The Evolution of States Part 4

[Footnote 72: On this see Montesquieu, _Grandeur des Romains_, c. 1. No one has elucidated so much of Roman history in so little s.p.a.ce as Montesquieu has done in this little book, which Buckle rightly set above the _Esprit des Lois_. (Cp. the eulogy of Taine, in his _t.i.te-Live._) Its real insight may perhaps best be appreciated by comparing it with the modern work of M. Charles Gouraud, _Histoire des Causes de la Grandeur de l'Angleterre_ (1856), in which it will be hard to find any specification of real causes.]

[Footnote 73: The specification of this detail is one of the items of real explanation in Mr. Warde Fowler's scholarly and sympathetic account of the development of the Roman City-State (work cited, c. viii). He credits the Romans with an "innate genius" for combination and const.i.tutionalism as compared with the Greeks, not noticing the fact that Roman unity was in the main a matter of conquest of non-Romans by Romans; that the conquest was furthered by the Roman inst.i.tutions; that the inst.i.tutions were first, so to speak, fortuitously shaped in favour of systematic war and conquest by the revolt against kingship; that war and conquest, again, were taken to almost inevitably as the main road to wealth; and that the accommodations of later times were forced on the upper cla.s.ses by the career of warfare, to which domestic peace was indispensable. (Cp. Hegel as to the element of coercion and patrician policy in the Roman social system. _Philos. der Gesch._, Theil iii, Abschnitt i, Kap. i.) See below, -- 6, as to the very different conditions of the Greek City-States.]

[Footnote 74: E.S. Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, 1894, p. 16.]

[Footnote 75: See below, ch. iii, _end_; ch. iv, -- 2 (_c_).]

[Footnote 76: Cp. Livy, viii, 3-5.]

[Footnote 77: Cp. Ferrero, _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans, i, 240.]

[Footnote 78: Cp. Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 11; vi, 5.]

[Footnote 79: Already in Montesquieu's _Grandeur des Romains_ it is pointed out that for Hannibal's soldiers, loaded with plunder, anywhere was Capua. Montesquieu rightly observes that the stock phrase on that head is one of the things everybody says because it has once been said.

And it is repeated still.]

[Footnote 80: Livy, xxv, 40.]

[Footnote 81: Cicero, _In Verrem_, iii, 6; iv, 65; v, 21, 22.]

[Footnote 82: Sall.u.s.t, _Bell. Jugurth._, c. 36.]

[Footnote 83: Cicero, _In Verrem_, iii, 20, 38, 81; v, 34; _In Pisonem_,34-36; _Pro Flacco_, 12; _Pro Fonteio_, 5; _Pro lege Manilia_, 13. See the record in Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. polit. des Romains_, 1840, vol. ii, liv. iv, ch. 8. Cp. Ferrero, i, 113-14, 183.]

[Footnote 84: Cp. Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, ii. 78-81, and Merivale, _General History of Rome_, pp. 299-300, as to the plunder and annexation of Cyprus. "Whether the annals of British India contain so foul a crime," writes Long, "I leave those to determine who know more of Indian affairs than I do."]

[Footnote 85: An admission that national "character" is not a connatural or fixed bias, but a simple function of variables.]

[Footnote 86: Teuffel, _Hist. of Roman Literature_, ed. Schwabe, Eng.

trans. i, 122 (-- 91).]

[Footnote 87: See the process traced in W.A. Schmidt's _Geschichte der Denk und Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und des Christenthums_, 1847.]

[Footnote 88: Polybius, vi, 51. See below, ch. iv, -- 1 (11).]

[Footnote 89: I am aware that Mr. Bury protests against this division; but his own difficulty in calling the middle (Byzantine) Empire the "later Roman Empire," while implicitly accepting the "Holy" Empire as _another_ "later Roman Empire," is the best proof that the established nomenclature is the most convenient. n.o.body is misled by it. A compromise might perhaps be made on the form "Greek Empire," contended for by M. Sathes (_Monumenta Historiae h.e.l.lenicae_, i, pref. p. 5), following on M. Rambaud.]

[Footnote 90: As cited below, pt. v, ch. i.]

[Footnote 91: Salvian, for instance, sees in the barbarian irruption a punishment of Christian sins; he never dreams of asking the cause of the Christian and pre-Christian corruption. Prudentius, again, is a thorough imperialist. See the critique and citations of M. Boissier, _La Fin du Paganisme_, ii, 136-141,407. Origen had set the note a century before Constantine (_Contra Celsum_, viii, 68-72).]

CHAPTER III

GREEK POLITICAL EVOLUTION

The politico-economic history of Greece has been less cleared up than that of Rome, by reason not only of the greater complexity of the problem, but of the predominance of literary specialism in Greek studies.

The modern Greek historian, Paparrigopoulo, has published in French an _Histoire de la Civilisation h.e.l.lenique_ (Paris, 1878), which condenses his learned Greek work in five volumes; but the general view, though sometimes suggestive, is both scanty and superficial as regards ancient Greek history, and runs to an unprofitable effort at showing the "unity" of all h.e.l.lenic history, Pagan and Christian, in terms of an a.s.sumed conception of h.e.l.lenic character.

The posthumous _Griechische Culturgeschichte_ of Jakob Burckhardt (1898) throws little light on social evolution. Trustworthy, weighty, and lucid, like all Burckhardt's work, it is rather a survey of Greek moral conditions than a study of social development, thus adding something of synthesis to the previous scholarly literature on the subject without reducing the phenomena to any theory of causation. It includes, however, good studies of vital social developments, such as slavery, to which Grote and Thirlwall paid surprisingly little attention, and which Mahaffy handles inadequately. This is also to be studied in W.R.

Patterson's _Nemesis of Nations_ (1907)--with some caution as regards the political generalisations.

Since the first edition of the present work there has appeared, in Dr. G.B. Grundy's _Thucydides and the History of his Age_ (1911) a new recognition of the fundamental character of economic conditions in Greek as in other history. Dr. Grundy, finding no academic precedent for his sociological method, has urged as new truths propositions which for economic historians are or should have been axioms. The result, however, is a really stimulating and valuable presentment of Greek history in terms of causal forces.

The chapters on Greece in Dr. Cunningham's _Western Civilisation_ (1898), though they contain not a few explanations of Greek culture-phenomena on the old lines, in terms of themselves, are helpful for the purposes of the present inquiry, since they really study causation, as do Meyer's _Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung des Alterthums_ and some other recent German treatises, of which Dr.

Cunningham makes use.

Much use, however, remains to be made of these and previous expert studies. Boeckh's great work on the _Public Economy of the Athenians_, which, though containing economic absurdities, hardly deserves even in that regard the strictures pa.s.sed on it by the first English translator (Sir G.C. Lewis, 1828; 2nd ed. 1842; superior American ed. tr. from 2nd German ed. by A. Lamb, 1857), has not very fruitfully affected the later historians proper. The third German edition by Frankel, 1886, typifies the course of scholarship. It corrects details and adds a ma.s.s of _apparatus criticus_ equal in bulk to the whole original work, but supplies no new ideas. Heeren's section on Greece in his _Ideen_, etc., translated as a _Sketch of the Political History of Ancient Greece_ (1829), and also as part of Heeren's _Thoughts on the Politics_, etc., of _the Ancient World_, is too full of early misconceptions to be well worth returning to, save for its general view. On the other hand, Grote's great _History of Greece_, though unmatched in its own species, and though a far more philosophical performance than that of Mitford (which Professor Mahaffy and the King of Greece agree in preferring for its doctrine), is substantially a narrative and critical history on the established lines, and does not aim at being more than incidentally sociological; and that of Bishop Thirlwall, though in parts superior in this regard, is substantially in similar case. At several points, indeed, Grote truly illuminates the sociological problem--notably in his view of the reactions between the Greek drama and the Greek life. Of the German general histories, that of Holm (Eng. tr. 4 vols. 1894-98) is a trustworthy and judicious embodiment of the latest research, but has no special intellectual weight, and is somewhat needlessly prolix. The history of Dr. Evelyn Abbott, so far as it has gone, has fully equal value in most respects; but both leave the need for a sociological history unsatisfied. Mr. Warde Fowler's _City State of the Greeks and Romans_ (1893) points in the right direction, but needs following up.

Apart from Burckhardt and Cunningham, the nearest approach yet made to a sociological study of Greek civilisation is the series of works on Greek social history by Professor Mahaffy (_Social Life in Greece_; _Greek Life and Thought from the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest_; _The Greek World under Roman Sway_; _Problems of Greek History_; and _Survey of Greek Civilisation_). These learned and brilliant volumes have great value as giving more vivid ideas of Greek life than are conveyed by any of the regular histories, and as constantly stimulating reflection; but they lack method, omit much, and abound regrettably in capricious and inconsistent dicta. The _Survey_ is disappointing as emphasising rather than making good the defects of the previous treatises. G.F.

Hertzberg's _Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Romer_ (1866), and indeed all his works on Greek history, are always worth consulting.

Some help may be had from the volume on Greece in the _Industrial History of the Free Nations_ by W.T. M'Cullagh (1846); but that fails to throw any light on what should have been its primary problem, the rise of Greek industry, and is rather sentimental than scientific in spirit. For later Greece, Finlay (_History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans_, revised ed. 7 vols. 1877) becomes illuminating by his interest in economic law, though he holds uncritically enough by some now exploded principles, and exhibits some religious prejudice. His somewhat entangled opening sections express his difficulties as a pioneer in sociological history--difficulties only too abundantly apparent in the following pages. Professor J.B. Bury's _History of the Later Roman Empire_ (2 vols. 1889) is an admirable work; but it does not attempt, save incidentally, to supersede Finlay in matters economic.

-- 1

The political history of ancient Greece, similarly summarised, will serve perhaps even better the purpose of illuminating later evolution.

That history has served historian after historian as a means of modern polemic. The first considerable English historians of Greece, Gillies and Mitford, pointed to the evil fate of Greek democracy as a conclusive argument against countenancing democracy now; never stopping to ask whether ancient monarchies had fared any better than the democracies.

And it is perfectly true that present-day democracies will tend to bad fortune just as did the ancient unless they bottom themselves more firmly and guide themselves by a deeper political science. It will not suffice that we have rejected the foundation of slavery, on which all the Greek polities rested. The strifes between the demos and the aristocracy in the Greek City-States would have arisen just as surely, though more slowly, if the demos, instead of being an upper-grade populace owning slaves, had included the whole ma.s.s of the artisan and serving cla.s.s.[92] Where population increases at anything like the natural animal rate, and infanticide is not overwhelming, poverty must either force emigration or breed strife between the "have-nots" and the "haves," barring such continuous stress of war as suffices at once to thin numbers and yield conquerors the lands of the slain losers. During some centuries the pressure was in part relieved by colonisation, as had already happened among the Phoenicians;[93] the colonies themselves in turn, with their more rapid evolution, developing the inevitable strife of rich and poor more quickly and more violently than the mother cities.[94] Among these, it was when that relief seemed to be exhausted that strife became most dangerous, being obscurely perceived to be a means to advancement and prosperity for individuals, as well as for the State which could extort tribute or plunder from the others. War, however, limits agriculture, so that food supply is kept proportionately small; and with peace the principle of population soon overtakes lost ground; so that, though the Greek States like others tended to gain in solidarity under the stimulus of foreign war, the pressure of poverty was always breeding fresh division.

If we take up Grecian history after the settling down of the prehistoric invasions, which complicated the ordinary process of rupture and fission, that process is seen occurring so frequently, and in so many different States, that there can be no question as to the presence of a general sociological law, not to be counteracted in any community save by a radical change of conditions. Everywhere the phenomena are broadly the same. The upper cla.s.s ("upper" in virtue either of primary advantages or of special faculty for acquiring wealth) attains to providing for its future by holding mult.i.tudes of poorer citizens in debt--the ancient adumbration of the modern developments of landlordism, national debts, and large joint-stock enterprises, which yield inheritable incomes. In early times, probably, debt led as often to adult enslavement in Greece as in Rome;[95] but in a world of small and warring City-States, shaken by domestic division, constantly making slaves by capture and purchase, and always exposed to the risk of their insurrection, this was too dangerous a course to be long persisted in,[96] and the creditor was led to press his mortgaged debtor in other ways. The son or the daughter was sold to pay the father's dues, or to serve in perpetual payment of interest; and the cultivator's share was ever at the lowest point. The pressure increases till the ma.s.s of debtors are hara.s.sed into insurrection, or are used by an adventurer to establish himself as despot.[97] Sometimes, in later days, the doc.u.ments of debt are publicly destroyed;[98] sometimes the land is divided afresh.[99] Landholders burdened with debt would vote for the former course and resist the latter;[100] and as that was clamoured for at Athens in early times, it may be presumed that in some places it was resorted to. Sometimes even a refunding of interest would be insisted on.[101] Naturally such means of rectification availed only for a moment; the despot stood a fair chance of being a.s.sa.s.sinated; the triumphant demos would be caballed against; the exiled n.o.bles, with the cold rage of Theognis in their hearts, would return; and the last state of the people would be worse than the first; till again slackened vigilance on one side, and intolerable hardship on the other, renewed the cycle of violent change.

In the course of ages there was perforce some approach to equipoise;[102] but it was presumably at the normal cost of a definite abas.e.m.e.nt of the populace;[103] and it was by a famous stroke of statecraft that Athens was able so to solve her first great crisis as to make possible some centuries of expanding democratic life. The name of Solon is a.s.sociated with an early crisis (594 B.C.) in which debt and dest.i.tution among the Athenian demos (then still for the most part small cultivators, for whom the city was a refuge fortress, but as a rule no longer owning the land they tilled) brought matters to the same point as was marked in Rome by the Secession of the Plebs. The Athenian oligarchy was very much like the Roman; and when the two sides agreed to call in Solon as arbitrator it was with a fairly general expectation that he would take the opportunity to become tyrant. The people knew him to be opposed to plutocratic tyranny; the n.o.bles and traders, anxious for security, thought him sure to be their friend; and both sorts had small objection to such a one as "despot." But Solon, a n.o.ble of moderate means, who had gained prestige in the wars of Athens with her neighbour, Megara, and some knowledge of life as a travelling trader, brought to his problem a higher vision than that of a Roman patrician, and doubtless had a less barbarous stock to deal with. Later ages, loosely manipulating tradition, ascribed to him a variety of laws that he cannot have made;[104] but all the records concur in crediting him with a "Seisachtheia," a "shaking-off-of-burdens," and a healing of the worst of the open wounds of the body politic. All existing mortgages were cancelled; all enslavement for debt was abolished; Athenians who had been sold into alien slavery were bought back (probably by a contribution from relieved debtors[105]); and the coinage was recast--whether or not by way of reducing State payments is not clear.

Grote (ii, 471), while eulogising Solon's plan as a whole, accepts the view that he debased the money-standard; while Boeckh (_Metrologie_, ch. 15) holds him to have further altered the weights and measures. For the former view there is clear support in Plutarch (_Solon_, c. 15), and for the latter in the lately recovered Aristotelian _Polity of Athens_ (c. 10). But when Messrs.

Mitch.e.l.l and Caspari, in their abridgment of Grote (p. 45), declare that the latter doc.u.ment makes clear that the coinage measure was solely for the promotion of trade, and entirely independent of the Seisachtheia (so also Bury, p. 183), they unduly stress the evidence. The doc.u.ment, which is hardly Aristotelian in structure, proceeds doubtfully on tradition and not upon record; and there may be some truth in the old view of Androtion (Plut. c. 15), that Solon only reduced the rate of interest while altering the money-standard. The point is really obscure. Cp. Abbott, _Hist. of Greece_, i, 407-8; Grote, ii, 472-76; Meyer, ii, 651-52; c.o.x, _Gen.

Hist. of Greece_, 2nd ed. pp. 76-79. So far are we from exact knowledge that it is still a moot point whether the tenant _Hektemorioi_ or "Sixth-men" _paid_ or _received_ a sixth part of their total product. Cp. Mitch.e.l.l and Caspari, abr. of Grote, p.

14, _note_; c.o.x, _Gen. Hist. of Greece_, 2nd ed. p. 77; Bury, _Hist. of Greece_, ed. 1906, p. 181; Meyer, ii, 642; Abbott, _Hist.

of Greece_, i, 289.

While the burdened peasants and labourers were thus ostensibly given a new economic outlook on life, they were further humanised by being given a share in the common polity. To the Ecclesia or "Congregation" of the people Solon gave the power of electing the public magistrates; and by way of controlling somewhat the power of the Areopagus or Senate, he established a "pre-considering" Council or "Lower House" of Four Hundred, chosen from all save the poor cla.s.s, thus giving the State "two anchors." And though the executive was in the hands of the aristocracy, subject only to popular election, the burdens of the community were soundly adjusted by a new or improved cla.s.sification of citizens according to their incomes ("timocracy"), which worked out somewhat as a graduated income-tax, whether by way of a money-rate or in respect of their share in military duties and public "liturgies," which had to be maintained by the richer citizens.

As to this vexed question, see Boeckh, _Staatsaushaltung der Athener_, B. iv, c. 5 (Grote's ref. wrong), as expounded and checked by Grote (ii, 485-88). Messrs. Mitch.e.l.l and Caspari, in their abridgment of Grote (pp. 22, 49, _notes_), reject the whole interpretation (which is reached by a combination of ancient data, Plutarch [c. 18] telling nothing as to taxation). But they adduce only the negative argument that "as we know that Peisistratos, the champion of the poorer cla.s.ses, subsequently levied a uniform tax of five or ten per cent., it is absurd to suppose that the highly democratic principle of a sliding-scale had been previously adopted by Solon. Peisistratos would not have dared to attempt a reaction from a sliding-scale income-tax to a sort of poll-tax." To this it might be replied that the "flat rate" of Peisistratos--which ought to modify the conception of him as the "friend of the poor"--may have been an addition to previous taxes; and that the division of citizens into income-cla.s.ses must have stood for _something_ in the way of burdens. The solution would seem to be that these were not regular money taxes. "Regular direct taxes were as little known in free Athens as in any other ancient State; they are the marks of absolute monarchy, of unfreedom" (Meyer, ii, 644). "Seemingly, it was not until later times that this distribution of cla.s.ses served the purposes of taxation" (Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. p. 40). But already the cost of certain public services, cla.s.sed under the head of "liturgies," was laid upon the rich; and there may well have been a process of collective contribution towards these at a time when very rich citizens cannot have been numerous.

Doubtless the graduated income-tax would have been unworkable in a systematic way, though in the "Servian" timocracy of early Rome a _tributum_ seems to have been imposed on the cla.s.ses (Livy, ii, 9).

At yet other points Solon prepared the ground for the democratic structure of the later Athenian polity. By overthrowing the sacrosanct power of the aristocratic priestly houses, who had aggrandised themselves by it like the n.o.bles of early Rome, he prevented the growth of a hierocracy. By const.i.tuting out of all the citizens, including the Thetes or peasant cultivators, a kind of universal jury-court, out of which the panels of judges were to be taken by lot, he put the people on the way of becoming a court of appeal against the upper-cla.s.s archons, who recruited the Areopagus. "The const.i.tution of the judicial courts (_Heliaia_) out of the whole people was the secret of democracy which Solon discovered. It is his t.i.tle to fame in the history of the growth of popular government in Europe."[106]

The whole reform was indeed a great achievement; and so far definitive that from that time forward Athens needed no further resort to "Seisachtheia" or to alteration of the money-standard. Solon had in fact eliminated the worst disruptive force at work in the community--the enslavement of the debtor; a reform so radical,[107] when considered as one man's work, that to note its moral limits may seem to imply blindness to its value. Henceforth, on the lines of the democracy which he made possible, Athenians were so far h.o.m.ogeneous that their slaves were aliens. Beyond that point they could not rise; after Solon, as before, they were at daggers drawn with neighbouring Statelets, and to the end it remained tolerable to them to enslave the men of other Greek-speaking communities. Floated over the first reef by Solon, they never found a pilot to clear the second--the principle of group-enmity.

Upon that the h.e.l.lenic civilisation finally foundered.

Even in respect of what he achieved, Solon received but a chequered recognition in his own time. The peasantry had expected him to divide the land among them;[108] and when they found that the abolition of enslavement for debt did not mean much less stress of life, they were ready to forfeit all the political rights he had given them for some more tangible betterment.

The simple fact that a generation later Peisistratos was able to become tyrant in the teeth of the aged Solon's vehement opposition is intelligible only as standing for the feeling of many of the common people that through a _tyrannos_ alone could their interests be maintained against the perpetual conspiracy of the upper cla.s.s to overreach them.[109] It may be that Solon had alienated the rural folk by his concern for commerce, which would be likely to mean the encouragement of imports of food.[110] Peisistratos, we know, was the leader of the _Diakrioi_, the herdsmen and crofters of the uplands, and was "accounted the most thorough democrat" as against the landlords of the plains (_Pediaioi_), led by Lycurgos, and the traders of the coast (_Paraloi_), led by Megacles.[111] The presumption is that by this time the fertile plain-lands were largely owned by rich men, who worked them by hired labour; but the nature of the conflicting forces is not now to be clearly ascertained. The credit given afterwards to Peisistratos for maintaining the Solonian laws points to an understanding between him and the people;[112] and their acceptance of him in Solon's despite suggests that they even identified the latter with the failure of his laws to secure them against further aristocratic oppression.