75 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENpOWMENT FUND tHE GIFT OF aaenrs M. Sage 1891 ^2^014-1 d:xuli3.. 97 »4 1 i DATE DUE ^ M-Jo ,.- ! ; 7% ncv UECtt H^^v -»».4>_ "--^ . J 1 ' rf _ GAYLORO mmmmai-- ^^' ~^'-^^^^mBMii PRINT ED INU.S.A. JC 73.F351913""'"""''-"'"'^ Greek imperialism, 3 1924 dfe' 875 ■696" Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924016875696 GREEK IMPERIALISM GREEK IMPERIALISM BY WILLIAM SCOTT FERGUSON PROFESSOR OF ANCIENT HISTORY HARVARD UNIVERSITY BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY (Sde nitjeDiite pxf^ €awbnigg S v?^ / >' A ; f\ COn-RIGHT, I9I3, BY WILLIAM SCOTT FERGUSON ALL BIGHTS RESERVED Published September iqij TO MY MOTHER PREFACE This book contains seven lectures, six of which were delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston during February, 1913. In the fir§t of them the main lines of imperial development in Greece are sketched. In the others I have tried to characterize, having regard rather to clearness than to novelty or completeness, the chief imperial growths which arose in Greece during the transformance of city-states from ultimate to constitu- ent political units. I hope that these discussions of the theory and practice of government in the empires of Athens, Sparta, Alexander, the Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Antigonids will be found useful by the general reader, and especially by the student of politics and his- tory. The idea I wish particularly to convey, however, is that there was continuity of constitutional develop- ment within the whole period. The city-state, indeed, reached its greatest efficiency in the time of Pericles, but the federation of city-states was being still perfected two hundred years afterwards. In government, as in science, the classic period was but the youthful bloom of Greece, whereas its vigorous maturity — in which it was cut down by Rome — came in the Macedonian time. viii PREFACE Briefly stated, my thesis is this: The city-states of Greece were unicellular organisms with remarkable insides, and they were incapable of growth except by subdivision. They might reproduce their kind indefi- nitely, but the cells, new and old, could not combine to form a strong nation. Thus it happened that after Athens and Sparta had tried in vain to convert their hegemonies over Greece into empires, a cancerous condi- tion arose in Hellas, for which the proper remedy was not to change the internal constitutions of city-states, as Plato and Aristotle taught, but to change the texture of their cell walls so as to enable them to adhere firmly to one another. With a conservatism thoroughly in harmony with the later character of the Greek people, the Greeks struggled against this inevitable and salu- tary change. But in the end they had to yield, saving, however, what they could of their urban separateness, while creating quasi-territorial states, by the use of the federal system and deification of rulers. These two contrivances were, accordingly, rival solutions of the same great political problem. Nothing reveals more clearly the limitations of Greek political theory than that it takes no account either of them or of their antecedents. Cambridge, Mass., June, 1913. CONTENTS I. IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE I. DEFINITIONS 1-5 1. Of empire, i. 2. Of emperor, 3. 3. Of imperialism, 4. II. THE CITY-STATE 6-19 1. Its origin, 6. 2. Its characteristics, 9. a. Fusion of agricultural, trading, industrial, and commercial classes, 9. b. Theory of common descent of citizens, 13, c. So-called worship of the dead, 14. d: Educative power of the laws, 16. e. Municipality and nation in one, 17. III. MEANS OF OBSCURING IMPERIALISM . . 19-25 1 . Symmachia the basis of the Peloponnesian league, 20. a. Support of oligarchies, 21. 2. Stasis, or civil war, 22. 3. Symmachia the basis of the Athenian empire, 23. a. Support of democracies, 23. b. Maintenance of the union, 24. IV. FAILURE OF HEGEMONIES 25-30 I. The idea of proportionate representation, 27. V. MEANS OF EVADING IMPERIALISM . . . 30-34 1. Grant of Polity, or citizenship, 30. 2. Gremt of Isopolity, or reciprocity of citizenship, 31. 3. Grant of Sympolity, or joint citizenship,?32. VI. MEANS OF JUSTIFYING IMPERIALISM . . 34-37 I. Deification of kings, 35. II. ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY I. ORIGIN OF THE IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY . 38-41 1. Themistocles, 39. 2. Pericles, 41. II. SIZE AND POPULATION OF 'ATHENS AND ITS EMPIRE 42-43 X CONTENTS III. THE FUNERAL ORATION: THE IDEALS OF PERICLEAN DEMOCRACY 43-48 IV. THE INSTITUTIONS OF DEMOCRACY . . 49-65 1. Ecclesia and heltea; their conjoined activity, 49. 2. The council of the 500 and the committees of magis- trates, 51. a. The ten prytanies, 52. h. Election by lot; annual tenure of office; rota- tion, 52, 53, 55. 3. The ecclesia an assembly of high-class amateurs, 57. o. Its use of experts, 58. h. Its choice of a leader: ostracism, 60. 4. The economic basis of democracy, 61. a. The place of slavery : simply a form of capital, 61. 6. The object of indemnities: political equality, 64. V. THE EMPIRE 65-78 1. The advantages of sea power, 66. 2. The demands of the fleet, 68. 3. The complaints made against Athens, 70. a. Misuse of tribute money, 71. 6. Misuse of judicial authority, 72. c. Seizure of land in subject territory, 73. d. Extirpation of the best, 74. 4. The destruction of the empire, 75. III. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE I. SPARTA IN HISTORY 79-97 1. Crushing of early Spartan culture, 81. 2. The military life of the Spartans, 84. 3. The effect of the Perioec ring-wall, 85, 88. a. The Peloponnesian league: 550-370 B.C., 88. 6. The Hellenic league: 405-395 B.C., 89. 4. The hoUowness of the Spartan hegemony, 90-95. a. Cinadon, 91. 5. The age of reaction, 96, 97. a. Urban particularism, 96. h. The ancestral constitution, 96. IL SPARTA AND ATHENS IN POLITICAL THEORY 97-114 I. Plato, 99-107. , a. Neglect of History, 99. 6. Plato's hatred of democracy, 102. c. His idealization of Sparta, 107. CONTENTS xi 2. Aristotle, 107-114. a. Relation to history, 108. b. Aristotle's hatred of imperialism, no, 113. c. Comparison of his Politics with the Prince of Machiavelli, in. d. Aristotle's failure to let "strength" operate in international politics, 114. IV. ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND WORLD- MONARCHY I. IDEAS RECEIVED BY ALEXANDER FROM HIS PARENTS AND HIS TUTOR 116-123 a. Alexander and Philip, 116. b. Alexander and Aristotle, 119, 135, 147. II. ACTS BY WHICH ALEXANDER DISCLOSED HIS POLICIES 123-148 1. The destruction of Thebes, 123. 2. The visit to Troy, 124. 3. The Gordian knot, 125. 4. The visit to the oasis of Siwah, 126, 139. 5. The burning of the palace of the Persian kings, 129. 6. The discharge of the Greek contingents, 130. 7. Proskynesis, 131. 8. The great marriage at Susa, 136. 9. The proskynesis of the city-states, 147. V. THE PTOLEMAIC DYNASTY I. HISTORY OF THE PTOLEMIES 149-160 1. Third period of Ptolemaic history: 80-30 B.C., 151. a. Ptolemy the Piper, 152. b. Cleopatra the Great, 152. 2, First period of Ptolemaic history: 323-203 B.C., 155. a. Ptolemy I. Soter: 323-283 B.C., 150, 155. b. Ptolemy II. Philadelphus: 285-246 B.C., 156. c. Ptolemy III. Euergetes: 246-222 B.C., 159, 179. d. Ptolemy IV. Philopator: 222-203 B.C., 160, 179. II. EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES 160-182 I. Grounds of the imperial policy of the early Ptolemies, 160. a. Pride of possession, 160. 6. Checkmating enemies, 161. c. Commercial advantages, 161. d. Domestic policy, 162. xii CONTENTS 2. Triple theory of Ptolemaic state, 162. a. For Egyptians, 162. b. For Greek city-states, 163. c. For Macedonians, 166. 3. The Ptolemaic army, 167. a. Origin, 168. h. Distribution of, in Egypt, 172. c. Influence of, upon natives, 176. d. Becomes immobile, 242-222 B.C., 179. e. Opened to Egyptians, 180. 4. Second or domestic period of Ptolemaic history, 200-80 B.C., 180. a. Absorption of Greek by native population, 181. VI. THE SELEUCID EMPIRE I. HISTORY OF THE SELEUCIDS 183-194 1. Antigonus the One-eyed, creator of the realm, 183. 2. Century and a half of progress, 184-190. a. Seleucus I: 312-281 B.C., 184. 6. Antiochus I, Soter: 281-262 B.C., 185. c. Antiochus II, Theos: 262-246 B.C., 185. d. Seleucus II, Callinicus: 246-226 B.C., 186. e. Seleucus III, Soter: 226-223 B.C. /. Antiochus III, The Great: 223-187 B.C., 187. g. Seleucus IV: 187-175 B.C. h. Antiochus IV, The God Manifest: 175-164 B.C., 190,213. 3. Century of decline: 164-163 B.C., 190. 4. External agents of destruction, 190. a. Rome disarms Seleucids, incites revolt, and keeps alive dynastic struggles, 190. 6. Indo-Scythians (Yue Tchi) occupy East Iran, 192. 5. Internal agencies: revolt of Jews, Parthians, Arme- nians, 191, 192. II. POLICY AND PROBLEMS OF THE SELEUCIDS 195-214 1. Seleucus I, heir of Alexander's ideas, 195. 2. Founding of city-states, 196. l^^ 3. Priestly communities and feudal states, how treated, 197. 4. Royal villages, how managed, 203, 205. 5. Land either property of king or of city-states, 204. 6. City-states, how far they Hellenized Asia, 206. 7. Relations of king to city-states, 208., CONTENTS xiii 8. Comparison of Syria and Italy, 210. 9. PolicyofAntiochus IV: conflict with Jews; submis- sion to Rome, 212. VII. THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTIGONIDS I. RELATION OF MACEDON TO HELLAS . . 213 II. MACEDONIAN CONTRIBUTION TO ROME . 215-216 1. War, 215. 2. Government — a constitutional and not an absolute monarchy, 216. 3. Culture, 2 16. III. MACEDONIAN OPPOSITION TO ROME . . 217-^218 IV. EARLY HISTORY OF THE ANTIGONIDS . . 218-222 1. Antigonus I — the exponent of unity in Graeco-Mace- donian world, 218. 2. Demetrius Poliorcetes — the adventurer, 219. 3. Antigonus and Demetrius not really kings of Mace- ^ don, 220. V. ANTIGONUS GONATAS 222-234 1. Training got in Greece and Macedon, 222. 2. Peace with Asia and Egypt, 223. a. Inroad of Pyrrhus, 223. 3. Protected Greece from northern barbarians, 224. 4. Governs Greece by "tyrannies," 224. 5. Stoic justification of "tyranny," 225. 6. Ptolemy Philadelphus opposes Antigonus in Greece, 226. 7. Rise of the ethne, 228. 8. Struggle with Egypt for^sea power, 229. a. Aratus seizes Sicyon: Alexander rebels, 230. h. The Laodicean War saves Antigonus, 231. c. Possessions of Antigonus at end of struggle, 233- VI. POSITION OF ACH^A, .lETOLIA, AND EGYPT AT THE END OF STRUGGLE 234 VII. THE FEDERAL MOVEMENT 235-240 1. Ethne become leagues, 236. 2. The city-state the federal unit, 237. 3. The league lacks an hegemon, 238. 4. Monarchical traits, 239. 5. Relation of federal to local authorities, 239. xiv CONTENTS VIII. DEMETRIUS II 240-241 I. War with Achseans and ^tolians, 241. IX. FALL OF THE ACHAEAN LEAGUE . . , 241-242 1. Treachery of the iEtolians, 241. 2. Desertion of Egypt, 242. 3. Policy of Antigonus Doson, 242. 4. Cleomenes of Sparta, 242. X. THE HELLENIC LEAGUE OF ANTIGONUS DOSON 242-245 1. Leagues, not cities, the units, 243. 2. Macedon a unit, 243. 3. League assemblies recognized as sovereign authori- ties, 244. 4. Military weakness, 244. XL PHILIP IV AND THE LEAGUE .... 245-248 1. The Social War, 246. 2. The Roman peril: speech of Agelaus of Naupactus, 246. 3. End of Hellenic independence, 248. GREEK IMPERIALISM GREEK IMPERIALISM 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 charac- ter 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 oli- garchy, 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 gov- a"ned by the one, the few, or the many ; for all kinds of governments may exist, and have existed, in depend- encies. 2 GREEK IMPERIALISM 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 de- tails 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 modem times this is acknowledged with the utmost frankness. Upon the higher capacity for government claimed by the Chris- tian peoples, the Western cultures, or the Anglo- Saxons, as the case may be, modem pride, greed, or con- science bases its right to control inferior races. "Take up the white man's burden" is the modem substitute for the ancient commandment, "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature." The pos- session 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 IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 3 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 Konigsberg 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'itat c'est mot 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 pre- sumes the permanency of the condition of absolute sur- render (deditio) which, with the Romans, prefaced the work of restoration — the reestablishment of civil rights within an enlarged state. In actual experience, 4 GREEK IMPERIALISM 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 note- worthy 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 thoroughgoing imperial policy — one in which the possession of physical ability may be presupposed — is the formation of an universal empire, i And, in fact, the two most powerful and ardent imperial- ists of antiquity, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, aimed to include in their dominions the entire inhabit- able world. This issue was, however, never more nearly reached than in the long period before and after the IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 5 Christian era during which only shifting nomads and intractable Parthians disputed successfully the will of the Roman Senate and the orders of the Roman em- perors. 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^ 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 Ro- man 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 Prankish 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 endur- ing, 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 * A History of the Eastern Roman Empire, pp. 319 /. 6 GREEK IMPERIALISM 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 cul- mination 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 talentsjjut also pre- pared the way for the unification of the ancient world in the empire of RoniS 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 tr^ce the development of the forms by which imperialism wks obscured, evaded, and ultimately justi- fied 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 tiieir appearance as early as the sixth century B.C. The circumstances in which these city-states arose are IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 7 shrouded in the mystery which surrounds most begin- nings. They, accordingly, present all the better oppor- tunity for the construction of a theory; and perhaps the theory which had once the greatest vogue is that enun- ciated 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 preexistent family; that the family was a reli- gious 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 accom- panied 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 con- fine 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, 8 GREEK IMPERIALISM were the prime sources of Phoenician enterprise. The home of Roman law and government was a city, and when Italy led the world a second time, she was a com- plex 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, excep- tional 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 coOperate easily. In it ideas and feelings spread quickly. Life, property, and privi- leges are there protected by walls, and, if need be, by street barricades. ' ' Two voices are there, ' ' wrote Words- worth 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 assas- sination was powerless. IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 9 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 progres- sive 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, pas- ture, 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 10 GREEK IMPERIALISM 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 in- land. 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 connec- tion between urban and agrarian pursuits and inter- ests. 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, ^gina, 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 mer- chants, since all alike were residents of the city. The IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE ii 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 sim- plicity which degenerates so easily into brutality, its monotony, its fajiaticism 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 modem 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 modem 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 12 GREEK IMPERIALISM 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, mould- ers, 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, be- cause 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 Euboea, 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 ex- perience ; 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,^ 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 modem indus- trial organization ; by the capitalist, the manager and ^ Atlantic Monthly, Oct., 1912, vol. ex, pp. 517 Jf. IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 13 the laborer" ; in which " there is to be a continual shift- ing of laborers of the poorer classes back and forth be- tween the town and the country," and "the distindtion 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 god- desses 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 14 ' GREEK IMPERIALISM sprung, all its inhabitants were bound to one an- other 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 pur- poses 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 elec- toral 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 modem 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 IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE^ 15 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 toler- able. "The beasts of the field and the birds of the air," rang the impassioned plea of Tiberius Gracchus^ 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 gen- erals 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 inter- prets, 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 ^Eneas, the last of his family, he was expected to carry his Lares and ' Plutarch, Ti. Gracch. 9; cf. Greenidge, A History of Rome, p. iii. i6 GREEK IMPERIALISM 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 pro- vide 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 patriot- ism. Like the Hebrew Christians, they were "also com- passed about with so great a crowd of witnesses." We have made our peace with economics by consider- ing 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 in- cessantly their subjects according to a given model. The citizens of each city had, in fact, a general family resem- IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 17 blance, 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 pur- suits, location with reference to the sun and the sea, con- tact with foreigners, and other similar agencies. They even had specifics which they prescribed for the physio- logical 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 na- tional 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 — con- i8 GREEK IMPERIALISM troversies 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 recogni- tion 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 pre- served 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 mis- chief was that the land which they loved was not all Greece, but merely the territory of a single town. IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 19 The national fanaticism of the countries of modern Europe is probably more tolerant of foreign interference N/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 distin- guished 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, them- selves 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 Perioecs; for the hamlets of the latter were really Spartan municipalities. It was, moreover, with the resources of the whole complex that Sparta held the 20 GREEK IMPERIALISM Peloponnesians united under her leadership for one hun- dred and eighty years (550-370 B.C.). On the other hand, it was with the combined strength of the Pelopon- nesians 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 outra- geous 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 gov- ernment that an ally could regard Sparta's intermed- dling 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 IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 21 league; ^ "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 Lacedaemonians, but by fortune, that those who have no arms or other capacity for public ser- vice 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 sus- pension 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 1 PHpiiSov], IlepV IIoXvTcCas, 30 (Ed. Drerup). With characteristic con- servatism the English scholars, Adcock and Knox (Klio, 1913, pp. 249 Jf.), uphold the attribution of this pamphlet to Herodes Atticus. 22 GREEK IMPERIALISM mischief of this system, in the circumstances then exist- ing in Greece, was that it bred civil war within the cities. "War," says the Larissean 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 encour- aging 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 inter- ference was formally justifiable or at least justified. Not she, but the government she upheld, had the responsi- bility. ) 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 confeder- acies. For the leaders of both the one third and the two thirds, says Thucydides in a famous passage of his his- tory of the Peloponnesian War^ "used specious names, • Thucy.,.iii, 82, 8. (The translation used here and elsewhere in the book is that of Jowett.) IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 23 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 grasp- ing 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 suc- ceeded 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 24 GREEK IMPERIALISM bare the fact that it was in reality a tyranny, a sover- eignty 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.,^ "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 1 Thucy., m, 37, 2. IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 25 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 forma- tion 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 circum- stances 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 Macedon- ians 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 recre- 26 GREEK IMPERIALISM ancy to boot, the times were surely out of joint. Such an issue was the reductio ad absurdum of the system of he- gemonies, as both reformers and statesmen in Greece came speedily to realize. The reformers strove to alter the untoward circum- stances, 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 citi- zens 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 de- manded 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 perma- nent 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.^ On ' The same is true of the second Athenian empire. The confederation from which it grew had no reason to outlast the occasion which had called IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 27 the other hand, the position occupied by Thebes in Boeo- tia prior to 387 B.C. was clearly anticipatory of what the future was to bring to Greece as a whole. Bofotia was thereby blocked off into six districts,^ one (Thebes) with four electoral divisions, two (Orchomenus and Thespise) with two each, and three with one apiece. Six of the ten city-states of Boeotia — 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 Boeo- tarchs who formed the executive of the league, sixty of the six hundred and sixty councillors who formed the Boeotian synod, and its corresponding share of the league judges. Thebes thus became the Prussia of Boeotia, 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 distrib- uted according to the population and wealth of the dif- ferent parts of the country. That was equitable; and since the city-states, though thrust into the back- ground and held responsible for decisions in the making of which they had often little influence, formed a single ethnbs and spoke a single dialect, they were evidently it into existence — the "tyranny" of Sparta. It was, therefore, by design at least, a temporary, and not a permanent, union. 1 Hellemca Oxyrhyn., 11, 2-4. 28 GREEK IMPERIALISM fairly well satisfied. As the league was constituted, Thebes was forced to struggle with Orchomenus and Thespiae 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 influ- ence. It was not revived when Thebes reunited Boeotia (377-371 B.C.), and under Epaminondas we may more properly speak of Boeotia as a single city-state like Attica than as a league of city-states. - Though sacrificed at home to the ambition of Thebes, the Boeotian 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 Boeotia. Moreover, and this is an important historical connection which the wonderful epigraphical researches of Adolph Wilhelm ^ enable us to establish, the Boeotian league reappears mutatis mutandis in the organization imposed upon all Greece by Philip of Macedon after his crowning victory at Chaeronea in 338 B.C. For if we equate Philip and the Committee of Public Safety with the eleven Boeotarchs, the synod of Corinth with the Boeotian synod of six hundred and sixty, and the districts into which Hellas, including Macedon and excluding only Sparta, was divided for federal pur- 1 Attische Urkunden, i Teil. (Sitzb. d. Akad. in Wien. Phil.-hist. Klasse. 165,6, 191 1). IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 29 poses, with the six districts which had existed in Boeo- tia, it is evident that the political system used by Philip for organizing the Greeks was borrowed from Boeotia no less than the military system with which he con- quered them. It was not for nothing that the king of Macedon had spent his youth as a hostage in Thebes. Characteristic of the BcEotian 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 subor- dinated 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 surren^ dered the Hellenic sjmod, which met at Corinth, gained. The national appeal was far weaker than the ethnic appeal had been in Boeotia. 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 30 GREEK IMPERIALISM sailors for which their representation in the synod obli- gated them, or pay a heavy fine for every day their con- tingents were absent from the national levy. The synod completed its organization by choosing Philip its hege- mon 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 Bceotia, 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 con- temporary king of Macedon as its hegemon. The hegem- ony of Macedon was sugar-coated, but it was none the less an hegemony, and, as such, illegal and unaccept- able.i 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 inhab- itemts of other cities as well? There were some, and ' It was revived on much less objectionable terms by Antigomis Doson. See below, page 34 and chapter vii. IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 31 among them the comedian Aristophanes,^ who can- vassed this idea. "Let us assume," he says, "that our city is a heap of wool, and that each of our aUied cities is a fleck of wool. Let us take all the wool and spin it into yam, and weave the yam 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 sacri- ficed 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 per- manent entente between cities was the grant of isopoUty, 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, how- ever, it amounted simply to an exchange of commercial privileges, and proved barren of political consequences > Lysistrata, 579 Jf. 32 GREEK IMPERIALISM 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 inde- pendent 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 rudi- mentary nations, like the Achaeans and the iEtolians,' among whom the towns and hamlets had never become independent and self-sufficient political units; so that the inhabitants were Achaeans from ^Egium, or Achseans from Cerynia, or Achseans from some other of the ten so-called cities of which the Achaean nation or league was constituted. In like fashion the ^Etolian 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 satisfac- tory 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 Achaea took the irrevocable step of acquiring Achaean citizenship in addition to its own ; while in Central Greece the ^tolians by fair means or foul bestowed a dual citizenship upon all their neighbors. Athens and Sparta > See below, chapter vii. IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 33 alone p ersiste d 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.^ In this way arose what by the general consent of his- torians and jurists is the most perfect state which antiq- uity 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 Achaean and ^tolian leagues which their statesmen did not remove. "Equal- ity," says Aristotle, "is just, but only between equals." The cities which had an equal voice in the international board, like the modem nations which cast a vote each at the Hague Congress, were unequal in population and in wealth. The Achaeans and ifEtolians came nearer than any ancient republicans to entrusting power to representa- tives; but, besides creating a large legislative council, constituted in successive years, in the one case, of dif- > See below, chapter vii. 34 GREEK IMPERIALISM ferent 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 dis- trust 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;^ but the best that can be said of the combination he made is that despite its great promise and possibilities it proved imacceptable to Hellas, and hence ineffective.^ 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, weak- ened politically by continuous emigration and incessant conflicts, economically, by the withdrawal of industry 1 See above, page 30. • See below, chapter vn. IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 35 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 £md 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 reciproc- ity of citizenship, and with it the local advantages pre- served 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 irrevoca- ble treaties till she was forced to give them municipal status, and others (the "friends," amid, or the "friends and allies," amid et sodi, in what later became the pro- vinces) 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 36 GREEK IMPERIALISM 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} It was a means of uniting cities or provinces in an indis- soluble 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 antin- omy 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 super- natural power of any of them, there was no religious dif- ficulty 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. * See especially Ed. Meyer, Kleine Schriften, 283/., and below, chapter IV. IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE 37 The kings became men chosen for their high office by God, Most High. Crowned, usually by their predeces- sors, and anointed by God's priests, the patriarchs, they governed by divine right and acknowledged responsibility only to their Creator.^ 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 lll-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 1. DE CoxiLANGES, FusTEL. La citS antigue'' (i87g). 2. BusoLT, G. Die griechischen Stoats- und Rechtsaltertumer,^ (1892). In Miiller's Handbuch der klassischen Altertums- wissenschaft, iv, i. 3. ScHOMANN-LiPSius. GriecMscke Alterthiimer,* 11 (1892). • 4. Francotte, H. La PoUs grecque (1907). 5. WiLAMowiTZ-MoELLENDORFF, Ulrich VON. Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen (1910). In Hinneberg's Die Kultur der Gegenwart. Tail 11, Abteilung iv, i. 6. ZiMMERN, Alfred. The Greek Commonwealth (191 1). 7. Keil, Bruno. Griechische Staatsaltertumer (1912). In Gercke and Norden's Einleitung in die Altertumswissen- schaft, pp. 297 ff. ' Bury, J. B., The Constitution of the Later Roman Empire (1910), pp. 10/., 36. 11 Athens: an imperial democracy No form of government, or profession of political idea, saves a state from imperialism. Even this country, which is dedicated, as is no other of the modern great powers, to the concept of popular sovereignty; which uprears the structure of its state upon a belief in the essential equality of men, ajid treats, or at least aims to treat, as comparatively negligible the differences cre- ated by birth and race, education and religion, property and occupation; — even this idealistic republic has be- come an empire in our own time and almost without our perceiving it. M. Bouch6-Leclercq has given a prom- inent place in his Legons d' histoire romaine ^ to the dis- comforting doctrine that the Romans conquered the world in spite of themselves — a debatable question, as he himself shows. It is not our sense of truth that is gratified when we are told that the beatitude, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," desig- nates the English. Yet Seeley has maintained the thesis that the British empire was secured in a "prolonged fit of national absence of mind." Unwittingly, it seems, the modem foster-mother of liberal institutions has become the mistress of countless millions. » Pages 27 /. ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY 39 There never was a people which made the principle that all its citizens were equal a more live reality than the Athenians made it;' and no state to my knowledge was more cunningly contrived to insure the government of the people than was theirs. Yet they became imperial^ ists with ardor and conviction, and with this much of logical consequence, that, while they believed in democracy for everybody, they did not doubt that the Athenians had earned the right to rule both Greeks, and barbarians by the acquisition of superior culture./ Equality among its citizens Athens carefully distin-i guished from equality among all men. ] The foundations of Athenian democracy and empire were laid by Themistocles, whose figure moves weird and gigantic through the golden mist in which Herodotus has enveloped the great Persian War. And it was this genial statesman, to whose unerring skill in discerning the course of coming events the austere historian Thu- cydides pays a rare tribute, who mapped out for his city the foreign policy by which it had the best chance of realizing its imperial ambition. Let it use its great fleet, which by fifteen years of persistent advocacy he had led the Athenians to build, as its arm of offense, and its impregnable walls, which he had enabled the Athenians to construct despite the treacherous opposition of Sparta, as a bulwark of defense and a basis for timely advance against its powerful continental rivals. Let it utilize the wave of democratic fervor then sweeping 40 GREEK IMPERIALISM through Greece to consolidate its power within the Con- federacy of Delos and to undermine and eventually to overthrow the leadership which Sparta, by the support of dying mediaeval aristocracies, had hitherto possessed in Hellenic affairs. Let it make peace on advantageous terms with Persia; use the liberty thus secured to break the power of Sparta, and, on the basis of a consoli- dated Hellas, strike boldly for Athenian dominion of the world. It seems almost incredible that a clear-headed man should have entertained a programme of such magni- tude. But we must remember that never had human beings more clearly performed the obviously miracu- lous. We know, on the authority of a German military expert,^ that, had the host which followed Xerxes to Athens numbered the 5,283,220 men attributed to it by Herodotus "without taking count of women cooks, con- cubines, eunuchs, beasts of burden, cattle, and Indian dogs," its rear guard must have been still filing out of Sardis while its van was vainly storming Thermopylae. But what Herodotus reports is what the Athenians be- lieved. They had met and routed the might of all Asia. They had mastered in fair fight the conquerors of all other peoples. The world was theirs: it was merely a question of taking possession. Themistocles had, accordingly, to reckon with a » Delbruck, Die Perserkriege und die Burgunderknege, pp. 137 If. ; Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, i (1893), P- 368, n. 3. ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY 41 national self-confidence which knew no bounds. And this had been increased by famous victories of Cimon over the Persians, and a revolt of the Helots which dis- closed the fatal weakness of Sparta, when in 461 B.C. the task of conducting the fierce current of national energy, first for fifteen years (461-446 B.C.) in a heroic, but fruit- less, struggle by sea and land against the Greeks and Persians simultaneously, and then for fifteen further years (446-431 B.C.) in the prosecution of glorious works of peace, fell upon the broad shoulders of Pericles, Xanthippus's son. It is conceded that there is no taskmaster so ruthless as one's own will. The impulse to action during this strenuous epoch came from the Athenian people itself, not from it^ chief statesman. That fact does not, how- ever, diminish the credit of Pericles. The golden age of Greece is, properly speaking, a golden age of Athens, and to its birth many things contributed ; but decisive among them, in addition to the intensity of national life already alluded to, was an unrivaled facility for great leaders to get into effective contact with the masses under conditions in which there was the fullest oppor- tunity for men in general to use their natural powers to the utmost. This happy combination of creative genius and receptive multitude arose in the main from the dem- ocratic institutions of Athens; but, for the public and private wealth without which Athenian democracy proved unworkable, and for the imaginative stimulus 42 GREEK IMPERIALISM which enterprises of great pitch and moment alone give, the possession of empire was, perhaps, essential. In the age of Pericles, Athens was a city with a popula- tion of about 150,000. Attica, the territory of the Athe- nians, had an approximately equal number of inhabit- ants. Of the 300,000 thus accounted for, about one third was servile and one sixth foreign. The free and fran- chised population made up one half of the total, and yielded about 50,000 males of military age. The empire of the Athenians consisted of five prov- inces, the Thracian, Hellespontine, Insular, Ionian, and Carian, with a total population of perhaps, 2,000,000. It formed a complex of islands, peninsulas, and estu- aries, the most remote extremities of which were distant two hundred or two hundred and fifty miles from Athens. The highways of this empire were the land-locked channels and lakes which make up the ^gean Archipelago. Their greatest length in normal circumstances was a continuous voyage of about eight days. On the other hand, no land way of more than a single day's march need be traversed by an Athenian expedition aimed at any of its subject cities. Without the control of the sea the empire was, accordingly, un- thinkable. This absent, the district fell at once into more than four hundred fragments, the thousand "cities" from which, according to the comedian Aris- tophanes, the Athenians gathered tribute. ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY 43 The Athenian sphere of naval operations and of politi- cal and commercial interests reached far beyond the frontiers of the empire. It included points like Sicily, Egypt, Phoenicia, and the Euxine, distant over six hun- dred miles from the Piraeus. An Athenian fleet might thus require the best part of a month to reach its destina- tion. The world which had to take careful account of the Athenian naval power in all its political and military calculations, the world which Athens under Pericles sought to dominate, must have had a population of over 20,000,000. If, then, we take into account the ratio of dominant, subject, and foreign elements, and also the time con- sumed in reaching with ships, orders, or explanations, the outer limits of authority, the magnitude of Athens's imperial undertaking will stand comparison with that of England in modern times. In Sparta the gravestone of a citizen was inscribed regularly with his name alone. No epitaph was needed there to tell the tale of a life; for the life of one citizen was the well-known life of all. If, however, a man had died for his country, two words, iv irokeiim, "in war," expressed with laconic brevity his ground of distinction. For those who fell in battle Athens set apart apiiblic cemetery near the Dipylon Gate, and at the end of every campaign a commemorative service was held there in honor of the year's crop of martyrs. A man high in pub-> 44 GREEK IMPERIALISM lie esteem voiced the nation's gratitude for the sacrifice. On such an occasion, at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles reversed the normal pro- cedure, and, instead of expatiating on the merits of the fallen, he explained in an eloquent speech why Athens was worthy of loyalty unto death. Thucydides heard his words, and, perhaps many years afterwards, repro- duced them as best he could in the famous Funeral Oration. The statesman did not linger long over the legendary glories of Athens. Her alleged boons to humanity — grain, the norms of civilized Hfe, the drama; the serv- ices, that is to say, upon which the later Athenians dwelt with special pride — had no meaning for him. Two things their ancestors had done: they had de- fended their country successfully, and had transmitted to their descendants a free state. "And if these were worthy of praise," ^ proceeds his splendid exordium, "still more were our fathers, who added to their inherit- ance, and after many a struggle transmitted to us their sons this great empire. And we ourselves assembled here to-day, who are still most of us in the vigor of life, have chiefly done the work of improvement, and have richly endowed our city with all things, so that she is sufficient for herself both in peace and war. Of the mili- tary exploits by which our various possessions were acquired, or of the energy with which we or our fathers 1 Thucy., II, 36, 2. ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY 45 drove back the tide of war, Hellenic or Barbarian, I will not speak; for the tale would be long and is familiar to you. But ... I should like to point out by what princi- ples of action we rose to power, and under what insti- tutions and through what manner of life our empire became great." In these words of Pericles I should like you to find stated the theme of my second chapter. And were it not that Pericles left unexplained, what the Athenians whom he addressed knew without explanation, the so- cial and poUtical forms by which they realized their ideals, I might absolve my task by one long quotation. I might transcribe the whole Oration and have done with it. That being inexpedient, I cannot do better than present, using again Pericles's own words as a sort of text, the main principles of Athenian policy. But in psissing I may be permitted to observe that were our knowledge of Athens dependent solely upon the Fu- neral Oration; had we to form our idea of political life in fifth-century B.C. Greece from it alone, we might still infer a unique epoch in the history of mankind. Fortunately, that is not the case. The " tooth of time and razure of oblivion" have spared the Parthenon and its matchless sculptures, the noble tragedies of /Eschylus and Sophocles, and the undying charm of Herodotus. Ideals are always grounded in some measure in realities. At the least they stand to them as the "perfect round" 46 GREEK IMPERIALISM to the "broken arc." Even in Plato's psychology the mind needs to be sharpened by observation and reflec- tion before, as in a flash of light, the glimpse of the divine idea suddenly appears. Hence, were the affirma- tions of the Funeral Oration unsupported by contem- porary monuments of similar spirit, they would still be helpful revelations of Athenian democracy. And this conclusion, as I hope to show, rests not upon logical inference alone, but also upon the evidence of minute research. " It is true," said Pericles,* "we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excel- lence is .also recognized, and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private intercourse we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harm- less, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private intercourse, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by > Thucy., II, 37/. ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY 47 respect for authority and for the laws, having an especial regard to those ordained for the protection of the injured as well as to those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general senti- ment. . . . Wealth we employ not for talk and ostenta- tion, but when there is a real use for it. To avow pov- er ty with us is no disgrace: the true disg ra ce is in d oing no thing to avoif j, it;. An Athenian citizen does not neg- lect the state because he takes care of his own house- hold; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless but as a useless character; and if few of us are origi- nators, we are all sound judges of a policy. The great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not discussion biit,lli^„^i3.Tlt of-that knnwkdge.jnilugk,is .gained4>y dis- cussio n preparatory to ,, g^tion. For we have a peculia r power of thinking ; hf^fnrp yp apt anrl of. .acrinpr fnn . . . And we have not forgotten to provide for our weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games and sacrifices throughout the year; at home the style of our life is refined ; and the delight which we daily feel in all these things helps to banish melancholy. Be- cause of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as of our own. . . . We are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness. ... To 48 GREEK IMPERIALISM 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. . . . And we shall assuredly not be without witnesses; there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages; we shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may please for the moment, although his repre- sentation of the facts will not bear the light of day. For we have compelled every land and every sea to open a path for our valor, and have everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friendship and of our enmity." Such were the proud claims of the great Athenian statesman. Of art there was said no word except in so far as art was embodied in the monuments of empire. Music and the drama are alluded to, but in the same breath with athletic contests, as the relaxation of over- worked men. The speaker has no apology to make for democracy. He gloried in imperialism. Had he met Plato in Elysium — Plato who was bom in the year after Pericles's death, and both embodied and expressed the higher ideals of a later generation of Athenians — he would have disdained to reply to the philosopher's accu- ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY 49 sation that he had filled the city with traders and shops and ships and dockyards and such rubbish, instead of with righteousness and justice. Taking the Funeral Oration as my text, I should like to explain at this point by what institutions the princi- ples of Periclean democracy and imperialism were con- verted into facts. It was in the ecclesia, or general assembly, and in the helicsa, or popular courts of justice, that sovereign power was vested in Athens.^ The heliaea demanded of its jurors only that they should be citizens in good stand- ing, but each year it drew according to need from a specially constituted list of 6000. So, too, of the 50,000 citizens who might attend the ecclesia, 6000 were re- garded as a quorum when a quorum was required, and commonly an even smaller number was present. Meet- ings of the ecclesia were held either in the city or at the harbor; hence the urban element tended to dominate. Stated meetings occurred four times a month, but others might be called by the generals or the council. Various panels of from 401 to 2001 jurymen each might be allotted to tribunals on every day of the year which was not set aside for a public festival or preempted by a meeting of the ecclesia. Usually poor men of advanced years, such as were unsuited for more active work and • For the following sections see especially Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians. 50 , GREEK IMPERIALISM were satisfied with the indemnity of two obols ^ per day, volunteered for registration among the 6000 jurors. The work of Parliament was divided between the ecclesia and the heliaea; for legislation in the strict sense of the term could be enacted only by the joint action of the two bodies.^ Administrative decrees, moreover, by means of which the ecclesia disposed of all important public business, and which might differ from laws only in a formal way, could be suspended at the initiative of i individuals and were incontestable only when passed on, as to constitutionality or public expediency, by the '^ heliaea. The men who sat in the heliaea were but com- mon citizens like those who voted in the ecclesia; but ■ they came to sit in judgmen t on both laws and decreei^ by tlie accident of the lot and not becau^6 of any par- ticular «ite^fest'Tn"TEe~^^^Saircohcerne3. In other words, the courts could not be packed with partisans as the meetings of the ecclesia commonly were. This fact, together with the delay which necessarily occurred, protected the state against the verdict of a chance ma- jority, which was in fact usually a minority of all the citizens. There was no such thing in Athens as the final settlement of controversial matters by a single popular vote. The heliaea acted as sovereign in one further particu- lar. Upon it devolved the duty of determining whether * Seven cents, equal in purchasing power to thirty-five cents perhaps, ' Greenidge, Greek Constitutional History (1896), pp. 170^. ATHENS: AN IMPE^lkL DEMOCRACY 51 the magistrates and councilors observed the laws and conducted themselves honestly during their years of office. It was to the sworn assembly of the Atheniahs, accordingly, that all those engaged in civil administra- tion were responsible. The ecclesia, on the other hand, had the right to impeach and dismiss those officials who, being given discretionary powers, abused them. The main work of the heliaea was of course to settle domestic and imperial litigation. As we shall see, the judicial power of the heliaea gave it a large measure of political control over all the subject cities of Athens. The heliaea was the brake on the democratic machine: the ecclesia was the dynamo. The intent of the Athe- nians was that all political decisions of importance should be reached, after full debate, by the ecclesia. It was, however, obvious that an assembly of from five to fifty thousand men would proceed with disastrous slowness if all matters, great and small, were laid before it, or even if It considered only significant affairs, but consid- ered them without previous examination and formula- tion. Perversion of modern democracies results most notably from the usurpation of power on the part of those who sift proposals for popular reference. Athens had to guard against a similar danger. Hence the harbinger of democracy, Clisthenes, created for it one of the most peculiar probuleutic, or deliberative, bodies which ever had the handling of large affairs. This was the council of the Five Hundred. 52 GREEK IMPERIALISM It was constituted anew each year and was made an exact miniature of the ecclesia which it was to serve. Every ward and township of Attica, to the number of one hundred and over, first eliminated such of its mem- bers as had not yet reached their thirtieth year or had already served two terms in the council, and then se- lected by lot from among the rest the councilor or coun- cilors to which it was entitled on the basis of popula- tion. Accordingly, each successive council had from two hundred and fifty to five hundred new and inexperienced members. Not desire or fitness but pure chance deter- mined its personnel. Every section, interest, and class of Attica — if we exclude young men between eighteen and thirty — was adequately represented in it. There was, therefore, a general presumption that it would take the same view of public questions as the ecclesia; that it would do a disservice to its own members should it foster their temporary rights as councilors at the expense of their lifelong rights as members of the ecclesia; that it would, in other words, labor to the best of its ability to present to the ecclesia a well-considered and sufficiently inclusive programme of business. Otherwise, the helisea had to be faced at the end of the twelve months. A committee of five hundred impresses us as little less unwieldy than an assembly of five thousand. Clisthenes was of the same opinion. Hence he divided his council into ten sections, or prytanies, of fifty mem- bers each, and arremged that each prytany should act ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY 53 y for the whole for th irty-six days in an order determined by lot at the latest possible moment. Th e prytany w as constituted in such a way that it was a miniature of the council, just as the council was a miniature of the ecclesia. The lot, again applied at the latest possible moment, determined, furthermore, which of its fifty members should be its chairman, and be present with one third of his colleagues in the council chamber for the single twenty-four hours for which he served. The same man was chairman of the council at its daily ses- sion, and he also presided at the ecclesia, should a meet- ing of the citizens be held onJbia]day.f th^ fi^^H**n'l. One of the nine, designated likewise by lot, was given the special honor and responsibility of putting the motions and declaring the votes. . Only proposals which originated in a council thus organized came before- the ecclesia; but there they might be discussed ad libitum, emended, accepted, rejected, 54 GREEK IMPERIALISM or referred back to the council ; and it was even possible during their consideration to substitute for the resolu- tion of the council an entirely different bill, or to move that the council bring in a proposition at the next meet- ing on an altogether irrelevant matter. It ;was the deliberate intention of the Athenians that the"ecclesia should consider everything it wanted to consider. The management of civil administration, subject to the constant direction of the ecclesia and the watch- ful supervision of the council, — which in this jnatter also acted for the body of which it was a miniature, — was entrusted to a multitude of committees, each com- posed normally of ten members. Aristotle, in his Constitution of the Athenians, specifies the duties of twenty-five such committees and estimates at seven hundred the number of citizens engaged annually in domestic administration. The work of each committee was definitely circumscribed by law and formed a small bundle of routine matters. The committees may be thought of as standing drawn up in a long line for the council to inspect. Had they been placed one behind the other in files, the rear committee being responsible to the one before it and so on down to the front, the council would have come into direct contact only with a few powerful committees. Such committees, however, must have proved impossible for inexperienced coun- cilors to manage. Besides, while the councilors, as agents of the ecclesia, and subject to its commands, might ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY 55 properly hold all the civil magistrates to a monthly ac- counting, it was not thought in accord with democracy that one group of citizens who happened to hold one civil office should have under their direction another group of citizens also engaged temporarily on public work. Though all the committees were thus on the same plane, and recognized only the council as their common superintendent, the work that they did was by no means of equal dignity or importance. It ranged all the way from managing the scavengers to managing the Great Dionysia. All committees were reconstituted annually. No man could be a member of the same committee twice in his lifetime. At the end of his xear_each magistrate was required to render an indescribably minute account- ing of his public acts, first to specially appointed audit- ing committees, and finally to the helisea. It was an easy matter to get an office in Athens, but a very diffi- cult task to get honorably rid of it. For the lot was used to'^iSfect "the requisite number of members for each committee from among the citizens thirty years old or older who had not disqualified themselves by earlier service. The theory that one citizen was as competent as another for public office was thus put into practice. Every office was refilled annually by a chance group of new and necessarily inexperienced men. While defining constitutions Aristotle lays down the condition for a thoroughgoing democracy that all citi- 56 GREEK IMPERIALISM zens should hold governmental positions in turn. On this theory, there should have been an approximate agreement between the number of places in Athens and the number of citizens reaching their thirtieth year annually. That, however, was not the case. Even if we assume that men were councilors only once and held only one magistracy in their lifetime, we need to include some of the seven hundred (?) imperial posts in our calculation, and regard them, too, as subject to the conditions of tenure assumed for domestic positions, in order to reach the required total of about thirteen hun- dred. This is, naturally, an unwarranted and unwork- able series of assumptions. It is, however, reasonable to suppose that the majority of Athenian citizens, and practically all of those who ma^le a habit of attending the meetings of the ecclesia held a deme, or municipal, position, let us say, in their youth; a/post in the council or in the domestic or imperial administration in their maturity; and a place in the register of the six thousand jurors in their advancing years. Recall, now^-that three hundred and sixty of the five hundred councilors had to preside at meetings of fifty and five hundred men, and, if chance^willed,- at-.one .oi from five to fifty ^ousand also; observe that ma gistra tes had not only — "•"'--"-«iTMiM>MiM|ii^ii Bury, J. B., A History of Greece (1900), p. 355. ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY 71 charge of misbehavior established conclusively, though in this matter, as in so many others in the history of Greece, our judgment is dependent upon the point at which we transfer our sympathy from the city-states, which were the bearers of culture in the Greek Middle Ages, to the whole people, for whose progress and inde- pendence urban particularism was finally fatal. "Surely Hellas is insulted with a dire insult," declared the oppo- nents of Pericles,^ "and manifestly subjected to tyranny when she sees that, with her own enforced contributions for the war, we are gilding and bedizening our city, which, for all the world like a wanton woman, adds to her wardrobe precious stones and costly statues and temples worth their millions." To this accusation the proper retort was, not that having provided adequate protection against Persia, Athens was free to spend the money contributed by the subjects in any way she pleased ; for the logical inference was then that the con- tributions were excessive. Pericles may not have cared to be logical, but he could not ignore forms. Had he been able to show, as has been claimed recently, that he used for building purposes only the sixtieth of the tribute, which had been dedicated as the first fruits to Athena, he would never have been attacked at all. Evidently, he spent on Athenian public works much larger sums de- rived indirectly from the tribute, for which course the defense actually made seems to have been that the * Plut., Pericles, 12. (Translated by Perrin.) 72 GREEK IMPERIALISM money Jy^ due Athens for losses sustained during the invasj^ of Xerxes and for sums advanced to the war fund during the continuance of the struggle with Persia. In any case the tribute paid was a mere bagatelle as compared with what the subjects saved through having no fleets of their own to maintain. The charge is more serious that in order to enjoy " the steady receipt of salaries throughout the year derived from the court fees " ; to "manage the affairs of the sub- jects while seated at home without the expense of naval expeditions"; to "preserve the partisans of democracy and ruin its opponents"; to boost the business of hotel keepers and such ilk in Athens, and to win for the com- mon citizens the flattery and consideration that would be shown otherwise only to generals and ambassadors, the Athenians "compelled the allies to voyage to Athens in order to have their cases tried." For it seems clear that the law courts at Athens were usually so clogged with litigation that the gain in having a model code of law and in escaping the fierce partisanship of the local tribunals was largely neutralized by the added expense and humiliation. The real justification of the practice was that it obviated the necessity of sending out naval expeditions. In the third place Athens took from the allies lands and settled them with impecunious Athenians; but in payment therefor reductions of tribute were given. On the other hand, thousands from the allied cities migrated ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY 73 to Athens, and, while not escaping military or financial service, or obtaining Athenian citizenship, they were cordially welcomed", and enjoyed to the full the commer- cial and industrial advantages of the metropolis. Again, Athenians often found it less profitable to invest capital in Attic land, which was exposed to hostile attack, than in lands on the islands of the empire, which the fleet pro- tected. Hence there were many Attic farmers in the subject territory, their right to own foreign real estate being secured by commercial treaties. There was accord- ingly economic give and take, the military preponder- ance of Athens being, however, responsible for the result that the Athenians abroad were often policemen, the allies in Athens, hostages. In all three instances of alleged misbehavior, it must be admitted that the defense offered by the Athenian apologists simply added insult to injury in the view of a majority of the subjects. But for them Athens, arro- gant or conciliatory, malefactor or benefactor, was al- ways a foreign governor to be gotten rid of at any cost. Such uncompromising sentiments time alone could alter, and to secure the benefits of time Pericles endeavored to avoid an Hellenic war. His policy of peace after 446 B.C. was, therefore, the sound policy of an imperialist. The general ground on which contemporaries criti- cized the Athenian regime was that under it every assist- ance was given by the state to the least cultivated portion of the inhabitants both of Athens and of its 74 GREEK IMPERIALISM four hundred and twenty subject cities, at the expense of the most intelligent and cultivated elements ; that the highest goal of endeavor was moral and intellectual mediocrity. There may be some truth in this conten- tion. The case would be more conclusive, however, if the tendency of the critics to identify intelligence with wealth and cultivation with birth were less obvious. If the point be granted, we must accept the opinion of those historians who affirm that Athens was great in this age despite, and not because of, its democracy. Personally, I do not believe that this was sos I cannot admit that extirpation of the best was practiced in an age in which ideas were created and forms were perfected for their lit- erary and artistic expression which have been the wonder and despair of the men of the highest cultivation from that day to this. Does it not seem like irony that a. regime is charged with promoting mediocrity under which rose Sophocles, Herodotus, Phidias, Pericles, Euripides, Hippocrates, Socrates, and Thucydides? Much more important than the leveling tendency of the democracy was the facility it afforded for men of ability both to rise to the top and to find there a sympathetic and critical audience. So much for democracy. The empire stands approved by the fact that the sharpest accusation now made against the democracy is that it failed to make the empire enduring. On this point the last word — unless it be that no political order has ever been enduring, and that those which have lasted ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY 75 the longest have been generally of the least worth — was said by Thucydides * over twenty-three hundred years ago, and I present in conclusion his mastffl-ly account of the circumstances which led to the downfall of the Athenian Empire: — •* "During the peace while Pericles was at the head of affairs he ruled with prudence; under his guidance Athens was safe, and reached the height of her greatness in his time. When the war began, he showed that here, too, he had formed a true estimate of the Athenian power. He survived the commencement of hostilities two years and six months; and, after his death, his foresight was even better appreciated than during his life. For he had told the Athenians that if they would be patient and would attend to their navy, and not seek to enlarge their dominions while the war was going on, nor imperil the existence of the city, they would be victorious; but they did all that he told them not to do, and in matters which seemingly had nothing to do with the war, from motives of private ambition and private interest they adopted a policy which had disastrous effects in respect both of themselves and of their allies; their measures, had they been successful, would have brought honor and profit only to individuals, and, when unsuccessful, crip- pled the city in the conduct of the war. The reason of the difference was that he, deriving authority from his capacity and acknowledged worth, being also a man of » Thucy., II, 65, 5 S. 76 GREEK IMPERIALISM transparent integrity, was able to control the multitude in a free spirit ; he led them rather than was led by them ; for, not seeking power by dishonest arts, he had no need to say pleasant things, but, on the strength of his own high character, could venture to oppose and even to anger them. When he saw them unseasonably elated and arrogant, his words humbled and awed them; and when they were depressed by groundless fears, he sought to reanimate their confidence. Thus Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact ruled by her greatest citizen. But his successors were more on an equality with one another, and, each struggling to be first him- self, they were ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of affairs to the whims of the people. Such weakness in a great and imperial city led to many errors, of which the greatest was the Sicilian expedition; not that the Athe- nians miscalculated their enemy's power, but they them- selves, instead of consulting for the interests of the expedition which they had sent out, were occupied in intriguing against one another for the leadership of the democracy, and not only grew remiss in the management of the army, but became embroiled, for the first time, in civil strife. And yet, after they had lost in the Sicilian expedition the greater part of their fleet and army, and were distracted by revolution at home, still they held out three years not only against their former enemies, but against the Sicilians who had combined with them, and against most of their own allies who had risen in ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY 77 revolt. Even when Cyrus, the son of the King, joined in the war and supplied the Peloponnesian fleet with money, they continued to resist, and were at last over- thrown, not by their enemies, but by themselves and their own internal dissensions." A summarization such as this, in style austere and authoritative, in content the product of penetrating insight and wonderful sense for political realities, not only bears witness to the greatness of Thucydides; when it is contrasted with similar analyses in Plato and Aris- totle it testifies to the loss of power for sustained histori- cal thinking which Greece suffered when men of genius were no longer enriched by the experience which came through living in a state like the imperial democracy of Athens. Not the least of its merits is its self-restraint. Having concluded that the reckless rivalries of her would- be leaders and the reckless dissensions of her citizens ruined Athens, he refrains from assigning a cause for the spirit of lawlessness. It is not Thucydides, but Alcibia- des, who declared that democracy was " manifest folly " ; not he, but Cleon, who reiterated that "a democracy cannot manage an empire." Thucydides does not de- spair of democracy. In the case of Athens it was less the unsoundness of the "majority" than the selfishness of the "remnant" that caused the nation to perish. For the demoralization of their leaders, however, the Athe- nians themselves held Socrates responsible, meaning to incriminate the Sophistic movement. Who shall say that 78 GREEK IMPERIALISM they were wrong? And who shall hold democracy re- sponsible for the evils of the Sophistic movement? SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. WiLAMOWITZ-MOELLENDORFF, ULRICH VON. Votl deS attischen Reiches HerrUchkeit (iSyf). In Reden und Vor- trdge, pp. 27 Jf. 2. Jebb, R. C. The Age of Pericles (1889). In Essays and Addresses, pp. 104^. 3. Meyer, Eduard. Geschichte des Altertums, iv (1901). 4. WiLAMOWITZ-MOELLENDORFF, UlRICH VON. Stoat UTld Gesellschaft der Griechen (1910): C. Die athenische Demo- kraiie, pp. 95 /. 5. ZiMMERN, Alfred. The Greek Commonwealth (191 1). 6. Cavaignac, E. Histoire de VAntiguiti, 11 : Athines (480- 330), (191a). Ill FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE A CURIOUS legend about the Spartans arose in the age that followed the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. It was then reported that they were the kinsmen of the Jews. According to one version of the story, Judsea was founded by a Spartan named Judseus, who had accompanied the god Dionysus from Thebes on his triumphal progress through Asia. According to another account, the Spartans were descendants of Abraham, the strongest of the children of Israel having migrated to Greece at the time Moses led the remainder out of Egypt to the land of Canaan.^ This absurd legend, of which the Greek origin is unmistakable, seems to have been responsible for a cer- tain rapprochement between the two peoples. Despite the first book of the Maccabees, which affirms the con-- trary, it is, indeed, impossible that Areus I, king of Sparta between 308 and 264 B.C., wrote to Onias I, Jewish high priest, demanding and offering a commu- nity of goods, and that Jonathan Maccabaeus, one hun- dred and fifty years afterwards, sent greetings to the Spartans, together with the word that the Jews "at all 1 Schurer, Geschichte des jUdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, i • (1901), pp. 236/. See notes. 8o GREEK IMPERIALISM times without ceasing both in their feasts and other con- venient days remembered them in the sacrifices which they offered, and in their prayers, as reason was, and as it becameth them to think upon their brethren."^ Nothing is more unlikely than that the Spartans volun- teered to divide their "cattle" and property with the Jews only a short time before they crushed with great bloodshed a communistic movement among their own citizens, unless it be the thought that the prayers and offerings of the Jews went up continually to Jehovah for the prosperity of heathen who were also backsliders. Nevertheless, that communications were actually estab- lished between the Judaea of Onias and Jonathan and the Sparta of Areus and Menalcidas, we cannot doubt; and, indeed, we have still other evidences that the alleged community of origin was turned to account by the Jews. There was evidently a considerable Jewish settlement in Sparta. When we seek to discover the reason for this strange conjunction of the warrior community by the Eurotas and the religious community by the Jordan, we are helped by observing that in another Hellenistic legend the Jews are made the kinsmen of the gymnosophists, or naked philosophers, of India. The Greek mind was at this time fascinated by the great problem of subordinat- ing the species of things to their proper genera, of per- ceiving the types by means of which individual objects ' I Mace, xu, II. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 8i became intelligible parts of a cosmos. It was the age of Aristotle and Theophrastus, Menander and the New Comedy, of idealistic portraiture. Hence the temptatjon was irresistible to bring into family relationship the various societies of men in which the principle of caste dominated ; to regard it as unessential that in Judaea the people were there to support the priests, in Laconia to support the soldiers, in India to support the Brahmans. In each case there was found an odd community, in which, so far at least as the state could accomplish it, all human interests were subordinated to one, be it war and preparation for war, religious practices of a ritualistic character, or theosophical speculation. Had the Greeks known it, there was a further analogy of an external sort between the Spartans and the Jews which they would have delighted to establish. For at about the same time that a richly diversified national life was narrowed down in Judaea to a single interest under the stress of complete preoccupation with the means of regaining Jehovah's favor for his chosen people, Sparta ruthlessly compressed and crushed a many-sided and progressive culture to the end that her citizens might become trained soldiers, having but one esprit, the esprit de corps of a professional army. Prior to 580 B.C. Sparta was the home of poets and mu- sicians. It was for a chorus of Spartan maidens, the dlite of the noble families, that Alcman wrote the exquisite lines on the breathless calm of nature which Goethe has 82 GREEK IMPERIALISM made familiar to all lovers of poetry. In hollow Lacedae- mon — a valley rich with vegetation suggestive of boun- tiful harvests, down which the steel-gray Eurotas runs, swift and turbulent, over its rocky bottom, and over which rise on either side the snow-capped ridges of Taygetus and Parnon, their slopes resonant with the songs of the nightingales in the mating season — in this secluded spot, whose haunting beauty is a joy forever to all who have seen it, there was reared a famous temple of Athena, "Athena of the Brazen House," at a time when in Athens itself the city's protecting goddess had to be content with a crude, primitive sanctuary. All this, and much besides, was observed, and the proper inferences drawn, by Eduard Meyer twenty years ago;^ so that the amazement with which the English archaeologists, who have excavated in Laconia during the past five or six years, report their remarkable "finds" is a source of no little amusement to the wary. They have discovered that prior to 580 b.c. Sparta was the maker of a kind of artistic pottery which was known and imitated in far-distant Cyrene and Tarentum; that she then had trade relations with Egypt and Lydia; that "combs, toilet-boxes, elaborate pins and bronze ornaments, seals, necklaces, and gold and ivory gew- gaws" were made and used — witnesses /or "a golden age of Spartan art," against the puritanical spirit tra- ditionally attributed to early and middle Sparta." 1 Geschichte des Altertums, 11 1 (1893), pp. 562/. ' Dickins, Journal of Hellenic Studies, xxxii (1912), p. 12. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 83' In Athens, as we have seen, supremacy in art and literature was attained by making universal among citizens the spirit and culture of the aristocracy, 'the whole people, thus ennobled, being supported on the shoulders of the tributary allies and enriched by the commercial advantages of maritime empire. The devel- opment of Sparta was directly the reverse of this. There the aristocracy, whose exuberance of life and responsive- ness to sensuous impressions are attested with sufficient certainty, was destroyed in the sixth century B.C. This century was one of repression in Greece gener- ally; whence some historians have called it the epoch of the Greek Reformation. It is the time of the "Seven Wise Men," from one of whom came the Delphian motto "nothing in excess," a time in which the riotous joy of living and the fresh spontaneity of theso-called Ionian Renascence were subdued by a force, which might have been everywhere a blight, — as in Sparta, — but which in fact, when later the inspiration of the great Persian War came, exerted the gentle restraint which marks the classic in Greek art and letters. In thia_perilous period the aristocracy of Sparta perished, and with- it the ideals and accomplishments of which it had been the exponent. The instrument of repression of all that was superior to the average in Spartan life was the college of the five ephors, which Cicero compares with the tribunate in Rome. The ephors acquired such power that they made 84 GREEK IMPERIALISM the continuance of even the kingship dependent upon the submission of the kings to their authority ; and upon the kings, as upon all others, they enforced the new rules of law of which they were the living expositors. The development of Sparta, like the development of Rome, from aristocratic to republican government is characterized by the absence of tyrants. The fact is that the tribunate in the one case and the ephorate in the other was tyranny in commission, the division of its powers between ten and five annually changing officers respectively having proved to be a sufficient safeguard against the concentration of executive power in the person of a single individual, be he an inherited king robbed of monarchical rights or an ambitious demagogue aiming at their restoration. The new rules of law which the ephors enforced pre- scribed in minute detail the life of the citizen from the moment of his birth to the time of his death. They were the regulations of a military school in which war alone was taught, of military barracks when war was already declared. From seven years of age to sixty the entire energies of the male half of the population were directed toward being prepared for war. Boys and men drilled and hunted, learned to use their weap- ons and campaigned, danced and exercised, ate in the "messes" year in and year out, and never escaped the watchful eyes of trainers, subalterns, officers, and ephors. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 85 No one in Sparta had to make his own way in life. His whole course was mapped out for him before he was born. No citizen had any business cares; for all trade and industry were tabooed, and the lands which he in- herited he could not sell. Neither could he buy those of another. The agricultural laborers were serfs, the sullen and recalcitrant Helots, of whom there were fifteen to every Spartan; the clothing and weapons were made by the contented and tractable Perioecs, who outnumbered the Spartans five to one, and formed with their one hundred hamlets and their contiguous terri- tories an insulating band round Helots and Spartans alike. Iron money was the only local currency, though silver had, of course, to be given in payment for the articles which were imported from abroad. These, how- ever, were reduced to a minimum, and such foreigners as made their way through the wall of Perioecs were rounded up at intervals and forcefully expelled. All the pretty things of their earlier life, the Spartans chose to do without. Coarse fare and unlovely houses, piazzas devoid of statues and inclosed in unsightly and flimsy public buildings; no theatres, no new music, no new ideas of any kind ; mothers who gave up their little children and their grown sons without flinching; wives who violated fundamental instincts that their offspring might be more perfect; homeless boys who went half- naked winter and summer, slept in pens in the open air like cattle and got their food and living by their wits; 86 GREEK IMPERIALISM girls who would hardly have known their brothers, brides who would hardly have recognized their husbands, mothers who would hardly have been able to distinguish their own sons, were it not that there were less than five thousand brothers, husbands, and sons in all — of such was the new Sparta, to whose citizens the ephors issued the annual command "to shave their mustaches and obey the laws." Long-haired and tangly-bearded, in groups of about fifteen each, they lounged and ate and slept in the three hundred tents, or barracks, which lined Hyacinth Street. There they kept their long spears and their armor.* Thence, clad in their scarlet cloaks, they issued in time of danger or of war to take their places, group by group, in the five carefully drilled regiments of which the Spartan phalanx was composed. Quietly, at an appointed hour in a single night, the whole army might steal away without confusion, trail- ing after it, on occasion, thirty-five thousand Helots to attend to the commissariat. Five thousand Perioec hoplites might follow at its heels, and with machine-like precision, to the sound of flutes played in the austere Dorian mode, ten thousand Lacedaemonian soldiers might advance into battle against foemen who were always comparatively ill-organized, and who often fled before a single blow was struck. The secret of this strange perversion of the natural life of man is to be found in the declaration of war * Schoemann-Lipsius, Griechische Allerthumer, * i (1897), pp. 261 ff. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 87 annually made by the ephors upon the Helots. They could not follow it up by a campaign waged in regular fashion; for that would have been to destroy their "own serfs. But they picked out young soldiers, and sent them about among the Helots, with instructions to strike down secretly all who seemed restless or over- ambitious. The chief centre of Helot disaffection, at least in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., was on the far side of Mount Taygetus, in Messenia. There the yoke of serfdom chafed more than elsewhere, not least because those whose estates the Helots of Messenia tilled for one half the yield lived beyond the snow- capped ridge which shuts in that country on the east. The Messenians aspired to regain their lost independ- ence. The Helots of the Eurotas Valley had no such ambition. They were, therefore, slower to revolt against injustice; but their aim, when an insurrection did come, could be nothing less thajti the extermination of their masters, or at least an exchange of position with them. Moreover, their very proximity to the five villages which constituted the unwalled city of Sparta, and the very weight of their numbers made the Spartans live in ever-present fear of a massacre. Constant prepared- ness for war was, accordingly, a simple mandate of self- preservation. • The Spartans thought it unwise that any of their serf- tilled estates should lie in or outside the ring of Perioec 88 GREEK IMPERIALISM land. It would not do to have fuses, so to speak, of Helots running through the wall to the outside world, or to have masses of Helots beyond the wall, exposed directly to foreign manipulation. Hence the formation of the Perioec ring set definite limits to the territory of Sparta. It could be enlarged in but one way — the widening of the ring by the reduction of more and more outlying states to the status of Pericecs. And it was in this way that the Spartan dominions were in fact enlarged in the seventh century B.c.^ At the end of this century, however, Sparta came into conflict with cities which, unlike the mountain and maritime hamlets situated roundabout Laconia and Messenia, were too strong and high-spirited to submit to Spartan control. They had, therefore, to be treated leniently, since Sparta could not crush them altogether and would not leave them alone. And the reasons for conciliatory action were strengthened by the fact that Sparta had now to act abroad with a sharp eye to the possibility of a servile insurrection at home. There was never anything mechanical or idealistic in the foreign policy of the ephors. Hence, first with Tegea at about 560 B.C., and thereafter with all the states in the Pelo- _^onnesus, excepting Argos and Achgea, Sparta con- cluded a treaty, the imperialistic aspect of which was that they agreed individually to accept Sparta's leader- 1 See particularly Niese, op, cit. in Select Bibliography at end of chap- ter. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 89 ship in all defensive wars and in offensive wars to which they had assented. The Peloponnesian league, thus formed, stood for the autonomy and freedom of its members; but Sparta, by championing aristocracies against tyrants and de- mocracies, and using to its own advantage the jealous- ies of its allies as well as their fears of outside powers, dominated it for one hundred and eighty years, and made it during all that time the main steadying influ-^ ence in Greek politics. Twice it was enlarged into an Hellenic league, first during the three years of the great Persian invasion (480-478 B.C.), and again for ten years after the dissolution of the Athenian empire (405- 395 B.C.). On the earlier occasion, the ephors felt relieved of an intolerable burden when in 477 B.C. the ^gean cities, over four hundred and twenty in number, abandoned Spartan for Athenian leadership. And in the forty-six years that followed, not they but the Athenians were the aggressors. During that epoch of democratic fervor,^ it was an uphill struggle for the champions of aristocracy to maintain their position ; and the war of political principles was even carried into Sparta, when, in 464 B.C., the Helots of Messenia made a last desperate fight for their liberty. The Spartans profited, however, during the last third of the fifth century B.C., by the discredit into which democracy came among cultivated people through the mistakes and excesses of Athens; » Beloch, CriecMsche CescUchte, i (1893), pp. 439/, 90 GREEK IMPERIALISM and at the end of the Peloponnesian War they were again able to make the Peloponnesian league an Hel- lenic league by incorporating into it Athens and the iEgean cities which they had just "liberated" from Athenian tyranny. A successful war may strengthen a nation, but not when victory lays upon it a task that is beyond its powers to perform. Such would have been the case had Athens won at Syracuse. Such was the issue of ^gos- potami. This we can readily see by examining briefly, first the situation in Sparta, and then the position of Sparta in Hellas, during the existence of her second Hellenic league. The Spartans of military age now numbered only about two thousand. War had done its part in reducing them to this handful. Close intermarriage had done even more. In the case of large families, the subdivision of lots which then occurred impoverished sons so greatly that they could no longer stand the expense of the mil- itary clubs, upon membership in which, however, citi- zenship depended. So far did the evil implicit in this condition go that brothers refused to divide their in- heritance, and possessed not only one house, but one wife in common. Men could neither buy land nor sell it, but they might acquire it by marriage or by gift; and since the rich, then as always, tended to marry among themselves, property, and with it citizenship, remained eventually in the possession of a very few. Much of the FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 91 land, which was the only wealth, came into the hands of women. A plutocracy thus developed in Sparta as the number of the Spartans diminished ; and in this \^ay the domestic situation became still further ominous by the growth in the city of a considerable body of disfran- chised and discontented "inferiors" and half-breeds. The perils which attended this situation are revealed by the following incident as described by Xenophon in his Hellenica: ^ — "Now Agesilaus (401-36Q B.C.) had not been seated on. the throne one year when, as he sacrificed one of the appointed sacrifices in behalf of the city, the soothsayer warned him, saying: 'The gods reveal a conspiracy of the most fearful character' ; and when the king sacrificed a second time, he said : ' The aspect of the victims is now even yet more terrible'; but when he had sacrificed for the third time, the soothsayer exclaimed: 'O Agesilaus, the sign is given to me, even as though we were in the very midst of the enemy.' Thereupon they sacrificed to the deities who avert evil and work salvation, and so barely obtained good omens, and ceased sacrificing. Nor had five days elapsed after the sacrifices were ended, ere one came bringing infprmation to the ephors of a conspiracy, and named Cinadon as the ringleader; a young man robust of body as of soul, but not one of the peers. Accordingly, the ephors questioned their inform- ant: 'How say you the occurrence is to take place?' and * ni, 3. Aff- 92 GREEK IMPERIALISM he who gave the information answered : ' Cinadon took me to the limit of the market-place, and bade me count how many Spartans there were in the market-place ; and I counted — king, and ephors, and elders, and others, maybe forty. But tell me, Cinadon, I said to him, why have you bidden me count them? and he answered me : Those men, I would have you know, are your sworn foes; and all those others, more than four thousand, congregated there are your natural allies. Then he took and showed me in the streets, here one and there two of our enemies, as we chanced to come across them, and all the rest our natural allies; and so again running through the list of Spartans to be found in the country districts, he still kept harp- ing on that string: Look you, on each estate one foeman — the master — and all the rest allies!' The ephors asked: ' How many do you reckon are in the secret of the mat- ter?' The informant answered: 'On that point also he gave me to understand that there were by no means many in their secret who were prime movers of the affair, but those few to be depended on ; and to make up, said he, we ourselves are in their secret, all the rest of them — Helots, enfranchised, inferiors, Pericecs, one and all. Note their demeanor when Spartans chance to be the topic of their talk. None of them can conceal the delight it would give him if he might eat up every Spartan raw.' Then, as the inquiry went on, the question came: 'And where did they propose to find arms?' The answer followed: 'He explained that those of us, of course, who are enrolled in FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 93 regiments have arms of our own already, and as for the mass — he led the way to the war foundry, and showed me scores and scores of knives, of swords, of spits, hateh- ets, and axes, and reaping hooks. Anything or everything, he told me, which men use to delve in the earth, cut timber, or quarry stone, would serve our purpose; nay, the instru- ments used for other arts would in nine cases out of ten fur- nish weapons enough and to spare, especially in dealing with unarmed antagonists.' Once more being asked what time the affair was to come off, he replied his orders were not to leave the city." The ephors, wishing to remove Cinadon from Sparta without suspicion, sent him on a mission to Aulon. He was to arrest certain persons, and among them "a woman, the fashionable beauty of the place — supposed to be the arch-corruptress of all Lacedaemonians, young and old, who visited Aulon." His escort seized him in- stead and wrested from him the names of his accom- plices. " His fate was to be taken out forthwith in irons, just as he was, and to be placed with his two hands and his neck in the collar, and so under scourge and goad to be driven, himself and his accomplices, round the city. Thus upon the heads of those," concludes the pious Xenophon, "was visited the penalty of their offense." Beset with dangers such as this, the Spartans had to tread warily. They drafted Pericecs into their army so as to make it about fifty-six hundred strong. They picked 94 GREEK IMPERIALISM out Helots, trained and emancipated them, and used them abroad as soldiers. They took mercenaries into their service and distributed them according to local needs under Spartan captains, acting always, however, on requests from local governments. They got large con- tingents of troops from their old allies, whom, however, they left free of tribute, financing their government with a thousand talents raised annually from the former allies of Athens. With the funds thus secured they hired rowers and marines for the warships which their allies 'umished and thus patrolled the sea as well as the land. They got a moral mandate for empire by upholding everjrwhere aristocracy, real or sham, against democ- racy, and by assuming the r61e of champion of Greece against the barbarians. This did not prevent them, however, from forming an alliance with Dionysius I,^ who had just made himself tyrant of Syracuse, or from working in harmony with Persia as long as that was possible. "The growth of Lacedsemon," said Timolaus of Cor- inth ^ in'394 B.C., "seems to me just like that of some mighty river — at its sources small and easily crossed, but as it further and further advances, other rivers dis- charge themselves into its channel, and its stream grows * The successive tyrannies in Syracuse and the empires of Syracuse over the West Greeks have been omitted of necessity in this book. They have been examined with particular care by Freeman in his History of Sicily and with particular sympathy by Beloch in his Griechische Geschichte. ' Xenophon, Hellenica, iv, 2, iz ff. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 95 ever more formidable. So it is with the Lacedaemonians. Take them at the starting-point and they are but a single community, but as they advance and attach city affer city they grow more numerous and more resistless. I observe that when people wish to take wasps' nests — if they try to capture the creatures on the wing, they are liable to be attacked by half the hive; whereas, if they apply fire to them ere they leave their homes, they^ill master them without scathe themselves. On this princi- ple, I think it best to bring about the battle within the hive itself, or, short of that, as close to Lacedaemon as possible." The advice was sound; but the wasps could not be caught at home. It was not till Athens had beaten the Spartans at sea, and Thebes had beaten them on land, that Epaminondas reached the hive. He then broke up the Peloponnesian league, emancipated the Helots of Messenia, and substituted, for the once considerable power which had saved the Peloponnesus from serious attack for two hundred years, a multitude of little city- states such as existed elsewhere in Greece — rather, such as came to exist elsewhere in European Greece, when, a few years later, with Epaminondas's death, the su- premacy of Thebes ceased, Athens was abandoned by the states which had joined her against Sparta, and the empire of Dionysius I in the west dissolved, shortly after his death, into its constituent parts. Theoretically, conditions should then have been ideal. 96 GREEK IMPERIALISM In the case of the Greeks the deep-seated human instinct to compare the present disadvantageously with the past was not checked by a theory of evolution conceived as progress, such as misleads many sensible people nowa- days to imagine that the farther back they go the more rudimentary political and social conditions become. The golden age of the Greeks lay in "the dark backward and abysm of time." In early days, before the rise of the Spartan and Athenian empires, every city, so it was believed, had "lived in peace, free and autonomous, and in secure possession of its own territory," For more than a century men had struggled to bring back those blessed times, and now at length their efforts, it might have seemed, had been crowned with success. Every city in Greece, great and small, had apparently regained its liberty and autonomy. At the same time men had made a persistent effort to reestablish in each city " the constitution of the fathers," and under the Spartan hegemony the favorable oppor- tunity for success in this campaign had seemingly come. But it then appeared that, apart from the general under- standing that citizenship was to be reserved to those who could afford to pay taxes and provide themselves with the arms and knowledge of arms necessary for fighting, no two persons agreed as to what the "ancestral consti- tution" was. It proved to be in reality the ideal of each reformer and each politician, and since the age was one in which most of the ordinary restraints were lacking as FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 97 they seldom are in the history of civilized man, the tran- sition from an unpopular ideal to a conspiracy was apt to be singularly abrupt. /The outcome of the attempts to restore the urban particularism of mediaeval Greece and the constitutions of the over-praised olden time was unsatisfactory to everybody. Barren wars of city against city instead of large enterprises directed by imperial ambitions; an atmosphere murky with plots and coun- ter-plots, where once there had blown the strong wind of steady civic progress; and, in addition, national disaster and humiliation despite manifest military superiority — these were the bitter fruits of political reaction in Greece during the Spartan supremacy, f It was in this unhappy age that the science of govern- ment was born, and it bears its birthmark to the present day. The midwife, to use his own homely figure, was Socrates, whom the Athenians, tarred on by Aristoph- anes, put to death " for corrupting the youth and intro- ducing strange gods." He, of course, denied the accusa- tions, and claimed that he deserved the honors of a public benefactor for taking men individually and showing to them how ill they understood the virtues on which all societies are based, to wit, justice, wisdom, temper- ance, and courage. No one, he thought, could make them better citizens except by promoting truth and dis- pelling ignorance about these things. His execution con- secrated his mission. It was the sowing of dragon's teeth 98 GREEK IMPERIALISM from which sprang up armed warriors, of whom the most doughty were Plato and Aristotle. The vice of the Socratic school was a noble one — an enormous overestimate of the value of education. ' ' Truth is the beginning of every good thing," says Plato,^ "both to gods and men; and he who would be blessed and happy, should be from the first a partaker of the truth, that he may live a true man as long as possible, for then he can be trusted; but he is not to be trusted who loves voluntary falsehood and he who loves involuntary false- hood is a fool." There was, of course, only one truth; which, being discovered, should be taught; which, being taught, must be acted upon, since, if men really knew what was right, it was impossible, Plato thought — ig- noring the frailty or obstinacy of the human will — that they should not do it. " Discover the truth. " "Teach it. " These are the two Socratic commandments. I have no intention to make an exposition of the po- litical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,^ but to do something much more modest: to explain wherein and wherefore they missed the truth in the matter of Greek imperialism, and to notice some of the historic forces which they disregarded. If I deal with the Laws rather than the Republic of Plato, it is because it is his more mature and less imaginative work. ' £oaw, V, p. 730. (The translation used here and elsewhere in the book is that of Jowett.) ' For what is here omitted see the excellent little book by von Amim, Die poUHschen Theorien des Altertums. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 99 It was upon his immediate present that Plato focused his attention; to the analysis of its political and moral strength and weakness that he turned his penetrating in- telligence; for its betterment that he wrote and taught and suffered. The past he peopled with creations of his own exuberant fancy, of popular misconception, of defective knowledge. He can be easily convicted of gross historical errors. And what is more serious ; he has no real regard for historical truth and no sense whatever for thh real factors in historical developments. Without the slightest qualm of conscience, and without taking the least pains to ascertain the facts, Plato alters the divine and profane history of his people to make it serve his purpose. And he does this on principle : ' ' The legislator, ' he says,^ "has only to reflect and find out what belief will be of the greatest public advantage, and then use all his efforts to make the whole community utter one and the same word in their songs and tales and discourses all their life long." To disagreeable things in the sacred story he gives a short shrift. Since the gods are perfect, every report that tends to tarnish the lustre of their reputation must be false. The history of mankind is solved by a similar formula; since justice is the sine qua non of public and private prosperity and happiness, all reports which affirm the conjunction of injustice with well-being, or of righteousness with misfortune, need correction or suppression.* History, accordingly, be- > Laws, n, p. 664. ' Laws, 11, p. 662. 100 GREEK IMPERIALISM comes a happy hunting-ground for edifying stories. It at once ceases to yield lessons, which, being grounded in the realities of human experience, are less apropos, per- haps, than the political theorist may like, but are alone valuable. Plato's absorption in the present led him to misread not only the past, but also the future. For the false standard with which he measured past policies and in- stitutions is not less characteristic than the false judg- ment which he formed of the drift of contemporary events. The future belonged, not, as he dreamed, to the autonomous, archaizing city-state, but to the move- ment for their unification which he condemned. He tried to mend city constitutions when the world required the creation of larger territorial states. He watched with attention domestic politics when foreign politics were chiefly worth watching. A glance at the ideal state portrayed by Plato in the Laws ^ shows in what sense he read his history. His citi- zens are to have "their food and clothing provided for them in moderation," the latter through "entrusting the practice of the arts to others, ' ' the former through get- ting from the land, which slaves till for a part of the pro- duce, "a return sufficient for men living temperately." They are to have "common tables in which the men are placed apart, and near them are the common tables of their families, of their daughters and mothers, which, * VII, p. 806. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE loi day by day, the officers, male and female, are to inspect." They are not, however, to live fattening like beasts; for "such a life is neither just nor honorable, nor can he wlio lives it fail of meeting his due; and the due reward of the idle fatted beast is that he should be torn to pieces by some other valiant beast whose fatness is worn down by brave deeds and toil." Naturally, Plato does not wish his ideal citizens to meet such an ignominious end. He proceeds to prescribe a regime for them in which, after a most carefully nur- tured childhood, three years are spent on reading and writing, three more on learning to play the lyre, and others still on the study of arithmetic, geometry, astron- omy, and law, and on the practice of dancing, wrestling, running, hunting, and many kinds of military exercises. The citizens to be protected from fatty degeneration in this way are, it should be observed, the women as well as the men. The children's stories are prescribed and are unalter- able; so are the music and the dancing and the poetry. The law studied is that of the commonwealth, with which every citizen is to be inoculated. The moral and religious ideas are to be fixed, and death is the penalty set for heterodoxy. Everything is to be made and kept rigid, the number of the houses, of the farms, of the citizens, of the children, of traders, artisans, and foreigners, the maximum and minimum wealth of everybody. In other words, the community which Plato in his old age pro- 102 GREEK IMPERIALISM posed as a model is not a thorough-going communism, like that of his more youthful and more famous Republic. It is simply a system of governmental control carried to its logical extreme — an emended and perfected edition of Sparta. That a well-bom Athenian, disgusted at the license which resulted from letting people live as they pleased, should have planned to put all citizens in an adminis- trative strait- jacket, is not surprising. Many of us to-day object to a "wide-open town." But that Plato, whose practice in discussion was "to follow the argument whithersoever it might lead," should have idealized a state in which freedom of thought and freedom of speech were denied altogether, shows (even if we make all allow- ances for the idea, that, if things were perfect and there was but one perfection, all changes must be harmful) how unreal and involved in self-contradiction was the thinking of the best Greeks in this age of reaction. The theory of individual liberty, as applied in Athens, had led, in the economic sphere, thought Plato, to the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and, in the political sphere, to the exploitation of the rich by the poor. Plato, therefore, discarded the theory of individual liberty alto- gether. He was dominated by a general view of life in which all the natural human instincts and cravings were harmful. The only hope for states was that they should educate their best citizens to be their governors. Plato, accordingly, nailed to the mast the doctrine of salvation FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 103 by education, and despaired of all states in which the carefully trained few of high intellectual capacity did not make the laws and enforce them. Of all these ideas "the Athenian democracy was the negation, and Plato hated it with the bitterness of a passionate nature. That Plato hated the Periclean democracy as a politi- cal system is eilso intelligible from his hatred of imperial- ism upon which it was based ; and there are those to-day, who, for the same reason and also because of a mistaken notion of its dependence upon slavery, find Athenian democracy justified, if at all, by its fruits; who contem- plate its art and literature with the same mingled feelings with which they view the hectic beauty of the consump- tive. Plato is not of their company. The fruits he finds even more deleterious than the stock which bore them. "In music," he writes,^ meaning thereby poetry inter- preted by the voice with musical accompaniment, — "in music it was that there first arose the universal con- ceit of omniscience and genercil lawlessness; — freedom came following afterwards, and men, fancying that they knew what they did not know, had no longer any fear, and the absence of fear begets shamelessness. For what is this shamelessness, which is so evil a thing, but the insolent refusal to regard the opinion of the better by reason of an over-daring sort of liberty?" Whereto the Spartan who is his interlocutor says: "Very true." * Laws, in, p.700. The same initial cause of degeneracy is postulated in Plato's Republic, viu, p. 546. 104 GREEK IMPERIALISM " Consequent upon this freedom," continues the speaker, "comes the other freedom, of disobedience to rulers; and then the attempt to escape the control and exhortation of father, mother, elders, and when near the end, the control of the laws also ; and at the very end there is the contempt of oaths and pledges, and no regard at all for the gods, — herein they exhibit and imitate the old so- called Titanic nature, and come to the same point as the Titans when they rebelled against God, leading a life of endless evils." The modern critic, even if he endorses the sharp indictment of Euripides, the poet of the most radical democracy, — that he destroyed the character of Attic tragedy by introducing into it elements from melodrama and the operatic concert, by perverting the grand style of its text and music by vulgar flippancies and incon- gruous measures, by substituting for artistic develop- ment of characters and plot disturbing discussions of the woman question and the latest sensations in phi- losophy and science, by turning the ancient gods and heroes into burlesque through having them argue and ' act like contemporary sycophants and sophists, — the modern critic, even Professor Shorey,i for example, in his spirited defense of the Sophoclean drama, would abandon Plato, I fancy, when he makes the drama the fundamental cause for the decline of Athenian greatness. In his Laws, Plato is dealing with what, chastened by ' Greek Literature (The Columbia University Press, 1912), p. 11. .j FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 105 age and experience, he regarded as correctible things. The lust for private possessions, for land and home, wife and children, he once placed in this category, but he does so no longer; and in other respects he makes wide con- cessions to human frailties. With greed for wealth, how- ever, he concluded no truce. It is Greeks, mark you, of whom Plato ^ says: "Love of wealth wholly absorbs men, and never for a moment allows them to think of anything but their own private possessions; on this the soul of every citizen hangs suspended, and can attend to nothing but his daily gain. Mankind are ready to learn any branch of knowledge, and to follow any pursuit which tends to this end, and they laugh at every other. . . . From an insatiate love of gold and silver, every man will stoop to any art or contrivance, seemly or unseemly, in the hope of becoming rich ; and will make no objection to performing any action, holy or unholy and utterly base, if only like a beast he have the power of eating and drinking all kinds of things, and procuring for himself in every sort of way the gratifications of his lusts." Such were the evil conditions of the present when one citizen despoiled his fellow and every city its neighbor. It had been different in the past. Before the introduc- tion of luxurious tastes to stimulate inventions and of coined money to destroy a sense for the natural limits of wealth, men had "worked in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot,^ but in winter substantially > Laws, viii, p. 831. * Rept^lic, n, p. 372 b. I06 GREEK IMPERIALISM clothed and shod. They fed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they served up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle. And they and their children feasted, drinking of the wine which they had made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. They took care that their families did not exceed their means: having an eye to poverty or war." But it was not to an age of such rude simplicity that Plato would recall his contemporaries. He would, indeed, restore the virtues which existed among the early country folk before the rise of modem cities and the establishment of the capitalistic regime ; but, while hostile to transmarine commerce, retail trade, industries, banking, interest, and all other accompaniments of interchange between cities, which he regarded as gen- erally undesirable and provocative of wars and con- quests, he imagines his ideal people in possession of city culture and the articles of luxury and convenience secured through the capitalistic organization. His citi- zens are, indeed, farmers, but they are gentlemen farmers, who have their money invested in land and slaves and live on their dividends, free to devote their leisure to athletic, intellectual, and other worthy pur- suits. They will be free from greed of wealth because they all possess a competency, which Plato defines as FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 107 enough to live "temperately," Aristotle as enough to live "with liberality and temperance." Neither phi- losopher thinks of poverty except as the ordainir of body- and soul-destroying work, work which degrades those who have to perform it, and makes slavery their natural condition. Plato and Aristotle would make all tillers of the soil and workers at the trades and crafts slaves and aliens. They were to exist simply to provide the conditions of "good living" for their masters or superiors; whereupon "we must not conceal from our- selves," says Aristotle,^ "that a country as large as the Babylonian or some other of boundless extent will be required if it is to support five thousand citizens in idle- ness." Even in America, where, to use the current formula, ten per cent of the people own ninety per cent of the wealth, the economic situation proposed as ideal by the most enlightened reformers of the fourth cen- tury B.C. has hardly been reached. Whether Plato failed to realize that he was condemning nine tenths of people to perpetual bondage and ignorance; or, realizing it, refused to think of anything but the perfection of the few, the conclusion is alike inevitable: he had failed; miserably to trace to their historical causes both the cultural barrenness of Sparta and the astounding fer- tility of his own Athens. 1 Politics, II, 3 (6), 3, p. 1265 a. (The translation used here and else- where in the book is that of Welldon: the text that of Immisch.) I08 GREEK IMPERIALISM Had Aristotle lived in the commonwealth of Plato's Laws, he must have suffered the same fatp that Socrates suffered in Athens. For, though far from ungrateful to his teacher, he was not a docile pupil. By birth he was a Stagirite, by experience a citizen of the world. He did ' not, like Plato, form his youthful impressions in a milieu that was poisoned with bitterness at a demoralized democracy. The Athens to which he came as a lad of seventeen was still a democracy, and a very unhealthy one at that, and for it he had little liking ; but his was a more dispassionate nature than was Plato's. He was not a great historian.^ That the discovery in Egypt in 1890 of one of his many lost historical works has proven clearly; but he was a very learned man, and perhaps came to as close a comprehension of earlier Greek his- tory as was possible for a political philosopher who had nothing to guide him but the unscientific methods then in vogue for investigating the past. By its very nature science is objective. It is not in- human, but it is deliberately impersonal. In this respect it contrasts sharply with the arts. The greatest artist may be the man who embodies in his verse or stone or colors moods and thoughts which must be in "widest commonalty spread," but which constitute in the aggre- gate his own self or soul. History is of course a science, but not one of the common type. Unlike the ordinary scientist, the scientific historian has to practice, not » Bury, J. B,, The Ancient Greek Historians, pp. 182/. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 109 self-suppression, but self-expansion. He must become conscious, so far as that is possible, of the prejudices and special interests of his own age, and, divested of them, he must migrate into a strange land in order to bring back thence a report that is at once an unbiased account of what he has seen and a story that is comprehensible to his fellow-citizens, or, at least, to his fellow-historians. He dare not treat the past as one in spirit with the pres- ent, or as resolvable into precisely the same factors. He must be alive to the existence of many different pasts leading to the present in no pre-determinable succession, much less progression. The points must make a line, but the line may be of any conceivable curve. Aristotle was far from arriving at a full appreciation of the diffi- culties of historical inquiry; but, unlike Plato, he took I infinite pains to acquire historical knowledge. He did not idealize the constitutions of the olden times. Since all men then carried daggers, the presump- tion, he says, is that they needed them and used them. Since conditions where violence reigned must have con- tinued indefinitely, if political change had been pro- hibited, he finds it good as well as inevitable that laws be modified from time to time. The permanency of those of Sparta is worthy of high praise ; but he traces the corruption and decay of the Spartan state to failure to make needed reforms. In general he strikes a much more just balance between Spartan and Athenian achievement than does Plato. no GREEK IMPERIALISM The first test he applies to institutions, such as the family and the state, is their naturalness — their source in the nature of man as that is revealed in his history. He was well aware that a political science that was based upon perfected human nature was, indeed, suited only for "gods and sons of gods"; that the only principles of government which had real value were those which had approved themselves in practice. "All discoveries," he says,* "have been already made, although in some cases they have not been combined, and in others, when made, are not acted upon." " The Politics of Aristotle," says a recent writer, "is the one great book on the sci- ence of government because it is the only one which is wholly empirical." That is too high praise. For the Politics of Aristotle differs from the Prince of Machiavelli in other respects, of course, but noticeably in that the Greek hasjnoral ideals, the Italian none. With Aristotle, £is with Plato, the state has an ethical purpose. He requires it to jus- tify not only its acts but its existence. Iniquitous gov- ernments might exist, — Aristotle's world was full of them, in fact, — and his mind was too curious of all things political for him to leave them out of his obser- vation: he has, indeed, considered minutely the ways and means for the preservation of all kinds of states, and has shown therein that he had as keen an eye for the realities as had Machiavelli himself. But he would » Politics, II, 2 (5), 10, p. 1264 o. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE in never have permitted, much less advised, his legislator to use foul means to establish a just government or fair means to establish an unjust one. On the establishment of governments, moreover, he spends very little thought. This, however, is with Machiavelli the main matter, as he himself says near the opening of the second part of his work: "The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that when they are well armed they have good laws. I shall leave the laws out of the discussion and shall speak of the arms." Had the Greek heard him he would have scoffed at both the argument and the conclusion. The argument is, of course, sophistical, and the conclu- sion saved only by the fact that Machiavelli had already considered the political weapons with which rulers should operate. The Politics is a handbook for legislators ; the Prince a set of instructions for potentates. For the latter the ways and means of aspiring power was, in Machiavelli's judgment, the all-important thing; whereas the legislator's possession of power is taken for granted by Aristotle, and it is assumed through- out his entire treatment that, if the lawgiver knows the constitution, the laws, and the system of education which are best adapted to the economic, social, and political conditions of his state, he can at once introduce them. In a measure, therefore, the Prince and the Politics 112 GREEK IMPERIALISM supplement each other, though Aristotle would have been horrified at the idea. For in his thinking, in any- thing approximating to an ideal world, each city was free to order its internal affairs as it thought best, and, having this liberty, if it was shown what was best, it must, according to the Socratic psychology, immedi- ately adopt it; whereas — to give the devil his due — Machiavelli was actuated, in formulating his precepts for Prince Lorenzo, by the vision of a united Italy, the realization of which by his pupil was to wash away the crimes committed in subjecting to his will the city- states of the peninsula. The conquest of "Italy was, accordingly, the goal of the ideal Prince's endeavor; whereas, though Aristotle in one passage of the Politics^ notes that "if the Greeks were united in a single polity they would be capable of universal empire," he regards such a union as highly undesirable. To him a state that was not a city was a rudimentary and very imperfect state. It ceased to be a state at all when it ceased to be free. Hence a city could have subjects, that is to say, slaves, but not dependencies. And since in his thinking it was natural inferiority alone that justified slavery, and this was found especially among the nations of Asia, and not at all in Greece, no Greek city could rightly enslave the inhabitants of any other Greek city :. it could wage war and organize slave raids only against barba- rians. " vii (iv), 6 (7), I, p. 1327 h. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 113 The birthmark which we have noted on Plato is an J inheritance from unreasoning hatred of democracy.j That whi^h mars above all the political thinking of Aristotle comes from the aversion instinctively felt by | his age for imperialism. That this, too, is a disfigure- 1 ment, we may show in a few concluding remarks. "It is necessary," says Aristotle ^ in concluding his plea that a mixed constitution is best for the common run of states, "it is necessary to begin by assuming a principle of general application, viz., that the part of the state which desires the continuance of the polity ought to be stronger' than that which does not" ; and he proceeds to point out that "strength" consists neither in num- bers, nor property, nor military or political ability alone, but in all of them combined, so that regard has to be taken of "freedom, wealth, culture, and nobility, as well as of mere numerical superiority." Nothing could be more cold and objective than the thinking of Aris- totle on this important matter. Yet by an extraordinary oversight he lets "strength" exert a decisive influence within the city-states, while he ignores altogether the effect of varying population, wealth, and political and military ability in determining the relations between them. The whole of the political thinking of Aristotle is dominated by the idea that the world of men is made up of an infinite procession of inferiors and superiors, the 1 PoHHcs, TV (vi), 10 (12), I, p. 1296 b. 114 GREEK IMPERIALISM desire to forge ahead being one of the most fundamental instincts of human beings. If an omniscient God were to arrange the inhabitants of each city in a line according to their real "strength," he would place few of them ^ahre^tJ No Greek betrays more naively than Aristotle does the national consciousness of the Hellenes that they stood at the head of the honor roll of peoples. It was, therefore, imperative upon them to conquer the Asiatics; for he finds it to be a beneficent command of nature, issued primarily for the advantage of the weaker, _tiiat superiors should rule inferiors. Among moral philosophers Aristotle is characterized by his refusal to let himself be led astray by a visionary ideal of human equality. Nevertheless, while recogniz- ing' that Greek cities, even more than individuals, dif- fered in "strength," he refused to let the "strong" use their advantage. He sets apart the sphere of interurban, that is to say, international, relations as one in which the " universal principle," that superior rule inferior, shall not apply. In a visionary world, the "strong" man, on Aristotle's theory, is a "gentle" man; but in the real world, he is a ruler. Had Aristotle not been blinded by the prejudices of his age against imperialism, he must have seen the necessity that in the real world the "strong" state would also be the ruler. It is one of the enigmas of history that Aristotle was the contemporary and subject of Philip II of Macedon, one of its ironies that he was the tutor of Alexander the Great. FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE 115 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. ScHOMANN-LiPSius. GriecMsche Alter tiitner,* i (1892), pp. 197 #. 2. Bury, J. B. A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great (1900). 3. Meyer, Eduakd. Geschichte des Altertums, v (1902). 4. NiESE, B. Neue Beitrage zur Geschichte und Landeskunde Lakeddmons: Die lakeddmonischen Perioken. In Nach- richten der Gott. Gesell.d. Wissenschaften (1906), pp. 10 1#. 5. Arnim, Hans von. Die poUtischen Theorien des Altertums (1910). 6. GoMPERZ, Th. Greek Thinkers, iii (1905), iv (1912). IV ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND WORLD MONARCHY Alexander the Great was bom in 356 b.c. His mother, Olympias, was a half-civilized Molossian prin- cess whose fresh beauty, revealed at a wild religious fite on mystic Samothrace, had caught the roving fancy of Philip of Macedon. Their union had the further attraction to Philip that it might bring Epirus under his suzerainty. Philip wished his wife to be his chief concubine rather than his consort. Olympias, a proud and passionate woman, chafed at her husband's marital infidelities, and had the will and courage to revolt and act for herself when Philip set her aside in 337 B.C. She cannot be acquitted of guilty knowledge of the murder of Philip which occurred a year later at the marriage arranged by him between her daughter and her brother. The act was timed to assure the accession of her son, who was its chief beneficiary. "My father," Alexander is reported to have said twelve years later to his mutinous Macedonian soldiers,^ "found you nomadic and poor. Clad in sheepskins, you tended your meagre herdson the mountains, and had to fight grievously for them against the lUyrians, Triballi, ' Arrian, Anabasis, vii, 9, 2ff. ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 117 and Thracians on your borders. He gave you cloaks to wear in place of hides, he led you down from the hills into the plains, he made you the match in battle of the barbarians who dwelt near you; so that you depended for your safety thenceforth, not on the inaccessibility of your country, but on your own valor. He taught you to live in cities; he appointed good laws and customs for your governance. He made you lords, instead of slaves and subjects of those barbarians by whom you and your possessions had long been harried. The great- est part of Thrace he annexed to Macedon. By seizing the most suitable points on the seacoast, he threw open your country to commerce. He gave you the chance to work your mines in safety. The Thessalians, before whom you had cowered, half dead with fright, he taught you to conquer, and by humbling the Phocians he made your road into Greece, hitherto narrow and difficult, broad and easy. To such a degree did he lower the Athenians and the Thebans, who had ever been ready to fall upon Macedon, — and herein had he my help, — that, instead of your paying tribute to Athens and taking orders from Thebes, it was to us in turn that they went for protection. Into the Peloponnesus he passed and set matters to rights there; and, being appointed com- mander-in-chief of united Greece in its projected war against Persia, he achieved this high distinction, not so much for himself as for the commonwealth of Mace- donia." Ii8 GREEK IMPERIALISM The words are not those of the great king himself: they are at the best a paraphrase of the ideas expressed by him on the occasion; at the worst they are the free invention of an historian concerned only with having Alexander say what the situation seemed to him to demand. However that may be, they are a good ac- count of the wonderful work which Alexander, as a boy and young man, saw his father accomplish for Macedon. "What a man we had to fight," said Demosthenes,^ his great enemy. "For the sake of power and dominion he had an eye put out, his shoulder broken, an arm and a leg injured. Whatever limb fortune demanded, that he gave up, so that the remnant of his body might live in glory and honor. " " Taking everything into account, ' ' says Theopompus,^ the far from generous contemporary historian of his achievements, "Europe has never pro- duced the like of Philip, the son of Amyntas." The court of Philip was rough and boorish. Revels, disgraced by drunkenness and debauchery, interrupted the king's wars and amours. In Pella men behaved like Centaurs and Lsestrygonians, sneered the fastidious Athenians; and the frenzy which wine inspired in Philip, religion inspired in Olympias. In wild abandon she let herself be possessed with the spirit of the god, Dionysus, and roamed the hills at night in the company of other women equally intoxicated, brandishing the thyrsus and the "wreathM snake," shouting with 1 De Cor. 67. " Mailer, F. H. G., I, Frg. 27. ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 119 ecstasy. Hers was the religion which William Vaughn Moody, with poetic license, singled out in the splendid Prelude to his Masque of Judgment as characteristic of the world into which Christ was born. It was really abhorrent to the best Greek feeling, and was repressed with stem cruelty by Rome. ' Passion, fierce and generous, the main, source of heroic action, was bred in the bone of Alexander. His imagi- nation, naturally fervent, was fed by tales of his ancestor Achilles which he heard at his mother's knee, and fired by the vistas opened out to it by the exploits of his father. At thirteen Philip gave him Aristotle as his tutor, and during the formative years of his youth he studied poetry with this great teacher. The poetry was Greek, not Macedonian. In it were found the ideals of the people to which Alexander belonged in spirit and in blood, if not in nationality; thence came the ideas tinged with emotion which fasten themselves like barbed arrows in the memory of the learner — the ideas of right and wrong, of heroism and tenderness, of regard for parents and for duties; as Plato would say, of justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage — which color all subsequent thinking and constitute character. The Greeks have still something to teach us £is to the educa- tive power of great poetry. The commandments of Homer, whom Aristotle never ceases to cite in his philosophical works, went over into the flesh and blood of Alexander, and in him Achilles, 120 GREEK IMPERIALISM the youthful hero of the Iliad, became in a real sense incarnate. Next after Homer, Alexander rated and knew the Attic tragedians, the continuators and improv- ers of Homer, according to Aristotle, who, therefore, bases his Poetics largely upon tragedy, as being the high- est form of dramatic art. There can be no question of the influence of Aristotle in determining the literary interest and taste of Alexan- der. It seems also cle^ that the young prince came at least to know, and probably to share, his teacher's curiT osity as to natural history; for he afterwards sent speci- mens back from Asia for Aristotle's botanical and zo6- logical collections. This being the case, it seems incred- ible that he should have received from him no instruc- tion in politics ; that Aristotle, the pupil of Plato, who had himself gone to Sicily to educate the young Dionysius II for his high place, should, have failed to communicate to the future ruler of Macedon and of Greece the ideas which he had formed as to the best kind of government. We can imagine the thousand opportunities which their three years of close association in the country seat at Mieza offered for the discussion of politics: how Aris- totle explained that virtue or merit or political capacity, or however the elusive Greek word arete be translated, gave the best claim to leadership, and that the best of all forms of government was that in which the man of the highest virtue ruled; "that," to use his own words,* » Politics, III, II (17), 12, p. 1288 a. ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 121 "wherever there is, as it happens, a whole family or an individual so superior in virtue to all the rest that the virtue of this individual or family exceeds that of "all others in the state, in that case it is but just that this family should enjoy a regal or supreme position and that this individual should be king. For . . . this is not only in accordance with the principle of justice usually alleged by the founders of polities, whether aristocracies, oli- garchies, or democracies, in all of which the claim to rule is dependent on superiority, although the superiority is not the same; but it accords also with the theory we laid down befora. For assuredly it is not proper to put to death or outlaw or even ostracize this preeminent in- dividual or to require him to become a subject in his turn. . . . The only alternative is that they should yield him obedience, and that he should be supremg, not on the principle of alternation, but absolutely. ... It will be a wrong," he urged,^ "to treat him as worthy of mere equality, when he is so vastly superior in virtue and po- litical capacity, for any. person so exceptional may well be compared to a deityjigontiie_earth.'' Again and again, in season and out of season, often doubtless to the annoyance of the impatient young prince, who feared lest his father's victories should leave him nothing to do, Aristotle^ must have harped on the theme that "man is naturally a city-dwelling animal and that one who is > Pontics, HI, 8 (13), I, p. 1284 a. » PoUtics, I, I (2), 9, p. 1253 o. 122 GREEK IMPERIALISM not a native of a city, if the cause of his isolation be nat- ural and not accidental, is either a superhuman being or low in the scale of civilization, as he stands alone like a 'blot' on the backgammon board. The 'clanless, law- less, hearthless' man so bitterly described by Homer is a case in point ; for he is naturally a native of no city and a lover of war," We can imagine the philosopher insisting that just as city life was synonymous with civilized life, so city was synonymous with state; that the highest of all human activities, the exercise of political functions, was destroyed the moment a city became dependent upon an outside ppwer; that subjects could not exist perma- nently unless the conquered were natural inferiors like the Asiatics ; that it was, however, to the interest of such persons that they should be ruled by their superiors, in the case of Asiatics, by the Greeks. Such were the oft- repeated maxims of the political philosopher in whose age. Philip rejoiced, it iasaid,^ "that his son was born, since his teaching would make him worthy of his father and equal to the position to which he was to succeed." Such was the literary and political education of Alexande* his military training ^nd his knowledge of affairs he got in the unrivaled school of his father; but in this connec- tion it is well to remember the admission of Napoleon** "War is a singular art ; I can assure you that fighting sixty battles taught me nothing I did not know at the • Aulus Gellius, Nodes Attica, ix. ' Johnston, R. M., The Corsican, p. 498. ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 123 first one. The essential quality of the general is firmness, and that is a gift from heaven^," It is not my purpose to give a biographical sketch* of Alexander, nor yet to tell the story of his marvelous conquests, or to estim'ate the consequences of his work on the later course of history.. I have had in mind while, preparing this chapter first to emphasize'such features in his family and education as _help_to explain his politi,- cal thinking, and then, somewhat in Plutarch's fashion, to pick up such incidents in his career as show concretely how precisely he aimed to organize his world empire. Where the political sagacity of Alexander stood forth most conspicuously, according to Napoleon, was in the * skill with which he appealed to the imagination of men. Love of symbolism was ingrained in his nature. By an act which he went deliberately out of his way to perform he contrived again and again to illumine an entire situa- tion, to drive home a lesson, to reveal a policy. In a way it was a kind of advertising; a means of conveying to the world at large in an unmistakable manner the will and attitude of the monarch. But it was more than that. It was the application in the world of politics of a mode of expression with which the Greeks were familiar in the world of the plastic arts. The first instance of this sort of thing was the destruc- tion of Thebes in 335 B.C. At the accession of Alexander a year earlier, all Greece had seethed with insurrection. 124 GREEK IMPERIALISM Philip was dead in the full vigor of manhood, and a strip- ling of twenty was about to take his place. By a prompt advance southward Alexander nipped the threatened revolt in the bud; and to secure himself for the future, he put a garrison in the citadel of Thebes, where the most manifest disaffection had existed. A few months later, however, while he was cleansing his northern frontiers, preparatory to attacking Persia, the Thebans, acting on the false report that he had fallen in battle, and in con- junction with Athens and other Greek cities, revolted a second time. With almost incredible secrecy and celerity Alexander came upon Thebes, took it by assault, sold the inhabitants into slavery, and razed the city to the ground. No such disaster had overtaken a Greek city (outside of unhappy Sicily) since the destruction of Miletus by the Persians in 493 B.C. It showed beyond the shadow of a doubt what the Greeks had to expect if they continued to make trouble while Alexander was absent in Asia. And on this occasion one object lesson was contained within another: by sparing the house of Pindar, the destroyer of Thebes proclaimed his regard for Hellenic civilization; distinguished himself clearly from the destroyers of Miletus and other barbarians. Next year, when about to open his attack on the Per- sian empire, Alexander sent his army across the Helles- pont by the usual route from Sestus to Abydus; but he himself proceeded to Elaius where he sacrificed at the tomb of Protesilaus, and prayed that he might have a ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 125 better fate than was his who first of Agamemnon's men set foot on the soil of AsieU Then crossing the Helles- pont to Harbor of the Achaeans, he went up to Ilium where he dedicated his armor to Athena Ilias and took in its place some weapons said to have been used in the Trojan War. After appeasing the manes of Priam and entreating them to forgive him, a descendant of Neoptol- emus, Priam's slayer, he laid a wreath on the tomb of Achilles, while his bosom friend, Hephsestlon, laid an- other on that of Patroclus. Whereupon he proceeded to rejoin his army. The incident stirred in every Greek a thousand memories. He saw another Agamemnon set out to take another Troy; another champion of the Hel- lenes in their eternal struggle with the peoples of Asia. In no way could Alexander more clearly identify his undertaking with the long cherished dreams of the whole Greek race. It was the nearest that a ruler of that time could come to proclaiming a holy war. At Gordium, where Alexsinder's troops spent their first winter in Asia, there stood on the citadel the cart in which, according to the story, Midas, a peasant's son, had driven to the meeting-place of the Phrygians on the day when unexpectedly he was proclaimed their king. The legend had spread thence around the country that whosoever unfastened the knot of cornel bark which held the yoke to the shaft of this cart would become king of Asia. This task Alexander essayed in vain. Then he drew his sword and cut the thong in two. Thereby he 126 GREEK IMPERIALISM announced both his departure from the policy of Philip, which had been simply to emancipate the Ionian Greeks, and the forthcoming execution of his own policy, which was to take from the Persians their dominion over Asia. After his first victory at the Granicus River Alexander advanced along the ^gean seaboard as far as Cilicia, securing as he went all the coast towns in Asia Minor which had contributed ships to the Persian fleet. This plan of campaign he adhered to after his second victory at Issus over Darius, when, instead of keeping in touch with his defeated enemy and of following him into th^ interior, as the ordinary common sense of war com- manded, he let the King go, and spent a year in seizing the naval towns between Cilicia and Cyrenp. This he did in order to destroy the Persian fleet, an end which he could not otherwise attain, since he had no ships of his own. To leave the enemy's fleet in possession of the Mediterranean, however, while he was campaigning fac in the heart of the continent would have been to jeopr ardize all that he had already accomplished, and, in parr ticular, to leave to the Persians the means of causing a general insurrection among the Greeks, whom he rightlj^ feared more than the Persians. This long d6tour south- ward to Egypt is, accordingly, amply explained by soujid strategical considerations. That, however, cannot be said of Alexander's sensa,tional march through the Sahara to the oasis of Siwah in the hinterland of Gyrene. There, in mysterious aloofness, lay an oracle of the ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 127 Egyptian Ammon whom the Greeks called Zeus. Just^ as Dodona in Epirus.had been eclipsed in times past as an oracular sea^: by the shrine of Apollo at Delphi/ so this in turn had waned in prestige anicredit when it became known gradually to the Greeks that Zeus Am- mon revealed unfailingly the future to his priests at Siwah, For more than two generations prior to Alexan- der's visit the Ammonium had been the Mecca of piU grims, and the recipient of gifts from all parts of the Greek world. Athens had even built a sacred trireme, the so-called "ship of Ammon," to carry public mes- sengers to and from the oracle. In Egypt the Ammon of Siwah was of no account as compared with the Ammon of Thebes ; but among the Greeks the Ammon that was known and revered was, to speak with Plato, the Ammon of Gyrene. Alexander knew well the impression which would be produced in the official and pious world of Hel- las should the priests of Ammon greet him as the son of their god. This, however, they were bound to do on his arrival at the temple, since to omit this formality would have been to refuse allegiance to the new Pharaoh who had just been recognized in Egypt; for every Pharaoh from time immemorial was officially a son of Ammon. It was the peculiarity of Siwah that the ruler greeted there as the son of Ammon was presented authoritatively to the Greek world as the son of Zeus. The march across the desert to Ammonium was ac- complished only with supernaturar assistance, according 128 GREEK IMPERIALISM to the official report; and deliberate mystery shrouded the interview of Alexander with the god. It is with no impropriety, as we shall see presently, that Tennyson brings his fine poem on the great king to a climactic close with an allusion to the occurrence: — "High things were spoken there, unhanded down; Only they saw thee from the secret shrine Returning with hot cheek and kindled eyes." One thing, however, was stressed in the official ver- sion of what happened: the desired greeting was given publicly to Alexander by the eldest of the priests. And its import was enhanced by the arrival of messengers to say that oracles to the same effect had been given simul- taneously by the Sibyl of Erythree and Apollo at Bran- chidse, where a long silence of over one hundred and fifty years was interrupted thereby. As to the private inter- view Alexander wrote to his mother that "secret things were divulged to him which he could communicate only to her personally." I shall revert to the significance of the visit to Siwah presently. Meanwhile, it will suffice to note that it was quite in character with the methods already adopted by Alexander that he should seek in this bizarre way to impress upon the imagination of men a new idea; to dis- close by a sensational action of this kind an important change of policy. And it is paralleled by several inci- dents in his later career. ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 129 Twelve months after leaving Siwah, Alexander was master of Persepol is. This was the capital of Persis, a land of some half a million inhabitants whom Cyrus and Darius had made lords of a subject population not much below that of the Roman empire. For over two hun- dred years forty millions of people had looked to Persis and Persepolis as the seats of the mighty. The "city of the Persians" and the palace of their kings which it con- tained were the manifest symbols of empire: the one Alexander gave over to his soldiers to pillage, the other he fired with his own hand, thus proclaiming to the world that the end of a dynasty had come. His own part in this catastrophe — which affected the imaginations of men in some such way as did the capture of Rome by Alaric in 410 a.d. — was taken conspicuously. Starting up from a banquet, he and his companions, among whom was the beautiful Athenian courtesan Thais, went in Dionysiac revel to the sound of flutes through the streets to the palace, and threw the torches which they had taken with them from the feast upon the cedar beams of the roof. Once the flames had shot up and the desired effect had been produced, Alexander ordered the fire to be extinguished. Early in the following year Alexander entered Ecba- tana, the summer capital of the Persian empire, and Darius became a fugitive. Up to this point Alexander had been hegemonof the Hellenic league as well as king of Macedon, and, on liberating the Greek cities in Asia 130 GREEK IMPERIALISM from Persian control, he had added them to the league. Now that the war against Persia, for which the league had been ostensibly formed, had ended, Alexander thought the time had come to relieve himself of the partnership into which, following the policy of Philip, he had entered at the opening of his reign. This he did in his usual dra- matic way.- He discharged all the Greek troops put under, his command by the league, and made elaborate provi- sion for their transport back to the coast and across the Mediterranean to Greece. To every Greek city which had sent him a contingent, its return was a message that Alexander was no longer bound by the treaties made when the league was formed. This did not mean, as he took pains to show, that it was freed thereby from all obligations toward him. Over the Macedonians he ceased at this point to be hegemon, but he still remained their king.^ A little later he appeared before his astonished Ma- cedonian officers clad in what pleased him of the costume of the Persians. The tiara and the sleeved jacket and the baggy trousers he did not adopt, but he took their soft undergarments, and, as the symbol of authority, the diadem. He also remodeled his court in the Oriental fashion, adding purple to the uniform of the guards, chamberlains, and, if a dubious report is to be trusted, a harem. Finally in 327 B.C., shortly after his romantic marriage with Roxane, a Persian princess of the Sogdian * See above, page 28, and below, page 243. ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 131 nobility, he added the requirement that all who were admitted to his presence should kneel at his feet and kiss the dust before him. "Chares of Mytilene," ^ who was master of ceremonies when this custom was inaugu- rated, "says that Alexander, while drinking at a sympo- sium, offered his goblet to one of his comrades, who, taking it, rose and went to the hearth, where, quaffing it off, he first knelt and kissed Alexander's feet, then kissed his cheek and returned to his couch. All present did the same except Callisthenes," who proffered the kiss on the cheek without first kneeling and thus earned the disfavor of the king. With this rather lame conclu- sion was enacted the prologue of what his old Macedon- ian nobles regarded as a great tragedy. "It has been thought," says Eduard Meyer,* "that proskynesis" — to use the technical term for this cere- mony — "was only the natural expression of the fact that by the arbitrament of battle Alexander had become lord of the Persian empire and legitimate successor of Darius. And, indeed, there is. truth in this idea. But the meaning of the requirement, and the historical significance of the occurrence and of the conflict which it occasioned, are by no means exhausted when proskynesis is regarded as a harmless concession to the views of his Oriental sub- jects. The essential point is that Alexander demanded it of the Macedonians and Greeks also. It is precisely in this matter, however, that the views of Orientals and » Plut., j^Jex. 54. ' Kldne Schriften, pp. 314/. 132 GREEK IMPERIALISM Europeans collide most squarely and typically. Herein exists an antagonism which is independent altogether of race and nationality. We cannot say how it arose, but it dominates the whole course of the cultural and political development of the regions in question. The Oriental, be he a Semite, an Egyptian, an Indo-European, a China-, man, or of any other stock, finds it natural that in inter- course with others he has to humble himself; that he call himself their servant, them his masters; that he kneel in the dust, not only before the king, but before all supe- riors, without lessening thereby the sense of personal pride with which he, too, may be animated. "To the European, on the other hand, such demeanor involves the destruction of his own personality. Never will a free man call himself the slave of another. Rather, he will always speak of himself in confident tones, with^ a strong feeling of [his own wo^th. . . . Prostration and kissing the dust are due, in European thinking, only to^a god who is thereby acknowledged to be the lord of the worshiper, in whose presence the worshiper can have no^ will of his own. "It was among the Greeks, in their free republic?, that this feeling developed to its full strength. It finds typical expression in the story of the Spartan heralds, Sperthies and Bulls, who, although they had surrendered themselves to the Persian king to be executed, refused to prostrate themselves before him; 'for in their country,! Herodotus makes them say,^ it was not customary to kiss ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 133 the dust before a man, nor had they come for that pur- pose.' The stories of Themistocles who rendered the required homjige, and of Conon who on its account avoided an audience with the King altogether, despite the high value it would have had for him, are similarly significant. In demanding proskynesk, accordingly, Alexander offended Greek sentiment violently. Rather, what he thereby demanded was the acknowledgment that officially, in his capacity of king-, — his private position is a different matter altogether, — he was np longer a man, but a go^." In other words, when Alexander demanded that Greeks and Macedonians fall at his feet and kiss the dust before him, he demanded that they recognize him as a god, as in fact the son of Zeus. This ceremony had no such implications for the Persians ; but, as we shall see in a moment, in Alexander's thinking, the Persians were to cease to exist; they were to be made Hellenes by education. Alexander set out for Asia with a firm belief in the absolute superiority of Hellenic cultureil and in this belief he remained fixed to the end. To establish Hel- lenic life throughout Asia, he regarded as the main ob- ject of his conquests. His Hellenic ideals he revealed to the astonished natives at almost every halting-place on his march; for on such occasions he again and again held gymnastic and musical contests after the Greek pat- tern. As we have seen, he had learned from Aristotle 134 GREEK IMPERIALISM that city-life and Hellenic life were synonymous, and that without political activity city-life was animal rather than human in character. Accordingly, he dis- played a feverish energy in founding Greek city-states everywhere in the conquered territory, but particularly in the regions of the Far East where urban life had been hitherto lacking. Like mushrooms overnight, toAvns by the scores sprang up behind him on his line of march ; so vast was the immigration into Asia from Greece and Macedon even during the thirteen brief years of his reign. The fact was that by founding cities Alexander less- ened enormously his military and administrative diffi- culties. For every city took from his shoulders re- sponsibility for maintaining order, collecting taxes, and dispensing justice in the territory assigned to It — neces- sary tasks, now that a European state was arising in Asia, which could be performed otherwise only by the creation of a bureaucratic system of officials. This, how- ever, was a non-Hellenic institution for which Alexander had naturally no liking. In the future he saw the whole world — ^[that of Asia which he had already conquered and that of the Far West which he meant to conquer — honeycombed, like Greece itself, with a multitude of city-states, each a separate cell with a town in its cen- tre, each possessed of a general assembly and a council, magistrates of its own choosing and laws of its own making or adoption, each the home of free men speaking ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 135 the Greek language, fostering Greek art and letters, and fighting with Greek arms and tactics. It was a grand vision, which failed of realization in Alexander's time and thereafter; but it set forth an ideal toward which future generations moved for over five centuries. It is clear that Alexander never lost faith in the abso- lute supremacy of Hellenic culture. Certainly the place of unlimited authority which he reserved for himself above the world of city-states and their law-bound citi- zens, was the one prescribed for the ideal wise man, the man of supreme political ability, by Aristotle his tutor. That Aristotle thought of a different pamhasileus for each city-state and Alexander of a single "absolute monarch" for all, is a non-essential difference, and it is simply in the institutions which Alexander found necessary to translate the idea of the philosopher into the world of reality that Hellenic practice and custom were violated. These outlandish institutions, however, Alexander employed as means for the better dissemination of Greek life and thought, without being conscious, per- haps, that they were destructive of the spirit which they were intended to preserve. On the other hand, it is indisputable that Alexander revised his tutor's, and his own youthful, opinion as to the worth of the Asiatics. What he came to think of Semites and Egyptians we do not know; and it may be that he continued to regard them as naturally servile 136 GREEK IMPERIALISM and, hence, condemned them to remain forever hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Hellenic or Hellen- ized citizens in whose cities they were to Hve. But as to the Medes and Persians and the kindred Iranian stocks of the Far East, the views of their conqueror changed radically when he came really to know them, and to appreciate fully the magnitude of the task which he had undertaken. He found that they had spirit and capacity compar- able to those of the Greeks and Macedonians themselves. That they caused him no physical repulsion is shown by his fa:lling in love with and marrying Roxane. Teach them the Greek language, draw them along with the immigrant Greeks into the body politic of the new cities, equip them with Macedonian weapons, drill them in the Macedonian fashion, and distribute them in the Macedonian regiments; above all, use the nobles in the high administrative posts, and it seemed to Alexander possible, within a short time, to fuse the new masters of Asia with the old into a new cosmopolitan race. With iron resolution he carried this policy forward despite all opposition. Then, choosing the dramatic moment of his return to Susa after his Indian campaign, he arranged an extraordinary marriage as a symbol of the contemplated fusion of the dominant peoples of Europe and Asia. "He himself," says Arrian in his Anabasis,^ quoting Aristobulus, an eye-witness, "mar- • VII, 4, 4^. ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY (137 ried Barsine (rather Stateira) , the eldest of the daughters of Darius, and, in addition to her, another, the young- est of the daughters of Ochifs (the able predecessor ©f Darius), Parysatis. Earlier, too, he had wedded Roxane^ the daughter of Oxyartes of Bactri^. To Hephaestion he gave Drj^etis, who, too, was a daughter of Darius and sister of the wife he took himself; for he wished the children of Hephaestion to be cousins of his own child- ren. To Craterus he gave Amastrinfej the daughter of Oxyartes, Darius's brother; to Perdiccas, the daughter of Atropates, satrap of Media ; to Ptolemy, his aide, and to Eumenes, his private secretary, children of Artabazus, ,to the one Artacama, to the other, Artonis. To Near- chus he gave the daughter of Barsine and Mentor, to Seleucus the daughter of Spitamenes of Bactria ; and in like manner to his other companions he gave the most famous of the daughters of the Medes and Persians, to the number of eighty. The marriages were celebrated in the Persian manner. Seats were placed in order, and on them the bridegrooms reclined"; and at this point we may let Chares, master of ceremonies, interrupt Arrian and describe the setting which he had arr£m.ged for the service. "It was," he says,^ "a hall of a hundred couches, each large enough for two to recline at table, and in it each couch, made of twenty minas' worth of silver, was 1 Athenaeus, xii, pp. 538 ff. (Translated by Wheeler in his Alexander the Great, pp. 477 /.) 138 GREEK IMPERIALISM decked as for a wedding. Alexander's had feet of gold. And to the feast were bidden all his Persian friends, and. given places on the opposite side of the hall from himself and the other bridegrooms. And all the army and the sailors and the embassies and the visitors were assem- bled in the outer court. The hall was decorated in most sumptuous style, with expensive rugs, and hangings of fine linen, and tapestries of many colors wrought with threads of gold. And for the support of the vast tent which formed the hall there were pillars thirty feet high, plated with silver and goldf and set with precious stones. And around about the sides were costly portieres, eiq- broidered with figures and shot through with gold, threads, hung on gilded and silvered rods-, "The circuit of the court was half a mile. Everything was started at the signal of a trumpet-blast, whether it was the beginning of the feast, the celebration of the marriages, or the pouring of one of the various libations, so that all the army might know." "After the banquet," resumes Arrian,' "the brides entered and seated them- selves each beside her fianc6, who thereupon took her by the hand and kissed her; and the first to do this was the king. . . . Then each man, taking his wife, led her away. Their dowries Alexander gave to every one of them. And he caused the names to be written down of all the other Macedonians who had married Asiatic women, emd there were said to be over ten thousand of » VII, 4. 7/. ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 139 them. To these, too, gifts were given by Alexander at the marriage feast." For five consecutive days artists from every land and people entertained the cosmopolitan assembly with dis- plays of skill as various as were the ideas and interests to which they catered. But the discord was lessened and the dominant motiv- repeated again and again by the appearance and reappearance of the greatest Gree;J< masters of the dramatic and musical arts. It being established by these many incidents that it was a salient-trait of Alexander's character to disclose his fiindamental policies by acts elaborately staged and performed bef Qi;:&4he4argest possfbleaudiences. we-may ret urn to his ext r a ordmary^visit'ttrthertemple of Ammon of-Cyrene. He had first to proceed one hundred and seventy-five miles along the Libyan coast and then sond iwest for about^even days before reaching his goal. - A month of the most difficult marching, at a time when every day was^ecigus,_was theJiiglLprice-W-hich^AteE- ander though tit economical te-pay for the recognition which he there receisaed-as the son of Zeus- What was, theiTL, the va lu£-o£-this- ^ell-adve r tlsed re cognition ? That it had none for Egyptjand the nations of Asia, to whom th e god of Si w ah, lik e the prophet in his own country, was without honor, implies that Alexander esteemed highly i ts valu eJnJheJGreek world, wh£re_die- voice heard at Siwah was in fact an admonition to the 140 GREEK IMPERIALISM' pious and might be an embarrassment to all in official positions. An oracle, however, was always addressed primarily to him who received it. Other persons could neglect it with impunity. Nevertheless, Alexander had made it improbable that anybody should be unaware that Zeus had acknowledged him as his son. Doubtless, much discussion was provoked ; but there the matter ^eems to have ended so far as Hellas was concerned till seven years later, at the time of the feast at Susa, when Alexander issued a mandate to all the Greek city- states, new and old, that they should recognize him as a god. Strange as it may seem to us, among whom church and state are separated sharply, and religion depends upon a revelation which can be interpreted but not sup- plemented, the question was one which came properly within the province of the general assembly of the citi- zens of each city* At this very time the Athenians, for example, had waiting within their gates many foreign deities whose claims to official recognition were being pressed upon the ecclesia by votaries among both the alien and the native population. Such were Isis the Egyptian, and the Cypriote Aphrodite. In compara- tively recent times, moreover, the ecclesia had yielded to similar solicitations, and had enrolled among the deities of the Athenian people Asclepius and the Thracian Bendis. In a polytheistic world there is no logical limit to the ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 141 possible number of gods; so that the chance always existed that there were deities whom a given community had not yet discovered at any given moment. There is, in such a world, a logical necessity that anarchy should be absent from heaven. Hence each community had to rank its g ods and goddess es according to jtheirjtower-and spheres of activity. The lowest god, demigod or hero was, accordingly, separated from mankind by^nadeepxai- bro ad c hasm. WitlLHiost-of^ their-de iti e s, in fact, th e- Greeks were on t erms-o f f amilia r i ntima cy , a s wer e mPfjiirYfi l r hnVi t inTi fi wit h t heir Rfiintfi Various-o£-the__ Icrigrr gn d n, Th pip u f; and H o r nHrn nmnnr ; t he nnrp'i t nr'i nf Ajpvandpr fnx ^^XaTT^*^, ^^'^ r»npf> hppn mpn yVin TiarT bpp p pl p vatprl tn Qlyrppu" by th p g ra^p ^ f 7 " i ip b^'^aiiF'^ Q£_the naaay «ervices~which Ih^iiad renderedrimnen . Itjs tru e t hat-& ey were the ch il dren o f-Zeasi-bat-had nolZejis-also claimed Alexand er-as-hisowa-soar? Why, then, ,shQ uld not he too be doi fiedj- The difficulty from the standpoint of religion — of the sentiment which had led in the past to the heroizing of men — was that heVas still livings And this was an_ insurmountable difficulty. From the religious concear tions of the Greeks the worship of the living ruler could never be derived; and, in fact, it was by pious people and for theological reasons that the rendering of diving h onors to Alexander was opposed in Athens and else- where.^ The most that could be expected from men of • In Macedon, by the regent 'Aprbrarpos, &in§h tovto xplvas (Suidas). 142 GREEK IMPERIALISM religious convictions was a sullen acquiescence in some- thing which they could not prevent. The apotheosis of Alexander was grounded in im- piety, in disbelief in the supernatural altogether. For the age in which he lived was marked by this very thing. In that time of storm and stress the.ascient Greek reli- gion became bankrupt. For enlightened people — and their name was then legion — the gods had ceased to have objective reality. Like the spirits of the departed whom Ulysses had recalled to consciousness by giving them blood to drink, they were dependent for their existence upon the kindliness of men. Without the min- istrations of the living they would not merely be for- gotten ; they would be annihilated. It was the gratitude of mankind which had kept the memory of benefactors green by rites deemed and called religious. Once, to be sure, the deities had been real beings, but that was before they had died, whilrjjuxjyfrr living upon thr earth as men. Then they had p erformed great service s — had founded cities, conquered^ worlds, established laws, invented arts, developed- gmina - and -fruits, and trained animals. So at least many men of talent-and learning already taught. But it remained for Euhemeras of Messene, about fifty years later (ca. 280 B.C.), to giv& the idea dassic expression in an entertaining woric of popularization.! With all the circumstantiality of ' Pauly-Wissowa, Real-encyclopadie, vi, I, pp. 952 #.; Wendknd, Die Hellenistisch-rSmische KuUur (1907), pp. 67 Jf. ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 143 Defoe, he tells how, in the course of his voyaging, he was driven southward into the Indian O cean from Ar aby the Blest, till he came to the island of Pzm ch ce a. T here he found a model community whose soeial-ajid-f olitical organization he described in the manner familiar -to us from Pjatp^s RepubUc-JThere, too, he mad e a remark — able discovery — an account written on golden tablets in "reforpied Egyptian" by Hermes of the lives and achievements of Chronus, Zeus, and all the other gods and goddesses of the Greek hierarchy. They had been kings and notables of Panchaea, and some of them, like Zeus_and Dionysus, had been world conquerors. OtherSj^ indeed, had earned the favorable verdict of posterity by vejy questionable acts. .Aphrodite was the first prosti- tute, and Cadmus, the grandfather of Dionysus, was the, cook of a king in Sidon and had run away with a flut% girl named Harmonia. Thia^sacred writ" was naturally the latest and most au^oritative revelation. It waa_saved, moreover, from being a gospel of atheism because, as Cumont^ says, " It l eft to the eternal and incomiptihle_stars . . . the dig- nity of original gods and exalted them in proportion, as it l ower ed their rivals of bygone days." The signal merit of Chronus had been to introduce the worship of the heavenly bodies in Panchaea. In this respect the Scriptures of Euhemerus accorded with a strong current of both earlier and contemporary ^ Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans (1912), p. 55. 144 GREEK IMPERIALISM religious thought. Most men at that time recognized supernatural powers of a certain sort, like Tyche, " Chaxice." — the favorite deity of the Hellenistic world, — whose play in human affairs modem disbelievers in religion also would be the last to deny. But they declined to recognisg as efficacious .the gods and goddesses in whose honor the cities maintained temples, priests, sacrifices, and games, except when they had lived on the earth as men and women. At the best, therefore, these deities were simply pro- totypes of Alexander, who had founded seventy cities and given them their constitutions and laws, who had conquered all the territory which Dionysus had one© overrun, and who was plcmning to build a highway along the coast of North Africa to the pillars set by Heracles at the limits of the world ; who, moreover, was moulding, the masses of Europe and Asia into a new race, and up- held, as no god had ever done, the social and politics^ framework of the world. Religion was unable to elevate a living man to god- hood. Even in Egypt the sacred animals were but sacred animals till seventy days after their death, when they became deities. But irreligion, having degraded all goda to the level of human beings, had no reason to withhold from great men the homage which, it accorded to the great dead. The fundamental document on the deification of Greek kings comes to us stamped with the seal of the ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 145 Athenian state. It was sung by the multitude at the offi- cial reception of its sovereign, the young Macedonian, king, Demetrius Poliorcetes, on his return to Athens in 290 B.c.^ "The king comes, light-hearted as befits a god, fait-and laughing, yet majestic withal in his circle of courtiers, he the sun, they the stars : hail ! child of mighty Poseidon and of Aphrodite. The other gods are a long wa^^K)r have no ears, or no existencer-or_take_no care ofl^Rit thee we see face to faee — a true god, not one of wood and stone." This catchy bit of blasphemy makes it impossible for any reasonable doubt to lingeir^ to the regions- of thought from which the worship of Greek rulers sprang. But why should men who regarded the gods they already had as useless burden the state with the cult of another whose power was only too real? Why aban- don King Log for a possible King Stork? It is on this point chiefly that scholars disagree to-day» There are those who make the apotheosis of Alexander a tribute paid by the Greeks to transcendant genius, a result of the reverence-compelling personality of the man. I confess, ho;?fever, that enthusiastic admiration such as this presupposes does not seem to me to harmonize with the contemptuous expressions which marked the estab- lishment of his cult in certain places in Greece.^ In Sparta, Damis moved, in regard to Alexander's message 1 Ferguson, Hellenistic Athens, p. 143. ' Meyer, Ed., Kleine Schriften, p. 330, n. 2. 146 GREEK IMPERIALISM that he be decreed a god, that the Spartans "let him be called a god if he wishes it"; while in Athens Demos- thenes advised his fellow-citizens "to acknowledge the king as the son of Zeus, or, for all he cared, as the son of Poseidon, if such was his pleasure." In other places, however, the recognition seems to have been spontane- ous enough, and to have been an expressioi^^real gratitude for services rendered or expected. B^^Mdcs on earlier occasions, and other peoples as -wea^mre equally grateful and no less servile without deifying the object of those sentiments. Why then did admiration, gratitude, or servility take this form in this particular instance? It is true that deification was demanded of the Greek cities by Alexander, and that it was in response to a mandate sent out by him from Susa in 324 B.C. that "sacred ambassadors," such as were sent Xo gods and not to kings or states, arrived at Babylon in the spring of 323 B.C. a few weeks before Alexander's death, bearing the decrees in which his request was granted. But for the following fifty years it was at the initiative of the Greek cities, and, at times, against the will and interest of the recipient, that such honors were conferred upon later rulers. Hence we may be certain that in the first instance deification was an accommodation both to Alexander and to the cities in his realm. Nor can we, I think, be in serious doubt as to the character of the service it rendered. ALEXANDER AND WORLD MONARCHY 147 It gave a legal position to Alexander in the world of city-states which he was organizing^. It was unjust, Aristotle had taught him, that a man of supreme politi- cal capacity — such as he had displayed — should be treated as worthy of mere equality in the cities of his realm. Yet he could be treated in no other fashion if he were to be a citizen of them. On the other hand, now that he had freed himself from the constitutional limi- tations placed upon the earlier kings of Macedon and from the treaties which he had formed with the Hellenic cities at the opening of his reign, he ran the risk of being put to death or outlawed or ostracized, if he were not, as Aristotle suggested, rated as a deity upon the earth. From his point of view, his rule was legitimatized when he was enrolled among the deities recognized by each city; for thereafter he had a clear right to issue orders to all the citizens of his world. From their point of view, on the other hand, by deifying Alexander they escaped from the intolerable necessity of obeying the commands of a foreigner. They thereby gave their con- sent to be ruled by^hiaik They subordinated their will to his. The deification of rulers was, accordingly, simply the proskynesis of cities. Its consequences were an abso- lutism such as Europe — and for that matter Asia — had never known before and has never ceased to know since. And it is this melancholy consequence of apothe- osis which has only too frequently obscured its signal 148 GREEK IMPERIALISM service: that it made possible the lasting union of all the city-states of the world in a single great territorial state. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Hogarth, D. The Deification of Alexander the Great. In English Historical Review, il (1887), pp. 317 Jf. 2. NiESE, B. Zur Wiirdigung Alexander's des Grossen. In Historische Zeitschrift, Lxxix (1897), pp. i ff. 3. Wheeler, B. I. Alexander the Great, (1900). 4. Bevan, E. The Deification of Kings in the Greek Cities. In English Historical Review, xvi (1901), pp. 625 Jf. 5. Meyer, Eduard. Alexander der Grosse und die absolute Monarchie. In Kleine Schriften (1910), pp. 28^ ff. 6. Karst, J. Der hdlenistische HerrscherkuU. Beilage 2 in Geschichtedeshellenistischen Zeitalters, 11, i (1909), pp. 374jf. 7. Ferguson, W. S. Legalized Absolutism en route from Greece to Rome. In American Historical Review, xviii (1912), pp. 29/. V THE EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES The death of Alexander the Great was followed by some days of indescribable confusion. When a certain semblance of order was restored the view was officially promulgated that he had not died at all, but had simply "departed from the life among men." His memory was, accordingly, not damned ; and, in a sense, his presence in the world which he had transformed continued to be recognized. But not in any real sense. The imperial coins, wherever issued, bore for some time the great« king's face as Zeus Ammon ; but no imperial cult existed to bring steadily to men's consciousness the idea that their dead lord had an honored place among the Olym- pians. It was not by the will of those who succeeded to his power, but by the force of historic developments, that his acta were validated. His heirs were the Macedonians whom he had recestly tried to oust from their ancestral partnership with him. They were now to be found, partly in Macedon, partly in detachments throughout the empire, and partly in Babylon where Alexander had died. Those in Babylon took it upon themselves to act for the whole people; and what they did was to establish a regency in the interest of Philip Arrhidaeus and the son whom Roxane was ISO GREEK IMPERIALISM expected to bear, and to concur in the "grab" of the important western satrapies which was at once made by their chief officers. It was they, too, who decided not to proceed with Alexander's ambitious projects. These, as read to them from his papers,^ were "to build in Phoenicia, Syria, CiHcia, and Cyprus one thousand battleships of the super-trireme pattern for the campaign against the Carthaginians and the other peoples dwelling on the shores of the Mediterranean from Libya and Iberia clear round to Sicily ; to construct a road along the coast from Cyrene to the Pillars of Hercules, and prepare harbors and naval stations at suitable places; to erect six temples at the enormous cost of $1,890,000 each (fifteen hundred talents) ; to found cities and transplant men and women both from Asia into Europe and from Europe into Asia, thus linking the two greatest conti- nents by understandings based upon friendly inter- course and by brotherly feeling due to intermarriages^' Alexander, it appeared, had lookgdL upon his-wjark-aa Qnly h alf done: the Macedonians. JKere.£ageiLJx>-enj«y the. fruits of an enterprise which they regarded'as' already JinMied. Their sentiment was shared by Ptolemy, son of Lagos, formerly one of Alexander's aides. He had married a Persian princess at Alexander's order, but now he deserted her, and, taking his Athenian mistress, Thais, 1 Diodorus, xviii, 4. THE EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES 151 witit him, he went off to Egypt, which had been given to him as his province. There he established liiroself se curely, gov erned- with power and sagacity for forty years, and, marrying in succession two Macedonian prin- cesses, founded a dynasty which gave to Egypt its last great queen, Cleopatra VL/and prior to her accession, ten kings, ^ all of whom were named Ptolemj. Between them-they reigned two hundred -and-seventy one years; the average length of the reign was over thirty-two years; several of them were expelled temporarily and several of them had colleagues, but nine of them died in possession of the throne. That constitutes a statistical record which it is hard to parallel in all history. It would be a fascinating study of human enterprise and human depravity to trace the careers of these eleven monarchs. But to do so would be to exhaust the space at my disposal without reaching the special subject of my essay. It must suffice, therefore, to observe that the history of the Ptolemies falls into an imperial period of four reigns and one hundred and twenty years (323- 203 B.C.) ; and a domestic period, likewise of one hundred and twenty years (200-80 B.C.), in which the native peoples, encouraged by the weakness of the Ptolemies abroad, and by a ruinous schism between the military and the civil elements of the foreign-resident population,, -gained point after point at the expense of the dynasty. A third period follows of fifty years' duration, in which } Omitting the shadowy Eupator, Philopator Nebs, and Alexander II. 152 GREkK IMPERIALISM Egypt was at the mercy, not now of the Roman Senate, but of the all-powerful generals who had dethroned it. The last king of Egypt, Ptolemy the Piper, a bastard by birth and instinct, demeaned himself for twenty-eig^ years (80-52 B.C.) ; but by bankrupting his treasury and sacrificing the good opinion of his countrymen, he man- aged to transmit a badly tarnished crown to his famous daughter, then a girl of seventeen years. Cleopatra VI had an asset of much greater value than the servility and buffoonery of her father, namely, her. personal attractiveness. She early lost all repugnance against using her physical charms, as well as her even more notable mental graces, in what, with all our dis- like for the imperial courtesan, we must characterize as her gallant and patriotic effort to rescue her country from the spoiler, to make the queen of Egypt the con- sort instead of the slave of the coming Roman monarch, to set proud Alexandria beside imperious Rome at the head of the Mediterranean peoples. She gave herself to Julius Caesar; bore him a son; left her kingdom and joined him in Rome, where Cicero and others paid her court in Caesar's gardens, wondering, perhaps, if she was to become their titular queen. In contemporary documents Caesar is called "the savior and benefactor of the inhabitable world"; and during the last year of his life he was busied with projects of universal empire. He meant to add the districts not yet Roman to his realm, to subdue the Getae, the Scythians, THE EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES 153 and the Parthians. Why was not Egypt, the richest prize of all, i nclude d i n the -Us t of his int e nded -eenque&ts-?- It wasjthexountry which he had tried over twenty years earlieii_tQ_secure as his own province, But-4hat- was before he had met Cleopatra, That he left it out of the military programme on which he was-engaged-atJiifi. time of Jiis murder shows, I think, that Cleop atra's goIu - tion of the Egyptian question was likely to be his^lso.* Ten years later Alexandria witnessed an extraordi- nary spectacle.^ On a stage plated with silver two. thrones of-gold stood, and on them sat side by side Antony as Dionysu§ and Cleopatra as Isis. At their feet sat Caesarion, Cleopatra's son by C8esar^_andjnn a level with_hiiiLAlex«ider, her oldest-son by Antony, in Pbf- sian-costnme and -with -th©-tiar-a-of-4;he-Eersian kings,. Lower down sat Alexander's twin sister, Cleopatra^i Selene, and at her side her younger brother, Philadel- phns, in Marerl onian mst u m e a nd -with the headgear of the kings of Macedon. The significance of the tableau Antony himself explained: Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, Cyprus, and Ccele-Syrj^, was henceforth 'queen of^ queens'; her son, Caesarion, 'king of kings.' Alexander was declared king of Armenia and of the states lying between the Euphrates and India, Philadelphus, of Syria and all the lands between the Euphrates and the Hellespont, Cleopatra Selene, queen of Libya includ- 1 Bouch6-Leclercq, Histoire des Lagides, ii, p. 278; Plut., Antony, 54; Dio Cassius, xlix, 41. 154 GREEK IMPERIALISM ing Cyrene. It was the restoration of the ancient empire of the Ptolemies, and in Antony "captured Italy" was symbolized. The Alexandrian siren had regained wh^t her ancestors had lost; and, had the Roman whom she had enthralled only proved equal to the task of maintain- ing his initial ascendency in Italy, she might, indeed, have fulfilled her boast and administered justice on the Capitol. But Antony went down to defeat at Actium and the young Augustus came to Egypt, like the com- rades of Ulysses to the shore of the tempters, with his ears stuffed with wax. Pascal^ says: Le nez de ClSopdtre: s'il e4t eie plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changS. But Pascal speaks as a philosopher. He probably did not know that Cleopatra had a prominent nose. He was certainly ig- ^norant that her death made little or no difference in the constitutional position of Egypt. In a sense Au- gustus was simply the executor of the great queen's policy; for, after his reorganization of the Roman empire was completed, "it is," as Mommsen* says, "quite as correct to say that the kings of Egypt ruled in Rome as that the prince of the Roman peo- ple reigned in the valley of the Nile." Be that as it may, the empire of the Ptolemies could not have been recalled from the past even by the magic of a woman's > Pe«5&s, VI, 43 bis. Ed. Havet; cf. Bouch6-Leclercq,fl»rf.iM Logides, II, p. i8o, n. I. ' Gesammelte Schriften, iv, p. 236. THE EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES 155 beauty; for, as we shall see when we come to look at the second period of its history, the death it had died was a naturaLone.-- It had.but experienced the fate to whieh4fe* constitution made it prone. It was beset fromits-birtk withJncurable weaknesses. None-Ae-less it made~3"brave" show during-the-firsl. century of its existence; and during the reign of -its. second-monarch, Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-246 B.C.), its capital, Alexandria, was the London of the ancient world. Its only rival in trade and commerce was its neighbor to^e- west, Carthage. The golden age of the Ptolemie s coincid es- wife the one epoch in the history of the world in which Africa was the leader in business enterprise, in money power, in naval strength, in luxury, in scienceA andj..till the real test came, in political pres- tige -and influence. The commercial aristocracy qf Carthage and theojlightened-despots of Alexandria had the Mediterranean divided between them. West of Sicily lay a Carthaginian lake,, into which foreign ships entered at their own peril ; east of it, the chief harbors in the whole circuit from Cyrene to Corcyra, as well as the I islands which lay in the area thus inclosed, the Ptolemies aimed to secure. Possession of the sea between Egypt and the Grseco-Macedonian world and of the coasts which it waished and the islands which it surrounded, was the main object of the foreign policy of the early i Ptolemies. The founder of the dynasty was a brave soldier, but 156 GREEK IMPERIALISM a cautious general. Again and again he withdrew from Asia before a land attack and put his main reliance upon the natural defenses of Egypt. He was no sailor at all ; yet he became an admiral, and as the result of three great maritime expeditions (308-306, 295-294, 288- 287 B.C.), he handed over to his unwarlike son the essen- tial body of the possessions of the family outside of Egypt. The founder of the dynasty was at the same time the founder of the empire. The Solomon of the Ptolemies, Philadelphus, is addressed by Theocritus,^ a Sicilian poet who had recently come to Alexandria looking for a patron, in the following adulatory strains: — "Lo he hath seen three hundred towns arise, Three thousand, yea three myriad ; and o'er all He rules, the prince of heroes, Ptolemy. Claims half Phoenicia, and half Araby, Syria and Libya, and the ^thiops murk; Sw^ys the Pamphylian and Cilician braves, The Lycian and the Carian trained to war. And all the isles; for never fleet like his Rode upon ocean: land and sea alike , And sounding rivers hail King Ptolemy." The hero of these lines had just brought a war against his brother in Cyrene and his rival in Asia to a successful termination (273 B.C.) ; and, except for a probable inter- val of four years (253-249 B.C.), the invincible fleet which he then possessed ruled the sea till his death. But he was anything but a warrior king. During his whole ' Idyll, XVII. (Translation of Calverley.). THE EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES 157 life he never commanded an army or a fleet in person. Like Augustus Csesar, withi whom he has been compared, he had a delicate constitution which unfitted him for the rough and tumble of war. He had a lively intelligence, which was carefully cultivated, and, like the Emperor Hadrian, an insatiable thirst for novelties. A new book, an old painting, a strange animal, a useful invention, alike aroused his curiosity. One amazing woman — his own sister — swept him from his self-indulgent moor- ings. She made herself his wife — as any Egyptian woman might do with her brother — and, though she was his queen for six years at most (275-270 B.C.), when she was over forty and he over thirty-two, he followed her policy and cherished her memory for many long years. That her acta might not be invalid he had her deified after her death, and that he might still be her consort, he had himself elevated at the same time to her side as the first self-constituted god-king since Alexander. A sensualist by instinct, he surrounded himself in Alexandria with everything that appealed to his varie- gated lusts.^ The women whom he took into his harem after his sister's death were given palaces and race- horses, public statues, — in costumes which were not always modest, — and even divine honors. Splendid new quarters were laid out in Alexandria, and public works erected there and elsewhere in his realm. The ' See Droysen, Gesckichte des Hellenismus,* iii, pp. 262 ff. 158 GREEK IMPERIALISM capital thronged with scientific, literary, and musical, celebrities, attracted by the endowments and collection§ of the Museum, the richness of the library, the profusion of festivals, and the liberality of the king, who wished Alexandria to become to the new world what Athens had been to the old. Yet despite all these manifold gratifications, life palled on the much-experienced monarch. He turned, from the doctors to the quacks, and, shrinking from pain and death, experimented with draughts that were alleged to confer immortality : a strange act for one who was already a god ! While suffering agony from the gout, he envied the lot of the fellahs, whom he saw from his window stretched out on the sand in the sun eating their simple meal. "Ye poor," he is said to have once ex- claimed, "would that I had been one of you." "From behind the rich curtains of his palace," as his stout adversary, Antigonus of Macedon,^ phrased it, Ptolemy Philadelphus played cautiously and adroitly the great game of international politics. His emissaries, laden with gifts and money, were to be found at every capital from the Ganges to the Tiber. " Mighty kings" and "great cities," Theocritus tells us,^ were in his pay; ' and in the harbor of Alexandria many great battleships lay ready to give emphasis to diplomacy, to support the agents whom his gold had brought into action. By these means, too, he kept open the roads which ' Plut., Aratus, xv. * IdyU, xvn, no/. THE EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES 159 led across the sea from all directions to Alexandria; shut off, by a fringe of Egyptian possessions, the great con- tinental empire of the Seleucids from access to the Mediterranean; and kept Greece so persistently in insurrection against its suzerain, Macedon, that he was able to ward off all danger from that quarter. He enlarged his inherited empire by seizing Ionia when Eumenes I of Pergamum threw off the suzerainty of the Seleucids and shattered their authority in Asia Minor (263-261 B.C.) ; biit the gains he then made he had to abandon during the upheaval which accompa- nied the revolt of his "son" in Ephesus (259-255 B.C.), and he suffered still further losses in Asia during the war he waged thereafter (253-249 B.C.), with Macedon and Syria combined* These, however, his son, Euer*- getes, at the opening df his reign (246-242 B.C.), re- gained, £ind he acquired district;s in Ionia and the Hellespont besides; and the position which he thereby secured he held till his death twenty years later. On the sea, however, he showed himself less persistent than his father, Philadelphus had lost control of the ^Egean when beaten at Cos in 253 B.C. by Antigonus of Mace- don, but had not rested till he had regained it four years later, when the league of the Islanders, which was the immediate bone of contention, came again under the authority of his admirals. Euergetes suffered a crushing naval defeat in 242 B.C. off the island of Andros at the hands of the "veteran" Antigonus; whereupon he let the i6o GREEK IMPERIALISM Cyclades go altogether. That was not the only sequel, however ; for in consequence of the large outlay for little gain entailed in building and keeping in readiness the huge battleships then employed, and perhaps also in consequence of the failure of the Carthaginians, despite great naval expense and preparations, to hold the sea against the improvised fleets of Rome in the First Punic War (which had just ended), the third Ptolemy, like the Barcid government in Carthage, abandoned the policy of maintaining a fleet strong enough to drive all enemies from their respective parts of the Mediterranean. It was a great mistake in each case. When at the end of the third century B.C. Macedon and Syria, the traditional and long-suffering enemies of Egypt, were in a position to renew their joint struggle with the Ptolemies, the far- spread Ptolemaic empire fell together like a house of cards, and Rome alone saved the dynasty from complete destruction. A variety of motives actuated the early Ptolemies in their struggle for foreign dominions. Pride of possession was among them, of course. The court poet Callima- chus ^ struck a responsive chord when, in his poem on the death of Arsinoe, the sister-wife of Philadelphus, he has the sad news flashed from beacon point to beacon point till it reaches Lemnos at the outer edge of the empire. National honor is a strong motive for action, J Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Sitzb. d. Bed. Akad. xxix (1912), pp. 524/. THE EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES i6i but it is commonly stirred by the fear of losing some- thing possessed rather than by the hope of acquiring something new. Hence wejnustJookrdeepef-foiMii^ reasons jadiich Jed ^jautious statesmen like the iirst two Ptolemies to4ilace-rQundJE;gypt4t&-girdle-ef-pewer. The motive suggested by Polybius ' is quite different. It was with regard to possible movements on the ^art of the nfenarchs.jof Syria,- Asia Minor-, -Thrace,— and Macedon^that tiie^Ptolemies held, asJiesay-s,---t4ie-fflost important to wn s , p lac p o , and h arbors" along the whole coast" of the eastern Mediterranean. And there can be no doubt that he is right in attributing this rather malicious aim to them. They were, doubtless, great intriguers. But ta Polybius, looking on from without, from one of the digtrictS-which-hadJaeen-affeGted by the close proximity of Egyptian garrisons and naval sta- tions, the connection of these posts with the foreign, policy of the Ptolemies was apt to obtrude itself to the exclusion of everything else. Nowadays historians are prone to a similar onesidedness because of thejcloae attention they give to economic factors. They are quite right when they stress the importance of Ptolemaic naval power and of the vantage-points held in Europe and Asia for the development of Alexandrian conimerce. The lighthouse which Ptolemy erected at the mouth of the Nile at a cost of a million dollars (eight hundred talents) was not only one of the seven wonders of the » V, 34. 6-«. l62 GREEK IMPERIALISM world: it was a messenger of good will to the trading vessels which came from all the dependencies with or without cargoes, to get for Greek consumption the varied products of the Alexandrian factories, the Egyptian grain-fields, and the Nile-borne traffic of Arabia, India, Somaliland, and Ethiopia. What the lighthouse symbolizes, the growth of Alexandria to hali a million in a hundred years proves: the magnitude of the commerce which the transmarine possessions of Egypt stimulated, when they did not originate it. Where the economic historians are wrong, however, is in doing what Polybius did. He made the imperial policy^f the early Ptolemies primarily foreign"; they- make it primarily commercial The truth is that it was dictated also by the plain netessities of the domestic situation. Let us see what that«Wcis. The first Ptolemy had stepped into the place of the Pharaohs on Alexander the Great's death. The only right he cared to acknowledge for the obedience of the Egyptians was the right of conquest. As for them, we may be sure that just as they created the myth that Alexander was not really Philip's child, but a son begot- ten from Olympias by either Nectanebus, the last native Pharaoh, or Ammon, the great god himself who had taken the form of Nectanebus for the purpose; and just as they in later times represented Caesar and Antony as Ammon reincarnate, that Cleopatra's bastard children THE EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES 163 might be legitimate Pharaohs: so, too, they applied to Ptolemy the fiction by which for thousands of years they had been wont to bridge over the gaps in the genealogy of their kings.^ The bridge was necessary, however; for, in their think- ing, the gods, who had once lived among men, on with- drawing to the divine abodes, had left one of theiB number to rule over the world — which, of course, wa^ Egypt. From him all their kings were descended. The Pharaoh was, accordingly, the only god who resided upon the earth, and, as such, fittingly the mediator between mpn anr| fhfi cfpnt cndn find-cnrhlmnpri of the upper tmd nethfirjsmrld.^ The_Phar-aob-4Sfas,-therefore,-betii-^e god4dng_and the chief priest. The whole land and ppr.jTlp^r»f_ggTj7pt y^re ^r'" prnpprty Without his-pre&^ en ce and rn inistratinng flip parth wrtnlrl literaHyJan^^mgh and grow b a rren , a nd t he me n,-AgQm£n, -and children would jjerish.- E g yp t w as , accordingly, b ound -to -have a le gitimate Phar aoh. Ptolemy could be made Ammon'g ofispringLas easily as Alexander the Great; but how it waajlonejve do not kmow^ OnJiT s arrival in Egyp t , Ptnle my. foimd-tbete-twf)- oJJLffr statps in addition to that of the Kg;^^''^"^- These Wf'fe'thp old (rrPPV f'''