The Evolution of States
by J. M. Robertson · English · Gutenberg #39860 · 1,446,155 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Evolution of States
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Evolution of States
Author: J. M. Robertson
Release date: May 30, 2012 [eBook #39860]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39860
Credits: Produced by Adrian Mastronardi, Graeme Mackreth and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EVOLUTION OF STATES ***
Produced by Adrian Mastronardi, Graeme Mackreth and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
THE EVOLUTION OF STATES
AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH POLITICS
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD.
NEW ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD.
WINNOWINGS FROM WORDSWORTH.
WALT WHITMAN: An Appreciation.
MONTAIGNE AND SHAKESPEARE. (Second Edition, with additional Essays on
cognate subjects.)
BUCKLE AND HIS CRITICS: a Sociological Study.
THE SAXON AND THE CELT: a Sociological Study.
MODERN HUMANISTS: Essays on Carlyle, Mill, Emerson, Arnold, Ruskin, and
Spencer. (Fourth Edition.)
THE FALLACY OF SAVING: a Study in Economics.
THE EIGHT HOURS QUESTION: a Study in Economics. (Second Edition.)
THE DYNAMICS OF RELIGION: an Essay in English Culture-History.
By "M.W. Wiseman."
A SHORT HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT, Ancient and Modern. (Second Edition:
2 vols.)
PATRIOTISM AND EMPIRE. (Third Edition.)
STUDIES IN RELIGIOUS FALLACY.
WRECKING THE EMPIRE.
A SHORT HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.
CHRISTIANITY AND MYTHOLOGY. (Second Edition.)
CRITICISMS. 2 vols.
TENNYSON AND BROWNING AS TEACHERS.
ESSAYS IN ETHICS.
ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGY. 2 vols.
LETTERS ON REASONING. (Second Edition.)
DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE "TITUS ANDRONICUS"?
PIONEER HUMANISTS: Essays on Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza,
Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Gibbon, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
TRADE AND TARIFFS.
COURSES OF STUDY.
CHAMBERLAIN: A STUDY.
PAPERS FOR THE PEOPLE.
CHARLES BRADLAUGH. By Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner. Part II. by J.M.R.
PAGAN CHRISTS: Studies in Comparative Hierology. (Second Edition,
Revised and Expanded.)
THE MEANING OF LIBERALISM.
THE
EVOLUTION OF STATES
AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH POLITICS
BY
J.M. ROBERTSON
LONDON:
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1912
"The sociologist has three main quests--first, he must try to discover
the conditions that determine mere aggregation and concourse. Secondly,
he must try to discover the law that governs social choices--the law,
that is, of the subjective process. Thirdly, he must try to discover
also the law that governs the natural selection and the survival of
choices--the law, that is, of the objective process."
--_Professor Giddings._
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE vii
PART I.
POLITICAL FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY
CHAP. I.--THE SUBJECT-MATTER 1
II.--ROMAN POLITICAL EVOLUTION 8
III.--GREEK POLITICAL EVOLUTION 36
IV.--THE LAWS OF SOCIO-POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT 54
PART II.
ECONOMIC FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY
CHAP. I.--ROMAN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION 75
II.--GREEK ECONOMIC EVOLUTION 98
PART III.
CULTURE FORCES IN ANTIQUITY
CHAP. I.--GREECE 121
II.--THE SARACENS 146
III.--ROME 158
EPILOGUE--A GENERAL VIEW OF DECADENCE 170
PART IV.
THE CASE OF THE ITALIAN REPUBLICS
NOTE ON LITERATURE 181
CHAP. I.--THE BEGINNINGS 183
II.--THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EVOLUTION 209
III.--THE POLITICAL COLLAPSE 233
PART V.
THE FORTUNES OF THE LESSER EUROPEAN STATES
CHAP. I.--IDEAS OF NATIONALITY AND NATIONAL GREATNESS 257
II.--THE SCANDINAVIAN PEOPLES 264
III.--THE HANSA 286
IV.--HOLLAND 291
Sec. 1. The Rise of the Netherlands 293
Sec. 2. The Revolt against Spain 301
Sec. 3. The Supremacy of Dutch Commerce 310
Sec. 4. Home and Foreign Policy 318
Sec. 5. The Decline of Commercial Supremacy 321
Sec. 6. The Culture Evolution 325
Sec. 7. The Modern Situation 328
V.--SWITZERLAND 331
Sec. 1. The Beginnings of Union 332
Sec. 2. The Socio-Political Evolution 338
Sec. 3. The Modern Renaissance 347
VI.--PORTUGAL 355
Sec. 1. The Rise and Fall of Portuguese Empire 355
Sec. 2. The Colonisation of Brazil 361
PART VI.
ENGLISH HISTORY TILL THE CONSTITUTIONAL PERIOD
CHAP. I.--BEFORE THE GREAT REBELLION 369
II.--THE REBELLION AND THE COMMONWEALTH 414
III.--FROM THE RESTORATION TO ANNE 436
IV.--INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION 458
CONCLUSION 468
INDEX 473
PREFACE
The following treatise is an expansion, under a new title, of one
originally published (1900) under the name of _An Introduction to
English Politics_. Several friendly reviewers of that work objected, not
unjustly, that its title was something of a misnomer, or at least an
imperfect indication of its contents. It had, as a matter of fact,
originated remotely in a lecture delivered as preliminary to a course on
"Modern English Politicians" (from Bolingbroke to Gladstone), the aim of
the prefatory address being to trace in older politics, home and
foreign, general laws which should partly serve as guides to modern
cases, or at least as preparation for their scientific study; while the
main course dealt with modern political problems as they have arisen in
the careers and been handled by the measures of modern English
statesmen. It was that opening exposition, developed into an essay, and
published as a series of magazine articles, that had been further
expanded into this treatise, by way of covering the ground more
usefully; and the original name is therefore retained as a sub-title.
It is perhaps unnecessary to explain that the book makes no pretension
to being a complete or systematic treatment of political history, or of
political forms and theories. The object in view from the first has
been, not the technical anatomy or documentary history of institutions,
but the bringing into light of the ruling forces in all political life,
ancient and modern alike. It seeks to help the reader to fulfil the
precept of Montaigne: "_Qu'il ne luy apprenne pas tant les histoires
qu'a en juger._"
Since it was first written, there has been so much fresh sociological
study of history that I need not repeat the justification originally
offered for my undertaking. Alike as to ancient and modern history, the
effort of scholars is now more and more towards comprehension of
historic causation in terms of determining conditions, the economic
above all; so much so that I have profited somewhat in my revision from
various recent works, and might with more leisure have done so more
fully. Revised as it is, however, the book may serve to expound views of
history which are still not generally accepted, and to call in question
fallacious formulas which seem to me still unduly common.
On any view, much remains to be done before the statement of historic
causation can reach scientific thoroughness; and it may well be that
some of my theories will incur modification. All I claim for them is
that they are made in the light of a study of the concrete process; and
I am satisfied that fuller light is to be obtained only in that
direction. In the end, doubtless, conflicts of historical interpretation
will turn upon problems of psychology. A contemporary German expert of
distinction, Prof. Lamprecht, in his able lectures on the problem _What
is History?_ (Eng. trans. 1905), lays it down that the main problem of
every scientific history of mankind is the "deducing from the history of
the most important communities of men the evolution of the breadth of
consciousness"; and again that "the full historical comprehension of a
single change or of a single phenomenon, with their historical
significance, can only be acquired from the most general principles;
that is to say, from the application of the highest universal-historical
categories." If I understand Prof. Lamprecht aright, he here means
simply that we properly understand the motivation of men in the past in
terms of our own psychosis, conceived as in touch only with their data.
This seems to me substantially sound. But on the other hand I doubt the
utility of his apparent purpose of explaining modern historic
developments in terms of special psychic changes or movements in
communities, considered as forces. That way seems to lie reversion to
the old and vain device of explaining the course of nations in terms of
their "characters."
In any case, however, we have Prof. Lamprecht's avowal that "It would be
a study of great value to establish, by comparative work in universal
history, what are the constantly recurring economic factors of each
period which are so uniformly followed by the development of other
higher intellectual values." That is as full a recognition of the
"economic factor" as I am concerned to contend for, if it be understood
that economic motives are on the one hand recognised as affecting social
action in general, and on the other that varying forms of social
machinery react variously on intellectual life. Upon such hypotheses the
following inquiry proceeds; to such conclusions it leads.
Obviously all critical exposition, historical or other, is an attempt to
influence the psychic processes of the reader, to make him "feel" this
and "think" that; and in this sense any resulting change of conduct
means the play of "the psychic factor." But that is only another way of
saying that the psychic factor is conditioned by material circumstances,
by knowledge, and by ignorance. To insist on the perpetual social
significance of all three is the general aim of this book.
_September, 1912._
PART I
POLITICAL FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY
CHAPTER I
THE SUBJECT MATTER
Sec. 1
Politics, in its most general and fundamental character, is the strife
of wills on the ground of social action. As international politics is
the sum of the strifes and compromises of States, so home politics is
the sum of the strifes and compromises of classes, interests, factions,
sects, theorists, in all countries and in all ages. In studying it,
then, we study the evolution of an aggregate, a quasi-organism, in terms
of the clashing forces of its units and of their spontaneous
combinations.
This may seem too obvious and simple a truth to need formal telling; and
yet no truth is more often missed or set aside by writers who deal with
political history. The past course of nations, when it is sought to be
explained at all, is by two writers out of three accounted for by
certain supposed qualities of character in the given nation as a whole,
instead of by the specially conditioned play of forces common to all
peoples.[1] For instance, M. Taine, in the preface to the first volume
of his fascinating work, _Les origines de la France contemporaine_, goes
about to justify his own political indifferentism by stating that in
eighty years his country had thirteen times changed its constitution.
"_We_," he says, have done this; and "_we_ have not yet found that which
suits _us_."[2] It is here implied that a body of men collectively and
concurrently seeking for a fixed constitution have failed, and that the
failure is discreditable--that those who thus seek and fail have been
badly employed. It is by implication denied that successive changes of a
constitution may fitly be regarded as a process of growth and healthy
adjustment of parts: the ideal of political health is assumed to be a
state of fixity. Thus does indifferentism, naturally if not necessarily,
miss the point of view from which itself is to be studied as one of the
forces whose conflict the true historian ought to analyse.
There is no national "we" aiming collectively at a fixed and final
constitution; nor are the successive constitutions of France as such
more significant of failure or permanent harm than the successive
changes in the professedly unchanged constitution of Great Britain,
though the violent kinds of change are as such harmful. If M. Taine had
but applied with rigour the logic he once before prescribed, soundly if
wittily, for all problems alike, he could not have begun his history
with that delusive abstraction of a one-minded community, failing to
achieve "their" or "its" purpose. "_Je n'en sais rien_," he remarks with
a shrug, over the protest of M. Royer-Collard that certain scientific
reasoning will make Frenchmen revolutionary; "_est-ce qu'il y a des
Francais?_"[3] In dead earnest he now assumes that France consists just
of the single species "Frenchmen," whose constitution-building is a
corporate attempt to build a French house to live in; when all that is
truly historical in his own book goes to show clearly enough that French
constitutions, like all others, are products of ever-varying and
conflicting passions and interests of sets of people in France who are
"Frenchmen" merely when they happen to act in concert against other
geographical groups. At no moment were all of the French people
consenting parties to any one of the thirteen constitutions. Then there
was no collective failure.
Of course M. Taine knew this well enough in his capacity of narrator;
but as teacher he could not escape from the rut dug for his thought by
his fatalism. He must needs make the synthetic abstraction of "we,"
which excludes the political analysis essential to any practical
explanation; and it inevitably followed that his generalisations were
merely pseudo-biological, and not what is most wanted in
history--sociological truth rooted in psychology and biology. In
denuding himself alike of hopes and fears, M. Taine really gave the
great illustration of the truth of his own penetrating comment on
Merimee,[4] that he who will be duped by nothing ends in being the dupe
of his distrust. He will not be duped by this ideal or that; he will not
care enough for any to have a strong wish to see it realised; and so he
comes to be duped by the wish to disprove all, to work down all
sociology to the plane of cynical pseudo-biology. The enthusiastic
amateur can show it, can convict the critic of hearing only the devil's
advocate in every moral process,[5] and of becoming at length the
historic oracle of those, of all readers, who are most alien to his
philosophy.
Such an outcome, in the work of such a critic, is vividly instructive.
At worst, indeed, he has a positive value as the extremest reactionist
against the merely partisan method of history, which is almost all we
have had in England since the French Revolution, down to the other day.
After M. Taine has passed, fools' paradises must needs fall in market
value. But when the devil's advocate has made his round, we must still
plough and eat, and the paradises must just be laid out for new sowing.
The evil of theoretical extremes is not so much their falsehood as their
irrelevance. If we are to instruct each other in conduct, it must be in
terms of sympathies and antipathies; and if we are to profit by a study
of politicians, who are among the most generally typical of men, and of
politics, which is the expression of so much of life, we must go about
it as humanists and not as fatalists.
Sec. 2
Humanity, however, will not suffice to save us from false philosophy if,
as humanists, we seek to gain our polemical ends by M. Taine's didactic
methods. He, naturally so much of an analyst, took to pseudo-synthesis
when he wished with little labour to discredit certain popular
aspirations. But pseudo-synthesis is the favourite expository process of
many men with ardent aspirations, and of many writers who are friendly
enough to the aspirations of their fellows. By pseudo-synthesis I mean
that process, above exemplified, of "cooking" an intricate moral problem
by setting up one or more imaginary entities, to whose volition or
potency the result is attributed. It was the method of medieval science;
and it is still popular among the experts as well as the amateurs of
historical science. It was the ordinary expedient of Comte, in whose
pages history becomes a Jonsonian masque of personified abstractions;
and Buckle too often resorts to it. But hear a learned and judicious
English Liberal, not to be suspected of doctrinary extravagance:--
"As in time past Rome had sacrificed domestic freedom that she
might be the mistress of others, so now" [in the later Empire] "to
be universal she, the conqueror, had descended to the level of the
conquered" [in respect of Caracalla's edict giving to all subjects
of the Empire the rights of Roman citizenship]. "But the sacrifice
had not wanted its reward. From her came the laws and the language
that had overspread the world; at her feet the nations laid the
offerings of their labour; she was the head of the Empire and of
civilisation."[6]
The "she" of this passage I take to be as purely imaginary an entity as
Phlogiston; and it is not easy to see how a method of explanation which
in physical science is found worse than barren can give any edification
in the study of history. To say nothing of the familiar explanation that
Caracalla's sole motive in conferring the citizenship on the provincials
was the desire to lay on them corresponding taxes,[7] the proposition
has no footing in political actualities. "Rome's self-abnegation that
she might Romanise the world"[8] expresses no fact in Roman volition,
thought, or deed; it is not the mention of a sentiment which swayed
men's action, but the attempt to reduce a medley of actions to the
semblance of a joint volition. There was no "Rome" capable of
"self-abnegation" and susceptible of "reward." Why, then, should it be
said? It is said either because the writer permits himself to fill in a
perspective with a kind of pigment which he would not employ in his
foreground, or because he is still too much under the sway of old
methods when he is generalising conventional knowledge instead of
analytically reaching new.[9] Either way the lapse is only too
intelligible. And if an innovating expert, dealing with old facts, runs
such risks, great must be those run by plain people when they seek to
attain a generalised knowledge of facts which are the battle-ground of
current ideals. Only by perpetual analysis can we hope partly to escape
the snare of the pseudo-synthetic, the traps of rhetoric and exegetic
fiction.
Sec. 3
The term "pseudo-synthesis" implies, of course, that there may be a true
synthesis. What is necessary to such synthesis is that there shall have
been a preliminary analysis; but a synthesis once justly made is the
greatest of helps to new analyses. Now there is one such which may
safely be brought to bear on the study of practical politics, because it
is an axiom alike of inorganic physics and of biology, and a commonplace
of human science, though seldom used as a means of historic
generalisation. This is the simple principle that all energy divides
ostensibly into forces of attraction and of repulsion.
[The principle thus stated should be compared with the theorem of
Kant as to the correlative forces of sociability and unsociability
(_Idee zu einer allgemein Geschichte_), and the important and
luminous formula of Professor Giddings, that all sociological
processes, properly so called, turn upon "consciousness of kind"
(_Principles of Sociology_, 1896, 3rd ed. pp. 17-19, and Preface;
and in earlier writings by Professor Giddings, there mentioned).
The scientific value of that formula is obvious; but other ways of
stating the case may still serve a purpose. The view in the text I
find to have been partly anticipated by Shaftesbury, _Essay on the
Freedom of Wit and Humour_, 1709, pt. iii, Sec. 2 (_Characteristics_,
ed. 1733, i, pp. 111-12), who is followed by Eusebe Salverte, _De
la Civilisation depuis les premiers Temps historiques_, 1813, p.
53. Shaftesbury even anticipates in part the formula of Professor
Giddings in the passage: "If anything be natural, in any Creature
or any Kind, 'tis that which is preservative of the Kind itself,"
and in the sequel. As Professor Giddings traces (pref. to 3rd ed.
p. x) the first suggestion of his "consciousness of kind" to Adam
Smith's _Theory of the Moral Sentiments_, which is certainly in
the line of descent from Shaftesbury, there may really be a causal
connection.]
That principle obviously holds of the relations of men in society as it
does of their muscular action and of their moral and intellectual life;
and so fundamental is the fact that when we study human history in view
of it, we find it more and more difficult to suppose that it will ever
cease to hold. That is to say, it is almost impossible to conceive state
of life in which the forces of attraction and repulsion shall not
operate energetically in the moral and intellectual relations of human
beings. From the primitive and the barbaric stages in which the sight of
an alien moves the savage to such destructive rage as is seen in some
dogs at the sight of others, or in which a difference of personal odour
rouses a no less spontaneous repulsion--as in Chinese against Europeans,
or in Europeans against Chinese[10]--down to the fierce battle in
self-governing countries over every innovating law, or that strife of
opinion in which these lines play their part, the clash of opposing
tendencies is perpetual, ubiquitous, inevitable. And so difficult is it
to conceive any cessation that at once many observers leap from the
general principle to the particular conclusion that all the _modes_ in
which the action and reaction, the attractions and repulsions of
individuals and groups, have operated in the past must needs operate in
the future. They conclude, that is, that the particular phenomenon of
WAR, above all, is chronic, and can never definitely disappear. Thus M.
Zola, looking around him and finding strife everywhere, decides that all
the past _forms_ of strife are inevitably recurrent.[11] It may be well
at the outset to insist that the general principle involves no such
particular necessity.
War is simply a form in which the instincts of attraction and repulsion
have operated in human societies during ages in which certain
psychological and physiological types have been normal. It may very well
recur, with growing infrequency, for a long time to come; but it is not
rationally to be regarded as a necessary function of the grand
biological forces. What does seem certain is a different thing--that the
forces of attraction and repulsion will always operate in _some_ form;
and that the very fact of their finding less expression in the mode of
physical strife will imply their coming into play in other modes, such
as the strife of ideals, doctrines, and class interests as they are
expressed in politics without bloodshed. The general law is that the
forces of attraction and repulsion, as exhibited in human thought or
feeling, run during the earlier stages of growth in channels which may
be broadly regarded as animal; and that when altered political and
social conditions partly or wholly close these channels, the biological
forces open for themselves new ones.
War is precisely the blindest, the least rational, the least human of
all the forms of human conflict, inasmuch as it is the collective
clashing of communities whose members, divided among themselves by many
real differences of interest, bias, and attraction, are set against each
other, as wholes--if by anything higher than animal pugnacity--either by
the mere ideals or appetites of rulers or leaders, or by more or less
imaginary differences of interest, seen under the moral illusion of the
most primitive of social instincts--the _sensus gregis_. As evolution
proceeds, the blind form may be expected to disappear, and the more
reasoned forms--that is, the inter-social and intellectual--to develop.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: It is one of the shortcomings of Buckle that, though he at
least once (_Introd. to Hist. of Civ. in Eng._, Routledge's ed. p. 352)
recognises the futility of explaining history in terms of national
character, he repeatedly lapses to that method, and speaks of peoples as
if they were of one will, bent, and mind. (Ed. cited, edit. notes pp.
354, 385, 540, 553, 558, 719, etc.). See below, pt. iii, ch. iii, second
note, as to Eduard Meyer.]
[Footnote 2: Similarly De Tocqueville begins _L'ancien regime et la
revolution_ with "_Les Francais ont fait...._" (Avant-Propos, 2e ed. p.
5), and makes the successors of the Revolutionists "_les memes
Francais_" (p. 12). Soon he makes the Revolution an entity (p. 35).
Compare with Taine's passage the programme of the first number of Le
Play's _La Reforme Sociale_, 1881 (cited by H. Higgs, _Quarterly Journal
of Economics_, Boston, July, 1890, p. 418), which might almost have been
written by Taine. In the case of Le Play the ideal of a
quasi-patriarchal order, very stable and very fixed, led to an attitude
resembling at points that of Taine. It is easy to see how the natural
recoil from political turmoil has, since the French Revolution,
developed successive schools such as those of Saint Simon, Comte, and Le
Play, all aiming at stability and order, all seeking to elbow out the
cosmic force of Change. In Taine's case the result was an acceptance of
Spencer's "administrative nihilism."]
[Footnote 3: _Les philosophes classiques du XIXe siecle en France_,
3ieme ed. p. 37.]
[Footnote 4: _Lettres de Prosper Merimee a une Inconnue_, pref. _end_.
When, however, M. Taine wrote on Sainte-Beuve's death (1869), he laid
down, as one of the necessities of the search for "the true truth," this
very determination "to be the dupe of nothing and nobody, above all of
oneself" (_Derniers Essais_, p. 52). Years before an acute critic had
said of his literary criticism: "M. Taine, at bottom, let us say it with
bated breath, is the dupe of himself when he supposes himself to have
given a rigorous formula, an exact definition, a chemical analysis of
his author" (Frederic Morin, _Les hommes et livres contemporains_, 1862,
p. 33). Compare the brochure of Professor Edouard Droz, _La critique
litteraire et la science_, 1893, discussed in the present writer's _New
Essays towards a Critical Method_, 1897, p. 13 _sq._]
[Footnote 5: See _Napoleon et ses detracteurs_, par le Prince Napoleon,
p. 13, and _passim_.]
[Footnote 6: Professor Bryce, _The Holy Roman Empire_, 8th ed. p. 7.]
[Footnote 7: Gibbon, ch. vi (Bohn ed. i, pp. 201, 212-13). In the same
way, Julius Caesar, and the triumvirs after him, were in their day moved
to extend citizenship in Italy because of the falling-off in the free
Roman population. Widened citizenship meant a wider field for Italian
recruiting. At that time the extension involved not taxation, but
immunities; but, according to Cicero, Antony received great sums from
the Sicilians in payment for the privilege he conferred upon them. _Ad
Atticum_, xiv, 12; _Philipp._ ii, 36.]
[Footnote 8: Bryce, p. 9.]
[Footnote 9: A different explanation holds in the case of Hegel,
who--after very pointedly affirming that "nothing great in the world has
been accomplished without passion" (_Leidenschaft_), in the sense of
individual interest and self-seeking aim, and that "an individual is
such and such a one, not a man in general, for that is not an existence,
but one in particular" (_Philos. der Geschichte_, 2te Aufl. p.
30)--proceeds to express historical processes in terms of universal
spirit, abstract universality, and so forth. Here the trouble is the
cherished tendency to verbal abstraction.]
[Footnote 10: Cp. Professor H.A. Giles, _The Civilisation of China_,
1911, pp. 214-15. Smell appears to be an insuperable bar to any general
association of "whites" with "blacks," and it probably enters into many
racial repugnances. Compare the curious device of Lombard women to set
up by an artificial bad smell a repugnance on the part of their alien
suitors such as they themselves may have felt. Gummere, _Germanic
Origins_, 1892, p. 138.]
[Footnote 11: Cited by Tolstoy, _The Kingdom of God is Within You_, ch.
vi, end.]
CHAPTER II
ROMAN POLITICAL EVOLUTION
Sec. 1
A survey of the ancient history best known to us may help to make
clearer the fatality of strife and the impossibility of solving it save
by transcending the physical plane. The habit of summing up all Roman
history as so many planned actions of "the Romans," or of "Rome," is in
singular contrast with the imbroglio of the records. In the social stage
discovered to us by the analysis of the oldest known institutions,
"early" Rome is already an artificial political organism, far removed
from the simple life of tribal barbarism.[12] There are three tribes;
the very name of tribe, it may be, comes from the number three[13] in
the flection _tribus_; and the subdivisions are fixed by the numbers
three and ten.[14] Behind the artificial "tribe" is a past in which, it
may be, a group of villages forms the _pagus_ or settlement.[15]
Already privilege and caste are fully established, even between classes
of freemen; and only by inference can we reach the probable first bases
of civic union among the ruling caste. They were clearly a caste of
conquerors. Their _curiae_, apparently the oldest form of group after the
family or the clan,[16] are artificially arranged, numbering thirty,
each _curia_ containing nominally a hundred _gentes_, each _gens_
nominally ten families.
Eduard Meyer (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 511) decides for the
view of L. Lange, that the historic appellation of Roman citizens,
_Quirites_, derives from _curia_. The ancients had several theories
as to the name. One (Festus) was that the Sabine goddess Curis gave
her name to the Sabine town Cures (cp. Athene, Athenai), whence,
according to the legend, had come a band under Titus Tatius, who
conquered the Capitoline and Quirinal hills, and had for tribe-god
Quirinus. Cp. Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 82. Mommsen (Eng. tr. 1862, i,
57, 78, _notes_) has secured currency for the other tradition,
argued for by F.W. Newman (_Regal Rome_, 1852, pp. 55-56), that the
root is the Sabine word _curis, quiris_, a spear. For this somewhat
unplausible theory there is support in the fact that in the cognate
Gaelic _coir_, pronounced quir, means a spear, and that there is
derived thence _curiadh_, a warrior. Mommsen is followed by
Merivale, _General History of Rome_, 5th ed. p. 13; and Greenidge,
_Roman Public Life_, p. 33. Pott and Becker, who derived _Quirites_
from _curia_, explain the latter word as _co-viria_, the band of
warriors. And as the view that "Athene" comes from "Athenai," not
_vice versa_, has the stronger claims to acceptance, the more
acceptable presumption is that "Curis" and Quirinus evolved from
the _curia_. If _Quirites_ meant spearmen, how could Caesar be
understood to cow mutineers by simply addressing them as Quirites
[= citizens]? The curia theory is supported by the facts that "the
Roman constitutional tradition ... makes the division into curies
alone originate with the origin of the city"; that it "appears as
an essential part of the Latin municipal system;" and that of all
the old divisions it seems to be the only one that "really
fulfilled important functions in the primitive constitutional
organisation" (Mommsen, B. i, ch. v, pp. 73-75).
These _curiae_ may be conceived as derived from inner tribal or clan
groups formed in the conquering stage, since they are ostensibly united
by their collective or curial _sacra_, the rites for which the grouped
_gentes_--who each have their private _sacra_--assemble in a special
place, under a special priest. They still retain the usage of a common
banquet,[17] the earliest form of collective religion known to us.[18]
Apart from the members of the _curiae_ are the conquered _plebs_,[19]
"the many" not enslaved, but payers of tribute; without share in the
_curiae_ or vote in the _comitia_, or assembly, and without part in the
curial or other _sacra_.
On this head there has been some gratuitous confusion. Schwegler
(i, 621 _sq._) gives convincing reasons for the view that in early
times the plebs were not members of the _curiae_. Cp. Ihne, as
cited, pp. 110, 127; and Fustel de Coulanges, p. 278 _sq._ Meyer
(ii, 513, 521) asserts, on the contrary, without any specification
of periods, that the _curiae_ included plebeians as well as
patricians. The contradiction seems to arise out of inattention to
chronology, or a misreading of Mommsen. That historian rightly sets
forth in his history (B. ii, ch. i; Eng. trans. ed. 1862, i,
264-65) that the plebs were not admitted into the _comitia curiata_
before the "Servian" period; adding that these bodies were "at the
same time" almost totally deprived of their prerogatives. In his
_Roemisches Forschungen_, 1864, i, 144 _sq._, he shows that they
were admitted in the "_historic_ period"--when the _comitia_ in
question had ceased to have any legal power, and when, as he
elsewhere states, the admission "practically gave little more than
the capacity for adrogation" (_Roemisches Staatsrecht_, Bd. iii,
Abth. i, p. 93). Here again he states that "to equal rights in the
curies, especially to the right of vote in the comitia, the
plebeians attained only in the later times" (_Id._ p. 72). Yet
Professor Pelham, in asserting (p. 21; cp. p. 46) that "the
_primitive_ Roman people of the thirty _curiae_ included all the
freemen of the community, _simple as well as gentle_," gives the
note: "The view here taken on the vexed question of the purely
patrician character of the _curiae_ is that of Mommsen (_Roem.
Forschungen_, vol. i)."
When this error is corrected, the question ceases to be vexed.
Schwegler has disposed of the blunder of Dionysius, who ascribes to
the plebeians a share in the _curiae_ from the beginning; and it is
not disputed that they were allowed to enter when the _comitia
curiata_ had been practically superseded by the _comitia
centuriata_. It is to be noted that the denial of the inclusion of
the plebeians in the original _curiae_ does not apply to the
_clientes_, whose status, though non-patrician, had been different
from that of the true plebs. M. Delaunay, who argues that the
plebeians were all along admitted to the _curiae_, adds the
qualification: "Doubtless not the entire mass of the plebeians, but
only those who were ... attached to the gentes" (Robiou et
Delaunay, _Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome_, 1884, i, 21). But
who were these _gentilitia_ if not the _clientes_? (cp. _loc. cit._
p. 26).
The _populus_ at this stage, then, is not "the people" in the
modern sense; it is the aggregate of the privileged _curiae_, and
does not include the plebs,[20] which at this stage is not even
part of the army. But a separate quasi-plebeian class, the
_clientes_ of the patricians, are in a state of special dependence
upon the latter, and in a subordinate fashion share their
privileges.
The _clientes_ have very much the air of being primarily the
servile or inferior part of the early clan or _gens_, as distinct
from its "gentlemen." Cp. Burton, _Hist. of Scotland_, viii,
524-25, as to the lower and the higher (duniewassal) orders in the
Scottish Highland clans. "In the old life of the _pagus_ and the
_gens_ the weaker sought the protection of the stronger by a
willing vassalage" (Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, p. 6). The
_clientes_ are the nominal as distinct from the real "family" of
the chief or _patronus_. M. Delaunay (_Les Institutions de
l'ancienne Rome_, as cited, i, 27) thinks with Mommsen (so also
Dupond, pp. 20-21) that they were mainly freedmen, but gives no
evidence. As to the meaning and etymology of the word (_clientes_
from _cluere_ or _cliere_, "to listen" or "obey"), cp. Newman,
_Regal Rome_, p. 49; Ortolan, p. 29; Mommsen, _Roemisches
Staatsrecht_, III, i, 1887, p. 63. The theory that the plebeians
were all _clientes_ (Ortolan, pp. 25, 27) seems untenable, though
Mommsen (_Staatsrecht_, III, i, 63) pronounces that "all
non-patricians were clients"; and Meyer (ii, 521) appears to
acquiesce. Only in theory can the mass of the plebs have been
clients at any time. Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, pp. 277-78. The
_clientes_, it seems clear, were as such admitted to the _comitia_,
whereas the plebs were not. See the citations of Fustel de
Coulanges from Livy, ii, 56-64; also iii, 14 (Dupond, p. 22, doubts
the fact). On any view, the _clientela_ rapidly dwindled, passing
into the plebs (cp. Dupond, p. 23; Livy, vi, 18). As to its early
status see Fustel de Coulanges, p. 273 _sq._ Ortolan, after
representing all plebeians as clients, speaks (p. 31) of plebeians
belonging to no gens (so Aulus Gellius, x, 20).
Wealth is not yet a matter of land-owning--the main element of
property is cattle;[21] and the bulk of the land is _ager
occupatorius_, a great "common" on which all men's cattle feed.
The voteless free plebeian has simply his home and homestead, "toft
and croft," the latter being two yokes (= five roods) of land, on
which he raises the grain and olives and vegetables that feed his
household.[22] This goes to his heir. Here arises another problem.
E.W. Robertson (as last cited) decides that the "two yokes" can
have been only "the homestead, and could not have included the farm
or property attached to it." The _heredium_, he holds, following
Pliny (_Hist. Nat._, xix, 19), and citing Livy (vi, 36), was only
in the _hortus_, the house and garden, "and not in the arable or
pasture land." But surely the arable was on a different footing
from the pasture land (_ager compascus_). Corn was not grown in
common, unless it were by the _gentes_ (Mommsen, vol. i, pp. 38,
72, 193). The solution seems to be that given by Greenidge, that as
"the _heredium_ consisted only of two _jugera_ (Festus, p. 53), an
amount obviously insufficient for the maintenance of a family,"
"there must have been _ager privatus_ as well, owned by some larger
unit, and this unit would naturally have been the gens" (_Roman
Public Life_, p. 15).
Among general historians of Rome Mommsen seems to be the first to
note this circumstance, and he gives neither details nor evidence.
Schwegler, discussing (i, 619) the theory of Puchta that there was
no private property in Rome before the "arrival" of the plebs,
admits that among the ancient Germans the land was yearly
apportioned among the groups as such, but finds that "Roman
tradition tells of nothing of the kind." (So Greenidge, p. 15.) In
any case, Mommsen, while insisting that "the fields (_sic_) of the
gentes (_Geschlechts-Genossen_) in the earliest period lay
together" (_Staatsrecht_, III, i, 24; cp. p. 94), admits that such
gentile ownership had at an early stage disappeared (_frueh
verschwundenen_). There was then no communal tillage in the
historic period. Cincinnatus, in the legend, returns to the plough
on his own croft. Further, the early complaints cited by Livy as to
the "two yokes" being "hardly enough to raise a roof on or to make
a grave in" were addressed by the tribunes on behalf of plebeians
to patricians who each had above five hundred yokes. The non-client
plebeians then had no share in the land of the _gentes_ or clans,
being themselves in large part dispossessed by conquest.
Meyer (ii, 519) pronounces that the plot of two yokes was, "of
course, no farm, but a kitchen-garden," adding: "It is also the
personal land of the small farmers and day-labourers who look after
the lands of the large landholders, not the original private
holding in contrast to the mark belonging in common to the _gens_
(_Geschlecht_) or commune (_Gauverband_)." But on the previous page
Meyer says that "the land was settled not by the _gentes_, but
communally (_genossenschaftlich_) by unions of equal freemen." If
these, then, were the _curiae_ (the Mark, says Meyer in this
connection, did _not_ belong to the _gentes_), they did not include
the plebs; and we come back to the datum that the free plebeian had
no means of support save his five roods and what beasts he had on
the public pasture. The pasture-land, again, is surmised by Mommsen
(ch. xiii, p. 201) to have been small in area relatively to the
arable-land communally owned and cultivated by the _gentes_ or
clans--a proposition irreconcilable with the evidence as to the
quantity of cattle. As to the two yokes of land, Schwegler decides
(i, 618) that it was "nowise inadequate" as arable-land, in view of
the extraordinary fruitfulness of Italy, and, further, of the
circumstance that "the free burghers had also the use of the common
land" (for pasture). We are to remember that Italian land could
yield two crops in a year. (Niebuhr, _Lebensnachrichten_, ii, 245,
cited by Schwegler.)
On the general problem as to why or how the land once communally
tilled ceased to be so, we have still no better light than the old
generalisation of Hobbes in reply to his own question: "Upon what
impulsives, when all was equally every man's in common, men did
rather think it fitting that every man should have his inclosure?"
"I found," he puts it, "that from a community of goods there must
needs arise contention whose enjoyment should be greatest, and from
that contention all kind of calamities must unavoidably ensue."
[Epistle Dedicatory to _Philosophical Rudiments concerning
Government and Civil Society_ (translation of _De Cive_), 1651. Cp.
Goldwin Smith, _The United States_, 1893, p. 23.]
The patrician, of course, had a larger homestead, at least "four yokes"
in the earlier stages; later seven; later still twenty-five.[23] But the
patricians were "a class of occupying landholders rather than
proprietary landowners."[24] The "public land" was literally so, save in
so far as the patricians would have the ampler (and often untaxed or
low-rented) use of it for their much larger herds;[25] or, it may be,
for cultivation by their clients or slaves. _Heredia_, however, were
saleable, and herein lay one usual path to the dispossession and
enslavement of freemen; while at all stages there went on that pressure
of population on means of subsistence which underlies all economic
history.
Thus far, however, mere conquest has done less to impoverish and enslave
the mass than the economic process is to do later. The conquerors,
probably highland herdsmen to begin with, take estates for themselves,
but leave the mass of the conquered in possession or use of land for
which they pay tribute, and upon which they can independently live.[26]
And thus far they live mainly as small pastoral farmers.[27]
Trade and artisanship were for long but slightly developed, and were
mainly in the hands of slaves, dependent "clients," or foreigners; and
artisans and aliens were not admitted into the legions.[28] The ruling
caste occupied, potentially[29] if not constantly, the city proper, the
two or three fortified hills[30] on which at this stage it stands. They
were certainly not the founders. The Palatine and the Quirinal hills had
been occupied by Latins and Sabines respectively long before the time
traditionally assigned to the "founding" of Rome; and there were
communities there before them. Modern excavators trace many successive
strata of civilisation before that which we call the Roman; and the
probability is that the Romans of history, like the kindred Sabines,
conquered a previous city "aristocracy" of kindred race, whose place and
possessions they took. The previous inhabitants had presumably grown
weak for self-defence by reason of some such disintegrating economic
evolution as was soon to affect the conquerors themselves. Such a
disintegration may well have taken place in the case of Alba Longa, of
which the prior supremacy seems entirely credible.[31] But before Alba
Longa there had been a civilisation[32] on the Roman hills which perhaps
outwent in economic evolution anything attained in the Roman period
until the last century of the Republic.
This was already inferred in the eighteenth century by Ferguson
(_History of the Roman Republic_, 1783, ch. i, _note_; perhaps
following Maffei [1727], cited by Schwegler, i, 807), from the
nature of the remains of the great _cloacae_, which he held could
not have been built by any of the early Roman kings. That view is
since adopted by various authorities; see Middleton's _Remains of
Ancient Rome_, 1892, i, 104-107; and Robiou et Delaunay, _Les
Institutions de l'ancienne Rome_, 1884, vol. ii, ch. i, Sec. 1. Cp.
Merivale, _General History of Rome_, pp. 9-11; Burton, _Etruscan
Bologna_, 1876, pp. 170-74. Livy (i, 38) ascribes great _cloacae_ to
the legendary Tarquin the elder. Professor Ettore Pais, on the
other hand, confidently decides that the _cloaca maxima_ belongs to
the republican period, and dates it about 170 B.C. In any case, we
know that an ante-Roman civilisation underlies the historic, and
may now decide with Mr. Mahaffy that "as civilisation of some kind
was vastly older on the Hill of Troy than any of us had imagined,
so the site of every historic city is likely to have been the
habitation of countless generations" (_Survey of Greek Civ._ 1897,
p. 28).
Sec. 2
There had in fact been a "decline and fall of Rome" before the Rome we
know began to be. Relatively to their predecessors, the early Romans
were even as the northerners who in a later age were to capture historic
Rome--vigorous barbarians beginning a new era on a footing of fraternity
in conquest; and the condition of their early success as State-builders
seems to have been precisely the joining of several tribe-groups in a
real federation,[33] securing local peace as between the hill-holders.
It has been said that Rome grew up without any known aid from men of
political genius such as Solon.[34] But men of genius have counted for
something in all stages of upward human evolution. The guiders of early
Rome are lost in a cloud of myth and fable; but some man or men of civic
faculty there must have been to shape tendency, though doubtless a main
factor in the early union was the simple _collocation_ of the hills
first fortified. Granting that Servius Tullius is a mythical king, the
elaborate constitution assigned to him stood for _some_ planning by able
men, and has several main points in common with that given to Athens by
Solon.
Whatever were the part played by individual leaders, Roman or Etruscan,
there clearly came into play in early Rome as in Athens the important
factor of mixture of stocks. Romans and Sabines united to begin with;
and the conquered plebs, destined later to enter the constitution and
share in all the civic offices, represented some such source of
recuperation to the Roman aristocracy as did the Saxons to that of
England after the Norman Conquest. If we add the probable factor of an
Etruscan element, Rome is to be conceived as standing for a ruling class
of more various faculty than was to be found in any of the rival
communities singly. The progressive absorption of the most enterprising
of the plebeians was again, probably, an exception to the rule of Italic
life as to that of other races, so that in following the class struggles
of Rome we are to note not so much the violence of the process as the
fact that, so far as it went, it was relatively fortunate. And its
success, again, is conceivably due to the fact, among others, that from
an early period the region of the seven defensible hills was a refuge or
centre for men breaking away from the other Italian communities, where
conservatism held firm.
Behind the legend of the flocking of all manner of "broken men" to the
standard of Romulus lies the probability that the ancient "asylum"
behind the Capitol brought a variety of types to the place; and as in
Athens so in Rome, such variety of stock might well raise the level of
faculty. But it was a faculty for aggression. Given the initial
federation of Romans and Sabines, the one general force of comity or
cohesion, apart from the more public cults, is the bond of mere
collective antagonism to other communities. The total polity is one of
war; and never in the history of civilisation has that ground of comity
long averted the economic process by which social inequality deepens and
widens. It is thus entirely credible that, through this economic
process, which we shall trace later, the early Roman polity came to a
pass at which its conquest by Etruscan "kings" was welcomed by the
plebs, sinking into poverty or held in outlawry under primitive
"capitalistic" exploitation. There is no clear historic record of the
process; but all the better evidence goes to prove its occurrence.[35]
The most plausible theory of the constitution ascribed to Servius
Tullius is that it was imposed by Etruscan conquerors. The earlier
Romans had been quasi-sacerdotally ruled by priest-kings of the
primitive type, "kings of the sacrifice," whose religious powers were
balanced by the secular interest of the patrician heads of
families--themselves priests of their family cults. The "Servian"
constitution put down the _rex sacrificulus_, divided the city into four
tribes, and its territory into twenty-six districts, each under a
headman or headmen. The city at the same time was in part new walled,
and the seven hills united; while the mass of the free population were
divided into five classes according to their property, and enrolled for
military purposes in 193 "centuries." In the first and richest class
were forty centuries of men above forty-six for the defence of the city,
and forty of younger men for service in the field; while the second,
third, and fourth classes were divided into twenty centuries each, and
the fifth class into thirty. The poorest of all were grouped in a
separate century, the "Proletarians," or "breeders," without military
duties; and the trumpeters, armourers, and carpenters in four more. New
assemblies, the _comitia centuriata_, were formed, in which all members
of the centuries shared, the old _comitia curiata_ being thus virtually
superseded. The military organisation was made the basis of a fiscal
one, in which the classes were taxed on the capital value of their
property. As freedom from direct taxation was the mark of the ancient
"free" communities in general, the whole arrangement seems to be one
that only a conqueror could have imposed; and the tradition ran that
Servius was regarded as the friend of the poor, who made his birthday an
annual festival.
But plebeian distress was probably not the sole, perhaps not the
primary, factor in the convulsion. All along, the process of inequality
had gone on among plebeians and patricians alike, some of the former
rising to wealth and some of the latter sinking to relative poverty.
Thus arises in effect the struggle of a "middle class" to share the
political and social privileges of the "upper"; and there is reason to
think that the Etruscan conquest was furthered by rich plebeians as
against the patricians. The new constitution was what the Greeks called
a "timocracy," or "rule of property"; and though in respect of the
_comitia centuriata_ plebeians were admitted to the franchise, it was
under such provisions as to voting that the richer classes easily held
the balance of power.[36] At the same time the patricians retained the
religious power of the old kings, as custodians of the ritual
mysteries--a great source of dominion. Thus the crisis was only
temporarily relieved, and the struggle was renewed again and again, both
under and after the kings. We can broadly divine that the anti-patrician
rule of the king, who would rely on the plebs, unified against him the
patricians or "free" citizens, who sought to keep down the masses;
while, on the other hand, the increasing outlaw plebs was unified by its
sheer need.[37]
As to the rule of the kings, whether native or Etruscan, no exact
knowledge is now possible. We can but trace some of their functions in
certain constitutional forms. Thus the Senate, or Council of the Elders,
appears to have been the council of the king, selected by him, but
capable of nominating his successor.[38] Whatever were its original
function, it became in time the supreme power in the State, growing
alike in numbers and in power, overruling or eclipsing the _comitia
curiata_, _comitia centuriata_, and other bodies in which the general
mass, first of patrician citizens and later of enfranchised plebeians,
were enrolled.[39] But it is not through the complicated archaeology of
the Roman constitution, latterly compiled with such an infinity of
scholarly labour, that the nature of Roman evolution is really to be
known. The technique of the system resulted from an endless process of
compromise among social forces; and it is in the actual clash and play
of those forces, as revealed in the simple records, that the human
significance of it all is to be felt. In this way we substitute for a
vague and false conception of unitary growth one of perpetual strife of
classes, interests, and individualities.
In the doubtful transition period, as the tradition goes, it is in the
time of discontented plebeian subjection, after the expulsion of the
king (510 B.C.), that the Etruscan enemy captures the city (497); and
the surmise that the battle of Lake Regillus was not really a Roman
victory[40] is partly strengthened by the fact that soon after it there
occur the division into twenty-five tribes, the tumults of the nexi, and
the successful Secession of the Plebs, ending in their incorporation,
with two tribunes to represent their interests (494). There is a clear
presumption that only from a weakened patriciate, forced to seek union,
could the plebs have won their tribunate and enfranchisement. On the
other hand, it is after victories over the Volscians that the consul
Spurius Cassius, who had proposed to divide among landless men the land
conquered from the Hernicans, is said to have been executed (485) by the
triumphant aristocracy; and it is in another period of security, when
the Veientines and Sabines are depressed (473), that the tribune Cneius
Genucius is murdered for having ventured to bring a consular to trial.
Always we are in presence of a brutal caste, in the main utterly
selfish, some of whose members are at all times as prone to the use of
the dagger as an Italian _camorra_ of our own day. Yet it is by the
forcing of concessions on this caste that the Roman polity is kept
vigorous and adaptable in comparison with those of the surrounding
States which Rome subordinated or overran.
While Rome thrives, a new project for popular law reform is defeated
(462); and it is after Cincinnatus, according to the legend, barely
saves the State (458) that the tribunes are raised from five to ten, and
the land is divided among the poor (456); though at the same time
decemvirs are appointed and the conservative Twelve (at first Ten)
Tables are drawn up (451-450). Thus partially strengthened, the plebs
are able soon to force the abdication of the decemvirate (449) by the
old menace of their withdrawal; and for a time the commonalty
sufficiently holds its own, getting (445) the right of marriage with
patricians, and (444) the institution of military tribunes with consular
power;[41] though fresh distribution of land is prevented, and the
patricians learn to divide the tribunes against each other. Thus class
dissension goes on till the Gauls capture the city (390), multitudes of
the Romans flying to Veii. Then it is that the plebeian party, after the
Gauls have gone, are willing to transfer the seat of government to Veii;
and the threat would doubtless win them some concessions in the
rebuilding of Rome. But population always blindly increases; and the
cancer of poverty spreads, despite the chronic planting of colonies in
subject territory. Manlius is executed for trying to relieve debtors;
but some land is reluctantly distributed. New wars create new popular
distress, and new colonies fail to relieve it. At length the Licinian
laws, relieving debtors and limiting estates, are proposed (376), and
after nine years of agitation are passed at the crisis (367) at which
the Gauls (who themselves had in the meantime undergone dissensions)
again attack Rome; while the powers of the consuls (limited in 443 by
the appointment of two Censors) are now further limited by the creation
of a Praetor (patrician) and of Curule _aediles_, alternately taken from
the two strata.
This makes a temporary palliation, and in time the now privileged
plebeians[42] lean to the patrician side and status; while fresh wars
with Hernicans, Gauls, Etruscans, and Samnites check class strife, and
the patricians recover preponderance, passing a law (358) to check "new
men." This is immediately followed by counter measures, limiting
interest to ten per cent. and putting a five per cent. tax on
manumissions; but the eternal distress of debtors is renewed, and a vain
attempt is made to meet it (352) by State loans, and again by reducing
interest to five per cent. (347). Increase of plebeian poverty again
causes reactions, and after a mutiny futile laws are passed prohibiting
interest altogether (342); the dictator Publilius carries popular
political laws (339) checking the power of the Senate, and debtors are
once more protected (326). After many wars, checking all domestic
progress, popular distress causes a last Secession of the Plebs (287)
and new political concessions to them; but still wars multiply, till all
Italy is Romanised (266). The now mixed warlike aristocracy of birth,
wealth, and office monopolises power in the Senate; and the residual
plebs gradually ceases to be a distinct moral force, its last great
struggle being made under the Gracchi, to whom it gives no valid
support.
If we consider this evolution purely as a play of domestic political
forces, we recognise it from first to last as a simple conflict of class
needs and interests, partially modified at times by movements of true
public spirit on the part of such men as the patricians who supported
the Licinian laws, and such men as the Gracchi. The State-organism is
the result of the struggles and pressures of its elements. What happened
in the chronic readjustments was never a democratisation of the State,
but at most an institutional protection of the poorer plebeians, and an
admission of the richer to something like equal status with the
optimates. Never was the "people" really united by any common home
interest beyond the need of extorting some privileges. Only to that
extent were the richer plebeians at one with the poorer; and there can
be little doubt that as soon as the former secured the privileges they
craved they tended to abuse them as the patricians had done. There was
no _personnel_ adequate to the effective working of the Licinian laws in
face of a perpetual process of conquest which infallibly evoked always
the instinct of acquisition, and never the science which might have
controlled it. The early division of the State-territory into
twenty-five tribes (495), of whom twenty-one were rural, determined the
limitation of the political problem to the simple sharing of land; and
every effort of public-spirited men to arrest the aggregation of lands
in the hands of a few meant a convulsive explosion of resistance by the
wealthy.
From the Polonian prattle of Cicero to his son we can gather how all
schemes of reconstruction were viewed by the ruling class, whether in
retrospect or prospect. The slaying of Tiberius Gracchus by Scipio
Nasica is a standing theme of praise;[43] the lesson of the course of
things social towards a steep sunderance of "haves" and "have-nots" is
angrily evaded. Cicero knew as well as any the need for social
reconstruction in Rome;[44] and he repeatedly records the sagacity of
Lucius Marcus Philippus, who had been tribune and consul in Cicero's
boyhood. As consul, Philippus had resisted the attempts of M. Livius
Drusus to reform the Senate and provide for the poorer citizens and the
Italians; but inasmuch as he had during his tribuneship avowed the fact
that there were not left two thousand men in the State who owned
property, Cicero denounces the avowal as pernicious.[45] The ideal
aristocratic course was to resist all political change and slay those
who attempted it--Drusus as the Gracchi before him. It was as a
consummation of that policy that there exploded the so-called Marsian or
Social War, in which Rome and the Italian States around her grappled and
tore for years together like their ancestors of the tribal period;
whereafter Marians and Sullans in turn rent Rome, till Sulla's iron
dictatorship, restoring class supremacy, marked the beginning of the end
of self-governing institutions, and prepared for the day of autocracy,
which was not to come without another agony of long-protracted civil
war. It is the supreme proof of the deadliness of the path of conquest
that for most Romans the end of Roman "freedom" was a relief.
Sec. 3
The effect of continuous foreign war in frustrating democracy is here
plain. On the one hand, the peasant-farmers are reduced to debt and
slavery by their inability to farm their lands in war-time, while the
patrician's lands are worked by his slaves. On the other hand, their
distress is met by a share in the lands conquered; and after the
soldiers are allowed pay (406 B.C.) they are more and more ready to join
in conquest. Not only is popular discontent put off by the prospect of
foreign plunder, but the perpetual state of aggressive war, while
tending first to pauperise most of the small cultivators who make the
army, breeds a new public spirit on a low plane, a sinister fraternity
of conquest. Ethics must needs worsen throughout the State when the
primitive instinct of strife developed into a policy of plunder; and
worsened ethics means a positive weakening of a society's total
strength. There is no lesson that men are slower to learn--and this
naturally, because they see the success of unjust conquest--yet there
is no truth easier to prove from history. Early Rome was strong as
against strong enemies, because not only were its people hardily bred,
but the majority were on the whole satisfied that they had just laws:
the reciprocal sense of recognised _rights_ sustained public spirit at
the possible maximum. But the rights are thoroughly selfish at best; and
it is the diversion of their selfishness to the task of continuous
conquest that "saves" the community from early dissolution, preserving
it for the life of dominion, which in turn destroys the old forces of
cohesion, and leaves a community fit only for subjection to a military
autocracy. The society of mutual selfish rights has a measure of
cohesion of its own, up to the point of conflict between the "haves" and
the "have-nots." An outwardly similar cohesion can, indeed, be sustained
for a time by mere concurrence in piracy; but it lies in the very nature
of society that union so engineered, cohesion so secured, is fleeting.
Men whose main discipline is the practice of tyranny over aliens become
simply incapable of strict reciprocity towards kin, and there must ensue
either internecine strife or the degradation of the weaker elements, or
a sequence of these results.
This is what happened in Rome. One of the first political signs of the
contagion of the life of rapine in the later Republic is the growth of
public bribery as a means to further wealth. Administrative posts being
the chief of these means, candidates for them set about buying votes in
the modern manner.[46] As early as 432 B.C. the law against canvassing
by candidates[47] (_lex de ambitu_) suggests the recognition of
electoral corruption; and later there followed a whole series of futile
vetoes--futile because the social conditions grew always morally worse.
The _lex AEmilia Baebia_ (182 B.C.) forbade all money gifts by candidates;
and twenty-three years later another law decreed that offenders should
be exiled. This also failing, there followed the _leges tabellariae_,
establishing the ballot (139-137). Still the disease persisted, because
there was no stop now possible to the career of conquest, which had
undermined the very instincts whereon law depends; and on the
treacherous struggle for place and pelf by way of bribery there
supervened the direct grapple over the ill-gotten gains. The Roman
ruling class had evolved into a horde of filibustering fortune-hunters,
as did the Greeks under and after Alexander; and the political sequels
of despotism and civil war were substantially the same.
The process was gradual, and the phenomena are at times apt to delude
us. When a political machinery was set up that conduced to systematic
and extending warfare in which the commonwealth was often at stake, the
community had a new albeit fatal bond of cohesion, and the destructive
or repulsive energies for generations found a wide field outside of the
State. It is when the aristocratic Republic, succeeding finally in the
long struggle with Carthage for the wealth of Sicily and Spain and the
control of the Mediterranean, has further overrun Greece and pretty well
exhausted the immediate fields of conquest, that the forces of repulsion
again begin to work destructively within the body politic itself, and
men and classes become the fools of their animosities. The wars of
faction, the popular propaganda of the Gracchi, the murderous strifes of
Marius and Sulla, the rivalries of Pompey and Crassus, Conservatives and
Democrats, Caesar and Pompey, the pandemonium on Caesar's death, all in
turn represent the renewed operation within the State of the crude
energies of cohesion and strife which had been so long employed in
foreign war. And the strife is progressively worse, because the
materials are more complex and more corrupt. The aristocracy are more
arrogant and hardened, the free farmer class has in large part
disappeared, and the populace are more debauched.[48]
The perpetual wars had multiplied slaves; and the slaves added a new and
desperate element to the social problem. It was the proof of the fatal
lack in Rome of vital ethical feeling--or, let us say, of social
science--that this deadly iniquity was never effectually recoiled from,
or even impugned as it had been, before Aristotle, among the more highly
evolved of the Greeks.[49] As wealth and luxury, pride and power
accumulated, the usage of slave labour spread ever further and ate ever
deeper into the population, brutalising alike the enslaved and the free.
It was doubtless a partial recognition of this that motived, in
Cicero's day, the large number of affranchisements of slaves
(Wallon, _Hist. de l'Esclavage_, ii, 409). But fresh enslavements
went on; the amelioration consisted in the brevity of the period of
enslavement in cases of good conduct. And the evil was in the main
a product of conquest. It is fairly established by Dureau de la
Malle (_Econ. polit. des Romains_, 1840, vol. i, liv. ii, ch. 2)
that down to the second Punic War Roman slaves were few. They would
be for the most part _nexi_, victims of debt. As conquests
multiplied prisoners, the class increased rapidly. Broadly
speaking, the house servants were all slaves, as were the bulk of
the shepherds in the great _latifundia_, the crews of the galleys,
and many of the artisans. The total number has doubtless been
greatly exaggerated, both in ancient and modern times, as has been
the population of the imperial city. Athenaeus is responsible for
many wild estimates. (Cp. Letronne, as cited by Dureau, liv. ii,
ch. 4.) Dureau arrives by careful calculation at an estimate of an
Italian population of some five millions about the year 529 A.U.C.,
of whom some two and three quarter millions were free and some two
and a quarter millions were slaves or _metaeci_, aliens without
political rights (i, 296). The population of Rome as late as
Aurelian he puts at between 500,000 and 600,000 (i, 368). (See
Prof. Bury's note in his ed. of Gibbon, iii, 308, for different
views. Gibbon, Bunsen, and Hodgkin put the figure at about a
million.) The exact proportion of slaves to free is not of the
essence of the problem. A society with nine slaves for every eleven
free was sufficiently committed to degeneration.
But the fatality of war was as irresistible as the fatality of plebeian
degradation; and the collapse of the slave war in Sicily (132), and the
political movement of the Gracchi, alongside of the new warlike triumphs
in Spain and Southern Gaul (121--the first great successes since the
fall of Carthage), illustrate the general principle that a ruling class
or house may always reckon on checking domestic criticism and popular
self-assertion by turning the animal energies of the people to animal
strife with another nation, in which case union correlates with strife.
Wars imply comradeship and the putting aside of domestic strife for the
time being; and a war with Illyria was made the pretext for suspending
the operation of the new land law passed by the elder Gracchus when the
younger later sought to carry it out. The triumphs of Marius, again,
over Jugurtha and the Cimbri availed nothing to unify the parties in the
State, or to secure his own. In democratising the army by drawing on a
demoralised _demos_, he did but make it a more facile tool for the
general, a thing more detached from the body politic.[50] The tendency
of all classes in Rome to unite against the claims of the outside
Italians was from the first a stumbling-block to the democrats within
Rome; and the final identification of the popular interest, in the
period of Marius and Sulla, with an anti-Roman policy among the Marians,
gave to Sulla, strong in the prestige of recent conquest, the position
of advantage, apart from his own strength. Further, as Montesquieu very
justly notes, civil wars turn an entire nation into soldiers, and give
it a formidable advantage over its enemies when it regains unity.[51]
But this again is only for a time; there is no enduring society where
there is no general sense of reciprocal justice among free men; and
systematic militarism and plunder are the negation of moral reciprocity.
One partial exception, it is true, must be made. In the early days of
the Republic the poor soldier stood to lose his farm by his patriotism.
Soon the fighters had to be paid; and from the day of Marius onwards
Roman commanders perforce provided for their veterans--so often their
accomplices in the violation of their country's laws and liberties. The
provision was made on the one hand by donations from the loot, on the
other by grants of land taken from others, it might be in Italy itself.
Sulla so rewarded his sworders; the triumvirs took the land of eighteen
Italian towns to divide among their legionaries.[52] To the end the
emperors had constantly to provide for their time-expired men by
confiscations. Thus did empire pay for its instrument.
Sec. 4
The animal energies themselves, in time, are affected by domestic
conditions; and when Caesar comes on the scene Rome is visibly far on the
way to a state of things such as had long before appeared in older
civilisations[53]--a state of things commonly but rather loosely called
degenerate, in which the animal energies are grown less robust, and the
life therefore in some respects more civilised. Such a course had been
run in Italy long before the rise of Rome, notably in Etruria, where,
after a conquest of aborigines by a small body of invaders,[54] who were
in touch with early Greek culture, the civilisation remains at that
archaic stage while Greek civilisation continues to progress.[55] There,
with a small aristocracy lording it over a people of serfs,[56] progress
of all kinds was arrested, and even the religion of the conquerors
assimilated to that of the aborigines.[57] In the Rome of Caesar we see,
after much fluctuation, with a more complex and less enfeebled structure
of population, the beginnings of the same fixation of classes; while, at
the same time, there has been such psychological variation as can begin
to give new and ostensibly higher channels to the immanent forces of
union and strife. This is the social condition that, given the required
military evolution, above all lends itself to imperialism or absolute
monarchy; which system in turn best maintains itself by a policy of
conquest, so employing the animal energies and keeping up the cohesive
force of militarist pride throughout all classes. Even now, of course,
in a semi-enslaved populace, as in a slave population pure and
simple,[58] there were possibilities of insurrection; and it was at
length empirically politic for the emperors to give the populace its
daily bread and its daily games, as well as to keep it charmed with the
spectacle of conquest. The expedient of doles of food did not at once
condemn itself by dangerously multiplying mouths, because, although it
was only in the upper classes that men commonly refused to marry and
have legitimate children, population was now restrained by the
preventive checks of vice, city life, and wholesale abortion,[59] which
are so much more effective--alike against child and mother[60]--than the
random resort to infanticide, though that too had greatly increased.[61]
On the other hand, as the field of practicable conquest again approaches
exhaustion and no sufficiently strong rival arises to conquer the
conquerors, nothing can hinder that people of all classes, having no
ideals tending to social and intellectual advance, and no sufficient
channel for the instinct of union in the politics of the autocracy,
shall find some channels of a new kind.[62] These are opened in due
course, and take the shape especially of religious combinations or
churches. Such modes had appeared even in the earlier stages of civic
disintegration, when the semi-private or sectarian cults had begun to
compete successfully with the public or civic. They did so by appealing
more freshly and directly to the growths of emotional feeling (the
outcome in part of physiological modification)[63] which no longer found
outlet in primary forms, such as warfare and primitive revelry. After
having themselves consented in times of panic to the introduction of
several cults in the name of the public interest, the ruling classes,
instinctively conservative by the law of their existence, take fright at
the startling popularity of the unofficial Bacchic mysteries, and decide
to stamp out the movement.[64] But the attempt is futile, the causal
conditions remaining; and soon Judaism, Osirianism, Mithraism, the
worships of Attis, Adonis, Bacchus, Isis, Serapis, all more or less
bound up with divination and sorcery, make way in the disintegrating
body politic.[65] The wheel of social evolution had, so to speak, "gone
full circle" since the first Roman _curia_, the basis of the State,
subsisted as groups with their special _sacra_, finding in these their
reason for cohering. Decadent Rome, all other principles of subordinate
cohesion having been worked out, resolves itself once more into groups
similarly motived. But the principle is newly conditioned, and the
_sacra_ now begin the struggle for existence among themselves. The rise
of Christianity is simply the success of a system which, on a good
economic foundation, copied from that of the Jewish synagogues,
assimilates the main attractions of similar worships, while availing
itself of exoteric and democratic as well as esoteric methods. It thus
necessarily gains ground among the multitude, rich as well as poor;[66]
and its ultimate acceptance by the autocrat was due to the very
exclusiveness which at first made it intolerable. Once diffused widely
enough to set up the largest religious organisation in the Empire, it
became the best possible instrument of centralisation and control, and
as such it was accepted and employed.[67]
And now again we see how inevitably the force of attraction correlates
with the force of repulsion. The new channels of the spirit of union,
being dug not by reason but by ignorance, become new channels for the
reverse flow of the spirit of strife; and as sectarian zeal spreads, in
the absence of openings, good or bad, for public spirit, there arise new
forms of domestic hate and struggle. Crude religious fervours,
excluding, or arising in lack of, the play of the saner and higher forms
of thought and feeling, beget crude antipathies;[68] and Christianity
leads back to bloody strifes and seditions such as had not been seen
since the fall of the Republic. There is not intellectuality enough to
raise men above this new superinduced barbarism of ignorant instinct;
half of the old Christendom, disintegrated like the old politics, is
overrun by a more robust barbarism that adopts a simpler creed; and the
new barbaric Christendom exhibits in its turn all the modes of operation
of the biological forces that had been seen in the old.
Sec. 5
Thus far we have considered Roman evolution in terms of a moral estimate
of the reactions of classes. But lest we lose sight of the principle of
total causation, it is fitting to restate the process in terms of that
conception, thus explaining it non-morally. We may view Rome, to begin
with, as a case of the unique aggrandisement of a State in virtue of fit
conditions and institutions. Thus (1) the comparatively uncommercial
situation of the early Latins, leaving them, beyond cattle-breeding and
agriculture, no occupation save war for surplus energy, and no readier
way of acquiring wealth;[69] (2) the physical collocation of a group of
seven defensive hills, so close that they must be held by a federated
group;[70] (3) the ethnic collocation of a set of tribe groups of nearly
equal vigour and ardour, strengthening each other's sinews by constant
struggling; (4) the creation (not prescient, but purely as a provision
against kingship) of the peculiar institution of the annual
consulate,[71] securing a perpetuity of motive to conquest and a
continuous flow of administrative energy;[72] (5) the peculiar need,
imposed by this very habit of all-round warfare, for accommodation
between the ruling and ruled classes, and for the safeguarding of the
interests of the latter by laws and franchises; (6) the central position
of Rome in Italy, enabling her to subdue it piecemeal; and finally (7)
the development by all these means of a specialist aristocracy,
habitually trained to administration[73]--all these genetic conditions
combined to build up the most remarkable military empire the world has
ever seen. They obtrude, it is clear, half of the explanation of the
fact that the Romans rose to empire where the much more early civilised
Greek cities of Italy did not.
Of the latter fact we still receive the old explanation that it came of
"the habit, which had ever been the curse of Hellenism, of jealous
separation and frequent war between town and town, as well as internal
feuds in the several cities themselves."[74] But this is clearly no
_vera causa_, as these symptoms are duplicated in the history of Rome
itself. The determining forces must, then, be looked for in the special
conditions. The Greeks, indeed, brought with them the tradition of the
separate City-State; but just as the cities remained independent in
Greece by reason of natural conditions,[75] so the Greek cities of Italy
remained isolated and stationary at a certain strength, because their
basis and way of life were commercial, so that while they restricted
each other's growth or dominance they were in times of peace mutually
nutritive. They wanted customers, not plunder. For the Romans plunder
was the first social need after agriculture, and as they began they
continued. When Jugurtha learned that anything could be had of the
Romans for gold, he had but read an open secret.
Of course, the functions that were originally determined by external
conditions came in time to be initial causes--the teeth and claws, so to
speak, fixing the way of life for the body politic. The upper-class
Romans became, as it were, the experts, the specialists of war and
empire and administration. Until they became wholly demoralised by
habitual plunder, they showed, despite their intense primeval
superstition of citizenship,[76] a degree of sagacity in the
conciliation of their defeated rivals which was a main cause of their
being able to hold out against Hannibal, and which contrasts markedly
with the oppressive and self-defeating policy of imperial Carthage,
Athens, and Sparta. Their tradition in part was still that of conquering
herdsmen, not wholly turned into mere exploiters of humanity. Pitted
against any monarch, they were finally invincible, because a
still-growing class supplied their administrators, as the swarming
provinces supplied their soldiers, and because for all alike war meant
plunder and new lands, as well as glory. Pitted against a republic like
Carthage, even when its armies were led by a man of genius, they were
still insuppressible, inasmuch as Carthage was a community of traders
employing mercenaries, where Rome was a community in arms, producing
generals as Carthage produced merchants. Mithridates failed in turn, as
Hannibal failed. The genius of one commander, exploiting passive
material, could not avail against the accumulated faculty for
organisation in the still self-renewing Roman patriciate.[77]
Carthage had, in fact, preceded Rome on the line of the evolution of
class egoism. Herself an expression of the pressure of the social
problem in the older Semitic world, she began as a colony, staved off
domestic strife by colonies, by empire, and by doles,[78] and was
already near the economic stage reached only centuries later by the
Roman Empire. Save for Rome, her polity might have endured on the
imperialist basis for centuries; but, as it was, it was socially
exhausted relatively to the task and the danger, depending as it did on
hired foreign troops and coerced allies. It is idle to speak, as men
still do, of Hannibal's stay in Capua as a fatal mistake.[79] Had
Hannibal taken Rome, the ultimate triumph of the Romans would have been
just as certain. Their State was bound to outlast the other, so long as
it maintained to any extent its old basis of a fecund rural population
of free cultivators, supplying a zealous soldiery, headed by a
specialised class equally dependent on conquest for all advancement. For
the trading Carthaginians, war was, beyond a certain point, a mere act
of self-defence; they could not have held and administered Italy had
they taken it. The supreme general could last only one lifetime; the
nation of warriors still yielded a succession of captains, always
learning something more of war, and raising the standard of capacity as
the progress of machinery widens the scope of all engineers.
The author of a recent and meritorious _History of Rome_, Mr.
Shuckburgh, is satisfied to quote (p. 231) from Polybius, as
explaining the fall of Carthage, the generalisation that "Italians
as a nation are by nature superior to Phoenicians and Libyans,
both in strength of body and courage of soul"; and to add: "That is
the root of the matter, from which all else is a natural growth."
This only leaves us asking: "What was the natural root of the
alleged physiological superiority?" There must have been reasons.
If they were "racial" or climatic, whence the later implied
degeneration of the Romans in body or soul, or both? We are driven
to the explanation lying in polity and institutions, which it
should have been Mr. Shuckburgh's special aim to give, undertaking
as he does to deal with "the state of the countries conquered by
the Romans." And such explanations are actually offered by Polybius
(vi, 53).
Sec. 6
And yet the deterioration of the Roman State is visibly as sure a
sequence as its progress. Nothing that men might then have proposed
could save it. In Cicero's day the Senate had become a den of thieves.
The spectacle of the wealth of Lucullus, taken in Napoleonic fashion
from the opulent East, set governor after governor elsewhere upon a
course of ruthless extortion which depraved Rome as infallibly as it
devastated the subject States.
Roman exploitation of conquest began in the relatively moderate fashion
of self-supporting victors willing to live and let live. Sicily was at
first (210) taxed by Marcellus in a fashion of which Livy makes
boast;[80] and after the suppression of the slaves' revolt in 131 B.C.,
the system was further reformed. Seventeen towns, retaining their lands,
paid a fixed tax to the Republic; eight were immune, save for an annual
contribution of 800,000 _modius_ of wheat for free doles in Rome; and
the rest of the island paid a tenth of all produce, as under Hiero.[81]
Later, the realms of the kings of Macedonia, Pergamos, and Bithynia, and
the lands of Cyrene and Cyprus, were made the public patrimony of the
conquering State. Sardinia, Spain, North Africa, and Asia were in
general taxed a tenth of their produce of all kinds. As the exploitation
went on, individual governors added to all this regular taxation a vast
irregular plunder on their own account; and nearly every attempt to
impeach them was foiled by their accomplices in the Senate.[82] Verres
in Sicily, Fonteius in Southern Gaul, Piso in Macedonia, Appius in
Cilicia, Flaccus in Asia Minor, wrung infinite gold and loot
immeasurable from the victim races by every device of rapacious
brigandage, trampling on every semblance of justice, and then devised
the ironic infamy of despatching corrupted or terrorised deputations of
citizens to Rome to testify to the beneficence of their rule.[83]
It was a riot of robbery in which no public virtue could live. To
moralise on the scarcity of Catos is an ill way of spending time if it
be not recognised that Catos had latterly become as impossible as eaters
of acorns in the upper grades of the ever-plundering State. Cato himself
is a product of the last vestiges of the stage before universal
conquest; and he begins to show in his own later years all the symptoms
of the period of lawless plutocracy. To yearn for a series of such
figures is to ask that men shall be capable of holding doggedly by an
ethic of honest barbarism while living the lives of pirates and slavers,
according no moral sympathy to the larger world of aliens and slaves,
yet cherishing a high public spirit for the small world of the patrician
State. The man himself was a mere moral anomaly; and in Cato the
Younger, dreaming to the last of a loyal republican life, but always
ready at his fellow-citizens' behest to go and beat down the rights or
liberties of any other State,[84] we have the paternal bias reproduced
in an incurable duality. He sought for honour among thieves, himself
being one. Concerning the Catonic attitude towards the "degeneration" of
Roman patrician life in the age of conquest, it has been truly said that
"the policy of shameless selfishness which was pursued by the Roman
Senate during this period, and reached its climax in their abominable
conduct towards the unhappy, prostrate city of Carthage--the frivolous
wars, tending to nothing but aggrandisement and enrichment, waged by
Rome continuously after the second Punic War--destroyed the old Roman
character[85] far more effectually than Grecian art and philosophy could
ever have done. Henceforth there was a fearful increase in internal
corruption, immorality, bribery, an insatiable eagerness for riches,
disregarding everything else and impudently setting aside laws, orders
of the Senate, and legal proceedings, making war unauthorised,
celebrating triumphs without permission, plundering the provinces,
robbing the allies."[86] And the ideal of conquest inspired it all.
We have only to ask ourselves, What was the administrative class to do?
in order to see the fatality of its course. The State must needs go on
seeking conquest, by reason alike of the lower-class and the upper-class
problem. The administrators must administer, or rust. The moneyed men
must have fresh plunder, fresh sources of profit. The proletaries must
be either fed or set fighting, else they would clamour and revolt. And
as the frontiers of resistance receded, and new war was more and more a
matter of far-reaching campaigns, the large administering class at home,
men of action devoid of progressive culture, ran to brutal vice and
frantic sedition as inevitably as returned sailors to debauch; while the
distant leader, passing years of camp life at the head of professional
troops, became more and more surely a power extraneous to the Republic.
When a State comes to depend for its coherence on a standing army, the
head of the army inevitably becomes the head of the State. The Republic
passed, as a matter of course, into the Empire, with its army of
mercenaries, the senatorial class having outlived the main conditions of
its health and energetic stability; the autocracy at once began to
delete the remaining brains by banishing or slaying all who openly
criticised it;[87] and the Empire, even while maintaining its power by
the spell of its great traditional organisation, ran through stage after
stage of civic degeneration under good and bad emperors alike, simply
because it had and could have no intellectual life commensurate with its
physical scope. Its function involved moral atrophy. It needs the
strenuous empiricism of a Mommsen to find ground for comfort in the
apparition of a Caesar in a State that must needs worsen under Caesars
even more profoundly than it did before its malady gave Caesar his
opportunity.
Not that the Empire could of itself have died as an organism. There are
no such deaths in politics; and the frequent use of the phrase testifies
to a hallucination that must greatly hamper political science. The
ancient generalisation[88] to the youth, maturity, and decrepitude and
death of States is true only in respect of their variations of relative
military and economic strength, which follow no general rule.
The comparison of the life of political bodies to that of
individuals was long ago rightly rejected as vicious by Volney
(_Lecons d'Histoire_, 1794, 6ieme Seance), who insisted that
political destruction occurred only through vices of polity,
inasmuch as all polities have been framed with one of the three
intentions of _increasing_, _maintaining_, or _overthrowing_. The
explanation is obscure, but the negation of the old formula is
just. The issue was taken up and pronounced upon to the same effect
in the closing chapter of C.A. Walckenaer's _Essai sur l'histoire
de l'espece humaine_, 1798. (Professor Flint, in his _History of
the Philosophy of History_, cites Walckenaer, but does not mention
Volney's _Lecons_.) Le Play, in modern times, has put the truth
clearly and strongly: "At no epoch of its history is a people
fatally doomed either to progress or decline. It does not
necessarily pass, like an individual, from youth to old age" (cited
by H. Higgs in _American Quarterly Journal of Economics_, July,
1890, p. 428). It is to be regretted that Dr. Draper should have
adhered to the fallacy of the necessary decay and death of nations
in his suggestive work on the _Intellectual Development of Europe_
(ed. 1875, i, 13-20; ii, 393-98). He was doubtless influenced by
the American tendency to regard Europe and Asia as groups of "old
countries." The word "decay" may of course be used with the
implication of mere "sickness," as by Lord Mahon in the opening
sentence of his _Life of Belisarius_; but even in that use it gives
a lead to fallacy.
Had there been no swarming and aggressive barbarians, standing to later
Rome as Rome had done to Carthage--collectively exigent of moral
equality as Romans had once been, and therefore conjunctly mighty as
against the morally etiolated Italians--the Western Roman Empire would
have gone on just as the Eastern[89] so long did, just as China has so
long done--would have subsisted with little or no progress, most factors
of progress being eliminated from its sphere. It ought now to be
unnecessary to point out that Christianity was no such factor, but
rather the reverse, as the history of Byzantium so thoroughly proves. No
Christian writer of antiquity, save perhaps Augustine[90] in a moment of
moral aspiration, shows any perception of the political causation of
the decay and fall of the Empire.[91] The forces of intellectual
progress that did arise and collapse in the decline and the Dark Ages
were extra-Christian heretical forces--Sabellian, Arian, Pelagian,
anti-ritualistic, anti-monastic, Iconoclastic. These once deleted,
Christianity was no more a progressive force among the new peoples than
it was among the old; and the later European progress demonstrably came
from wholly different causes--new empire, forcing partial peace; Saracen
contact, bringing physics, chemistry, and mathematics; new discovery,
making new commerce; recovery of pagan lore, making new speculation;
printing, making books abundant; gunpowder, making arms a specialty; and
the fresh competition and disruption of States, setting up fruitful
differences, albeit also preparing new wars. To try to trace these
causes in detail would be to attempt a complete sociological sketch of
European history, a task far beyond the scope of the present work;
though we shall later make certain special surveys that may suffice to
illustrate the general law. In the meantime, the foregoing and other
bird's-eye views of some ancient developments may illustrate those of
modern times.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: Cp. A. Schwegler, _Roemische Geschichte_, 1853, i, 610-615;
Pelham, _Outlines of Roman History_, 1893, p. 25. When Professor Ferrero
(_Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans. 1907, i, 5) pronounces
that "The Romans were a primitive people without the defects peculiar to
a primitive people," he sets up a needless mystification. They had the
defects of their own culture stage, which was far beyond that of
"primitives" in the general sense of the term. They were "semi-civilised
barbarians," with a long past of institutional life.]
[Footnote 13: It might be an interesting inquiry whether a grouping by
threes could have arisen from a primary union of two exogamous clans.]
[Footnote 14: Schwegler, i, 616. The origin of _tribus_ from _three_ is
not an accident special to the Romans. Among the Spartans and Dorians
likewise there were three stocks (cp. K.O. Mueller, _The Dorians_, Eng.
tr. 1830, i, 35-37; Fustel de Coulanges, _La Cite antique_, 8e edit. p.
135, note 2); and the great number of Greek epithets in which "three" or
"thrice" enters is a proof of the special importance anciently attached
to the number. Cp. K.D. Huellmann, _Ursprung der roemischen Verfassung
durch Vergleichungen erlaeutert_, 1835, p. 24.]
[Footnote 15: Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, 1901, p. 1.]
[Footnote 16: Pelham, p. 20; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 132, _sq._;
Schwegler, i, 610, 615; Ihne, _Early Rome_, 1897, p. 108; Ortolan,
_Hist. de la Legislation romaine_, ed. Labbe, 1880, pp. 35, 36.]
[Footnote 17: Schwegler, i, 611, following Dionysius. Cp. Meyer, ii,
514.]
[Footnote 18: Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, pp. 13, 24, 132, 179; Robertson
Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, 1889, pp. 245, 247, 251, etc.; Jevons,
_Introd. to the History of Religion_, ch. xii.]
[Footnote 19: Cp. Schwegler, i, 628; Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 107; Dupond,
_Magistratures romaines sous la Republique_, 1877, p. 19. The source of
the plebs is one of the vexed points of Roman origins; and the view that
they were primarily a conquered population is not yet generally
accepted. See Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, 1894, p. 44. The true
solution seems to be that the plebs were always being added to in
various ways--by aliens, by "broken men," by discarded clients, and by
fugitives. Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, p. 279.]
[Footnote 20: Schwegler, i, 621-28, 636-38; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 277.
Note the expression _populo plebique_ in Livy, xxix, 27; Cicero, _Pro
Murena_, i; Macrobius, _Saturnalia_, i, 17. Ortolan (endorsed by Labbe)
argues (work cited, p. 31) that _populus plebsque_ no more implies
separation than _senatus populusque_. But this argument destroys itself.
The Senate as such _was_ distinct from the populus, as having
_auctoritas_, while the populus had only _potestas_. The phrase then was
not a pleonasm. By this very analogy _populus plebsque_ implies a vital
legal distinction. Niebuhr, who first made the facts clear (cp. his
_Lectures_, Eng. trans. ed. 1870, p. 107), followed Vico, who was led to
the true view by knowledge of the separateness of the _popolo_ from the
_commune_ in the Italian republics.]
[Footnote 21: Schwegler, i, 619; E.W. Robertson, as cited, p. xxvii. Yet
the constant tradition is that not only did the mass of the people live
mainly on farinaceous food and vegetables, but the upper classes also in
the early period ate meat only on festival days. Cp. Guhl and Koner,
_The Life of the Greeks and Romans_, Eng. trans., pp. 501-2; Pliny,
_H.N._, xviii, 3, 19; Ramsay, _Roman Antiquities_, 1851, p. 437. The
cattle then were presumably sold to the people of the Etruscan and
Campanian cities. Professor Ferrero leaves this problem in a state of
mystery. The early Romans, he writes, had "few head of cattle" (i, 2);
but land capture, he admits, meant increase (p. 5); and at the time of
the Roman Protectorate over all Italy (266 B.C.) he recognises "vast
wandering herds of oxen and sheep, without stable or pen" (p. 9),
conducted by slave shepherds. On such lands there must have been a
considerable amount of cattle-breeding at a much earlier period. On the
other hand, noting that the Romans early imported terracottas and metals
from Etruria, Phoenicia, and Carthage, "besides ivory-work and
ornaments, perfumes for funerals, purple for the ceremonial robes of the
magistrates, and a few slaves" (p. 3), Professor Ferrero lightly affirms
that "it was not difficult to pay for these in exports: timber for
shipbuilding, and salt, practically made up the list."]
[Footnote 22: Cp. Schwegler, i, 451, 617-19; ii, 108; E.W. Robertson,
_Historical Essays in connection with the Land, the Church, etc._, 1872,
pp. xxvi-vii, 244.]
[Footnote 23: E.W. Robertson, as cited, pp. 243-44; Schwegler, i,
617-19.]
[Footnote 24: E.W. Robertson, p. xxv.]
[Footnote 25: Schwegler, i, 619, and refs.; Robertson, pp. 244-45;
Ferrero, i, 9; Greenidge, _Rom. Pub. Life_, p. 35.]
[Footnote 26: Cp. E.W. Robertson, as cited, p. xxv.]
[Footnote 27: Schwegler, i, 629; Robertson, p. xxvii.]
[Footnote 28: Schwegler, i, 620 and refs.]
[Footnote 29: Mommsen (ch. xiii. i, 200) puts this point in some
confusion, making the patricians live mostly in the country. Meyer (ii,
521) seems to put a quite contrary view. Greenidge (_History of Rome_,
1904, p. 11) agrees with Mommsen, putting town houses as a development
of the second century B.C.]
[Footnote 30: According to Niebuhr (_Lectures_, xv; Eng. trans. ed.
1870, p. 81) and Mommsen (ch. iv), the Palatine and the Quirinal. (But
cp. Greenidge, p. 2.) The Palatine was probably the first occupied by
Romans. Schwegler, i, 442. Cp. Merivale, _General History of Rome_, 5th
ed. p. 3, as to its special advantages. The Quirinal was held by the
Sabines. Cp. Koch, _Roman History_, Eng. trans. p. 2.]
[Footnote 31: Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 82.]
[Footnote 32: Presumably "Pelasgian." Cp. K.O. Mueller, _The Dorians_,
Eng. trans. i, 15; Schwegler, i, 155 _sq._]
[Footnote 33: Perhaps the result of a partial conquest. Cp. Mommsen,
vol. i, ch. 6, _ad init._, as to the precedence of the Palatine priests
over those of the Quirinal.]
[Footnote 34: So Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 5.]
[Footnote 35: Cp. Pelham, ch. iii. Ihne, who argues that the narratives
concerning the Etruscan kings are no more trustworthy than those as to
their predecessors, recognises that Pliny's record of the humiliating
conditions of peace imposed on the Romans by Porsenna "would not have
been made if the fact of the subjugation of Rome by an Etruscan king had
not been incontestable" (_Early Rome_, p. 79; cp. pp. 85-86).]
[Footnote 36: Cp. Merimee, _Etudes sur l'histoire romaine_, t. i,
_Guerre sociale_, 1844, p. 352 _sq._; Mommsen, B. ii, ch. i (i, 265).]
[Footnote 37: Cicero (_De Officiis_, ii, 12) and Sallust (cited by
Augustine, _De Civ. Dei_, iii, 16) preserved the belief (accepted by
Niebuhr) that the oppression of the poor by the rich had been restrained
under the kings. Cp. Mahaffy (_Problems in Greek History_, pp. 81-83;
Social _Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p. 83) and Wachsmuth (_Hist. Antiq. of
the Greeks_, Eng. tr. i, 416) as to Greek despots. And see Schwegler,
_Roemische Geschichte_, ii, 203, as to the weakness of Rome through
class-strifes after the expulsion of the kings.]
[Footnote 38: Greenidge, pp. 47-48; Mommsen, i, 72.]
[Footnote 39: Greenidge, pp. 147, 262, 273.]
[Footnote 40: Niebuhr, _Lect._ xxv, 3rd Eng. ed. p. 134. So Ihne, _Early
Rome_, p. 80; and also Schwegler, ii, 200. Mommsen takes the traditional
view. Cp. Shuckburgh (_History of Rome_, p. 71), who remarks that the
battle was at least not a decisive victory. Meyer (_Geschichte des
Alterthums_, ii, 812) gives no verdict.]
[Footnote 41: The demand for the admission of plebeians to the consulate
was thus met on the patrician plea that religion vetoed it. Only in 367
was it enacted that one of the two consuls should always be a plebeian.]
[Footnote 42: Plebeians first admitted to the Quaestorship, 421 B.C.; to
the Military Tribuneship, 400; to the Consulate, 367; to the
Dictatorship, 356; to the Censorship, 351; to the Praetorship, 337. This
left the patricians in possession of the important privilege of
membership of the sacred colleges. But that, in turn, was opened to
plebeians in 300 or 296.]
[Footnote 43: _De Officiis_, i, 22, 30.]
[Footnote 44: _Ad Atticum_, i, 19.]
[Footnote 45: _De Officiis_, ii, 21.]
[Footnote 46: See Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, iv, 272-76, for
some interesting details; and refs. in Merimee, _Guerre Sociale_, p.
22.]
[Footnote 47: Livy, iv, 25.]
[Footnote 48: A writer in many respects instructive (W. Warde Fowler,
_The City State of the Greeks and Romans_, 1893, p. 194), in pursuance
of the thesis that "the Romans" had an "innate political wisdom" and an
"inborn genius" for accommodation, speaks of the process of democratic
self-assertion and aristocratic concession as "leaving no bad blood
behind," this when social disease was spreading all round. The theorem
of "national genius" will suffice to impair any exposition, however
judicious otherwise. And this is the fundamental flaw in the argument of
Bagehot in _Physics and Politics_. Though he notes the possibility of
the objection that he is positing "occult qualities" (p. 24), he never
eliminates that objection, falling back as he does on an assumed "gift"
in "the Romans" (p. 81), instead of asking how an activity was evoked
and fostered.]
[Footnote 49: Cp. the _Politics_, i, 6.]
[Footnote 50: Cp. Professor Pelham's _Outline of Roman History_, 1893,
p. 197; Merimee, _Guerre Sociale_, pp. 217, 220.]
[Footnote 51: _Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains,
et de leur decadence_, ch. xi. He refers to the many cases in point in
modern European history.]
[Footnote 52: Dio Cassius, xlvii, 14; xlviii, 6; Appian, _Bell. Civ._
iv, 3; v, 5, 22.]
[Footnote 53: See below, p. 30, as to Carthage.]
[Footnote 54: Schwegler, _Roemische Geschichte_, i, 269.]
[Footnote 55: _Idem_, i, 272-73.]
[Footnote 56: See Livy, xxxiii, 36, as to the _conjuratio servorum_
throughout Etruria in 557 A.U.C.]
[Footnote 57: Schwegler, i, 270, 275.]
[Footnote 58: Compare the slave wars of Rome in Sicily with the modern
disorders (1892) in the same region, and with Aristotle's testimony as
to the constant tendency of the slave populations in Greece to conspire
against their owners (_Politics_, ii, 9).]
[Footnote 59: Juvenal, _Sat._ vi, 368, 593-96; Ovid, _Amor_. 1. ii,
elegg. 13, 14. It is uncertain whether among the ancients any prudential
preventive check was thought of. On the whole question see Malthus'
fourteenth chapter. Malthus, however, omits to notice that the Romans
probably learned the arts of abortion from the Greeks, Egyptians, and
Syrians.]
[Footnote 60: Ovid speaks of the many women killed, _Amor._ ii. xiv,
38.]
[Footnote 61: Malthus cites Tacitus, _De Mor. Germanorum_, c. 19;
Minucius Felix, c. 30; Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xxix, 4.]
[Footnote 62: Cp. Shaftesbury, _Characteristics_, Treatise ii, pt. iii,
Sec. 2 (i, 114). Guizot seems to find the process surprising: "Singulier
phenomene! C'est au moment ou l'Empire se brise et disparait, que
l'Eglise chretienne se rallie et se forme definitivement. L'unite
politique perit, l'unite religieuse s'eleve" (_Histoire de la
civilisation en France_, ed. 1874, i, 339). He does not recognise the
case as one of cause and effect. Of course, the fall of the State is not
necessary to set up new combinations. It suffices that men should be
without political influence or national consciousness--_e.g._, the
secret societies of China in recent times.]
[Footnote 63: An inquiry, or series of inquiries, into the physiological
side of social and political development is obviously necessary, and
must be made before sociology can on this side attain much scientific
precision. I know, however, no general treatise on the subject except an
old essay on _Changes Produced in the Nervous System by Civilisation_,
by Dr. Robert Verity (2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1839). This is suggestive,
but, of course, tentative. Cp. Ferrero, _Greatness and Decline of Rome_,
Eng. trans, i, 298-99.]
[Footnote 64: Livy, xxxix, 8-18. See below, pt. iii. ch. iii.]
[Footnote 65: Cp. Salverte, _De la Civilisation_, p. 52.]
[Footnote 66: The subject is discussed in the author's essay on
Mithraism in _Pagan Christs_.]
[Footnote 67: M. Hochart (_Etudes d'histoire religieuse_, 1890, ch. ix)
argues that Constantine was never really converted to Christianity; and
this is perhaps the best explanation of his long postponement of his
baptism.]
[Footnote 68: Compare episodes in the history of the Salvation Army in
England (1890), where that body was seen prepared to practise continuous
fighting. It had no thought of "Christian" conciliation.]
[Footnote 69: Various causes, the chief being probably Greek piracy, had
caused in pre-Roman Etruria a decay of the original seaports. See
Schwegler, _Roemische Geschichte_, i, 273.]
[Footnote 70: On this cp. Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 6; and Mommsen, ch.
iv.]
[Footnote 71: This may have been set up in imitation of the Carthaginian
institution of _Suffetae_, which would be well known to the Etruscans of
the monarchic period, who had much traffic with Carthage. E. Meyer,
_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 701. But it may also be explained by
the simple fact that the original army was divided into two legions
(_id._ ii, 812).]
[Footnote 72: On this see Montesquieu, _Grandeur des Romains_, c. 1. No
one has elucidated so much of Roman history in so little space as
Montesquieu has done in this little book, which Buckle rightly set above
the _Esprit des Lois_. (Cp. the eulogy of Taine, in his _Tite-Live._)
Its real insight may perhaps best be appreciated by comparing it with
the modern work of M. Charles Gouraud, _Histoire des Causes de la
Grandeur de l'Angleterre_ (1856), in which it will be hard to find any
specification of real causes.]
[Footnote 73: The specification of this detail is one of the items of
real explanation in Mr. Warde Fowler's scholarly and sympathetic account
of the development of the Roman City-State (work cited, c. viii). He
credits the Romans with an "innate genius" for combination and
constitutionalism as compared with the Greeks, not noticing the fact
that Roman unity was in the main a matter of conquest of non-Romans by
Romans; that the conquest was furthered by the Roman institutions; that
the institutions were first, so to speak, fortuitously shaped in favour
of systematic war and conquest by the revolt against kingship; that war
and conquest, again, were taken to almost inevitably as the main road to
wealth; and that the accommodations of later times were forced on the
upper classes by the career of warfare, to which domestic peace was
indispensable. (Cp. Hegel as to the element of coercion and patrician
policy in the Roman social system. _Philos. der Gesch._, Theil iii,
Abschnitt i, Kap. i.) See below, Sec. 6, as to the very different
conditions of the Greek City-States.]
[Footnote 74: E.S. Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, 1894, p. 16.]
[Footnote 75: See below, ch. iii, _end_; ch. iv, Sec. 2 (_c_).]
[Footnote 76: Cp. Livy, viii, 3-5.]
[Footnote 77: Cp. Ferrero, _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans,
i, 240.]
[Footnote 78: Cp. Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 11; vi, 5.]
[Footnote 79: Already in Montesquieu's _Grandeur des Romains_ it is
pointed out that for Hannibal's soldiers, loaded with plunder, anywhere
was Capua. Montesquieu rightly observes that the stock phrase on that
head is one of the things everybody says because it has once been said.
And it is repeated still.]
[Footnote 80: Livy, xxv, 40.]
[Footnote 81: Cicero, _In Verrem_, iii, 6; iv, 65; v, 21, 22.]
[Footnote 82: Sallust, _Bell. Jugurth._, c. 36.]
[Footnote 83: Cicero, _In Verrem_, iii, 20, 38, 81; v, 34; _In
Pisonem_,34-36; _Pro Flacco_, 12; _Pro Fonteio_, 5; _Pro lege Manilia_,
13. See the record in Dureau de la Malle, _Econ. polit. des Romains_,
1840, vol. ii, liv. iv, ch. 8. Cp. Ferrero, i, 113-14, 183.]
[Footnote 84: Cp. Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, ii. 78-81, and
Merivale, _General History of Rome_, pp. 299-300, as to the plunder and
annexation of Cyprus. "Whether the annals of British India contain so
foul a crime," writes Long, "I leave those to determine who know more of
Indian affairs than I do."]
[Footnote 85: An admission that national "character" is not a connatural
or fixed bias, but a simple function of variables.]
[Footnote 86: Teuffel, _Hist. of Roman Literature_, ed. Schwabe, Eng.
trans. i, 122 (Sec. 91).]
[Footnote 87: See the process traced in W.A. Schmidt's _Geschichte der
Denk und Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und
des Christenthums_, 1847.]
[Footnote 88: Polybius, vi, 51. See below, ch. iv, Sec. 1 (11).]
[Footnote 89: I am aware that Mr. Bury protests against this division;
but his own difficulty in calling the middle (Byzantine) Empire the
"later Roman Empire," while implicitly accepting the "Holy" Empire as
_another_ "later Roman Empire," is the best proof that the established
nomenclature is the most convenient. Nobody is misled by it. A
compromise might perhaps be made on the form "Greek Empire," contended
for by M. Sathes (_Monumenta Historiae Hellenicae_, i, pref. p. 5),
following on M. Rambaud.]
[Footnote 90: As cited below, pt. v, ch. i.]
[Footnote 91: Salvian, for instance, sees in the barbarian irruption a
punishment of Christian sins; he never dreams of asking the cause of the
Christian and pre-Christian corruption. Prudentius, again, is a thorough
imperialist. See the critique and citations of M. Boissier, _La Fin du
Paganisme_, ii, 136-141,407. Origen had set the note a century before
Constantine (_Contra Celsum_, viii, 68-72).]
CHAPTER III
GREEK POLITICAL EVOLUTION
The politico-economic history of Greece has been less cleared up than
that of Rome, by reason not only of the greater complexity of the
problem, but of the predominance of literary specialism in Greek
studies.
The modern Greek historian, Paparrigopoulo, has published in French
an _Histoire de la Civilisation hellenique_ (Paris, 1878), which
condenses his learned Greek work in five volumes; but the general
view, though sometimes suggestive, is both scanty and superficial
as regards ancient Greek history, and runs to an unprofitable
effort at showing the "unity" of all Hellenic history, Pagan and
Christian, in terms of an assumed conception of Hellenic character.
The posthumous _Griechische Culturgeschichte_ of Jakob Burckhardt
(1898) throws little light on social evolution. Trustworthy,
weighty, and lucid, like all Burckhardt's work, it is rather a
survey of Greek moral conditions than a study of social
development, thus adding something of synthesis to the previous
scholarly literature on the subject without reducing the phenomena
to any theory of causation. It includes, however, good studies of
vital social developments, such as slavery, to which Grote and
Thirlwall paid surprisingly little attention, and which Mahaffy
handles inadequately. This is also to be studied in W.R.
Patterson's _Nemesis of Nations_ (1907)--with some caution as
regards the political generalisations.
Since the first edition of the present work there has appeared, in
Dr. G.B. Grundy's _Thucydides and the History of his Age_ (1911) a
new recognition of the fundamental character of economic conditions
in Greek as in other history. Dr. Grundy, finding no academic
precedent for his sociological method, has urged as new truths
propositions which for economic historians are or should have been
axioms. The result, however, is a really stimulating and valuable
presentment of Greek history in terms of causal forces.
The chapters on Greece in Dr. Cunningham's _Western Civilisation_
(1898), though they contain not a few explanations of Greek
culture-phenomena on the old lines, in terms of themselves, are
helpful for the purposes of the present inquiry, since they really
study causation, as do Meyer's _Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung des
Alterthums_ and some other recent German treatises, of which Dr.
Cunningham makes use.
Much use, however, remains to be made of these and previous expert
studies. Boeckh's great work on the _Public Economy of the
Athenians_, which, though containing economic absurdities, hardly
deserves even in that regard the strictures passed on it by the
first English translator (Sir G.C. Lewis, 1828; 2nd ed. 1842;
superior American ed. tr. from 2nd German ed. by A. Lamb, 1857),
has not very fruitfully affected the later historians proper. The
third German edition by Fraenkel, 1886, typifies the course of
scholarship. It corrects details and adds a mass of _apparatus
criticus_ equal in bulk to the whole original work, but supplies no
new ideas. Heeren's section on Greece in his _Ideen_, etc.,
translated as a _Sketch of the Political History of Ancient Greece_
(1829), and also as part of Heeren's _Thoughts on the Politics_,
etc., of _the Ancient World_, is too full of early misconceptions
to be well worth returning to, save for its general view. On the
other hand, Grote's great _History of Greece_, though unmatched in
its own species, and though a far more philosophical performance
than that of Mitford (which Professor Mahaffy and the King of
Greece agree in preferring for its doctrine), is substantially a
narrative and critical history on the established lines, and does
not aim at being more than incidentally sociological; and that of
Bishop Thirlwall, though in parts superior in this regard, is
substantially in similar case. At several points, indeed, Grote
truly illuminates the sociological problem--notably in his view of
the reactions between the Greek drama and the Greek life. Of the
German general histories, that of Holm (Eng. tr. 4 vols. 1894-98)
is a trustworthy and judicious embodiment of the latest research,
but has no special intellectual weight, and is somewhat needlessly
prolix. The history of Dr. Evelyn Abbott, so far as it has gone,
has fully equal value in most respects; but both leave the need for
a sociological history unsatisfied. Mr. Warde Fowler's _City State
of the Greeks and Romans_ (1893) points in the right direction, but
needs following up.
Apart from Burckhardt and Cunningham, the nearest approach yet made
to a sociological study of Greek civilisation is the series of
works on Greek social history by Professor Mahaffy (_Social Life in
Greece_; _Greek Life and Thought from the Age of Alexander to the
Roman Conquest_; _The Greek World under Roman Sway_; _Problems of
Greek History_; and _Survey of Greek Civilisation_). These learned
and brilliant volumes have great value as giving more vivid ideas
of Greek life than are conveyed by any of the regular histories,
and as constantly stimulating reflection; but they lack method,
omit much, and abound regrettably in capricious and inconsistent
dicta. The _Survey_ is disappointing as emphasising rather than
making good the defects of the previous treatises. G.F.
Hertzberg's _Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der
Roemer_ (1866), and indeed all his works on Greek history, are
always worth consulting.
Some help may be had from the volume on Greece in the _Industrial
History of the Free Nations_ by W.T. M'Cullagh (1846); but that
fails to throw any light on what should have been its primary
problem, the rise of Greek industry, and is rather sentimental than
scientific in spirit. For later Greece, Finlay (_History of Greece
from its Conquest by the Romans_, revised ed. 7 vols. 1877) becomes
illuminating by his interest in economic law, though he holds
uncritically enough by some now exploded principles, and exhibits
some religious prejudice. His somewhat entangled opening sections
express his difficulties as a pioneer in sociological
history--difficulties only too abundantly apparent in the following
pages. Professor J.B. Bury's _History of the Later Roman Empire_ (2
vols. 1889) is an admirable work; but it does not attempt, save
incidentally, to supersede Finlay in matters economic.
Sec. 1
The political history of ancient Greece, similarly summarised, will
serve perhaps even better the purpose of illuminating later evolution.
That history has served historian after historian as a means of modern
polemic. The first considerable English historians of Greece, Gillies
and Mitford, pointed to the evil fate of Greek democracy as a conclusive
argument against countenancing democracy now; never stopping to ask
whether ancient monarchies had fared any better than the democracies.
And it is perfectly true that present-day democracies will tend to bad
fortune just as did the ancient unless they bottom themselves more
firmly and guide themselves by a deeper political science. It will not
suffice that we have rejected the foundation of slavery, on which all
the Greek polities rested. The strifes between the demos and the
aristocracy in the Greek City-States would have arisen just as surely,
though more slowly, if the demos, instead of being an upper-grade
populace owning slaves, had included the whole mass of the artisan and
serving class.[92] Where population increases at anything like the
natural animal rate, and infanticide is not overwhelming, poverty must
either force emigration or breed strife between the "have-nots" and the
"haves," barring such continuous stress of war as suffices at once to
thin numbers and yield conquerors the lands of the slain losers. During
some centuries the pressure was in part relieved by colonisation, as had
already happened among the Phoenicians;[93] the colonies themselves in
turn, with their more rapid evolution, developing the inevitable strife
of rich and poor more quickly and more violently than the mother
cities.[94] Among these, it was when that relief seemed to be exhausted
that strife became most dangerous, being obscurely perceived to be a
means to advancement and prosperity for individuals, as well as for the
State which could extort tribute or plunder from the others. War,
however, limits agriculture, so that food supply is kept proportionately
small; and with peace the principle of population soon overtakes lost
ground; so that, though the Greek States like others tended to gain in
solidarity under the stimulus of foreign war, the pressure of poverty
was always breeding fresh division.
If we take up Grecian history after the settling down of the prehistoric
invasions, which complicated the ordinary process of rupture and
fission, that process is seen occurring so frequently, and in so many
different States, that there can be no question as to the presence of a
general sociological law, not to be counteracted in any community save
by a radical change of conditions. Everywhere the phenomena are broadly
the same. The upper class ("upper" in virtue either of primary
advantages or of special faculty for acquiring wealth) attains to
providing for its future by holding multitudes of poorer citizens in
debt--the ancient adumbration of the modern developments of landlordism,
national debts, and large joint-stock enterprises, which yield
inheritable incomes. In early times, probably, debt led as often to
adult enslavement in Greece as in Rome;[95] but in a world of small and
warring City-States, shaken by domestic division, constantly making
slaves by capture and purchase, and always exposed to the risk of their
insurrection, this was too dangerous a course to be long persisted
in,[96] and the creditor was led to press his mortgaged debtor in other
ways. The son or the daughter was sold to pay the father's dues, or to
serve in perpetual payment of interest; and the cultivator's share was
ever at the lowest point. The pressure increases till the mass of
debtors are harassed into insurrection, or are used by an adventurer to
establish himself as despot.[97] Sometimes, in later days, the documents
of debt are publicly destroyed;[98] sometimes the land is divided
afresh.[99] Landholders burdened with debt would vote for the former
course and resist the latter;[100] and as that was clamoured for at
Athens in early times, it may be presumed that in some places it was
resorted to. Sometimes even a refunding of interest would be insisted
on.[101] Naturally such means of rectification availed only for a
moment; the despot stood a fair chance of being assassinated; the
triumphant demos would be caballed against; the exiled nobles, with the
cold rage of Theognis in their hearts, would return; and the last state
of the people would be worse than the first; till again slackened
vigilance on one side, and intolerable hardship on the other, renewed
the cycle of violent change.
In the course of ages there was perforce some approach to
equipoise;[102] but it was presumably at the normal cost of a definite
abasement of the populace;[103] and it was by a famous stroke of
statecraft that Athens was able so to solve her first great crisis as to
make possible some centuries of expanding democratic life. The name of
Solon is associated with an early crisis (594 B.C.) in which debt and
destitution among the Athenian demos (then still for the most part small
cultivators, for whom the city was a refuge fortress, but as a rule no
longer owning the land they tilled) brought matters to the same point as
was marked in Rome by the Secession of the Plebs. The Athenian oligarchy
was very much like the Roman; and when the two sides agreed to call in
Solon as arbitrator it was with a fairly general expectation that he
would take the opportunity to become tyrant. The people knew him to be
opposed to plutocratic tyranny; the nobles and traders, anxious for
security, thought him sure to be their friend; and both sorts had small
objection to such a one as "despot." But Solon, a noble of moderate
means, who had gained prestige in the wars of Athens with her
neighbour, Megara, and some knowledge of life as a travelling trader,
brought to his problem a higher vision than that of a Roman patrician,
and doubtless had a less barbarous stock to deal with. Later ages,
loosely manipulating tradition, ascribed to him a variety of laws that
he cannot have made;[104] but all the records concur in crediting him
with a "Seisachtheia," a "shaking-off-of-burdens," and a healing of the
worst of the open wounds of the body politic. All existing mortgages
were cancelled; all enslavement for debt was abolished; Athenians who
had been sold into alien slavery were bought back (probably by a
contribution from relieved debtors[105]); and the coinage was
recast--whether or not by way of reducing State payments is not clear.
Grote (ii, 471), while eulogising Solon's plan as a whole, accepts
the view that he debased the money-standard; while Boeckh
(_Metrologie_, ch. 15) holds him to have further altered the
weights and measures. For the former view there is clear support in
Plutarch (_Solon_, c. 15), and for the latter in the lately
recovered Aristotelian _Polity of Athens_ (c. 10). But when Messrs.
Mitchell and Caspari, in their abridgment of Grote (p. 45), declare
that the latter document makes clear that the coinage measure was
solely for the promotion of trade, and entirely independent of the
Seisachtheia (so also Bury, p. 183), they unduly stress the
evidence. The document, which is hardly Aristotelian in structure,
proceeds doubtfully on tradition and not upon record; and there may
be some truth in the old view of Androtion (Plut. c. 15), that
Solon only reduced the rate of interest while altering the
money-standard. The point is really obscure. Cp. Abbott, _Hist. of
Greece_, i, 407-8; Grote, ii, 472-76; Meyer, ii, 651-52; Cox, _Gen.
Hist. of Greece_, 2nd ed. pp. 76-79. So far are we from exact
knowledge that it is still a moot point whether the tenant
_Hektemorioi_ or "Sixth-men" _paid_ or _received_ a sixth part of
their total product. Cp. Mitchell and Caspari, abr. of Grote, p.
14, _note_; Cox, _Gen. Hist. of Greece_, 2nd ed. p. 77; Bury,
_Hist. of Greece_, ed. 1906, p. 181; Meyer, ii, 642; Abbott, _Hist.
of Greece_, i, 289.
While the burdened peasants and labourers were thus ostensibly given a
new economic outlook on life, they were further humanised by being given
a share in the common polity. To the Ecclesia or "Congregation" of the
people Solon gave the power of electing the public magistrates; and by
way of controlling somewhat the power of the Areopagus or Senate, he
established a "pre-considering" Council or "Lower House" of Four
Hundred, chosen from all save the poor class, thus giving the State
"two anchors." And though the executive was in the hands of the
aristocracy, subject only to popular election, the burdens of the
community were soundly adjusted by a new or improved classification of
citizens according to their incomes ("timocracy"), which worked out
somewhat as a graduated income-tax, whether by way of a money-rate or in
respect of their share in military duties and public "liturgies," which
had to be maintained by the richer citizens.
As to this vexed question, see Boeckh, _Staatsaushaltung der
Athener_, B. iv, c. 5 (Grote's ref. wrong), as expounded and
checked by Grote (ii, 485-88). Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari, in
their abridgment of Grote (pp. 22, 49, _notes_), reject the whole
interpretation (which is reached by a combination of ancient data,
Plutarch [c. 18] telling nothing as to taxation). But they adduce
only the negative argument that "as we know that Peisistratos, the
champion of the poorer classes, subsequently levied a uniform tax
of five or ten per cent., it is absurd to suppose that the highly
democratic principle of a sliding-scale had been previously adopted
by Solon. Peisistratos would not have dared to attempt a reaction
from a sliding-scale income-tax to a sort of poll-tax." To this it
might be replied that the "flat rate" of Peisistratos--which ought
to modify the conception of him as the "friend of the poor"--may
have been an addition to previous taxes; and that the division of
citizens into income-classes must have stood for _something_ in the
way of burdens. The solution would seem to be that these were not
regular money taxes. "Regular direct taxes were as little known in
free Athens as in any other ancient State; they are the marks of
absolute monarchy, of unfreedom" (Meyer, ii, 644). "Seemingly, it
was not until later times that this distribution of classes served
the purposes of taxation" (Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_,
Eng. tr. p. 40). But already the cost of certain public services,
classed under the head of "liturgies," was laid upon the rich; and
there may well have been a process of collective contribution
towards these at a time when very rich citizens cannot have been
numerous.
Doubtless the graduated income-tax would have been unworkable in a
systematic way, though in the "Servian" timocracy of early Rome a
_tributum_ seems to have been imposed on the classes (Livy, ii, 9).
At yet other points Solon prepared the ground for the democratic
structure of the later Athenian polity. By overthrowing the sacrosanct
power of the aristocratic priestly houses, who had aggrandised
themselves by it like the nobles of early Rome, he prevented the growth
of a hierocracy. By constituting out of all the citizens, including the
Thetes or peasant cultivators, a kind of universal jury-court, out of
which the panels of judges were to be taken by lot, he put the people on
the way of becoming a court of appeal against the upper-class archons,
who recruited the Areopagus. "The constitution of the judicial courts
(_Heliaia_) out of the whole people was the secret of democracy which
Solon discovered. It is his title to fame in the history of the growth
of popular government in Europe."[106]
The whole reform was indeed a great achievement; and so far definitive
that from that time forward Athens needed no further resort to
"Seisachtheia" or to alteration of the money-standard. Solon had in fact
eliminated the worst disruptive force at work in the community--the
enslavement of the debtor; a reform so radical,[107] when considered as
one man's work, that to note its moral limits may seem to imply
blindness to its value. Henceforth, on the lines of the democracy which
he made possible, Athenians were so far homogeneous that their slaves
were aliens. Beyond that point they could not rise; after Solon, as
before, they were at daggers drawn with neighbouring Statelets, and to
the end it remained tolerable to them to enslave the men of other
Greek-speaking communities. Floated over the first reef by Solon, they
never found a pilot to clear the second--the principle of group-enmity.
Upon that the Hellenic civilisation finally foundered.
Even in respect of what he achieved, Solon received but a chequered
recognition in his own time. The peasantry had expected him to divide
the land among them;[108] and when they found that the abolition of
enslavement for debt did not mean much less stress of life, they were
ready to forfeit all the political rights he had given them for some
more tangible betterment.
The simple fact that a generation later Peisistratos was able to become
tyrant in the teeth of the aged Solon's vehement opposition is
intelligible only as standing for the feeling of many of the common
people that through a _tyrannos_ alone could their interests be
maintained against the perpetual conspiracy of the upper class to
overreach them.[109] It may be that Solon had alienated the rural folk
by his concern for commerce, which would be likely to mean the
encouragement of imports of food.[110] Peisistratos, we know, was the
leader of the _Diakrioi_, the herdsmen and crofters of the uplands, and
was "accounted the most thorough democrat" as against the landlords of
the plains (_Pediaioi_), led by Lycurgos, and the traders of the coast
(_Paraloi_), led by Megacles.[111] The presumption is that by this time
the fertile plain-lands were largely owned by rich men, who worked them
by hired labour; but the nature of the conflicting forces is not now to
be clearly ascertained. The credit given afterwards to Peisistratos for
maintaining the Solonian laws points to an understanding between him and
the people;[112] and their acceptance of him in Solon's despite suggests
that they even identified the latter with the failure of his laws to
secure them against further aristocratic oppression.
Nonetheless, Solon's recasting of the political structure of the State
determined the future evolution. As Athens grew more and more of an
industrial and trading city, her people reverted more and more surely to
the self-governing ideal; albeit the Solonian constitution preserved the
unity of the State, keeping all the people of Attica "Athenians." The
rule of Peisistratos was twice upset, and that of his house in all did
not last much above fifty years. When the last member was driven out by
Kleisthenes (510 B.C.), the constitution was re-established in a more
democratic form than the Solonian; all freemen of Attica became burghers
of Athens; and thousands of unenfranchised citizens and emancipated
slaves obtained full rights of citizenship. For better and for worse,
republican Athens was made--a new thing in the ancient world, for
hitherto "democratical government was a thing unknown in Greece--all
Grecian governments were either oligarchical or despotic, the mass of
the freemen having not yet tasted of constitutional privilege."[113]
What followed was an evolution of the old conflicting forces on a new
constitutional basis, the balance of power and prestige being on the
side of the demos and its institutions, no longer on that of a
land-owning and dominant aristocracy. But the strife never ceased.
Kleisthenes himself found "the Athenian people excluded from everything"
once more, and, "being vanquished in the party contest with his rival,
took the people into partnership."[114] The economic tendencies of all
civic life reproduced the hostility again and again. One of the most
remarkable of the laws of Solon was that which disfranchised any citizen
who in a "stasis" or seditious feud stood aloof and took no side.[115]
He had seen the risks of such apathy in the attempt of Kylon, in his
youth, to become despot of Athens; and his fears were realised when
Peisistratos seized power. The law may have helped to promote
public-spirited action; but in the nature of things it was hardly
necessary when once democracy was established. Again and again the demos
had to fight for its own hand against the cliques who sought to restore
oligarchy; and apathy was not likely to be common. The perpetual
generation of fresh poverty through rapid increase of population, and
the inevitable resort to innovating fiscal and other measures to relieve
it, sufficed to provide grounds of class strife while free Athens
endured.
It lies on the face of Aristotle's _Politics_, however, that even if the
population difficulty had been solved otherwise than by exodus, and even
if the Athenians could have guarded against class strife among
themselves, the fatality of war in the then civilised world would have
sufficed to bring about political dissolution. As he profoundly
observes, the training of a people to war ends in their ruin, even when
they acquire supremacy, because their legislators have not "taught them
how to rest."[116] Add the memorable testimony of Thucydides concerning
the deep demoralisation wrought by the Peloponnesian War--a testimony
supported by every page of the history of the time. Even the sinister
virtue of uniting a people within itself was lacking to the perpetual
warfare of the Greeks: the internal hatreds seemed positively to worsen
in the atmosphere of the hatreds of the communities. But while the
spirit of strife is universal, peoples are inevitably trained to war;
and even if the Greek States could have so far risen above their
fratricidal jealousies as to form a stable union, it must needs have
turned to external conquest, and so run the downward course of the
post-Alexandrian Hellenistic Empires, and of the Roman Empire, which in
turn sank to dissolution before the assaults of newer militarisms.
Sec. 2
Nothing can save any democratic polity from the alternatives of insane
strife and imperial subjection but a vital prosperous culture, going
hand in hand with a sound economy of industry. The Greek democracies in
their different way split on the rock that wrecked the Roman Republic:
there was (1) no general mental development commensurate with the
political problems which arose for solution, and (2) there was no
approach to a sound economics. The first proposition will doubtless be
denied by those who, nourished on the literature of Greece, have come to
see in its relative excellence, the more confidently because of the
abiding difficulty of mastering it, the highest reach of the faculties
of thought and expression. But this judgment is fundamentally astray,
because of the still subsisting separation, in the literary mind, of the
idea of literary merit from the idea of scientific sanity. Men
themselves too often vowed to the defence and service of a mythology are
slow to see that it was not for nothing that the Athenian people
bottomed its culture to the last on myth and superstition. Yet a little
reflection might make it clear that the community which forced Socrates
to drink the hemlock for an alleged and unproved scepticism, and
Anaxagoras to fly for a materialistic hypothesis concerning the sun,
could have no political enlightenment adequate to the Athenian needs. We
see the superstitious Athenian demos playing the part of the ignorant
multitude of all ages, eager for a master, incapable of steadfast
self-rule, begging that the magnificent Alcibiades, who led the sacred
procession to Eleusis in despite of the Spartans near at hand, shall put
down his opponents and reign at Athens as king[117]--this after he had
been exiled by the same demos on a charge of profane parody of the
Eleusinian mysteries, and sacerdotally declared accursed for the
offence.[118] A primitive people may stumble along in primitive
conditions by dint of elementary political methods; but a civilised
people with a complex political problem can solve it only by means of a
correspondingly evolved science. And the Athenian people, with their
purely literary and aesthetic culture, never as a body reached even a
moderate height of ethical and scientific thought,[119] or even any such
general aesthetic well-being as we are apt to credit them with. Moderns
think of them, as the great song of Euripides has it, "lightly lifting
their feet in the lucid air,"[120] and are indulgently ready to take by
the letter the fine panegyric of the Athenian polity by Pericles,[121]
forgetting that statesmen in all ages have glorified their State, always
making out the best case, always shunning discouragement for their
hearers, and making little account of evil. But Burckhardt, after his
long survey, decides with Boeckh that "the Hellenes were more unhappy
than most men think;"[122] and the saying holds good of their political
and intellectual life above all things.
Our more idealising scholars forget that the philosophy of the
philosophers was a specialism, and that the chance of hearing a tragedy
of Sophocles or a comedy of Aristophanes was no training in political
conduct for a people whose greatest philosopher never learned to see the
fatality of slavery. On the economic side, Periclean Athens was nearly
as ill founded as aristocratic Rome. Citizens often with neither
professions nor studies, with no ballasting occupation for head or hand;
average men paid from the unearned tribute of allied States to attend to
affairs without any fundamental study of political conditions; citizens
whose work was paid for in the same fashion; citizens of merely
empirical education, for whom politics was but an endless web of
international intrigue, and who had no higher ideal than that of the
supremacy of their own State in Hellenedom or their own faction in the
State--such men, it is now easy to see, were incapable of saving Athens,
much less of unifying Greece. They were politically raised to a
situation which only wise and deeply instructed men could fill, and they
were neither wise nor deeply instructed, however superior their
experience might make them relatively to still worse trained
contemporaries, or to populations living under a systematic despotism.
On some of the main problems of life the majority had thought no further
than their ancestors of the days of the kings. The spell of religion had
kept them ignorant and superstitious.[123] In applied ethics they had as
a body made no progress: the extension of sympathy, which is moral
advance, had gone no further than the extortion of civic status and
power by some new classes, leaving a majority still enslaved. Above all,
they could not learn the lesson of collective reciprocity; could not see
the expediency of respecting in other communities the liberty they
prized as their own chief good. Athens in her turn "became an imperial
or despot city, governing an aggregate of dependent subjects all without
their own active concurrence, and in many cases doubtless contrary to
their own sense of political right.... But the Athenians committed the
capital fault of taking the whole alliance into their own hands, and
treating the allies purely as subjects, without seeking to attach them
by any form of political incorporation or collective meeting and
discussion--without taking any pains to maintain community of feeling or
idea of a joint interest--without admitting any control, real or even
pretended, over themselves as managers. Had they attempted to do this,
it might have proved difficult to accomplish--so powerful was the force
of geographical dissemination, the tendency to isolated civic life, and
the repugnance to any permanent extramural obligations, in every Grecian
community. But they do not appear to have ever made the attempt. Finding
Athens exalted by circumstances to empire, and the allies degraded into
subjects, the Athenian statesmen grasped at the exaltation as a matter
of pride as well as profit. Even Pericles, the most prudent and
far-sighted of them, betrayed no consciousness that an empire without
the cement of some all-pervading interest or attachment, although not
practically oppressive, must nevertheless have a natural tendency to
become more and more unpopular, and ultimately to crumble in
pieces."[124]
In fine, a democracy, the breath of whose nostrils is justice,
systematically refused to do as it would be done by; and as was Athens,
so were the rest of the Greek States. When the Athenians told the
protesting Melians, in effect, that might is right,[125] they did even
as Sparta and Thebes had done before them.[126] Hence the instinct of
justice was feeble for all purposes, and the domestic strife of factions
was nearly as malignant and animalised as in Borgian Italy. Mother
cities and their colonies fought more destructively with each other than
with aliens; Athens and Syracuse, Corinth and Corcyra, strove more
malignantly than did Greek with barbarian. It was their rule after a
victory to slay their prisoners.[127] Such men had not learned the
secret of stable civic evolution; animal instinct was still enthroned
against law and prudence. Unearned income, private and public; blindly
tyrannous political aggression; ferocious domestic calumny; civic and
racial disruption--these were the due phases and fruits of the handling
of a great political problem by men who in the mass had no ideals of
increasing knowledge, of growing tolerance, of widening justice, of
fraternity.[128] Stoic and Epicurean wisdom and righteousness came too
late to save free Hellas: they were the fruits of retrospect in
decadence. The very art and literature which glorified Athens were in
large part the economic products of impolicy and injustice, being
fostered by the ill-gotten wealth accruing to the city from her
tributary allies and subject States, somewhat as the art of the great
period in Italy was fed by the wealth of the Church and of the merchant
princes who grew by the great river of trade. In the one case as in the
other, there was no polity, no science, equal to the maintenance of the
result when the originating conditions disappeared. Greek art and
letters passed away because they were ill rooted. Nobly incorrupt for
himself, Pericles thus fatally fostered a civic corruption that no
leader's virtues could countervail, and his policy in this regard was
probably the great force of frustration to his scheme for a pan-Hellenic
congress at Athens, to promote free trade and intercourse.[129]
For various views on this matter cp. Heeren, Eng. tr. of Researches
on the _Political History of Ancient Greece_, pp. 129-34;
Thirlwall, _History of Greece_, ch. xviii (1st ed. iii, 62-70);
Grote, iv, 490-504; Abbott, _History of Greece_, i, 405-9; Holm,
_History of Greece_, Eng. tr. ii, 268, note 8 to ch. xvii (a
vindication). Grote, who vindicates the policy of Pericles with
much care, endorses the statesman's own plea that his use of the
confederate treasure in ennobling the city gave her a valuable
prestige. But even to the Athenian opposition this answer was
indecisive, for, as Grote records, the argument of Thucydides was
that Athens was "disgraced in the eyes of the Greeks" by her use of
the treasure. This meant that her prestige was fully balanced by
hatred, so that the civic gain was a new danger.
Not that matters would have gone a whit better if, as our Tory
historians used retrospectively to prescribe, democracy had been
permanently subverted by aristocracy. No other ideal then in vogue would
have produced even so much "good life" as was actually attained. We know
that the rich and the great in the Greek cities were the worst citizens,
in the sense of being the least law-abiding; and that the lower-class
Athenians who served in the fleet were the best disciplined; the
middle-class hoplites less so; and the rich men who formed the cavalry
the least orderly of all.[130] Above all, the aristocrats were cruel and
rapacious when in power as the demos never were, even when they had
overthrown the guiltiest of their tyrants.[131] The leading aristocrats
were simply weaker versions of the demagogues, making up for their
weakness by their cruelty; and nothing can be more misleading than to
take the account given of Kleon by Aristophanes for even a semblance of
the truth. The great humorist saw nothing as it really was: his very
genius was as it were a many-faceted mirror that could reflect no whole,
and left his practical judgment worth less than that of any of the men
he ridiculed. Kleon is to be conceived as a powerful figure of the type
of a New York Tammany "Boss," without culture or philosophy, but shrewd,
executive, and abounding in energy. The aristocrats were but slighter
egoists with a varnish of education, as far as he from a worthy
philosophy. And the philosophers _par excellence_, Plato and Aristotle,
were equally incapable of practical statesmanship. The central truth of
the entire process is that free Greece fell because her children never
transcended, in conception or in practice, that primary ethic of egoism
in which even love for one's country is only a reflex of hate for
another people. This is clear in the whole play of the astounding
hatreds of Athenians for Athenians through every struggle of Athens for
her life. The treasons of Alcibiades are evoked and amply balanced by
the murderous plots of his fellows against him: every figure in the line
of leaders, from Solon's self, is hated by some hetairia; the honest
Anytus, the perfect type of brainless conservatism sitting in the chair
of sociological judgment, can be appeased only by the slaying of
Socrates; and to the end the egoisms of Demosthenes, AEschines, and
Isocrates are at grapple, with the national assassin in sight.
And it is the prevailing consciencelessness, the universal lust to
tyrannise, that really consummates the political dissolution. It was not
the battle of Chaeronea that made an end of Greek independence. That
disaster would have been retrieved like others if only the Greeks had
persistently cared to retrieve it. They fell because they took the bribe
of empire. Philip held it out at once by his offer of facile terms to
Athens: he was planning in his own way what the pragmatic Isocrates took
for the ideal Hellenic course, a Hellenic war of conquest against
Persia; and it was that very war, made by Alexander, that transformed
the Greeks into a mere diluvium of fortune-hunters, turning away from
every ideal of civic stability and dignity to the overrunning of alien
populations and the getting of alien gold. Given the process of historic
determination, moral bias becomes a fatality; and when it is fixed,
"'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus." Republican Greece passed
away because there were no more republican Greeks, but only a rabble of
imperialists. Here again appears the fatality of their past: it was the
sombre memory of unappeasable civil strife, of eternal inequality and
envy and class attrition, that made the new promise so dazzling; any
future seemed fairer than the recent past. But it was through the
immediate bait to their cupidity that the Greeks were led out of their
old man-making life of turbulent counterpoise, the sphere of free
equals, into the new unmanning life of empire, the sphere of slaves.
They were easy victims. The men of Aristotle's day had once more before
their eyes, in the squalid drama of Philip's house--in the spectacle of
alienated wife and son deriding and hating the laurelled conqueror and
exulting in his murder--the old lesson of autocracy, its infallible
dishonour, its depravation, its dissolution of the inmost ties of
cordial life. But any countervailing ideal that still lived among them
was overborne by the tide of triumphant conquest; and, with Aristotle
and Plato in her hand, Greece turned back to the social ethic of the
Heraclidae.
And when once the Circean cup of empire had been drained by the race,
there was no more returning to the status of republican manhood. The new
self-governing combination of cities which arose in Achaia after the
disintegration of Alexander's empire might indeed conceivably have
reached a high civilisation in time; but the external conditions, as
summed up in the existence of Rome, were now overwhelmingly
unfavourable. The opportunity for successful federalism was past. As it
was, the Achaian and AEtolian Leagues were but politic unions as much for
aggression as for defence, even as the Spartan reformers, Agis and
Cleomenes, could never rise above the ideal of Spartan self-assertion
and domination. Thus we have on one hand the Spartan kings, concerned
for the well-being of the mass of the people (always excepting the
helots) as a means to restore Spartan pre-eminence; and on the other
hand the Achaian federation of oligarchies, hating the doctrine of
sympathy for the demos as much as they hated Sparta--the forces of union
and strife always repelling the regimen of peace, to say nothing of
fraternity. The spectacle of Cleomenes and Philopoemen at deadly odds
is the dramatic summary of the situation; the ablest men of the later
Greek age could not transcend their barbarian heredity.
The statement of Freeman (_History of Federal Government in Greece
and Italy_, ed. 1893, p. 184) that a federal system in Greece was
"utterly impossible," is true in the bare philosophic sense that
that was impossible which did not happen; but such a proposition
would hold equally true of anything else that did not happen at a
given time; and it merely creates confusion to affirm it of one
item in particular. Pericles schemed something like a federal
union;[132] and had his practice been in accord with his ideal, it
might conceivably have been at least tried. M. Fustel de Coulanges
well points out how the primary religious conception of the ancient
City-State expelled and negatived that of a composite State (_La
Cite antique_, l. iii, ch. xiv, p. 239); that is a process of
rational explanation. But unless we conceive the "failures" of the
past as lessons to be profited by, there can be neither a social
nor a moral science. Freeman, however, actually proceeds to say
that Greek federation was utterly undesirable--an extraordinary
doctrine in a treatise devoted to studying and advocating
federalism. On the principles thus laid down, Dr. Freeman's
denunciation of Austria and France in modern times is irrational,
since that which has happened in these countries is that which
alone was possible; and the problem as to the desirable is
hopelessly obscured.
To say that "Greece united in a federal bond could never have
become the Greece" we admire (_id._ p. 184), is only to vary the
verbalism. Granted that Hellenic greatness _as we know it_ was
"inseparably limited to the system of independent city
commonwealths," it remains a rational proposition that had the
Greek cities federated they could have developed their general
culture further than they actually did, though the special
splendour of Periclean Athens could not in that case have been so
quickly attained. And as the _fall_ of Greece is no less
"inseparably linked" with the separateness of the States, Dr.
Freeman's proposition suggests or implies an assertion of the
desirableness of that fall. Mr. T. Whittaker, in his notable essay
on _The Liberal State_ (1907, pp. 70-72), rightly puts it as a
fatality of the Greek State that it could neither enter into nor
absorb a larger community, but recognises this as a failure to
solve the great problem. When, however, he writes that "the free
development of Athens as an autonomous State would have been
restricted by a real federation in which other States had a voice
of their own," he partly sets up the difficulty created by Freeman.
Wherein would Athens have suffered as to freedom?
The lesson for modern democracies from the story of the ancient is thus
clear enough. To flourish, they must have peace; they must sooner or
later practise a scientific and humane restraint of population--the
sooner the better, as destruction of surplus population is always going
on, even with emigration; they must check inequality, which is the
fountain of domestic dispeace; and they must maintain a progressive and
scientific culture. And the lesson is one that may now be acted on as it
never could have been before. There is no longer a reserve of fecund
barbarism ready to overwhelm a civilisation that ceases to be
pugnacious; and the civilised States have it in their own power to
submit their quarrels to bloodless arbitrament. The inveterate strifes
of the Greeks belong to a past stage of civilisation, and were in any
case the product of peculiar geographical conditions, Greece being
physically divided, externally among islands, and internally into a
multitude of glens, which in the days of City-State life and primitive
means of communication preserved a state of cantonal separateness and
feud, just as did the physical conditions of the Scottish Highlands in
the days before effective monarchic rule.
This permanent dissociation of the City-States was only a more
intractable form of the primary divisions of the districts. Thus in
Attica itself the divisions of party largely followed the
localities: "There were as many parties among them as there were
different tracts of land in their country"--the mountain-dwellers
being democratic, while the plain-dwellers were for an oligarchy,
and the coast-dwellers sought a mixed government. (Plutarch,
_Solon_, cc. 13, 29; Aristotle, _Polity of Athens_, c. 13.) See the
question further discussed below, ch. iv, Sec. 2 (_c_).
Indeed, the fulness of the autonomous life attained by the separate
cities was a psychological hindrance to their political union, given the
primary geographical sunderance. Thus we have in the old Amphictyonic
councils the evidence of a measure of peaceful political attraction
among the tribes before the cities were developed;[133] yet on those
ancient beginnings there was no political advance till the rise of
formal federalism in the AEtolian and Achaian Leagues after the death of
Alexander. And that federalism was not ethically higher than the spirit
of the ancient Amphictyonic oath, preserved by AEschines. The balance of
the forces of separateness and political wisdom is to be conceived in
terms of a given degree of culture relatively to a given set of physical
conditions. Happily the deadlock in question no longer subsists for
civilised States.
Again, there is now possible a scientific control of population, without
infanticide, without vice, without abortion. There has been attained a
degree of democratic stability and enlightenment which given peace,
permits of a secure gradual extension of the principle of equality by
sound machinery. And there is now accumulated a treasury of seminal
knowledge which makes possible an endless intellectual progress, the
great antiseptic of political decay, provided only that the foregoing
conditions are secured. This is, in brief, the programme of progressive
democracy.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 92: Cp. Mr. Godkin, _Problems of Modern Democracy_, 1896, pp.
327-28, as to the recent rise of class hatred in the United States.]
[Footnote 93: Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 142.]
[Footnote 94: "Freedom flourishes in colonies. Ancient usages cannot be
preserved ... as at home.... Where every man lives by the labour of his
hands, equality arises, even where it did not originally exist" (Heeren,
_Pol. Hist. of Greece_, Eng. tr. p. 88. Cp. Bagehot, _Physics and
Politics_, p. 99). Note, in this connection, the whole development of
Magna Graecia. Sybaris was "perhaps in 510 B.C. the greatest of all
Grecian cities" (Grote, part ii, ch. 37). As to the early strifes in the
colonies, cp. Meyer, ii, 681.]
[Footnote 95: Such was the legal course of things before Solon (Grote,
ii, 465-66; Ingram, _History of Slavery_, p. 16; cp. Schoemann,
_Griechische Alterthuemer_, 2te Aufl. i, 341; Aristotle, _Polity of
Athens_, cc. 2, 4, 6; Wachsmuth, _Histor. Antiq. of the Greeks_, Sec. 33,
Eng. tr. 1837, i, 244).]
[Footnote 96: Cp. Schoemann, i, 114; Burckhardt, _Griechische
Culturgeschichte_, i, 159; Meyer, _Gesch. des Alterthums_, ii, 642. In
the historic period the majority of slaves are said to have been of
non-Greek race (Schoemann, i, 112; Burckhardt, i, 158). But this is said
without much evidence. The custom was to kill adult male captives and
enslave the women and children. Men captives who were spared by the
Athenians were put to slavery in the mines (Burckhardt, citing
Polyaenus, II, i, 26).]
[Footnote 97: _E.g._ Telys at Sybaris, Theagenes at Megara, and Kypselus
at Corinth, in the sixth century B.C.; and Klearchus at Herakleia in the
fourth (Grote. ii, 414, 418; iv, 95; x, 394). Compare the appeals made
to Solon by both parties to make himself despot (Plutarch, _Solon_, c.
14).]
[Footnote 98: As at Sparta under Agis IV (Plutarch, _Agis_, c. 13;
Thirlwall, c. lxii, 1st ed. viii, 142). The claims were restored at
Agis's death (_id._ p. 163).]
[Footnote 99: As by Cleomenes, soon after (_id._ p. 164).]
[Footnote 100: _E.g._ Agesilaus in the same crisis.]
[Footnote 101: As at Megara (Grote, ii, 418).]
[Footnote 102: See Grote, ii, 381, as to the general development.]
[Footnote 103: But cp. Grote, ii, 420, as to the case of Megara.]
[Footnote 104: Grote, ii, 490-94.]
[Footnote 105: Cp. Meyer, ii, 651.]
[Footnote 106: Bury, pp. 183-84.]
[Footnote 107: Eduard Meyer writes of Solon (ii, 649) that "aller
Radicalismus liegt ihm fern"; and, two pages later, as to the freeing of
the peasantry, that "Hier konnte nur ein radicales Mittel, ein Bruch des
formellen Rechts, Huelfe bringen."]
[Footnote 108: Grote (ii, 471) finds this incredible; it is hard to see
why. Plutarch (14, 16) is explicit on the point; so also the _Athenian
Polity_, c. 11.]
[Footnote 109: Friends of Solon's in the upper classes took advantage of
a disclosure of his plans to buy up land in advance, escaping full
payment under his law cancelling debts (Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 15;
Aristotle, _Athenian Polity_, c. 6). See Plutarch, c. 16, as to the
moderation and popularity of Peisistratos.]
[Footnote 110: See below, pt. ii, ch. ii, Sec. 1.]
[Footnote 111: Plutarch, _Solon_, 13, 29.]
[Footnote 112: As to his tactic in building up a party see Busolt,
_Griech. Gesch._ 1885, i, 550-53. But the panegyric of Peisistratos as a
ruler by Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari (abr. of Grote, p. 58) is
extravagant. The tyrant is there extolled for the most primitive device
of the ruler seeking popularity, the remission of taxes to individuals.]
[Footnote 113: Grote, ii, 468, 496.]
[Footnote 114: Herodotus, v, 66-69.]
[Footnote 115: Plutarch, _Solon_, c. 24.]
[Footnote 116: Bk. vii, c. 15.]
[Footnote 117: Plutarch, _Alcibiades_, c. 34.]
[Footnote 118: Grote, ch. 46.]
[Footnote 119: Cp. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, iv, Sec. 446.]
[Footnote 120: Rev. A.S. Way's translation of Euripides, _Medea_,
829-30.]
[Footnote 121: Thucydides, ii, 40.]
[Footnote 122: _Griechische Culturgeschichte_, i, 11; cp. ii, 386-88,
394, etc. And see Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 727-29, 734,
etc. For an able counter-pleading, see the essay of Mr. Benn, "The
Ethical Value of Hellenism," in _Intern. Jour. of Ethics_, April, 1902,
rep. in his _Revaluations, Historical and Ideal_, 1909.]
[Footnote 123: Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, _La cite antique_, ed. 1880, pp.
260-64; E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 728.]
[Footnote 124: Grote, iv, 489-90.]
[Footnote 125: Thucydides, v, 85 _sq_.]
[Footnote 126: Cp. Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. Sec.
66.]
[Footnote 127: Grote, iv, 539. Cp. Thirlwall, i, 181-83.]
[Footnote 128: The view here set forth is fully borne out by the
posthumous _Griechische Culturgeschichte_ of Burckhardt. Cp. i, 249-57.]
[Footnote 129: Plutarch, _Pericles_, c. 17.]
[Footnote 130: Xenophon, _Memorabilia_, iii, 5, 18. Cp. Grote, iv, 465.
As Grote goes on to show, the same general statement holds good of Rome
after her victory over Carthage, of the Italian Republics, and of the
feudal baronage in England and elsewhere.]
[Footnote 131: Grote, vi, 315-17, 518, rightly insists on the moderation
of the people after the expulsions of the Four Hundred and the Thirty
Tyrants.]
[Footnote 132: Plutarch, _Pericles_, c. 17; Grote, iv, 510; T. Davidson,
_The Parthenon Frieze_, 1882, pp. 82-128.]
[Footnote 133: Grote, pt. ii, ch. ii (ed. 1888, ii, 173-78); Freeman,
_History of Federal Government_, ed. 1893, p. 103.]
CHAPTER IV
THE LAWS OF SOCIO-POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
Sec. 1
The word "progressive," however, raises one of the most complex issues
in sociology. It would be needless to point out, were it not well to
anticipate objection, that the foregoing summaries are not offered as a
complete theory of progress even as commonly conceived, much less as
sufficing to dismiss the dispute[134] as to what progress is, or what
basis there is for the modern conceptions bound up with the word. Our
generalisations proceed on the assumption--not of course that human
affairs must constantly improve in virtue of some cosmic law, but--that
by most men of any education a certain advance in range of knowledge, of
reflection, of skill, of civic amenity, of general comfort, is held to
be attainable and desirable; that such advances have clearly taken place
in former periods; and that the due study of these periods and of
present conditions may lead to a further and indefinitely prolonged
advance. Conceiving progress broadly as occurring by way of rise in the
quantity and the quality of pleasurable and intelligent life, we beg the
question, for the purposes of this inquiry, as against those who may
regard such a tendency with aversion, and those who may deny that such
increase ever takes place. Taking as proved the evolution of mankind
from lower forms of animal life, we conceive such evolution as
immeasurably slow in the period before the attainment of agriculture,
which may serve as the stage at which what we term "civilisation"
begins. Only with agriculture begins the "civitas," as distinct from the
horde or tribe. Thenceforth all advance in arts and ethics, no less than
in political co-ordination, counts as "civilisation." The problem is,
how to diagnose advance.
All of us, roughly speaking, understand by progress the moving of things
in the way we want them to go; and the ideals underlying the present
treatise are easily seen, though it does not aim at an exhaustive survey
of the conditions and causes of what it assumes to be progressive forms
or phases of civilisation. To reach even a working theory, however, we
have to make, as it were, cross-sections in our anatomy, and to view the
movement of civilisation in terms of the conditions which increase men's
stock of knowledge and extend their imaginative art. To lay a
foundation, we have to subsume Buckle's all-important generalisation as
to the effect of food and life conditions in differentiating what we may
broadly term the primary from the secondary civilisation. Thus we think
from "civilisation" to _a_ civilisation.
Buckle drew his capital distinction, so constantly ignored by his
critics, between "European" and "non-European" civilisations. This
broadly holds good, but is a historical rather than a sociological
proposition. The process of causation is one of life conditions;
and the first great steps in the higher Greek civilisation were
made in Asia Minor, in contact with Asiatic life, even as the
earlier civilisations, such as the "Minoan" of Crete, now being
traced through recovered remains, grew up in contact with both
Egypt and the East. (Cp. Prof. Burrows, _The Discoveries in Crete_,
1907, chs. v, ix.) The distinction here made between "primary" and
"secondary" civilisations is of course merely relative, applying as
it does only to the historic period. We can but mark off the known
civilisations as standing in certain relations one to another. Thus
the Roman civilisation was in reality complex before the conquest
of Greece, inasmuch as it had undergone Italo-Greek and Etruscan
influences representing a then ancient culture. But the Roman
militarist system left the Roman civilisation in itself
unprogressive, and prevented it from being durably fertilised by
the Greek.
Proceeding from general laws to particular cases, we may roughly say
that:--
(1) Primary civilisations arise in regions specially favourable to the
regular production of abundant food, and lying inland, so as not to
offer constant temptation to piratical raids. (Fertile coast land is
defensible only by a strong community.)
(2) Such food conditions tend to maintain an abundant population,
readily lending itself to exploitation by rulers, and so involving
despotism and subordination. They also imply, as a rule, level
territories, which facilitate conquest and administration, and thus also
involve military autocracy.
The general law that facile food conditions, supporting large
populations in a primary civilisation, generate despotisms, was
explicitly put in the eighteenth century by Walckenaer (_Essai sur
l'histoire de l'espece humaine_, 1798, l. v, ch. iv, p. 198).
Montesquieu, whose reasonings on climate and soil tend to be
fanciful and non-economic (cp. Volney, _Lecons d'Histoire_, 6ieme
seance; and Buckle, Routledge's ed. pp. 24, 468-69), noted the fact
that sterile Attica was relatively democratic, and fertile
Lakedaimon aristocratic; and further (following Plutarch) decides
that mountaineers tend to be democratic, plain-dwellers subject to
rulers, and coast-dwellers something midway between (_Esprit des
Lois_, l. xviii, ch. i). He is right in his facts, but misses the
economic explanation. The fact that mountaineers as such are not
easy to conquer, doubtless counts for a good deal. See it touched
on in Gray's unfinished poem on the _Alliance between Government
and Education_, written before the appearance of the _Esprit des
Lois_, and stopped by Gray on the ground that "the Baron had
forestalled some of his best thoughts" (Gray's _Works_, ed. 1821,
p. 274). The point is discussed more fully in Dr. Dunbar's _Essays
on the History of Mankind_, 1780, Essay vi.
(3) If the nation with such conditions is well aloof from other nations,
in virtue of being much more civilised than its near neighbours, and of
being self-sufficing as regards its produce, its civilisation (as in the
cases of China and Incarial Peru and ancient Egypt) is likely to be
extremely conservative. Above all, lack of racial interbreeding involves
lack of due variation. No "pure" race ever evolved rapidly or highly.
Even the conservative primary civilisations (as the Egyptian, Chinese,
and Akkadian) rested on much race mixture.
As Dr. Draper has well pointed out (_Intellect. Develop. of
Europe_, ed. 1875, i, 84-88), the peculiar regularity of Egyptian
agriculture, depending as it did on the Nile overflow, which made
known in advance the quantity of the crops, lent itself especially
to a stable system of life and administration. The long-lasting
exclusion of foreigners there, as in China and in Sparta, would
further secure sameness of culture; and only by such causes can
special unprogressiveness anywhere arise. Sir Henry Maine's
formula, marking off progressive and unprogressive civilisations as
different species, is merely verbal, and is not adhered to by
himself. (The point is discussed at some length by the present
writer in _Buckle and his Critics_, pp. 402-8.) Maine's distinction
was drawn long ago by Eusebe Salverte (_De la Civilisation depuis
les premiers temps_, 1813, p. 22, _seq._), who philosophically goes
on to indicate the conditions which set up the differentiation;
though in later references (_Essai sur les noms d'hommes_, 1824,
pref. p. ii; _Des Sciences occultes_, 1829, pref. p. vi) he recurs
to the empirical form of his proposition, which is that adhered to
by Maine.
(4) When an old civilisation comes in steady contact with that of a race
of not greatly inferior but less ancient culture, physically so situated
as to be much less amenable to despotism (that is, in a hilly or
otherwise easily defensible region), it is likely so to fecundate the
fresher civilisation that the latter, if not vitiated by a bad political
system, will soon surpass it,[135] provided that the latter community in
turn is duly crossed as regards its stock, and that the former has due
resources.
(5) In other words, a primitive but not barbarous people, placed in a
region not highly fruitful but not really unpropitious to human life, is
the less likely to fall tamely under a despotism because its population
is not so easily multiplied and maintained;[136] and such a people, when
physiologically variated by a mixture of stocks, and when mentally
fecundated by contact with older civilisations, tends to develop what we
term a secondary civilisation, higher in all respects than those which
have stimulated it.[137]
(6) A very great disparity in the culture-stages of meeting races,
however, is as unfavourable to the issue of a higher civilisation from
their union as to a useful blending of their stocks.[138] Thus it fares
ill with the contact of higher and lower races even in a climate equally
favourable to both; and where it is favourable to the latter only, there
is likely to be no immediate progress in the lower race, while in the
terms of the case the higher will deteriorate or disappear.[139]
(7) Where a vigorous but barbarian race overruns one much more
civilised, there is similarly little prospect of immediate gain to
progress, though after a period of independent growth the newer
civilisation may be greatly fecundated by intelligent resort to the
remains of the older.
The cases of China and the Roman Empire may serve as illustrations.
They were, however, different in that the northern invasion of Rome
was by relatively considerable masses, while the Tartar conquerors
of China were easily absorbed in the vast native population.
(8) Where, again, independent States at nearly the same stage of
civilisation, whether speaking the same or different languages, stand in
a position of commerce and rivalry, but without desperate warfare, the
friction and cross-fertilisation of ideas, together with the mixture of
stocks, will develop a greater and higher intellectual and artistic life
than can conceivably arise in one great State without great or close
rivals, since there one set of ideals or standards is likely to overbear
all others, with the result of partly stereotyping taste and opinion.
This point is well put by Hume as to Greece, in his essay _Of the
Rise of the Arts and Sciences_ (1752); and after him by Gibbon, ch.
53, Bohn ed. vi, 233; Cp. Heeren, _Pol. Hist. of Ancient Greece_,
Eng. tr. p. 42; Walckenaer, _Essai_ cited, p. 338; Ferguson, _Essay
on the History of Civil Society_, 1767, pp. 182, 183; Dunbar,
_Essays on the History of Mankind_, 1780, pp. 257, 271; Goguet, _De
l'origine des lois, des arts, et des sciences_, 1758, iii Epoque,
L. ii, ch. 2; Salverte, _De la Civilisation_, 1813, pp. 83-88;
Grote, _History of Greece_, pt. ii, ch. i, ed. 1888, ii, 156;
Cunningham, _Western Civilisation_, i, 75. Grote brings out very
clearly the "mutuality of action and reaction" in the case of the
maritime Greeks as compared with the others and with other nations.
See also Hegel, _Philos. der Geschichte_, Th. ii, Absch. i (ed.
1840, p. 275). Hegel, besides noting the abstract element of
geographical variety, points to the highly mixed character of the
Greek stocks, especially in Attica. So Salverte, as cited. The same
principle is rightly put by Guizot (_Hist. de la civilisation en
France_, i, lecon 2), and accepted by J.S. Mill (_On Liberty_, ch.
iii, end), as a main explanation of the intellectual progress of
modern Europe. It is therefore worth weighing as regards given
peoples, by those who, like Mr. Bryce, see nothing but harm in the
subdivision of Germany after the Thirty Years' War (_Holy Roman
Empire_, 8th ed. p. 346). Against the undoubted evils connected
with the partition system ought to be set the intellectual gains
which latterly arose from it when the intellectual life of Germany
had, as it were, recovered breath.
(9) Thus, while an empire with a developed civilisation may communicate
it to uncivilised conquered peoples not too far below its own
anthropological level, the secondary civilisation thus acquired is in
its nature less "viable," less capable of independent evolution, than
one set up by the free commerce of trading peoples. The most rapid
growths of civilisation appear always to have occurred by way of the
multiplying of free contacts among trading communities, and among the
free colonies of such.[140] The "money economy" they introduced was a
great instrument of social and industrial evolution;[141] and on such
city civilisations the ancient empires themselves seem always to have
proceeded.[142]
(10) Every phase of civilisation has its special drawbacks, so that
great retrogression may follow on great development, especially when
adventitious sources of wealth are the foundation of a luxurious
culture. In some cases a great development may be dependent on an
exhaustible source of wealth, as in the case of Britain's coal supply,
the empire of ancient Rome, the primacy of the Pope before the
Reformation, or even the Periclean empire of Athens, and the trade
monopolies of Venice, the Hansa Towns, and the Dutch Republic.
(11) The expression "decay" as applied to a people, however, has only a
relative significance: used absolutely, it stands for a delusion.
Economic conditions may worsen, and military power decline; but such
processes imply no physiological degeneration. All the "dead"
civilisations of the past were _overthrown or absorbed by military
violence_; and there is no known case of a nation physically well placed
dying out.
Professor W.D. Whitney, who is usually so well worth listening to,
fails to recognise this fact in his interesting essay on "China and
the Chinese" (_Oriental and Linguistic Studies_, 2nd series). He
declares that "according to the ordinary march of events in human
history, the Chinese empire should have perished from decay, and
its culture either have become extinct or have passed into the
keeping of another race, more than two thousand years ago. It had
already reached the limit to its capacity of development" (p. 88).
Similarly Ratzel pronounces (_History of Mankind_, Eng. tr. 1896,
i, 26) that "Voltaire hits the point when he says Nature has given
the Chinese the organ for discovering all that is _useful_ to them,
but not for going _any further_." Voltaire never penned such a
"bull." He wrote (_Essai sur les moeurs_, Avant-Propos, ch. i),
"Il _semble_ que la Nature ait donne," and "_necessaire_," not
"useful." Even that has a touch of paralogism; but the great
essayist goes on to suggest two causes for Chinese
conservatism--their ancestral piety and the nature of their method
of writing. The first is a pseudo-explanation; the second is a
_vera causa_, though only one of those involved. The German
specialist of to-day is really further from the scientific point of
view than the French wit of the middle of the eighteenth century,
going on as he does to decide that "defect in their endowments"
causes the mediocrity of the Chinese, and "also is the sole cause
of the rigidity in their social system."
This is a vain saying; and it is no less vain to go on to ask, as
Professor Whitney does, what has become of Egypt, of the
Phoenicians and Hebrews, of the Persians, of Greece and Rome, and
of Spain. The answer is easy. Egypt was conquered, and the old race
still reproduces itself, in vassalage. The "Pelasgic" civilisation
of ancient Greece was absorbed by the Greek invaders. The
"Mycenaean" and "Minoan" civilisations, as seen in ancient Troy and
"Minoan" Crete, were conquered and partly absorbed. The
Phoenicians and Hebrews were destroyed or absorbed. The Persians
are at present retrograde, but may rise again.[143] Rome and Greece
were successively overrun by barbarism. Spain, like Italy,
retrograded, but, like Italy, is on the path of regeneration. In
all these cases the process of causation is obvious. No nation dies
or disappears save by violence; and, given the proper conditions,
all races are capable of progress indefinitely. China, though
unprogressive in comparison with a European State, has changed in
many respects within two thousand years--nay, within twenty.[144]
Professor Whitney adopts an empirical convention, and accordingly
misses any real elucidation of the problem of Chinese sociology,
which he assumes to solve (p. 87) by saying we must look for our
explanations "deep in the foundations of the national character
itself." That is to say, the national character is determined by
the national character.
It is surely time that this palaeo-theological fashion of explaining
human affairs were superseded by the more fruitful method of
positive science, even as regards China, which is perhaps the worst
explained of all sociological cases. Like others, it had been
intelligently taken up by sociologists of the eighteenth century
before the conservative reaction (see the _Esprit des Lois_, vii,
6; viii, 21; x, 15; xiv, 8; xviii, 6; xix, 13-20; Dunbar's
_Essays_, as cited, pp. 257, 258, 262, 263, 321; and Walckenaer,
_Essai_ cited, pp. 175, 176); but that impetus seems to have been
thus far almost entirely lost. Voltaire's fallacy is remembered and
his truth ignored; and the methods of theology continue to be
applied to many questions of moral science after they have been
wholly cast out of physics and biology. The old "falsisms" of
empirical politics are repeated even by professed biologists when
they enter on the field of social science. Thus we have seen them
accepted by Dr. Draper, and we find Professor Huxley (_Evolution
and Ethics_, Romanes Lecture for 1893, p. 4) rhetorically putting
"that successive rise, apogee, and fall of dynasties and states
which is the most prominent topic of civil history," as
scientifically analogous to the process of growth and decay and
death in the human organism. Any comparative study of history shows
the analogy to be spurious. Professor Whitney was doubtless
influenced, like Dr. Draper, by the American habit of regarding
European and ancient civilisations as necessarily decrepit because
"slow" and "old." Cp. Draper as cited, ii, 393-98.
In the cases above dealt with, however, and in many others, there is
seen to have been _intellectual_ decay, in the sense of, first, a
cessation of forward movement, and, next, a loss of the power to
appreciate ideas once current. A common cause of such paralysis of the
higher life is the malignant action of dogmatic religious systems, as in
the cases of Persia, Jewry, Byzantium, Islam, Spain under Catholicism,
and Scotland for two centuries under Protestantism. Such paralysis by
religion may arise alike in a highly-organised but isolated State like
Byzantium, and in a semi-civilised country like Anglo-Saxon
England.[145] The special malignity of dogma in these cases is itself of
course a matter for analysis and explanation. Other cases are partly to
be explained by (_a_) the substitution of systematic militarism, always
fatal to progressive culture, for a life of only occasional warfare,
favourable to study among the leisured class.[146] But (_b_) there is
reason to surmise a further and profoundly important cause of
intellectual retrogression in the usage which develops the culture of a
people for the most part in one sex only. The thesis may be ventured
that whereas vigorous and creative brains may arise in abundance in a
young civilisation, where the sexes are physiologically not far removed
from the approximate equality of the semi-barbarous stage, the
psychological divergence set up by mentally and physically training the
males and not the females is likely to be unfavourable to the breeding
of mentally energetic types.
(12) Whether or not the last hypothesis be valid, it is clear that the
co-efficient or constituent of intellectual progress in a people, given
the necessary conditions of peace and sufficient food, is multiplication
of ideas; and this primarily results from international contact, or the
contact of wholly or partly independent communities of one people.
Multiplication of arts and crafts is of course included under the head
of ideas. But unless the stock of ideas is not merely in constant
process of being added to among the studious or leisured class, but
disseminated among the other classes, stagnation will take place among
these, and will inevitably infect the educated class.
De Tocqueville, balancing somewhat inconclusively, because always
_in vacuo_, the forces affecting literature in aristocratic and
democratic societies, says decisively enough (_Democratie en
Amerique_, ed. 1850, ii, 62-63) that "Toute aristocratie qui se met
entierement a part du peuple devient impuissante. Cela est vrai
dans les lettres aussi bien qu'en politique." This holds clearly
enough of Italian literature in the despotic period. Mr. Godkin's
criticism (_Problems of Modern Democracy_, p. 56) that "M. de
Tocqueville and all his followers take it for granted that the
great incentive to excellence, in all countries in which excellence
is found, is the patronage and encouragement of an aristocracy," is
hardly accurate. De Tocqueville puts the case judicially enough, so
far as he goes; and Mr. Godkin falls into strange extravagance in
his counter statement that there is "hardly a single historical
work composed prior to the end of the last [eighteenth] century,
except perhaps Gibbon's, which, judged by the standard that the
criticism of our day has set up, would not, though written for the
'few,' be pronounced careless, slipshod, or superficial."
Tillemont, by the testimony of Professor Bury, was a more thorough
worker in his special line than Gibbon. It would be easy to name
scores of writers in various branches of history in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries whom no good critic to-day would call
careless or slipshod; and if Hume and Robertson, Clarendon and
Burnet, be termed superficial, the "standard" will involve a
similar characterisation of most historical writers of our own day.
As regards present-day literary productions, De Tocqueville and Mr.
Godkin alike omit the necessary economic analysis.
(13) In the intellectual infectiousness of all class degradation,
properly speaking, lies the final sociological (as apart from the
primary ethical) condemnation of slavery. The familiar argument that
slavery first secured the leisure necessary for culture, even were it
wholly instead of being merely partially true, would not rebut the
censure that falls to be passed on slavery in later stages of
civilisation. All the ancient States, before Greece, stood on slavery:
then it was not slavery that yielded her special culture. What she
gained from older civilisations was the knowledge and the arts developed
by _specialisation_ of pursuits; and such specialisation was not
necessarily dependent on slavery, which could abound without it. It was
in the special employment, finally, of the exceptionally large _free_
population of Athens that the greatest artistic output was reached.[147]
In later periods, the slave population was the great nucleus of
superstition and anti-culture.
Inasmuch, then, as education is in only a small degree compatible with
toilsome poverty, the betterment of the material conditions of the
toiling class is essential to progress in ideas. That is to say,
continual progress implies gradual elimination of class inequality, and
cannot subsist otherwise. At the same time, a culture-class must be
maintained by new machinery when leisured wealth is got rid of.[148]
(14) Again, it follows from the foregoing (4-10) that the highest
civilisation will be that in which the greatest number of varying
culture-influences meet,[149] in the most happily-crossed stock, under
climatic conditions favourable to energy, on a basis of a civilisation
sufficiently matured.[150] But in order to the effectual action of such
various culture-influences through all classes of the nation in which
they meet, there is needed a constant application of social or political
regimen. In the lack of that, a great conflux of culture-forces may miss
fruition. A mere fortuitous depression of the rich class, and elevation
of the poor, will not suffice to place a society on a sound or even on
an improved footing. Such a change occurred in ancient Athens after
Salamis, when the poorer sort, who had constituted the navy,
flourished[151] as against the richer, who had been the land soldiery,
and whose lands had been ravaged. But the forces of disintegration
played afresh. Yet again, transient financial conditions, such as those
of Italy before the Reformation, of Holland until the decline of its
fishing and trade, and of Venice until its final commercial decay, may
sustain a great artistic life, art having always depended on private or
public demand. Thus with a change in the geographical course of trade, a
great phase of culture-life may dwindle. So many and so complex are the
forces and conditions of progress in civilisation.
Sec. 2
It will readily be seen that most of the foregoing propositions have
direct reference to well-known facts of history. Thus (_a_) ancient
Egypt represents a primary civilisation, marked indeed by some
fluctuations connected with dynastic changes which involved mixture of
stocks, but on the whole singularly fixed; while ancient Greek
civilisation was emphatically a secondary one, the fruit of much
race-mixture and many interacting culture-forces, all facilitated by the
commercial position and coast-conformation of Hellas.
This view is partly rejected by Grote in two passages (pt. i, chs.
xvi, xvii, ed. 1888, i, 326, 413) in which he gives to the
"inherent and expansive force" of "the Greek mind" the main credit
of Greek civilisation. But his words, to begin with, are confused
and contradictory: "The transition of the Greek mind from its
poetical to its comparatively positive stage was self-operated,
accomplished by its own inherent and expansive force--_aided
indeed, but by no means either impressed or provoked_ from
without." In the second place, there is no basis for the denial of
"impression or provocation" from without. And finally, what is
decisive, the historian himself has in other passages acknowledged
that the Greeks received from Asia and Egypt just such
"provocation" as is seen to take place in varying degrees in the
culture-contacts of all nations (chs. xv, xvi, pp. 307, 329). Of
the contact with Egypt he expressly says that it "enlarged the
range of their thoughts and observations." His whole treatment of
the rise of culture, however, is meagre and imperfect relatively to
his ample study of the culture itself. Later students grow more and
more unanimous as to the composite character of the Greek-speaking
stock in the earliest traceable periods of Hellenic life (cp. Bury,
_History of Greece_, ed. 1906, pp. 39-42, and Professor Burrows,
_The Discoveries in Crete_, 1907, p. 144), and the consequent
complexity of the entire Hellenic civilisation. The case is
suggestively put by Eduard Meyer (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii,
155) in the observation that while the west coast of Greece had as
many natural advantages as the eastern, it remained backward in
civilisation when the other had progressed far. "_Here there lacked
the foreign stimulus_: the west of Greece is away from the source
of culture. Here, accordingly, primitive conditions continued to
rule, while in the east a higher culture evolved itself.... Corinth
in the older period played no part whatever, whether in story or in
remains." The same proposition was put a generation ago by A.
Bertrand, who pointed out that the coasts of Elis and Messenia are
"incomparably more fertile" than those of Argolis and Attica
(_Etudes de mythologie et d'archeologie grecques_, 1858, pp.
40-41); and again by Winwood Reade in _The Martyrdom of Man_ (1872,
p. 64): "A glance at the map is sufficient to explain why it was
that Greece became civilised before the other European lands. It is
nearest to those countries in which civilisation first arose ...
compelled to grow towards Asia as a tree grows towards the light."
But to this generalisation should be put the qualifying clause
(above, p. 55) that fertile coasts when developed are defensible
only by a strongly organised community. Thus an early exploitation
of Elis and Messenia would be checked by piracy.
The question as to the originality of Greek culture, it is
interesting to note, was already discussed at the beginning of the
eighteenth century. See Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_, Misc. iii,
ch. i.
(_b_) The Greek land as a whole, especially the Attic, was only
moderately fertile, and therefore not so cheaply and redundantly
populated as Egypt.
The bracing effect of their relative poverty was fully recognised
by the Greeks themselves. Cp. Herodotus, vii, 102, and Thucydides,
i, 123. See on the same point Heeren, _Political History of Ancient
Greece_, Eng. tr. pp. 24-33; Thirlwall, _History of Greece_, small
ed. i, 12; Duncker, _Gesch. des Alterthums_, iii, ch. i, Sec. 1;
Wachsmuth, _Hist. Antiq. of the Greeks_, Sec. 8; Duruy, _Hist.
Grecque_, 1851, p. 7; Grote, part ii, ch. i (ed. 1888, ii, 160);
Boeckh, _Public Economy of Athens_, B. i, c. 8; Niebuhr,
_Lectures_, li (Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 265); Mahaffy, _Rambles and
Studies in Greece_, 4th ed. pp. 137, 164-67. Dr. Grundy
(_Thucydides and the History of his Age_, 1911, p. 58 _sq._) lays
stress on the fertility of the valleys, but recognises the
smallness of the fertile areas.
(_c_) Hellas was further so decisively cut up into separate cantons by
its mountain ranges, and again in respect of the multitude of the
islands, that the Greek districts were largely foreign to each
other,[152] and their cultures had thus the advantage of reacting and
interacting, as against the disadvantage of their incurable political
separateness--that disadvantage in turn being correlative with the
advantage of insusceptibility to a despotism.
The effect of geographical conditions on Greek history is discussed
at length in Conrad Bursian's essay, _Ueber den Einfluss des
griechischen Landes auf den Charakter seiner Bewohner_, which I
have been unable to procure or see; but I gather from his
_Geographie von Griechenlands_ that he takes the view here set
forth. Cp. Senior's _Journal kept in Turkey and Greece_, 1859, p.
255, for a modern Greek's view of the state of his nation,
"divided into small districts by mountain ranges intersecting each
other in all directions without a road or canal"; the deduction
from the same perception made by the young Arthur Stanley
(Prothero's _Life of Dean Stanley_, 1-vol. ed. p. 143); and the
impression retained from his travels by M. Bertrand, _Etudes de
mythologie et d'archeologie grecques_, 1858, p. 199.
The profound importance of the geographical fact has been
recognised more or less clearly and fully by many writers--_e.g._,
Hume, essay Of the _Rise and Progress of the Arts and the Sciences_
(ed. 1825 of _Essays_, i, 115-16); Gillies, _History of Greece_,
1-vol. ed. p. 5; Heeren, as cited, pp. 35, 75; Duncker, as last
cited, also ch. iii, Sec. 12 (2te Aufl. 1860, p. 601); Duruy, ch. i;
Cox, _General History of Greece_, bk. i, ch. i; Thirlwall, ch. x;
Wachsmuth, Eng. tr. i, 87; Comte, _Cours de Philosophie Positive_,
Lecon 53ieme; Grote, pt. ii, ch. i (ii, 155); Finlay, _History of
Greece_, Tozer's ed. i, 28; K.O. Mueller, _Introd. to Scientific
Mythology_, Eng. tr. p. 179; Hegel, as last cited; Hertzberg,
_Geschichte von Hellas und Rom_, 1879 (in Oncken's series), i, 9;
Winwood Reade, _The Martyrdom of Man_, 1872, p. 65 sq.; Bury,
_History of Greece_, ed. 1906, pp. 2-4; Fyffe (very explicitly),
_Primer of Greek History_, p. 8--but it is strangely overlooked by
writers to whom one turns for a careful study of causes. Even
Grote, after having clearly set forth (ii, 150) the predetermining
influence of land-form, attributes Greek divisions to the
"character of the race," which even in this connection, however, he
describes as "splitting _by natural fracture_ into a multitude of
self-administering, indivisible cities" (pt. ii, ch. 28,
beginning); and Sir George Cox, after specifying the geographical
factor, speaks of it as merely "fostering
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/39860