Problems in Greek history Part 17

[157:1] Cf. -- 10.

[158:1] With the usual zeal of a specialist, who not only makes a hero his own, but defends him against every criticism, Droysen even justifies Alexander's introduction of the Oriental obeisances at his court. As Holm observes, such ceremonies, in themselves impolitic as regards free subjects, were quite inconsistent with the familiarities of the drinking-parties, which Alexander would not deny himself. A Persian King would have understood this, not so a Macedonian. The latest estimate, that of Holm (iii. 403 _sq._), appears to me also far the best. Yet he too, seems to attribute too much consciousness to the youthful Alexander.

[159:1] Thus Timoleon set up in his house a shrine to [Greek: Automatia], the spontaneous impulse which had led him to many brilliant successes. Cf. my _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 110.

[160:1] We hear of the complaints of Macedonians and Greeks. The complaints of the Persians have not been transmitted to us; but as they were certainly more just and well-founded, and as the king was living in their midst, where he could not but hear them, are we rash in a.s.serting that they must have been fully as important in influencing his decision?

Could the many Persian princesses, married to high Macedonian officers, and their native retinues, have been satisfied or silenced without large concessions?

[165:1] In the _Historical Review_ for 1887, pp. 317, _sqq._

[166:1] It is to be noted that the Achaemenid kings, though a.s.serting for themselves a Divine origin, did not claim to be G.o.ds. I think the first Greek who received in his lifetime supra-human honours was Lysander, who was flattered by altars, &c., in Asia Minor after his great victory.

CHAPTER IX.

POST-ALEXANDRIAN GREECE.

[Sidenote: Tumults of the Diadochi:]

[Sidenote: their intricacy;]

-- 69. The period which follows the death of Alexander is one so complicated with wars and alliances, with combinations and defections, with reshapings of the world's kingdoms[168:1], with abortive efforts at a new settlement, that it deters most men from its study, and has certainly acted as a damper upon the student who is not satisfied with the earlier history, but strives to penetrate to the closing centuries of freedom in Greece. There is very little information upon it, or rather there are but few books upon it, to be found in English.

Thirlwall has treated it with his usual care and justice; and to those who will not follow minute and intricate details, I have recently given, in my _Greek Life and Thought_, a full study of the social and artistic development which took place in this and the succeeding periods of h.e.l.lenism in Greece and the East. Hertzberg's and Droysen's histories, the one confined in s.p.a.ce to Greece proper, the other in time to the fourth and third centuries B.C., are both thorough and excellent works.

Holm's final volume, which will include the same period, is not yet accessible, so that I cannot notice it.

[Sidenote: their wide area.]

[Sidenote: The liberation of Greece.]

A great part of this history was enacted, not in Greece, or even in Greek Asia Minor, but in Egypt, in Syria, in Mesopotamia, and even in Upper Asia. The campaigns which determined the mastery over Greece were usually Asiatic campaigns, and each conqueror, when he arrived at Athens, endeavoured to enlist the support of Greece by public declarations of the freedom, or rather the emanc.i.p.ation, of the Greeks.

This constant and yet unmeaning manifesto, something like the Home Rule manifestoes of English politicians, is a very curious and interesting feature in the history of the _Diadochi_, as they are called, and suggests to us to consider what was the independence so often proclaimed from the days of Demetrius (306 B.C.) to those of the Roman T.

Flamininus (196 B.C.), and why so unreal and shadowy a promise never ceased to fascinate the imagination of an acute and practical people.

[Sidenote: Spread of monarchies.]

[Sidenote: The three h.e.l.lenistic kingdoms.]

For, on the other hand, it was quite admitted by all the speculative as well as the practical men of the age that monarchy was not only the usual form of the h.e.l.lenistic State, but was the only means of holding together large provinces of various peoples, with diverse traditions and diverse ways of life. From this point of view the monarchy of the Seleucids in Hither Asia, and that of the Antigonids over the Greek peninsula, are far more interesting than the simpler and more h.o.m.ogeneous kingdom of the Ptolemies in Egypt[170:1]. For the Greeks in Egypt were never a large factor in the population. They settled only two or three districts up the country; they shared with Jews and natives the great mart of Alexandria, and even there their influence waned, and the Alexandria of Roman days is no longer a h.e.l.lenistic, but an Egyptian city. The persecutions by the seventh Ptolemy, who is generally credited with the wholesale expulsion of the Greeks, would only have had a transitory effect, had not the tide of population been setting that way; the persecutions of the Jews in the same city never produced the same lasting results. The Syrian monarchy stands out from this and even from the Macedonian as the proper type of a h.e.l.lenistic State. Unfortunately, the history of Antioch is almost totally lost, and the very vestiges of that great capital are shivered to pieces by earthquakes. Of its provinces, one only is tolerably well-known to us, but not till later days, through the _Antiquities_ of Josephus, and the _New Testament_[171:1].

[Sidenote: New problems.]

-- 70. How did the Greeks of Europe and of Asia accommodate themselves to this altered state of things, which not only affected their political life, but led to a revolution in their social state? For it was the emigrant, the adventurer, the mercenary, who now got wealth and power into his hands, it was the capitalist who secured all the advantages of trade; and so there arose in every city a moneyed cla.s.s, whose interests were directly at variance with the ma.s.s of impoverished citizens.

Moreover the king's lieutenant or agent was a greater man in the city than the leading politician. Public discussions and resolutions among the free men of Athens or Ephesus were often convincing, oftener exciting, but of no effect against superior forces which lay quietly in the hands of the controlling Macedonian.

[Sidenote: Politics abandoned by thinking men,]

We may then cla.s.sify the better men of that day as follows. First there was a not inconsiderable number of thoughtful and serious men who abandoned practical politics altogether, as being for small States and cities a thing of the past, and only leading to discontent and confusion. These men adopted the general conclusion, in which all the philosophical schools coincided, that peace of mind and true liberty of life were to be obtained by retiring from the world and spending one's days in that practice of personal virtues which was the religion of a nation that had no creed adequate to its spiritual wants.

[Sidenote: except as a purely theoretical question,]

[Sidenote: with some fatal exceptions.]

Nevertheless among other topics of speculation these men sometimes treated of politics; and when they did condescend to action, it was to carry out trenchant theories, and to act on principle, without regard to the terrible practical consequences of imposing a new order of things on a divided or uneducated public. The Stoic philosophers, in particular, who interfered in the public life of that day, were dangerous firebrands, not hesitating at the murder of an opponent; for were not all fools criminal, and was not he that offended in one point guilty of all? Such men as the Sphaerus who advised the _coup d'etat_ of the Spartan Cleomenes[172:1], and the Blossius who stimulated the Gracchi into revolution, and the Brutus who mimicked this sort of thing with deplorable results to the world in the murder of Caesar,--all these were examples of the philosophical politician produced by the h.e.l.lenistic age.

[Sidenote: Dignity and courage of the philosophers]

[Sidenote: shown by suicide.]

But if there were mischievous exceptions, we must not forget that the main body of the schools kept alive in the Greek mind a serious and exalted view of human dignity and human responsibility,--above all, they trained their hearers in that n.o.ble contempt for death which is perhaps the strongest feature in h.e.l.lenistic as compared with modern society; for there can be no doubt that Christian dogmas make cowards of all those who do not live up to their lofty ideal. The Greeks had no eternal punishment to scare them from facing death, and so we find whole cities preferring suicide to the loss of what they claimed as their rightful liberty[173:1]. People who do this may be censured; they cannot be despised.

[Sidenote: Rise of despots on principle.]

-- 71. Secondly, most philosophers had become so convinced of the necessity of monarchy, if not of the rule of one superior spirit, as better than the vacillations and excitements of a crowd, that many of their pupils considered themselves fit to undertake the duty of improving the ma.s.ses by absolute control; and so we have a recrudescence, in a very different society, of those tyrants whose merits and defects we have already discussed at an earlier stage in this essay[173:2]. The long series of pa.s.sages from essays _That Monarchy is best_, which we may read in the commonplace book of Stobaeus[173:3], is indeed followed by a series of pa.s.sages _On the Censure of Tyranny_; but the former is chiefly taken from h.e.l.lenistic philosophical tracts, whereas the latter is drawn wholly from older authors, such as Xenophon, who lived in the days of successful republics.

[Sidenote: Probably not wholly unpopular.]

Even the literary men, who are always anti-despotic in theory, confess that many of these later tyrants were good and worthy men; and the fact that Gonatas, the greatest and best of the Antigonids, constantly 'planted a tyrant' in a free State which he found hard to manage, proves rather that this form of government was not unacceptable to the majority, than that he violated all the deepest convictions of his unmanageable subjects for the sake of an end certain to be balked if he adopted impolitic means. The force of imitation also helped the creation of tyrannies in the Greek cities; for were not the h.e.l.lenistic monarchies the greatest success of the age? And we may a.s.sume that many sanguine people did not lay to heart the wide difference between the requirements of the provinces of a large and scattered empire, and those of a town with a territory of ten miles square.

These then were phenomena which manifested themselves all over the peninsula,--aye, even at times at Athens and Sparta, though these cities were protected by a great history and by the sentimental respect of all the world from the experiments which might be condoned in smaller and less august cities.

[Sidenote: Contemptible position of Athens and Sparta in politics,]

[Sidenote: except in mischievous opposition to the new federations,]

-- 72. But despite these clear lessons, the normal condition of the old leaders of the Greek world was hardly so respectable as that of the modern tyrannies. It consisted of a constant policy of protest, a constant resuscitation of old memories, an obsolete and ridiculous claim to lead the Greeks and govern an empire of dependencies after the manner of Pericles or Lysander. The strategic importance of both cities, as well as their hold upon Greek sentiment, made it worth while for the great h.e.l.lenistic monarchs to humour such fancies; for in those days the means of defending a city with walls or natural defences were still far greater than the means of attack, even with Philip's developments of siege artillery,--so that to coerce Athens or Sparta into absolute subjection by arms was both more unpopular and more expensive than to pay political partisans in each, who could at least defeat any active external policy. But if from this point of view these leading cities with all their dignity had little influence on the world, from another they proved fatal to the only new development of political life in Greece which had any promise for small and separate States. And this brings us to the feature of all others interesting to modern readers,--I mean the experiment of a federation of small States, with separate legislatures for internal affairs, but a central council to manage the external policy and the common interests of all the members.

[Sidenote: whose origin was small and obscure.]

-- 73. This form of polity was not quite new in Greece or Asia Minor, but had remained obscure and unnoticed in earlier and more brilliant times.

We may therefore fairly attribute to the opening years of the third century B.C. its discovery as an important and practical solution of the difficulty of maintaining small States in their _autonomy_ or independence as regards both one another and the great Powers which threatened to absorb them.

[Sidenote: The old plan of a sovran State not successful.]

The old idea had been to put them under the _hegemony_, or leadership, of one of the great cities. But these had all abused the confidence reposed in them. Athens, Sparta, Thebes, had never for one moment understood the duty of ruling in the interests, not only of the governing, but of the governed. The Athenian law, by which subject-cities could seek redress before the courts of Athens, had been in theory the fairest; and so Grote and Duruy have made much of this apparent justice. But the actual hints we find of individual wrong and oppression, and the hatred in which Athens was held by all her dependencies or allies, show plainly that the democratic theory, fair as it may seem in the exposition of Grote, did not work with justice.

Accordingly, we find both in northern and in southern Greece the experiment of federations of cities attaining much success, and receiving much support in public opinion.

[Sidenote: The leading cities stood aloof from this experiment.]

[Sidenote: Athens and the aetolians]

It is most significant that these new and powerful federations were formed outside and apart from the leading cities. Neither Athens nor Sparta, nay, not even Thebes, and hardly even Argos, would condescend to a federation where they should have only a city vote in conjunction with other cities; and so the new trial was deprived both of their advice and of the prestige of their arms and arts. If, for example, both Athens and Thebes, but especially the former, had joined the aetolian League of wild mountaineers, who had wealth and military power, but no practice in the peaceful discussion and settlement of political questions, they would probably have influenced the counsels of the League for good, and saved it from falling into the hands of unprincipled mercenary chiefs, who regarded border wars as a state of nature, and plunder as a legitimate source of income.