The Greek commonwealth, politics & economics in fifth-century Athens

Preface To Third Edition

In revising the book for a third edition I have been chiefly indebted to my friend Mr. Shirley C. Atchley, of H.M. Legation at Athens, who has not only applied his unrivalled knowledge of the Greek countryside to the revision of the text, but has also corrected the map of Attica in the light of knowledge gained in his many wanderings. I am also indebted to a distinguished Spanish scholar, Don Miguel de Vuamuno of the University of Salamanca, for a number of helpful suggestions. The other changes and additions relate chiefly to the recent literature on the subject and to later applications of ideas or tendencies referred to in the text.

A. E. Z.

Oakhill Drive, - »

Surbiton.

March 20, 1921.

Preface To Second Edition

I am indebted to a number of friendly critics for enabling me to correct certain errors and obscurities in the first edition. My thanks are due especially to the Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, to Canon Cruikshank, Mr. H. J. Cunningham, Mr. G. Dickins, to reviewers in The Times and the Journal of Hellenic Studies, to Professor Francotte of the University of Liege and, above all and in spite of all, to Professor von Wilamowitz- Moellendorff of the University of Berlin. I have also made use of the opportunity to add references to the literature of the subject since 1911, and an occasional comment on recent events, as on pp. 98 and 245-7. But the great addition to the book is the map of Attica by my friend Mr. Arnold J. Toynbee.

The book as a whole remains unchanged. I cannot pretend to be satisfied with the discussion of slavery as it is left by Part III, Chapters XIV and XV, on the juxtaposition of which some critics have fastened. But I have come no nearer a final solution than when I wrote them. Perhaps some one else may make a better use of the evidence to which I have called attention.

While the book has been passing through the press war has broken out, bringing Great Britain face to face, for the first time since she has become a Democracy, with the full ultimate meaning of the civic responsibilities, both of thought and action, with which, in the narrower field of the City-State, the fifth-century Athenians were so familiar. Greek ideas and Greek inspiration can help us to-day, not only in facing the duties of the moment, but in the work of deepening and extending the range and the meaning of Democracy and Citizenship, Liberty and Law, which would seem to be the chief political task before mankind in the new epoch of history on which we have suddenly entered.

A. E. Z.

Board of Education,

Whitehall, S.W.

Dec. 2, 1914.

Preface To First Edition

This book is the result of an attempt to make clear to myself what fifth-century Athens was really like. Most educated people have their own vision of ancient Greece. I have tried to convey mine in the form of a study of the nature, influence, and interaction of two great forces in Athenian life.

A few words may explain what has dictated this choice of treatment.

It is now generally admitted that neither an individual nor a nation can be properly understood without a knowledge of their surroundings and means of support — in other words, of their geographical and economic conditions. This doctrine, obvious though it seems to-day, was somewhat slow in winning acceptance in connexion with the study of ancient Greece. The traditions of classical learning and the lack of relevant evidence combined to keep Greek scholars out of touch with newer methods of social inquiry. But during the last two generations, thanks mainly to the archaeologists, this defect has been steadily repaired ; and we now possess, and are entitled to draw conclusions from, a large and increasing mass of information about the economic side of Greek life. It is this accumulation of new evidence which, more than any other single factor, distinguishes the Greece of modern scholarship from the Greece of Grote and our grandfathers.

Classical scholarship, therefore, on the Continent at any rate, can no longer be reproached with neglecting the application of modern methods. The special dangers to which it is exposed to-day, and which determined my choice of treatment, lie rather in the opposite direction. There is, firstly, the tendency to overspecialization and one-sidedness, the inclination to forget the wood for the trees. This is a temptation which besets every science at a stage when knowledge is accumulating very rapidly ; but it is particularly insidious in such a study as that of ancient Greece, where for the student everything depends upon remaining steadily conscious, in and through the smallest detail, of the

8 PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION

wonder and greatness of the whole. It is so easy, for instance, in studying the Erechtheum building inscriptions to become absorbed in their interesting information about work and wages, and to forget that they relate to the Erechtheum. Yet when that is forgotten all is forgotten.

Books and articles written in this spirit are easily detected and can be allowed for accordingly. But there is a second tendency to error, against which it is more difficult to guard. It arises from the application of modern methods and ideas to ancient times without a sufficient estimate of the difference between ancient Greek and modern conditions. To take an obvious instance. It has long been clear to historians that economic circumstances had a good deal to do with the Peloponnesian War ; yet we have no right to pass from this to an explanation of the whole struggle in modern economic terms. What is misleading in such explanations is not the details but the background. They seem to be based upon a wrong or at least an inadequate conception of the normal economic life of ancient Greece. The only safe road to the solution of this and kindred problems is to go back to first beginnings, to the careful analysis of ordinary ancient terms and processes. This must be my excuse for the disproportionate length of the third section of the book.

Some further explanation is perhaps necessary as to the attitude I have adopted towards the fourth-century philosophers. Plato and Aristotle used often to be regarded, in the comparative lack of other evidence, as first-rate authorities upon the life of the City State. It is perhaps not even yet sufficiently recognized that they are not. They only knew the City State in the days of its decline, and their view of it is coloured by their own personal ideas and doctrines. It is as unsafe to rely upon them for the facts and spirit of the fifth and preceding centuries as it would be to rely upon Carlyle and Ruskin for the facts and spirit of English life before the Great Reform Bill and the Industrial Revolution. The right method is exactly the reverse, to apply the history of the generation that preceded them to the interpretation of their own doctrines. No interpretation of either the political or the ethical theories of the later philosophers can be satisfactory which does not take into account the impression left upon their minds by the social development which I have

Preface To First Edition 9

attempted to describe. I had originally planned to close the book with a section dealing with this subject — one of great importance in the history of European political speculation — but eventually abandoned it as beyond the proper limits of my scheme. I have, however, allowed myself occasionally to touch upon the subject in the footnotes, as a glance at the Index will show.

I have tried to arrange the book so as to make it useful to students with the least possible distraction to the general reader. It seemed inconvenient to group the footnotes together at the end of the book or the chapters, but I hope that their arrangement in paragraphs will make it easy for the general reader to skip them. My ancient references are, so far as possible, to well-known authors. Modern writers I have generally quoted either to support some statement that seemed to need confirmation, or because I thought the reference might be helpful to the reader. I have never referred to a writer simply because I disagreed with him, and have not troubled to multiply modern witnesses when I had good ancient testimony on my side. In a work involving so many decisions on points of detail I cannot hope to have avoided errors of judgement, but I have done my best to play no tricks with the evidence. Indeed, as those who care to look up the references will realize, there are comparatively few special points on which I can claim to have contributed anything novel

I have to thank a great number of friends for kind help and en couragement, notably Professor Gilbert Murray, Professor Myres Mr. Reginald Coupland, Mr. R. H. Dundas, Mr. Arnold J Toynbee, Mr. Richard Jennings, Mr. W. C. Barton, the Rev J. M. Murphy, S.J., of the National University of Ireland and, last but not least, my old teacher and present colleague Mr. Graham Wallas. My acknowledgements are also due to the authorities of the British School at Athens, who by making me an Associate of the School enabled me to write the greater part of the book under the pleasantest and most favourable conditions.

A. E. Z.

Oakhill Drive, Swbiton, 191 1.

Contents

PAGE

Introductory Note .....

Part I : Geography Chapter

I. The Mediterranean Area .

II. The Sea . . . . . .

. 24

III. The Climate .....

• 36

IV. The Soil

• 43

Part II : Politics

I. Fellowship, or the Rule of Public Opinion II. Custom, or the Rule of the Family

III. Efficiency, or the Rule of the Magistrate

IV. Gentleness, or the Rule of Religion V. Law, or the Rule of Fair Play

VI. Self-Government, or the Rule of the People VII. Liberty, or the Rule of Empire .

The Ideal of Citizenship VIII. Happiness, or the Rule of Love .

59 69

83 107

139 180

Finance .....

Conclusion

Chronological Table Note on Abbreviations Index of Modern Writers cited General Index page 301

350 366 380 397 403

444 450 451 455

MAPS Greece and adjoining lands ...... 14

Map of Attica ....... face p. 41

Attica, Megara, and parts of Corinth and Boeotia, with

Yorkshire to same scale ...... 156

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

It is not the purpose of this book to tell any part of the story of Greek history. That lies within the province of the narrative historian. Our object here is a more modest one — to group together certain facts and to trace the course of certain ideas which may help to make that story and the men who acted in it more intelligible to modern readers.

Greek civilization differs from our own both in its material environment and in its feelings and ideas. Our method will be to deal first with the main features of that environment ; next with the political institutions which the Greeks established within it ; next with their means of livelihood, that is with their ' economics ' or housekeeping ; and lastly with the conflict which arose, as it has arisen in many modern civilized communities, between' the driving necessities of economic development and the accepted institutions and ideals of national life — a conflict which brought inward unhappiness and outward disaster upon the foremost Greek community at the very height of her greatness and left its mark upon the mind and writings of the men who laid the foundations of European political thought.

We shall thus be approaching Greek civilization from a direction contrary to that often taken by modern writers, approaching it from the side on which its differences from our own are most apparent and from which its unique characteristics are most easily seized.

THE GREEK COMMONWEALTH

The Greeks are like Genius, simple : that is why they are the immortal teachers.

Part I. Geography

Two Voices are there ; one is of the sea, One of the mountains, each a mighty voice In both from age to age thou didst rejoice, They were thy chosen music, Liberty.

Chapter I The Mediterranean Area »

'H 'EXXa? ras &pas noWov ti /caXXiora Kexprjfxevas e'Xa^e.

Herodotus, iii. 106.

Greece enjoys by far the best tempered climate.

•

To to>v cE\\r)va)f yevos fiecrevd Kara tovs tottovs.

Aristotle, Politics 1327.

The Hellenic race occupies an intermediate situation geographically.

Greece is a Mediterranean country, placed, as Aristotle says, in an intermediate position, half-way between the Tropics and the cold lands of the North. It shares with the other Mediterranean lands, as compared with Europe beyond the Alps and Africa beyond the Atlas, a distinctive climate, distinctive scenery, and, as a necessary consequence, a distinctive mode of life.

It is the scenery which first attracts the passing traveller of to-day ; and so it has been with the invading hosts of all ages. From the days before history, when the first barbarians thrust their way southwards, the men of the North have always been susceptible to the peculiar beauty of the Mediterranean lands. To us in the North, if we are book-learned and home-keeping, Greece and Italy spell Athens and Rome. They are associated in our minds with a host of inherited ideas, with Art and Freedom and Law and Empire. They are familiar to us as the cradle of some of the strongest forces in our national life, as the first and most congenial home of our distinctively Western civilization. But to the prehistoric Achaeans and Dorians, and to the Galatians and Goths and Longbeards and Vandals and Avars who followed them, this abstract appeal would have had no meaning. Yet they too, in their cold Northern homes, heard

1 In this and the following sections I have made much use of Philippson's Das Mittelmeergebiet, a popularly written book by a standard authority on Mediterranean Geography. So far as I know, there is no similar book in English, although one is greatly needed. It is to be hoped that professor Myres's inaugural lecture "on Greek Lands and the Greek People marks the beginning of a new era for English classical teaching in this respect.

the call of the South, and thousands of them obeyed it. For months or years they pushed sunwards with their families and possessions and household gods, trusting in tribesmen's tales of a wonderful land behind the hills. When they emerged at length out of the last rough Balkan defile and pitched camp one evening on level Greek ground between the mountains and the sea, it was the sheer beauty of this new world which made them feel that they had found a home. Upon their Northern eyes, unused to a region of sharp outlines and strong colours, the Southern landscape worked like magic. They felt they had come to fairyland, and that they must stay there for ever.

The poets of their race, from the bards of the early invaders, out of whom our Homer grew, to Goethe and Byron, Ibsen and Browning, bear constant witness to this spell. Yet it is hard, except just at twilight when the magic is working, to feel quite at home in fairyland. Romance and Imagination sway us powerfully at moments ; but Habit and Affection are stronger forces in our nature and are not to be won over by superficial enticements. The gulf between North and South is too great to be bridged in a single visit or a single lifetime. It takes more than one generation to live a new country into the blood. Our Northern poets who have sung of the South have sung as strangers and sojourners : they have been Romantics not Realists, enthusiastic bystanders rather than quiet inhabitants going about their business and speaking naturally of their life and feelings. The spirit of the South remains for them something strange and picturesque and external, which attracts their wonder and curiosity without winning its way into their understanding or laying its hold upon their devotion. And sometimes they are honest enough to confess it. ' Oh to be in England,' cried Browning, letting pass before his mind's eye all the dear familiar sights that he was missing —

Oh to be in England

Now that April 's there,

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England — now !

chap, i THE MEDITERRANEAN AREA 19

That tells us something of what men have to renounce when they go southward. At the outset of our journey it is well to have it brought to mind.

Where even the poets feel homesick, plain men will fare worse. Often and often must the conquering invader have repented of having obeyed the call, and cursed himself for a fool as he opened his eyes in the morning, after a hot and troubled night, upon the metallic sky above him and the baked ground beneath. It was not for a mere whim that many a Frankish baron of mediaeval Greece abandoned his hard-won domains and went ! home ' to die by the Rhine or the Loire. What could be more attractive to the possessive spirit of a Northern noble than to have Athens for his very own and to look forward to leaving it to his heir ? Otho de la Roche, first feudal lord of Attica and Boeotia, had the Acropolis for his castle and the Parthenon for his minster. Yet he gave up all in his old age and went back with his sons to the rolling plains of Burgundy.1

If the Northerner who has come and seen and yielded to the spell cannot easily adapt his mind to Southern conditions, it is still harder for those who can only enter into contact with it indirectly through books and pictures. They can only understand Mediterranean life and the literature to which it gave birth, whether in Greece or Palestine, by a deliberate effort of the imagination. No doubt the effort is worth making, but its difficulty (especially for young and untrained minds) is very great ; and in England, at any rate, our educational traditions do little to overcome it. For the uncorrected imagination of the Northerner the olive-groves of Colonus are an English park and the plane-trees of the Ilissus a Thames promenade, while ' Sunium's marbled steep ', like the chalk cliffs of the South coast, runs down to long stretches of tidal beach.

These mistakes are all the harder to correct because the Greek poets who have come down to us seldom pause to describe the scenery of their country, and are never detailed or Wordsworthian in their treatment of it. Landscape poetry, like land-

1 Miller, Latins in the Levant, pp. 91-2, cf. 68, 74. Count Berthold of Katzenellenbogen, the Crusader who gave the signal for setting fire to Constantinople, is another instance of the same home-sickness. Both their modest castles still stand. Otho's is La Roche-sur-Ognon on the Haute- Saone : Katzenellenbogen looks down on a little village in Nassau.

B 2 scape painting, belongs to the reflective period in a nation's life, when it has learnt to see itself in its own surroundings. Greek writers, at least up to the end of the fifth century, had not yet fully entered upon this stage of self-consciousness. Like all simple folk, they take a knowledge of their scenery and surroundings for granted in all who listen to them. The Mediterranean landscape, like the institutions of the City State, forms a permanent background to Greek life and thought. Its influence is omnipresent, but it is seldom expressed. It is left to show itself, more spontaneously and truthfully, in the chance idiom or detail that slips out as the setting of a story, in what is implied or hinted rather than consciously stated, in the many little significant touches which to the careful observer, of nations as of men, are always the surest and happiest revelation of character.

Thus the traveller in Southern lands, if he is prepared to forget all he ever knew and begin learning it afresh, will constantly be discovering the real meaning of words and phrases and metaphors which he had been accustomed from his school-days to regard as ' classical tags ' or romantic properties, or had perhaps never noticed at all. A man must have overcome his first strangeness and grown used to going up the Acropolis for his evening walk before he can know why Pericles said that his Athens ' cheered the heart and delighted the eye day by day '. He must have stood on an island peak after sunset before he can truly understand the words of Alcman's evening hymn : —

The hills have fallen asleep.

One quiet spreads, O'er rocks that face the deep

And stony torrent beds.1

or appreciate the masterful subtlety with which Goethe adapted it to his Northern purpose in Uber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh. He must have sailed through the straits of Salamis and landed to look across at the hills of Attica to feel what Euripides' hearers felt when the chorus sang : —

1 Alcman, Frag. 65, beginning

evdovviv §' opeccv Kopvcpai re Kn\ (papuyyes, 7Tpa>oPes tc Kal xapdSpai, where every word should call up a picture.

chap, i THE MEDITERRANEAN AREA 21

In Salamis, filled with the foaming

Of billows and murmur of bees, Old Telamon stayed from his roaming,

Long ago, on a throne of the seas ; Looking out on the hills olive-laden,

Enchanted, where first from the earth The grey-gleaming fruit of the Maiden Athena had birth.1

But what seems simple and obvious to the man on the spot often entirely escapes the notice of the Northern reader ; or, if his attention is directed to it, seems unnatural and mysterious. The traveller, if he is teachable, gradually learns what to look for : he is living in the atmosphere, and a sense of the world in which the old books were written settles on him like thin dust and is with him all day long. When he returns to his study or class-room and takes up Sophocles or Aristophanes his mind is alive with pictures. He can hear the chorus of village elders holding forth by the fountain ; he can almost smell the garlic. His stay-at-home fellow student cannot follow him there without guidance, if he can ever really follow him at all. Travellers' tales, alas, are very different from travel, and geography is a poor substitute for personal experience. Books and lectures and lantern slides cannot take the place of life. Still, unless we are to despair of classical education, the attempt at guidance is worth making. Let us try, therefore, before describing Greek institutions in detail, to make clear some of the simpler features of the world in which the Greeks lived.2

We are taught from early youth to divide the world into continents, and are apt to think of the Mediterranean, which washes three of the five, as marking a boundary line between Europe, Asia, and Africa. We think of Europe as ' civilized ', Asia as Oriental or stagnant, and Africa as barbarous ; or, making the

1 Eur. Troad. 799 ff., tr. Murray.

2 This is not the place in which to marshal the arguments for and against using the languages and literatures of Greece and Rome as a means of training the young. But it is worth pointing out that the analogous attempt to use the English language and literature as a means of education in India is severely criticized by some of the very people who defend the ' classical ' tradition in English education. — 1921. See on this point the masterly report of the Sadler Commission on the University of Calcutta, which is likely to remain for long the locus classicus, not only on the problem of education in Bengal but on kindred problems in other countries.

frontier one of religion rather than of ' progress ', we regard Europe as Christian and Nearer Asia and Africa as Mohammedan. In either case we ' think in continents ', making the land our centre of vision.

This view is natural enough in London, but appears strange in Constantinople, where business men cross twice daily, in suburban steamers, from one continent to the other. It has always been misleading from the point of view of physical geography, for the countries round the Mediterranean form, both structurally and climatically, a distinct region of the world's surface. But it is historically and politically misleading also. Since the French occupation of Algiers, North Africa is no longer Barbary ; and with a Parliament in Constantinople and a railway to the Prophet's Tomb at Medina, Nearer Asia can no longer be called ' stagnant '. We are returning, in fact, to normal conditions. For to the Greeks the Mediterranean area was always a unity, and the Mediterranean itself not a frontier, but a highway ; they saw the world as ' a rim of convergent coastlands encircling the Midland Sea, which is Our Sea '. ' Our Sea ' or ' This Sea ' was indeed their only name for it. With the countries immediately round it they were tolerably familiar ; but the hinterland beyond, which differed in climate, structure, and manners, always remained to them mysterious. Herodotus penetrated behind the true Mediterranean region to Scythia and Babylon and inland Egypt and Libya ; so we can see from his book what non- Mediterranean lands looked like when observed through Greek spectacles.1

This Mediterranean area differs structurally from the countries round it. It is younger than they. A geological map shows the greater part to consist of chains of sharp, recently folded mountains, forr-ed mainly of limestone ; and only in isolated patches,

1 ' Convergent coastlands ' : Myres in Anthropology and the Classics, p. 121. The reference is to Hdt. iv. 36-45. Herodotus could not understand (ch. 45) why ' the earth, being single, should be divided into three parts with names called after women '. The names Europe, Asia, and Libya are unknown to Homer and appear first in Pindar and Aeschylus (e. g. P. V. 412). Compare Myres's paper on The Geographical Aspect of Greek Colonization, published in Proceedings of the Classical Association, vol. viii (191 1), where he dwells on ' the persistent Greekness ', even now, of the Mediterranean seaboard, and shows how ' in all the chief functions of human life and in all the principal relations between its several parts ' the ancient world, which was even in Roman times a predominantly Greek world, ' faced inwards upon the shores of a Midland Sea.'

chap, i THE MEDITERRANEAN AREA 23

as in the ' blunt bowheaded Downs ' round Constantinople, does the traveller find the tame contours to which he is accustomed in England. This adds to the grandeur of the scenery ; but also to the difficulty of communications by land, which is a constant feature of Mediterranean life. Sometimes, for instance, as in Dalmatia, the Chile of Europe, a strip of land is entirely cut off from the regions behind the mountains, and leads a separate life through the greater part of history.

The sea in its present dimensions is even younger than the rocks. Proofs of various sorts, amongst others the occurrence of fossils of dwarf elephants in Malta, Sicily, and Sardinia, have convinced geologists that at some (geologically) very recent period there was. a great subsidence of land over large parts of the area, accompanied, of course, by a corresponding encroachment of sea. To this are attributed the deep depressions which interrupt the mountain chains at many points and cause the irregular coastline and the countless larger and smaller islands and sunken rocks of the Aegean. The cliffs that rise out of what Sophocles called the ' sea-ravines ' of the Cyclades are simply the continuation, across a submerged depression, of the mountain chains of the mainland. Hence, too, the curious straits which we find in Greek lands, which bear little resemblance to our narrow seas at Dover or Stranraer. The Bosporus, the Hellespont, and the Euripus are close and intricate pathways full of twists and corners ; they have, in fact, been eroded, and are simply submerged river-valleys. The famous Golden Horn was once a tributary stream.1

Moreover, this process of subsidence is not yet completed, as Calabria and Sicily know only too well. Mediterranean man has always been familiar with earthquakes and volcanoes. Herodotus remarks it as noteworthy that in Scythia ' if an earthquake takes place, either in summer or winter, it is regarded as a wonder'. This found its reflection in religion and literature : and terra firma to the Greeks was never quite what it is to us.

But we must turn first to the sea, which deserves precedence over terra firma in Mediterranean geography.2

2 Hdt. iv. 28. Strabo, 57-9, gives a list of catastrophes by earthquake and volcano. For the general feeling cf. Eur. Bacchae 391, and numerous other similar passages.

Chapter II The Sea

Aeschylus, Prometheus Vinctus 294.

Ua>s drj av8pes yecopyoi Ka\ ov 6a\ao~aioi . . . agiov av n bpaev ; — Pericles in Thuc. i. 142-3.

How can mere farmers, with no knowledge of the sea, achieve anything worthy of note ?

Every Englishman is familiar with ' the sea ' ; but the sea of the Greeks is not the sea that we know. Landlocked on all sides, as its name implies, except for the narrow exits at Gibraltar and the Dardanelles, the Mediterranean seems in summer as gentle as an inland lake. Yet to call it a lake is to belie its possibilities. It is in fact double-natured, sometimes a lake far better adapted to oars than to sails, sometimes an ocean, not adapted, as a timid Greek navigator might say, for either : or to put it in his own language, a lake when the gods are kind, and an ocean when they are spiteful. This double-natured sea has its own peculiarities, some of which have interesting bearings upon the life of those who dwell round it.