ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY

No form of government, or profession of political idea, saves a state from imperialism. Even this country, which is dedicated, as is no other of the modern great powers, to the concept of popular sovereignty; which uprears the structure of its state upon a belief in the essential equality of men, and treats, or at least aims to treat, as comparatively negligible the differences created by birth and race, education and religion, property and occupation;-even this idealistic republic has become an empire in our own time and almost without our perceiving it. M. BouchÉ-Leclercq has given a prominent place in his LeÇons d'histoire romaine[18] to the discomforting doctrine that the Romans conquered the world in spite of themselves—a debatable question, as he himself shows. It is not our sense of truth that is gratified when we are told that the beatitude, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," designates the English. Yet Seeley has maintained the thesis that the British empire was secured in a "prolonged fit of national absence of mind." Unwittingly, it seems, the modern foster-mother of liberal institutions has become the mistress of countless millions.

There never was a people which made the principle that all its citizens were equal a more live reality than the Athenians made it; and no state to my knowledge was more cunningly contrived to insure the government of the people than was theirs. Yet they became imperialists with ardor and conviction, and with this much of logical consequence, that, while they believed in democracy for everybody, they did not doubt that the Athenians had earned the right to rule both Greeks and barbarians by the acquisition of superior culture. Equality among its citizens Athens carefully distinguished from equality among all men.

The foundations of Athenian democracy and empire were laid by Themistocles, whose figure moves weird and gigantic through the golden mist in which Herodotus has enveloped the great Persian War. And it was this genial statesman, to whose unerring skill in discerning the course of coming events the austere historian Thucydides pays a rare tribute, who mapped out for his city the foreign policy by which it had the best chance of realizing its imperial ambition. Let it use its great fleet, which by fifteen years of persistent advocacy he had led the Athenians to build, as its arm of offense, and its impregnable walls, which he had enabled the Athenians to construct despite the treacherous opposition of Sparta, as a bulwark of defense and a basis for timely advance against its powerful continental rivals. Let it utilize the wave of democratic fervor then sweeping through Greece to consolidate its power within the Confederacy of Delos and to undermine and eventually to overthrow the leadership which Sparta, by the support of dying mediÆval aristocracies, had hitherto possessed in Hellenic affairs. Let it make peace on advantageous terms with Persia; use the liberty thus secured to break the power of Sparta, and, on the basis of a consolidated Hellas, strike boldly for Athenian dominion of the world.

It seems almost incredible that a clear-headed man should have entertained a programme of such magnitude. But we must remember that never had human beings more clearly performed the obviously miraculous. We know, on the authority of a German military expert,[19] that, had the host which followed Xerxes to Athens numbered the 5,283,220 men attributed to it by Herodotus "without taking count of women cooks, concubines, eunuchs, beasts of burden, cattle, and Indian dogs," its rear guard must have been still filing out of Sardis while its van was vainly storming ThermopylÆ. But what Herodotus reports is what the Athenians believed. They had met and routed the might of all Asia. They had mastered in fair fight the conquerors of all other peoples. The world was theirs: it was merely a question of taking possession.

Themistocles had, accordingly, to reckon with a national self-confidence which knew no bounds. And this had been increased by famous victories of Cimon over the Persians, and a revolt of the Helots which disclosed the fatal weakness of Sparta, when in 461 B.C. the task of conducting the fierce current of national energy, first for fifteen years (461-446 B.C.) in a heroic, but fruitless, struggle by sea and land against the Greeks and Persians simultaneously, and then for fifteen further years (446-431 B.C.) in the prosecution of glorious works of peace, fell upon the broad shoulders of Pericles, Xanthippus's son.

It is conceded that there is no taskmaster so ruthless as one's own will. The impulse to action during this strenuous epoch came from the Athenian people itself, not from its chief statesman. That fact does not, however, diminish the credit of Pericles. The golden age of Greece is, properly speaking, a golden age of Athens, and to its birth many things contributed; but decisive among them, in addition to the intensity of national life already alluded to, was an unrivaled facility for great leaders to get into effective contact with the masses under conditions in which there was the fullest opportunity for men in general to use their natural powers to the utmost. This happy combination of creative genius and receptive multitude arose in the main from the democratic institutions of Athens; but, for the public and private wealth without which Athenian democracy proved unworkable, and for the imaginative stimulus which enterprises of great pitch and moment alone give, the possession of empire was, perhaps, essential.

In the age of Pericles, Athens was a city with a population of about 150,000. Attica, the territory of the Athenians, had an approximately equal number of inhabitants. Of the 300,000 thus accounted for, about one third was servile and one sixth foreign. The free and franchised population made up one half of the total, and yielded about 50,000 males of military age.

The empire of the Athenians consisted of five provinces, the Thracian, Hellespontine, Insular, Ionian, and Carian, with a total population of perhaps, 2,000,000. It formed a complex of islands, peninsulas, and estuaries, the most remote extremities of which were distant two hundred or two hundred and fifty miles from Athens. The highways of this empire were the land-locked channels and lakes which make up the Ægean Archipelago. Their greatest length in normal circumstances was a continuous voyage of about eight days. On the other hand, no land way of more than a single day's march need be traversed by an Athenian expedition aimed at any of its subject cities. Without the control of the sea the empire was, accordingly, unthinkable. This absent, the district fell at once into more than four hundred fragments, the thousand "cities" from which, according to the comedian Aristophanes, the Athenians gathered tribute.

The Athenian sphere of naval operations and of political and commercial interests reached far beyond the frontiers of the empire. It included points like Sicily, Egypt, Phoenicia, and the Euxine, distant over six hundred miles from the PirÆus. An Athenian fleet might thus require the best part of a month to reach its destination. The world which had to take careful account of the Athenian naval power in all its political and military calculations, the world which Athens under Pericles sought to dominate, must have had a population of over 20,000,000.

If, then, we take into account the ratio of dominant, subject, and foreign elements, and also the time consumed in reaching with ships, orders, or explanations, the outer limits of authority, the magnitude of Athens's imperial undertaking will stand comparison with that of England in modern times.

In Sparta the gravestone of a citizen was inscribed regularly with his name alone. No epitaph was needed there to tell the tale of a life; for the life of one citizen was the well-known life of all. If, however, a man had died for his country, two words, ?? p????, "in war," expressed with laconic brevity his ground of distinction.

For those who fell in battle Athens set apart a public cemetery near the Dipylon Gate, and at the end of every campaign a commemorative service was held there in honor of the year's crop of martyrs. A man high in public esteem voice the nation's gratitude for the sacrifice. On such an occasion, at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles reversed the normal procedure, and, instead of expatiating on the merits of the fallen, he explained in an eloquent speech why Athens was worthy of loyalty unto death. Thucydides heard his words, and, perhaps many years afterwards, reproduced them as best he could in the famous Funeral Oration.

The statesman did not linger long over the legendary glories of Athens. Her alleged boons to humanity—grain, the norms of civilized life, the drama; the services, that is to say, upon which the later Athenians dwelt with special pride—had no meaning for him. Two things their ancestors had done: they had defended their country successfully, and had transmitted to their descendants a free state. "And if these were worthy of praise,"[20] proceeds his splendid exordium, "still more were our fathers, who added to their inheritance, and after many a struggle transmitted to us their sons this great empire. And we ourselves assembled here to-day, who are still most of us in the vigor of life, have chiefly done the work of improvement, and have richly endowed our city with all things, so that she is sufficient for herself both in peace and war. Of the military exploits by which our various possessions were acquired, or of the energy with which we or our fathers drove back the tide of war, Hellenic or Barbarian, I will not speak; for the tale would be long and is familiar to you. But ... I should like to point out by what principles of action we rose to power, and under what institutions and through what manner of life our empire became great."

In these words of Pericles I should like you to find stated the theme of my second chapter. And were it not that Pericles left unexplained, what the Athenians whom he addressed knew without explanation, the social and political forms by which they realized their ideals, I might absolve my task by one long quotation. I might transcribe the whole Oration and have done with it.

That being inexpedient, I cannot do better than present, using again Pericles's own words as a sort of text, the main principles of Athenian policy. But in passing I may be permitted to observe that were our knowledge of Athens dependent solely upon the Funeral Oration; had we to form our idea of political life in fifth-century B.C. Greece from it alone, we might still infer a unique epoch in the history of mankind. Fortunately, that is not the case. The "tooth of time and razure of oblivion" have spared the Parthenon and its matchless sculptures, the noble tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles, and the undying charm of Herodotus. Ideals are always grounded in some measure in realities. At the least they stand to them as the "perfect round" to the "broken arc." Even in Plato's psychology the mind needs to be sharpened by observation and reflection before, as in a flash of light, the glimpse of the divine idea suddenly appears. Hence, were the affirmations of the Funeral Oration unsupported by contemporary monuments of similar spirit, they would still be helpful revelations of Athenian democracy. And this conclusion, as I hope to show, rests not upon logical inference alone, but also upon the evidence of minute research.

"It is true," said Pericles,[21] "we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized, and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private intercourse we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private intercourse, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for authority and for the laws, having an especial regard to those ordained for the protection of the injured as well as to those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment.... Wealth we employ not for talk and ostentation, but when there is a real use for it. To avow poverty with us is no disgrace: the true disgrace is in doing nothing to avoid it. An Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes care of his own household; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless but as a useless character; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy. The great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not discussion but the want of that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act and of acting too.... And we have not forgotten to provide for our weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games and sacrifices throughout the year; at home the style of our life is refined; and the delight which we daily feel in all these things helps to banish melancholy. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as of our own.... We are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.... To sum up: I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace. This is no passing and idle word, but truth and fact; and the assertion is verified by the position to which these qualities have raised the state.... And we shall assuredly not be without witnesses; there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages; we shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may please for the moment, although his representation of the facts will not bear the light of day. For we have compelled every land and every sea to open a path for our valor, and have everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friendship and of our enmity."

Such were the proud claims of the great Athenian statesman. Of art there was said no word except in so far as art was embodied in the monuments of empire. Music and the drama are alluded to, but in the same breath with athletic contests, as the relaxation of overworked men. The speaker has no apology to make for democracy. He gloried in imperialism. Had he met Plato in Elysium—Plato who was born in the year after Pericles's death, and both embodied and expressed the higher ideals of a later generation of Athenians—he would have disdained to reply to the philosopher's accusation that he had filled the city with traders and shops and ships and dockyards and such rubbish, instead of with righteousness and justice.

Taking the Funeral Oration as my text, I should like to explain at this point by what institutions the principles of Periclean democracy and imperialism were converted into facts.

It was in the ecclesia, or general assembly, and in the heliÆa, or popular courts of justice, that sovereign power was vested in Athens.[22] The heliÆa demanded of its jurors only that they should be citizens in good standing, but each year it drew according to need from a specially constituted list of 6000. So, too, of the 50,000 citizens who might attend the ecclesia, 6000 were regarded as a quorum when a quorum was required, and commonly an even smaller number was present. Meetings of the ecclesia were held either in the city or at the harbor; hence the urban element tended to dominate. Stated meetings occurred four times a month, but others might be called by the generals or the council. Various panels of from 401 to 2001 jurymen each might be allotted to tribunals on every day of the year which was not set aside for a public festival or preËmpted by a meeting of the ecclesia. Usually poor men of advanced years, such as were unsuited for more active work and were satisfied with the indemnity of two obols[23] per day, volunteered for registration among the 6000 jurors.

The work of Parliament was divided between the ecclesia and the heliÆa; for legislation in the strict sense of the term could be enacted only by the joint action of the two bodies.[24] Administrative decrees, moreover, by means of which the ecclesia disposed of all important public business, and which might differ from laws only in a formal way, could be suspended at the initiative of individuals and were incontestable only when passed on, as to constitutionality or public expediency, by the heliÆa. The men who sat in the heliÆa were but common citizens like those who voted in the ecclesia; but they came to sit in judgment on both laws and decrees by the accident of the lot and not because of any particular interest in the questions concerned. In other words, the courts could not be packed with partisans as the meetings of the ecclesia commonly were. This fact, together with the delay which necessarily occurred, protected the state against the verdict of a chance majority, which was in fact usually a minority of all the citizens. There was no such thing in Athens as the final settlement of controversial matters by a single popular vote.

The heliÆa acted as sovereign in one further particular. Upon it devolved the duty of determining whether the magistrates and councilors observed the laws and conducted themselves honestly during their years of office. It was to the sworn assembly of the Athenians, accordingly, that all those engaged in civil administration were responsible. The ecclesia, on the other hand, had the right to impeach and dismiss those officials who, being given discretionary powers, abused them.

The main work of the heliÆa was of course to settle domestic and imperial litigation. As we shall see, the judicial power of the heliÆa gave it a large measure of political control over all the subject cities of Athens.

The heliÆa was the brake on the democratic machine: the ecclesia was the dynamo. The intent of the Athenians was that all political decisions of importance should be reached, after full debate, by the ecclesia. It was, however, obvious that an assembly of from five to fifty thousand men would proceed with disastrous slowness if all matters, great and small, were laid before it, or even if it considered only significant affairs, but considered them without previous examination and formulation. Perversion of modern democracies results most notably from the usurpation of power on the part of those who sift proposals for popular reference. Athens had to guard against a similar danger. Hence the harbinger of democracy, Clisthenes, created for it one of the most peculiar probuleutic, or deliberative, bodies which ever had the handling of large affairs. This was the council of the Five Hundred.

It was constituted anew each year and was made an exact miniature of the ecclesia which it was to serve. Every ward and township of Attica, to the number of one hundred and over, first eliminated such of its members as had not yet reached their thirtieth year or had already served two terms in the council, and then selected by lot from among the rest the councilor or councilors to which it was entitled on the basis of population. Accordingly, each successive council had from two hundred and fifty to five hundred new and inexperienced members. Not desire or fitness but pure chance determined its personnel. Every section, interest, and class of Attica—if we exclude young men between eighteen and thirty—was adequately represented in it. There was, therefore, a general presumption that it would take the same view of public questions as the ecclesia; that it would do a disservice to its own members should it foster their temporary rights as councilors at the expense of their lifelong rights as members of the ecclesia; that it would, in other words, labor to the best of its ability to present to the ecclesia a well-considered and sufficiently inclusive programme of business. Otherwise, the heliÆa had to be faced at the end of the twelve months.

A committee of five hundred impresses us as little less unwieldy than an assembly of five thousand. Clisthenes was of the same opinion. Hence he divided his council into ten sections, or prytanies, of fifty members each, and arranged that each prytany should act for the whole for thirty-six days in an order determined by lot at the latest possible moment. The prytany was constituted in such a way that it was a miniature of the council, just as the council was a miniature of the ecclesia. The lot, again applied at the latest possible moment, determined, furthermore, which of its fifty members should be its chairman, and be present with one third of his colleagues in the council chamber for the single twenty-four hours for which he served. The same man was chairman of the council at its daily session, and he also presided at the ecclesia, should a meeting of the citizens be held on his day of office. A chance nomination for a single day's service, at a time not previously known, was, Clisthenes thought, a sufficient safeguard of council and ecclesia against successful scheming, conspiracy, collusion, or other interference with the popular will on the part of the chairman. He was mistaken; and the later democracy took the further precaution of requiring the chairman to relinquish the presidency at the meetings of the council and ecclesia to a board of nine men chosen by lot for that specific purpose from the non-officiating prytanies of the council. One of the nine, designated likewise by lot, was given the special honor and responsibility of putting the motions and declaring the votes.

Only proposals which originated in a council thus organized came before the ecclesia; but there they might be discussed ad libitum, emended, accepted, rejected, or referred back to the council; and it was even possible during their consideration to substitute for the resolution of the council an entirely different bill, or to move that the council bring in a proposition at the next meeting on an altogether irrelevant matter. It was the deliberate intention of the Athenians that the ecclesia should consider everything it wanted to consider.

The management of civil administration, subject to the constant direction of the ecclesia and the watchful supervision of the council,—which in this matter also acted for the body of which it was a miniature,—was entrusted to a multitude of committees, each composed normally of ten members. Aristotle, in his Constitution of the Athenians, specifies the duties of twenty-five such committees and estimates at seven hundred the number of citizens engaged annually in domestic administration. The work of each committee was definitely circumscribed by law and formed a small bundle of routine matters. The committees may be thought of as standing drawn up in a long line for the council to inspect. Had they been placed one behind the other in files, the rear committee being responsible to the one before it and so on down to the front, the council would have come into direct contact only with a few powerful committees. Such committees, however, must have proved impossible for inexperienced councilors to manage. Besides, while the councilors, as agents of the ecclesia, and subject to its commands, might properly hold all the civil magistrates to a monthly accounting, it was not thought in accord with democracy that one group of citizens who happened to hold one civil office should have under their direction another group of citizens also engaged temporarily on public work. Though all the committees were thus on the same plane, and recognized only the council as their common superintendent, the work that they did was by no means of equal dignity or importance. It ranged all the way from managing the scavengers to managing the Great Dionysia.

All committees were reconstituted annually. No man could be a member of the same committee twice in his lifetime. At the end of his year each magistrate was required to render an indescribably minute accounting of his public acts, first to specially appointed auditing committees, and finally to the heliÆa. It was an easy matter to get an office in Athens, but a very difficult task to get honorably rid of it. For the lot was used to select the requisite number of members for each committee from among the citizens thirty years old or older who had not disqualified themselves by earlier service. The theory that one citizen was as competent as another for public office was thus put into practice. Every office was refilled annually by a chance group of new and necessarily inexperienced men.

While defining constitutions Aristotle lays down the condition for a thorough-going democracy that all citizens should hold governmental positions in turn. On this theory, there should have been an approximate agreement between the number of places in Athens and the number of citizens reaching their thirtieth year annually. That, however, was not the case. Even if we assume that men were councilors only once and held only one magistracy in their lifetime, we need to include some of the seven hundred (?) imperial posts in our calculation, and regard them, too, as subject to the conditions of tenure assumed for domestic positions, in order to reach the required total of about thirteen hundred. This is, naturally, an unwarranted and unworkable series of assumptions. It is, however, reasonable to suppose that the majority of Athenian citizens, and practically all of those who made a habit of attending the meetings of the ecclesia held a deme, or municipal, position, let us say, in their youth; a post in the council or in the domestic or imperial administration in their maturity; and a place in the register of the six thousand jurors in their advancing years. Recall, now, that three hundred and sixty of the five hundred councilors had to preside at meetings of fifty and five hundred men, and, if chance willed, at one of from five to fifty thousand also; observe that magistrates had not only to know the duties of their office,—which included the reception and preparation of some kind of cases for submission to a panel of jurors, over which they had, moreover, to preside,—but had also to keep accounts which they must defend in a law court; reflect that jury service involved acting as judge and jury in both domestic and imperial litigation, and it will appear that the knowledge of reading and writing which Clisthenes presupposed in all citizens would not have carried a man far in the age of Pericles; he must then have had a working knowledge of parliamentary forms, he must have had the view of administration which comes of being on the inside of the wicket; he must have been so conversant with the law and legal procedure that he could assume heavy personal responsibility for the legality of all bills proposed by him and could argue his own cases when acting as plaintiff or defendant in a law suit. It was a proverb in Athens that "office will show the man." We may be sure that most men took some pains in advance that it did not show them wholly incompetent. It must have left them with a new insight into public affairs. It is fair to say that, as a consequence of all this, the normal town meeting of the Athenians was, from one point of view, an assembly of experts, while viewed differently it possessed simply a high level of amateur attainment, comparable, perhaps, with that Mr. H.G. Wells postulates in his socialistic Utopia.

The office assigned by Pericles to this assembly of high-class amateurs was to choose the best among divergent policies proposed to it by citizens of exceptional endowment. The ecclesia by no means closed the door in the face of such real experts as it possessed. Thus it did not leave it to the council to draw up the specifications for the construction of the naval arsenals or any similarly technical job, but it could and did delegate such tasks to men of special competence. Nor was it so doctrinaire as to entrust the command of its expeditions or the conduct of its diplomacy to chance persons; but it both elected its generals, reËlected them as often as it cared to, and gave them special rights of calling and canceling meetings of the ecclesia and of laying proposals directly before them. It was, accordingly, aware of the difficulty and danger which it faced in settling questions of foreign policy, where the elements involved, being the resources, aims, sentiments, and traditions of other states, far transcended the knowledge of the common citizen; and where error might mean irreparable disaster; where, in fact, error did mean irreparable disaster.

The surest way to avoid error was to pick out a single individual of high character, intelligence, and competence, and give him cordial and resolute support in the policy he advocated. The ecclesia was accordingly a great "contest," or agon, of statesmen. The Athenians believed in competition. A public contest, in which excellence might be displayed and determined, was arranged to encourage effort in every conceivable employment. To digress a little, there was a contest of potters, as we learn from a gravestone on which an unknown affirms by a mighty oath that he was adjudged the first of all the potters of Attica. There were probably contests of painters and sculptors as well. There were contests of horse-breeders—the chariot- and running-races; contests of athletes of all ages in all kinds of physical exercises, of torch-racers on foot and on horseback; there were contests between the successive prytanies of the council, between detachments of cavalry, and between regiments of foot; at each of many festivals there were contests in singing of five choruses of boys and five choruses of men, each fifty voices strong, so that a single festival called for the training of five hundred singers annually and the production of ten new musical compositions; there were contests of rhapsodists in reciting Homer, contests of rhetoricians; above all contests of tragedians and contests of comedians, each tragic contest demanding twelve new plays annually and the participation of one hundred and eighty choral singers and dancers, each comic contest involving six new plays yearly and one hundred and forty-four choral singers and dancers. The rivalry which produces Olympic records and superdreadnaughts nowadays, the Athenians turned to advantage in art and music as well: with the result that the taste and skill of the artisan as well as the sculptor and painter, of the consumer as well as the producer, became well-nigh faultless; that in the hundred years of the empire close to two thousand plays of picked quality were written and staged in Athens, while during the same time from five to six thousand new musical compositions were made and presented. It is estimated that upwards of two thousand Athenians had to memorize the words and practice the music and dance figures of a lyric or dramatic chorus every year. Hence, a normal Athenian audience must have been composed in large part of ex-performers, a fact which students of Sophocles and Aristophanes would do well to bear constantly in mind.

The reward of victory in an athletic or musical contest was the glory and the prize. Great, indeed, was the reward which the victor in the supreme contest, the struggle for political leadership in the ecclesia, obtained. The man to whom the Athenians gave their confidence became stronger than a king. "In form," says Thucydides, "their government was a democracy: in reality it was the rule of their ablest citizen." The man who was vanquished in a chariot-race might be the victor on the next occasion. Not so the victim of a decisive political defeat. His fate was ostracism. That is to say, he was exiled without dishonor or loss of property for ten years. The way was thereby cleared for the victor. By this strange device the Athenians saved themselves for over two generations from the procrastination and uncertainty of distracted counsels. It was ostracism which made possible the uncrowned kingship of Themistocles, Cimon, and Pericles; and when, after the death of Pericles in 429 B.C., this institution failed them utterly, the Athenians were pulled this way and that by rival leaders; till finally, misled by Alcibiades and Cleophon, they were convicted by disaster of being unsound judges of foreign policy.

There is nothing that dies so hard as a well-nurtured delusion. In the romantic-idealizing view of the Greeks which was long current, the Athenians found leisure for art, literature, and philosophy by having all their work done for them by their slaves.[25] By this means, too, they were enabled to devote themselves freely to politics. If this were so, the inference of Calhoun was a sound one, that seen "in its true light" slavery was "the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world." The "first lie" is that the Athenians of the great age, whose dominant characteristic was their vibrant mental and physical activity, were in any sense men of leisure. The few among them who had slaves and other property to the extent of great wealth had to make and manage their own investments. The majority of the farmers had to till the land with their own hands. Many citizens—at least one third of the whole, in all probability—had to earn their living by selling their labor. This they could do easily in the time of the empire. For during that period of rapid commercial and industrial expansion the demand for labor was so great that the price could be regulated only by the constant import of slaves and by a steady stream of immigration from less prosperous parts of Greece. Outside labor served the purpose in Athens which immigrant labor serves in the United States to-day. With its growth grew the need that the material prosperity which occasioned it should endure. The problem of food-supply became progressively acute and the control of the sea was soon seen to be an economic necessity. More than one half of the grain sold on the Athenian market came ultimately from abroad, as did an even larger proportion of the raw materials of Athenian industry. "The Athenians are the only people in the Hellenic and barbarian world," wrote an Athenian aristocrat[26] in about 420 B.C., "who are able to control an abundant supply of raw materials. For if a state is rich in timber for shipbuilding, where will it find a market for it if not with the masters of the sea? If another abounds in iron or bronze or linen yarn, where will it find a market except with the sea-lord? Yet this is the stock from which ships are made in Athens. One city yields timber to her, another iron, a third bronze, a fourth linen yarn, a fifth wax, and so on. Moreover, Athens prevents her rivals from transporting goods to other countries than Attica by the threat of driving them from the sea altogether."

The demands put upon the time of Athenian citizens by the state were enormous, but not such as to cripple economic production. A comparison with modern conditions will make this clear. A little less frequently than once a week the ecclesia met, but the attendance was generally less than one tenth of those qualified. That represents a suspension of work roughly equivalent to our Saturday afternoons and legal holidays. A little oftener than once a week a contest or other public festival occurred, and to these there was, it seems, a pretty general resort. They correspond to our fair-days and Sundays. Preparation for the contests was, perhaps, not more destructive of money-earning time than are our collegiate and university courses. During their nineteenth and twentieth years young Athenians of the upper third trained for the army; but it was not till a century after Pericles's death that universal military service for a similar period was made compulsory—as in modern Europe. We may assume that at least two years of every citizen's life was required for deliberative and administrative work; and, having regard to the imperial service, we may, perhaps, advance this requirement to three. That is an enormous enlargement of modern demands. The same ratio would give the United States two million and a half or three million public employees, exclusive of postmasters and postal clerks, tax-collectors, and day laborers of every description. But a bald comparison of this sort is misleading. Athens regularly employed a committee of ten to do one man's work, with the result that all of them were free to give nine tenths of their time to their private business. The council during the year and the jury courts at its expiry were there to insure the state that, even if his colleagues would let him, any particular official did not neglect his public duties. Nor was the Athenian practice wildly extravagant so long as the magistrate received, not a living salary, but an indemnity equal only to a common workman's daily wage. The Athenians employed four hundred or even two thousand jurors where we employ twelve; but they had neither high salaried judges nor exacting lawyers to pay, since the judicial system worked without either. The juryman's fee, moreover, was a meagre indemnity, comparable to the old-age pension paid in the progressive countries of modern Europe.

The payment of indemnities for service in the council, the magistracies, the jury courts, and for attendance in the theatre, music-hall, and stadion, was a Periclean innovation. He did not intend to create a class of salaried officials; nor yet to make an advance toward communism. His ideal was political, not economic, equality—to enable all, irrespective of wealth or station, to use the opportunities and face the obligations which democracy brought in its train. Like all the great democratic leaders who preceded him, he was a nobleman by birth and breeding, and, like them, he did not doubt for a moment that the culture which ennobled the life of his class would dignify and uplift that of the masses also. To give the workingman the political insight and knowledge of the Eupatrids; to lend to him the grace and elasticity of movement which physical culture gave them; to fill his memory with the noble thoughts set in melodious and stirring words which they got from their intimacy with great poetry; to inspire in him, though a mere artisan, an artist's taste and fervor for formal beauty—that was to bless him with more than leisure. It was to unite the whole people in a community of high ideas and emotions. It was to make them a nation of noblemen. We do not wonder much that in the furtherance of this cause the men of large wealth in Athens volunteered to assume in turn financial and personal responsibility for the support of the theatre, the opera-house, the stadion, and the gymnasia. It was a heavy burden, but, in the absence of a regular property or income tax, generosity became at once a duty and a wise precaution.

A nation of noblemen is a luxury for which somebody has to pay. Athens, in Pericles's memorable phrase, was "the school of Hellas." It was right, he thought, that the Hellenes should sacrifice something for their education. He had tried to make them all contributory allies of Athens, but had failed in the attempt. As a good schoolmaster he was determined, none the less, to hold those "well in hand" whom he had under his care.

The physical means to this end was the control of the sea. The advantages of sea power in warfare, in enabling the holder of it to circumscribe according to his convenience the area of military action, as well as in facilitating mobilization, transport, and communications, were not perceived for the first time by the English Admiralty, much less by Clausewitz and Captain Mahan. They are stated in the clearest terms by a contemporary of Pericles.[27] Here is what he says: "The subjects of a power which is dominant by land have it open to them to form contingents from several small states and to muster in force to battle. But with the subjects of a naval power it is different. As far as they are groups of islands (and the whole world, we may remark in passing, is now simply a magnified Ægean Archipelago) it is impossible for their states to meet together for united action, for the sea lies between them, and the dominant power is master of the sea. And even if it were possible for them to assemble in some single island unobserved, they would only do so to perish of famine. And as to the states subject to Athens which are not islanders, but situated on the continent, the larger are held in check by need and the small ones absolutely by fear, since there is no state in existence which does not depend upon imports and exports and these she will forfeit, if she does not lend a willing ear to those who are masters of the sea. In the next place, a power dominant by sea can do certain things which a land power is debarred from doing; as, for instance, ravage the territory of a superior, since it is always possible to coast along to some point, where either there is no hostile force to deal with or merely a small body; and in case of an advance in force on the part of the enemy they can take to their ships and sail away. Such a performance is attended by less difficulty than that experienced by the army marching along the seaboard to the rescue. Again, it is open to a power so dominating by sea to leave its own territory and sail off on as long a voyage as you please. Whereas the land power cannot place more than a few days' journey between itself and its own territory, for marches are slow affairs; and it is not possible for an army on the march to have food supplies to last for any great length of time. Such an army must either march through friendly territory or it must force a way by victory in battle. The voyager meanwhile has it in his power to disembark at any point where he finds himself in superior force; or, at the worst, to coast by until he reaches either a friendly district or an enemy too weak to resist. Again, those diseases to which the fruits of the earth are liable as visitations from heaven fall severely on a land power, but are scarcely felt by the naval power, for such sicknesses do not visit the whole earth everywhere at once.... There is just one thing which the Athenians lack. Supposing they were the inhabitants of an island, and were still, as now, rulers of the sea, they would have had it in their power to work whatever mischief they liked and suffer no evil in return."

At all costs Athens must retain control of the sea. That meant to keep the fleet constantly in fighting trim. In the effort the Athenians made the most heroic financial and personal sacrifices, demonstrating clearly that popular government need not be self-indulgent. Neither the aristocracy in England nor Napoleon in France was as hard a taskmaster of the people as the majority which ruled in Athens. Between 410 and 402 B.C.—a time of great economic distress—a well-to-do citizen was called upon to expend twenty thousand franks—which are perhaps equal in purchasing power to as many dollars—on what we may call national education and entertainment. His taxes on the account of the fleet amounted in the same years to double as much, or forty-three thousand franks. Great as was the burden of the rich, that of the commons was conceded by their adversaries to have been still greater. "In the first place," writes an aristocrat in about 420 B.C.,[28] "it is only just that the poorer classes and the 'people' of Athens should have the advantage over the men of birth and wealth, seeing that it is the people who man the fleet and put round the city her girdle of power. The steersman, the boatswain, the lieutenant, the look-out-man at the prow, the shipwright—these are the people who engird the city with power far rather than her heavy infantry and men of birth and quality." Plutarch[29] tells us that on a peace footing Athens kept a fleet of sixty ships on the sea for eight months of every year. To man such a squadron 10,200 rowers, 480 officers, and 600 marines would be required. In other words, one quarter of all the citizens of Athens would have lived on their battleships for three quarters of every year. We might believe this report, if it were not contradicted by Aristotle, who in a place, where exaggeration, not reduction, is suspected,[30] makes the fleet of Athens, which was constantly in service in time of war, consist only of twenty guard-ships. Hence one twelfth and not one quarter of all the Athenians were on active naval duty during the sailing season of almost every year. In addition, two thousand men were drafted yearly by lot to serve in garrisons throughout the empire; so that, if these are added to the seven hundred (?) imperial magistrates, and the five hundred guards of the arsenals, nearly another one twelfth of the citizens was involved.

This computation takes no account of the demands of naval warfare. In the Athenian dockyards lay ready for action four hundred battleships, from which the requisite number was selected for each particular expedition. If two hundred and fifty vessels were mobilized, as occasionally happened, nearly fifty thousand additional sailors were required. With the use of every possible citizen Athens could not produce such a number. She commonly did her utmost and called upon the allies for the rest.

It is true that tribute was collected from the allies to enable Athens to build the ships and pay the sailors; but it is also true that, in addition, huge sums were contributed for mobilization expenses by rich Athenians and were advanced for heavy war expenses by the Athenian treasury. And Athens gave freely not only of her money but also of her blood. The death roll of one of the ten corps into which the Athenians were divided for army and navy purposes is extant for the year 459 B.C. "Of the Erechtheid phyle," it runs, "these are they who died in the war, in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, at Halieis, in Ægina, at Megara, in the same year";[31] and one hundred and seventy-two names follow. It was not the year of a great battle, or of an Athenian disaster, yet in it the death rate must have been nearly twice as great as the birth rate; so costly in lives was the empire to its lords in war-time.

On three specific points and on one general ground, contemporaries both within and without Athens assailed the treatment accorded by the Periclean democracy to its subjects. In no instance, however, is the charge of misbehavior established conclusively, though in this matter, as in so many others in the history of Greece, our judgment is dependent upon the point at which we transfer our sympathy from the city-states, which were the bearers of culture in the Greek Middle Ages, to the whole people, for whose progress and independence urban particularism was finally fatal. "Surely Hellas is insulted with a dire insult," declared the opponents of Pericles,[32] "and manifestly subjected to tyranny when she sees that, with her own enforced contributions for the war, we are gilding and bedizening our city, which, for all the world like a wanton woman, adds to her wardrobe precious stones and costly statues and temples worth their millions." To this accusation the proper retort was, not that having provided adequate protection against Persia, Athens was free to spend the money contributed by the subjects in any way she pleased; for the logical inference was then that the contributions were excessive. Pericles may not have cared to be logical, but he could not ignore forms. Had he been able to show, as has been claimed recently, that he used for building purposes only the sixtieth of the tribute, which had been dedicated as the first fruits to Athena, he would never have been attacked at all. Evidently, he spent on Athenian public works much larger sums derived indirectly from the tribute, for which course the defense actually made seems to have been that the money was due Athens for losses sustained during the invasion of Xerxes and for sums advanced to the war fund during the continuance of the struggle with Persia. In any case the tribute paid was a mere bagatelle as compared with what the subjects saved through having no fleets of their own to maintain.

The charge is more serious that in order to enjoy "the steady receipt of salaries throughout the year derived from the court fees"; to "manage the affairs of the subjects while seated at home without the expense of naval expeditions"; to "preserve the partisans of democracy and ruin its opponents"; to boost the business of hotel keepers and such ilk in Athens, and to win for the common citizens the flattery and consideration that would be shown otherwise only to generals and ambassadors, the Athenians "compelled the allies to voyage to Athens in order to have their cases tried." For it seems clear that the law courts at Athens were usually so clogged with litigation that the gain in having a model code of law and in escaping the fierce partisanship of the local tribunals was largely neutralized by the added expense and humiliation. The real justification of the practice was that it obviated the necessity of sending out naval expeditions.

In the third place Athens took from the allies lands and settled them with impecunious Athenians; but in payment therefor reductions of tribute were given. On the other hand, thousands from the allied cities migrated to Athens, and, while not escaping military or financial service, or obtaining Athenian citizenship, they were cordially welcomed, and enjoyed to the full the commercial and industrial advantages of the metropolis. Again, Athenians often found it less profitable to invest capital in Attic land, which was exposed to hostile attack, than in lands on the islands of the empire, which the fleet protected. Hence there were many Attic farmers in the subject territory, their right to own foreign real estate being secured by commercial treaties. There was accordingly economic give and take, the military preponderance of Athens being, however, responsible for the result that the Athenians abroad were often policemen, the allies in Athens, hostages.

In all three instances of alleged misbehavior, it must be admitted that the defense offered by the Athenian apologists simply added insult to injury in the view of a majority of the subjects. But for them Athens, arrogant or conciliatory, malefactor or benefactor, was always a foreign governor to be gotten rid of at any cost. Such uncompromising sentiments time alone could alter, and to secure the benefits of time Pericles endeavored to avoid an Hellenic war. His policy of peace after 446 B.C. was, therefore, the sound policy of an imperialist.

The general ground on which contemporaries criticized the Athenian rÉgime was that under it every assistance was given by the state to the least cultivated portion of the inhabitants both of Athens and of its four hundred and twenty subject cities, at the expense of the most intelligent and cultivated elements; that the highest goal of endeavor was moral and intellectual mediocrity. There may be some truth in this contention. The case would be more conclusive, however, if the tendency of the critics to identify intelligence with wealth and cultivation with birth were less obvious. If the point be granted, we must accept the opinion of those historians who affirm that Athens was great in this age despite, and not because of, its democracy. Personally, I do not believe that this was so. I cannot admit that extirpation of the best was practiced in an age in which ideas were created and forms were perfected for their literary and artistic expression which have been the wonder and despair of the men of the highest cultivation from that day to this. Does it not seem like irony that a rÉgime is charged with promoting mediocrity under which rose Sophocles, Herodotus, Phidias, Pericles, Euripides, Hippocrates, Socrates, and Thucydides? Much more important than the leveling tendency of the democracy was the facility it afforded for men of ability both to rise to the top and to find there a sympathetic and critical audience. So much for democracy.

The empire stands approved by the fact that the sharpest accusation now made against the democracy is that it failed to make the empire enduring. On this point the last word—unless it be that no political order has ever been enduring, and that those which have lasted the longest have been generally of the least worth—was said by Thucydides[33] over twenty-three hundred years ago, and I present in conclusion his masterly account of the circumstances which led to the downfall of the Athenian Empire:—

"During the peace while Pericles was at the head of affairs he ruled with prudence; under his guidance Athens was safe, and reached the height of her greatness in his time. When the war began, he showed that here, too, he had formed a true estimate of the Athenian power. He survived the commencement of hostilities two years and six months; and, after his death, his foresight was even better appreciated than during his life. For he had told the Athenians that if they would be patient and would attend to their navy, and not seek to enlarge their dominions while the war was going on, nor imperil the existence of the city, they would be victorious; but they did all that he told them not to do, and in matters which seemingly had nothing to do with the war, from motives of private ambition and private interest they adopted a policy which had disastrous effects in respect both of themselves and of their allies; their measures, had they been successful, would have brought honor and profit only to individuals, and, when unsuccessful, crippled the city in the conduct of the war. The reason of the difference was that he, deriving authority from his capacity and acknowledged worth, being also a man of transparent integrity, was able to control the multitude in a free spirit; he led them rather than was led by them; for, not seeking power by dishonest arts, he had no need to say pleasant things, but, on the strength of his own high character, could venture to oppose and even to anger them. When he saw them unseasonably elated and arrogant, his words humbled and awed them; and when they were depressed by groundless fears, he sought to reanimate their confidence. Thus Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact ruled by her greatest citizen. But his successors were more on an equality with one another, and, each struggling to be first himself, they were ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of affairs to the whims of the people. Such weakness in a great and imperial city led to many errors, of which the greatest was the Sicilian expedition; not that the Athenians miscalculated their enemy's power, but they themselves, instead of consulting for the interests of the expedition which they had sent out, were occupied in intriguing against one another for the leadership of the democracy, and not only grew remiss in the management of the army, but became embroiled, for the first time, in civil strife. And yet, after they had lost in the Sicilian expedition the greater part of their fleet and army, and were distracted by revolution at home, still they held out three years not only against their former enemies, but against the Sicilians who had combined with them, and against most of their own allies who had risen in revolt. Even when Cyrus, the son of the King, joined in the war and supplied the Peloponnesian fleet with money, they continued to resist, and were at last overthrown, not by their enemies, but by themselves and their own internal dissensions."

A summarization such as this, in style austere and authoritative, in content the product of penetrating insight and wonderful sense for political realities, not only bears witness to the greatness of Thucydides; when it is contrasted with similar analyses in Plato and Aristotle it testifies to the loss of power for sustained historical thinking which Greece suffered when men of genius were no longer enriched by the experience which came through living in a state like the imperial democracy of Athens. Not the least of its merits is its self-restraint. Having concluded that the reckless rivalries of her would-be leaders and the reckless dissensions of her citizens ruined Athens, he refrains from assigning a cause for the spirit of lawlessness. It is not Thucydides, but Alcibiades, who declared that democracy was "manifest folly"; not he, but Cleon, who reiterated that "a democracy cannot manage an empire." Thucydides does not despair of democracy. In the case of Athens it was less the unsoundness of the "majority" than the selfishness of the "remnant" that caused the nation to perish. For the demoralization of their leaders, however, the Athenians themselves held Socrates responsible, meaning to incriminate the Sophistic movement. Who shall say that they were wrong? And who shall hold democracy responsible for the evils of the Sophistic movement?

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. Von des attischen Reiches Herrlichkeit (1877). In Reden und VortrÄge, pp. 27 ff.

2. Jebb, R.C. The Age of Pericles (1889). In Essays and Addresses, pp. 104 ff.

3. Meyer, Eduard. Geschichte des Altertums, IV (1901).

4. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen (1910): C. Die athenische Demokratie, pp. 95 ff.

5. Zimmern, Alfred. The Greek Commonwealth (1911).

6. Cavaignac, E. Histoire de l'AntiquitÉ, II: AthÈnes (480-330), (1912).