The Evolution of States Part 12

The attempt of Boeckh (bk. i, ch. viii) to confute the ordinary view as to the poverty of the Attic soil cannot be maintained. (See above, p. 99.) Niebuhr (_Lectures on Roman History_, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 264) doubtless goes to the other extreme in calling the Greeks bad husbandmen. Compare the contrary view of c.o.x, _General History_, 2nd ed. p. 4. But even good husbandry on a poor soil could not compete with the output of Bosporus and Egypt. And in the Peloponnesian war Attic agriculture sank to a low level (Curtius'

_History_, Eng. tr. iv, 71; bk. v, ch. ii).

As to the incomes made in the Bosporus corn-trade, cp. Grote, x, 410, 412, 413. When it became possible thus to draw a revenue from investment, the Athenian publicists rapidly developed the capitalist view that the lending of money capital is the support of trade. See Demosthenes, as cited by Boeckh, bk. i, ch. ix.

-- 2

In the economic readjustments, finally, which followed on the rise and subdivision of the empire of Alexander, Greece as a whole took a secondary place in the h.e.l.lenistic world, though Macedonia kept much of its newly acquired wealth. While commerce pa.s.sed with industry and population to the new eastern cities, the remaining wealth of Greece proper would tend to pa.s.s into fewer hands,[271] thus _pro tanto_ narrowing more than ever the free and cultured cla.s.s, and relatively enlarging that of the slaves.

[Boeckh (bk. i, ch. viii) dwells on the variety of manufactures, and here gives a juster view than does Dr. Mahaffy, who (_Social Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p. 406) oddly speaks of the lack of machinery as making "any large employment of hands in manufacture impossible." But the main manufacture, that of arms, was peculiarly dependent on the Athenian command of the confederate treasure; and it does not appear that the other manufactures were a source of much revenue till just before the period of political decline, when other causes combined to check Athenian trade. By that time the aristocratic cla.s.s had weakened in their old prejudice against all forms of commerce (Mahaffy, as cited; Boeckh, as cited), which had hitherto kept it largely in the hands of aliens, this long after the time when, at Corinth and other ports, the ruling cla.s.s had been const.i.tuted of the rich traders; and after the special efforts of Solon to encourage and enforce industry. Apart from this prejudice, which in many States put a political disability on traders, commerce had always been hampered by war and bad policy.

Dr. Mahaffy (_Social Life_, p. 405) somewhat over-confidently follows Heeren and Boeckh in deciding that none of the Greek trade laws were in the interests of particular trades or traders; but even if they were not, they none the less hampered all commerce.

Cp. Boeckh, bk. i, ch. ix. As Hume observed, the high rates of profit and interest prevailing in Greece show an early stage of commerce. Cp. Boeckh, bk. i, chs. ix, xxii.]

Those who had not shared in the plunder of Asia, to begin with, would find themselves badly impoverished, for the new influx of bullion would raise all prices. It is notable, on the other hand, that philosophy, formerly the study of men with, for the most part, good incomes, and thence always a.s.sociated more or less with the spirit of aristocracy,[272] was now often cultivated by men of humble status.[273]

The new rich then appear to have already fallen away somewhat from the old Athenian standards; while the attraction of poorer men was presumably caused in part by the process of endowment of the philosophic schools begun by Plato in his will--an example soon followed by others.[274] It is probable that as much weight is due to this economic cause as to that of political restraint in the explanation of the prosperity of philosophy at Athens at a time when literature was relatively decaying.

The Roman conquest, again, further depressed Greek fortunes by absolute violence, hurling whole armies of the conquered into slavery,[275] and later setting up a new foreign attraction to the Greeks of ready wit and small means. They presumably began to flock to Rome or Egypt or Asia Minor as the conditions in Greece worsened; and that process in turn would be promoted by the gradual worsening of the Roman financial pressure. It is notable that a rebellion of Attic slaves occurred in 133 B.C., synchronously with the first slave-rising in Sicily--a proof of fresh oppression all round.[276] The Romans had retained the Greek systems of munic.i.p.al government, and had begun by putting on light taxes.[277] But these surely increased;[278] and the Mithridatic war, in which Athens had taken the anti-Roman side, changed all for the worse.

Sulla took the city after a difficult siege, ma.s.sacred most of the citizens, and entirely destroyed the Piraeus; whereafter Athens practically ceased for centuries to be a commercial centre. Corinth, which had been razed to the ground by Mummius, was ultimately reconstructed by Caesar as a Roman colony, and secured most of what commerce Greece retained. Twenty years before, Pompey had put down the Cilician pirates, a powerful community of organised freebooters that had arisen out of the disbanding of the hired forces of Mithridates and other Eastern monarchs on the triumph of the Romans, and was further swelled by a large inflow of poverty-stricken Greeks. While it lasted, it greatly multiplied the number of slaves for the Roman market by simple kidnapping.

[The great mart for such sales was Delos, which was practically a Roman emporium (Strabo, bk. xiv, c. v, -- 1). Mahaffy (_Greek World under Roman Sway_, p. 154) regards the pirates as largely anti-Roman, especially in respect of their sacking of Delos. But previously they sold their captives there; and Dr. Mahaffy (p. 7) recognises the connection. The pirates, in short, became anti-Roman when the Romans, who had so long tolerated them as slave-traders (as the rulers of Cyprus and Egypt had done before), were driven to keep them in check as pirates.]

Thus all the conditions deteriorated together; and the suppression of the pirate state found Greece substantially demoralised, the prey of greedy proconsuls, poor in men, rich only in ancient art and in wistful memories. In the civil wars before and after Caesar's fall, Greece was harried by both sides in turn; and down to the time of Augustus depopulation and impoverishment seem to have steadily proceeded under Roman rule.[279] Every special contribution laid on the provinces by the rulers was made an engine of confiscation; citizens unable to pay their taxes were sold as slaves; property owners were forced to borrow at usurious rates in the old Roman fashion; and the parasitic cla.s.s of so-called Roman citizens, as such free of taxation, tended to absorb the remaining wealth.[280] This wealth in turn tended to take the shape of luxuries bought from the really productive provinces; and the fatality of the unproductive communities, lack of the bullion which they in a double degree required, for the time overtook Greece very much as it overtook Italy. Both must have presented a spectacle of exterior splendour as regarded their monuments and public buildings, and as regarded the luxury that was always tending to concentrate in fewer hands, usurers plundering citizens and proconsuls plundering usurers; but the lot of the ma.s.s of the people must have been depressed to the verge of endurance if depopulation had not spontaneously yielded relief.

As it was, the Greek populations would tend to consist more and more of the capitalistic, official, and parasitic cla.s.ses on the one hand, and of slaves and poor on the other.[281]

The general depopulation of subject Greece is thus perfectly intelligible. The "race" had not lost reproductive power; and even its newer artificial methods of checking numbers were not immeasurably more active than simple infanticide or exposure had been in the palmy days.

In the ages of expansion the whole h.e.l.lenic world in nearly all its cities and all its islands swarmed with a relatively energetic population, who won from conditions often in large part unpropitious a sufficiency of subsistence on which to build by the hands of slaves a wonderful world of art. To these conditions they were limited by racial hostilities; everywhere there was substantial though convulsive equipoise among their own warring forces, and between those of their frontier communities and the surrounding "barbarians." The conquest of Alexander (heralded and invited by the campaign of the Ten Thousand) at one blow broke up this equipoise: organised Greek capacity, once forcibly unified, triumphed over the now lower civilisations of Egypt and the East, and Greek population at once began to find its economic level in the easier conditions of some of the conquered lands. They flocked to Egypt and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin as they do at the present time, for similar economic reasons. Nothing could now restore the old conditions; but the Roman conquest and tyranny forced on the disintegration till Greece proper was but the glorious sh.e.l.l of the life of the past, inhabited by handfuls of a semi-alien population, grown in a sense psychically degenerate under evil psychic conditions.

In the lower strata of this population began the spread of Christianity, pa.s.sing sporadically from Syria to the Greek cities, as at the same time to Egypt and Rome. A new conception of life was generated on the plane that typified it.

-- 3

It is a great testimony to the value of sheer peace that in the Roman Empire of the second century, with an incurable economic malady, as it were, eating into its nerve centres, and with no better provision for the higher life than the schools of rhetoric and the endowments of the Greek philosophic chairs, there was yet evolved a system of law and administration which, even under the frightful chances of imperial succession, sustained for centuries a vast empire, and imposed itself as a model on the very barbarism that overthrew it. And it is this system which connects for us the life conditions of Greece as the Romans held it, with its artistic sh.e.l.l almost intact despite all the Roman plunder,[282] and those of the strangely un-h.e.l.lenic Greek-speaking world which we know as Byzantium, with its capital at Constantinople.

The economic changes in this period can be traced only with difficulty and uncertainty; but they must have been important. The multiplication of slaves, which was a feature of the ages of the post-Alexandrian empires, the Roman conquest, and the Cilician pirate state, would necessarily be checked at a certain stage, both in town and country, by the continued shrinkage of the rich cla.s.s. Agriculture in Greece, as in Italy, could not compete with that of Egypt; and slave-farming, save in special cultures, would not be worth carrying on. In the towns, again, the manufactures carried on by means of slaves had also dwindled greatly; and the small wealthy cla.s.s could not and would not maintain more than a certain number of slaves for household purposes. The records of the religious a.s.sociations, too, as we shall see, seem to prove that men who were slaves in status had practical freedom of life, and the power of disposing of part of their earnings; whence it may be inferred that many owners virtually liberated their slaves, though retaining a legal claim over them. In this state of things population would gradually recover ground, albeit on a low plane. The type of poor semi-Greek now produced would live at a lower standard of comfort than had latterly been set for themselves by the more educated, who would largely drift elsewhere; and a home-staying population living mainly on olives and fish could relatively flourish, both in town and country. On that basis, in turn, commerce could to some extent revive, especially when Nero granted to the Greeks immunity from taxation.[283] We are prepared then, in the second century, under propitious rulers like Hadrian and the Antonines, to find Greek life materially improved.[284]

The expenditure of Hadrian on public works, and the new endowments of the philosophic schools at Athens by the Antonines, would stimulate such a revival; and the Greek cities would further regain ground as Italy lost it, with the growth of cosmopolitanism throughout the Empire. While domestic slavery would still abound, the industries in Athens under the imperial rule would tend to be carried on by freedmen.

A further stimulus would come from the overthrow of the Parthian empire of the Arsacidae by Artaxerxes, 226 A.C. The Arsacidae, though often at war with the Romans, still represented the h.e.l.lenistic civilisation, whereas the Sa.s.sanidae zealously returned to the ancient Persian religion, the exclusiveness of which would serve as a barrier to Western commerce,[285] even while the cult of Mithra, h.e.l.lenised to the extent of being specially a.s.sociated with image-worship, was spreading widely in the West. Commerce would now tend afresh to concentrate in Greece, the Indian and Chinese trade pa.s.sing north and south of Persia.[286] The removal of the seat of government from Rome by Diocletian, greatly lessening the Italian drain on the provinces, would still further a.s.sist the Greek revival after the Gothic invasion had come and gone. Thus we find the larger Greek world in the time of Constantine grown once more so important that in the struggle between him and Licinius his great naval armament, composed chiefly of European Greeks, was ma.s.sed in the restored Piraeus. The fleet of Licinius, made up chiefly by Asiatic and Egyptian Greeks, already showed a relative decline on that side of the Empire's resources.[287] When, finally, Constantine established the new seat of empire at Byzantium, he tended to draw thither all the streams of Greek commerce, and to establish there, as the centre of the revenues of the Eastern Empire, some such population as had once flourished in Rome; with, however, a definite tendency to commerce and industry in the lower cla.s.s population as well as in the middle cla.s.s. To the government of this population was brought the highly developed organisation of the later Pagan Empire, joined with an ecclesiastical system from which heresy was periodically eliminated by the imperial policy, aided by the positive intellectual inferiority of the new Greek-speaking species.

There was prosperity enough for material life; and the political and religious system was such as to prevent the normal result of prosperity, culture, from developing independently. The much-divided Greek world had at last, after countless convulsions, been brought to a possibility of quasi-inert equilibrium, an equilibrium which enabled it to sustain and repel repeated and destructive irruptions of northern barbarism,[288]

and on the whole to hold at bay, with a shrunken territory, its neighbouring enemies for a thousand years.

-- 4

We have pa.s.sed, then, through a twilight age, to find a new civilised empire ruled on the lines of the old, but with a single, albeit much-divided religion, and that the Christian, all others having been extirpated not by persuasion but by governmental force, after the new creed, adapting itself to its economic conditions, had secured for itself and its poor adherents, mainly from superst.i.tious rich women, an amount of endowment such as no cult or priesthood possessed in the days of democracy. This process of endowment itself originated, however, in pagan practice; for in the days of subst.i.tution of emotional Eastern cults for the simpler worships of early h.e.l.las, there had grown up a mult.i.tude of voluntary societies for special semi-religious, semi-festival purposes--_thiasoi_, _eranoi_, and _orgeones_, all cultivating certain alien sacrifices and mysteries, as those of Dionysos, Adonis, Sabazios, Sarapis, Cotytto, or any other G.o.d called "Saviour."[289] These societies, unlike the older h.e.l.lenic a.s.sociations of the same names[290] for the promotion of native worships, were freely open to women, to foreigners, and even to slaves;[291] they were absolutely self-governing; the members subscribed according to their means; and we find them flourishing in large numbers in the age of the Antonines,[292] when the old state cults were already deserted, though still endowed. They represent, as has been said, the reappearance of the democratic spirit and the gregarious instinct in new fields and in lower strata when general and practical democracy has been suppressed. In some such fashion did the Christian Church begin, employing the attractions and the machinery of many rival cults. Its final selection and establishment by the Empire represented in things religious a process a.n.a.logous to that which had forcibly unified the competing republics of Greece in one inflexible and unprogressive organisation. Nothing but governmental force could have imposed doctrinal unity on the chaos of sects into which Christianity was naturally subdividing; but the power of conferring on the State Church special revenues was an effective means of keeping it practically subordinate.

The historian who has laid down the proposition that religious unity was the cause of the survival of the Eastern Empire when the Western fell,[293] has made the countervailing admission that between Justinian and Heraclius there was an almost universal centrifugal tendency in the Byzantine State, which was finally overcome only by "the inexorable principle of Roman centralisation,"[294] at a time when it was nearly destroyed by its enemies and its own dissentient forces.[295] Province after province had been taken by the Persians in the East; Slavs and Avars were driving back the population from the northern frontiers, even harrying the Peloponnesus; discontent enabled Phocas to dethrone and execute Maurice (602 A.C.); and Phocas in turn was utterly defeated by the Persian foe; when Heraclius appeared, to check the continuity of disaster, and to place the now circ.u.mscribed Empire on a footing of possible permanence. But it is important to realise how far the economic and external conditions conduced to his success, such as it was.

Hitherto the populace of Constantinople had been supported, like that of imperial Rome, by regular allowances of bread to every householder, provided from the tributary grain supplies of Egypt. The Persian conquest of Egypt in the year 616 stopped that revenue; and the emperor's inability to feed the huge semi-idle populace became a cause of regeneration, inasmuch as the State was forcibly relieved of the burden, and many of the idlers became available for the army about to be led by the emperor against the menacing Persians. He was reduced, however, to the expedient of offering to continue the supply on a payment of three pieces of gold from each claimant, and finally to breaking that contract; whereafter, on his proposing to transfer his capital to Carthage to escape the discontent, the populace and the clergy implored him to remain, and thus enabled him to exact a large loan from the latter,[296] and to dominate the n.o.bility who had hitherto hampered his action. The victories of Heraclius over the Persians, however, only left the eastern and Egyptian provinces to fall under the Arabs; the first financial result of his successes having been to tax to exasperation the recovered lands in order to repay the ecclesiastical loan with usury; and the circ.u.mscribed Empire under his successors could not, even if the emperors wished, resume the feeding of the ma.s.s of the citizens. Constantinople, though still drawing some tribute from the remaining provinces in Italy, was thus perforce reduced to a safe economic basis, even as the people in general had been coerced into united effort by the imminent danger from Persia.

From this time forward, with many vicissitudes of military fortune, the contracted Byzantine State endured in virtue of its industrial and commercial basis and its consequent maritime and military strength, managed with ancient military science against enemies less skilled. The new invention of "Greek fire," like all advances in the use of missiles in warfare, counted for much; but the decisive condition of success was the possession of continuous resources. Justinian, among many measures of mere oppression and restriction, had contrived to introduce from the far East the silk manufacture, which for the ancient and medieval European world was of enormous mercantile importance. Such a staple, and the virtual control of the whole commerce between northern and western Europe and the East, kept Byzantium the greatest trading power in Christendom until the triumph of the Italian republics. Even the Saracen conquests in Asia and Africa did not seriously affect this source of strength; for the Saracen administration, though often wise and energetic, was in Egypt too often convulsed by civil wars to permit of trade flourishing there in any superlative degree. The Byzantines continued to trade with India by the Black Sea and Central Asian route; and their monopolies and imposts, however grievous, were relatively bearable compared with the afflictions of commerce under other powers.

As of old, the Greeks or Greek-speaking folk were the traders of the Mediterranean, the Saracen navy never reaching sufficient power to check them; and when finally its remnants took to piracy, they served rather to cut off all weaker compet.i.tion than to affect the preponderating naval power of the Empire.

In this period of prevailing commercial vigour, from the sixth to the eleventh century, the life of the Greek Empire was substantially civic, the rural districts remaining desolate, and agriculture extremely feeble,[297] though the Sclavonian immigrants who now inhabited the Peloponnesus[298] must have lived by that means. Under such circ.u.mstances the towns would be fed by imported grain, presumably that of the Crimea; but as they did not grow in size, at least in the case of the capital, their industrial prosperity must have largely depended on the restriction of population, whether by vice, preventive checks, misery, or the sheer unhealthiness of city life, which at the present day prevents so many Eastern cities from maintaining themselves save by influx from the country.[299] It is misleading to point to the legal veto on infanticide as a great Christian reform without taking these things into account. The presumption is that misery, vice, child-exposure, and abortion, rather than prudence, kept the poor population within the limits of subsistence.

Mr. Oman (_Byzantine Empire_, p. 145) takes the popular view as to the reformative effect of Christianity. He goes on to describe Constantine as providing for the children of the dest.i.tute to prevent their exposure, but does not mention that the same thing had been done under the Antonines, and that Constantine permitted the finder of an exposed child to enslave it. The punishment of all exposure as infanticide, under Valentinian, was only an adoption of the pagan practice at Thebes (aelian, _Var. Hist._ ii, 7). But in spite of all enactments, under Christian as under pagan rule, exposure and positive infanticide continued, though Christian sentiment never gave it the toleration exhibited in the drama of Menander. As to the historic facts, cp. Lecky, _Hist. of European Morals_, 6th ed. ii, 24-33.

Broadly speaking, it was inevitable that in such a population as is pictured for us by Chrysostom--a mult.i.tude profoundly ignorant, superst.i.tious, excitable, sensuous--all the vices of the Graeco-Roman period should habitually flourish, while poverty must have been normally acute after the stoppage of regular free bread.

On the general moral environment, cp. the author's _Short History of Freethought_, 2nd ed. i, 249-50.

It is necessary, in the same way, to subst.i.tute an accurate for a conventional view as to the treatment of slaves under the Christian Empire. We are still told[300] that the Christian doctrine or implication of religious equality had the effect first of greatly modifying the evils of slavery and finally of abolishing it. Research proves that the facts were otherwise. We have already seen how economic causes partially limited slavery before Christianity was heard of; and in so far as the limitation was maintained,[301] the efficient causes remain demonstrably economic.[302] Indeed, no other causes can be shown to have existed. Not only is slavery endorsed in the Gospels,[303] and treated by Paul as not merely compatible with but favourable to Christian freedom on the part of the slave,[304] but the early Christians, commonly supposed to have been the most incorrupt, held slaves as a matter of course.[305] In the laws of Justinian not a word is said as to slavery being opposed to either the spirit or the letter of Christianity; and the only expressions that in any degree deprecate it are in terms of the Stoic doctrine of the "law of nature,"[306] which we know to have been already current in the time of Aristotle,[307] and to have become widespread in the age of the Antonines, under Stoic auspices. That "law of nature," however, was never allowed to override a definite law of society; and the Christian influence on the other hand set up a new set of arguments for slavery.[308] Among the Christian Visigoths, slaves who married without authority from their masters were forcibly separated; and the slave who dared to marry a free-woman was burnt alive with his wife; while "the bishops were among the largest slave-holders in the realm; and baptised Christians were bought and sold without a blush by the successors of St. Paul and Santiago."[309] It cannot even be said of the Byzantines, any more than of the Protestants of the southern United States of fifty years ago, that they were more humane to their slaves than the earlier pagans had been; for we find Christian Byzantine matrons causing their slave-girls to be tied up and brutally flogged;[310] even as we have the testimony of Salvian to the atrocities committed by Christian slave-owners in Gaul.[311] The admission that the Church, even when encouraging laymen to free their slaves, insisted on retaining its own,[312] is the proof that the urging force was not even then doctrinal, but the perception that the Church's secular interests were served by the growth of an independent population outside its own lands.[313] The spirit of the Justinian code, despite its allusion to the law of nature, and the spirit of the enactments of the early Councils of the Church, are alike opposed to any idea of spiritual equality between bond and free.

On the other hand, the simple restriction of conquest limited the possibilities of slavery for Byzantium. Captives were enslaved to the last,[314] but of these there was no steady supply. In the rural districts, again, the fiscal conditions made for at least nominal freedom, as is shown by the historian who has most closely a.n.a.lysed the conditions:--

"The Roman financial administration, by depressing the higher cla.s.ses and impoverishing the rich, at last burdened the small proprietors and cultivators of the soil with the whole weight of the land-tax. The labourer of the soil then became an object of great interest to the treasury, and ... obtained almost as important a position in the eyes of the fisc as the landed proprietor himself. The first laws which conferred any rights on the slave are those which the Roman government enacted to prevent the landed proprietors from transferring their slaves, engaged in the cultivation of lands a.s.sessed for the land-tax, to other employments which, though more profitable to the proprietor of the slave, would have yielded a smaller or less permanent return to the imperial treasury.[315] The avarice of the imperial treasury, by reducing the ma.s.s of the free population to the same degree of poverty as the slaves, had removed one cause of the separation of the two cla.s.ses. The position of the slave had lost most of its moral degradation, and [he] occupied precisely the same political position in society as the poor labourer from the moment that the Roman fiscal laws compelled any freeman who had cultivated lands for the s.p.a.ce of thirty years to remain for ever attached, with his descendants, to the same estate.[316] The lower orders were from that period blended into one cla.s.s; the slave rose to be a member of this body; the freeman descended, but his descent was necessary for the improvement of the great bulk of the human race, and for the extinction of slavery. _Such was the progress of civilisation in the Eastern Empire._ The measures of Justinian which, by their fiscal rapacity, tended to sink the free population to the same state of poverty as the slaves, really prepared the way for the rise of the slaves _as soon as any general improvement took place in the condition of the human race_."[317]

For the rest, it cannot be supposed that the "freedom" thus const.i.tuted had much actuality. Sons of soldiers and artisans were held bound to follow their father's profession, as in the hereditary castes of the East,[318] and none of the fruits of freedom are to be traced in Byzantine life. Still, the fact remains that the commercial and industrial life sustained the political, and that the political began definitely to fail when the commercial did. Constantinople could hardly have collapsed as it did before the Crusaders if its commerce had not already begun to dwindle through interception by Venice and the Italian trading cities. As soon as these were able to trade directly with the East they did so, thus withdrawing a large part of the stream of commerce from Byzantium; and when, finally, they acquired the secret of her silk manufacture, her industrial revenue was in turn undermined. On the economic weakening, the political followed; and the Eastern Empire finally fell before the Turks, very much as the Western had fallen before the Goths.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 233: Aristotle, _Politics_, v, 9.]

[Footnote 234: _Id._ i, 2.]

[Footnote 235: Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 24.]

[Footnote 236: _Id._ c. 22. Cp. Dr. Grundy, _Thucydides and the History of his Age_, 1911, p. 66, as to Solon's evident purpose of promoting manufactures.]

[Footnote 237: Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. p. 38.

Cp. Meyer, ii, 644.]

[Footnote 238: Cp. Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, i (1898), 100-2.]

[Footnote 239: Grote, ii, 504. Hitherto Athens was far behind other cities, as Corinth, in trade. The industrial expansion seems to begin in Solon's time (Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 22; Busolt, _Griechische Geschichte_, i, 501).]

[Footnote 240: Busolt, as cited, i, 549-50. The details, many of them from lately recovered inscriptions, are full of interest. Cp. Grote, ii, 462.]

[Footnote 241: Plutarch, _Agis._ c. 5; Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 9; Thirlwall, viii, 133.]

[Footnote 242: The arguments of K.O. Muller (Dorians, Eng. tr. b. iii, c. 3, ---- 3-5) in discredit of the received view, though not without weight, have never carried general conviction. Cp. Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. p. 17.]

[Footnote 243: See the recovered pa.s.sage of Polybius (xii, 6, ed.

Hultsch) cited (from Mai, _Nov. Collect. Vet. Scriptor._ ii, 384) by Muller (_Dorians_, Eng. tr. ii, 205). Cp. M'Lennan, _Kinship in Ancient Greece_, -- 2.]

[Footnote 244: Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, c. 9. On Aristotle's unhesitating a.s.sumption (ii, 10) as to the normality and the effects of paederasty, cp. the refutation of Muller, _Dorians_, Eng. tr. b. iv, c.

4, ---- 6-8; and as to the real causes of decline of population, see b.

iii, c. 10, -- 2. Primogeniture was a main factor. As the propertied cla.s.s, of whom Aristotle speaks, became small through acc.u.mulations, which often went to heiresses, the whole statistic as to births is narrow and dubious. But it is safe to decide that the decline of the pure Spartan population was not a result of vice, any more than the normal dwindling of the numbers of modern aristocracies. It should be remembered that younger sons would be likely to have illegitimate offspring among the helots, if not among the _perioikoi_. The selfish aristocracy thus wrought for its own cla.s.s extinction.]

[Footnote 245: Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 22.]