The Evolution of States Part 16

From the whole history there emerges the demonstration of what might reasonably be put _a priori_--that for a whole community, once self-governing, to acquiesce in an all-embracing foreign despotism meant the settling of lethargy on half of its mental life.[361] What the thinkers left in Greece _could_ do was to lend philosophic ideas and method to the jurists at work on the problem of adapting Roman law to the needs of a world-empire, and this was done to good purpose; but it was the last genuine task that the circ.u.mstances permitted of. To discuss vitally the problems of politics would have meant challenging the despotism. There remained, it is true, philosophy and the arts; and these were still cultivated; but they finally subsisted at the level of the spirit of a community which felt itself degenerate from its past, and so grew soon hopelessly imitative. No important work, broadly speaking, can ever be done save by men who, like the most gifted Greeks of the palmy days (innovating in drama and improving on the science of the foreigner), feel themselves capable of equalling or transcending the past;[362] and that feeling seems to have become impossible alike for the students and the sculptors of Greece soon after the Macedonian conquest, or at least after the Roman. Plato and Pheidias, Aristotle and Praxiteles, aeschylus and Epicurus, figured as heights of irrecoverable achievement; and the pupillary generations brooded dreamily over Plato or drew serenity from Epicurus as their bent lay, and produced statues of alien rulers, or of the deities of alien temples, where their ancestors had portrayed heroes for the cities and G.o.ds for the shrines of Greece. Beneath the decadence of spirit there doubtless lay, not physiological decay, as is sometimes loosely a.s.sumed, but a certain arrest of psychological development--an arrest which, as above suggested, may be held to have set in when the life and culture of the "family women" in the Greek cities began decisively to conform to the Asiatic standard, the men cultivating the mind, while the women were concerned only with the pa.s.sive life of the body. In this one matter of the equal treatment of the s.e.xes Sparta transcended the practice of Athens, her narrow intellectual life being at least the same for both; and to this element of equilibrium was probably due her long maintenance of vigour at the level of her ideal.

[As, however, the Spartan women, whatever their training, could not finally live the martial life of the men, the results of their chiefly animal training were not exemplary. See the question vivaciously discussed by De Pauw, _Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs_, 1787, ptie. iv, sect. x, -- 1--a work which contains many acute observations, as well as a good many absurdities. The Spartan women, it appears, were in a special degree carried away by the Bacchic frenzy. Aelian, _Var. Hist._ iii, 42. Cp. Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 9 (and other testimonies cited by Hermann, _Manual of the Political Antiquities of Greece_, -- 27, 12), as to their general licence.]

The arrested psychological development, it need hardly be added, would tend to mean not merely unoriginal thinking among those who did think, but finally a shrinkage of the small number of those who cared greatly for thinking. Even in the independent period, the mental life of Greece drew perforce from a relatively small cla.s.s--chiefly the leisured middle cla.s.s and the exceptional artificers or slaves who, in a democratic community, could win culture by proving their fitness for it. Under the Roman rule the endowed scholars (sophists) and artists alike would tend to minister to Roman taste, and as _that_ deteriorated its ministers would. Rome, it is easy to see, went the downward intellectual way in the imperial age with fatal certainty; and her subject States necessarily did likewise at their relative distance. Finally, when Christianity became the religion of the Empire, all the sciences and all the fine arts save architecture and metal-work were rapidly stupefied, the Emperor vetoing free discussion in the fifth century, and the Church laying the dead hand of convention on all such art as it tolerated, even as the priesthood of Egypt had done in their day. It is positively startling to trace the decline of the fine arts after the second century. On the arch of Constantine, at Rome, all the best sculpture is an appropriation from the older arch of Trajan: under the first Christian emperor there are no artists capable of decently embellishing his monument in the ancient metropolis. All the forms of higher faculty seem to have declined together; and as the decay proceeded the official hostility to all forms of free thought strengthened.

[See Finlay, _History of Greece_, as cited, i, 284-85, as to the veto on discussion by Theodosius. In the next century Justinian suppressed the philosophic schools at Athens. Finlay, in one pa.s.sage (i, 221), speaks of them as nearly extinct before suppression; but elsewhere (pp. 277-81) he gives an entirely contrary account. There are too many such contradictions in his pages. Cp. Hertzberg, _Geschichte Griechenlands seit dem Absterben des antiken Lebens_, 1876, i, 78-84.]

By the time of Constantine, even the coinage had come to look like that of a semi-barbarian State; and thought, of course, had already stagnated when Christianity conquered the "educated" cla.s.ses. But these cla.s.ses themselves were speedily narrowed nearly to those of the priests and the bureaucracy, save in so far as commerce maintained some semi-leisure.

Barbarian invasion and imperial taxation combined in many districts to exterminate the former leisured and property-owning cla.s.s. It is indeed an exaggeration to say that "the labourer and the artisan alone could find bread ... and, with the extinction of the wealthy and educated cla.s.ses, the local prejudices of the lower orders became the law of society."[363] But the last clause is broadly true. In this society the priest, with his purely pietistic tastes and knowledge, became the type and source of culture.

A cultured modern Greek apologist of the Byzantine Empire[364] has anxiously sought to combine with the thesis that Christianity is a civilising force, the unavoidable admission that Byzantine civilisation was intellectually stationary for a thousand years. It is right that every possible plea for that ill-famed civilisation should be carefully attended to, even when it takes the form of reminding us[365] that after all the sixth century produced Procopius and Agathias; the seventh, George of Pisidia; the eighth, John of Damascus; the ninth, Photius; and so on--one man or two per century who contrived to be remembered without being annalised as emperor. Of rather more importance is the item that Christian Constantinople at one point, following Egyptian and Roman precedent, improved on the practice of heathen Athens, in that the women of the imperial court and of the upper cla.s.ses seem to have received a fair share of what culture there was.[366] It is further a matter of bare justice to note that Byzantium had all along to maintain itself against the a.s.saults of Persia, of Islam, of barbarism, heathen and Christian, and of Latin Christendom. But there must all the same be made the grieving admission that "We certainly do not find in the Byzantine authors the same depth and originality which mark the ancient writers whom they copied";[367] and that this imitation "was unhappily the essential weakness of Byzantine literature." That is to say, the intelligence of the Christian Empire, like that of the Greece of the post-Macedonian and the Roman domination, looked back to pagan Athens as to an irrecoverable greatness. In that case, if we are to a.s.sume comparative equality of culture between the s.e.xes, there is no escape from the conclusion that Christianity was in itself a force of fixation or paralysis, the subsequent counteraction of which in Europe was a result of many causes--of any cause but the creed and lore itself. The creed, in fact, was a specific cause of isolation, and so of intellectual impoverishment. As was well said by Gibbon, the mental paralysis of the Byzantines was "the natural effect of their solitary and insulated state."[368] The one civilisation from which Byzantium might latterly have profited--the Saracen--was made tabu by creed, which was further the efficient cause of the sunderance of Byzantine and Italian life.

Had the external conditions, indeed, permitted of the maintenance of the earlier manifold Empire of Constantine, the mere conditions of social diversity which prepared the countless strifes of speculative sects in Egypt and Syria might have led to intellectual progress, were it only by arousing in the more rational minds that aversion to the madness of all the wrangling sects which we detect in Procopius.[369] The disputes of the Christians were indeed the most absurd that had ever been carried on in the Greek tongue; and in comparing the competing insanities it is hard to imagine how from among themselves they could have evoked any form of rational thought. But as in Northern Europe in a later age, so in the Byzantine Empire, the insensate strifes of fanatics, after exhausting and decimating themselves, might have bred in a saner minority a conviction of the futility of all wars of creed--this if only external peace could have been secured. But the attacks, first of Persia and later of Islam, both determined religious enemies, with whom, on Christian principles, there could be no fruitful intercourse, sh.o.r.e away all the outlying and diversified provinces, leaving to Byzantium finally only its central and most h.o.m.ogeneous section, where the power of the organised Church, backed by a monarchy bent on spiritual as on political unity, could easily withstand the slight forces of intellectual variation that remained. The very misfortunes of the Empire, connected as they were with so many destructive earthquakes and pestilences,[370] would, on the familiar principle of Buckle, deepen the hold of superst.i.tion on the general mind. On the other hand, the final Christianising of the Bulgarian and Slav populations on the north, while safeguarding the Empire there, yielded it only the inferior and r.e.t.a.r.ding culture-contact of a new pietistic barbarism, more childish in thought than itself. We can see the fatality of the case when we contemplate the great effort of Leo the Isaurian in the eighth century to put down image-worship by the arm of the executive. No such effort could avail against the mindless superst.i.tion of the ignorant ma.s.s, rich[371] and poor, on whom the clerical majority relied for their existence. A Moslem conqueror, with outside force to fall back upon, might have succeeded; but Leo was only shaking the bough on which he sat.[372] It seems clear that the Iconoclastic emperors were politically as well as intellectually progressive in comparison with the orthodox party. The worshipped images which they sought to suppress were artistically worthless, and they aimed at an elevation of the people.

"If the Iconoclastic reformers had had their way, perhaps the history of the agricultural cla.s.ses would have been widely different. The abolition of the principle which the first Christian emperors had adopted, of nailing men to the clod, was part of the programme which was carried out by the Iconoclastic emperors and reversed by their successors."[373]

Thus did it come about that Christian Byzantium found the rigid intellectual equilibrium in which it outlasted, at a lower level of mental life, the Caliphate which sought its destruction, but only to fall finally before the more vigorous barbarism of the Turks.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 319: Whistler, _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_, 1890, pp.

138, 139.]

[Footnote 320: Cp. Prof. Burrows, _The Discoveries in Crete_, 1907, ch.

xi; Bury, _History of Greece_, 1906, p. 65. "The supreme inspiration,"

says Bury, "came to their minstrels on Asiatic soil."]

[Footnote 321: E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii. 533-36; A.R.

Hall, _The Oldest Civilisation of Greece_, 1901, pp. 31, 32. Cp. the author's _Short History of Freethought_, i, 122-27; and Von Ihering's _Vorgeschichte der Indo-Europaer_, Eng. trans. ("The Evolution of the Aryan"), p. 73. Von Ihering's dictum is the more noteworthy because it counters his primary a.s.sumption of race-characters.]

[Footnote 322: Cp. Galton. _Hereditary Genius_, ed. 1892, p. 329. The contrast between the policy of Athens, before and after Solon, and that of Megara, which boasted of never having given the citizenship to any stranger save Hercules (Wachs.m.u.th, Eng. tr. i, 248), goes far to explain the inferiority of Megarean culture.]

[Footnote 323: "No other Greek city possessed so large an immediate territory" [as distinct from subject territory, like Laconia] "or so great a number of free and equal citizens" (Freeman, _History of Federal Government_, ed. 1893, p. 22, _note_). And the number was greatly swelled "after Athens had in 477 taken the lead in the Delian Maritime League" (Maisch, _Greek Antiquities_, -- 28), so that in 451 it was felt necessary again to limit citizenship to men born of Athenian parents.]

[Footnote 324: Cicero (_in Verrem_ ii, 59) testifies to the zeal of Greek cities in buying paintings and statues in his day, and their unwillingness to sell.]

[Footnote 325: The result is a marked poverty of power in such sculpture as the Persians had. It is in every respect inferior to the a.s.syrian which it copies. See Reber, _History of Ancient Art_, Eng. tr. 1883, pp.

121-28.]

[Footnote 326: See above, p. 28.]

[Footnote 327: See Maspero, _Manual of Egyptian Archaeology_, Eng. tr.

1895, pp. 215, 226, 235, 236, 240, etc.]

[Footnote 328: See above, p. 56.]

[Footnote 329: See Maspero, as cited, pp. 212, 214, 231, etc., as to the religious influence. M. Maspero recognises several movements of renaissance and reaction through the ages.]

[Footnote 330: Grote, iii, 21-22.]

[Footnote 331: Cp. Haigh, _The Tragic Drama of the Greeks_, 1896, ch. i; Miss Harrison, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_, 2nd ed.

1908, ch. viii.]

[Footnote 332: Pt. ii, ch. 67.]

[Footnote 333: See Holm's suggestion, cited by Mahaffy, _Problems of Greek History_, p. 92, _note_, as to the value of Herodotus to the _traders_ of his day. Holm also suggests, however, that the political service rendered by Herodotus to the Athenians was felt by them to be important, as giving them new light on Egypt and the East (Eng. tr. ii, 290, 291). The reward paid to Herodotus would greatly stimulate further historical research.]

[Footnote 334: Cp. Bury, _History of Greece_, pp. 7, 33-34.]

[Footnote 335: The Spartan women were indeed reputed the most beautiful, doubtless a result of their healthier life. As for the works of "art"

claimed by Muller (_The Dorians_, ii, 25-26) for Sparta, they are simply objects of utility, and were by his own avowal (p. 24) the work of non-Spartan Laconians, aliens, or slaves, "since no Spartan, before the introduction of the Achaean const.i.tution, was allowed to follow any trade." No one disputes that other Dorian cities, notably Sikyon, did much for art--another proof that "race" has nothing to do with the matter.]

[Footnote 336: Bury, _History of Greece_, ed. 1906, p. 59.]

[Footnote 337: Cited in Strabo, bk. viii, ch. v, -- 6.]

[Footnote 338: Cp. Muller, i, 80. Muller notes that the Corinthians were "nearly singular among the Doric States" in esteeming trade, their experience of its productiveness "having taught them to set a higher value upon it" (work cited, ii, 24).]

[Footnote 339: Cp. Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. -- 11; K.O. Muller, _The Dorians_, i, 105, 203.]

[Footnote 340: The native Spartans were positively forbidden to go abroad without special leave, nor were strangers permitted to settle there (Grote, ii, 306; Wachs.m.u.th, i, 248).]

[Footnote 341: Grote, iii, 294, and _note_.]

[Footnote 342: Cp. Dr. Mahaffy's remark on post-Alexandrian Sparta, "where five ignorant old men were appointed to watch the close adherence of the State to the system of a fabulous legislator" (_Greek Life and Thought from the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest_, 1887, p. 3).]

[Footnote 343: Macaulay, in his youthful review of Mitford (_Miscellaneous Writings_, ed. 1868, p. 74), draws up a long indictment against the Spartans in the matter of bad faith and meanness. It is only fair to remember that some similar charges can be laid against others of the Greek States.]

[Footnote 344: Grote, ii, 204. But cp. Aristotle (_Politics_, ii, 9) and Plutarch (_Lycurgus_, c. 27), who agrees with the saying of Plato and others (cp. Muller, _Dorians_, Eng. tr. ii, 43, _note_) that in Sparta a free man was most a freeman, and a slave most a slave. And see Schomann, _Alterthumer_, i, 362. Hume (_On Populousness_) cites Xenophon, Demosthenes, and Plautus as proving that slaves were exceptionally well treated at Athens, and this is borne out by the Athenian comedy in general (cp. Maisch, _Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. -- 32). But the fact remains that at Athens slaves, male and female, were frequently tortured to make them give evidence against their masters, who in turn were free to kill them for doing so (Mahaffy, _Social Life in Greece_, pp.

240-41). And Aristotle takes for granted that they were substantially inferior in character to freemen.]

[Footnote 345: Cp. Finlay, _History of Greece_, Tozer's ed. i, 15; Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 4, 105.]

[Footnote 346: Fifth century B.C.]

[Footnote 347: Holm (Eng. tr. iv, 595-98) misses half the problem when he argues that the Greek cities under the Romans were nearly as free and self-governing as are to-day those of Switzerland, the United States, or the German Empire. The last-named may perhaps approximate at some points; but in the other cases the moral difference is inexpressible.

The Greek cities under the Romans were _provincialised_, and their inhabitants deprived of the powers of _State_ government which they formerly possessed. Their whole outlook on life was changed.]

[Footnote 348: Cp. Finlay, i, 76.]

[Footnote 349: In artistic handicraft, of course, such daily renewal of creative intelligent effort is of great importance to mental health; and the complete lack of it, as in the conventional sculpture of Egypt, tells of utter intellectual stagnation. In the least artistic crafts, however, it is not so essential a condition of sound work.]

[Footnote 350: Cp. Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 4, 10, 15, 131-38, 144.]

[Footnote 351: The change was not so immediately dependent on the Alexandrian regime as Droysen implies (_Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen_, 3te Aufl. p. 367): the New Comedy had been led up to by the Middle Comedy, which already tended to withdraw from burning questions (cp. K.O. Muller, _Lit. of Ancient Greece_, Eng. tr. pp. 436-41); but the movement was clearly hastened.]

[Footnote 352: Cp. Mackintosh, _On the Progress of Ethical Philosophy_, 4th ed. p. 29; Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 6th ed. i, 128.]

[Footnote 353: Mahaffy, _Problems of Greek History_, p. 85; _Survey of Greek Civilisation_, pp. 87, 99, 117; _Social Life in Greece_, 3rd ed.

pp. 83, 137, 440. Cp. the remark of Thirlwall, ch. xii (1st ed. ii, 125), that the tyrants "were the natural patrons of the lyrical poets, who cheered their banquets, extolled their success," etc.]