CHAPTER II
The Historical Background
IF the argument of the preceding
chapter is correct, it is clearly impossible to give a simple answer to the
question, 'If Plato lived again, what would he think of the modern world?' For Plato was no disembodied spirit hovering
with objective gaze over the process of history: he was a Greek, an Athenian,
and an aristocrat who lived a troubled life in the fifth and fourth centuries
before Christ. Before we can bring him
back to our world we must learn to know him in his own, and for this reason we
must pause for a moment to glance at the history of Greek civilization and to
pick out some of its distinctive characteristics.
Greek
civilization was not confined to the country we call Greece, or even centred
there. All round the Mediterranean, from
the Straits of Gibraltar to the Syrian coast, up the Dardanelles, on the Sea of
Marmora, and round the whole of the Black Sea, were scattered the independent
Greek cities. Not only the coasts of the
mainland but the islands too were occupied; in particular Sicily, Crete,
Cyprus, and the Greek Cyclades. Only where the Carthaginians held control in
the Western Mediterranean were the Greeks repulsed in their colonizing
activities. These colonies were quite
unlike any modern colonies. The
colonists, in spite of the ties of blood and commerce which often bound them to
the mother city, were citizens of independent cities and, generally speaking,
lived on equal terms with the 'barbarians' around them. Thus the European notion of the nation-state,
with its coloured empire and imperial rivalries, was completely foreign to the
Greek mind. The Greek recognized his
nationality only in the sense that he felt himself a Hellene, culturally
distinct from the peoples with whom he came into contact. But the idea that cultural unity should imply
a common government or that cultural superiority gave the right to political
domination was fundamentally un-Greek.
A Hellenic state
was envisaged by none save empty dreamers, a federation of Hellenic city-states
only by a few bold statesmen, who foresaw that the internecine rivalries of the
politicians must ultimately exhaust the energy of their peoples. For the ordinary Greek citizen the city-state
seemed to be as obvious a unit of political life, and as essential to security
and freedom, as the nation-state appears to the ordinary European. Equally foreign was the modern notion of
colonization and empire. The imperial
control of foreign peoples, whether for their exploitation or for their
well-being, did not appeal to a merchant people content to trade and live on
equal terms with all. The Greeks did not
feel the weight of 'the white man's burden', or at least did not feel that
Greek culture could be imposed by the political and military control of vast
continents. Alexander, the imperial
missionary of Hellenism, was a Macedonian, not a Greek.
It is idle to
search for a single cause of this remarkable difference between Greek
civilization and our own. Geography
doubtless played its part: for political unity between the townships scattered
round the mountainous shores of the Aegean was difficult to achieve. But more important still is the simple fact
that life in a tiny city-state contrasted so favourably with anything to be
found in any of the great Oriental empires.
The Greek international anarchy (for such it must be called) may have
been the final cause of the collapse of Greek independence: it was also the
chief reason for the well-nigh incredible activity which the Greeks displayed
from about 750 B.C. until, in about 350 B.C., the rise
of the Macedonian Empire brought the end of the 'Classical Period'. When we remember this we shall understand the
reluctance of Greeks as farsighted as Plato or Aristotle to face the
possibility that the city-state had played its part and must be replaced by new
forms of political organization.
The earliest
period of Greek life of which we know enough to write any connected history is
the early eighth century B.C. By this
time the Greeks were settled in Greece proper and along the coast of Asia Minor. Homer had become a mythical figure; Mycenae,
the city of Agamemnon, a ruin crumbling into the earth. The age of migrations was over, and it was
already difficult to distinguish the newcomers from the original
population. After the dark ages of confusion
in which the Cretan civilization had foundered, the new era dawns with a burst
of colonial expansion by a number of Greek cities. Between 750 and 500 B.C., colonists from
Corinth and Miletus and many other towns occupied
many of the best available sites on the coastlines of the Mediterranean and
Black Sea: hundreds of new cities sprang up and Greek life as we know it began.
What is the
explanation of Greek colonization?
Partly, no doubt, it was caused by the pressure of population in
countries whose agricultural possibilities were strictly limited by the climate
and the poverty of the soil: partly by the fact that the inland territories of
Asia Minor were actually occupied while in Greece proper there is hardly any
inland territory which is not mountain or desert. But though land-hunger may have been a
cause, undoubtedly trade was another.
The Greeks were always a maritime people, and already in the Dark Ages
Greek traders were active. Naturally
enough, therefore, when expansion was necessary, it followed the
trade-routes. Not only the hungry
peasant, but the ambitious merchant was willing to face the risks of a strange
country and to settle overseas.
This brings us
to the second distinguishing characteristic of Greek life. The Greeks were by necessity a seafaring
race, and so the economy of the Greek city-state could not long remain a
self-sufficient agricultural economy; it was bound to develop on mercantile
lines and to become dependent upon foreign trade. Whereas in the Eastern empires the traders
were a small class in comparison with the great mass of peasants, in Greece
trade permeated the whole of city life and its importance was vastly increased
by colonial activity. Rival
trade-leagues sprang up, and the first Greek war of which we have any record
was probably between two such leagues competing for the western trade, the one
headed by Corinth, the other by Miletus. The date of the Lelantine
war, as it was called, is about 700 B.C., and it left Corinth commercially
supreme in the west, while Miletus retained her power
in the Black Sea.
Inevitably the
growing influence of trade proved a no less disturbing factor in the domestic
affairs of the city-states. The Greek
city-state in 750 was usually ruled by an aristocracy or a king: the people met
perhaps in a general assembly, but only to give its consent by acclaim to the
dictates of its rulers. The aristocracy
was an aristocracy of birth and land, and the trader belonged to the common
people. Religion and justice alike were
in the hands of those chosen families who by ancestral tradition claimed to
know the ways of God and man. Such a
political structure is suitable only to a stable agricultural community in
which the wealth of the individual does not conflict with the interests of the people
as a whole. But in the city-state
agriculture was drawn into the orbit of trade as soon as the community ceased
to be self-supporting. Whereas
previously the merchant had imported only the luxuries of life and exported
only the unwanted produce, now production began to be specifically for export,
and cities became dependent upon imports for their raw materials. Corinth, for instance, began to monopolize
the export of pottery to the west, and so became rapidly more and more
dependent on imports for her food supply.
The same thing happened in scores of towns.
The result was
an ever deepening fissure between the supporters of the traditional and of the
new way of life. The aristocracy was
divided. Some sided with the new
mercantilism, others fiercely opposed it; and a social struggle began between
the old-fashioned landowners and the new traders. This struggle was intensified by the
introduction of coinage about 650 B.C.
For at first the control of the new means of exchange was not fully
understood and for this reason it merely accentuated the social misery. The peasant proprietor was often bought up or
enslaved: silver was hoarded and shortage of currency resulted in rising
prices. Increasing misery brought
political consciousness and the struggle between two rival groups of nobles
became a social upheaval of the people claiming the right to live.
This social
upheaval was the prelude to the second epoch of Greek history - the age of the
Tyrants. Up and down the Greek world
dictators supplanted the aristocrats and seized complete political control,
supported frequently by the starving masses and by the merchants.
It is a queer
accident that the word 'tyrant', first used to describe these democratic
dictators, should have come to mean a ruthless despot. Periander in
Corinth, Peisistratus in Athens, and many others like
them were men of great business ability and statesmanship who accommodated the
political structure of their cities to the new economic conditions. They were the bridge between aristocracy and
constitutional government. Without their
work Greece could not have developed that independence of spirit which was the
source of her later brilliance and the chief cause of her success in the
Persian wars.
The age of
tyranny lasted from the middle of the seventh to the end of the sixth
century. Throughout the century and a
half one city after another succumbed to the economic crisis and the ensuing
social revolution which passed from Asia Minor to mainland Greece and then
spread all over the Greek world. It is
impossible to overestimate the importance of this period in Greek history. Misunderstood by the later Greek philosophers
and historians, neglected by some modern Hellenists who like to think of Greek
culture as a unique spiritual phenomenon, remote from the petty considerations
of money and trade, it was, in fact, the age in which were laid the foundations
of the constitutional governments, legal codes, and philosophies of right which
were the glory of classical Greece. It
is as futile to disregard the age of tyranny in the study of Greek democracy as
it would be to disregard the industrial revolution in an analysis of the modern
State. As at the beginning of the
nineteenth century industrialists and workmen united to sweep away an aristocratic
regime, or to modify it to the new conditions, so in Greece the trader and the
common people joined forces behind a tyranny to challenge the authority of the
aristocracy of birth and land.
Thus it was the
tyrants who really created the Greek State. They broke down the old tribal organization
of primitive aristocracy and substituted for it a new patriotism: they
destroyed local religious cults and replaced them by State-religions. By encouraging commerce they gained the
loyalty of the merchant and manufacturer to the new regime: by stabilizing the
currency and helping the peasant proprietor they restored agriculture to
something like prosperity. Last, but not
least, by breaking with the old tradition, they set free the spirit of reason
and harnessed it to useful commercial ends.
Tyranny was the government of the hard-headed businessman who puts
prosperity first in his political programme.
As such it was a necessary stage in Greek development.
Of this new type
of statesman, Peisistratus of Athens was perhaps the
best example. In the colonizing period
Athens had played no prominent part, but had solved her land problem by
unifying Attica as a single State. Till
the end of the seventh century she remained a small agricultural State,
crippled in the closing years in her trade connections by the island power Aegina, just across the bay. But Athens could not avoid the economic
crisis. After 630 social unrest
increased steadily until the supreme power was granted to Solon
(one of the seven wise men of Greece). Solon tried to grapple with the problem by currency
operations, cancellation of agricultural debt, and constitutional reform. But the conflict was too violent to be
settled by peaceful means and the reforms he carried through in 594 B.C. were
largely ineffective. Class-war grew
yearly more violent, until Peisistratus in 560 B.C.
seized control. Under his dictatorship
Athens became a rich commercial state.
The discovery of silver at Mount Laurium
enabled her to mint a coinage famous through the Aegean: the concentration in
agriculture upon the cultivation of the vine and olive made her a great
exporting nation. She was able to
provide the Black Sea towns with the wine and fats which they could not produce
and in return to receive their flax and corn.
Thirdly, she became the leading manufacturer of pottery and, with the
friendship of Corinth, shipped her vases to cities all over the
Mediterranean. Wealth brought culture:
the tyrant's court was filled with poets; Athenian tragedy began and the
Acropolis was adorned with those temples and statues whose fragments are now
perhaps more highly prized than even the later products of the Periclean Age.
Throughout this
period of colonial expansion and social revolution, one state in Greece had developed
upon highly peculiar lines. Sparta, in
the eighth century, was a normal Greek aristocracy, but it had solved its
population problems not by sending out colonists, but by adding to its own Laconian territory the rich plain of Messenia. The Messenians
became the serfs of the Spartan overlords, no better than the Helots in Laconia
itself, and the new Sparta became a feudal State. About 650 the Messenians
rose in revolt against the Spartans and for many years Sparta was torn by civil
war. The Spartans were victorious; but
they perceived that, if they were to secure themselves against further
revolution, they could not afford the easy regime of earlier days. They must become a homogeneous and compact
army, always on the watch for signs of social unrest. Within the citizen body there must be no
inequalities of wealth or status such as would tempt the poorer classes to ally
themselves with the serfs. But in the
age of tyranny such inequalities were bound to arise through the new
commercialism and the introduction of coinage.
Towards the end of the seventh century, therefore, the Spartan
constitution was radically reconstructed.
The distinction of aristocrat and people was abolished and all Spartans
were made equal; commerce was forbidden to any citizen on pain of expulsion,
the land was redistributed, and coinage was banished for ever from Sparta. Sparta was fashioned into an equalitarian
feudal State, in which powers were divided between the two hereditary kings and
the five ephors elected by the citizen Assembly.
But the
reconstruction of the constitution was not enough. The serfs outnumbered the citizen body by
fifteen to one, and revolution could only be suppressed by force of arms. Sparta therefore became an armed camp. A rigorous military education was introduced
for boys and girls alike, luxury was forbidden to all, and a secret service was
built up to keep watch upon the serfs.
From now on the Spartans lived the life of foreign conquerors dominating
and terrorizing a subject population, like the Spaniards in Mexico.
These changes
insulated Sparta from the normal course of Greek development. While in the rest of Greece the influence of
commerce broke up the old landed aristocracy, in Sparta feudalism was
artificially preserved. Whereas elsewhere
trade brought intercourse with foreign lands and stimulated the new culture and
philosophy and science, in Sparta these were all sacrificed to the exigencies
of the class-war. The Spartan army
became the most powerful in all Greece, but it was used not to promote the
interests of commerce abroad, but to preserve the feudal order at home.
For although at
first the new regime showed imperial pretensions, and efforts were made to
conquer the Peloponnese, it soon became clear that no
Spartan army could venture far from home without the risk of a revolution
occurring in its absence. Thus Sparta
became the acknowledged leader of the Peloponnesian League, not by conquest,
but by a series of loose alliances and mutual assistance pacts. Her neighbours acknowledged her hegemony with
an easy mind, confident that she could not afford the luxuries of conquest and
aggression.
Sparta was fated
to be the greatest military power in all Greece, yet impotent to use this power
effectively. Such a situation was bound
to exasperate ambitious kings or generals; and when such men gained influence
in Sparta, her foreign policy showed sudden vacillations. In each generation statesmen arose who tried
to forge a Spartan Empire. At first they
would be successful, but always they would end by arousing suspicion and fear
in the minds of the citizens - and they would fall as suddenly as they had
arisen to power. Such men were Cleomenes at the end of the sixth century and his nephew Pausanias at the end of the Persian wars. In both cases a burning patriotism and
imperial zeal were thwarted by the conservatism of a feudal State: in both
cases great Spartan generals were forced to realize that only by emancipating
the serfs could Sparta gain the inner vitality which empire demands. In both cases the suspicion that they
harboured this design was largely responsible for their downfall.
From the middle
of the sixth century Sparta and Athens stood as prototypes of conflicting
policies and contrasted philosophies.
Athens represented the spirit of experiment, of commercialism, and of
culture: Sparta was conservatism incarnate, resolutely opposed to tyranny and
to democracy, and anxious to see in all the Greek cities the rule of the great
landowner and the preservation of the aristocratic tradition.
In 546, at the
height of Athenian prosperity, something happened far off in Asia Minor which
was to change the whole course of European history. Sardis, capital of Lydia, was captured by
Cyrus the Persian, and Greek independence was suddenly in danger of
extinction. As we have seen, the Greek
cities on the whole lived on friendly terms with their neighbours. In Asia Minor the kings of Lydia had from
time to time made war upon them and subdued them, but their regime was not
oppressive. Now in the course of thirty
years a new empire arose to swallow up Babylon and Egypt, Phoenicia and Media
and Lydia, and for the first time in history to organize an imperial government
on a modern scale. Within a few years
the Greeks of Asia Minor were a subject people, and by 510 it seemed clear that
Persia would in time extend its control to mainland Greece.
It is important
not to view this crisis through the eyes of succeeding generations. In 510 it must have seemed fantastic to
suggest opposition to Persia. How could
these hundreds of independent towns unite against a great imperial power? And, moreover, why should they do so? Greek commerce could continue as well under
Persian rule, Greek wealth and prosperity would not be seriously affected by a centralized
foreign empire. We must not imagine that
any feeling of Greek solidarity was manifested at this time: on the contrary,
Greek nationalism was the effect, not the cause, of the victories at Marathon
and Salamis. The first serious result of
the irruption of Persian power into Greek life was not unity but discord. Sparta was not deeply concerned by the news,
and not even the warning of King Cleomenes - then at
the height of his power - could convince her that she had any responsibility or
call to champion the cause of Greek independence. Sparta was concerned not for Greek
independence but for the restoration of aristocratic government in the Greek
towns, for the security of her position in the Peloponnese
and for the maintenance of her military prestige. At Athens financial stringency was soon
felt. For international trade was
disturbed, the Egyptian market was closed, the Black Sea threatened, and the
North Aegean silver mines lost. The
tyranny which had given Athens peace and prosperity could not maintain its
popularity through a period of depression, and in 510 Peisistratus'
son, Hippias, was expelled.
But the
expulsion of the tyrants solved no problem.
Athens was leaderless and faction reappeared. Rival parties fought for power and 'political
associations' multiplied. It looked as
though civil was inevitable, and Sparta was only too willing to decide the
issue in favour of the old aristocracy.
At this moment, the Alcmaeonidae (a noble
family of dubious commercial reputation) decided to make a bold bid for
power. They had retained their trade
connections with the east throughout a long period of exile under the tyranny:
now they were concerned to strengthen their newly won influence in the
city. With this end in view they
introduced democracy and so gained the solid support of the people for their
commercial interests (509-8). Their
popularity was secured by the ignominious expulsion from the city of Cleomenes, who had appeared with a Spartan army to enforce
the restoration of the old aristocracy.
The democratic
constitution set the seal on the work of the tyranny, for it ensured the
exclusion of the large landowner from a predominating influence on politics,
and it put effective power into the hands of the townsman - the merchant, the
manufacturer, and proletariat. [The
Athenian 'proletariat' was composed of the free citizen artisans and labourers,
and must be distinguished both from the slaves and from the resident
foreigners. Living in the city and its
port at the Peiraeus, it could outvote the peasants
in the Assembly, and by manning the juries could dominate the law-courts. Its interests during the epoch of expansion
were closely allied with those of the merchants, and since the oarsmen of the
fleet were drawn from its ranks, it could demand a considerable price for its
allegiance.
Thus while democracy in
And here we must
note in passing another distinctive feature of Greek life. The difference between aristocracy,
oligarchy, and democracy in Greece lay not in any principles, but in the
disposition of privilege. Aristocracy
meant a state where the interests of the large landowner, oligarchy where those
of the merchant and manufacturer, democracy where those of the town
proletariat, predominated. Thus
democracy was not the reconciliation of class-conflict but the pre-eminence of
a single class.
The Alcmaeonidae hoped to remain masters in Athens owing to
their popularity and the prosperity which trade would bring. But the international situation proved too
difficult for them. Favouring
as they did the interests of commerce, they wishes to submit to
At this moment a
new statesman, Themistocles, rose to power: unlike
the founders of democracy, he saw that the era of peaceful trade was over. If Athens was to survive and grow rich, she
must arm and fight for her riches. Themistocles was the embodiment of a new democratic
imperialism opposed alike to the conservative aristocracy and to the laissez-faire
merchants who supported the Alcmaeonidae. More than any other man save Pericles, he set his stamp on Athenian democracy.
In 490 a small
Persian fleet was beaten off at Marathon by the Athenian army, and for the next
ten years a fierce battle was waged in Athens between the various political
factions. The issue was decided in 482,
when Themistocles persuaded his countrymen to employ
the profits of a new silver vein at Laurium for the
construction of a huge fleet. From then
on Athens was an imperial maritime power, and in 480 it was she who was chiefly
responsible for repelling the full force of the Persian attack at Salamis,
although Sparta remained the official leader of the Greeks.
Salamis was the
glorious justification of the new Athenian democracy.
[It is significant that Plato in true aristocratic vein
tried to make Marathon, the land victory, the decisive battle of the wars, and
to relegate Salamis to second place. He
could not concede to the Athenian proletariat the credit for saving
Greece! (See LAWS
707.)] The town proletariat had manned the fleet and
proved that a few thousand free citizens could defeat not only the conscript
barbarians of the Persian Empire, but also the Greek fleets which the Persians
had compelled to attack their kinsmen.
At once the Greek cities of the Aegean threw off the Persian yoke and
acclaimed Athens as their natural leader.
In mainland
The results of
the victory over the Persians were profoundly important in the growth of the
Greek mind. Sparta was forced by her
domestic problems to resign her claim to be the champion of Greece, while
Athens, transformed from a mercantile to an imperial power, welcomed her new
pan-Hellenic responsibility to protect Greek independence from Persian
aggression. To this end she formed the Delian League, an association of free cities pledged to
provide the armaments necessary to maintain their freedom, and to open the seas
again to Greek trade.
It was not till
after the first flush of victory had faded away that the real problems
arose. An uneasy alliance of Greek
cities had defeated Persia and freed their compatriots: the Delian
League had been formed. But how would
these scores of city-states organize their freedom? Would they collaborate or would they fall
into war and dissension again?
Such questions
are seldom solved by discussion or by a rational and deliberate plan. We do not know of any suggestions at this
time that the League should be turned into a real pan-Hellenic federation, and
it is unlikely that they were made. For
independence seemed essentially bound up with the structure of the city-state,
and the sacrifice by any city of its sovereign rights would have been regarded
as the sacrifice of freedom. For this
reason the League was confined to the maritime cities of the Aegean, and the
rest of the Greek world soon returned to its old inter-city rivalries. In Greece proper, for instance, Athens,
Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, and Argos remained the dominant and rival powers.
In the Aegean
the situation was different. Here,
whatever the constitution of the Delian League, the
Athenian fleet was supreme: and gradually, partly by accident, partly by
design, the patron of freedom became the tyrant whose power was used, not only
against Persia, but against recalcitrant members of the League. By 450 the League was rapidly developing into
an Athenian Empire. The cities were
still nominally free, but the real sovereignty was in Athens. To ensure the cooperation of her allies she
imposed democratic institutions, closely modelled on her own, upon most of the
cities: and, if resistance was offered, governors and garrisons were sent out to
preserve order. The contributions for
the upkeep of the anti-Persian fleet became, in effect, taxes imposed by an
imperial power, and used by that power for its own purposes; and a uniform
Athenian coinage, which most of the cities were forced to adopt, confirmed the
supremacy of Athenian trade. Even
justice became Athenian, since all capital offences and other important cases
from the allied cities had to be tried at Athens before an Athenian jury. And lastly, the empire was strengthened at
many strategic points by Athenian colonies in the modern sense of the word -
organized settlements of Athenian citizens permitted to occupy the land of
their nominal allies.
But it must be
repeated that Athens differed profoundly from a modern imperial power. Its situation approximated far more to that of
one member of a league of nations which managed to gain control of the league
machinery and use it for its own ends.
Theoretically it such a case the league would still be
a League, and members independent nation-states. Athens stood in some such relation to the
Aegean cities, and for this reason the transformation of the Delian League was not reflected in the speeches of the
politicians until long after it had happened.
Pericles, the greatest leader of the Athenian
democracy, was, of course, fully aware of the course events were
taking, but he still spoke the language of freedom to the assembled people, and
stressed the responsibilities of
The history of
the years 480 to 404 is little else than the story of the Athenian struggle to
maintain and increase her maritime empire while entering on a fresh effort to
conquer mainland Greece as well. For
seventeen years conservative policy prevailed and Athens was fully employed in
settling accounts with the Persians and in organizing the League, but at last,
in 462, she felt strong enough to challenge Sparta and her confederates on
land. Allying herself with Argos and
with Thessaly, Athens essayed the conquest of mainland Greece. In the course of three short years Aegina - 'the eyesore of the Peiraeus'
- was suppressed, Greece as far south as the isthmus of Corinth was brought
under Athenian control, and Corinthian trade in the west was threatened by
Athenian pressure in the Gulf of Corinth.
Those years mark
the zenith of Athenian democracy. The
conservative policy of the aristocratic party had been content to share the
hegemony of Greece with Sparta. Athens
at sea and Sparta on land should work together in the service of Hellenic
independence. This twofold leadership
could only last so long as Athens did not threaten the commercial interests of
Sparta's confederates. For even if
feudal Sparta had no foreign aspirations, Corinth, her strongest ally, was
vitally concerned with the western trade routes, and realized that as soon as
the Aegean and the Levant were secure, Athens would turn her attention to the
west. It was an Alcmaeonid
- Pericles - who once again broke the conservatives,
denounced the Spartan alliance, and proclaimed Athens' intentions to conquer
mainland Greece. He believed that
compromise was impossible - democracy must go forward or perish - and so in
domestic and foreign affairs he urged a policy of ceaseless activity.
We still possess
the war memorial on which are inscribed the names of Athenians 'who fell in the
same year in Cyprus, Egypt, and Phoenicia, at Haliesis,
in Aegina and in Megara'. Under the inspiration of Pericles,
Athens at the same time challenged the forces of mainland Greece and launched
an unprovoked attack upon the Persians in Egypt, the granary of the
Levant. The democrats knew that their
time was short - they struck when the iron was hot. Almost simultaneously, in Athens itself, the
second stage of the democratic revolution was pushed through. In 461 the Areopagus
(the Athenian House of Lords) was shorn of its power and the leading
aristocratic general banished. The last
defences of conservatism were broken through and supreme power was granted to
the people and to the people's chosen leaders.
But Athens had
overreached herself. In 454 came the
news that the Egyptian expedition had ended in disaster. In Greece too Sparta had been roused from her
inertia and in 447 compelled Athens to surrender most of her land empire. At last, in 445, Pericles
negotiated a thirty-years' peace with
In 432 came the
beginning of the end. Though she had
relinquished her empire, Athens still had designs on the western trade routes
to Sicily and South Italy; but in this field Corinth could brook no rival. Upon the pretext of a colonial dispute, war
was declared and Corinth instigated a reluctant Sparta to put aside her
domestic anxieties and face the menace of Athenian imperialism. The Greek world was divided into two factions
and from 432 to 404 the Athenian navy was pitted against the armies of the Peloponnese.
The final defeat
of Athens was due to many causes. In the
first place, the death of Pericles in the great
plague which decimated the city left her leaderless, and the struggle of
aristocrat against democrat and of town against country was disclosed in its
full bitterness once his unifying personality was removed from politics. In the second place the deadlock produced by
the conflict between an invincible army and an invincible navy was more
bearable to the Spartans than to the impatient spirit of Athens. In the third place the war brought for Athens
a financial stringency which was not felt in feudal Sparta and increasing
taxation made the allies yearly more restive.
And in the fourth place, Athens in 413 lost the flower of her navy in a
reckless attempt to conquer Sicily. From
411 to 404 Athens was convulsed by a series of revolutions culminating in an
aristocratic putsch whose leaders eagerly made peace with Sparta and
signed away the Athenian Empire. In was
Sparta's turn to show if feudal aristocracy could rule with greater moderation
and with stricter regard for justice than the democrats of Athens.
Such in barest
outline is the story of the Athenian democracy and the Athenian Empire. Both began as institutions for the
preservation and enlargement of freedom: both ended in tyrannical discord. They flourished only so long as there were
statesmen in Athens able to dominate the popular assembly and to control its
passions: and it is noteworthy that the rise of real proletarian leadership
during the war against Sparta coincided with their decline. As soon as the people lost confidence in the
statesmanship and expertise of the aristocracy, Athenian policy floundered; and
from 425 on the empire and the democracy alike degenerated with astonishing
rapidity, so that Plato, who was born in the year after Pericles
died, held class-war and ruthless imperialism to be the inevitable
accompaniments of popular self-government.
From his own experience, he could come to no other conclusion.
But even in Periclean Athens, the evils were already latent. The so-called democracies of the allied towns
were really the instruments of Athenian policy, and in Athens itself the
struggle of rich against poor was beginning to destroy the basis of civil
unity, already undermined by the growth of slavery (see Chapter VIII). When we look at the Parthenon and read the
funeral speech of Pericles we must not forget that
the ideals which they express were only partially realized; and this partial
realization was of brief duration. Ten
years after Pericles' death, Athenian democracy meant
not equality and liberty for all, but the exclusion of the countryman and the
aristocrat from the councils of the nation, and the
confirmation of privilege to one class in the State. The Athenian Empire did for a time
protect Greece from Persian aggression, but it also exposed scores of Greek
cities to Athenian exploitation. On the
other hand, to admit these defects is not to minimize the astonishing
achievements of democratic Athens. Pericles was not exaggerating when he said:
'To sum up: I
say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in
his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied
forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace. This is no passing and idle word, but truth
and fact; and the assertion is verified by the position to which these
qualities have raised the State. For in
the hour of trial Athens alone among her contemporaries is superior to the
report of her. No enemy who comes
against her is indignant at the reverses which he sustains at the hands of such
a city; no subject can complain that his masters are unworthy of him....
'I would have
you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until you become
filled with the love of her; and when you are impressed by the spectacle of her
glory, reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew their duty
and had the courage to do it, who in the hour of conflict had the fear of
dishonour always present to them, and who, if ever they failed in an
enterprise, would not allow their virtues to be lost to their country, but
freely gave their lives to her as the fairest offering which they could present
at her feast. The sacrifice which they
collectively made was individually repaid to them; for they received again each
one for himself a praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all sepulchres
- I speak not of that in which their remains are laid, but of that in which
their glory survives, and is proclaimed always and on every fitting occasion
both in word and deed. For the whole
earth is the sepulchre of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns
and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also
an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, esteeming courage to
be freedom and freedom to be happiness.... [THUCYDIDES,
II, 41, B. Jowett's translation.]
We must not
forget these words when we examine Plato's condemnation of Athenian
democracy. In it beauty was bound up
with beastliness, rapacity with nobility, slavery with freedom. Athenian civilization, like every other
civilization, contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Its flowers grew out of the dung of social
conflict, but while they lasted they were of unmatched brilliance.