the defence of its liberties, and with the spirit of personal patriotism. If you abolish the yeoman of any country, and trust merely to the artisan, you destroy the backbone of your fighting power; and no outlay will secure your victory if a yeoman soldiery is brought into the field against you and well handled. This was perfectly felt in Thucydides'

day; for he makes the Spartan king, when invading Attica, specially comment on the fact that the Athenian power was acquired by money rather than native[113:1]; and on this he bases his antic.i.p.ation that the army of Peloponnesian farmers will prevail. It would surely have been a safer and a better policy to extend the area of Athenian yeomen, and secure a supply of hardy and devoted soldiers as the basis of a lasting military and naval power.

[Sidenote: Advantages of mercenaries against citizen troops.]

-- 48. It will be urged, and it was urged in those days, that mercenary forces could be kept at sea more permanently than a body of farmers, who must go home frequently to look after their subsistence and work their fields. This is quite true; but mercenaries without a citizen force to keep them in order were always a failure, they became turbulent and unmanageable, and left their pay-master in the lurch when any new chance of immediate gain turned up. Besides, as the event proved in the next century, when Philip of Macedon rose to power, a mercenary force under a monarch will always defeat mercenaries under leaders directed by the discussion, the hesitation, the vacillation of a debating a.s.sembly[114:1].

[Sidenote: The smaller States necessarily separatists.]

The only excuse, therefore, for Pericles' policy was the impossibility of doing anything else with the materials he had at his disposal; and his materials were thus crippled because the Athenian democracy as a ruling power had not the confidence of the subject States. In fact, so long as these were _subjects_, liable to oppression in any moment of panic or of pa.s.sion, no solidarity, no common feeling of patriotism, no real union could possibly be attained. It has been rather the fashion, since Grote's influence has prevailed, to attribute the breakdown of all attempts at an empire among free Greeks to the incurable jealousy and the love of separatism in their small States. I fancy that at no period in the world's history could any small communities have easily been persuaded to submit to this kind of union, which was built on far too narrow a foundation, and was far too distinctly worked for the almost exclusive benefit of the leading city.

It is necessary to insist upon these things,--the want of representation in a common a.s.sembly, the want of scope for talent in the outlying States, the difficulty of redress against the dominant people if they transgressed their State-treaties,--especially for a practical writer, who holds that historical a.n.a.logies are most serviceable, and help to explain both ancient and modern history. But we must see clearly that the a.n.a.logies are genuine, and that we are not arguing from an irrelevant antecedent or to an irrelevant consequent.

[Sidenote: Attempt at federation]

Yet the necessity of combination was so great, and so keenly felt during the tyrannical ascendency of Sparta at the opening of the next century, that several attempts were made to obtain the advantages, while avoiding the evils, of the old Athenian supremacy. The first, which was made immediately after the battle of Cnidos (394 B.C.) and which seems to have been originated by Thebes, is pa.s.sed over in silence by all our literary authorities, and was only discovered upon the evidence of coins. We know that Rhodes, Cnidos, Naxos, Samos, Ephesus, belonged to it, and that they adopted for their common coinage an old Theban emblem--Heracles throttling the snakes. The existence of this confederation seems to justify the hopes of Epaminondas to make his city a naval power, and thus protects the great Theban from a charge of political vanity, often repeated[116:1].

[Sidenote: The second Athenian Confederacy;]

[Sidenote: its details,]

The second was the well-known Athenian Confederacy of 377 B.C. of which, however, the details are only preserved in an important inscription (No.

81 in Mr. Hicks' collection) which gives us most interesting information. It included Byzantium, Lesbos, Chios, Rhodes, Euba, and also Thebes. Western tribes and islands brought up the members to seventy in number. But its declared object was mainly to protect these members against Spartan tyranny, and it acknowledged the Persian supremacy in Asia Minor. The safeguards against Athenian tyranny, which were far more important, are a clause forbidding the acquisitions of _cleruchies_, and the appointment of a synod of the allies to sit at Athens, in which Athens was not represented. Decrees proposed either in the Athenian a.s.sembly or in this synod (_synedrion_) must be sanctioned by the other body before becoming law[116:2].

[Sidenote: its defects.]

As might be expected, all these Leagues failed. The precautions against the tyranny of the leading States only hampered the unity and promptness of action of the League, and did not allay jealousy in the smaller, or ambition in the greater, members. Yet these abortive attempts are important to the historian, as showing the intermediate stages in the history of Confederations between the old Attic Empire and the Achaean League.

[Sidenote: Political theories in the fourth century.]

-- 49. The century at which we have now arrived in our survey--the fourth before Christ--was eminently the age of political theories devised by philosophers in their studies; and they give us the conclusions to which able thinkers had come, after the varying conflicts which had tested the capacities of all the existing States to attain peace with plenty at home, or power abroad. The Athenian supremacy had broken down; the Spartan, a still more complete _hegemony_, as the Greeks called it, had gone to pieces, not so much by the shock of the Theban military power, as by its own inherent defects. Epaminondas has pa.s.sed across the political sky, a splendid meteor, but leaving only a brief track of brilliancy which faded into night.

[Sidenote: Greece and Persia.]

[Sidenote: Theoretical politics.]

And in every generation, if the military efficiency of Persia grew weaker, her financial supremacy became more and more apparent. In the face of all these brilliant essays and signal failures, in the face of the acknowledged intellectual supremacy of the Greeks, coupled with their continued exhibitions of political impotence in foreign policy, it was fully to be expected that Greek thinkers should discuss the causes of these contrasts, and endeavour to ascertain the laws of public happiness and the conditions of public strength. And so there were a series of essays, of which several remain, on the Greek State and its proper internal regulation, and a series of solutions for the practical difficulties of the day, especially the external dangers to which the h.e.l.lenic world was exposed. These doc.u.ments form the main body of the splendid prose Literature of the Attic Restoration, as I have elsewhere called it[118:1], and of the period which closed with the actual solution of the difficulties in foreign politics by the famous Philip of Macedon[118:2].

[Sidenote: Inestimable even to the practical historian.]

The historian of Greece must evidently take into account these speculations, though they be not strictly history; but the facts can hardly be understood and appreciated without the inestimable comments of the greatest thinkers and writers whom the country produced.

[Sidenote: Plato.]

[Sidenote: Xenophon.]