Читать книгу Greek Imperialism - William Scott Ferguson - Страница 6

Table of Contents

IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE

It is my purpose in this opening chapter to define some terms which I shall have to use repeatedly in the book; to make a somewhat detailed examination of the character of the Greek states whose political integrity was threatened by imperialism; to trace the development of imperialism to its culmination in the divine monarchy of Alexander the Great and his successors; and, at the same time, to arrange a general political setting for the topics to be discussed in the six succeeding chapters.

An empire is a state formed by the rule of one state over other states. It is immaterial in this connection what form of government the ruling people prefers. Power may be exercised there by a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a majority without altering in any essential the relation of the sovereign to its dependencies. Still less does it matter whether the subject people is governed by the one, the few, or the many; for all kinds of governments may exist, and have existed, in dependencies.

Naturally, an empire is compatible with any kind of an administrative service among both governors and governed. The suzerain may attend to its affairs with the aid of professional and specially trained officials, as in a bureaucracy; and a vassal may entrust the details of its public business to successive fractions of its citizens, as in some republics: no imperial relation is established unless separate states or parts of states are involved. But when these are related in a whole as superiors and inferiors, an empire at once arises.

The relation of inferiority and superiority is, however, essential in any empire. In modern times this is acknowledged with the utmost frankness. Upon the higher capacity for government claimed by the Christian peoples, the Western cultures, or the Anglo-Saxons, as the case may be, modern pride, greed, or conscience bases its right to control inferior races. "Take up the white man's burden" is the modern substitute for the ancient commandment, "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature." The possession of a better rule of public life imposes—it is affirmed—a missionary obligation no less weighty than the possession of a special rule of eternal life.

Less exasperating, perhaps, than this assumption of moral and political superiority is the candid profession of the right of the stronger. The right of conquest gives a title which is valid in international law when every other right is lacking. When superiority is stipulated to be absent, the product is a federation or something similar from which the name empire is withheld. When, in course of time, superiority dies out till a common right eventually embraces subject and sovereign alike, a new state arises, to which, as in the case of the present-day British world, the title empire is applied with some impropriety.

There is, however, still another kind of empire. In it the superior authority is not a people, but an individual. He is called an emperor, and his family a dynasty. His authority is bestowed, as the present German Emperor said at Königsberg in 1910, not by "parliaments, and meetings, and decisions of the peoples, but by the grace of God alone." He is "a chosen instrument of Heaven," to speak with the same high authority, and "goes his way without regard to the views and opinions of the day." An emperor, thus defined, is not properly a part of his state at all. He stands outside of it, and is equal or superior to it. He is a state unto himself; and his jurisdiction is not domestic but imperial, in that he exercises dominion over another state. L'état c'est moi is an imperfect definition of this kind of empire, however; for it presumes the absence of political organization and activity among the subjects of the emperor. It presumes the permanency of the condition of absolute surrender (deditio) which, with the Romans, prefaced the work of restoration—the reëstablishment of civil rights within an enlarged state. In actual experience, moreover, a complete autocracy never exists. The will of every emperor is bound by the legislation which he has himself enacted, or accepted with the throne from his predecessor. If responsible to nothing else, he is responsible to his own past. He may withdraw his charters: he cannot violate them with impunity.

The policy by which a people or an autocrat acquires and maintains an empire, we call imperialism. The term is, of course, a legacy from Rome—a mute witness to the peculiar importance of the Roman empire in the history of state-building. And, I suppose, it is the policy of Rome that we think of most instinctively when we allude to imperialism. This is by no means an accident. For not simply the type, but also many of the most noteworthy varieties of this kind of policy, are found in the experience of the Romans; and the course of political progress has been such that in the triumph of Rome imperialism reached its logical issue more closely than either before or since in the history of the world.

For the logical issue of a thorough-going imperial policy—one in which the possession of physical ability may be presupposed—is the formation of an universal empire. And, in fact, the two most powerful and ardent imperialists of antiquity, Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar, aimed to include in their dominions the entire inhabitable world. This issue was, however, never more nearly reached than in the long period before and after the Christian era during which only shifting nomads and intractable Parthians disputed successfully the will of the Roman Senate and the orders of the Roman emperors. For five hundred years after the triumph of Constantine the universality of the Roman empire was as mandatory in men's thinking as was the catholicity of the Christian Church. "There are many 'empires' in the world to-day," says Professor Bury[1] in explaining the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 A.D., "but in those days men could only conceive of one, the Roman imperium, which was simple and indivisible; two Roman empires were unimaginable. There might be more than the one emperor; but these others could only be legitimate and constitutional if they stood to him in a collegial relation." How thoroughly the Romans impressed the concept of universality upon the term empire may be judged by the fact that, in the face of all realities, the Frankish monarchs at Aachen and the Greek kings at Constantinople ruled as colleagues a Roman empire which stretched from the borders of Armenia to the shores of the Atlantic.

Transcendent as is the imperial achievement of the Romans, and unrivaled as is the political sagacity with which they consolidated their power and made it enduring, it must still be recognized that they were the heirs, in war, diplomacy, and government, of the Greeks, their predecessors. They worked with greater power and with larger units than did the Spartans and the Athenians. They benefited by the brilliant inventions and the costly errors of the Macedonians whose kingdoms they destroyed. But their success simply brought to a culmination the imperial movement in which Sparta, Athens, and Macedon were worthy co-workers. It is our task in this series of essays to examine in turn the imperial experiments by which the Greeks not only won a field for the display of their own talents, but also prepared the way for the unification of the ancient world in the empire of Rome.

I alluded a moment ago to the smallness of the units with which the imperial policy of Sparta and Athens had to deal. Before proceeding in the latter part of this chapter to trace the development of the forms by which imperialism was obscured, evaded, and ultimately justified in Greece, I should like to try to make clear the qualities which rendered the little Hellenic communities so hard for imperial digestion. In classic Greece, as in renascence Italy, the city was the state. It had not always been so; for in the past the land had been at one time in the possession of rudimentary nations, called ethne. But in the classic epoch these loose organisms persisted only in certain backward regions in the west and north. Elsewhere city-states had everywhere made their appearance as early as the sixth century B.C.

The circumstances in which these city-states arose are shrouded in the mystery which surrounds most beginnings. They, accordingly, present all the better opportunity for the construction of a theory; and perhaps the theory which had once the greatest vogue is that enunciated by Fustel de Coulanges in his brilliant book on The Ancient City. Of its main propositions, however,—that each city-state came into being at a single moment; that it was an artificial structure deliberately modeled on the preëxistent family; that the family was a religious association created and organized for the worship of ancestors; that the spirits of ancestors were the first gods, or, indeed, were gods at all,—not one has stood the test of a searching inquiry. On the contrary, it seems established that the city-state was the result of a natural growth, and that the incidents which accompanied its development, while varied and numerous, were all manifestations of political progress. Growth in the direction of a large number of distinct states was natural in Greece in view of the well-known physical features of the country; but the study of geography does not explain why these states were cities. For the true explanation of this phenomenon we must not confine our observation to Greece. Broadly speaking, high culture is everywhere city-bred, and the cities have regularly been the leaders in political development. In Babylonia that was the case, though the urban centres there were dominated from a very early date by Semitic tribes from the desert. Free cities, like Tyre and Sidon, were the prime sources of Phœnician enterprise. The home of Roman law and government was a city, and when Italy led the world a second time, she was a complex of city-states. The Hanse towns and the Flemish communes, the chartered cities of England and France, acquired political liberty or political rights long before the rest of Central Europe. Where, in fact, the cities have not been the mother, and the territorial states simply the foster-mother, of freedom and culture, exceptional conditions have existed—such as the need of regulating the Nile's overflow in Egypt, and the model and influence of the Roman empire in Mohammedan and Christian Europe.

The city enables men to coöperate easily. In it ideas and feelings spread quickly. Life, property, and privileges are there protected by walls, and, if need be, by street barricades. "Two voices are there," wrote Wordsworth in 1807, his vision limited by the peril of England and Switzerland,—

"one is of the sea,

One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice:

In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,

They were thy chosen music, Liberty."

The voice of a city mob—that of Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, Florence, or Paris, for example—was generally raucous and often cruel. But it made tyrants tremble and limited absolutism when the fear of assassination was powerless.

Fortunately, it is not with the origins, but with the characteristics, of the Greek city-states that we have to do mainly when we seek to discover the grounds of their hatred of all imperialistic projects. Let us, therefore, try to form a concrete impression of the salient features of the hundreds of little states with which the progressive parts of Greece were honeycombed at the beginning of the classic period, in the sixth century B.C. Each political cell, so to speak, had its nucleus in a walled town and its substance in a small circuit of grain, pasture, and garden land which the inhabitants of the town owned and cultivated. Most of the towns were simply hives of farmers. Whether the farmers were landlords, small proprietors, or peasants; however much they were divided by lines of social cleavage, they were all able to meet on the common ground of a single occupation. And every day from March to November, from the out-cropping of the grass and foliage in the spring, through the season of the grain harvest, the vintage, and the picking of the olives, to the fall planting and seeding, the ebb and flow of agricultural life carried the population of the city to the country in the morning and back to the city again in the evening.

There were few towns in Greece whose land did not touch the sea; and from the sea another harvest was gathered. Fishing existed, of course; but that was not all. Transmarine commerce is never wholly absent in any maritime country. In Greece it was especially favored by the difficulties of land transit, and by the excellence of the highways which the sea laid while carving the country up into a myriad of islands, head-lands, and estuaries. Hence, by the opening of the sixth century B.C. a second town had generally appeared on the coast of each little state when the chief town had developed, as was commonly the case, a few miles inland. In the new settlement the tone was set by the sailor-folk and the traders; in the old centre by the landed proprietors and the peasants. But the landlords were frequently merchants, and the peasants could easily attach work-places (ergasteria) to their houses—which, though in the towns, were really farmhouses—and become manufacturers in a small way; while it was regularly the ambition of a trader or seaman to crown a successful career by buying a farm, a ranch, or an orchard. There was, accordingly, a very close connection between urban and agrarian pursuits and interests.

It is true that with the Greek occupation of the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Seas in the seventh century B.C. some Greek towns, like Miletus, Samos, Corinth, Ægina, Chalcis, and Eretria, became cities in the modern sense of the term, with commercial and industrial interests predominant. But even there the advantages of urban life were within reach of the farmers, as well as of the traders, artisans, and merchants, since all alike were residents of the city. The only difference was that life in those cities was more rich and diversified than elsewhere.

The contrast between life in cities, with its complex social organization, its playhouses, its excitements, its stimuli to effort and to vice, its intolerance of oddities in manners and dress, and life in the country, with its simplicity which degenerates so easily into brutality, its monotony, its fanaticism in the pursuit of wealth, its contempt for the effeminacy of the shopkeeper, its piety and sobriety which easily accord with a longing to see the world and the wickedness thereof—this contrast which is so distressing an aspect of life in modern America, was almost entirely absent in classic Greece, at least among the enfranchised part of the population.

None of the cities was so large as to shut off the view of the country. After only a few minutes' walk Socrates and his companions might escape from the noise and confusion of Athens into the cool and fragrant groves of the suburbs. It was probably only into the biggest of the Greek cities that the olive trees and the grapevines did not push, as they and the late-come orange and lemon orchards push into the modern Greek hamlets. Even in Athens the crowing of the cock sounded the reveille for almost everybody, and it would never have come into the mind of an Athenian to suggest, as has been done in Boston, that a zoo should be stocked first with the common varieties of the domesticated animals. There is, says a French writer, a flavor of the barnyard about the comedies of Aristophanes. Yet this is the same Athens in which there were engaged in the building trades alone, according to Plutarch, carpenters, moulders, bronze-smiths, stone-cutters, dyers, veneerers in gold and ivory, painters, embroiderers, embossers, factors, sailors, pilots, wagon-makers, trainers of yoked beasts, drivers, rope-makers, weavers, cobblers, road-builders, and miners. This, too, is the Athens into which, as an ancient Athenian wrote, were swept, because of its maritime empire, the choice things of Sicily and Italy, of Cyprus, and Egypt, and Lydia, of Pontus and Peloponnesus, and many another place besides. When the farmer lived side by side in Athens, the largest city in the whole Greek world, with the trader and the artisan, the fusion of town and country must have been still more complete in the forty-three cities of Crete, the ten cities of Eubœa, and the four cities of Ceos—an island only ten miles broad and fourteen long. This being the case, economic conditions tended to make the citizens of each state homogeneous to a degree foreign in modern experience; for, however rapid be its approach, the age has not yet arrived in America in which the "country is to be urbanized"; in which, to speak with a recent essayist,[2] farming is to be "of necessity a specialized department of urban life"; "the task of agricultural production is to be taken over by the classes of modern industrial organization; by the capitalist, the manager and the laborer"; in which "there is to be a continual shifting of laborers of the poorer classes back and forth between the town and the country," and "the distinction implied in the terms 'townsman' and 'countryman' is to be obliterated."

Whether our essayist be right or wrong in his forecast of the future of farming in America, we will not stop to discuss. It is enough to point out that the early age of Greece was such a one as he desiderates; that then life was exclusively and uniformly urban: with the result that the entire population of any given city-state could be regarded as merely a great family. And it not only could be, but it was in fact so regarded. Were not all citizens descendants of a common ancestor? This query aristocrats might answer in the negative, mindful of the special god or demigod of whom each nobleman thought himself the offspring. But his negative was generally qualified by the admission that he, too, if he were an Athenian, had Zeus and Apollo—Zeus of the home-stead and Apollo of the fatherland—as his progenitors; that he, too, like all his fellow-citizens, was a descendant of Ion and a foster-child of Athena. The gods and goddesses of the Greeks were their creators in the literal physical sense of the word. Men projected backward, even to the age of the gods and heroes, with which the world began, the fact of paternity to which all animal origins were attributable; and since each city had its peculiar demigods, from which its citizens were directly sprung, all its inhabitants were bound to one another by a peculiar tie of blood.

The family aspect of the Greek city is accentuated by the fact that the town hall was a town hearth; that the chief subdivisions of citizens were brotherhoods, and that all permanent associations of them for public purposes assumed the descent of their several members from common ancestors, who were naturally gods or demigods. When heroes had to be discovered, with the help of the Pythian prophetess, to act as progenitors for the groups of citizens artificially united in the new electoral divisions which Clisthenes established in Athens in 508 B.C., it is conceivable that popular regard for purity of stock helped Pericles to enact the notorious law of 451 B.C. limiting citizenship at Athens to those sprung from the legitimate union of Athenian parents. Every city in Greece inherited from its distant tribal past a strong feeling of the kinship of its inhabitants, in comparison with which the sense of ethnic and racial unity was weak and watery. To destroy the political identity of a city was like taking human life.

We must make allowance, moreover, in appraising the strength of local attachments among both Greeks and Romans, for their beliefs as to the fate of the dead. The ancient world, like modern Japan, was saturated with the idea that the spirits of departed ancestors needed the ministrations of the living. Without the meat and drink which the relatives brought to the grave; without the coins—or the articles of use and pleasure which money might buy—that were buried with the body; without the covering of earth that was strewn over the dead, loved ones might lack life altogether in the underworld, or might lack everything that made the spirit life tolerable. "The beasts of the field and the birds of the air," rang the impassioned plea of Tiberius Gracchus[3] in introducing his agrarian reforms, "have their holes and their hiding-places, but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy but the blessings of light and air. Our generals urge their soldiers to fight for the graves and the shrines of their ancestors. The appeal is idle and false. You cannot point to a paternal altar. You have no ancestral tomb. No! you fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others. You are called the masters of the world: yet there is no clod of earth that is really yours." Plutarch, with a touch which shows that despite his modernity he belongs to the civilization which he interprets, tells us that the Athenians before Salamis were disposed to count victory dear which was purchased by the desertion of the temples and the tombs of their fathers. No man who neglected the plot where his dead lay might hold the chief magistracies in Athens. The soil of his fatherland was thus in a peculiar sense holy ground to the citizen of a Greek city. He might leave it, but not to an enemy; and if he were, like Æneas, the last of his family, he was expected to carry his Lares and Penates with him. Into a pit dug on the new site every companion of Romulus, we are told in a legend which merely transfers into the past later-day practice, threw a morsel of earth brought from his old home land. This he did not simply from an intensification of the feeling which led the Scotch girl in the well-known ballad to take with her, when starting for America, not baggage, but sods from her mother's grave. He did it from the sentiment which led General Nogi the other day to provide for the spirits of his ancestors before committing suicide. Thereby the colonist brought his dead along with him to the new city. The Greeks and the Romans had, accordingly, a very special reason for local patriotism. Like the Hebrew Christians, they were "also compassed about with so great a crowd of witnesses."

We have made our peace with economics by considering first the effect of occupation and residence in giving to the citizens of each city-state solidarity of interest and attitude. We have dwelt a little on the force which beliefs as to their origin and their destiny hereafter exerted in keeping the city-states apart. We have still to notice the centrifugal influence on the Greek race of their urban institutions and politics.

Each city in Greece had its own laws and customs. These were not, as with us, cold abstractions, but real, ever active, almost living, personal forces, moulding incessantly their subjects according to a given model. The citizens of each city had, in fact, a general family resemblance, due to the imprint set upon them by their social and political institutions. Cities acquired by this means clear-cut individualities which were capable of definition, not simply by narrating their history, but also in terms of physical, intellectual, and emotional qualities. We may illustrate this point by observing that the Hellenes created one literary type which we have not borrowed from them: they wrote the biographies of cities as well as of men. Their philosophers studied the effects upon urban character of climate, prevailing winds and pursuits, location with reference to the sun and the sea, contact with foreigners, and other similar agencies. They even had specifics which they prescribed for the physiological and pathological ills of cities, just as our sciolists, on a much more slender basis of facts, however, diagnose the diseases and classify the good and evil qualities of nations.

The truth is that cities meant to all the Greeks what (and much besides) the city and the nation combined mean to those of us who do not live in the country. They were the source and object at once of municipal and national pride. The problems which city-states had to consider and solve were not simply those in which good citizens find it so hard nowadays to develop a wholesome interest. Questions of police, education, public works, appointments; conflicts of racial, sectional, class, and religious ambitions; rivalries with neighboring cities for commercial, political, and cultural leadership—controversies of this order are common to all cities in all times and places. But the politics of the Greek cities had a high seriousness of their own. Each town had its own foreign policy to determine, its own army to train and direct, its own church to equip with shrines and deities, its own gods to honor with games and tragedies. Every move on the complex chessboard of the Mediterranean world might be pregnant with meaning to it. On one day it might decide that the time had come to seize some borderland in dispute with its immediate neighbors. On another it might conclude an alliance which imposed the obligation to wage a great war against frightful odds. On another the subject of voting might be the recognition of a new god or goddess, which, in fact, was often tantamount to a new creation. And in considering all these matters citizens were simply doing what their fathers and forefathers had done from time immemorial. Memories of great actions done in olden times were preserved by monuments of bronze or marble, and revived annually by appropriate ceremonies. Legend and fact, blended in an edifying tradition,—the repository of the yearnings and ideals of dead generations,—inspired the living to bear themselves worthily in all national crises. "Love thou thy land with love far-brought from out the storied past" was an admonition of which Greek cities of the classic epoch stood in little need. The mischief was that the land which they loved was not all Greece, but merely the territory of a single town.

The national fanaticism of the countries of modern Europe is probably more tolerant of foreign interference than was the passionate patriotism of the little urban units with which the imperial policy of Athens and Sparta had to deal.

If you were to look at a map of Greece which distinguished the states, and not the meaningless ethnical or tribal divisions of the people, you would observe that from the outset Sparta and Athens were destined to greatness, if by nothing else, by the size and material resources of their territories. They were, however, themselves city-states, and inferior to none in the strength with which they held to the conviction that no greater humiliation could befall them than to have to submit to the domination of another city or the will of a foreign lord. With what show of reason, therefore, could they adopt a policy of imperialism? They had to deal with Greeks, and not with barbarians. Hence they could not invoke in the interest of their ambition the convenient doctrine that inferior races need a political guardian.

In estimating the territory of Sparta we have included in it not simply the land of the citizens which the serfs or Helots tilled for them, but also the much larger, but less valuable, mass of enveloping land which belonged to the Periœcs; for the hamlets of the latter were really Spartan municipalities. It was, moreover, with the resources of the whole complex that Sparta held the Peloponnesians united under her leadership for one hundred and eighty years (550-370 B.C.). On the other hand, it was with the combined strength of the Peloponnesians that Sparta broke up the Athenian empire in 405 B.C., and widened the area of her leadership so as to include all Hellas. Thereafter Sparta's Peloponnesian league was simply the core of a general Hellenic league. The question is: What position did Sparta occupy in it?

Her legal rights rested solely upon a treaty of alliance (symmachia) which she had struck with each city in the league. But there can be no doubt that she had often secured the treaty in the first place by force, and that she interfered thereafter in the local affairs of both the Peloponnesian and the other Hellenic allies in a way not provided by its stipulations. But, however outrageous her conduct might be in fact, it was never formally reprehensible so long as the interference achieved its object. This was to establish or maintain, first against tyranny, and later against democracy, an aristocratic government in the allied cities. Since the aristocrats were always in a minority, they were bound to invite Spartan intervention for their own defense. Hence it was only when they failed to retain control of the government that an ally could regard Sparta's intermeddling as anything but the welcome act of a friendly power. "Perhaps some one may expostulate," writes a pamphleteer in 400 B.C. while commending to his fellow-citizens of Larisa a proposal that they join the Hellenic league;[4] "but Sparta sets up an oligarchy everywhere. That is true. But it is such a one as we prayed and yearned for for ages, and lost when we had enjoyed it for but a brief moment. Just compare the oligarchy they favor with the one we have already. Where is there a city in their domain, be it ever so small, in which a third of the population does not take part in public affairs? It is not by the Lacedæmonians, but by fortune, that those who have no arms or other capacity for public service are disfranchised. Their exclusion lasts only so long as their political worthlessness. How do we stand by comparison? It's my belief that were we to pray for a constitution we would not ask the gods for a different one from that which Sparta wishes." To even moderate men who thought as this speaker did, unruly Spartan garrisons seemed quite compatible with local autonomy. They came to Larisa at the call of the home authorities and remained at the disposal of those who called them. Their captains, the long-haired harmosts, took orders and did not give them. Their presence involved no suspension of the constitution, no violation of the laws, no seizure of public revenues. Naturally, the two thirds who were disfranchised thought differently; but it is a good rule of international law that a foreign state deal with the Government, and not with the Opposition. The, mischief of this system, in the circumstances then existing in Greece, was that it bred civil war within the cities. "War," says the Larisæan pamphleteer just quoted, "is conceded to be the greatest of all evils by as much as peace is the greatest of all blessings. Yet stasis, or civil war, as far exceeds war in the magnitude of its evil as war exceeds peace." The incentive to stasis was that Athens, with a naval power as irresistible as was the land power of Sparta, and an equally imposing array of allies, had long continued to reach out a supporting or encouraging hand to the two thirds whom Sparta tried to keep down. Athens, too, was the apostle of a great political idea, "the constitutional equality of the many," and whenever she succeeded in putting those who believed in this creed in control of an allied city, or in keeping them in control once they had the advantage, her interference was formally justifiable or at least justified. Not she, but the government she upheld, had the responsibility.

With the outbreak of the great duel for national leadership between Sparta and Athens which fills the final third of the fifth century B.C., the war was carried in the form of stasis into every city of the two confederacies. For the leaders of both the one third and the two thirds, says Thucydides in a famous passage of his history of the Peloponnesian War[5] "used specious names, the one professing to uphold the constitutional equality of the many, the other the wisdom of an aristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in name they were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in every way to overcome each other, they committed the most monstrous crimes; yet even these were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges, which they pursued to the very utmost, neither party observing any definite limits either of justice or public expediency, but both alike making the caprice of the moment their law. Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, or grasping power with the strong hand, they were eager to satiate the impatience of party spirit. Neither faction cared for religion; but any fair pretence which succeeded in effecting some odious purpose was greatly lauded. And the citizens who were of neither party fell a prey to both; either they were disliked because they held aloof, or men were jealous of their surviving. Thus stasis gave birth to every form of wickedness in Greece." The singleness of purpose with which Sparta made vocational training the aim of her public education achieved the happy result that she had no men of letters to betray to posterity damaging secrets of state. Hence no one has done for her what Thucydides has done for Athens: let us have an insight into the conscience of the city at the time of its greatness. With brutal candor Cleon and others in Thucydides' narrative brush aside the formal justification of the Athenian empire and lay bare the fact that it was in reality a tyranny, a sovereignty exercised without a moral sanction, one which self-respecting people had a solemn duty to overthrow. "You should remember," said Cleon to the Athenians in 427 B.C.,[6] "that your empire is a despotism exercised over unwilling subjects who are always conspiring against you; they do not obey in return for any kindness which you do them to your own injury, but in so far as you are their mistress; they have no love of you, but they are held down by force."

Dependence upon Sparta or Athens was, in fact, regarded by none of their allies except as the less of two evils: the greater was dependence upon their domestic foes. Hence the tyranny just described did not arise with the consent of the tyrannized. The allies of Athens had consented to enter only into alliance (symmachia) with her on stipulated terms and for a stipulated purpose—protection against Persia. What they had neglected to stipulate was the time for which they were to remain allies. Athens, accordingly, denied them the right to secede, and when particular cities tried none the less to withdraw, she made the preservation of the union a moral ground for coercion, and with the aid of such cities as remained faithful, and the fleet which she kept ready for action by the financial contributions of all, she forced them back on terms such as a conqueror could dictate. A new treaty of alliance was, however, the future, as it had been the ancient, tie. And speaking broadly, we may affirm that in the city-state world of classic Greece an empire was legally impossible: what we, and the ancients, looking to realities, call an empire was an aggregate knit together by treaties, the very formation of which shows that we have to do, not with a single sovereign, but with a group of sovereigns. In other words, the city remained the ultimate political unit. The rule of Athens and Sparta was, strictly speaking, an hegemony and not an arche; a shifting and temporary leadership, and not a permanent suzerainty. It was a necessity of circumstances assumed to be exceptional.

Unfortunately, experience showed that the circumstances in which imperialism was a political necessity recurred constantly. After the fall of Athens in 404 B.C., a defensive war against the barbarians—the Macedonians in Thessaly, the Persians in Ionia—served as a justification to Sparta in employing force to maintain the hegemony which she had won. But in 387 B.C. the peace known as the "King's Peace," or the "Peace of Antalcidas," was concluded with Persia, whereupon it became impossible to use any longer the national cause as even a pretext for tyranny. The hegemony, however, was not abandoned. It had to be maintained, it was alleged, to keep the other cities free, and to this end Persia lent aid to Sparta and Thebes successively. If an empire could only be prevented by an empire, and national recreancy to boot, the times were surely out of joint. Such an issue was the reductio ad absurdum of the system of hegemonies, as both reformers and statesmen in Greece came speedily to realize.

The reformers strove to alter the untoward circumstances, and in a later chapter we shall have occasion to note how Plato and Aristotle, with a blind faith in the power of education and of legislation, aimed to divert citizens from work to leisure and from war to peace, and both to eradicate the greed for land and money and to restrict the natural increase of population to which they traced the imperialistic spirit. Some of the statesmen followed their lead. Others, however, conceding that unity was demanded for the preservation and spread of civilization, and that the world needed not fewer but more Greeks, either, like the great publicist Isocrates, advocated an hegemony on the old lines but endowed with stability through being based on general consent, or favored one of several new devices for welding cities into a permanent territorial state. Respect for progress bids us to view at this point somewhat narrowly these unitarian movements.

The position attained by Thebes in Greece after her victory over Sparta at Leuctra in 371 B.C. was simply an hegemony of the earlier model—the reoccupation of lines proved twice already to be untenable.[7] On the other hand, the position occupied by Thebes in Bœotia prior to 387 B.C. was clearly anticipatory of what the future was to bring to Greece as a whole. Bœotia was thereby blocked off into six districts,[8] one (Thebes) with four electoral divisions, two (Orchomenus and Thespiæ) with two each, and three with one apiece. Six of the ten city-states of Bœotia—the six little lake cities—were confined to two of the eleven divisions. This was a setback to them and a boon to Thebes, seeing that each division furnished one of the eleven Bœotarchs who formed the executive of the league, sixty of the six hundred and sixty councillors who formed the Bœotian synod, and its corresponding share of the league judges. Thebes thus became the Prussia of Bœotia, and in return for the political advantages which it gained and four elevenths of the revenues which it received, it undertook to provide four elevenths of the soldiers and four elevenths of the taxes. In this way the burdens and the advantages of the league were distributed according to the population and wealth of the different parts of the country. That was equitable; and since the city-states, though thrust into the background and held responsible for decisions in the making of which they had often little influence, formed a single ethnos and spoke a single dialect, they were evidently fairly well satisfied. As the league was constituted, Thebes was forced to struggle with Orchomenus and Thespiæ for the control of the six little lake cities. In this she was normally successful—so successful, in fact, that in 387 B.C. Sparta, while enforcing the King's Peace, dissolved the league in order to destroy her influence. It was not revived when Thebes reunited Bœotia (377-371 B.C.), and under Epaminondas we may more properly speak of Bœotia as a single city-state like Attica than as a league of city-states.

Though sacrificed at home to the ambition of Thebes, the Bœotian league maintained a high prestige abroad. Some of its institutions had been transferred to Athens during the revolution of 411 B.C., and others had been adopted in Arcadia after they had been set aside in Bœotia. Moreover, and this is an important historical connection which the wonderful epigraphical researches of Adolph Wilhelm[9] enable us to establish, the Bœotian league reappears mutatis mutandis in the organization imposed upon all Greece by Philip of Macedon after his crowning victory at Chæronea in 338 B.C. For if we equate Philip and the Committee of Public Safety with the eleven Bœotarchs, the synod of Corinth with the Bœotian synod of six hundred and sixty, and the districts into which Hellas, including Macedon and excluding only Sparta, was divided for federal purposes, with the six districts which had existed in Bœotia, it is evident that the political system used by Philip for organizing the Greeks was borrowed from Bœotia no less than the military system with which he conquered them. It was not for nothing that the king of Macedon had spent his youth as a hostage in Thebes.

Characteristic of the Bœotian league and of Philip's Hellenic league is the synod. It was in each a strictly representative body. Its members were apportioned to the area constituting the league in such a way that the larger states had several representatives and the smaller states had one representative between them; while in the Hellenic league neighboring states and federated states were treated as a unit and given proportional representation. That this made all but the largest state—Macedon—the largest state's inferiors and subordinated many city-states to the federal districts to which they belonged, is obvious. And in this case loss of local liberty was compensated for very imperfectly by the consideration that what the constituent states surrendered the Hellenic synod, which met at Corinth, gained. The national appeal was far weaker than the ethnic appeal had been in Bœotia. The liberty lost had indeed been a bane and not a blessing. After 338 B.C. the cities could no longer enjoy the excitement of waging private wars and fomenting revolutions. No longer were they free to be enemies of Philip. Henceforth they must contribute the quota of horsemen, hoplites, light-armed troops, and sailors for which their representation in the synod obligated them, or pay a heavy fine for every day their contingents were absent from the national levy. The synod completed its organization by choosing Philip its hegemon by land and sea, and selected as its executive board a Committee of Public Safety which seemingly had its sessions at Pydna. The committee the confederates probably welcomed as a possible champion of their interests. The unwelcome organ of the league, and the one for which there was no parallel in Bœotia, was the hegemon. Subordination to a synod was offensive enough to city-states which regarded complete independence as alone ideal. It was intolerable to them to submit to a synod which its hegemon, Philip of Macedon, controlled,—one which could never have any one but the contemporary king of Macedon as its hegemon. The hegemony of Macedon was sugar-coated, but it was none the less an hegemony, and, as such, illegal and unacceptable.[10]

A notable start in the direction of uniting city-states legally in a larger whole had been made by Athens during the epoch of her empire. She had then founded many colonies (cleruchies), which, though organized as separate cities, retained for their residents citizenship in Athens. Why not grant citizenship (polity) to the inhabitants of other cities as well? There were some, and among them the comedian Aristophanes,[11] who canvassed this idea. "Let us assume," he says, "that our city is a heap of wool, and that each of our allied cities is a fleck of wool. Let us take all the wool and spin it into yarn, and weave the yarn into a great blanket with which to protect our lord Demos against the cold." But for this drastic measure the times were not ripe. It was altogether repugnant to the pride of the Athenians to share with everybody advantages which they had sacrificed so much to acquire; and there was little in the advantages thus diluted to compensate other cities for the at least partial loss of identity which they were bound to sustain on acquiring Athenian citizenship. In the one instance in which this course was taken, the Samians, to whom Athens gave her full civic rights in the supreme agony of the Peloponnesian War, had both earned them and come to appreciate them by sacrificing their own territory rather than desert their ally.

Another less heroic expedient for bringing about a permanent entente between cities was the grant of isopolity, or reciprocity of citizenship. In certain cases this was the concession of the passive rights of citizenship (civitas sine suffragio) to all citizens of a particular city who should take up residence in, or even merely visit, the territory of the grantor. Thus circumscribed, however, it amounted simply to an exchange of commercial privileges, and proved barren of political consequences in that each city reserved to itself complete control of its own policy, thus rendering impossible any advance in state building. It remained for the Romans to render this institution fruitful to an astonishing degree by making the legal exercise of Roman citizenship independent of migration to Rome.

Substantially the same result was achieved by the Greeks through what they termed sympolity, or joint citizenship. This was possessed from of old by rudimentary nations, like the Achæans and the Ætolians,[12] among whom the towns and hamlets had never become independent and self-sufficient political units; so that the inhabitants were Achæans from Ægium, or Achæans from Cerynia, or Achæans from some other of the ten so-called cities of which the Achæan nation or league was constituted. In like fashion the Ætolian hamlets had a double citizenship. An essential part of this scheme, evidently, was that each city had an equal voice in the election of the officials of the league and in the settlement of all federal matters. And so satisfactory a safeguard of urban autonomy did this prove to be that in the last half of the third century B.C. city after city in the Peloponnesus outside the ancient limits of Achæa took the irrevocable step of acquiring Achæan citizenship in addition to its own; while in Central Greece the Ætolians by fair means or foul bestowed a dual citizenship upon all their neighbors. Athens and Sparta alone persisted in their isolation, the former on the strength of an international guarantee of autonomy, the latter in stubborn reliance upon its own powers. The other city-states entrusted to an international board, not for a definite or indefinite term of years, but for all future time, complete control of their foreign relations. Each city put permanently the international authority between itself and the outside world, thus escaping individual danger by the surrender of individual diplomacy.[13]

In this way arose what by the general consent of historians and jurists is the most perfect state which antiquity produced. The antinomy between the city-state and the imperial spirit which had existed for centuries was reduced to a minimum by the nice balance of the federal system.

There were defects in the Achæan and Ætolian leagues which their statesmen did not remove. "Equality," says Aristotle, "is just, but only between equals." The cities which had an equal voice in the international board, like the modern nations which cast a vote each at the Hague Congress, were unequal in population and in wealth.

The Achæans and Ætolians came nearer than any ancient republicans to entrusting power to representatives; but, besides creating a large legislative council, constituted in successive years, in the one case, of different fractions of the citizens of each city, and in the other, of deputies apportioned to the constituent cities according to their size, they showed the ingrained distrust held by all Greeks for oligarchy by requiring the reference to a general assembly of all matters of high importance.

How to satisfy the just claims of those whom distance or lack of leisure prevented from coming to the meeting-place, they did not discover.

However, it was not these institutional imperfections which prevented the unification of Hellas in a single federation. For this result could not now be achieved by any triumph of political science. Antigonus Doson (229-221 B.C.) whose name ought not to be unknown where Callicratidas, Agesilaus, Iphicrates, and Phocion are household words, attempted with equal skill and generosity to combine the new federal idea with the old idea of a representative national congress meeting at Corinth under the hegemony of the king of Macedon;[14] but the best that can be said of the combination he made is that despite its great promise and possibilities it proved unacceptable to Hellas, and hence ineffective.[15] The situation had now got beyond the control of the Greek people. It may, perhaps, be realized best, if we imagine that the European nations of to-day, weakened politically by continuous emigration and incessant conflicts, economically, by the withdrawal of industry and commerce to more favorably situated districts under European control, let us say in the East, were to pool their diplomatic and military interests, and entrust them, not to a European parliament, but to warring Latin and Teutonic parliaments, and were to take this step only to escape the Russian peril and when America was already thundering at their shores, if that be imaginable, coming with irresistible might, at once to save and to destroy.

To describe how the Roman republic emancipated Greece from Macedon, impressed her will upon the Greek kingdoms of the East, and built up a universal empire of diverse fragments, lies beyond the scope of this book. We may note simply that to some cities she gave her citizenship, or polity, thus destroying their identity altogether; that to others she gave isopolity, or reciprocity of citizenship, and with it the local advantages preserved in Greece by sympolity, or joint citizenship, thus creating the municipality and organizing wards, so to speak, of the city of Rome all over Italy; that some (the socii, or Italian allies) she bound to herself by irrevocable treaties till she was forced to give them municipal status, and others (the "friends," amici, or the "friends and allies," amici et socii, in what later became the provinces) by understandings or temporary treaties till she had familiarized herself with deification of rulers, which was the Greek method of legalizing absolutism.

A word on this strange institution and I have finished this survey of the expedients devised by the Greeks to obscure, evade, and finally to justify imperialism. The Greek method of legalizing despotism was Alexander the Great's genial adaptation to state building of an idea which his tutor, Aristotle, had developed in his Politics.[16] It was a means of uniting cities or provinces in an indissoluble whole while preserving, on the one hand, the superiority and freedom of action of the suzerain, be it an emperor or a republic, and, on the other hand, the self-respect of the inferior states, without which their status was politically intolerable. Deification of rulers did the impossible: it reconciled completely the antinomy between the city-state and imperialism. It resolved the antagonism into two harmonious duties; the duty of the ruler to command and of the subject to obey.

To Alexander the Great governments have been in serious debt for over two thousand years. From him to Kaiser Wilhelm II runs an unbroken line. So long as the world had many gods and did not believe in the supernatural power of any of them, there was no religious difficulty in adding to its stock another such deity in the person of the living monarch. With the decadence of polytheism, however, a slight change was necessary. In Constantine's time god-kings suffered the same fate as other pagan gods; but with a difference. The heathen gods became devils or were metamorphosed into saints.

The kings became men chosen for their high office by God, Most High. Crowned, usually by their predecessors, and anointed by God's priests, the patriarchs, they governed by divine right and acknowledged responsibility only to their Creator.[17] In a less ecclesiastical world, as in modern Prussia, the kings crown themselves. But with these later developments we have no concern in this book. I shall endeavor, however, in chapters III-VI, to trace the growth of deification in the world-monarchy of Alexander the Great, and to make clear the purpose it served in the empires of the Ptolemies and Seleucids.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY