I. ROMAN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION
By singling out one set of the forces of aggregation and disintegration touched on in the foregoing general view, it is possible to get a more concrete idea of what actually went on in the Roman body politic. It is always useful in economic science, despite protests to the contrary, to consider bare processes irrespectively of ethical feeling; and the advantage accrues similarly in the "economic interpretation of history."[160] We have sufficiently for our purpose considered Roman history under the aspects of militarism and class egoism: it remains to consider it as a series of economic phenomena.
This has been facilitated by many special studies. Gibbon covers much of the ground in chapters 6, 14, 17, 18, 29, 35, 36 and 41; and Professor Guglielmo Ferrero sheds new light at some points in his great work, The Greatness and Decline of Rome (Eng. trans. 5 vols. 1907-1911), though his economics at times calls for revision. Cp. Alison on "The Fall of Rome," in Essays, 1850, vol. iii (a useful conspectus, though flawed by some economic errors); Spalding's Italy and the Italian Islands, 3rd ed. 1845, i, 371-400; Dureau de la Malle, Economie politique des Romains, 1840, t. ii; Robiou et Delaunay, Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome, 1888, vol. iii, ch. 1; Fustel de Coulanges, Le Colonat romain, etc.; Finlay, History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans, ed. 1877, ch. i, Sec.Sec. 5-8; Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, vol. i, 1864, chs. xi, xii, xx (a work full of sound criticism of testimonies); W.T. Arnold, Roman Provincial Administration, 1879; Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilisation and Decay, 1897, ch. i; and Dr. Cunningham's Western Civilisation, vol. i, 1899. Among many learned and instructive German treatises may be noted the Preisschrift of R. Poehlmann, Die Uebervoelkerung der antiken Grossstaedte, Leipzig, 1884. Special notice is due to the recent work of W.R. Patterson, The Nemesis of Nations, 1907--a valuable study of slavery.
As we have first traced them, the Romans are a cluster of agricultural and pastoral tribes, chronically at war with their neighbours, and centring round certain refuge-fortresses on one or two of the "Seven Hills." Whether before or after conquest by monarchic Etruscans, these tribes tended normally to fall into social grades in which relative wealth and power tended to go together. The first source of subsistence for all was cattle-breeding and agriculture, and that of the richer was primarily slave labour, a secondary source being usury. Slaves there were in the earliest historic times. But from the earliest stages wealth was in some degree procured through war, which yielded plunder in the form of cattle,[161] the principal species of riches in the ages before the precious metals stood for the command of all forms of wealth. Thus the rich tended to grow richer even in that primitive community, their riches enabling them specially to qualify themselves for war, so getting more slaves and cattle, and to acquire fresh slave labour in time of peace, while in time of war the poor cultivator ran a special risk of being himself reduced to slavery at home, in that his farm was untilled, while that of the slave-owner went on as usual.[162] Long before the ages described as decadent, the lapse of the poor into slavery was a frequent event. "The law of debt, framed by creditors, and for the protection of creditors, was the most horrible that has ever been known among men."[163] When the poorer cultivator borrowed stock or seed from the richer, he had first to pay a heavy interest; and when in bad years he failed to meet that liability he could be at once sold up and finally enslaved with his family, so making competition all the harder for the other small cultivators. As against the plainly disintegrating action of such a system, however, wars of conquest and plunder became to some extent a means of popular salvation, the poorer having ultimately their necessary share in the booty, and, as the State grew, in the conquered lands. Military expansion was thus an economic need.
In such an inland community, commerce could grow but slowly, the products being little adapted for distant exchange. The primitive prejudice of landholders against trade, common to Greece and Rome, left both handicraft and commerce largely to aliens and pariahs.[164] The traders, as apart from the agriculturists and vine-and olive-growers, would as a rule be foreigners, "non-citizens," having no political rights; and their calling was from the first held in low esteem by the richer natives, were it only because in comparison it was always apt to involve some overreaching of the agriculturist,[165] which as between man and man could be seen to be a bad thing by moralists who had no scruples about usury and enslavement for debt. And as the scope of the State increased from age to age, the patrician class found ready to its hand means of enrichment which yielded more return with much less trouble than was involved in commerce. The prejudice against trade was no bar to brigandage.
On the other hand, the first practical problem of all communities, taxation, was intelligently faced by the Roman aristocracy from the outset. The payment of the tributum or occasional special tax for military purposes was a condition of the citizen franchise, and so far the patricians were all burdened where the unenfranchised plebeians were not. But this contribution "was looked upon as a forced loan, and was repaid when the times improved."[166] And there were other compensations. The use of the public pastures (which seem at one time to have been the sole source of the State's revenue[167]), and the cultivation of public land, were operations which could be so conducted as to pay the individual without paying the State. It is clear that frauds in this connection were at all times common: the tithes and rents due on the ager publicus were evaded, and the land itself appropriated wherever possible by the more powerful, though still called public property.[168] "The poorer plebeian, therefore, always strove to have conquered lands divided, and not kept as ager publicus; while the landless men who got allotments at a distance were inclined to regard their migration as an almost equal grievance. If the rich men, they argued, had not monopolised the public pastures with their herds, and treated the lands which they leased at a nominal rental as their own, there would have been enough land at home to divide among those who had been ruined while serving their country in arms."[169]
But as the sphere of conquest widened, another economic phase supervened. Where newly conquered territory was too distant to tempt any save the poorest citizens, or to be directly utilised by the rich, it could still be made ager publicus and rented to its own inhabitants; and the collection of this and other exactions from subject provinces gradually grew to be a main source of Roman wealth. For the mere cattle-looting of the early days there was substituted the systematic extortion of tribute. "In antiquity conquest meant essentially the power to impose a tribute upon the conquered";[170] and "until the time of Augustus the Romans had maintained their armies by seizing and squandering the accumulated [bullion] capital hoarded by all the nations of the world."[171] Meanwhile the upper classes were directly or indirectly supported by the annual tribute which from the time of the conquest of Greece was drawn solely from the provinces. Paulus Emilius brought from the sack of Hellas so enormous a treasure in bullion, as well as in objects of art, that the exaction of the tributum from Roman citizens, however rich, was felt to have become irrational; and henceforth, until Augustus re-imposed taxation to pay his troops, Italy sponged undisguisedly on the rest of the Empire.[172] Caesar's expeditions were simply quests for plunder and revenue; and the reason for his speedy retreat from Britain, for which there have been framed so many superfluous explanations, is plainly given in the letter of Cicero in which he tells of the news sent him from Britain by his brother--"no hope of plunder."[173] But the supreme need was a regular annual tribute, preferably in bullion, but welcome as corn. On the one hand the exacted revenue supported the military and the bureaucracy; on the other hand, the business of collecting taxes and tribute was farmed out in the hands of companies of publicani, mainly formed of the so-called knights, the equites of the early days; in whose hands rich senators, in defiance of legal prohibition, placed capital sums for investment,[174] as they had previously used foreigners, who were free to take usury where a Roman was not. Of such money-makers Gallia Provincia was already full in the days of Cicero.[175] Roman administration was thus a matter of financially exploiting the Empire in the interest of the Roman moneyed classes;[176] and the ruthless skill with which the possibilities of the situation were developed is perhaps even now not fully realised. The Roman financier could secure a tribute upon tribute by lending to a subject city or State the money demanded of it by the government, and charge as much interest on the loan as the borrowers could well pay. We know that the notoriously conscientious Brutus, of sacred memory, thus lent, or backed a friend who lent, money to tribute-payers at 48 per cent., or at least demanded 48 per cent. on his loans, and sought to use the power of the executive to extort the usury.[177]
All this, we are to remember, went on without any furtherance of total domestic wealth-production. When corn-growing fell off, irrecoverably depressed by the unearned import from the richer soils of tributary provinces, there was a transference, partly economic, partly luxurious, of agricultural labour to vine-and olive-culture, and a wholesale turning of arable land to pasture. Some export of wine and olives followed, though the rich Romans tended to drink the wines of Greece. But Italy had ceased to be self-supporting. The produce she imported was far in excess of her power of export;[178] so that in sheer factitiousness the revenue of Rome is without parallel in history. Modern England, which has grown rich by burning up its coal in manufacture or selling it outright, but in the process has acquired a share in the national and municipal debts of all other countries--England is stable in comparison. While it lasts, the coal educes manufactures, which also earn imports and constitute loans. So with the recent exploitation of German iron; though in that case there has been much of sheer national waste in the wholesale export of iron at "dumping" prices in times of trade depression. But the history of Rome was a progressive paralysis of Italian production; and the one way in which the administration can be said to have counteracted the process--as apart from the spontaneous resort to vine-and olive-culture and to slave manufactures--was by forcing more-or-less unprofitable mining for gold and silver wherever any could be got, thus giving what stimulus can be given to demand by the mere placing of fresh bullion on the market. Roman civilisation was thus irrevocably directed to an illusory end, with inevitably fatal results. Bullion had come to standfor public wealth, and wars were made for mines as well as for tribute, Spain in particular being prized for her mining resources. As a necessary sequence, therefore, copper money was ousted by silver (B.C. 269), and silver finally, after a long transition period, by gold, about the time of Severus.[179] The silver had been repeatedly debased when the treasury was in difficulties;[180] and in the later days of the Empire it seems to have been base beyond all historic parallel,[181] though a large revenue was extorted till the end. Between revenue and tax-farming profits and the yield of the mines, the Roman moneyed class must indeed have spent a good deal, so long as the tributaries were not exhausted. But their economic demand was mainly for--(a) foods, spices, wines, cloths, gems, marbles, and wares produced by the more prosperous provinces; (b) expensive forms of food, fish, and fowl, raised chiefly on the estates run by their own class; (c) some wares of home production; and (d) services[182] from artists, architects, master craftsmen, slaves, mimes, parasites, and meretrices, whose economic demand in turn would as far as possible go in the same directions.
As for the mass of the town people, slave or free, which ought on common-sense principles to have been employed either in industry or on the land, it was by a series of hand-to-mouth measures on the part of the government, and by the operation of ordinary self-interest on the part of the rich class, made age by age more unproductive industrially and more worthless politically. Despite such a reform as the Licinian law of 367 B.C.,[183] which for a time seems to have restored a yeoman class to the State and greatly developed its fighting power, the forces of outside competition and of capitalism gradually ousted the yeomen cultivators all over Italy, leaving the land mainly in the hands of the patricians and financiers of the city, who exploited it either by slave labour or by grinding down the former cultivators as tenants. Even on this footing, a certain amount of industry would be forced on the towns. But not only was that also largely in the hands of slave-masters, with the result that demotic life everywhere was kept on the lowest possible plane: the emperors gradually adopted on humane grounds a policy which demoralised nearly all that was left of sound citizenship.
As of old, monarchy in the hands of the more rational and conscientious men tended to seek for the mass of the people some protection as against the upper class; and the taxes and customs laid on by Augustus, to the disgust of the Senate, were an effort in this direction. But this was rather negative than positive protection, and the effort inevitably went further. In the last rally of what may be termed conscientious aristocratic republicanism, such as it was, we find Caius Gracchus, as tribune, helping the plebs by causing grain to be sold at a half or a fourth of its market value--an expedient pathetically expressive of the hopeless distance that then lay between public spirit and social science. Both of the Gracchi sought by violent legal measures to wring the appropriated public lands from the hands of the rich, with the inevitable result of raising against themselves a host of powerful enemies. The needed change could not be so effected. But even if it had been, it could not have endured. The Greek advisers of Tiberius Gracchus, Blossius of Cumae and Diophanes of Mitylene,[184] looked solely to redistribution, taking for granted the permanence of slavery, the deadliest of all inequalities. The one way, if there were any, in which the people could be saved was by a raising of their social status; and that was impossible without an arrest of slavery and a cessation of extorted tribute. But no Roman thinker save the Gracchi and their predecessors and imitators seems ever to have dreamt of the former, and no one contemplated the latter remedy. Least of all were the Roman ruling class likely to think of either; and though Tiberius Gracchus did avowedly seek to substitute free for slave labour,[185] and wrought to that end; and though Caius Gracchus did in his time of power employ a large amount of free labour on public works, one such effort counted for nothing against the normal attitude of the patriciate. In order to fight the Senate he had to conciliate the publicani and money-lenders as well as the populace, and the reforms of the two brothers came to nothing.[186]
There is no record that in the contracts between the treasury and the companies of publicani any stipulation was ever made as to their employing free labour, or in any way considering the special needs of the populations among whom they acted.[187] Thus a mere cheapening of bread could do nothing to aid free labour as against capitalism using slaves. On the contrary, such aids would tend irresistibly to multiply the host of idlers and broken men who flocked to Rome from all its provinces, on the trail of the plunder. Industrial life in Rome was for most of them impossible, even were they that way inclined;[188] and the unceasing inward flow would have been a constant source of public danger had the multitude not been somehow pacified. The method of free or subsidised distribution of grain,[189] however, was so easy a way of keeping Rome quiet, in the period of rapidly spreading conquest and mounting tribute, that in spite of the resistance of the moneyed classes[190] it was adhered to. Sulla naturally checked the practice, but still it was revived; and Caesar, after his triumph in Africa, found the incredible number of 320,000 citizens in receipt of regular doles of cheapened or gratis corn. He in turn, though he had been concerned in extending it,[191] took strong measures to check the corrosion, reducing the roll to 150,000;[192] but even that was in effect a confession that the problem was past solution by the policy, so energetically followed by him, of re-colonising in Italy, Corinth, Carthage, Spain, and Gaul. And if Caesar sought to limit the gifts of bread, he seems to have outgone his predecessors in his provision of the other element in the popular ideal--the circus; his shows being bloodier as well as vaster than those of earlier days.[193] A public thus treated to sport must needs have cheap food as well.
Of this policy, the economic result was to carry still further the depression of Italian agriculture. The corn supplied at low rates or given away by the administration was of course bought or taken in the cheapest markets--those of Sardinia and Sicily, Egypt, Africa, and Gaul--and importation once begun would be carried to the utmost lengths of commercialism. Italian farms, especially those at a distance from the capital,[194] could not compete with the provinces save by still further substituting large slave-tilled farms for small holdings, and grinding still harder the face of the slave. When finally Augustus,[195] definitely establishing the system of lowered prices and doles, subsidised the trade in the produce of conquered Egypt to feed his populace, and thus still further promoted the importation of the cheapest foreign grain, the agriculture of a large part of Italy, and even of parts of some provinces, was practically destroyed.
It has been argued by M'Culloch (Treatises and Essays: History of Commerce, 2nd ed. p. 287, note) that it is impossible that the mere importation of the corn required to feed the populace--say a million quarters or more--could have ruined the agriculture of Italy. This expresses a misconception of what took place. The doles were not universal, and the emperors naturally preferred to limit themselves as far as possible to paying premiums for the importation and cheap sale of corn. (Cp. Suetonius, Claudius, c. 19, and the Digest, iii, 4, 1; xiv, i, 1, 20; xlvii, ix, 3, 8; l, v, 3, etc.) All of the conquered provinces, practically, had to pay a tithe of their produce; and where corn was specially cheap it would be likely to come to Rome in that form. (Cp. Dureau de la Malle, Econ. polit. des Romains, ii, 424 sq.) Many of the patrician families, besides, owned great estates in Africa, and they would receive their revenues in produce. Egyptian, Sardinian, Sicilian, and African corn could thus easily undersell Italian for ordinary consumption. For the rest, the produce of Egypt would be a means of special revenue to the emperor. Cp. M'Culloch's own statement, p. 291.
Prof. Ferrero (Greatness and Decline of Rome, Eng. trans. ii, App. A) has independently (but in agreement with Weber and Salvioli) carried M'Culloch's thesis further, and has opposed the view that the "competition" of Sicilian and African wheat "was the cause of the agricultural depression from which Italy began to suffer in 150 B.C." His own theory is the singular one that the "depression" was caused by "the increased cost of living" arising out of luxurious habits! This untenable and indeed unintelligible conclusion he ostensibly reaches by a series of arguments that are alternately incoherent and rotatory, of propositions some of which are rebutted by himself, and of assumptions that are plainly astray. The dispute may be condensed thus:--
(1) "In antiquity," the Professor begins, "each district consumed its own wheat"; yet he goes on to mention that in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Attica was "obliged to import, even in good seasons, between 12,000,000 and 15,000,000 bushels." This contradiction he appears to think is saved by the addendum that "the amount in question is a very small one, compared with the figures of modern commerce." Naturally it is, Athens being a small State compared with those of to-day. But the contradiction stands unresolved. And it follows that larger towns, not placed in fruitful "districts," would have proportionally larger imports.
(2) "Moreover," writes the Professor, "while the industrial countries of to-day seek so far as possible to check the import of cereals by protective duties, Athens used every expedient of war and diplomacy to render the supply of imported corn both regular and abundant." It is startling to find a professor of history, a sociological historian, unaware that Britain, Belgium, and Holland have no import duties on corn. (The most exclusive State in that matter is Portugal, which, with no pretensions to be an industrial State, prohibits corn imports altogether.)
(3) More plausibly, Prof. Ferrero argues that the policy of Athens proves that "corn was not easily transported for sale beyond the local market." But the efforts of the Athenians "to obtain the mastery of the Black Sea, and especially of the Bosphorus, in order to capture the corn trade for themselves, or to entrust it, on their own conditions, to whom they pleased," proves that the difficulties of transport were mainly those set up by hostile States or pirates, and that--as the Professor admits--the fertile Crimea, with its sparse population, yielded an easy surplus for export.
(4) All this, however, is only partially relevant to the question of the supplies of Rome from Sicily, Sardinia, Africa, and Spain in the second century B.C. Did such supplies come, or did they not? As the Professor admits, they were "vital" to the Roman military policy; and "she had immense granaries at her disposal whenever she required them." But such sources of supply meant a certain large normal production; and this would enter Italy in time of peace. If it was purposely maintained in view of the needs of war-time, so much the more surely would it undersell Italian wheat, raised on a less fruitful soil. In no other way could Sicily and Africa yield either annual tribute to Rome or rents to Roman owners of land in those countries. The first effect of the importation would be to add the pressure of lowered prices to the discouragement already offered to private cultivators by the inducements of loot in war, fleecings in administration of newly conquered countries, commerce, and usury. Of this discouragement the sequel would be the attempt to run by slave labour the large estates in which the old farms were merged. But slave labour is apt to be bad labour, and agriculture could not thereby be restored.
(5) The thesis that agriculture was depressed by high cost of living (= high prices for agricultural products) it is not easy to treat with seriousness. The simple fact is that sea-carriage to Rome from Sicily, Spain, and Africa must have been cheaper than land carriage from most parts of Italy to the capital. As Prof. Ferrero notes, food prices in the valley of the Po were very low--obviously because cost of carriage either to Rome or to the southern seaports deterred export.
(6) Prof. Ferrero's fallacy is capped by his proposition that "the economic crisis from which Italy has been suffering during the last twenty years is due to the increased cost of living occasioned by the introduction, from 1848 onwards, of the industrial civilisation of England and France into an old agricultural society." The confusion here defies analysis. Suffice it to say that the high cost of living in modern Italy is due to tariffs and high taxation. Sugar is dear there not because Italians consume it luxuriously--they do not and cannot--but because a particularly unintelligent policy of Protection causes them to pay for beetroot sugar produced in a country ill-suited to the growth of beetroot. Living costs more in Germany, France, and the United States than in Britain, not because those countries have only recently become "luxurious," but because they heavily tax imports. Costs of living in Rome certainly rose as Romans raised their standards of consumption; but their importation of corn from conquered provinces kept food prices lower than they would have been otherwise; and Italian agriculture was largely abandoned in favour of easier ways of making money.
Prof. Ferrero supplies a partial confutation of his economic theory by his own account (i, 311) of how, in the time of Pompey, "once more the precious metals were cheap and abundant" after a time of scarcity, and the decadent slave system of agriculture was superseded by new forms of production. (See above, p. 79, note.) But abundant bullion means high prices for produce, which the Professor has declared to be a cause of depression! As to the new production, the process certainly cannot have taken place with the rapidity which his description suggests. "The hideous slave-shelters or compounds [ergastula], with their gangs of forced labourers, vanished from the scene, together with the huge desolate tracts of pasture where they had spent their days [?], to be replaced by vineyards, olive-groves, and orchards, now planted in all parts of the peninsula, ... estates on which the new slave immigrants contentedly cultivated the vine or the olive, or bred animals for the stable or transport, under the direction of a Greek or Oriental bailiff; ... pleasant cottages of landlords, who farmed their own holdings with the help of a few slaves." All this cannot have happened in the time of Pompey. But in any case, inasmuch as bullion was rife, prices in general must have been high, yet without "depression"; and the new demand for wine and olives, in the terms of the case, made their cultivation remunerative. But "huge pastures" cannot have been "replaced" by vineyards and olive-groves; and Italian agriculture did not in imperial times become again the thing it had been.
It was not that, as Pliny put it in the perpetually quoted phrase,[196] the latifundia, the great estates, had ruined Italy and began to ruin the provinces; it was that, first, the fertile conquered provinces, notably Sicily, undersold Italy; whereafter the economically advantaged competition of Egypt, as imperially exploited, and of the African provinces, undersold the produce of most of the other regions, and would have done so equally had their agriculture remained in the hands of small farmers. The latifundia were themselves effects of the policy of conquest and annexation. The theory that "those large pastoral estates, and that slave-cultivation, which had so powerful and so deleterious an influence over Italian husbandry and population, may be principally ascribed to the confiscations and the military colonies of Sulla and his successors," is clearly wide of the mark.
So M'Culloch, Treatises and Essays: Colonial System of the Ancients, p. 426. No doubt agriculture went rapidly from bad to worse in the convulsions of Sulla's rule, when whole territories passed into the hands of his partisans. These would be bent on the use of slave labour, and would take to the forms of production which gave them the best money return. On the other hand, in an age of chronic confiscation of whole areas, steady men were not likely to be attracted to the land. See Prof. Pelham's Outlines, p. 213; Dureau de la Malle, Econ. polit. des Romains, vol. ii, liv. iii, ch. 22.
Large capitalistic estates were beginning to arise in Attica in the time of Solon, and were normal in the time of Xenophon.[197] In Carthage, where they likewise arose in due economic course, they do not seem to have hurt agriculture, though worked by slave labour;[198] and, on the other hand, the Roman military colonies were an attempt, albeit vain, to restore a free farming population. In Italy the disease was older than Sulla. When Tiberius Gracchus was passing through Etruria on his way from Spain, fifty years before the rule of Sulla, he saw no free labourers, but only slaves in chains.[199] The true account of the matter is this: that if Italy had not conquered Sicily, North Africa, Egypt, and the other fertile provinces, their competition could not have come to pass as it did; for any imports in that case would have had to be paid for by exports, and Italy had nothing adequate to export. It was the power to exact tribute, or otherwise the appropriation of conquered territory as estates by the nobles,[200] that upset the economic balance. Not merely in order to support the policy of cheap or free food--which was extended to other large Italian cities--but because corn was the staple product of Sicily and Egypt and North Africa, the tribute came in large measure in the form of foods; and in so far as it came in bullion, the coin had to be speedily re-exported to pay for further food and for the manufactures turned out by the provinces, and bought by the Italian rich. Save in so far as rich amateurs of agriculture went on farming at small profit or at a loss,[201] Italy produced little beyond olives and wine and cattle,[202] and ordinary wares for home consumption. Industrially considered, the society of the whole peninsula was thus finally a mere shell, doing its exchanges mainly in virtue of the annual income it extorted from provincial labour, and growing more and more worthless in point of character as its vital basis grew more and more strictly factitious. It would be accurate to say of the Empire, as represented by part of Italy and the capital, that it was a vast economic simulacrum. The paternal policy of the emperors,[203] good and bad, wrought to pretty much the same kind of result as the egoism of the upper classes had done; and though their popular measures must have exasperated the Senate, that body had in general to tolerate their well-meaning deeds as it did their crimes.[204]
We may perhaps better understand the case by supposing a certain economic development to take place in England in the distant future. At present we remain, as we are likely long to remain, economically advantaged or beneficed for manufacture by our coalfields, which are unequalled in Europe, though Germany, through the invention which made her phosphoric iron workable, has a larger store of the chief industrial metal. In return for our coal and manufactures and our shipping services, we import foods and goods that otherwise we could not pay for; and the additional revenue from British investments in foreign debts and enterprises further swells the food and raw material import, thus depressing to a considerable extent our agriculture under a system of large farms. When in the course of centuries the coalfields are exhausted, unless it should be found that the winds and tides can be made to yield electric power cheaply enough, our manufacturing population will probably dwindle. Either the United States will supersede us with their stores of coal, or--if, as may well be, their stores are already exhausted by a vaster exploitation--China may take the lead. The chief advantage left us would be the skill and efficiency of our industrial population--an important but incalculable factor.[205] A "return to the land," if not achieved beforehand, might in that case be assumed to be inevitable; but should Australian, Indian, and North and South American wheat-production continue (as it may or may not) to have the same relative advantages of soil, our remaining city populations would continue to buy foreign corn; and the land might still be largely turned to pasture. That remaining city population, roughly speaking, would in the terms of the case consist of (a) those persons drawing incomes from foreign investments; (b) those workmen, tradesmen, and professional people who could still be successfully employed in manufactures, or whom the interest-drawing classes employed to do their necessary home-work, as the Romans perforce employed to the last many workmen and doctors and scribes, slave or free; (c) those who might earn incomes by seafaring; and (d) the official class--necessarily reduced, like every other. Until the incomes from foreign investments had in some measure disappeared, the country could not gravitate down to an economically stable recommencement in agriculture.
We need not consider curiously whether things would or will happen in exactly this way: the actual presumption is that before coal is exhausted the whole social structure will be modified; and it is conceivable that the idle class may have been eliminated. But we are supposing a less progressive evolution for illustration's sake. Suffice it that such a development would be in a measure economically analogous to what took place in ancient Rome. If the upper-class population of such a hypothetical future in England, instead of receiving only dividends from foreign stocks and pensions from the revenue of India, were able to extort an absolute tribute from India and other dominions, the parallel would be so much the closer. What held together the Roman Empire so long was, on the one hand, the developed military and juridical organisation with its maintaining revenue, and on the other hand the absence of any competent antagonist. Could a Mithridates or an Alexander have arisen during the reign of one of the worse emperors, he might more easily have overrun the Roman world than Rome did Carthage. As it was, all the civilised parts of the Empire shared its political anaemia; and indeed the comparative comfort of the Roman peace, with all its burden of taxation, was in many of the provinces a sufficient though precarious ground for not returning to the old life of chronic warfare, at least for men who had lost the spirit of reasoned political self-assertion.
Under good emperors, the system worked imposingly enough; and Mommsen, echoing Gibbon, not unwarrantably bids us ask ourselves whether the south of Europe has ever since been better governed than it was under the Antonines.[206] The purely piratical plunder carried on by governors under the Republic was now, no doubt, in large measure restricted. But, to say nothing of the state of character and intellect, the economic evisceration was proceeding steadily alike under good emperors and bad, and the Stoic jurists did but frame good laws for a worm-eaten society. So long as the seat of empire remained at Rome, drawing the tribute thither, the imperial system would give an air of solidity to Italian life; but when the Roman population itself grew cosmopolitanised in all its classes, taking in all the races of the Empire, the provinces were in the terms of the case as Roman as the capital; and there was no special reason, save the principle of concentration, why the later emperors should reside there. Where of old the provincial governors had extorted from their subjects fortunes for themselves, to be spent in Rome like the public tribute, they would now tend to act as permanent dwellers in their districts.[207] Once the palace was set up elsewhere, the accessories of administration inevitably followed; and the transference of official and other population would partly balance the restriction of food supply caused by the deflection of Egyptian corn-tribute to Constantinople--a loss that had to be made good by a drain on Libya and Carthage.[208] But when under Valentinian and Valens the Empire came to be definitely divided, the western section, whose main source of revenue was the African province, speedily fell into financial straits. Valentinian had on his hands in the ten years of his reign three costly wars--one to recover Britain, one to repel the Alemanni from Gaul, one to recover Africa from Firmus; and it was apparently the drain on revenue thus set up, aggravated by an African famine,[209] that drove Gratian on his accession to the step of confiscating the revenues of the pagan cults.[210] So great was the State's need that even the pagan Eugenius could not restore the pagan revenues. Thenceforth the financial decay headed the military; and we shall perhaps not be wrong in saying that the growth of medieval Italy, the new and better-rooted life which was to make possible the Renaissance, obscurely began when Italy, stripped of Gaul and Spain and Africa, and cut off from the East, which held Egypt, was deprived of its unearned income, and the populace had in part to turn for fresh life to agriculture and industry. The flight of the propertied families at each successive sack of Rome by Goth and Vandal must have left freedom to many, and room for new enterprise to the more capable, though in some districts there seems to have been absolute depopulation. And while Italy thus fell upon a wholesomer poverty,[211] the provinces would be less impoverished.
Some of the ruin, indeed, has not been remedied to this day. Part of the curse of conquest was the extension of the malarious area of Italian soil, always considerable. The three temples to the Goddess Fever in Rome were the recognition of a standing scourge, made active by every overflow of the Tiber; and pestilent areas were common throughout the land. But when the great plain of Latium was well peopled, the feverous area was in constant process of reduction by agriculture and drainage; and the inhabitants had become in large part immune to infection.[212] In the early, the "Social" and the later civil wars it was devastated and depopulated to such an extent that Pliny[213] could enumerate fifty-three utterly eliminated stocks or "peoples," and could cite the record of thirty-three towns which had stood where now were the Pontine marshes.[214] As early as 340 B.C. the land round Rome was counted unhealthy, so that veterans were loth to settle on it;[215] but population went back instead of forward. It is thus true that the malaria of the Campagna and other districts was an ancient trouble;[216] but it was the perpetual march of conquest, for ever sending forth to more attractive soils the stocks who might have re-peopled and recovered it, that made that and so much more of Italy fixedly pestilential down to modern times. Thus the paralysis of Italian production by conquest was a twofold process, direct and indirect.
In ancient as in later times, doubtless, attempts were made to bring back to human habitation the stricken deserts that stained Italy like a leprosy. Thus Caesar sought early to repeople Campania from the idle populace of Rome.[217] But to maintain steady cultivation in unhealthy regions there was needed an immune stock, and that was reproducible only by the old way of savage, self-preserving persistence on the part of hardy and primitive rustics working their own land. The new imported stocks, slave or free, wilted away before the scourge of fever; and the "principle of population," weakened in the spring, failed to surmount the resistance of Nature. Under the early Empire the labour needed for the culture of the Campagna had to be brought in annually from distant districts; and when the invading Goths in the fifth century devastated the whole area there was no energy left to recover it.
[The theories once current as to ancient knowledge of prophylactics in the shape of perfumes and the habitual use of woollen clothing may be dismissed as fanciful. The rational conclusion is that the early races developed a relative immunity, which was possessed neither by the eastern stocks imported in the period of conquest nor by the later invading Teutons. It is noteworthy, however, that at all times the dwellers in the tainted areas learned something of the necessary hygiene. See Dureau de la Malle, as cited. His investigation is interesting as showing how, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, long before Pasteur, biology had reached the perception that fevers come of an organic infection. It was doubtless such knowledge that led the Romans to burn their dead.]
There remains the question, What is the precise economic statement of the final collapse? It is easy to figure that in terms of (a) increasing barbarian enterprise, stimulated by the personal experience of the many barbarians who served the Empire, and of (b) increasing moral weakness on the part of the whole administrative system. And doubtless this change in the balance of military energy was decisive. When utter weaklings sat by heredity in the imperial chair, at best contemptuously tolerated by their alien officers, the end was necessarily near. The most incurable disease of empire was just empire; ages of parasitism had made the Roman ruling class incapable of energetic action; and the autocracy had long withheld from citizens the use of arms. But the long subsistence of the Eastern Empire as contrasted with the Western proves that not only had the barbarians an easier task against Italy in terms of its easiness of invasion, but the defence was there relatively weaker in terms of lack of resources. This lack has been wholly or partly explained by quite a number of writers[218] as a result of a failure in the whole supply of the precious metals--a proposition which may be understood of either a falling-off in the yield of the mines or a general withdrawal of bullion from the Empire. It is difficult to see how either explanation can stand. There was already an immense amount of bullion in the Empire, and a general withdrawal could take place only by way of export to the barbarian east in return for commodities.[219] But the eastern provinces of the Empire were still in themselves abundantly productive, and after the fall of Rome they continued to exhibit industrial solvency. No doubt the plunder of Rome by Alaric (409-10) greatly crippled the west, and the loss of Gaul and Spain was worse; but while the Empire retained Africa it had a source of real revenue. The beginning of the end, or rather the virtual end, came with the conquest of the African province by the Vandals (430-40). In 455 came the sack of Rome by the Vandals, whereafter there remains only a shadow of the Roman Empire, till Odoaker, dismissing Augustulus, makes himself king of Italy.
As for the falling-off in the yield of the Spanish mines, to which some writers seem to attribute the whole collapse, it could only mean that the Roman Government at length realised what had been as true before and has been as true since, that all gold-mining, save in the case of the richest and easiest mines, separately considered, or of groups of mines which have been acquired at less cost than went to find and open them, is carried on at a loss as against the standing competition of the great mass of precious metal above-ground at any moment, the output of unknown barbarian toil and infinite slave labour, begun long before the age of written history.[220] When it was reluctantly realised that the cost of working either the gold or the silver mines was greater to the State than their product,[221] they would be abandoned; though under a free government private speculators would have been found ready to risk more money in reopening them immediately. As a matter of fact, the Spanish mines were actually worked by the Saracens in the Middle Ages, and have been since. The Romans had made the natural blunder of greed in taking all gold and silver mines into the hands of the State,[222] where speculative private enterprise would have gone on working them at a loss, and so adding--vainly enough--to the total bullion in circulation, on which the State could levy its taxes. Even as it was, when they were losing nothing, but rather checking loss, by abandoning the mines, a falling-off in revenue from one source could have been made good by taxation if the fiscal system had remained unimpaired, and if the former income of Italy had not been affected by other causes than a stoppage of mining output.
If the mere cessation of public gold-mining were the cause of a general weakening of the imperial power, and by consequence the cause of the collapse in Italy, it ought equally to have affected the Eastern Empire, which we know to have possessed a normal sufficiency of bullion all through the Dark and Middle Ages, though it had no mines left.[223] The fact is that, when Valentinian and Valens divided the Empire between them, the former chose the western half because he shared the delusion that the Spanish mines were a greater source of real wealth than the fruitful provinces of the east. Those could always procure the bullion they required, because they had produce to exchange for it. Gold mines even of average fertility could have availed no more; and if Italy had remained agriculturally productive she could have sustained herself without any mines.
Dr. Cunningham, in his study of the economic conditions of the declining Empire, appears to lay undue stress on the factor of scarcity of bullion, and does not duly recognise the difference of progression between the case of Italy and that of the east. "The Roman Empire," he writes (p. 187, note), lacked both treasure and capital, "and it perished." When? The eastern seat of the Empire survived the western by a thousand years. "It seems highly improbable," he argues again (p. 185), "that the drain of silver to the east, which continued during the Middle Ages, was suspended at any period of the history of the Empire." But such a drain (which means a depletion) cannot go on for twelve hundred years; and it was certainly not a drain of silver to the east that ruined the Byzantine Empire. Finlay's dictum (i, 52) that the debasement of the currency between Caracalla and Gallienus "annihilated a great part of the trading capital in the Roman Empire and rendered it impossible to carry on commercial transactions, not only with foreign countries but even with distant provinces," is another erroneous theorem.
It seems clear that the Italian collapse occurred as it did because, after the fall of the three great possessions, Gaul, Spain, and Africa, there was left only the central State, made impotent by long parasitism to meet the growing barbarian pressure. Italy in the transition period can have yielded very little revenue, though Rome had for the barbarians plenty of hoarded plunder; and the country had long ceased to yield good troops. Gaul itself had been monstrously taxed; and it must have been no less a prudent than a benevolent motive that led Julian to reduce to L2,000,000 the revenue of L7,000,000 extorted by Constantine and Constantius.[224] The greater the depression in the sources of income, and the greater the costs of the frontier wars, the harder became the pressure of the fiscal system, till the burdens laid on the upper citizens who formed the curia[225] put them out of all heart for patriotic action, and drove many to flight, to slavery, or the cloister. Towards the end, indeed, there was set up a rapid process of economic change which substituted for slaves a class of serfs, coloni, adscriptitii, and so on, who though tied to the land paid a rent for it and could keep any surplus; but under this system agriculture was thus far no more a source of revenue than before. Latterly the very wine of Italy grew worthless, and its olives decayed;[226] so that in once fruitful Campania, "the orchard of the south," Honorius in the year 395 had to strike from the fiscal registers, as worthless, more than three hundred thousand acres of land[227]--an eighth of the whole province. After the ruinous invasions of Rhadagast and Alaric, fresh remissions of taxation had to be given, so that as the danger neared the defence weakened.[228] In the east, again, there was no impulse to succour the falling west; and indeed there was not the ability. The fiscal power of the Emperor was inelastic; his revenues, extorted by cruel pressure, needed careful husbanding; his own world needed all his attention; and the eastern upper class of clerics and officials were not the people to strain themselves for the mere military retention of Britain or Gaul or Italy, as Rome would have done in the republican period, or as the emperors would have done before the period of decentralisation. For the rich agricultural provinces of Africa they did strive with success when Belisarius overthrew the Vandals; and in that age, when Italy had once more become revenue-yielding through the revival of her agriculture, it was worth the while of the east to reconquer Italy also; but the old spirit of resolute dominion and aggression was gone. Armies could still be enrolled and generalled if there was pay for them; but the pay failed, not because bullion was lacking, but because the will and power to supply and apply it in the old fashion was lacking. The new age, after Theodosius, looked at these matters in a different light--the light of commercial self-interest and Christian or eastern disregard for Roman tradition and prestige. The new religion, Christianity, was a direct solvent of imperial patriotism in the old sense, transferring as it did the concern of serious men from this world to the next, and from political theory to theological. In Italy, besides, the priesthood could count on making rather more docile Christians of the invaders than it had done of the previous inhabitants; so that Christian Rome, once overrun, must needs remain so.
[Finlay (ed. cited i, 294) suggests that "probably the knowledge which the Emperor Justin and his cabinet must have possessed of the impossibility of deriving any revenue from the agricultural districts of Italy offers the simplest explanation of the indifference manifested at Constantinople to the Lombard invasion." But he had already noted (p. 236, note) that a great revival of agriculture took place in the reign of Theodoric. Then it could only be through the exhaustion of the subsequent wars that Italy was incapable of yielding a revenue. The true explanation of Justin's inaction is probably not indifference but impotence, the Empire's resources being then drained.
After the invasion of the Lombards the clergy and Senate of Rome had to send a large sum in bullion to induce the Emperor Maurice to listen to their prayers for help. Still the help could not be given, though, save in the case of the coast towns (see below, p. 188), tribute was paid to Byzantium till the final breach between Rome and Leo the Iconoclast. (Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 114.)
Guizot (Histoire de la Civilisation en France, 13e ed. i, 75, 76) notes the fundamental difference in the attitude of the Church under the old and eastern emperors and under the Teutonic rule. Symonds (Renaissance in Italy, 2nd ed. i, 43) thinks this was a result of Theodoric's not having made Rome his headquarters, and his having treated it with special respect. But the clergy of Gaul at once gained an ascendency over the Frankish kings, and the popes would probably have done as well with resident emperors as with absentees. Their great resource was that of playing one Christian monarch against another--a plan not open to the patriarch of Constantinople.]
That the Empire could still at a push raise armies and find for them generals who could beat back the barbarians was sufficiently shown in the careers of Stilicho and Aetius and Belisarius; but the extreme parsimony with which Justinian supported his great commander in Italy is some proof of the economic difficulty of keeping up, even in a period of prudent administration,[229] a paid force along the vast frontiers of what had been Hadrian's realm. Only as ruled by one central system, inspired by an ideal of European empire, and using the finance and force of the whole for the defence of any part, could that realm have been preserved; and when Diocletian, while holding mechanically by the ideal of empire, began the disintegration of its executive, he began the ending of the ideal. The creation of an eastern capital was now inevitable; and when once the halving of the Empire had become a matter of course, the west, hollow at the core, was fated to fall. We should thus not be finally wrong in saying that "the Roman idea" died out before the Western Empire could fall; provided only that we recognise the economic and other sociological causation of the process.
It remains to note, finally, that the process cannot possibly be explained by the theory that the Eastern Empire was successfully unified by Christianity, and that the Western remained divided by reason of the obstinate adherence of the Roman aristocracy to Paganism. The framer of this theory confutes it by affirming that in Greece "the popular element ... by its alliance with Christianity, infused into society the energy which saved the Eastern Empire," while admitting that in Italy also the "great body of the [city] population" had embraced Christianity. Surely the popular Christian element ought to have saved Italy also if it were the saving force. Italy was essentially Christian in the age of Belisarius: if there was any special element of disunion it was the mutual hatred of Arians and Athanasians and other sects, which had abundantly existed also in the east, where it finally furthered the Saracen conquest of the Asiatic provinces and Egypt,[230] but as regarded the central part of the Empire was periodically got rid of by the suppression of all heresy.[231] Eastern unification, such as it was, had thus been the work, not of "Christianity," or of any sudden spirit of unity among the Greeks, but of the Imperial Government, which in the East had sufficient command of, and needed for its own sake to use, the resources that we have seen lost to Italy.[232] As for the established religion, it was the insoluble conflict of doctrine as to images that finally, in the reign of Leo the Iconoclast, arrayed the Papacy against the Christian Emperor, and completed the sunderance of Greek and Latin Christendom; while in the East the patriarch of Jerusalem became the minister of the Moslem conquerors in the seventh century, as did the patriarch of Constantinople in the fifteenth.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 160: The phrase of Professor Thorold Rogers, whose application of the principle, however, does not carry us far.]
[Footnote 161: Dr. Cunningham overlooks this form of gain-getting by war, when he says that the early Romans had no direct profit from it (Western Civilisation, i, 154), but mentions it later (p. 157). Prof. Ferrero likewise overlooks it when (Eng. tr. i, 4) he specifies "timber for shipbuilding and salt" as practically the whole of the exportable products of the early Romans. Once more, who consumed their cattle?]
[Footnote 162: Cp. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, i, 26, following Von Ihering.]
[Footnote 163: Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome, pref. to Virginia. Cp. Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 80-81.]
[Footnote 164: Cp. Dureau de la Malle, Econ. polit. des Romains, vol. ii, liv. iv, ch. 9.]
[Footnote 165: Cp. Cicero, De Officiis, i, 42.]
[Footnote 166: Mommsen, B. i, ch. v. Eng. tr. i, 80.]
[Footnote 167: Pliny, Hist. Nat. xviii, 3]
[Footnote 168: E. Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 518), alleges a common misconception as to the ager publicus being made a subject of class strife; but does not make the matter at all clearer. Cp. Niebuhr, Lectures on the History of Rome, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. pp. 153-54, 407, 503.]
[Footnote 169: Shuckburgh, History of Rome, pp. 93, 94. Cp. Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, ch. xii, and Pelham, pp. 187-89, as to the frauds of the rich in the matter of the public lands.]
[Footnote 170: W.T. Arnold, Roman Provincial Administration, 1879, p. 26.]
[Footnote 171: Finlay, History of Greece, Tozer's ed. i, 39.]
[Footnote 172: When Julius Caesar abolished the public revenue from the lands of Campania by dividing them among 20,000 colonists, the only Italian revenue left was the small duty on the sale of slaves (Cicero, Ep. ad Atticum, ii, 16).]
[Footnote 173: Ep. ad Atticum, iv, 15 (16).]
[Footnote 174: Cp. Niebuhr, Lectures on Roman History, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. pp. 227, 449; Gibbon, Bohn ed. iii, 404; v, 74-75.]
[Footnote 175: Orat. pro M. Fonteio, v. Cp. Long, in loc. (Orationes, 1855, ii, 167).]
[Footnote 176: Dr. Cunningham, preserving the conception of Rome as an entity with choice and volition, inclines to see a necessary self-protection in most Roman wars; yet his pages show clearly enough that the moneyed classes were the active power. He distinguishes (p. 161) "public neglect" (of conquered peoples) from "public oppression." But the public neglect was simply a matter of the control of the exploiting class, who were the effective "public" for foreign affairs. Compare his admissions as to their forcing of wars and their control of justice, pp. 163, 164.]
[Footnote 177: The fullest English account of the matter is given by Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, iv, 423-27, following Savigny. Cp. Plutarch's account of the doings of the publicani in Asia (Lucullus, cc. 7, 20). Lucullus gave deadly offence at Rome by his check on their extortions, as P. Rutilius Rufus had done before him (Pelham, Outlines of Roman History, 1893, pp. 198, 283; Ferrero, i, 183). The lowest rate of interest charged by the publicani seems to have been 12 per cent. (Niebuhr, Lectures, 1-vol. ed. p. 449). We shall find the same rates current in Renaissance Italy.]
[Footnote 178: Cp. R. Poehlmann, Die Uebervoelkerung der antiken Grossstaedte, 1884, pp. 14-15, 29-30. Prof. Ferrero (Greatness and Decline of Rome, Eng. tr. i, 123-27; ii, 131-36) affirms a restoration of Italian "prosperity" from 80 B.C. onwards, by way first of a general cultivation of the vine and the olive by means of Oriental slaves used to such culture, and later of slave manufactures in the towns. But the evidence falls far short of the proposition. The main items are that about 52 B.C. Italy began to export olive oil, and that certain towns later won repute for pottery, textiles, arms, and so on. On the new agriculture cp. Dureau de la Malle, i, 426-27.]
[Footnote 179: W.W. Carlile, The Evolution of Modern Money, 1901, pp. 46, 48.]
[Footnote 180: Cp. M'Culloch, Essays and Treatises, 2nd ed. pp. 58-64, and refs.]
[Footnote 181: Cp. Hodgkin, The Dynasty of Theodosius, 1889, pp. 19-20. From Severus onwards the silver coinage had in fact become "mere billon money," mostly copper. Carlile, as cited.]
[Footnote 182: On this cp. Poehlmann, Die Uebervoelkerung der antiken Grossstaedte, p.37, and Engel, as there cited.]
[Footnote 183: As to the probable nature of this much-discussed law see Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, i, chs. xi and xii. Cp. Niebuhr, Lect. 89.]
[Footnote 184: Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, c. 8.]
[Footnote 185: As Long remarks (i, 171), it does not appear what Tiberius Gracchus proposed to do with the slaves when he had put freemen in their place. Cp. Cunningham, p. 150.]
[Footnote 186: Cp. Pelham, Outlines, pp. 191-92; Ferrero, ch. iii.]
[Footnote 187: Robiou et Delaunay, Les institutions de l'ancienne Rome, 1888, iii, 18.]
[Footnote 188: Cp. Juvenal, iii, 21 sq.; 162 sq.]
[Footnote 189: For the history of the practice, see the article "Frumentariae Leges," in Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities.]
[Footnote 190: The first step by Gracchus does not seem to have been much resisted (Merivale, Fall of the Roman Republic, p. 22; but cp. Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, i, 262), such measures having been for various reasons resorted to at times in the past (Pliny, Hist. Nat. xviii, 1; Livy, ii, 34); but in the reaction which followed, the process was for a time restricted (Merivale, p. 34).]
[Footnote 191: It seems to have been he who, as consul, first caused the distribution to be made gratuitous. See Cicero, ad Attic. ii, 19, and De Domo Sua, cc. 10, 15. The Clodian law, making the distribution gratuitous, was passed next year.]
[Footnote 192: Suetonius, Julius, c. 41.]
[Footnote 193: Dio Cassius, xliii, 24.]
[Footnote 194: It must have been the relative dearness of land transport that kept the price of corn so low in Cisalpine Gaul in the time of Polybius, who describes a remarkable abundance (ii, 15).]
[Footnote 195: Suetonius, Aug. cc. 40, 41.]
[Footnote 196: Hist. Nat. xviii, 7 (6).]
[Footnote 197: Cp. his Economicus, chs. 5, 9, 11, 20, etc.]
[Footnote 198: Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, iii, 682 (Sec. 379).]
[Footnote 199: Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, c. 8.]
[Footnote 200: E.g., in the provinces of Africa (Gibbon, Bohn ed. iii, 445) and Sicily (Pelham, Outlines, p. 121).]
[Footnote 201: Cp. Pliny, as last cited.]
[Footnote 202: The Italians consumed large quantities of pork, mainly raised in the north (Polybius ii, 15; xii. fr. 1). Aurelian began a pork as well as a wine and oil ration for the Romans (Vopiscus, Aurelianus, 35, 47); and under Valentinian III the annual consumption in the city of Rome was 3,628,000 lbs., there being then a free distribution to the poor during five months of the year. Gibbon calculates that it sold at less than 2d. per lb. (Bohn ed. iii, 417-18.)]
[Footnote 203: Cp. Spalding, Italy and the Italian Islands, i, 372-75, 392, 398; Merivale, History, c. 32; ed. 1873, iv, 42; M'Culloch, as cited, pp. 286-92; Finlay, History of Greece, i, 43; Gibbon, Bohn ed. iii, 418; Dill, Roman Society in the Last Years of the Roman Empire, 2nd ed. p. 122 and refs.; and Blanqui, Histoire de l'economie politique, 2e ed. i, 123, as to the progression of the policy of feeding the populace. Cp. also Suetonius, in Aug. c. 42.]
[Footnote 204: There is, however, reason to surmise that the murder of Pertinax was planned, not by the praetorians who did the deed, but by the official and moneyed class who detested his reforms. See them specified by Gibbon, ch. iv, end.]
[Footnote 205: It is noteworthy that in the United States the New England region, producing neither coal nor iron, neither cotton nor (latterly) wheat, continues to retain a manufacturing primacy as against the South, in virtue of the (in part climatic) industry and skill of its population.]
[Footnote 206: Mommsen, History of Rome, Eng. tr. large ed. v, 5 (Provinces, vol. i); Gibbon, ch. iii, near end (Bohn ed. i, 104); cp. Mahaffy, The Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 397; Milman, History of Christianity, Bk. I, ch. vi; Renan, Les Apotres, ed. 1866, p. 312; and Hegewisch, as cited by Finlay (i, 80, note), who protests that the favourable view cannot be taken of the state of Greece and Egypt. Mr. Balfour (Decadence, 1908, p. 18) chimes in with Mommsen and the rest.]
[Footnote 207: Cp. Pelham, Outlines, p. 473.]
[Footnote 208: Gibbon, ch. xvii; Bohn ed. ii, 194, and notes.]
[Footnote 209: Symmachus speaks of a famine about the time of the confiscation of the temple revenues. Ep. x, 54.]
[Footnote 210: Valentinian had resumed those temple revenues which had been restored by Julian, but went no further, though he vetoed the acquisition of legacies by his own church. That Gratian's step was rather financial than fanatical is proved by his having at the same time endowed the pagan rhetors and grammarians as a small religious quid pro quo. Beugnot, Hist. de la destr. du paganisme en occident, 1835, i, 478.]
[Footnote 211: There was a fresh relapse after Theodoric, in the ruinous wars between Justinian and the Goths and Franks. Revival began in the north under the Lombards, and was stimulated in the south after the revolt of Gregory II against Leo the Iconoclast, which made an end of the payment of Italian tribute to Byzantium. (Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 127, 372, 377.)]
[Footnote 212: Cp. Dureau de la Malle, Econ. polit. des Romains, ii, 24 sq.]
[Footnote 213: Hist. Nat. iii, ix, 16.]
[Footnote 214: Id. ib. 6.]
[Footnote 215: Livy, vii, 38.]
[Footnote 216: Mommsen, i, 36. Mommsen does not deny the deterioration.]
[Footnote 217: Sueton. Julius, c. 20.]
[Footnote 218: E.g. Jacob, Hist. Inq. into the Prod. and Consump. of the Precious Metals, 1831, i, 221 sq.]
[Footnote 219: Cp. Pliny, Hist. Nat. xii, 18 (41).]
[Footnote 220: Cp. Del Mar, History of the Precious Metals, 1880, pref. p. vi; Money and Civilisation, 1886, introd. p. ix.]
[Footnote 221: Cp. Polybius, cited by Strabo, iii, ii, Sec. 10; Jacob, Hist. of the Precious Metals, i, 176.]
[Footnote 222: Cp. Dureau de la Malle, Econ. pol. des Romains, ii, 441; Merivale, History, iv, 44.]
[Footnote 223: Jacob, as cited, i, 179.]
[Footnote 224: Gibbon, ch. xvii, Bohn ed. ii, 237. Cp. Prof. Bury's note in his ed., and Dureau de la Malle, Econ. polit. des Romains, i, 301 sq.]
[Footnote 225: On this form of oppression cp. Guizot, Essais sur l'histoire de France, i; his note on Gibbon, Bohn ed. ii, 234; Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, B. iii, ch. 2; and Cunningham, Western Civilisation, pp. 188, 189.]
[Footnote 226: Spalding, Italy, i, 398, following Symmachus.]
[Footnote 227: Gibbon, ch. xvii, Bohn ed. ii, 237, citing Cod. Theodos. xi, 28, 2. Cp. Dill, pp. 259-60.]
[Footnote 228: Cp. Dill, as cited, p. 260.]
[Footnote 229: Anastasius in his reign of twenty-seven years had saved an enormous treasure, whence it is arguable that Justinian's straits were due to bad management. But while he enlarged the expenditure, chiefly for military purposes, he also enlarged the revenue by very oppressive means, and practised some new economies. The fact remains that where Anastasius could hoard with a non-imperialist policy, Justinian, re-expanding the Empire, could not. See Gibbon, ch. 40, passim. Non-military expenditure could not account for the final deficit in Justinian's treasury. Even the great church of San Sofia does not seem to have cost above L1,000,000. Id. Bohn ed. iv, 335.]
[Footnote 230: "Here [in Egypt], as in Palestine, as in Syria, as in the country about the Euphrates, the efforts of the Persians could never have been attended with such immediate and easy success but for the disaffection of large masses of the population. This disaffection rested chiefly on the religious differences" (Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, ii, 214). Compare Gibbon, ch. 47, Bohn ed. v, 275; and Mosheim, Eccles. Hist., 5 Cent, pt. ii, ch. ii, Sec.Sec. 2, 4, 5 (Reid's ed. pp. 179-81). As to the welcoming of the Saracens in Egypt by the Monophysites, see Gibbon, ch. 51, Bohn ed. vi, 59-60. Cp. Sharpe, Hist. of Egypt, 6th ed. ii, 371; Milman, Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ii, 213; Finlay, i, 370-71.]
[Footnote 231: E.g. the tome of St. Leo, the Laws of Marcian, the Henoticon of Zeno, and the laws of Justinian; and the ecthesis and typus of Heraclius and Constans II--all retailed by Gibbon, ch. 47.]
[Footnote 232: Finlay immediately afterwards (p. 139) declares of the choice of Byzantium by Constantine as his capital that "its first effect was to preserve the unity of the Eastern Empire." The admission is repeated on p. 140, where the whole credit of the stand made by the East is given to the administration. Cp. also the explanations as to Italy on p. 235, and as to Byzantium on p. 184. The theory of p. 138 is utterly unsupported, and on p. 289 it is practically repudiated once for all. Cp. finally, pp. 217, 276, 298, 309, 328, 329, 347, 348, and pp. 361 and 371. On p. 276 we have the explicit admission that the hostility to the Roman Government throughout the East [in the sixth century] was everywhere connected with an opposition to the Greek "clergy."]
II. GREEK ECONOMIC EVOLUTION
Sec. 1
In republican Greece, as in republican Rome, we have already seen the tendency to the accumulation of wealth in few hands, as proved by the strifes between rich and poor in most of the States. A world in which aristocrats were finally wont to take an oath to hate and injure the demos[233] was on no very hopeful economic footing, whatever its glory in literature and art. Nor did the most comprehensive mind of all the ancient world see in slavery anything but an institution to be defended against ethical attack as a naturally right arrangement.[234] In view of all this, we may reasonably hold that even if there had been no Macedonian dominance and no Roman conquest, Greek civilisation would not have gone on progressing indefinitely after the period which we now mark as its zenith--that the evil lot of the lower strata must in time have infected the upper. What we have here briefly to consider, however, is the actual economic course of affairs.
For the purposes of such a generalisation, we may rank the Greek communities under two classes: (1) those whose incomes, down through the historic period, continued to come from land-owning, whether with slave or free labour, as Sparta; and (2) those which latterly flourished chiefly by commerce, whether with or without military domination, as Athens and Corinth. In both species alike, in all ages, though in different degrees as regards both time and place, there were steep divisions of lot between rich and poor, even among the free. Nowhere, not even in early "Lycurgean" Sparta, was there any system aiming at the methodical prevention of large estates, or the prevention of poverty, though the primitive basis was one of military communism, and though certain sumptuary laws and a common discipline were long maintained.
Grote's examination (pt. ii, ch. vi; ed. cited, ii, 308-30) of Thirlwall's hypothesis (ch. viii; 1st ed. i, 301, 326) as to an equal division of lands by Lycurgus, seems to prove that, as regards rich and poor, the legendary legislator "took no pains either to restrain the enrichment of the former or to prevent the impoverishment of the latter"--this even as regards born Spartans. As to the early military communism of Sparta and Crete, see Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, Sec. 210; and as to the economic process see Fustel de Coulanges, Nouvelles recherches sur quelques problemes d'histoire, 1891, pp. 99-118.
Athens, on the other hand, was so situated as to become a place of industry and commerce; and from about the time of her great land-crisis, solved by Solon, her industrial and commercial interests determined her economic development. It follows from the success of Peisistratos that the mass of the people, blind to the importance of the political rights conferred upon them, were conscious of no such betterment from Solon's "shaking-off-of-burdens" as could make them averse to the rule of a "tyrant" who even laid upon them a new tax. The solution may perhaps lie in points of fiscal policy to which we have now no clear clue. Of Solon it is recorded[235] that he made a law against the export of any food produce of Attica save oil--the yield of the olive. This implied that of that product only was there in his opinion a redundancy; and we have it from the same source that he "saw that the soil was so poor that it could only suffice for the farmers," and so "gave great honour to trade," and "made a law that a son was not obliged to support his father if his father had not taught him a trade."[236] Himself a travelled merchant, he further recognised that "merchants are unwilling to despatch cargoes to a country which has nothing to export"; and we are led to infer that he encouraged on the one hand the export of manufactures, plus oil, and on the other the importation of corn and other food. In point of fact, grain was already being imported in increasing quantity from the recently colonised lands of Sicily and the Crimea;[237] and if the imports were free or lightly taxed the inland cultivators would have a local grievance in the depression of the prices of their produce.
The town and coast-dwellers, on the other hand, found their account in the carriage and development of manufactures--vases, weapons, objects of art--which, with the oil, and latterly the wine export, bought them their food from afar. Athens could thus go on growing in a fashion impossible to an agricultural community on the same soil; and could so escape that fate of shrinkage in the free class which ultimately fell upon purely agricultural Sparta. The upshot was that, after as before Solon, Athens had commercial interests among her pretexts for war, and so widened the sphere of her hostilities, escaping the worst forms of "stasis" in virtue of the expansibility of commerce and the openings for new colonisation which commerce provided and widened. But colonisation there had to be. Precisely by reason of her progressiveness, her openness to the alien, her trade and her enterprise, Attica increased in population at a rate which enforced emigration, while the lot of the rural population did not economically improve, and the probable change from corn-growing to olive-culture[238] would lessen the number of people employed on the land. Even apart from the fact of the popular discontent which welcomed the tyrannis of Peisistratos, we cannot doubt that Solon's plans had soon failed to exclude the old phenomena of poverty. The very encouragement he gave to artisans to immigrate,[239] while it made for the democratic development and naval strength of Athens, was a means of quickening the approach of a new economic crisis. And yet he seems to have recognised the crux of population. The traditional permission given by the sage to parents to expose infants, implicitly avows the insoluble problem--the "cursed fraction" in the equation, which will not disappear; and in the years of the approach of Peisistratos to power we find Athens sending to Salamis (about 570) its first kleruchie, or civic colony-settlement on subject territory--this by way of providing for landless and needy citizens.[240] It was the easiest compromise; and nothing beyond compromise was dreamt of.
[The statement that Solon by law permitted the exposure of infants is made by Malthus, who gives no authority, but is followed by Lecky. The law in question is not mentioned by Plutarch, and I do not find it noticed by any of the historians. It is stated, however, by Sextus Empiricus (Hypotyp. iii, 24) that Solon made a law by which a parent could put his child to death; and this passage, which is cited by Hume in his Essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations, is doubtless Malthus's authority. Nothing nearer to the purpose is cited by Meursius in his monograph on Solon; but this could very well stand as a permission of infanticide, especially seeing that the practice is presumptively prehistoric. Petit writes: "Quemadmodum liberos tollere in patris erat positum potestate, ita etiam necare et exponere, idque, meo judicio, non tam moribus quam lege receptum fuit Athenis" (Leges Atticae, fol. 219, ed. Wesseling, 1742). Grote (ii, 470, note) pronounces that the statement of Sextus "cannot be true, and must be copied from some untrustworthy authority," seeing that Dionysius the Halicarnassian (ii, 26) contrasts the large scope of the patria potestas among the Romans with the restrictions which all the Greek legislators, Solon included, either found or introduced. Dr. Mahaffy (Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. p. 165) believes "the notion of exposing infants from economical motives not to have prevailed till later times" than the seventh century B.C., but he gives no reason for fixing any date. We may take it as certain that while the laws of Lycurgus, like the Roman Twelve Tables, enjoined or permitted the destruction of sickly or deformed infants, the general Greek usage allowed exposure. The express prohibition of it at Thebes (AElian, Var. Hist. ii, 7) implies its previous normality there and elsewhere (cp. however, Aristotle, Pol. vii, 16); and the sale of children by their (free) parents was further permitted, except in Attica (Ingram, History of Slavery, p. 16); while even there a freeman's children by a slave concubine were slaves.]
On the other hand, the laws even of Sparta, framed with a view to the military strength of the State considered as the small free population, were ultimately evaded in the interests of property-holding, till the number of "pure Spartans" dwindled to a handful.[241] Under a system of primogeniture, with a rigid severance between the upper class and the lower, there could in fact be no other outcome. Here, apart from the revolts of the helots and the chronic massacres of these by their lords, which put such a stamp of atrocity on Spartan history,[242] the stress of class strife seems to have been limited among the aristocracy, not only by systematic infanticide, but by the survival of polyandry, several brothers often having one wife in common.[243] Whether owing to infanticide, or to in-breeding, or to preventives, families of three and four were uncommon and considered large, and special privileges offered to the fathers.[244] As always, such devices failed against the pressures of the main social conditions. All the while, of course, the perioikoi and the enslaved helots multiplied freely; hence the policy of specially thinning down the latter by over-toil[245] as well as massacre. In other States, where the polity was more civilised, many observers perceived that the two essential conditions of stability were (a) absolute or approximate equality of property, and (b) restraint of population, the latter principle being a notable reaction of reason against the normal practice of encouraging or compelling marriage.[246] Aristotle said in so many words that to let procreation go unchecked "is to bring certain poverty on the citizens; and poverty is the cause of sedition and evil";[247] and he cites previous publicists who had sought to solve the problem. Socrates and Plato had partly contemplated it; and the idealist, as usual, had proposed the more brutal methods;[248] but Aristotle, seeing more clearly the population difficulty, perhaps on that account is the less disposed towards communism.
As medical knowledge advanced, it seems certain, the practice of abortion must have been generally added to that of infanticide in Greece, as later in Rome. See Aristotle, Politics, vii, 16; Plutarch, Lycurgus, c. 3; and Plato, Theaetetus, p. 149 (Jowett's trans. iv, 202), as to the normal resort to abortion. The Greeks must have communicated to the Romans the knowledge of the arts of abortion, as they did those of medicine generally. But it does not appear that with all these checks population really fell off in Greece until after the time of Alexander. Before that time it may very well have fallen off in Athens when she lost her position as sovereign and tribute-drawing State. The tribute would tend to maintain a population in excess of the natural amount. Dr. Mahaffy (Rambles and Studies in Greece, 4th ed. p. 11--a passage not squared with the data in Greek Life and Thought, pp. 328, 558) accepts the old view of a general and inexplicable depopulation. One of the loci classici on that head, in the treatise On the Cessation of Oracles (viii) attributed to Plutarch but probably not by him, is searchingly examined by Hume at the close of his essay Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations, and the critic comes to the conclusion that the extreme decay there asserted cannot have taken place. He was in all probability right in arguing that the number of slaves in Attica had been enormously exaggerated in the figures of Athenaeus (cp. Cunningham, Western Civilisation, i, 109, note). There is reason to conclude, however, that Hume was unduly incredulous on some points. Strabo (refs. in Thirlwall, viii, 460) had found an immense decay of population in Greece more than a century before Plutarch; and his details prove a process of shrinkage which must have lasted long. In any case, a relative depopulation took place after the conquests of Alexander, from the operation of socio-economic causes, which are indicated by Finlay (History of Greece, Tozer's ed. i, 15; cp. Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, p. 328, and The Greek World under Roman Sway, 1890, p. 218). Broadly speaking, the Greeks went to lands where wealth was more easily acquired than in their own. Further depopulation took place under the Romans, partly from direct violence and deportation, partly from fiscal pressure, partly from the economic causes already noted.
Thirlwall, in his closing survey, proceeding on Polybius,[249] confidently decides that the main cause of depopulation was domestic and moral. Such a theory cannot be sustained. Polybius evidently had no clear idea of the facts, since he asserts that "in our time" and "rapidly" there took place in Greece a "failure of offspring" (or "dearth of children"), which left cities desolate and land waste; and goes on to ascribe it to habits of luxury, which either kept men from marrying or made them refuse to rear more than a few of their children. The whole theorem is haphazard. Cities and lands could not have been so depopulated.[250] There must have been, in addition to slaughter, a drain of population to lands where the conditions were more advantageous. Nor is there any good reason for believing that child-exposure had suddenly and immensely increased. Thirlwall says that marriages were "unfruitful"; but this is not the statement of Polybius. It is true that paederasty would count for much in lowering character; but it had been common in Greece centuries before the time of Polybius, and had not affected fecundity. As we have seen,[251] fecundity fell in Sparta for other reasons.
As between Sparta and Athens, the main difference was that Athenian life was for a long period more or less expansive, while that of Sparta, even in the period of special vigour, was steadily contractive, as regarded quantity and quality of "good life." At Sparta, as above noted, the normal play of self-interest in the governing class brought about a continuous shrinkage in the number of enfranchised citizens and of those holding land, till there were only 700 of the former and 100 of the latter--this when there were still 4,500 adult Spartans of "pure" descent, and 15,000 Laconians capable of military service. Even of the hundred landowners many were women, the estates having thus evidently aggregated by descent through heiresses.[252] It mattered little that this inner ring of rich became, after the triumph over Athens and in the post-Alexandrian period, as luxurious as the rest of Greece:[253] the evil lay not in the mode of their expenditure, but in the mode of their revenue. Agis IV and his successor Cleomenes thought to put the community on a sound footing by abolition of debts and forcible division of the land; but even had Agis triumphed at home or Cleomenes maintained himself abroad, the expedient could have availed only for a time. Accumulation would instantly recommence in the absence of a scientific and permanent system.
Schemes for promoting equality had been mooted in Greece from an early period (see Aristotle, Politics, ii, 6, 7, 8). Thus, "Pheidon the Corinthian, one of the oldest of legislators, thought that the families and number of citizens ought to continue the same." Phaleas of Chalcedon proposed to keep fortunes and culture equal; and Hippodamus the Milesian had a system of equality for a State of 10,000 persons. Some States, too, put restraints on the accumulation of land. But, save for transient successes, such as that of Solon at Athens, and of the compromise at Tarentum (see Aristotle, v, 5; and Mueller, Dorians, Eng. tr. ii, 184-86), there was no adequate adjustment of means to ends, as indeed there could not be. Aristotle's own practical suggestions show the hopelessness of the problem.
In the commercial cities, where industry was encouraged and wealth tended to take the form of invested capital, it could not readily get into so few hands; and as commerce developed and the investments were more and more in that direction, there would arise an idle rich class which could be best got at by way of taxation. In such communities, though the division and hostility of rich and poor were as unalterable as in Sparta, there was more elasticity of adjustment; so that we see maritime and trading communities like Heracleia and Rhodes maintaining their oligarchic government, with vicissitudes, down into the Roman period,[254] somewhat as Venice in a later age outlasted the other chief republics of Italy. The ruin of Corinth, though indirectly promoted by class strifes,[255] need not have occurred but for the Roman overthrow.[256]
As regards Athens, it is necessary to guard against some misconceptions concerning the life conditions even of the Periclean period. Public buildings apart, it was not a rich or rich-looking city; on the contrary, partly by reason of the force of democratic sentiment, its houses were mostly mean, the well-to-do people presumably having their better houses in the country, where the land was now mostly owned by them. After the destruction of the city by Xerxes (480 B.C.), the first need was felt to be its refortification on a larger scale, even sepulchres as well as the remains of private houses being made to yield materials for the walls.[257] At the same time the Piraeus and Munychia were walled on a still greater scale--the whole constituting a public work of extraordinary scope, rapidly carried through by the co-operation of the whole of the citizens. The further gradual rebuilding of the city, as well as the fresh flocking of the foreign trading population to the now safe Piraeus, would help, with the public works of Pericles, to set up the conditions of general prosperity which prevailed before the Peloponnesian war.[258] According to Demosthenes, the public men of the generation of Salamis had houses indistinguishable from those of ordinary people, whereas in the orator's own day the statesmen had houses actually finer than the public buildings.[259] This would be the natural result of the control of the confederate treasure resulting from the Athenian supremacy. But Dicaearchus belongs to the same period, and his account represents the mass of the city as poor in appearance, the houses small and with projecting stairways, and the streets crooked.[260] We know further from Xenophon that there were many empty spaces, some of them doubtless made by the customary destruction of the houses of those ostracised. There was thus a considerable approach to a rather straitened equality among the mass of the town-dwelling free citizens, who, despite the meanness of their houses, had luxuries in the form of the public baths and gymnasia.
Before Salamis, again, the revenue drawn from the leases of the silver mines of Laurium had been equally divided among the enfranchised citizens--an arrangement which had yielded only a small sum to each, but which represented a notable adumbration of a communal system, with the fatal implication of a basis in slavery.[261] The devotion of this fund[262] to the building of a navy was the making of the Athenian maritime power; whence in turn came the ability of Athens to extort tribute from the allied States, and therewith to achieve relatively the greatest and most effective expenditure on public works[263] ever attempted by any government. It was this specially created demand for and endowment of the arts and the drama that raised Athens to the artistic and literary supremacy of the ancient world, and, by so creating a special intellectual soil, prepared the ensuing supremacy of Athenian philosophy.[264] But the Periclean policy of endowment went far beyond even the employment of labour by the State on the largest scale; it set up the principle of supplying something like an income to multitudes of poorer free citizens--an experiment unique in history. The main features of the system were: (1) Payments for service to the members of the Council of Five Hundred; (2) payments to all jurors, an order numbering some six thousand; (3) the theorikon or allowance of theatre money to all the poorer citizens; (4) regular payments to the soldiers and sailors; (5) largesses of corn, or sales at reduced prices; (6) sacrificial banquets, shared in by the common people; (7) the sending out of "kleruchies," or bodies of quasi-colonists, who were billeted on the confederate cities, to the number of five or six thousand in ten years. Without taking the a priori hostile view of the aristocratic faction, who bitterly opposed all this--a view endorsed later by Plato and Socrates--the common-sense politician must note the utter insecurity of the whole development, depending as it did absolutely on military predominance.[265] The mere cessation of the expenditure on public works at the fall of Athens in the Peloponnesian war was bound to affect class relations seriously; and parties, already bitter, were henceforth more decisively so divided.[266]
In the second period of Athenian ascendency, after the fall of the Thirty Tyrants and of Sparta, when the virtual pensioning of citizens begun by Pericles had been carried to still further lengths,[267] we find Xenophon, the typical Greek of culture and military experience, proposing a financial plan[268] whereby Athens, instead of keeping up the renewed practice of oppressing the confederate cities in order to pay pensions to its own poorer citizens, should derive a sufficient revenue from other sources. In particular he proposed (1) the encouraging of foreigners to settle in the city in larger numbers, by exempting them from military service and from all forms of public stigma, and by giving them the waste grounds to build on. The taxes they would have to pay as aliens would serve as revenue to maintain the citizens proper. (2) A fund should be established for the encouragement of trade which in some unexplained way should yield a high interest, paid by the State, to all investors. (3) The State should build inns, shops, warehouses, and exchanges, chiefly for the use of the foreigners, and so further increase its revenue. (4) It should build ships for the merchant trade, and charter them out upon good security. (5) Above all, it should develop by slave labour the silver mines of Laurium, to the yield of which there was no limit. The public, in fact, might there employ thrice as many slaves as the number of citizens; and it should further set about finding new mines.
We have here the measure of the Athenian faculty to solve the democratic problem as then recognised. The polity of Pericles was bound to perish, alike because it negated international ethics and because it had no true economic basis. The comparatively well-meaning plan of Xenophon could not even be set in motion, so purely fanciful is its structure. The income of the poorer citizens is to come from the taxes and rents paid by foreigners, and from mines worked by slave labour; the necessary army of slaves has to be bought as a State investment. It is as if the Boers of the Transvaal had proposed to live idly in perpetuity on the dues paid by the immigrants, all the while owning all the mines and drawing all the profits. It is hardly necessary to say, with Boeckh,[269] that the thesis as to the yield of the mines was a pure delusion; and that the idea of living on the taxation of foreigners was suicidal.[270] The old method, supplemented perforce by some regular taxation of the taxable citizens, and by the special exaction of "liturgies" or payments for the religious festival drama and other public services from the rich, was maintained as long as might be; industry tending gradually to decay, though the carrying trade and the resumed concourse of foreigners for a time kept Athens a leading city. Never very rich agriculturally, the middle and upper classes had for the rest only their manufactures and their commerce as sources of income; and as the manufactures were mostly carried on by slave labour, and were largely dependent on the State's control of the confederate treasure, the case of the poorer free citizens must necessarily worsen when that control ceased. About 400 B.C. the Athenians had still a virtual monopoly of the corn trade of Bosporus, on which basis they could develop an extensive shipping, which was a source of many incomes; but even these would necessarily be affected by the new regimen which began with the Macedonian conquest.
The attempt of Boeckh (bk. i, ch. viii) to confute the ordinary view as to the poverty of the Attic soil cannot be maintained. (See above, p. 99.) Niebuhr (Lectures on Roman History, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 264) doubtless goes to the other extreme in calling the Greeks bad husbandmen. Compare the contrary view of Cox, General History, 2nd ed. p. 4. But even good husbandry on a poor soil could not compete with the output of Bosporus and Egypt. And in the Peloponnesian war Attic agriculture sank to a low level (Curtius' History, Eng. tr. iv, 71; bk. v, ch. ii).
As to the incomes made in the Bosporus corn-trade, cp. Grote, x, 410, 412, 413. When it became possible thus to draw a revenue from investment, the Athenian publicists rapidly developed the capitalist view that the lending of money capital is the support of trade. See Demosthenes, as cited by Boeckh, bk. i, ch. ix.
Sec. 2
In the economic readjustments, finally, which followed on the rise and subdivision of the empire of Alexander, Greece as a whole took a secondary place in the Hellenistic world, though Macedonia kept much of its newly acquired wealth. While commerce passed with industry and population to the new eastern cities, the remaining wealth of Greece proper would tend to pass into fewer hands,[271] thus pro tanto narrowing more than ever the free and cultured class, and relatively enlarging that of the slaves.
[Boeckh (bk. i, ch. viii) dwells on the variety of manufactures, and here gives a juster view than does Dr. Mahaffy, who (Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. p. 406) oddly speaks of the lack of machinery as making "any large employment of hands in manufacture impossible." But the main manufacture, that of arms, was peculiarly dependent on the Athenian command of the confederate treasure; and it does not appear that the other manufactures were a source of much revenue till just before the period of political decline, when other causes combined to check Athenian trade. By that time the aristocratic class had weakened in their old prejudice against all forms of commerce (Mahaffy, as cited; Boeckh, as cited), which had hitherto kept it largely in the hands of aliens, this long after the time when, at Corinth and other ports, the ruling class had been constituted of the rich traders; and after the special efforts of Solon to encourage and enforce industry. Apart from this prejudice, which in many States put a political disability on traders, commerce had always been hampered by war and bad policy. Dr. Mahaffy (Social Life, p. 405) somewhat over-confidently follows Heeren and Boeckh in deciding that none of the Greek trade laws were in the interests of particular trades or traders; but even if they were not, they none the less hampered all commerce. Cp. Boeckh, bk. i, ch. ix. As Hume observed, the high rates of profit and interest prevailing in Greece show an early stage of commerce. Cp. Boeckh, bk. i, chs. ix, xxii.]
Those who had not shared in the plunder of Asia, to begin with, would find themselves badly impoverished, for the new influx of bullion would raise all prices. It is notable, on the other hand, that philosophy, formerly the study of men with, for the most part, good incomes, and thence always associated more or less with the spirit of aristocracy,[272] was now often cultivated by men of humble status.[273] The new rich then appear to have already fallen away somewhat from the old Athenian standards; while the attraction of poorer men was presumably caused in part by the process of endowment of the philosophic schools begun by Plato in his will--an example soon followed by others.[274] It is probable that as much weight is due to this economic cause as to that of political restraint in the explanation of the prosperity of philosophy at Athens at a time when literature was relatively decaying.
The Roman conquest, again, further depressed Greek fortunes by absolute violence, hurling whole armies of the conquered into slavery,[275] and later setting up a new foreign attraction to the Greeks of ready wit and small means. They presumably began to flock to Rome or Egypt or Asia Minor as the conditions in Greece worsened; and that process in turn would be promoted by the gradual worsening of the Roman financial pressure. It is notable that a rebellion of Attic slaves occurred in 133 B.C., synchronously with the first slave-rising in Sicily--a proof of fresh oppression all round.[276] The Romans had retained the Greek systems of municipal government, and had begun by putting on light taxes.[277] But these surely increased;[278] and the Mithridatic war, in which Athens had taken the anti-Roman side, changed all for the worse. Sulla took the city after a difficult siege, massacred most of the citizens, and entirely destroyed the Piraeus; whereafter Athens practically ceased for centuries to be a commercial centre. Corinth, which had been razed to the ground by Mummius, was ultimately reconstructed by Caesar as a Roman colony, and secured most of what commerce Greece retained. Twenty years before, Pompey had put down the Cilician pirates, a powerful community of organised freebooters that had arisen out of the disbanding of the hired forces of Mithridates and other Eastern monarchs on the triumph of the Romans, and was further swelled by a large inflow of poverty-stricken Greeks. While it lasted, it greatly multiplied the number of slaves for the Roman market by simple kidnapping.
[The great mart for such sales was Delos, which was practically a Roman emporium (Strabo, bk. xiv, c. v, Sec. 1). Mahaffy (Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 154) regards the pirates as largely anti-Roman, especially in respect of their sacking of Delos. But previously they sold their captives there; and Dr. Mahaffy (p. 7) recognises the connection. The pirates, in short, became anti-Roman when the Romans, who had so long tolerated them as slave-traders (as the rulers of Cyprus and Egypt had done before), were driven to keep them in check as pirates.]
Thus all the conditions deteriorated together; and the suppression of the pirate state found Greece substantially demoralised, the prey of greedy proconsuls, poor in men, rich only in ancient art and in wistful memories. In the civil wars before and after Caesar's fall, Greece was harried by both sides in turn; and down to the time of Augustus depopulation and impoverishment seem to have steadily proceeded under Roman rule.[279] Every special contribution laid on the provinces by the rulers was made an engine of confiscation; citizens unable to pay their taxes were sold as slaves; property owners were forced to borrow at usurious rates in the old Roman fashion; and the parasitic class of so-called Roman citizens, as such free of taxation, tended to absorb the remaining wealth.[280] This wealth in turn tended to take the shape of luxuries bought from the really productive provinces; and the fatality of the unproductive communities, lack of the bullion which they in a double degree required, for the time overtook Greece very much as it overtook Italy. Both must have presented a spectacle of exterior splendour as regarded their monuments and public buildings, and as regarded the luxury that was always tending to concentrate in fewer hands, usurers plundering citizens and proconsuls plundering usurers; but the lot of the mass of the people must have been depressed to the verge of endurance if depopulation had not spontaneously yielded relief. As it was, the Greek populations would tend to consist more and more of the capitalistic, official, and parasitic classes on the one hand, and of slaves and poor on the other.[281]
The general depopulation of subject Greece is thus perfectly intelligible. The "race" had not lost reproductive power; and even its newer artificial methods of checking numbers were not immeasurably more active than simple infanticide or exposure had been in the palmy days. In the ages of expansion the whole Hellenic world in nearly all its cities and all its islands swarmed with a relatively energetic population, who won from conditions often in large part unpropitious a sufficiency of subsistence on which to build by the hands of slaves a wonderful world of art. To these conditions they were limited by racial hostilities; everywhere there was substantial though convulsive equipoise among their own warring forces, and between those of their frontier communities and the surrounding "barbarians." The conquest of Alexander (heralded and invited by the campaign of the Ten Thousand) at one blow broke up this equipoise: organised Greek capacity, once forcibly unified, triumphed over the now lower civilisations of Egypt and the East, and Greek population at once began to find its economic level in the easier conditions of some of the conquered lands. They flocked to Egypt and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin as they do at the present time, for similar economic reasons. Nothing could now restore the old conditions; but the Roman conquest and tyranny forced on the disintegration till Greece proper was but the glorious shell of the life of the past, inhabited by handfuls of a semi-alien population, grown in a sense psychically degenerate under evil psychic conditions. In the lower strata of this population began the spread of Christianity, passing sporadically from Syria to the Greek cities, as at the same time to Egypt and Rome. A new conception of life was generated on the plane that typified it.
Sec. 3
It is a great testimony to the value of sheer peace that in the Roman Empire of the second century, with an incurable economic malady, as it were, eating into its nerve centres, and with no better provision for the higher life than the schools of rhetoric and the endowments of the Greek philosophic chairs, there was yet evolved a system of law and administration which, even under the frightful chances of imperial succession, sustained for centuries a vast empire, and imposed itself as a model on the very barbarism that overthrew it. And it is this system which connects for us the life conditions of Greece as the Romans held it, with its artistic shell almost intact despite all the Roman plunder,[282] and those of the strangely un-Hellenic Greek-speaking world which we know as Byzantium, with its capital at Constantinople.
The economic changes in this period can be traced only with difficulty and uncertainty; but they must have been important. The multiplication of slaves, which was a feature of the ages of the post-Alexandrian empires, the Roman conquest, and the Cilician pirate state, would necessarily be checked at a certain stage, both in town and country, by the continued shrinkage of the rich class. Agriculture in Greece, as in Italy, could not compete with that of Egypt; and slave-farming, save in special cultures, would not be worth carrying on. In the towns, again, the manufactures carried on by means of slaves had also dwindled greatly; and the small wealthy class could not and would not maintain more than a certain number of slaves for household purposes. The records of the religious associations, too, as we shall see, seem to prove that men who were slaves in status had practical freedom of life, and the power of disposing of part of their earnings; whence it may be inferred that many owners virtually liberated their slaves, though retaining a legal claim over them. In this state of things population would gradually recover ground, albeit on a low plane. The type of poor semi-Greek now produced would live at a lower standard of comfort than had latterly been set for themselves by the more educated, who would largely drift elsewhere; and a home-staying population living mainly on olives and fish could relatively flourish, both in town and country. On that basis, in turn, commerce could to some extent revive, especially when Nero granted to the Greeks immunity from taxation.[283] We are prepared then, in the second century, under propitious rulers like Hadrian and the Antonines, to find Greek life materially improved.[284] The expenditure of Hadrian on public works, and the new endowments of the philosophic schools at Athens by the Antonines, would stimulate such a revival; and the Greek cities would further regain ground as Italy lost it, with the growth of cosmopolitanism throughout the Empire. While domestic slavery would still abound, the industries in Athens under the imperial rule would tend to be carried on by freedmen.
A further stimulus would come from the overthrow of the Parthian empire of the Arsacidae by Artaxerxes, 226 A.C. The Arsacidae, though often at war with the Romans, still represented the Hellenistic civilisation, whereas the Sassanidae zealously returned to the ancient Persian religion, the exclusiveness of which would serve as a barrier to Western commerce,[285] even while the cult of Mithra, Hellenised to the extent of being specially associated with image-worship, was spreading widely in the West. Commerce would now tend afresh to concentrate in Greece, the Indian and Chinese trade passing north and south of Persia.[286] The removal of the seat of government from Rome by Diocletian, greatly lessening the Italian drain on the provinces, would still further assist the Greek revival after the Gothic invasion had come and gone. Thus we find the larger Greek world in the time of Constantine grown once more so important that in the struggle between him and Licinius his great naval armament, composed chiefly of European Greeks, was massed in the restored Piraeus. The fleet of Licinius, made up chiefly by Asiatic and Egyptian Greeks, already showed a relative decline on that side of the Empire's resources.[287] When, finally, Constantine established the new seat of empire at Byzantium, he tended to draw thither all the streams of Greek commerce, and to establish there, as the centre of the revenues of the Eastern Empire, some such population as had once flourished in Rome; with, however, a definite tendency to commerce and industry in the lower class population as well as in the middle class. To the government of this population was brought the highly developed organisation of the later Pagan Empire, joined with an ecclesiastical system from which heresy was periodically eliminated by the imperial policy, aided by the positive intellectual inferiority of the new Greek-speaking species. There was prosperity enough for material life; and the political and religious system was such as to prevent the normal result of prosperity, culture, from developing independently. The much-divided Greek world had at last, after countless convulsions, been brought to a possibility of quasi-inert equilibrium, an equilibrium which enabled it to sustain and repel repeated and destructive irruptions of northern barbarism,[288] and on the whole to hold at bay, with a shrunken territory, its neighbouring enemies for a thousand years.
Sec. 4
We have passed, then, through a twilight age, to find a new civilised empire ruled on the lines of the old, but with a single, albeit much-divided religion, and that the Christian, all others having been extirpated not by persuasion but by governmental force, after the new creed, adapting itself to its economic conditions, had secured for itself and its poor adherents, mainly from superstitious rich women, an amount of endowment such as no cult or priesthood possessed in the days of democracy. This process of endowment itself originated, however, in pagan practice; for in the days of substitution of emotional Eastern cults for the simpler worships of early Hellas, there had grown up a multitude of voluntary societies for special semi-religious, semi-festival purposes--thiasoi, eranoi, and orgeones, all cultivating certain alien sacrifices and mysteries, as those of Dionysos, Adonis, Sabazios, Sarapis, Cotytto, or any other God called "Saviour."[289] These societies, unlike the older Hellenic associations of the same names[290] for the promotion of native worships, were freely open to women, to foreigners, and even to slaves;[291] they were absolutely self-governing; the members subscribed according to their means; and we find them flourishing in large numbers in the age of the Antonines,[292] when the old state cults were already deserted, though still endowed. They represent, as has been said, the reappearance of the democratic spirit and the gregarious instinct in new fields and in lower strata when general and practical democracy has been suppressed. In some such fashion did the Christian Church begin, employing the attractions and the machinery of many rival cults. Its final selection and establishment by the Empire represented in things religious a process analogous to that which had forcibly unified the competing republics of Greece in one inflexible and unprogressive organisation. Nothing but governmental force could have imposed doctrinal unity on the chaos of sects into which Christianity was naturally subdividing; but the power of conferring on the State Church special revenues was an effective means of keeping it practically subordinate.
The historian who has laid down the proposition that religious unity was the cause of the survival of the Eastern Empire when the Western fell,[293] has made the countervailing admission that between Justinian and Heraclius there was an almost universal centrifugal tendency in the Byzantine State, which was finally overcome only by "the inexorable principle of Roman centralisation,"[294] at a time when it was nearly destroyed by its enemies and its own dissentient forces.[295] Province after province had been taken by the Persians in the East; Slavs and Avars were driving back the population from the northern frontiers, even harrying the Peloponnesus; discontent enabled Phocas to dethrone and execute Maurice (602 A.C.); and Phocas in turn was utterly defeated by the Persian foe; when Heraclius appeared, to check the continuity of disaster, and to place the now circumscribed Empire on a footing of possible permanence. But it is important to realise how far the economic and external conditions conduced to his success, such as it was. Hitherto the populace of Constantinople had been supported, like that of imperial Rome, by regular allowances of bread to every householder, provided from the tributary grain supplies of Egypt. The Persian conquest of Egypt in the year 616 stopped that revenue; and the emperor's inability to feed the huge semi-idle populace became a cause of regeneration, inasmuch as the State was forcibly relieved of the burden, and many of the idlers became available for the army about to be led by the emperor against the menacing Persians. He was reduced, however, to the expedient of offering to continue the supply on a payment of three pieces of gold from each claimant, and finally to breaking that contract; whereafter, on his proposing to transfer his capital to Carthage to escape the discontent, the populace and the clergy implored him to remain, and thus enabled him to exact a large loan from the latter,[296] and to dominate the nobility who had hitherto hampered his action. The victories of Heraclius over the Persians, however, only left the eastern and Egyptian provinces to fall under the Arabs; the first financial result of his successes having been to tax to exasperation the recovered lands in order to repay the ecclesiastical loan with usury; and the circumscribed Empire under his successors could not, even if the emperors wished, resume the feeding of the mass of the citizens. Constantinople, though still drawing some tribute from the remaining provinces in Italy, was thus perforce reduced to a safe economic basis, even as the people in general had been coerced into united effort by the imminent danger from Persia.
From this time forward, with many vicissitudes of military fortune, the contracted Byzantine State endured in virtue of its industrial and commercial basis and its consequent maritime and military strength, managed with ancient military science against enemies less skilled. The new invention of "Greek fire," like all advances in the use of missiles in warfare, counted for much; but the decisive condition of success was the possession of continuous resources. Justinian, among many measures of mere oppression and restriction, had contrived to introduce from the far East the silk manufacture, which for the ancient and medieval European world was of enormous mercantile importance. Such a staple, and the virtual control of the whole commerce between northern and western Europe and the East, kept Byzantium the greatest trading power in Christendom until the triumph of the Italian republics. Even the Saracen conquests in Asia and Africa did not seriously affect this source of strength; for the Saracen administration, though often wise and energetic, was in Egypt too often convulsed by civil wars to permit of trade flourishing there in any superlative degree. The Byzantines continued to trade with India by the Black Sea and Central Asian route; and their monopolies and imposts, however grievous, were relatively bearable compared with the afflictions of commerce under other powers. As of old, the Greeks or Greek-speaking folk were the traders of the Mediterranean, the Saracen navy never reaching sufficient power to check them; and when finally its remnants took to piracy, they served rather to cut off all weaker competition than to affect the preponderating naval power of the Empire.
In this period of prevailing commercial vigour, from the sixth to the eleventh century, the life of the Greek Empire was substantially civic, the rural districts remaining desolate, and agriculture extremely feeble,[297] though the Sclavonian immigrants who now inhabited the Peloponnesus[298] must have lived by that means. Under such circumstances the towns would be fed by imported grain, presumably that of the Crimea; but as they did not grow in size, at least in the case of the capital, their industrial prosperity must have largely depended on the restriction of population, whether by vice, preventive checks, misery, or the sheer unhealthiness of city life, which at the present day prevents so many Eastern cities from maintaining themselves save by influx from the country.[299] It is misleading to point to the legal veto on infanticide as a great Christian reform without taking these things into account. The presumption is that misery, vice, child-exposure, and abortion, rather than prudence, kept the poor population within the limits of subsistence.
Mr. Oman (Byzantine Empire, p. 145) takes the popular view as to the reformative effect of Christianity. He goes on to describe Constantine as providing for the children of the destitute to prevent their exposure, but does not mention that the same thing had been done under the Antonines, and that Constantine permitted the finder of an exposed child to enslave it. The punishment of all exposure as infanticide, under Valentinian, was only an adoption of the pagan practice at Thebes (AElian, Var. Hist. ii, 7). But in spite of all enactments, under Christian as under pagan rule, exposure and positive infanticide continued, though Christian sentiment never gave it the toleration exhibited in the drama of Menander. As to the historic facts, cp. Lecky, Hist. of European Morals, 6th ed. ii, 24-33.
Broadly speaking, it was inevitable that in such a population as is pictured for us by Chrysostom--a multitude profoundly ignorant, superstitious, excitable, sensuous--all the vices of the Graeco-Roman period should habitually flourish, while poverty must have been normally acute after the stoppage of regular free bread. On the general moral environment, cp. the author's Short History of Freethought, 2nd ed. i, 249-50.
It is necessary, in the same way, to substitute an accurate for a conventional view as to the treatment of slaves under the Christian Empire. We are still told[300] that the Christian doctrine or implication of religious equality had the effect first of greatly modifying the evils of slavery and finally of abolishing it. Research proves that the facts were otherwise. We have already seen how economic causes partially limited slavery before Christianity was heard of; and in so far as the limitation was maintained,[301] the efficient causes remain demonstrably economic.[302] Indeed, no other causes can be shown to have existed. Not only is slavery endorsed in the Gospels,[303] and treated by Paul as not merely compatible with but favourable to Christian freedom on the part of the slave,[304] but the early Christians, commonly supposed to have been the most incorrupt, held slaves as a matter of course.[305] In the laws of Justinian not a word is said as to slavery being opposed to either the spirit or the letter of Christianity; and the only expressions that in any degree deprecate it are in terms of the Stoic doctrine of the "law of nature,"[306] which we know to have been already current in the time of Aristotle,[307] and to have become widespread in the age of the Antonines, under Stoic auspices. That "law of nature," however, was never allowed to override a definite law of society; and the Christian influence on the other hand set up a new set of arguments for slavery.[308] Among the Christian Visigoths, slaves who married without authority from their masters were forcibly separated; and the slave who dared to marry a free-woman was burnt alive with his wife; while "the bishops were among the largest slave-holders in the realm; and baptised Christians were bought and sold without a blush by the successors of St. Paul and Santiago."[309] It cannot even be said of the Byzantines, any more than of the Protestants of the southern United States of fifty years ago, that they were more humane to their slaves than the earlier pagans had been; for we find Christian Byzantine matrons causing their slave-girls to be tied up and brutally flogged;[310] even as we have the testimony of Salvian to the atrocities committed by Christian slave-owners in Gaul.[311] The admission that the Church, even when encouraging laymen to free their slaves, insisted on retaining its own,[312] is the proof that the urging force was not even then doctrinal, but the perception that the Church's secular interests were served by the growth of an independent population outside its own lands.[313] The spirit of the Justinian code, despite its allusion to the law of nature, and the spirit of the enactments of the early Councils of the Church, are alike opposed to any idea of spiritual equality between bond and free.
On the other hand, the simple restriction of conquest limited the possibilities of slavery for Byzantium. Captives were enslaved to the last,[314] but of these there was no steady supply. In the rural districts, again, the fiscal conditions made for at least nominal freedom, as is shown by the historian who has most closely analysed the conditions:--
"The Roman financial administration, by depressing the higher classes and impoverishing the rich, at last burdened the small proprietors and cultivators of the soil with the whole weight of the land-tax. The labourer of the soil then became an object of great interest to the treasury, and ... obtained almost as important a position in the eyes of the fisc as the landed proprietor himself. The first laws which conferred any rights on the slave are those which the Roman government enacted to prevent the landed proprietors from transferring their slaves, engaged in the cultivation of lands assessed for the land-tax, to other employments which, though more profitable to the proprietor of the slave, would have yielded a smaller or less permanent return to the imperial treasury.[315] The avarice of the imperial treasury, by reducing the mass of the free population to the same degree of poverty as the slaves, had removed one cause of the separation of the two classes. The position of the slave had lost most of its moral degradation, and [he] occupied precisely the same political position in society as the poor labourer from the moment that the Roman fiscal laws compelled any freeman who had cultivated lands for the space of thirty years to remain for ever attached, with his descendants, to the same estate.[316] The lower orders were from that period blended into one class; the slave rose to be a member of this body; the freeman descended, but his descent was necessary for the improvement of the great bulk of the human race, and for the extinction of slavery. Such was the progress of civilisation in the Eastern Empire. The measures of Justinian which, by their fiscal rapacity, tended to sink the free population to the same state of poverty as the slaves, really prepared the way for the rise of the slaves as soon as any general improvement took place in the condition of the human race."[317]
For the rest, it cannot be supposed that the "freedom" thus constituted had much actuality. Sons of soldiers and artisans were held bound to follow their father's profession, as in the hereditary castes of the East,[318] and none of the fruits of freedom are to be traced in Byzantine life. Still, the fact remains that the commercial and industrial life sustained the political, and that the political began definitely to fail when the commercial did. Constantinople could hardly have collapsed as it did before the Crusaders if its commerce had not already begun to dwindle through interception by Venice and the Italian trading cities. As soon as these were able to trade directly with the East they did so, thus withdrawing a large part of the stream of commerce from Byzantium; and when, finally, they acquired the secret of her silk manufacture, her industrial revenue was in turn undermined. On the economic weakening, the political followed; and the Eastern Empire finally fell before the Turks, very much as the Western had fallen before the Goths.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 233: Aristotle, Politics, v, 9.]
[Footnote 234: Id. i, 2.]
[Footnote 235: Plutarch, Solon, c. 24.]
[Footnote 236: Id. c. 22. Cp. Dr. Grundy, Thucydides and the History of his Age, 1911, p. 66, as to Solon's evident purpose of promoting manufactures.]
[Footnote 237: Maisch, Manual of Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. p. 38. Cp. Meyer, ii, 644.]
[Footnote 238: Cp. Cunningham, Western Civilisation, i (1898), 100-2.]
[Footnote 239: Grote, ii, 504. Hitherto Athens was far behind other cities, as Corinth, in trade. The industrial expansion seems to begin in Solon's time (Plutarch, Solon, c. 22; Busolt, Griechische Geschichte, i, 501).]
[Footnote 240: Busolt, as cited, i, 549-50. The details, many of them from lately recovered inscriptions, are full of interest. Cp. Grote, ii, 462.]
[Footnote 241: Plutarch, Agis. c. 5; Aristotle, Politics, ii, 9; Thirlwall, viii, 133.]
[Footnote 242: The arguments of K.O. Mueller (Dorians, Eng. tr. b. iii, c. 3, Sec.Sec. 3-5) in discredit of the received view, though not without weight, have never carried general conviction. Cp. Maisch, Manual of Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. p. 17.]
[Footnote 243: See the recovered passage of Polybius (xii, 6, ed. Hultsch) cited (from Mai, Nov. Collect. Vet. Scriptor. ii, 384) by Mueller (Dorians, Eng. tr. ii, 205). Cp. M'Lennan, Kinship in Ancient Greece, Sec. 2.]
[Footnote 244: Aristotle, Politics, ii, c. 9. On Aristotle's unhesitating assumption (ii, 10) as to the normality and the effects of paederasty, cp. the refutation of Mueller, Dorians, Eng. tr. b. iv, c. 4, Sec.Sec. 6-8; and as to the real causes of decline of population, see b. iii, c. 10, Sec. 2. Primogeniture was a main factor. As the propertied class, of whom Aristotle speaks, became small through accumulations, which often went to heiresses, the whole statistic as to births is narrow and dubious. But it is safe to decide that the decline of the pure Spartan population was not a result of vice, any more than the normal dwindling of the numbers of modern aristocracies. It should be remembered that younger sons would be likely to have illegitimate offspring among the helots, if not among the perioikoi. The selfish aristocracy thus wrought for its own class extinction.]
[Footnote 245: Plutarch, Solon, c. 22.]
[Footnote 246: See refs. in Fustel de Coulanges, La cite antique, 1. iii, ch. xviii, p. 265.]
[Footnote 247: Aristotle, Politics, ii, 6.]
[Footnote 248: Cp. the Republic, v, and the Laws (bks. v, xi; Jowett's tr. 3rd ed. v, pp. 122, 313) with the Politics, vii, 16.]
[Footnote 249: Fr. Vat. xxxvii, 9.]
[Footnote 250: Cp. Hume, essay cited, as to the slight effect of the exposure check in China.]
[Footnote 251: Above, p. 101.]
[Footnote 252: Aristotle, Politics, ii, 9; Plutarch, Agis, c. 7.]
[Footnote 253: Athenaeus, citing Phylarchus, iv, 20.]
[Footnote 254: Grote, x, 402; Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, p. 457; Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 237; M'Culloch, Treatises and Essays, ed. 1859, pp. 276-78.]
[Footnote 255: Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, p. 452.]
[Footnote 256: M'Culloch, as cited, p. 275.]
[Footnote 257: Thucydides, i, 93.]
[Footnote 258: Grote, iv, 341, 342.]
[Footnote 259: Citations in Boeckh, bk. i, ch. 12.]
[Footnote 260: Boeckh, bk. i, ch. 12. Cp. De Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs, 1787, i, 55-60.]
[Footnote 261: See E. Ardaillon, Les mines du Laurion dans l'antiquite, 1897, ch. v.]
[Footnote 262: The mines of Laurium, though anciently worked by the "Pelasgi," do not figure in Athenian history till the beginning of the fifth century B.C. Ardaillon, pp. 126-27.]
[Footnote 263: As to the enormous cost in labour and money of such buildings as the Propylaea and the Parthenon, cp. Mahaffy, Survey of Greek Civilisation, p. 143, and M'Cullagh, Industrial History of the Free Nations, 1846, i, 166, 167.]
[Footnote 264: "Before the Persian war Athens had contributed less than many other cities, her inferiors in magnitude and in political importance, to the intellectual progress of Greece. She had produced no artists to be compared with those of Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, AEgina, Laconia, and of many cities both in the eastern and western colonies. She could boast of no poets so celebrated as those of the Ionian and AEolian Schools. But ... in the period between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars both literature and the fine arts began to tend towards Athens as their most favoured seat" (Thirlwall, vol. iii, ch. xviii, pp. 70, 71). "Never before or since has life developed so richly" (Abbott, ii, 415). Cp. Holm, Eng. tr. ii, 156, 157.]
[Footnote 265: This view appears to be substantially at one with the reasoning of Dr. Cunningham (Western Civilisation, pp. 112-23). I must dissent, however, from his apparent position (pp. 119-21) that it was the mode of the expenditure that was wrong, and that Athens might have employed her ill-gotten capital "productively" in the modern economic sense. The cases of Miletus and Tyre, cited by him, seem to be beside the argument.]
[Footnote 266: Plutarch, Pericles, c. 11.]
[Footnote 267: Cp. Thirlwall, small ed. iii, 67.]
[Footnote 268: On the Revenues.]
[Footnote 269: As cited, bk. iv, ch. xxi.]
[Footnote 270: Boeckh's arguments, denounced by Lewis, need not be adhered to; but the whole theorem is so fantastic that Lewis's general vindication of it is puzzling (Trans. pref. xv, note).]
[Footnote 271: See Hertzberg, Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Roemer, Theil ii, Kap. 2, p. 200, as to the vast estates now acquired by a few.]
[Footnote 272: In Magna Graecia, in particular, the whole Pythagorean movement had such associations in a high degree. Note the frequency of names beginning anax (= king or chief) in the history of early Greek philosophy.]
[Footnote 273: Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, p. 136.]
[Footnote 274: Idem, pp. 145-49; Gibbon, Bohn ed. iv, 352.]
[Footnote 275: E.g., the whole population of Corinth; and 150,000 inhabitants of Epirus.]
[Footnote 276: Cp. Finlay, i, 23.]
[Footnote 277: They exacted from Macedonia only half the tribute it had paid to its kings; but there is a strong presumption that it was too impoverished after the war to pay more.]
[Footnote 278: "The extraordinary payments levied on the provinces soon equalled, and sometimes exceeded, the regular taxes" (Finlay, i, 39). Cp. Mahaffy, Greek World under Roman Sway, pp. 145, 156, 159, 161, 162.]
[Footnote 279: Cp. Hertzberg, Gesch. Griechenlands unter der Herrsch. der Roemer, Th. i, Kap. 5, pp. 486-91.]
[Footnote 280: Finlay, i, 45, 46, 74.]
[Footnote 281: "We stand [1st c. A.C.] before a decayed society of very rich men and slaves" (Mahaffy, Greek World, p. 268).]
[Footnote 282: Finlay, i, 73. But cp. Frazer, Pausanias, 1900, p. 4, as to the decay in the second century.]
[Footnote 283: This was soon withdrawn by Vespasian, but apparently with circumspection. In the first century A.C. the administration seems to have been unoppressive (Mahaffy, Greek World, pp. 233, 237).]
[Footnote 284: Hertzberg (Gesch. Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Roemer, Th. ii, Kap. 2, p. 189) rejects the statement of Finlay that Greece reached the lowest degree of misery and depopulation under the Flavian emperors ("about the time of Vespasian" is the first expression in the revised ed. i, 80). But Finlay contradicts himself: cp. p. 66. Hertzberg again (iii, 116) speaks of a "furchtbar zunehmende sociale Noth des dritten Jahrhunderts" at Athens, without making the fact clear. See below.]
[Footnote 285: This is noted by Finlay (i, 143) in regard to the later surrender of a large Mesopotamian territory by Jovian to Shapur II, when the whole Greek population of the ceded districts was forced to emigrate.]
[Footnote 286: Cp. Finlay, i, 264, 267-69.]
[Footnote 287: Finlay, i, 141. See p. 142 as to the recognition of the military importance of Greece by Julian.]
[Footnote 288: Cp. Finlay, i, 161. as to the ruin wrought at the end of the fourth century by Alaric; and pp. 253, 297, 303, 316, as to that wrought in the sixth century by Huns, Sclavonians, and Avars.]
[Footnote 289: Soteriaotai is one of the group-names preserved.]
[Footnote 290: They are already seen established in the laws of Solon.]
[Footnote 291: Foucart, Des associations religieuses chez les Grecs, 1873, pp. 5-10.]
[Footnote 292: They may have begun as early as the Peloponnesian war (Foucart, p. 66).]
[Footnote 293: Finlay, i, 85-86, notes.]
[Footnote 294: Id. i, 289.]
[Footnote 295: Id. p. 309; cp. pp. 328, 329.]
[Footnote 296: A fair idea of the facts may be had by combining the narratives of Gibbon, Finlay, and Mr. Oman (The Byzantine Empire, ch. x). Gibbon and Mr. Oman ignore the threat to make Carthage the capital; Gibbon ignores the point as to the stoppage of the grain supply; Finlay ignores the Church loan; Mr. Oman (p. 133) represents it as voluntary, whereas Gibbon shows it to have been compulsory (ch. 46. Bohn ed. v, 179, note). Mr. Bury alone (History of the Later Roman Empire, 1889, ii, 217-21) gives a fairly complete view of the situation. He specifies a famine and a pestilence as following on the stoppage of the grain supply.]
[Footnote 297: Finlay, i, 425.]
[Footnote 298: Id. ii, 37.]
[Footnote 299: Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 12.]
[Footnote 300: Oman, as cited, pp. 147, 148. The conventional claim, as made by Robertson and echoed by Guizot, was partly disallowed even by Milman, and countered by the clerical editor of the Bohn ed. of Gibbon (ii, 50-54). But such conventional formulas are always subject to resuscitation.]
[Footnote 301: Finlay (i, 81) writes that "at this favourable conjuncture Christianity stepped in to prevent avarice from ever recovering the ground which humanity had gained." This clearly did not happen, and his later chapters supply the true explanation.]
[Footnote 302: Finlay later says so in so many words (ii, 23, 220), explicitly rejecting the Christian theory (see also p. 321). This historian's views seem to have modified as his studies proceeded, but without leading him to recast his earlier text.]
[Footnote 303: Luke xvii, 7-10, Gr. The translation "servant" is, of course, an entire perversion.]
[Footnote 304: 1 Cor. vii, 21-24. The phrase unintelligibly garbled as "use it rather" clearly means "rather remain a slave." "even" being understood in the previous clause. This was the interpretation of Chrysostom and most of the Fathers. See the Variorum Teacher's Bible, ad loc. Cp. the whole first chapter of Larroque, De l'esclavage chez les nations chretiennes, 2nd edit. 1864; and the forcible passage of Frederic Morin, Origines de la Democratie, 3e edit. 1865, pp. 384-86. As Morin points out, the Church has never passed a theological condemnation of slavery. On the other hand, it was expressly justified by Augustine (De Civ. Dei, 1. xix, c. 15) as a divinely ordained punishment for sin; and by Thomas Aquinas (De regimine principum, ii, 10) as being further a stimulus to bravery in soldiers. He cannot have seen the Histories of Tacitus, where (ii, 4) civil wars are declared to have been the most bloody, because prisoners were not to be enslaved.]
[Footnote 305: Athenagoras, Apology for Christianity, c. 35; Chrysostom, passim.]
[Footnote 306: Instit. Justin. I, iii, Sec. 2, 4; v.]
[Footnote 307: Politics, i, 3.]
[Footnote 308: Cp. Michelet, Hist. de France, vol. vii, Renaissance, note du Sec. v. Introd. (ed. 1857, pp. 155-57). Michelet argues that the Christian influence was substantially anti-liberationist.]
[Footnote 309: U.R. Burke, History of Spain, Hume's ed. i, 116, 407.]
[Footnote 310: Chrysostom. 15th Hom. in Eph. (iv, 31); cp. 11th Hom. in 1 Thess. (v. 28).]
[Footnote 311: "Cum occidunt servos suos, jus putant esse, non crimen. Non solum hoc, sed eodem privilegio etiam in execrando impudicitiae caeno abutuntur" (De gubernatione Dei, iv).]
[Footnote 312: See below, pt. iv, ch. ii.]
[Footnote 313: Cp. the whole of Larroque's second chapter.]
[Footnote 314: So Mr. Oman admits, p. 148.]
[Footnote 315: Cod. Theod. xi, 3. 1, 2; Cod. Justin. xi, 47.]
[Footnote 316: Cod. Justin. xi, 47, 13 and 23. [A clear retrogression to quasi-slavery for the freemen.]]
[Footnote 317: Finlay, i, 200, 201. Cp. p. 153.]
[Footnote 318: Id. ii, 27, and note. Cp. Dill, as cited, p. 233.]
I. GREECE
Sec. 1
It is still common, among men who professedly accept the theory of evolution, to speak of special culture developments, notably those of sculpture and literature in Greece, art in medieval Italy, and theocratic religion in Judea, as mysteries beyond solution. It may be well, then, to consider some of these developments as processes of social causation, in terms of the general principles above outlined.
[A rational view was reached by the sociologists of the eighteenth century, by whom the question of culture beginnings was much discussed--e.g., Goguet's De l'origine des lois, des arts, et des sciences, 1758; Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767; and Hume's essay on the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences. At the end of the century we find the solution scientifically put by Walckenaer: "Ainsi le germe de genie et des talens existe dans tous les tems, mais tous les tems ne sont pas propres a le faire eclore" (Essai sur l'histoire de l'espece humaine, 1798, 1. vi, ch. xx, Des siecles les plus favorables aux productions de genie, pp. 348, 349). In England forty years later we find Hallam thus exemplifying the obscurantist reaction: "There is only one cause for the want of great men in any period--nature does not think fit to produce them. They are no creatures of education and circumstances" (Literature of Europe, pt. i, ch. iii, Sec. 35). A kindred though much less crude view underlies Sir Francis Galton's argument in Hereditary Genius. Cp. the present writer's paper on "The Economics of Genius," in The Forum, April, 1898 (rep. in Essays in Sociology, vol. ii), and the able essay of Mr. Cooley, there cited. My esteemed friend, Mr. Lester Ward (Dynamic Sociology, ii, 600, 601), seems to me, as does Mill (System of Logic, bk. vi, ch. iv, Sec. 4; cp. Bain, J.S. Mill, p. 146), to err somewhat on the opposite side to that of Hallam and Galton, in assuming that faculty is nearly equal in all, given only opportunity.]
And first as to Greece. As against the common conception of the Hellenic people as "innately" artistic, it may be well to cite the judgment of an artist who, if not more scientific in his method of reaching his opinion, has on the whole a better right to it in this case than has the average man to his. It is a man of genius who writes[319]: "A favourite faith, dear to those who teach, is that certain periods were especially artistic, and that nations, readily named, were notably lovers of art. So we are told that the Greeks were, as a people, worshippers of the beautiful, and that in the fifteenth century art was ingrained in the multitude....Listen! There never was an artistic period. There never was an Art-loving nation." This, which was sometime a paradox, is when interpreted one of the primary truths of sociology.
Our theorist goes on to describe the doings of the first artist, and the slow contagion of his example among men similarly gifted, till the artistic species had filled the land with beautiful things, which were uncritically used by the non-artistic; "and the Amateur was unknown--and the Dilettante undreamed of." Such is the artist's fairy tale of explanation. The probable fact is that the "first artists" in historic Greece were moved to imitative construction by samples of the work of foreigners. If, on the other hand, we decide that the "race" had evolved relatively high artistic capacities before it reached its Greek or Asian home,[320] it will still hold good that the early AEgean evolution owed much to ancient Oriental and Egyptian example. The Greeks as we know them visibly passed from primitive to high art in all things. Having first had fetish Gods of unshapen stone, they made Gods in crudely human shape, at first probably of wood, later of stone. So with vases, goblets, tables, furniture, and ware of all sorts, all gradually developing in felicity of form up to a certain point, whereafter art worsened. What we require to know is the why of both processes.
Pace the artist, it is clear that artistic objects were multiplied mainly because they were in steady economic demand. The shaping impulse is doubtless special, and in its highest grades rare; but there must also have been special conditions to develop it in one country in the special degree. That is to say, the faculty for shaping, for design, was oftener appealed to in Greece than elsewhere, and was allowed more freedom in the response, thus reaching new excellence. The early Greeks can have had no very delicate taste, satisfied as they were with statues as primitive as the conventional Assyrian types they copied.
Prof. Burrows, in his valuable work on The Discoveries in Crete (1907), somewhat confuses one of his problems by assuming that, on a given chronological view, the creators of the early AEgean civilisation were "the most progressive and artistic part of the race" (p. 193). No such assumption can be valid on any chronology. Every "part" of a race, broadly speaking, has the same total potentialities. The determinants are the special evocative conditions, which may be either culture contacts or economic fostering. A rational view of the growth of Greek art is put by Dr. Mahaffy, despite his endorsement of Mr. Freeman's extravagant estimate of Athenian intelligence:--"However national and diffused it [art] became, this was due to careful study, and training, and legislation, and not to a sort of natural compulsion.... As natural beauty was always the exception among Greek men, so artistic talent was also rare and special" (Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. p. 430). All the remains, as well as every principle of sociological science, go to support this view of the case. When Reber asserts (Hist. of Ancient Art, Eng. tr. 1883, p. 264) that "the very first carvings of Greece had a power of development which was wanting in all the other nations of that period," he is setting up an occult principle and obscuring the problem. The other nations of that period were not in progressive stages; but some of them had progressed in art in their time. And many of the "very first" Greek works--that is, of the "historic" period, as distinguished from the "Minoan"--are enormously inferior to some very ancient Egyptian work.
The development of taste was itself the outcome of a thousand steps of comparison and specialisation, art growing "artistic" as children grow in reasonableness and in nervous co-ordination. And the special conditions of historic Greece were roughly these:--
(1) The great primary stimulus to Greek art, science, and thought, through the contact of the early settlers in Asia Minor with the remains of the older Semitic civilisation,[321] and the further stimuli from Egypt.
(2) Multitude of autonomous communities, of which the members had intercourse as kindred yet critical strangers, emulous of each other, but mixing their stocks, and so developing the potentialities of the species.
(3) Multitude of religious cults, each having its local temples, its local statues, and its local ritual practices.
(4) The concourse in Athens, and some other cities, of alert and capable men from all parts of the Greek-speaking world,[322] and of men of other speech who came thither to learn.
(5) The special growth of civic and peaceful population in Attica by the free incorporation of the smaller towns in the franchise of Athens. Athens had thus the largest number of free citizens of all the Greek cities to start with,[323] and the maximum of domestic peace.
(6) The maintenance of an ideal of cultured life as the outcome of these conditions, which were not speedily overridden either by (a) systematic militarism, or (b) industrialism, or (c) by great accumulation of wealth.
(7) The special public expenditure of the State, particularly in the age of Pericles, on art, architecture, and the drama, and in stipends to the poorer of the free citizens.
Thus the culture history of Greece, like the political, connects vitally from the first with the physical conditions. The disrupted character of the mainland; the diffusion of the people through the AEgean Isles; the spreading of colonies on east and west, set up a multitude of separate City-States, no one of which could decisively or long dominate the rest. These democratic and equal communities reacted on each other, especially those so placed as to be seafaring. Their separateness developed a multitudinous mythology; even the Gods generally recognised being worshipped with endless local particularities, while most districts had their special deities. For each and all of these were required temples, altars, statues, sacred vessels, which would be paid for by the public[324] or the temple revenues, or by rich devotees; and the countless myths, multiplied on all hands because of the absence of anything like a general priestly organisation, were an endless appeal to the imitative arts. Nature, too, had freely supplied the ideal medium for sculpture and for the finest architecture--pure marble. And as the political dividedness of Hellenedom prevented even an approach to organisation among the scattered and independent priests, so the priesthood had no power and no thought of imposing artistic limitations on the shapers of the art objects given to their temples. In addition to all this, the local patriotism of the countless communities was constantly expressed in statues to their own heroes, statesmen, and athletes. And in such a world of sculpture, formative art must needs flourish wherever it could ornament life.
We have only to compare the conditions in Judea, Persia, Egypt, and early Rome to see the enormous differentiation herein implied. In Mazdean Persia and Yahwistic Judea there was a tabu on all divine images, and by consequence on all sculpture that could lend itself to idolatry.[325] (This tabu, like the monotheistic idea, was itself the outcome of political and social causation, which is in large part traceable and readily intelligible.) In Italy, in the early historic period, outside of Etruria, there had been no process of culture-contact sufficient to develop any of the arts in a high degree; and the relation of the Romans to the other Italian communities in terms of situation and institutions[326] was fatally one of progressive conquest. Their specialisation was thus military or predaceous; and the formal acceptance of the deities of the conquered communities could not prevent the partial uniformation of worship. Thus Rome had nearly everything to learn from Greece in art as in literature. In Egypt, again, where sculpture had at more than one time, in more than one locality, reached an astonishing excellence,[327] the easily maintained political centralisation[328] and the commercial isolation made fatally for uniformity of ideal; and the secure dominion of the organised priesthood, cultured only sacerdotally, always strove to impose one stolid conventional form on all sacred and ritual sculpture,[329] which was copied in the secular, in order that kings should as much as possible resemble Gods. Where the bulk of Greece was "servile to all the skyey influences," physically as well as mentally, open on all sides to all cultures, all pressures, all stimuli, Egypt and Judea and Persia were relatively iron-bound, and early Rome relatively inaccessible.
Finally, as militarism never spread Spartan-wise over pre-Alexandrian Greece, and her natural limitations prevented any such exploitation of labour as took place in Egypt, the prevailing ideal in times of peace, at least in Attica, was that of the cultured man, kalokagathos, supported by slave labour but not enormously rich, who stimulated art as he was stimulated by it. Assuredly he was in many cases a dilettante, if not an amateur, else had art been in a worse case.
It is to be remembered that in later Greece, from about the time of Apelles, all free children were taught to draw (Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxxv, 36, 15); and long before, the same authority tells us, art was taken up by men of rank. The introduction of painting into the schools at Sicyon took place about 350 B.C., and thence the practice spread all over Hellas. Aristotle, too (Politics, v [viii], 3), commends the teaching of drawing to children, noting that it enables men to judge of the arts and avoid blunders in picture-buying--though he puts this as an inferior and incidental gain. Thus the educated Greeks were in a fairly good sense all dilettanti and amateurs. On the whole subject see K.J. Freeman, Schools of Hellas, 1908, pp. 114-17.
Sec. 2
In literature Greek development is as clearly consequent as in art. The Homeric poems are the outcome of a social state in which a class of bards could find a living by chanting heroic tales to aristocratic households. Lyric genius is indeed something specially incalculable; and it is startling to realise that about the time of the rude rule of Peisistratos at Athens, Sappho in Lesbos was not merely producing the perfect lyrics which to this day men reckon unmatched, but was the centre of a kind of school of song. But Lesbos was really the home of an ancient culture--"the earliest of all the AEolic settlements, anterior even to Kyme"[330]--and Sappho followed closely upon the lyrists Pittakos and Alkaios. So that here too there is intelligible causation in environment as well as genius. In other directions it is patent. The drama, tragic and comic alike, was unquestionably the outcome of the public worship of the Gods, first provided for by the community, later often exacted by it from rich aspirants to political power. Greek drama is a clear evolution, on the tragic side, from the primitive ritual of Dionysos, Beer-God or Wine-God; individual genius and communal fostering combining to develop a primitive rite into a literary florescence.[331] For all such developments special genius is as a matter of course required, but potential genius occurs in all communities in given forms at a given culture stage; and what happened in Athens was that the special genius for drama was specially appealed to, evoked, and maintained. AEschylus in Egypt and Aristophanes in Persia must have died with all their drama in them. Further, as Grote has so luminously shown,[332] the juridical life of Athens, with its perpetual play of special pleading in the dikasteries, was signally propitious to the spirit of drama. The constant clashing and contrast of ethical points of view, the daily play of eristic thought, was in itself a real drama which educated both dramatists and audience, and which inevitably affected the handling of moral problems on the stage. Athens may thus be said to have cultivated discussion as Sparta cultivated "Laconism"; and both philosophy and drama in Greece are steeped in it. Myths thus came to be handled on the stage with a breadth of reflection which was nowhere else possible.
Historiography, science, and philosophy, again, were similarly fostered by other special conditions. Abstract and physical science began for Greece in the comparison and friction of ideas among leisured men, themselves often travelled, living in inquisitive communities often visited by strangers. What Egypt and Syria and Phoenicia had to give in medical lore, in geometry, and in astronomy, was assimilated and built upon, in an atmosphere of free thought and free discussion, whence came all manner of abstract philosophy, analytical and ethical. Plato and Aristotle are the peaks of immense accumulations of more primitive thought beginning on the soil laid by Semitic culture in Asia Minor; Socrates was stimulated and drawn out by the Athenian life on which he didactically reacted; Hippocrates garnered the experience of many medical priests. History was cultivated under similar conditions of manifold intercourse and intelligent inquisitiveness. Herodotus put down the outcome of much questioning during many travels, and he had an appreciative public with similar tastes.[333] The manifold life of Hellas and her neighbours, Egypt, Persia, Syria, was an endless ground for inquiry and anecdote. The art of writing, acquired long before from Phoenicia, was thus put to unparalleled uses; and at length the theme of the Peloponnesian war, in which all the political passions of Hellas were embroiled for a generation, found in Thucydides a historian produced by and representative of all the critical judgment of the critical Athenian age. Plutarch, in a later period, condenses a library of lesser writers.
Thus in respect of every characteristic and every special attainment of Greek life we can trace external causation, from the geographical conditions upwards, without being once tempted to resort to the verbalist explanation of "race qualities" or "national genius." If Hellas developed otherwise than Phoenicia from any given date onwards, the causes lay either in the environment or in the set previously given to Phoenician life by its special antecedents, which in turn were determined by environment. To suppose that "the Greeks" started primordially with a unique connatural bent to a relatively "ideal" method of life, preferring culture to riches and art to luxury, is to entail the further assumption of a separate biological evolution from the pre-human stage. To put the problem clearly, let us say that if we suppose the ancestors of the Greeks three millenniums before Homer to have been planted in Australia, with none of the domesticable animals which have played so decisive a part in the development of human societies, there is no good reason to think that the "race" would have risen to any higher levels than had been reached by the Australian aborigines at the time of their discovery by Europeans. One of the most remarkable things about those aborigines is their disproportionately high cranial capacity, which seems compatible with a mental life that their natural environment has always precluded. Many plain traces of gross primeval savagery remain in Greek literature and religion; and to credit all Greek progress to a unique racial faculty is to turn the back upon all the accumulating evidence which goes to show that from the first entrance of the Greeks into Greece they blended with and assimilated the culture of the races whom they found there.[334] The futility of the whole racial thesis becomes evident, finally, the moment we reflect how unequal Greek culture was; how restricted in Hellas, how special to Athens was it on the intellectual side when once Athens had reached her stature; how blank of thought and science was all Hellenic life before the contact of Semitic survivals in Ionia; how backward were many sections of the pagan Hellenic stock to the last; and how backward they have been since the political overturn in antiquity.
The vitiating concept of racial genius appears incidentally, but definitely, in Dr. Cunningham's contrast of Phoenicians and Greeks as relatively wealth-seekers and culture-seekers, ingrained barbarians and ingrained humanists (Western Civilisation, pp. 72, 73, 98, 99, etc.), and in his phrase as to the persistent "principles which the Greek and the Phoenician respectively represented." The antithesis, it is here maintained, is spurious. Many Greeks were in full sympathy with the Phoenician norm; many Phoenicians must have been capable of delighting in the Greek norm had they been reared to it. At a given period the Phoenicians had a higher life than the Greeks; and had the Phoenicians evolved for ages in the Greek environment, with an equivalent blending of stocks and cross-fertilisation of cultures, they could have become all that the Greeks ever were. The assertion that when we see "the destruction and degradation of human life in the march of material progress, we see what is alien to the Greek spirit" (id. p. 99) will not bear examination. Greek slavery, like every other, was just such a degradation of human life. And to speak of a "consciousness of her mission" on the part of "Athens" (id. pp. 72, 73) is to set up a pseudo-entity and a moral illusion.
It is remarkable that even among students well abreast of evolutionary thought there is still a strong tendency to think of Greek civilisation in terms of some occult virtue of "Hellenic spirit," something unique in social phenomena, something not to be accounted for like the process of evolution in other races. Thus so accomplished and critical a thinker as Prof. Gilbert Murray seems to account for every Greek advance beyond savagery as a result of "Hellenism." E.g., "Human sacrifice, then, is one of the barbarities which Hellenism successfully overcame" (The Rise of the Greek Epic, 1907, p. 16); "Solved by the progressive, or, I may say, by the Hellenic spirit" (Id. p. 25). In this way the discrediting and abandonment of the use of poisoned arrows in the "Homeric" period (Id. pp. 120-21) seems to be ascribed either to the Homeric or to the Hellenic "spirit."
Now, Mr. Murray himself incidentally notes (p. 121) that poisoned weapons are forbidden in the Laws of Manu; and it might be pointed out that even among the barbaric and ill-advantaged Somali, when visited by Burton fifty years ago, the use of poisoned arrows was already restricted to "the servile class" (First Footsteps in East Africa, ed. 1910, p. 45; cp. p. 74). The use of poisoned arrows, in short, is common in savagery, and is transcended by all races alike when they rise some way above that level. The "Hellenes," to start with, were savages like the rest, and rose like others in virtue of propitious conditions. So with human sacrifice. According to Herodotus, the Egyptians had abandoned it before the Greeks. Shall we describe the Egyptian progress as a matter of "Egypticism" or "the Egyptian spirit"?
Defences of the Greeks, such as that made so ably by Mr. Murray against the aspersions cast upon "Paganism" by uncritical Christians, are to be sympathetically received in the light of their purport; but the true historical method is surely not to exhibit the historic Greeks as "antitheses" to "the pagan man" of modern anthropology, but to show Christians how they and their creed have evolved from savagery even as did the Greeks. (Cp. the author's Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 77 sq., as to the pro-Hellenic handling of Greek phenomena by other scholars.)
Should the general line of causation here set forth be challenged, it will suffice, by way of test, to turn to the special case of Sparta. If it were "Greek character" that brought forth Greek art, letters, and science, they ought to have flourished in Greek Sparta as elsewhere. It is, however, the notorious historic fact that during all the centuries of her existence, after the pre-Lycurgean period, Sparta contributed to the general deed of man virtually nothing, either in art or letters, in science or philosophy.
The grounds for holding that choral poetry flourished pre-eminently at Sparta (see K.O. Mueller, History of the Dorians, Eng. tr. ii, 383) are not very strong. See Busolt, Griechische Geschichte, 1885, i, 158, 159, for what can be finally said on this head. Ernst Curtius (Griechische Geschichte, 1858, i, 240) writes on this subject as a romantic enthusiast. Burckhardt (Griechische Culturgeschichte, i, 116-19) examines the subject with his usual care, but decides only that the Spartans employed music with a special eye to military education. And Mueller acknowledges that though many Spartan lyrists are named, "there has not been preserved a single fragment of Spartan lyric poetry, with the exception of Alkman's," the probable reason being "a certain uniformity and monotony in their productions, such as is perceived in the early works of art." On the whole question cp. K.J. Freeman's Schools of Hellas, chs. i and xi.
In the story of Hellas, Sparta stands almost alone among the peoples as yielding no foothold to the life of the mind, bare of nearly all memory of beauty,[335] indigent in all that belongs to the spirit, morally sterile as steel. Yet "the Dorians of Laconia are perhaps the only people in Greece who can be said to have preserved in any measure the purity of their Greek blood."[336] Before such a phenomenon the dogma of race-character instantly collapses, whereas in terms of the reaction of conditions the explanation is entirely adequate. As thus:--
1. Sparta was by situation one of the most secluded of the Greek States. In the words of Euripides, it was "hollow, surrounded by mountains, rugged, and difficult of access to an enemy."[337] Compared in particular with Athens, it was not only landward and mountain-walled, but out of the way of all traffic.[338]
2. From the first the Spartans were balanced in a peculiar degree by the strength of the Achaians, who were in the Peloponnesus before them, the hostilities between the invaders and the older inhabitants lasting longer in the valley of the Eurotas than anywhere else.[339] The Spartan militarism was thus a special product of circumstances, not a result of Doric "character," since other Dorian communities did not develop it.
3. Being thus so little open to commercial influence, and so committed to a life of militarism, Sparta was susceptible of a rigidity of military constitution that was impossible elsewhere in the Hellenic world, save to some extent in the similarly aristocratic and undeveloped communities of Thessaly and Crete, each similarly noted for unintellectuality. Whatever be the political origins of these societies, it is clear that that of Sparta could not have been built up or maintained save under conditions of comparative isolation.
Grote, always somewhat inclined to racial explanations, argues (ed. 1888, ii, 262), as against K.O. Mueller, who had still stronger leanings of the kind, that the Spartans were not the "true Doric type," in that their institutions were peculiar to themselves, distinguishing them "not less from Argos, Corinth, Megara, Epidaurus, Sikyon, Korkyra, or Knidus, than from Athens or Thebes." This is doubtless true as against Mueller (cp. Kopstadt, cited by Grote; Cox, General History of Greece, 1877, p. 28; and Menard, Histoire des Grecs, 1884, pp. 218, 221), but the suggestion that the Spartans varied in respect of being less "Doric" is equally astray. Grote goes on to note that "Krete was the only other portion of Greece in which there prevailed institutions in many respects analogous, yet still dissimilar in those two attributes which form the real mark and pinch of Spartan legislation--viz., the military discipline and rigorous private training. There were doubtless Dorians in Krete, but we have no proof that these peculiar institutions belonged to them more than to the other inhabitants of the island." The argument cuts both ways. If it was not definitely "Dorian" to have such institutions, neither was it un-Dorian. As Cox observes (p. 30), the Spartan constitution in its earlier stages "much resembled the constitution of the Achaians as described in the Iliad." Equally arbitrary seems Grote's argument (i, 451) that "the low level of taste and intelligence among the Thessalians, as well as certain points of their costume, assimilates them more to Macedonians or Epirots than to Hellenes." He notes the equally low level of taste and intelligence among the Spartans, who as a rule could not read or write (ii, 307), and to whom he might as well have assimilated the Thessalians as to the Macedonians. In all cases alike culture conditions supply the true explanation. All through Greece, barring Sparta, stocks were endlessly mixed. M. Menard well points out in reply to Mueller that it is impossible to associate types of government with any of the special "races"--that as against Sparta there were "Ionian aristocracies at Marseilles and at Chalkis, and Dorian democracies at Tarentum and Syracuse," while most of the Greek cities had by turns aristocratic and democratic constitutions.
4. As regards Sparta, the specialisation of all life on the military side developed a spirit of peculiar separateness and arrogance,[340] which clinched the geographical influence. Where Greeks of all States were admitted to the Eleusinian festivals, Sparta kept hers for her own people.[341] This would limit her literary mythology, and by consequence her art.
Among the names of Greek sculptors only three belong to Sparta, and these are all of the sixth century B.C., the beginning of the historic period. After that, nothing. See Radford's Ancient Sculpture, Chron. List at end. Thus Sparta positively retrogressed into militarism. "There is evidence in the character of Alkman's poetry that he did not sing to a Sparta at all resembling the so-called Sparta of Lycurgus" (Mahaffy, Problems in Greek History, p. 77; cp. Burckhardt, Griechische Culturgeschichte, i, 117).
5. Not only does military specialism preclude, so far as it goes, more intellectual forms of activity: it develops in the highest degree the conservative spirit[342] when thoroughly rooted in law and custom. Nor is it any more favourable to moral feeling in general.[343]
As offset to all this it may be urged that the middle unenfranchised class (the Perioikoi) in Sparta, the Penestai in Thessaly, and the ordinary citizens in Crete, were in some ways superior types to part of the similar classes of Attica; while the slaves, as having some military life, were, despite the flavour of the name "Helot," above the average.[344] But even if that were so, it would not affect the problem as to culture development, and its solution in terms of the primary and secondary conditions of life for the given communities.
It is to be noted that in Crete, less isolated by nature and way of life than either Sparta or Thessaly, less rigidly militarised than they and more democratic in constitution, there were more stirrings of mind. Epimenides, the author of the famous saying that the Cretans were always "liars, evil beasts, idle gluttons," was himself a distinguished Cretan. But Crete on the whole counts for very little in Greek culture-history. Cp. K.J. Freeman, Schools of Hellas, p. 38.
Sec. 3
Such being, in brief, the process of the building up of culture for Greece, it remains to note the causes of the process of retrogression, which also connects broadly with the course of politics. Indeed, the mere expansion of Hellenistic life set up by the empire-making of Alexander might alone account for a complete change in the conditions and phases of Greek civilisation. In the new Hellenistic world wealth and power were to be won with ease and with amenity[345] where of old there was only an alien barbarism, or at least a society which to the cultured Greek was barbaric. When such cities as Alexandria and Antioch beckoned the Greek scholar of small means, impoverished Athens could hardly retain him. Her extorted revenue in her most powerful period,[346] as we saw, was the source of her highest flight of artistic splendour; and even after the Peloponnesian War, with greatly lessened power, Athens was the most desirable dwelling-place in Hellas. After Alexander, all this was insensibly changed: Athens, though for a time filled with Greeks enriched by the plunder of Persia, must needs gradually dwindle to the point at which the slight natural advantages of her soil, industry, and situation would maintain her; and the life of ideas, such as it finally was, passed inevitably to Alexandria, where it was systematically encouraged and protected, in the fashion in which well-meaning autocrats do such things. But while these new developments were not inconsiderable, and included some rare felicities, they were on the whole fatally inferior to the old, and this for reasons which would equally affect what intellectual life was left in Greece proper.
The forces of hindrance were political and psychological;[347] and they operated still more powerfully under the Romans than under the successors of Alexander. The dominance of the Greeks over the other races in the eastern provinces did not make them more than a class of privileged tools of Rome; and they deteriorated none the less.[348] When for the stimulating though stormy life of factious self-government there was substituted the iron hand of a conqueror, governing by military force, there was need of a new and intelligent discipline if the mental atmosphere were not to worsen. All civilisation, in so far as it proceeds from and involves a "leisured class," sets up a perpetual risk of new morbid phases. Men must have some normal occupation if their life is to be sound; and where that occupation is not handicraft it can be kept sound and educative only by the perpetual free effort of the intelligence towards new truth, new conception, and new presentment.[349] Nor can this effort conceivably take place on any wide scale, and with any continuity, save in a community kept more or less generally alert by the agitation of vital issues. For a generation or two after Alexander, it is true, there is no arrest in the production of good philosophic minds among the Greeks; indeed, the sudden forcing back of all the best remaining minds on philosophy, as the one mental employment left to self-respecting men of leisure,[350] raised the standards of the study, and led to the ethical systems of Epicurus and Zeno, certainly fit in their way to stand beside those of Plato and Aristotle. So, too, the thrusting back of the drama (which in the hands of Aristophanes had meddled audaciously with every public question) on the study of private life, developed in the highest degree the domestic and psychological bent of the later comedy,[351] very much as the autocracy has developed the novel in contemporary Russia. But the schools of Epicurus and Zeno, both of which outlasted in moral credit and in moral efficacy that of Plato,[352] and the new comedy of Menander, alike represent the as yet unexhausted storage of the mental energy generated by the old political life; and the development is not prolonged in either case. Evidently something vital was lost: only a renewal of the freer life could make possible a continuous advance in intellectual power.
On this it is important to insist, as there are plausible grounds for contrary inferences, which are often drawn. All supposed exceptions to the law, however, will be found on analysis to be apparent only. A tyranny may indeed give economic encouragement to art and culture, and a republic may fail to do so; but the work of the tyranny is inevitably undone or kept within a fixed limit by its own character; while, if the free community be but fairly well guided, its potentialities are unlimited. This is the solution of much modern dispute between the schools of laissez-faire and protection. A Velasquez, who might otherwise have been condemned to seek his market with coarser wares, may develop to perfection at the court of an autocrat of fine taste; but even he partly depends for his progress on intelligent communion, which the autocrat in this case chances to yield him. And from Velasquez onward there is no progress. So, in autocratic Assyria, sculpture reaches a certain point and becomes for ever conventionalised. In Egypt it conforms more or less exactly to the general stereotyping of life. We may grant, with some emphatic qualifications, that in some cases "with the tyrant began the building of large temples, ... the patronage of clever handicrafts, the promoting of all the arts,"[353] and that he may have patronised men of letters; but as regards the temples it is certain that in Hellas he was not the chief temple-builder; and it is also quite certain that the tyrant never evolved a single generation of important writers, thinkers, and artists, any more than of intelligent, self-respecting, and self-governing citizens. The latter constituted, in fact, the necessary nutritive soil for the former in the communities of antiquity.[354] It has been said[355] that "at the end of the third century of Rome, when its inhabitants had hardly escaped from the hands of Porsena, Syracuse contained more men of high genius than any other city in the world. These were collected at the court of the first Hiero, during his short reign of ten years, and among them were the greatest poets of the age: Pindar ... Simonides ... AEschylus." This is true; but Hiero had not been the means of evolving the powers of any one of the three. Pindar is manifestly the product of the diversified life of the free States; Simonides, though much patronised by aristocrats, began to "find himself" as a chorus teacher at Carthea in Ceos, won countless prizes at the Greek festivals,[356] and spent only the latter part of his life with Hiero; AEschylus is the product of the Attic theatre. Not the tyranny, but democracy, had been the alma mater. It is true that Athens after AEschylus played the "despot city" in finance, but she so far preserved at home the democratic atmosphere, in which, according to Demosthenes, slaves had more freedom of speech than citizens in many other places.[357] Lesbos had her oscillations between oligarchy and despotism; but the group in which Sappho stood was that of Pittakos and Alkaios--the elected ten-years dictator who finally laid down his dictatorship, and the fierce singer who assailed him. Not in the "Roman peace" of a fixed despotism did Lesbian song reach its apex.
The old problem of the culture-value of the tyrant has been raised afresh by Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari, in their abridgment of Grote's History of Greece. Grote's enthusiasm for democracy, they contend, "undoubtedly prevented him from doing full justice to much that was good in the non-democratic governments of Greece," notably "in his estimate of the so-called 'tyrants' of the Greek world and in his attitude towards the Macedonian Empire" (pref. to work cited, p. xv). Part of their discussion is beside the case, and proves only their general hostility to Grote as "a rationalist," to whom "every problem was a matter for rational discussion" (p. xiii). They first assert that Grote's chapter heading, "Age of the Despots," is "subtly misleading," inasmuch as there were despots at various periods in Greek history--as has been insisted by Professor Mahaffy. Then they avow that "this fact is mentioned by Grote himself," and that he "quite properly distinguishes" between the early and the late tyrannies.
The counter-claim is first put in the propositions (1) that an early Greek "tyranny" was in effect "a union of one powerful personality with the poorer and hitherto unrepresented classes," favourable to individual life among the latter; and (2) that the tyrants by preserving peace and giving the people individual freedom of life promoted "the accumulation of wealth and the extension of trade at home and abroad, and enriched the Greek mind by familiarising it with the natural and artistic products of other lands" (p. xvii). There is really nothing here that Grote denied; nor do the critics attempt to show that he denies it. Grote actually said, before them, that "the demagogue despots are interesting as the first evidence of the growing importance of the people in political affairs. The demagogue stood forward as representing the feelings and interests of the people against the governing few.... Even the worst of the despots was more formidable to the rich than to the poor; and the latter may perhaps have gained by the change...." (History, pt. ii, ch. ix, ed. 1888, ii, 397). As regards the case of Peisistratos, on which Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari chiefly found their plea, Grote notes that his "was doubtless practically milder" than the average despotism, but that "cases of this character were rare." And to this thesis, which is backed by an overwhelming mass of Greek testimony, from Herodotus to Aristotle and Plato, the critics offer no kind of answer.
They do, however, claim for "the tyrants" in general that "in the first place their orderly government provided for the first time the conditions which are essential to artistic and literary production. Secondly, it was their policy to foster in all possible ways everything that contributed to the magnificence of the States." If it be meant to include under the head of tyrannoi the early feudal chieftains before whom the bards chanted, the issue is merely confused. If not, the proposition is untenable. If again it be argued that the Mausoleum was a finer thing than the Parthenon, or quite as well worth having, the real issue is missed.
It is significant that Grote's anti-rationalistic critics make no attempt to gauge the respective effects of "tyrannic" and democratic or oligarchic rule on the inner life of men, which is what Grote chiefly considered. Neither is this, the vital issue, once faced in the essay of Hegewisch "On the Epoch of Roman History most Fortunate for the Human Race" (French trans. by Solvet, 1834), or in the encomiums of Gibbon, Mommsen, and Renan, before cited (p. 89, note). As has been shown above, there is no instance of a new and great intellectual development taking its rise or visibly going forward (save as at Alexandria under the Ptolemies) under the auspices of even a good despot in antiquity; though such a despot might at times usefully preserve the peace and cherish writers and artists. Here, then, is a sociological clue that should be followed. The reasonable inference seems to be that democratic conditions, other things being equal, tend most to elicit human faculty.
And where in modern times certain of the less democratic nations may be said to have developed certain forms of culture more widely and energetically than do certain of the more democratic States--as Germany her learned class, in comparison with France and England and the United States; or modern Russia in comparison with the States in the matter of the higher fiction--it can easily be shown (1) that these developments arise not in virtue of but in reaction against autocracy, and (2) that they were possible only in virtue of the evocative influence of communities living more freely. Modern communities differ vitally from the ancient in that printing has created a species of intercourse which overleaps all political and geographical restrictions, so that a politically tyrannised community can yet receive and respond to the stimulus of another. But the stimulus is still indispensable. Thus the intellectual expansion of France after the death of Louis XIV[358] drew germinally from the culture of the England of the day; and that of Germany later in the century was equally a sequence from that and from the ferment in France. Given the cluster of independent States, each with its court and its university, which made up the Germany of the period, the revived spirit of free thought bore the more and the better fruit because of the multitude of the reactions involved in the circumstances. For the time, the slackened and lightened petty autocracies counted for intellectual democracy, though even Kant was made to feel the pressure of censorship. It was not regal or ducal rule that made Lessing or Herder or Schiller or Goethe; and it was not mere kingly encouragement that bred scholars like Hermann and Wachsmuth and Buttmann and Bekker and Boeckh and Heeren and Ottfried Mueller. The school of Tuebingen was the outcome of a movement that proximately began in English Deism; and even the personal bias of Frederick counted for much less in the evolution than the general contagion of European debate. In the University of Berlin, organised after Jena, the inspiring principle was that of intellectual freedom; and the moving spirits took express pains to guard against the tyranny of convention which they saw ruling in the universities of England. For the rest, the production of a very large class of scholarly specialists in Germany was made possible primarily by the number of universities set up in the days of separatism, and secondarily by the absence of such economic conditions (all resting on possession of coal and maritime situation) as drew English energy predominantly to industry and commerce. It is true that if a democratic society to-day does not make express economic provision for a scholarly and cultured class, it is likely to lack such, because the leisured or idle class in all countries grows less capable of, and less inclined to, such intellectual production as it contributed to the serious literature of England during the nineteenth century. But such economic provision has been still more necessary in monarchic communities. Finally, at every stage Germany has been reacted upon by France and England; and it is notable that while, in the last generation, under a strengthening militarism and imperialism, the number of trained German specialists was maintained, the number of Germans able to stir and lead European thought fell off.[359]
In the same way the phenomenon of a group of great novelists in the autocratic Russia of our own age is no fruit of autocracy, save in the sense that autocratic government checks all other forms of criticism of life, all liberal discussion, and so drives men back on artistic forms of writing which offer no disturbing social doctrine. And the artistic development itself is made possible only by the culture previously or contemporaneously accumulated in other and freer communities, from whose mental life the cultivated Russian draws his. It was to some extent a similar restrictive pressure that specially developed the drama in France under the Third Empire. Apart from the peculiar case of the Italian cities of the Renaissance, discussed hereinafter, the most that can be said for the "tyrant" in modern Europe is that Richelieu and Colbert promoted science in France; that the German principalities of the eighteenth century fostered music at their courts; that George III did much for Handel in England; and that the King of Bavaria did still more for Wagner. On the other hand, the system of national and municipal theatres on the Continent was an essential adjunct even in this regard; and the mere comparative freedom accorded to the drama in Elizabethan England, at a time when surplus intellectual energy lacked other stimuli, sufficed to develop that art in one generation to a degree never so speedily reached elsewhere, save in republican Athens. Where the "tyrant" is most useful is in such a civilisation as that of the Saracens, for which autocracy is the only alternative to anarchy, and where, on a basis of derived culture, he can protect and rapidly further the useful arts and all manner of special studies. But even he cannot command a great intellectual art, or an inwardly great literature.[360] It will hardly be pretended that the freethinking which went on in Moslem Persia and Spain in the eighth and later centuries was evoked by the Caliphs, though some of them for a time protected it. The Ptolemies for a while fostered science at Alexandria; but under Roman rule--surely as tyrannous--it died out. And even under the Ptolemies science was a hothouse plant which never throve in the open.
It is clear, then, that first the rule of Alexander and his successors, and later the rule of Rome, over Greece and the Graecised East, put a check on the intellectual forces there, against which there was no counteractive in existence. There remained no other free communities whose culture could fecundate that of the Greek and other cities held in tutelage.
The city of Rhodes, which recovered its independence at the death of Alexander, and maintained its self-government down till the Roman period, was, in point of fact, latterly distinguished for its art (Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, pp. 334-38), thus illustrating afresh the value of free life as an art stimulus; but its pre-eminently commercial activity, as in the case of Corinth, and as later in the case of Venice, kept it relatively undistinguished in literature. Rich merchants commissioned pictures and statues, but not philosophies or books. Holm (Eng. trans. iv, 492) calls Rhodes a seat of philosophy, etc., naming Theophrastus and Eudemus. But they both studied and settled at Athens.
From the whole history there emerges the demonstration of what might reasonably be put a priori--that for a whole community, once self-governing, to acquiesce in an all-embracing foreign despotism meant the settling of lethargy on half of its mental life.[361] What the thinkers left in Greece could do was to lend philosophic ideas and method to the jurists at work on the problem of adapting Roman law to the needs of a world-empire, and this was done to good purpose; but it was the last genuine task that the circumstances permitted of. To discuss vitally the problems of politics would have meant challenging the despotism. There remained, it is true, philosophy and the arts; and these were still cultivated; but they finally subsisted at the level of the spirit of a community which felt itself degenerate from its past, and so grew soon hopelessly imitative. No important work, broadly speaking, can ever be done save by men who, like the most gifted Greeks of the palmy days (innovating in drama and improving on the science of the foreigner), feel themselves capable of equalling or transcending the past;[362] and that feeling seems to have become impossible alike for the students and the sculptors of Greece soon after the Macedonian conquest, or at least after the Roman. Plato and Pheidias, Aristotle and Praxiteles, AEschylus and Epicurus, figured as heights of irrecoverable achievement; and the pupillary generations brooded dreamily over Plato or drew serenity from Epicurus as their bent lay, and produced statues of alien rulers, or of the deities of alien temples, where their ancestors had portrayed heroes for the cities and Gods for the shrines of Greece. Beneath the decadence of spirit there doubtless lay, not physiological decay, as is sometimes loosely assumed, but a certain arrest of psychological development--an arrest which, as above suggested, may be held to have set in when the life and culture of the "family women" in the Greek cities began decisively to conform to the Asiatic standard, the men cultivating the mind, while the women were concerned only with the passive life of the body. In this one matter of the equal treatment of the sexes Sparta transcended the practice of Athens, her narrow intellectual life being at least the same for both; and to this element of equilibrium was probably due her long maintenance of vigour at the level of her ideal.
[As, however, the Spartan women, whatever their training, could not finally live the martial life of the men, the results of their chiefly animal training were not exemplary. See the question vivaciously discussed by De Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs, 1787, ptie. iv, sect. x, Sec. 1--a work which contains many acute observations, as well as a good many absurdities. The Spartan women, it appears, were in a special degree carried away by the Bacchic frenzy. Aelian, Var. Hist. iii, 42. Cp. Aristotle, Politics, ii, 9 (and other testimonies cited by Hermann, Manual of the Political Antiquities of Greece, Sec. 27, 12), as to their general licence.]
The arrested psychological development, it need hardly be added, would tend to mean not merely unoriginal thinking among those who did think, but finally a shrinkage of the small number of those who cared greatly for thinking. Even in the independent period, the mental life of Greece drew perforce from a relatively small class--chiefly the leisured middle class and the exceptional artificers or slaves who, in a democratic community, could win culture by proving their fitness for it. Under the Roman rule the endowed scholars (sophists) and artists alike would tend to minister to Roman taste, and as that deteriorated its ministers would. Rome, it is easy to see, went the downward intellectual way in the imperial age with fatal certainty; and her subject States necessarily did likewise at their relative distance. Finally, when Christianity became the religion of the Empire, all the sciences and all the fine arts save architecture and metal-work were rapidly stupefied, the Emperor vetoing free discussion in the fifth century, and the Church laying the dead hand of convention on all such art as it tolerated, even as the priesthood of Egypt had done in their day. It is positively startling to trace the decline of the fine arts after the second century. On the arch of Constantine, at Rome, all the best sculpture is an appropriation from the older arch of Trajan: under the first Christian emperor there are no artists capable of decently embellishing his monument in the ancient metropolis. All the forms of higher faculty seem to have declined together; and as the decay proceeded the official hostility to all forms of free thought strengthened.
[See Finlay, History of Greece, as cited, i, 284-85, as to the veto on discussion by Theodosius. In the next century Justinian suppressed the philosophic schools at Athens. Finlay, in one passage (i, 221), speaks of them as nearly extinct before suppression; but elsewhere (pp. 277-81) he gives an entirely contrary account. There are too many such contradictions in his pages. Cp. Hertzberg, Geschichte Griechenlands seit dem Absterben des antiken Lebens, 1876, i, 78-84.]
By the time of Constantine, even the coinage had come to look like that of a semi-barbarian State; and thought, of course, had already stagnated when Christianity conquered the "educated" classes. But these classes themselves were speedily narrowed nearly to those of the priests and the bureaucracy, save in so far as commerce maintained some semi-leisure. Barbarian invasion and imperial taxation combined in many districts to exterminate the former leisured and property-owning class. It is indeed an exaggeration to say that "the labourer and the artisan alone could find bread ... and, with the extinction of the wealthy and educated classes, the local prejudices of the lower orders became the law of society."[363] But the last clause is broadly true. In this society the priest, with his purely pietistic tastes and knowledge, became the type and source of culture.
A cultured modern Greek apologist of the Byzantine Empire[364] has anxiously sought to combine with the thesis that Christianity is a civilising force, the unavoidable admission that Byzantine civilisation was intellectually stationary for a thousand years. It is right that every possible plea for that ill-famed civilisation should be carefully attended to, even when it takes the form of reminding us[365] that after all the sixth century produced Procopius and Agathias; the seventh, George of Pisidia; the eighth, John of Damascus; the ninth, Photius; and so on--one man or two per century who contrived to be remembered without being annalised as emperor. Of rather more importance is the item that Christian Constantinople at one point, following Egyptian and Roman precedent, improved on the practice of heathen Athens, in that the women of the imperial court and of the upper classes seem to have received a fair share of what culture there was.[366] It is further a matter of bare justice to note that Byzantium had all along to maintain itself against the assaults of Persia, of Islam, of barbarism, heathen and Christian, and of Latin Christendom. But there must all the same be made the grieving admission that "We certainly do not find in the Byzantine authors the same depth and originality which mark the ancient writers whom they copied";[367] and that this imitation "was unhappily the essential weakness of Byzantine literature." That is to say, the intelligence of the Christian Empire, like that of the Greece of the post-Macedonian and the Roman domination, looked back to pagan Athens as to an irrecoverable greatness. In that case, if we are to assume comparative equality of culture between the sexes, there is no escape from the conclusion that Christianity was in itself a force of fixation or paralysis, the subsequent counteraction of which in Europe was a result of many causes--of any cause but the creed and lore itself. The creed, in fact, was a specific cause of isolation, and so of intellectual impoverishment. As was well said by Gibbon, the mental paralysis of the Byzantines was "the natural effect of their solitary and insulated state."[368] The one civilisation from which Byzantium might latterly have profited--the Saracen--was made tabu by creed, which was further the efficient cause of the sunderance of Byzantine and Italian life.
Had the external conditions, indeed, permitted of the maintenance of the earlier manifold Empire of Constantine, the mere conditions of social diversity which prepared the countless strifes of speculative sects in Egypt and Syria might have led to intellectual progress, were it only by arousing in the more rational minds that aversion to the madness of all the wrangling sects which we detect in Procopius.[369] The disputes of the Christians were indeed the most absurd that had ever been carried on in the Greek tongue; and in comparing the competing insanities it is hard to imagine how from among themselves they could have evoked any form of rational thought. But as in Northern Europe in a later age, so in the Byzantine Empire, the insensate strifes of fanatics, after exhausting and decimating themselves, might have bred in a saner minority a conviction of the futility of all wars of creed--this if only external peace could have been secured. But the attacks, first of Persia and later of Islam, both determined religious enemies, with whom, on Christian principles, there could be no fruitful intercourse, shore away all the outlying and diversified provinces, leaving to Byzantium finally only its central and most homogeneous section, where the power of the organised Church, backed by a monarchy bent on spiritual as on political unity, could easily withstand the slight forces of intellectual variation that remained. The very misfortunes of the Empire, connected as they were with so many destructive earthquakes and pestilences,[370] would, on the familiar principle of Buckle, deepen the hold of superstition on the general mind. On the other hand, the final Christianising of the Bulgarian and Slav populations on the north, while safeguarding the Empire there, yielded it only the inferior and retarding culture-contact of a new pietistic barbarism, more childish in thought than itself. We can see the fatality of the case when we contemplate the great effort of Leo the Isaurian in the eighth century to put down image-worship by the arm of the executive. No such effort could avail against the mindless superstition of the ignorant mass, rich[371] and poor, on whom the clerical majority relied for their existence. A Moslem conqueror, with outside force to fall back upon, might have succeeded; but Leo was only shaking the bough on which he sat.[372] It seems clear that the Iconoclastic emperors were politically as well as intellectually progressive in comparison with the orthodox party. The worshipped images which they sought to suppress were artistically worthless, and they aimed at an elevation of the people. "If the Iconoclastic reformers had had their way, perhaps the history of the agricultural classes would have been widely different. The abolition of the principle which the first Christian emperors had adopted, of nailing men to the clod, was part of the programme which was carried out by the Iconoclastic emperors and reversed by their successors."[373] Thus did it come about that Christian Byzantium found the rigid intellectual equilibrium in which it outlasted, at a lower level of mental life, the Caliphate which sought its destruction, but only to fall finally before the more vigorous barbarism of the Turks.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 319: Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 1890, pp. 138, 139.]
[Footnote 320: Cp. Prof. Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete, 1907, ch. xi; Bury, History of Greece, 1906, p. 65. "The supreme inspiration," says Bury, "came to their minstrels on Asiatic soil."]
[Footnote 321: E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii. 533-36; A.R. Hall, The Oldest Civilisation of Greece, 1901, pp. 31, 32. Cp. the author's Short History of Freethought, i, 122-27; and Von Ihering's Vorgeschichte der Indo-Europaeer, Eng. trans. ("The Evolution of the Aryan"), p. 73. Von Ihering's dictum is the more noteworthy because it counters his primary assumption of race-characters.]
[Footnote 322: Cp. Galton. Hereditary Genius, ed. 1892, p. 329. The contrast between the policy of Athens, before and after Solon, and that of Megara, which boasted of never having given the citizenship to any stranger save Hercules (Wachsmuth, Eng. tr. i, 248), goes far to explain the inferiority of Megarean culture.]
[Footnote 323: "No other Greek city possessed so large an immediate territory" [as distinct from subject territory, like Laconia] "or so great a number of free and equal citizens" (Freeman, History of Federal Government, ed. 1893, p. 22, note). And the number was greatly swelled "after Athens had in 477 taken the lead in the Delian Maritime League" (Maisch, Greek Antiquities, Sec. 28), so that in 451 it was felt necessary again to limit citizenship to men born of Athenian parents.]
[Footnote 324: Cicero (in Verrem ii, 59) testifies to the zeal of Greek cities in buying paintings and statues in his day, and their unwillingness to sell.]
[Footnote 325: The result is a marked poverty of power in such sculpture as the Persians had. It is in every respect inferior to the Assyrian which it copies. See Reber, History of Ancient Art, Eng. tr. 1883, pp. 121-28.]
[Footnote 326: See above, p. 28.]
[Footnote 327: See Maspero, Manual of Egyptian Archaeology, Eng. tr. 1895, pp. 215, 226, 235, 236, 240, etc.]
[Footnote 328: See above, p. 56.]
[Footnote 329: See Maspero, as cited, pp. 212, 214, 231, etc., as to the religious influence. M. Maspero recognises several movements of renaissance and reaction through the ages.]
[Footnote 330: Grote, iii, 21-22.]
[Footnote 331: Cp. Haigh, The Tragic Drama of the Greeks, 1896, ch. i; Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 2nd ed. 1908, ch. viii.]
[Footnote 332: Pt. ii, ch. 67.]
[Footnote 333: See Holm's suggestion, cited by Mahaffy, Problems of Greek History, p. 92, note, as to the value of Herodotus to the traders of his day. Holm also suggests, however, that the political service rendered by Herodotus to the Athenians was felt by them to be important, as giving them new light on Egypt and the East (Eng. tr. ii, 290, 291). The reward paid to Herodotus would greatly stimulate further historical research.]
[Footnote 334: Cp. Bury, History of Greece, pp. 7, 33-34.]
[Footnote 335: The Spartan women were indeed reputed the most beautiful, doubtless a result of their healthier life. As for the works of "art" claimed by Mueller (The Dorians, ii, 25-26) for Sparta, they are simply objects of utility, and were by his own avowal (p. 24) the work of non-Spartan Laconians, aliens, or slaves, "since no Spartan, before the introduction of the Achaean constitution, was allowed to follow any trade." No one disputes that other Dorian cities, notably Sikyon, did much for art--another proof that "race" has nothing to do with the matter.]
[Footnote 336: Bury, History of Greece, ed. 1906, p. 59.]
[Footnote 337: Cited in Strabo, bk. viii, ch. v, Sec. 6.]
[Footnote 338: Cp. Mueller, i, 80. Mueller notes that the Corinthians were "nearly singular among the Doric States" in esteeming trade, their experience of its productiveness "having taught them to set a higher value upon it" (work cited, ii, 24).]
[Footnote 339: Cp. Maisch, Manual of Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. Sec. 11; K.O. Mueller, The Dorians, i, 105, 203.]
[Footnote 340: The native Spartans were positively forbidden to go abroad without special leave, nor were strangers permitted to settle there (Grote, ii, 306; Wachsmuth, i, 248).]
[Footnote 341: Grote, iii, 294, and note.]
[Footnote 342: Cp. Dr. Mahaffy's remark on post-Alexandrian Sparta, "where five ignorant old men were appointed to watch the close adherence of the State to the system of a fabulous legislator" (Greek Life and Thought from the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest, 1887, p. 3).]
[Footnote 343: Macaulay, in his youthful review of Mitford (Miscellaneous Writings, ed. 1868, p. 74), draws up a long indictment against the Spartans in the matter of bad faith and meanness. It is only fair to remember that some similar charges can be laid against others of the Greek States.]
[Footnote 344: Grote, ii, 204. But cp. Aristotle (Politics, ii, 9) and Plutarch (Lycurgus, c. 27), who agrees with the saying of Plato and others (cp. Mueller, Dorians, Eng. tr. ii, 43, note) that in Sparta a free man was most a freeman, and a slave most a slave. And see Schoemann, Alterthuemer, i, 362. Hume (On Populousness) cites Xenophon, Demosthenes, and Plautus as proving that slaves were exceptionally well treated at Athens, and this is borne out by the Athenian comedy in general (cp. Maisch, Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. Sec. 32). But the fact remains that at Athens slaves, male and female, were frequently tortured to make them give evidence against their masters, who in turn were free to kill them for doing so (Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece, pp. 240-41). And Aristotle takes for granted that they were substantially inferior in character to freemen.]
[Footnote 345: Cp. Finlay, History of Greece, Tozer's ed. i, 15; Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, pp. 4, 105.]
[Footnote 346: Fifth century B.C.]
[Footnote 347: Holm (Eng. tr. iv, 595-98) misses half the problem when he argues that the Greek cities under the Romans were nearly as free and self-governing as are to-day those of Switzerland, the United States, or the German Empire. The last-named may perhaps approximate at some points; but in the other cases the moral difference is inexpressible. The Greek cities under the Romans were provincialised, and their inhabitants deprived of the powers of State government which they formerly possessed. Their whole outlook on life was changed.]
[Footnote 348: Cp. Finlay, i, 76.]
[Footnote 349: In artistic handicraft, of course, such daily renewal of creative intelligent effort is of great importance to mental health; and the complete lack of it, as in the conventional sculpture of Egypt, tells of utter intellectual stagnation. In the least artistic crafts, however, it is not so essential a condition of sound work.]
[Footnote 350: Cp. Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, pp. 4, 10, 15, 131-38, 144.]
[Footnote 351: The change was not so immediately dependent on the Alexandrian regime as Droysen implies (Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen, 3te Aufl. p. 367): the New Comedy had been led up to by the Middle Comedy, which already tended to withdraw from burning questions (cp. K.O. Mueller, Lit. of Ancient Greece, Eng. tr. pp. 436-41); but the movement was clearly hastened.]
[Footnote 352: Cp. Mackintosh, On the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, 4th ed. p. 29; Lecky, History of European Morals, 6th ed. i, 128.]
[Footnote 353: Mahaffy, Problems of Greek History, p. 85; Survey of Greek Civilisation, pp. 87, 99, 117; Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. pp. 83, 137, 440. Cp. the remark of Thirlwall, ch. xii (1st ed. ii, 125), that the tyrants "were the natural patrons of the lyrical poets, who cheered their banquets, extolled their success," etc.]
[Footnote 354: Holm on this head makes an admission (iii, 168) which countervails the remark last above cited from him. Noting the prosperity of art in Asiatic Greece, he writes: "Art as a rule flourishes--we do not say, reaches its highest point, for that is impossible without freedom--where wealth is to be found combined with good taste. And good taste is a gift which even tyrants may possess, and semi-barbarians acquire."]
[Footnote 355: Professor Spalding, Italy and the Italian Islands, i, 117, 118.]
[Footnote 356: K.O. Mueller, History of Greek Literature, 1847, pp. 208, 210.]
[Footnote 357: Schoemann, Griechische Alterthuemer, ii, 362.]
[Footnote 358: The questions of the previous expansion under Richelieu and Mazarin, and of the decay in the latter part of Louis's reign, are discussed, apropos of the laissez-faire argument of Buckle, in the author's Buckle and his Critics, pp. 324-39.]
[Footnote 359: An interesting corroboration of the above general view was presented in an article on the state of German art in the Century Magazine for July, 1898. The writer thus described the position of German art under the Kaiser's patronage: "Moved by the best of intentions, the Emperor is not very successful in his efforts to encourage art. They smack too much of personal tastes and one-man power. Menzel is perhaps a favourite, not because of his great Meissonnier-like skill in illustrations, but because he is the draftsman and painter of the period of Frederick the Great. The Emperor is really honouring his own line rather than the artist when he covers him with rewards.... It is not by making sketches for the Knackfusses to carry out that the Emperor will raise art in Prussia from its present stagnation, but by allowing the dangerous breath of liberty to blow through the art world. The fine arts are under the drill-sergeant, and produce recruits who have everything except art in them. It is too much to say that this is the Emperor's fault; but it is true that so long as he insists upon running things artistic, no one else can, or will--and the artists themselves least of all."]
[Footnote 360: Cp. Mill, Liberty, ch. iii, People's ed. p. 38.]
[Footnote 361: Cp. J.S. Mill's analysis of "benevolent despotism" in ch. iii of his Representative Government.]
[Footnote 362: Prof. Mahaffy (Greek Life and Thought, p. 112) attributes the same sense of superiority to the men of the period of the earlier successors of Alexander. This could well be, and such a feeling would serve to inspire the great art works of the period in question. Cp. Thirlwall (vii, 120) as to the sense of new growth set up by the commercial developments of the Alexandrian world.]
[Footnote 363: Finlay. History of Greece, i. 186. Cp. p. 185.]
[Footnote 364: D. Bikelas. Seven Essays on Christian Greece, translated by the Marquess of Bute, 1890.]
[Footnote 365: Work cited, p. 103.]
[Footnote 366: Work cited, pp. 97-98; Finlay, History of Greece, iv, 351-52. That this was no Christian innovation becomes clear when we compare the status of women in Egypt and imperial Rome. Cp. Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, pp. 173-74. And see his Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 328, as to pre-Christian developments.]
[Footnote 367: Bikelas, p. 104.]
[Footnote 368: Ch. 53, Bohn ed. vi, 233. Cp. Finlay, ii, 4, 217, as to the internal forces of routine.]
[Footnote 369: De bello Gothico, i, 3. Cp. Gibbon, ch. 47, note, Bohn ed. v, 243; and Prof. Bury's App. to his ed. of Gibbon, iv, 516.]
[Footnote 370: Finlay, History of Greece, i, 224-25; Gibbon, ch. 43, end.]
[Footnote 371: "The degrading feature of the end of the seventh century ... was the ignorant credulity of the richer classes" (Bury, History of the Later Empire, ii, 387). Cp. Gibbon, ch. 54, Bohn ed. vi, 235.]
[Footnote 372: Cp. Bury, as cited, ii, 521.]
[Footnote 373: Bury, App. 12 to ed. of Gibbon, v, 531.]