The Evolution of States Part 11

[Footnote 212: Cp. Dureau de la Malle, _econ. polit. des Romains_, ii, 24 _sq._]

[Footnote 213: _Hist. Nat._ iii, ix, 16.]

[Footnote 214: _Id. ib._ 6.]

[Footnote 215: Livy, vii, 38.]

[Footnote 216: Mommsen, i, 36. Mommsen does not deny the deterioration.]

[Footnote 217: Sueton. _Julius_, c. 20.]

[Footnote 218: _E.g._ Jacob, _Hist. Inq. into the Prod. and Consump. of the Precious Metals_, 1831, i, 221 _sq._]

[Footnote 219: Cp. Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xii, 18 (41).]

[Footnote 220: Cp. Del Mar, _History of the Precious Metals_, 1880, pref. p. vi; _Money and Civilisation_, 1886, introd. p. ix.]

[Footnote 221: Cp. Polybius, cited by Strabo, iii, ii, -- 10; Jacob, _Hist. of the Precious Metals_, i, 176.]

[Footnote 222: Cp. Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. pol. des Romains_, ii, 441; Merivale, _History_, iv, 44.]

[Footnote 223: Jacob, as cited, i, 179.]

[Footnote 224: Gibbon, ch. xvii, Bohn ed. ii, 237. Cp. Prof. Bury's note in his ed., and Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. polit. des Romains_, i, 301 _sq._]

[Footnote 225: On this form of oppression cp. Guizot, _Essais sur l'histoire de France_, i; his note on Gibbon, Bohn ed. ii, 234; Dill, _Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire_, B. iii, ch.

2; and Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, pp. 188, 189.]

[Footnote 226: Spalding, _Italy_, i, 398, following Symmachus.]

[Footnote 227: Gibbon, ch. xvii, Bohn ed. ii, 237, citing _Cod.

Theodos._ xi, 28, 2. Cp. Dill, pp. 259-60.]

[Footnote 228: Cp. Dill, as cited, p. 260.]

[Footnote 229: Anastasius in his reign of twenty-seven years had saved an enormous treasure, whence it is arguable that Justinian's straits were due to bad management. But while he enlarged the expenditure, chiefly for military purposes, he also enlarged the revenue by very oppressive means, and practised some new economies. The fact remains that where Anastasius could h.o.a.rd with a non-imperialist policy, Justinian, re-expanding the Empire, could not. See Gibbon, ch. 40, _pa.s.sim_. Non-military expenditure could not account for the final deficit in Justinian's treasury. Even the great church of San Sofia does not seem to have cost above 1,000,000. _Id._ Bohn ed. iv, 335.]

[Footnote 230: "Here [in Egypt], as in Palestine, as in Syria, as in the country about the Euphrates, the efforts of the Persians could never have been attended with such immediate and easy success but for the disaffection of large ma.s.ses of the population. This disaffection rested chiefly on the religious differences" (Bury, _History of the Later Roman Empire_, ii, 214). Compare Gibbon, ch. 47, Bohn ed. v, 275; and Mosheim, _Eccles. Hist._, 5 Cent, pt. ii, ch. ii, ---- 2, 4, 5 (Reid's ed. pp.

179-81). As to the welcoming of the Saracens in Egypt by the Monophysites, see Gibbon, ch. 51, Bohn ed. vi, 59-60. Cp. Sharpe, _Hist.

of Egypt_, 6th ed. ii, 371; Milman, _Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii, 213; Finlay, i, 370-71.]

[Footnote 231: _E.g._ the _tome_ of St. Leo, the Laws of Marcian, the _Henoticon of Zeno_, and the laws of Justinian; and the _ecthesis_ and _typus_ of Heraclius and Constans II--all retailed by Gibbon, ch. 47.]

[Footnote 232: Finlay immediately afterwards (p. 139) declares of the choice of Byzantium by Constantine as his capital that "its first effect was to preserve the unity of the Eastern Empire." The admission is repeated on p. 140, where the whole credit of the stand made by the East is given to the administration. Cp. also the explanations as to Italy on p. 235, and as to Byzantium on p. 184. The theory of p. 138 is utterly unsupported, and on p. 289 it is practically repudiated once for all.

Cp. finally, pp. 217, 276, 298, 309, 328, 329, 347, 348, and pp. 361 and 371. On p. 276 we have the explicit admission that the hostility to the Roman Government throughout the East [in the sixth century] was everywhere connected with an opposition to the Greek "clergy."]

Chapter II

GREEK ECONOMIC EVOLUTION

-- 1

In republican Greece, as in republican Rome, we have already seen the tendency to the acc.u.mulation of wealth in few hands, as proved by the strifes between rich and poor in most of the States. A world in which aristocrats were finally wont to take an oath to hate and injure the demos[233] was on no very hopeful economic footing, whatever its glory in literature and art. Nor did the most comprehensive mind of all the ancient world see in slavery anything but an inst.i.tution to be defended against ethical attack as a naturally right arrangement.[234] In view of all this, we may reasonably hold that even if there had been no Macedonian dominance and no Roman conquest, Greek civilisation would not have gone on progressing indefinitely after the period which we now mark as its zenith--that the evil lot of the lower strata must in time have infected the upper. What we have here briefly to consider, however, is the actual economic course of affairs.

For the purposes of such a generalisation, we may rank the Greek communities under two cla.s.ses: (1) those whose incomes, down through the historic period, continued to come from land-owning, whether with slave or free labour, as Sparta; and (2) those which latterly flourished chiefly by commerce, whether with or without military domination, as Athens and Corinth. In both species alike, in all ages, though in different degrees as regards both time and place, there were steep divisions of lot between rich and poor, even among the free. Nowhere, not even in early "Lycurgean" Sparta, was there any system aiming at the methodical prevention of large estates, or the prevention of poverty, though the primitive basis was one of military communism, and though certain sumptuary laws and a common discipline were long maintained.

Grote's examination (pt. ii, ch. vi; ed. cited, ii, 308-30) of Thirlwall's hypothesis (ch. viii; 1st ed. i, 301, 326) as to an equal division of lands by Lycurgus, seems to prove that, as regards rich and poor, the legendary legislator "took no pains either to restrain the enrichment of the former or to prevent the impoverishment of the latter"--this even as regards born Spartans.

As to the early military communism of Sparta and Crete, see Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, -- 210; and as to the economic process see Fustel de Coulanges, _Nouvelles recherches sur quelques problemes d'histoire_, 1891, pp. 99-118.

Athens, on the other hand, was so situated as to become a place of industry and commerce; and from about the time of her great land-crisis, solved by Solon, her industrial and commercial interests determined her economic development. It follows from the success of Peisistratos that the ma.s.s of the people, blind to the importance of the political rights conferred upon them, were conscious of no such betterment from Solon's "shaking-off-of-burdens" as could make them averse to the rule of a "tyrant" who even laid upon them a new tax. The solution may perhaps lie in points of fiscal policy to which we have now no clear clue. Of Solon it is recorded[235] that he made a law against the export of any food produce of Attica save oil--the yield of the olive. This implied that of that product only was there in his opinion a redundancy; and we have it from the same source that he "saw that the soil was so poor that it could only suffice for the farmers," and so "gave great honour to trade," and "made a law that a son was not obliged to support his father if his father had not taught him a trade."[236] Himself a travelled merchant, he further recognised that "merchants are unwilling to despatch cargoes to a country which has nothing to export"; and we are led to infer that he encouraged on the one hand the export of manufactures, _plus_ oil, and on the other the importation of corn and other food. In point of fact, grain was already being imported in increasing quant.i.ty from the recently colonised lands of Sicily and the Crimea;[237] and if the imports were free or lightly taxed the inland cultivators would have a local grievance in the depression of the prices of their produce.

The town and coast-dwellers, on the other hand, found their account in the carriage and development of manufactures--vases, weapons, objects of art--which, with the oil, and latterly the wine export, bought them their food from afar. Athens could thus go on growing in a fashion impossible to an agricultural community on the same soil; and could so escape that fate of shrinkage in the free cla.s.s which ultimately fell upon purely agricultural Sparta. The upshot was that, after as before Solon, Athens had commercial interests among her pretexts for war, and so widened the sphere of her hostilities, escaping the worst forms of "stasis" in virtue of the expansibility of commerce and the openings for new colonisation which commerce provided and widened. But colonisation there had to be. Precisely by reason of her progressiveness, her openness to the alien, her trade and her enterprise, Attica increased in population at a rate which enforced emigration, while the lot of the rural population did not economically improve, and the probable change from corn-growing to olive-culture[238] would lessen the number of people employed on the land. Even apart from the fact of the popular discontent which welcomed the _tyrannis_ of Peisistratos, we cannot doubt that Solon's plans had soon failed to exclude the old phenomena of poverty. The very encouragement he gave to artisans to immigrate,[239]

while it made for the democratic development and naval strength of Athens, was a means of quickening the approach of a new economic crisis.

And yet he seems to have recognised the crux of population. The traditional permission given by the sage to parents to expose infants, implicitly avows the insoluble problem--the "cursed fraction" in the equation, which will not disappear; and in the years of the approach of Peisistratos to power we find Athens sending to Salamis (about 570) its first _kleruchie_, or civic colony-settlement on subject territory--this by way of providing for landless and needy citizens.[240] It was the easiest compromise; and nothing beyond compromise was dreamt of.

[The statement that Solon by law permitted the exposure of infants is made by Malthus, who gives no authority, but is followed by Lecky. The law in question is not mentioned by Plutarch, and I do not find it noticed by any of the historians. It is stated, however, by s.e.xtus Empiricus (_Hypotyp_. iii, 24) that Solon made a law by which a parent could put his child to death; and this pa.s.sage, which is cited by Hume in his _Essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations_, is doubtless Malthus's authority. Nothing nearer to the purpose is cited by Meursius in his monograph on Solon; but this could very well stand as a permission of infanticide, especially seeing that the practice is presumptively prehistoric. Pet.i.t writes: "Quemadmodum liberos tollere in patris erat positum potestate, ita etiam necare et exponere, idque, meo judicio, non tam moribus quam lege receptum fuit Athenis" (_Leges Atticae_, fol. 219, ed. Wesseling, 1742). Grote (ii, 470, _note_) p.r.o.nounces that the statement of s.e.xtus "cannot be true, and must be copied from some untrustworthy authority," seeing that Dionysius the Halicarna.s.sian (ii, 26) contrasts the large scope of the _patria potestas_ among the Romans with the restrictions which all the Greek legislators, Solon included, either found or introduced.

Dr. Mahaffy (_Social Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p. 165) believes "the notion of exposing infants from _economical_ motives not to have prevailed till later times" than the seventh century B.C., but he gives no reason for fixing any date. We may take it as certain that while the laws of Lycurgus, like the Roman Twelve Tables, enjoined or permitted the destruction of sickly or deformed infants, the general Greek usage allowed exposure. The express prohibition of it at Thebes (aelian, _Var. Hist._ ii, 7) implies its previous normality there and elsewhere (cp. however, Aristotle, _Pol._ vii, 16); and the _sale_ of children by their (free) parents was further permitted, except in Attica (Ingram, _History of Slavery_, p. 16); while even there a freeman's children by a slave concubine were slaves.]

On the other hand, the laws even of Sparta, framed with a view to the military strength of the State considered as the small free population, were ultimately evaded in the interests of property-holding, till the number of "pure Spartans" dwindled to a handful.[241] Under a system of primogeniture, with a rigid severance between the upper cla.s.s and the lower, there could in fact be no other outcome. Here, apart from the revolts of the helots and the chronic ma.s.sacres of these by their lords, which put such a stamp of atrocity on Spartan history,[242] the stress of cla.s.s strife seems to have been limited among the aristocracy, not only by systematic infanticide, but by the survival of polyandry, several brothers often having one wife in common.[243] Whether owing to infanticide, or to in-breeding, or to preventives, families of three and four were uncommon and considered large, and special privileges offered to the fathers.[244] As always, such devices failed against the pressures of the main social conditions. All the while, of course, the _perioikoi_ and the enslaved helots multiplied freely; hence the policy of specially thinning down the latter by over-toil[245] as well as ma.s.sacre. In other States, where the polity was more civilised, many observers perceived that the two essential conditions of stability were (_a_) absolute or approximate equality of property, and (_b_) restraint of population, the latter principle being a notable reaction of reason against the normal practice of encouraging or compelling marriage.[246]

Aristotle said in so many words that to let procreation go unchecked "is to bring certain poverty on the citizens; and poverty is the cause of sedition and evil";[247] and he cites previous publicists who had sought to solve the problem. Socrates and Plato had partly contemplated it; and the idealist, as usual, had proposed the more brutal methods;[248] but Aristotle, seeing more clearly the population difficulty, perhaps on that account is the less disposed towards communism.

As medical knowledge advanced, it seems certain, the practice of abortion must have been generally added to that of infanticide in Greece, as later in Rome. See Aristotle, _Politics_, vii, 16; Plutarch, _Lycurgus_, c. 3; and Plato, _Theaetetus_, p. 149 (Jowett's trans. iv, 202), as to the normal resort to abortion. The Greeks must have communicated to the Romans the knowledge of the arts of abortion, as they did those of medicine generally. But it does not appear that with all these checks population really fell off in Greece until after the time of Alexander. Before that time it may very well have fallen off in Athens when she lost her position as sovereign and tribute-drawing State. The tribute would tend to maintain a population in excess of the natural amount. Dr.

Mahaffy (_Rambles and Studies in Greece_, 4th ed. p. 11--a pa.s.sage not squared with the data in _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 328, 558) accepts the old view of a general and inexplicable depopulation. One of the _loci cla.s.sici_ on that head, in the treatise _On the Cessation of Oracles_ (viii) attributed to Plutarch but probably not by him, is searchingly examined by Hume at the close of his essay _Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations_, and the critic comes to the conclusion that the extreme decay there a.s.serted cannot have taken place. He was in all probability right in arguing that the number of slaves in Attica had been enormously exaggerated in the figures of Athenaeus (cp. Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, i, 109, note). There is reason to conclude, however, that Hume was unduly incredulous on some points. Strabo (refs. in Thirlwall, viii, 460) had found an immense decay of population in Greece more than a century before Plutarch; and his details prove a process of shrinkage which must have lasted long. In any case, a relative depopulation took place after the conquests of Alexander, from the operation of socio-economic causes, which are indicated by Finlay (_History of Greece_, Tozer's ed. i, 15; cp. Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 328, and _The Greek World under Roman Sway_, 1890, p. 218). Broadly speaking, the Greeks went to lands where wealth was more easily acquired than in their own. Further depopulation took place under the Romans, partly from direct violence and deportation, partly from fiscal pressure, partly from the economic causes already noted.

Thirlwall, in his closing survey, proceeding on Polybius,[249]

confidently decides that the main cause of depopulation was domestic and moral. Such a theory cannot be sustained. Polybius evidently had no clear idea of the facts, since he a.s.serts that "in our time" and "rapidly" there took place in Greece a "failure of offspring" (or "dearth of children"), which left cities desolate and land waste; and goes on to ascribe it to habits of luxury, which either kept men from marrying or made them refuse to rear more than a few of their children.

The whole theorem is haphazard. Cities and lands could not have been so depopulated.[250] There must have been, in addition to slaughter, a drain of population to lands where the conditions were more advantageous. Nor is there any good reason for believing that child-exposure had suddenly and immensely increased. Thirlwall says that marriages were "unfruitful"; but this is not the statement of Polybius.

It is true that paederasty would count for much in lowering character; but it had been common in Greece centuries before the time of Polybius, and had not affected fecundity. As we have seen,[251] fecundity fell in Sparta for other reasons.

As between Sparta and Athens, the main difference was that Athenian life was for a long period more or less expansive, while that of Sparta, even in the period of special vigour, was steadily contractive, as regarded quant.i.ty and quality of "good life." At Sparta, as above noted, the normal play of self-interest in the governing cla.s.s brought about a continuous shrinkage in the number of enfranchised citizens and of those holding land, till there were only 700 of the former and 100 of the latter--this when there were still 4,500 adult Spartans of "pure"

descent, and 15,000 Laconians capable of military service. Even of the hundred landowners many were women, the estates having thus evidently aggregated by descent through heiresses.[252] It mattered little that this inner ring of rich became, after the triumph over Athens and in the post-Alexandrian period, as luxurious as the rest of Greece:[253] the evil lay not in the mode of their expenditure, but in the mode of their revenue. Agis IV and his successor Cleomenes thought to put the community on a sound footing by abolition of debts and forcible division of the land; but even had Agis triumphed at home or Cleomenes maintained himself abroad, the expedient could have availed only for a time.

Acc.u.mulation would instantly recommence in the absence of a scientific and permanent system.

Schemes for promoting equality had been mooted in Greece from an early period (see Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 6, 7, 8). Thus, "Pheidon the Corinthian, one of the oldest of legislators, thought that the families and number of citizens ought to continue the same." Phaleas of Chalcedon proposed to keep fortunes and culture equal; and Hippodamus the Milesian had a system of equality for a State of 10,000 persons. Some States, too, put restraints on the acc.u.mulation of land. But, save for transient successes, such as that of Solon at Athens, and of the compromise at Tarentum (see Aristotle, v, 5; and Muller, _Dorians_, Eng. tr. ii, 184-86), there was no adequate adjustment of means to ends, as indeed there could not be. Aristotle's own practical suggestions show the hopelessness of the problem.

In the commercial cities, where industry was encouraged and wealth tended to take the form of invested capital, it could not readily get into so few hands; and as commerce developed and the investments were more and more in that direction, there would arise an idle rich cla.s.s which could be best got at by way of taxation. In such communities, though the division and hostility of rich and poor were as unalterable as in Sparta, there was more elasticity of adjustment; so that we see maritime and trading communities like Heracleia and Rhodes maintaining their oligarchic government, with vicissitudes, down into the Roman period,[254] somewhat as Venice in a later age outlasted the other chief republics of Italy. The ruin of Corinth, though indirectly promoted by cla.s.s strifes,[255] need not have occurred but for the Roman overthrow.[256]

As regards Athens, it is necessary to guard against some misconceptions concerning the life conditions even of the Periclean period. Public buildings apart, it was not a rich or rich-looking city; on the contrary, partly by reason of the force of democratic sentiment, its houses were mostly mean, the well-to-do people presumably having their better houses in the country, where the land was now mostly owned by them. After the destruction of the city by Xerxes (480 B.C.), the first need was felt to be its refortification on a larger scale, even sepulchres as well as the remains of private houses being made to yield materials for the walls.[257] At the same time the Piraeus and Munychia were walled on a still greater scale--the whole const.i.tuting a public work of extraordinary scope, rapidly carried through by the co-operation of the whole of the citizens. The further gradual rebuilding of the city, as well as the fresh flocking of the foreign trading population to the now safe Piraeus, would help, with the public works of Pericles, to set up the conditions of general prosperity which prevailed before the Peloponnesian war.[258] According to Demosthenes, the public men of the generation of Salamis had houses indistinguishable from those of ordinary people, whereas in the orator's own day the statesmen had houses actually finer than the public buildings.[259] This would be the natural result of the control of the confederate treasure resulting from the Athenian supremacy. But Dicaearchus belongs to the same period, and his account represents the ma.s.s of the city as poor in appearance, the houses small and with projecting stairways, and the streets crooked.[260] We know further from Xenophon that there were many empty s.p.a.ces, some of them doubtless made by the customary destruction of the houses of those ostracised. There was thus a considerable approach to a rather straitened equality among the ma.s.s of the town-dwelling free citizens, who, despite the meanness of their houses, had luxuries in the form of the public baths and gymnasia.

Before Salamis, again, the revenue drawn from the leases of the silver mines of Laurium had been equally divided among the enfranchised citizens--an arrangement which had yielded only a small sum to each, but which represented a notable adumbration of a communal system, with the fatal implication of a basis in slavery.[261] The devotion of this fund[262] to the building of a navy was the making of the Athenian maritime power; whence in turn came the ability of Athens to extort tribute from the allied States, and therewith to achieve relatively the greatest and most effective expenditure on public works[263] ever attempted by any government. It was this specially created demand for and endowment of the arts and the drama that raised Athens to the artistic and literary supremacy of the ancient world, and, by so creating a special intellectual soil, prepared the ensuing supremacy of Athenian philosophy.[264] But the Periclean policy of endowment went far beyond even the employment of labour by the State on the largest scale; it set up the principle of supplying something like an income to mult.i.tudes of poorer free citizens--an experiment unique in history. The main features of the system were: (1) Payments for service to the members of the Council of Five Hundred; (2) payments to all jurors, an order numbering some six thousand; (3) the _theorikon_ or allowance of theatre money to all the poorer citizens; (4) regular payments to the soldiers and sailors; (5) largesses of corn, or sales at reduced prices; (6) sacrificial banquets, shared in by the common people; (7) the sending out of "kleruchies," or bodies of quasi-colonists, who were billeted on the confederate cities, to the number of five or six thousand in ten years. Without taking the _a priori_ hostile view of the aristocratic faction, who bitterly opposed all this--a view endorsed later by Plato and Socrates--the common-sense politician must note the utter insecurity of the whole development, depending as it did absolutely on military predominance.[265] The mere cessation of the expenditure on public works at the fall of Athens in the Peloponnesian war was bound to affect cla.s.s relations seriously; and parties, already bitter, were henceforth more decisively so divided.[266]

In the second period of Athenian ascendency, after the fall of the Thirty Tyrants and of Sparta, when the virtual pensioning of citizens begun by Pericles had been carried to still further lengths,[267] we find Xenophon, the typical Greek of culture and military experience, proposing a financial plan[268] whereby Athens, instead of keeping up the renewed practice of oppressing the confederate cities in order to pay pensions to its own poorer citizens, should derive a sufficient revenue from other sources. In particular he proposed (1) the encouraging of foreigners to settle in the city in larger numbers, by exempting them from military service and from all forms of public stigma, and by giving them the waste grounds to build on. The taxes they would have to pay as aliens would serve as revenue to maintain the citizens proper. (2) A fund should be established for the encouragement of trade which in some unexplained way should yield a high interest, paid by the State, to all investors. (3) The State should build inns, shops, warehouses, and exchanges, chiefly for the use of the foreigners, and so further increase its revenue. (4) It should build ships for the merchant trade, and charter them out upon good security. (5) Above all, it should develop by slave labour the silver mines of Laurium, to the yield of which there was no limit. The public, in fact, might there employ thrice as many slaves as the number of citizens; and it should further set about finding new mines.

We have here the measure of the Athenian faculty to solve the democratic problem as then recognised. The polity of Pericles was bound to perish, alike because it negated international ethics and because it had no true economic basis. The comparatively well-meaning plan of Xenophon could not even be set in motion, so purely fanciful is its structure. The income of the poorer citizens is to come from the taxes and rents paid by foreigners, and from mines worked by slave labour; the necessary army of slaves has to be bought as a State investment. It is as if the Boers of the Transvaal had proposed to live idly in perpetuity on the dues paid by the immigrants, all the while owning all the mines and drawing all the profits. It is hardly necessary to say, with Boeckh,[269] that the thesis as to the yield of the mines was a pure delusion; and that the idea of living on the taxation of foreigners was suicidal.[270] The old method, supplemented perforce by some regular taxation of the taxable citizens, and by the special exaction of "liturgies" or payments for the religious festival drama and other public services from the rich, was maintained as long as might be; industry tending gradually to decay, though the carrying trade and the resumed concourse of foreigners for a time kept Athens a leading city. Never very rich agriculturally, the middle and upper cla.s.ses had for the rest only their manufactures and their commerce as sources of income; and as the manufactures were mostly carried on by slave labour, and were largely dependent on the State's control of the confederate treasure, the case of the poorer free citizens must necessarily worsen when that control ceased. About 400 B.C. the Athenians had still a virtual monopoly of the corn trade of Bosporus, on which basis they could develop an extensive shipping, which was a source of many incomes; but even these would necessarily be affected by the new regimen which began with the Macedonian conquest.