Problems in Greek history Part 13

All these theorists, though in close contact with politicians, were themselves outside the sphere of practical affairs, whether from choice or compulsion. As they looked upon the changing phases of society which make up that complicated and various whole called Greek history, they were led to one general conclusion. No State, however perfectly framed, however accurately balanced, was intended by Nature to last for ever.

Polities, like individuals, had their youth, development, and decay, and would in the lapse of time give way to newer growths. In this we find one of the most curious contrasts between the buoyant, hopeful Greek and the weary, saddened modern. The former had no hope of the permanent and indefinite improvement of the human race; the latter adopts it almost as an historical axiom. Each modern State hopes to escape the errors and misfortunes which have ruined its predecessors, and makes its preparations for a long futurity. The Greeks were fuller in their experience or fainter in their hope; they would have regarded our expectations as chimerical, and our antic.i.p.ations as contradicted by all the past records of human affairs.

FOOTNOTES:

[110:1] The tract _de Repub. Athen._ handed down to us among Xenophon's works, is now, by general agreement, a.s.signed to some author who lived earlier, and wrote it before the close of the Peloponnesian war. It does not, therefore, express the individual opinion of Xenophon, though it is an attack upon the Athenian democracy by a determined and bitter aristocrat. Upon the details, cf. my _Gk. Lit._ ii. p. 47.

[111:1] G. G. iii. pp. 221 _sq._

[113:1] [Greek: onete mallon e oikeios.]

[114:1] Cf. on this point Polybius, xi. 13, whom I have quoted in my _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 416.

[116:1] Cf. the excellent summary in Holm iii. 54-7.

[116:2] Cf. Holm iii. 96 _sqq._

[118:1] That is, the Restoration of its legitimate democracy. Cf. my _History of Greek Literature_, part ii. cap. v.

[118:2] Roughly speaking, 400-340 B.C.

[121:1] This Professor Freeman has admirably shown in his _History of Federal Governments_; and it is generally admitted by all competent scholars.

[121:2] It is perhaps worth calling attention to the fact that the tract on Athens in the Xenophontic collection has the same t.i.tle as the newly-discovered treatise, so that some distinction is necessary in citing them. For the present the novelty of the Aristotelian book has cast the older doc.u.ment into oblivion.

[122:1] Cf. [Greek: Ath. Pol.] c. 28. Holm (ii. p. 583) controverts my use of Plutarch's quotation from this chapter of Aristotle, and thinks that I had mistranslated the term [Greek: beltistos]. The full text now shows that Holm was mistaken and I was right.

[123:1] It is well to add, lest the reader might be misled by a false a.n.a.logy, that this supervision applied to the appointment of teachers, and the regulation of teaching and of school discipline. The Greeks would have despised any system such as ours, which limits the State control to examinations, and which tests efficiency by success in them.

The modern notion of disregarding the moral and social conditions under which the young are brought up, provided they can answer at a high-cla.s.s examination, would have struck them as wicked and barbarous.

[123:2] Cf. the citation in Cicero _de Repub._ iv. 3. 3.

[124:1] The makeshift of boarding-schools was unknown to the ancients, but at Sparta, young men were kept together even in their hours of leisure, and away from their homes, so that we must here admit a qualified exception. But what we know of this separate life is rather that of a barrack than of a school.

[126:1] Seventh Edition. It had been formerly the last chapter of my _Rambles and Studies in Greece_.

[127:1] It was an artistic device, to make this paternal despot a foreign prince, living in a bygone age, of the same kind as the device of aeschylus to narrate the Persian war from the Oriental side, and make Darius a capital figure. No Greek or contemporary person could have sustained the figure of Cyrus in Xenophon's book. I need only remind the reader that the tract on the Athenian State now preserved among Xenophon's works is by an unknown author, and therefore an authority independent of Xenophon.

[130:1] Grote's _Plato and the other Companions of Socrates_, 3 vols.

(Murray, London.) His _Aristotle_ is posthumous and fragmentary, and does not include the _Politics_. Mr. Jowett's expected Essays on the _Politics_ may perhaps supply this deficiency.

CHAPTER VIII.

PRACTICAL POLITICS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY.

[Sidenote: The practical politicians.]

-- 54. Let us now pa.s.s on to the practical politicians of the day, or to those who professed to be practical politicians, and see what they had to propose in the way of improving the internal condition of Greek society, as well as of saving it from those external dangers which every sensible man must have apprehended, even before they showed themselves above the political horizon.

[Sidenote: Isocrates,]

[Sidenote: his anti-Persian policy.]

Let us begin with Isocrates, whose pamphlets, though written with far too much attention to style, and intended as rhetorical masterpieces, nevertheless tell us a great deal of what filled the minds of thoughtful men in his day. He sees plainly that the Greeks were wearing themselves out with internecine wars and perpetual jealousies, and he opined, shrewdly enough, that nothing but a great external quarrel would weld them together into unity, and make the various States forget their petty squabbles in the enthusiasm of a common conflict against a foreign foe.

He saw plainly enough that the proper enemy to attack was the power of Asia. For it was ill-cemented and open to invasion; it was really dangerous to the liberty even of the h.e.l.lenic peninsula,--almost fatal to that of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, and moreover so full of wealth as to afford an enormous field for that legitimate plunder which every conqueror then thought his bare due at the hands of the vanquished.

[Sidenote: No large ideas of spreading h.e.l.lenic culture.]

Isocrates had not the smallest idea of raising the Asiatic nations, or of civilizing them[132:1]. No Greek down to Aristotle, nay, not even Aristotle himself, ever had such a notion, though he might concede that isolated men or cities could possibly, by careful and humble imitation of h.e.l.lenic culture, attain to a respectable imitation of it. Isocrates'

plain view of the war policy against Persia was simply this: first, that the internal quarrels of Greece would be allayed; secondly, that a great number of poor and roving Greeks would attain wealth and contentment; thirdly, 'the Barbarians would learn to think less of themselves[132:2].'

[Sidenote: Who is to be the leader of Greece?]

His first proposal was that Athens and Sparta, the natural leaders of Greece, should combine in this policy, divide the command by a formal treaty, and so resume their proper position as benefactors and promoters of all h.e.l.lenedom.

But as years went on, the impotence and the strife of these powers made it only too plain that this was no practical solution; so he turns in an open letter to Philip of Macedon, who was gradually showing how to solve the problem of h.e.l.lenic unity, and advises him to use his power, not for the subjugation of the Greeks, but to lead them in a victorious campaign into Asia.

But in Philip they had already found that common enemy against whom they should have united, if voluntary union was ever again possible among them; and their miserable failure to do so showed plainly that the days of independent States throughout Greece were numbered, and that the first neighbouring power with organization and wealth was certain to pluck the over-ripe fruit of h.e.l.lenedom.

[Sidenote: Demosthenes another ideal figure in this history.]

-- 55. This brings us by natural transition to Demosthenes, on whose life and policy it is very necessary to say a few words, seeing that they have been, like so many other topics in Greek history, distorted by the specialists, and made the ground of sentimental rhetoric instead of being sifted with critical care. To utter anything against Demosthenes thirty years ago was almost as bad as to say a word in old Athenian days against the battle of Marathon. This battle was so hymned and lauded by orators and poets that had you suggested its importance in the campaign to be overrated, had you said that you believed the alleged numbers of the Persians to be grossly exaggerated, you would have been set down as an insolent and unpatriotic knave. In the same way the scholars have laid hold of Demosthenes; they have dwelt not only upon the matchless force of his eloquence, but upon the grammatical subtleties of his Greek, till they are so in love with him that whatever is said in his favour is true, and whatever appears to be against him is false.

As I have not spent the whole of a long life either in commenting on this great author or in vindicating for him all the virtues under heaven, I may perhaps be better able than greater scholars to give a fair estimate of his political merits.

[Sidenote: He sees the importance of a foreign policy for Athens]

[Sidenote: against Persia]

[Sidenote: or Macedonia.]

Demosthenes at the outset of his career saw plainly, like Isocrates, that a foreign policy was necessary to give not only dignity, but consistency, to the counsels of Athens; and he too at the outset, misconceiving the real power of Philip, thought that Persia was the serious foe[134:1], and should be the object of most importance to Athenian politicians. Darius Ochus, the last vigorous king of Persia, had made such military preparations for the reconquest of his rebellious provinces as to alarm all the Asiatic Greeks and conjure up the phantom of a new Persian war. But presently the real danger set aside this bugbear; the activity and military skill of Philip, added to his discovery or utilization of the Thracian gold mines, made him clearly the future lord of the h.e.l.lenes if he could prevent them from combining against him for a few years.

[Sidenote: Grote on Demosthenes.]

The narrative of this famous struggle, carried on mainly by the eloquence of Demosthenes on one side, and the diplomacy of Philip on the other, forms one of the most attractive pages in history; and nowhere is it better told than in the eleventh volume of Grote's work. The cause of Demosthenes naturally attracted the Radical historian[135:1], who sees in the power of Macedon nothing but the overthrow of democracy, of discussion, of universal suffrage; and hence the relapse of society into a condition worse and less developed than what had been attained by all the labours of great and enlightened reform.

[Sidenote: A. Schafer on Demosthenes.]

The cause of Demosthenes also attracted Arnold Schafer, who having chosen the orator and his works for his own speciality, spent years in gradually increasing admiration for this choice, till Demosthenes became for him a patriot of spotless purity and a citizen of such high principle that all charges against him are to be set down as calumnies.

This enthusiasm has reached so far that if in the collection of law speeches which the orator composed for pay, and often to support a very weak case, there are found illogical arguments or inconsistencies with other speeches on a.n.a.logous subjects, such flaws are set down as evidence that the particular speech is spurious, and cannot have emanated from so n.o.ble a character as Demosthenes[136:1].

[Sidenote: Very different estimate of the ancients.]