FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE

A curious legend about the Spartans arose in the age that followed the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. It was then reported that they were the kinsmen of the Jews. According to one version of the story, JudÆa was founded by a Spartan named JudÆus, who had accompanied the god Dionysus from Thebes on his triumphal progress through Asia. According to another account, the Spartans were descendants of Abraham, the strongest of the children of Israel having migrated to Greece at the time Moses led the remainder out of Egypt to the land of Canaan.[34]

This absurd legend, of which the Greek origin is unmistakable, seems to have been responsible for a certain rapprochement between the two peoples. Despite the first book of the Maccabees, which affirms the contrary, it is, indeed, impossible that Areus I, king of Sparta between 308 and 264 B.C., wrote to Onias I, Jewish high priest, demanding and offering a community of goods, and that Jonathan MaccabÆus, one hundred and fifty years afterwards, sent greetings to the Spartans, together with the word that the Jews "at all times without ceasing both in their feasts and other convenient days remembered them in the sacrifices which they offered, and in their prayers, as reason was, and as it becameth them to think upon their brethren."[35] Nothing is more unlikely than that the Spartans volunteered to divide their "cattle" and property with the Jews only a short time before they crushed with great bloodshed a communistic movement among their own citizens, unless it be the thought that the prayers and offerings of the Jews went up continually to Jehovah for the prosperity of heathen who were also backsliders. Nevertheless, that communications were actually established between the JudÆa of Onias and Jonathan and the Sparta of Areus and Menalcidas, we cannot doubt; and, indeed, we have still other evidences that the alleged community of origin was turned to account by the Jews. There was evidently a considerable Jewish settlement in Sparta.

When we seek to discover the reason for this strange conjunction of the warrior community by the Eurotas and the religious community by the Jordan, we are helped by observing that in another Hellenistic legend the Jews are made the kinsmen of the gymnosophists, or naked philosophers, of India. The Greek mind was at this time fascinated by the great problem of subordinating the species of things to their proper genera, of perceiving the types by means of which individual objects became intelligible parts of a cosmos. It was the age of Aristotle and Theophrastus, Menander and the New Comedy, of idealistic portraiture. Hence the temptation was irresistible to bring into family relationship the various societies of men in which the principle of caste dominated; to regard it as unessential that in JudÆa the people were there to support the priests, in Laconia to support the soldiers, in India to support the Brahmans. In each case there was found an odd community, in which, so far at least as the state could accomplish it, all human interests were subordinated to one, be it war and preparation for war, religious practices of a ritualistic character, or theosophical speculation.

Had the Greeks known it, there was a further analogy of an external sort between the Spartans and the Jews which they would have delighted to establish. For at about the same time that a richly diversified national life was narrowed down in JudÆa to a single interest under the stress of complete preoccupation with the means of regaining Jehovah's favor for his chosen people, Sparta ruthlessly compressed and crushed a many-sided and progressive culture to the end that her citizens might become trained soldiers, having but one esprit, the esprit de corps of a professional army.

Prior to 580 B.C. Sparta was the home of poets and musicians. It was for a chorus of Spartan maidens, the Élite of the noble families, that Alcman wrote the exquisite lines on the breathless calm of nature which Goethe has made familiar to all lovers of poetry. In hollow LacedÆmon—a valley rich with vegetation suggestive of bountiful harvests, down which the steel-gray Eurotas runs, swift and turbulent, over its rocky bottom, and over which rise on either side the snow-capped ridges of Taygetus and Parnon, their slopes resonant with the songs of the nightingales in the mating season—in this secluded spot, whose haunting beauty is a joy forever to all who have seen it, there was reared a famous temple of Athena, "Athena of the Brazen House," at a time when in Athens itself the city's protecting goddess had to be content with a crude, primitive sanctuary.

All this, and much besides, was observed, and the proper inferences drawn, by Eduard Meyer twenty years ago;[36] so that the amazement with which the English archÆologists, who have excavated in Laconia during the past five or six years, report their remarkable "finds" is a source of no little amusement to the wary. They have discovered that prior to 580 B.C. Sparta was the maker of a kind of artistic pottery which was known and imitated in far-distant Cyrene and Tarentum; that she then had trade relations with Egypt and Lydia; that "combs, toilet-boxes, elaborate pins and bronze ornaments, seals, necklaces, and gold and ivory gewgaws" were made and used—witnesses for "a golden age of Spartan art," against the puritanical spirit traditionally attributed to early and middle Sparta.[37]

In Athens, as we have seen, supremacy in art and literature was attained by making universal among citizens the spirit and culture of the aristocracy, the whole people, thus ennobled, being supported on the shoulders of the tributary allies and enriched by the commercial advantages of maritime empire. The development of Sparta was directly the reverse of this. There the aristocracy, whose exuberance of life and responsiveness to sensuous impressions are attested with sufficient certainty, was destroyed in the sixth century B.C.

This century was one of repression in Greece generally; whence some historians have called it the epoch of the Greek Reformation. It is the time of the "Seven Wise Men," from one of whom came the Delphian motto "nothing in excess," a time in which the riotous joy of living and the fresh spontaneity of the so-called Ionian Renascence were subdued by a force, which might have been everywhere a blight,—as in Sparta,—but which in fact, when later the inspiration of the great Persian War came, exerted the gentle restraint which marks the classic in Greek art and letters. In this perilous period the aristocracy of Sparta perished, and with it the ideals and accomplishments of which it had been the exponent.

The instrument of repression of all that was superior to the average in Spartan life was the college of the five ephors, which Cicero compares with the tribunate in Rome. The ephors acquired such power that they made the continuance of even the kingship dependent upon the submission of the kings to their authority; and upon the kings, as upon all others, they enforced the new rules of law of which they were the living expositors.

The development of Sparta, like the development of Rome, from aristocratic to republican government is characterized by the absence of tyrants. The fact is that the tribunate in the one case and the ephorate in the other was tyranny in commission, the division of its powers between ten and five annually changing officers respectively having proved to be a sufficient safeguard against the concentration of executive power in the person of a single individual, be he an inherited king robbed of monarchical rights or an ambitious demagogue aiming at their restoration.

The new rules of law which the ephors enforced prescribed in minute detail the life of the citizen from the moment of his birth to the time of his death. They were the regulations of a military school in which war alone was taught, of military barracks when war was already declared. From seven years of age to sixty the entire energies of the male half of the population were directed toward being prepared for war. Boys and men drilled and hunted, learned to use their weapons and campaigned, danced and exercised, ate in the "messes" year in and year out, and never escaped the watchful eyes of trainers, subalterns, officers, and ephors.

No one in Sparta had to make his own way in life. His whole course was mapped out for him before he was born. No citizen had any business cares; for all trade and industry were tabooed, and the lands which he inherited he could not sell. Neither could he buy those of another. The agricultural laborers were serfs, the sullen and recalcitrant Helots, of whom there were fifteen to every Spartan; the clothing and weapons were made by the contented and tractable Perioecs, who outnumbered the Spartans five to one, and formed with their one hundred hamlets and their contiguous territories an insulating band round Helots and Spartans alike. Iron money was the only local currency, though silver had, of course, to be given in payment for the articles which were imported from abroad. These, however, were reduced to a minimum, and such foreigners as made their way through the wall of Perioecs were rounded up at intervals and forcefully expelled.

All the pretty things of their earlier life, the Spartans chose to do without. Coarse fare and unlovely houses, piazzas devoid of statues and inclosed in unsightly and flimsy public buildings; no theatres, no new music, no new ideas of any kind; mothers who gave up their little children and their grown sons without flinching; wives who violated fundamental instincts that their offspring might be more perfect; homeless boys who went half-naked winter and summer, slept in pens in the open air like cattle and got their food and living by their wits; girls who would hardly have known their brothers, brides who would hardly have recognized their husbands, mothers who would hardly have been able to distinguish their own sons, were it not that there were less than five thousand brothers, husbands, and sons in all—of such was the new Sparta, to whose citizens the ephors issued the annual command "to shave their mustaches and obey the laws." Long-haired and tangly-bearded, in groups of about fifteen each, they lounged and ate and slept in the three hundred tents, or barracks, which lined Hyacinth Street. There they kept their long spears and their armor.[38] Thence, clad in their scarlet cloaks, they issued in time of danger or of war to take their places, group by group, in the five carefully drilled regiments of which the Spartan phalanx was composed. Quietly, at an appointed hour in a single night, the whole army might steal away without confusion, trailing after it, on occasion, thirty-five thousand Helots to attend to the commissariat. Five thousand Perioec hoplites might follow at its heels, and with machine-like precision, to the sound of flutes played in the austere Dorian mode, ten thousand LacedÆmonian soldiers might advance into battle against foemen who were always comparatively ill-organized, and who often fled before a single blow was struck.

The secret of this strange perversion of the natural life of man is to be found in the declaration of war annually made by the ephors upon the Helots. They could not follow it up by a campaign waged in regular fashion; for that would have been to destroy their own serfs. But they picked out young soldiers, and sent them about among the Helots, with instructions to strike down secretly all who seemed restless or over-ambitious. The chief centre of Helot disaffection, at least in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., was on the far side of Mount Taygetus, in Messenia. There the yoke of serfdom chafed more than elsewhere, not least because those whose estates the Helots of Messenia tilled for one half the yield lived beyond the snow-capped ridge which shuts in that country on the east. The Messenians aspired to regain their lost independence. The Helots of the Eurotas Valley had no such ambition. They were, therefore, slower to revolt against injustice; but their aim, when an insurrection did come, could be nothing less than the extermination of their masters, or at least an exchange of position with them. Moreover, their very proximity to the five villages which constituted the unwalled city of Sparta, and the very weight of their numbers made the Spartans live in ever-present fear of a massacre. Constant preparedness for war was, accordingly, a simple mandate of self-preservation.

The Spartans thought it unwise that any of their serf-tilled estates should lie in or outside the ring of Perioec land. It would not do to have fuses, so to speak, of Helots running through the wall to the outside world, or to have masses of Helots beyond the wall, exposed directly to foreign manipulation. Hence the formation of the Perioec ring set definite limits to the territory of Sparta. It could be enlarged in but one way—the widening of the ring by the reduction of more and more outlying states to the status of Perioecs. And it was in this way that the Spartan dominions were in fact enlarged in the seventh century B.C.[39]

At the end of this century, however, Sparta came into conflict with cities which, unlike the mountain and maritime hamlets situated roundabout Laconia and Messenia, were too strong and high-spirited to submit to Spartan control. They had, therefore, to be treated leniently, since Sparta could not crush them altogether and would not leave them alone. And the reasons for conciliatory action were strengthened by the fact that Sparta had now to act abroad with a sharp eye to the possibility of a servile insurrection at home. There was never anything mechanical or idealistic in the foreign policy of the ephors. Hence, first with Tegea at about 560 B.C., and thereafter with all the states in the Peloponnesus, excepting Argos and AchÆa, Sparta concluded a treaty, the imperialistic aspect of which was that they agreed individually to accept Sparta's leadership in all defensive wars and in offensive wars to which they had assented.

The Peloponnesian league, thus formed, stood for the autonomy and freedom of its members; but Sparta, by championing aristocracies against tyrants and democracies, and using to its own advantage the jealousies of its allies as well as their fears of outside powers, dominated it for one hundred and eighty years, and made it during all that time the main steadying influence in Greek politics. Twice it was enlarged into an Hellenic league, first during the three years of the great Persian invasion (480-478 B.C.), and again for ten years after the dissolution of the Athenian empire (405-395 B.C.). On the earlier occasion, the ephors felt relieved of an intolerable burden when in 477 B.C. the Ægean cities, over four hundred and twenty in number, abandoned Spartan for Athenian leadership. And in the forty-six years that followed, not they but the Athenians were the aggressors. During that epoch of democratic fervor,[40] it was an uphill struggle for the champions of aristocracy to maintain their position; and the war of political principles was even carried into Sparta, when, in 464 B.C., the Helots of Messenia made a last desperate fight for their liberty. The Spartans profited, however, during the last third of the fifth century B.C., by the discredit into which democracy came among cultivated people through the mistakes and excesses of Athens; and at the end of the Peloponnesian War they were again able to make the Peloponnesian league an Hellenic league by incorporating into it Athens and the Ægean cities which they had just "liberated" from Athenian tyranny.

A successful war may strengthen a nation, but not when victory lays upon it a task that is beyond its powers to perform. Such would have been the case had Athens won at Syracuse. Such was the issue of Ægospotami. This we can readily see by examining briefly, first the situation in Sparta, and then the position of Sparta in Hellas, during the existence of her second Hellenic league.

The Spartans of military age now numbered only about two thousand. War had done its part in reducing them to this handful. Close intermarriage had done even more. In the case of large families, the subdivision of lots which then occurred impoverished sons so greatly that they could no longer stand the expense of the military clubs, upon membership in which, however, citizenship depended. So far did the evil implicit in this condition go that brothers refused to divide their inheritance, and possessed not only one house, but one wife in common. Men could neither buy land nor sell it, but they might acquire it by marriage or by gift; and since the rich, then as always, tended to marry among themselves, property, and with it citizenship, remained eventually in the possession of a very few. Much of the land, which was the only wealth, came into the hands of women. A plutocracy thus developed in Sparta as the number of the Spartans diminished; and in this way the domestic situation became still further ominous by the growth in the city of a considerable body of disfranchised and discontented "inferiors" and half-breeds.

The perils which attended this situation are revealed by the following incident as described by Xenophon in his Hellenica:[41]—

"Now Agesilaus (401-360 B.C.) had not been seated on the throne one year when, as he sacrificed one of the appointed sacrifices in behalf of the city, the soothsayer warned him, saying: 'The gods reveal a conspiracy of the most fearful character'; and when the king sacrificed a second time, he said: 'The aspect of the victims is now even yet more terrible'; but when he had sacrificed for the third time, the soothsayer exclaimed: 'O Agesilaus, the sign is given to me, even as though we were in the very midst of the enemy.' Thereupon they sacrificed to the deities who avert evil and work salvation, and so barely obtained good omens, and ceased sacrificing. Nor had five days elapsed after the sacrifices were ended, ere one came bringing information to the ephors of a conspiracy, and named Cinadon as the ringleader; a young man robust of body as of soul, but not one of the peers. Accordingly, the ephors questioned their informant: 'How say you the occurrence is to take place?' and he who gave the information answered: 'Cinadon took me to the limit of the market-place, and bade me count how many Spartans there were in the market-place; and I counted—king, and ephors, and elders, and others, maybe forty. But tell me, Cinadon, I said to him, why have you bidden me count them? and he answered me: Those men, I would have you know, are your sworn foes; and all those others, more than four thousand, congregated there are your natural allies. Then he took and showed me in the streets, here one and there two of our enemies, as we chanced to come across them, and all the rest our natural allies; and so again running through the list of Spartans to be found in the country districts, he still kept harping on that string: Look you, on each estate one foeman—the master—and all the rest allies!' The ephors asked: 'How many do you reckon are in the secret of the matter?' The informant answered: 'On that point also he gave me to understand that there were by no means many in their secret who were prime movers of the affair, but those few to be depended on; and to make up, said he, we ourselves are in their secret, all the rest of them—Helots, enfranchised, inferiors, Perioecs, one and all. Note their demeanor when Spartans chance to be the topic of their talk. None of them can conceal the delight it would give him if he might eat up every Spartan raw.' Then, as the inquiry went on, the question came: 'And where did they propose to find arms?' The answer followed: 'He explained that those of us, of course, who are enrolled in regiments have arms of our own already, and as for the mass—he led the way to the war foundry, and showed me scores and scores of knives, of swords, of spits, hatchets, and axes, and reaping hooks. Anything or everything, he told me, which men use to delve in the earth, cut timber, or quarry stone, would serve our purpose; nay, the instruments used for other arts would in nine cases out of ten furnish weapons enough and to spare, especially in dealing with unarmed antagonists.' Once more being asked what time the affair was to come off, he replied his orders were not to leave the city."

The ephors, wishing to remove Cinadon from Sparta without suspicion, sent him on a mission to Aulon. He was to arrest certain persons, and among them "a woman, the fashionable beauty of the place—supposed to be the arch-corruptress of all LacedÆmonians, young and old, who visited Aulon." His escort seized him instead and wrested from him the names of his accomplices. "His fate was to be taken out forthwith in irons, just as he was, and to be placed with his two hands and his neck in the collar, and so under scourge and goad to be driven, himself and his accomplices, round the city. Thus upon the heads of those," concludes the pious Xenophon, "was visited the penalty of their offense."

Beset with dangers such as this, the Spartans had to tread warily. They drafted Perioecs into their army so as to make it about fifty-six hundred strong. They picked out Helots, trained and emancipated them, and used them abroad as soldiers. They took mercenaries into their service and distributed them according to local needs under Spartan captains, acting always, however, on requests from local governments. They got large contingents of troops from their old allies, whom, however, they left free of tribute, financing their government with a thousand talents raised annually from the former allies of Athens. With the funds thus secured they hired rowers and marines for the warships which their allies furnished and thus patrolled the sea as well as the land. They got a moral mandate for empire by upholding everywhere aristocracy, real or sham, against democracy, and by assuming the rÔle of champion of Greece against the barbarians. This did not prevent them, however, from forming an alliance with Dionysius I,[42] who had just made himself tyrant of Syracuse, or from working in harmony with Persia as long as that was possible.

"The growth of LacedÆmon," said Timolaus of Corinth[43] in 394 B.C., "seems to me just like that of some mighty river—at its sources small and easily crossed, but as it further and further advances, other rivers discharge themselves into its channel, and its stream grows ever more formidable. So it is with the LacedÆmonians. Take them at the starting-point and they are but a single community, but as they advance and attach city after city they grow more numerous and more resistless. I observe that when people wish to take wasps' nests—if they try to capture the creatures on the wing, they are liable to be attacked by half the hive; whereas, if they apply fire to them ere they leave their homes, they will master them without scathe themselves. On this principle, I think it best to bring about the battle within the hive itself, or, short of that, as close to LacedÆmon as possible."

The advice was sound; but the wasps could not be caught at home. It was not till Athens had beaten the Spartans at sea, and Thebes had beaten them on land, that Epaminondas reached the hive. He then broke up the Peloponnesian league, emancipated the Helots of Messenia, and substituted, for the once considerable power which had saved the Peloponnesus from serious attack for two hundred years, a multitude of little city-states such as existed elsewhere in Greece—rather, such as came to exist elsewhere in European Greece, when, a few years later, with Epaminondas's death, the supremacy of Thebes ceased, Athens was abandoned by the states which had joined her against Sparta, and the empire of Dionysius I in the west dissolved, shortly after his death, into its constituent parts.

Theoretically, conditions should then have been ideal. In the case of the Greeks the deep-seated human instinct to compare the present disadvantageously with the past was not checked by a theory of evolution conceived as progress, such as misleads many sensible people nowadays to imagine that the farther back they go the more rudimentary political and social conditions become. The golden age of the Greeks lay in "the dark backward and abysm of time." In early days, before the rise of the Spartan and Athenian empires, every city, so it was believed, had "lived in peace, free and autonomous, and in secure possession of its own territory." For more than a century men had struggled to bring back those blessed times, and now at length their efforts, it might have seemed, had been crowned with success. Every city in Greece, great and small, had apparently regained its liberty and autonomy.

At the same time men had made a persistent effort to reËstablish in each city "the constitution of the fathers," and under the Spartan hegemony the favorable opportunity for success in this campaign had seemingly come. But it then appeared that, apart from the general understanding that citizenship was to be reserved to those who could afford to pay taxes and provide themselves with the arms and knowledge of arms necessary for fighting, no two persons agreed as to what the "ancestral constitution" was. It proved to be in reality the ideal of each reformer and each politician, and since the age was one in which most of the ordinary restraints were lacking as they seldom are in the history of civilized man, the transition from an unpopular ideal to a conspiracy was apt to be singularly abrupt. The outcome of the attempts to restore the urban particularism of mediÆval Greece and the constitutions of the over-praised olden time was unsatisfactory to everybody. Barren wars of city against city instead of large enterprises directed by imperial ambitions; an atmosphere murky with plots and counter-plots, where once there had blown the strong wind of steady civic progress; and, in addition, national disaster and humiliation despite manifest military superiority—these were the bitter fruits of political reaction in Greece during the Spartan supremacy.

It was in this unhappy age that the science of government was born, and it bears its birthmark to the present day. The midwife, to use his own homely figure, was Socrates, whom the Athenians, tarred on by Aristophanes, put to death "for corrupting the youth and introducing strange gods." He, of course, denied the accusations, and claimed that he deserved the honors of a public benefactor for taking men individually and showing to them how ill they understood the virtues on which all societies are based, to wit, justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage. No one, he thought, could make them better citizens except by promoting truth and dispelling ignorance about these things. His execution consecrated his mission. It was the sowing of dragon's teeth from which sprang up armed warriors, of whom the most doughty were Plato and Aristotle.

The vice of the Socratic school was a noble one—an enormous overestimate of the value of education. "Truth is the beginning of every good thing," says Plato,[44] "both to gods and men; and he who would be blessed and happy, should be from the first a partaker of the truth, that he may live a true man as long as possible, for then he can be trusted; but he is not to be trusted who loves voluntary falsehood and he who loves involuntary falsehood is a fool." There was, of course, only one truth; which, being discovered, should be taught; which, being taught, must be acted upon, since, if men really knew what was right, it was impossible, Plato thought—ignoring the frailty or obstinacy of the human will—that they should not do it. "Discover the truth." "Teach it." These are the two Socratic commandments.

I have no intention to make an exposition of the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,[45] but to do something much more modest: to explain wherein and wherefore they missed the truth in the matter of Greek imperialism, and to notice some of the historic forces which they disregarded. If I deal with the Laws rather than the Republic of Plato, it is because it is his more mature and less imaginative work.

It was upon his immediate present that Plato focused his attention; to the analysis of its political and moral strength and weakness that he turned his penetrating intelligence; for its betterment that he wrote and taught and suffered. The past he peopled with creations of his own exuberant fancy, of popular misconception, of defective knowledge. He can be easily convicted of gross historical errors. And what is more serious; he has no real regard for historical truth and no sense whatever for the real factors in historical developments. Without the slightest qualm of conscience, and without taking the least pains to ascertain the facts, Plato alters the divine and profane history of his people to make it serve his purpose. And he does this on principle: "The legislator," he says,[46] "has only to reflect and find out what belief will be of the greatest public advantage, and then use all his efforts to make the whole community utter one and the same word in their songs and tales and discourses all their life long." To disagreeable things in the sacred story he gives a short shrift. Since the gods are perfect, every report that tends to tarnish the lustre of their reputation must be false. The history of mankind is solved by a similar formula; since justice is the sine qua non of public and private prosperity and happiness, all reports which affirm the conjunction of injustice with well-being, or of righteousness with misfortune, need correction or suppression.[47] History, accordingly, becomes a happy hunting-ground for edifying stories. It at once ceases to yield lessons, which, being grounded in the realities of human experience, are less apropos, perhaps, than the political theorist may like, but are alone valuable.

Plato's absorption in the present led him to misread not only the past, but also the future. For the false standard with which he measured past policies and institutions is not less characteristic than the false judgment which he formed of the drift of contemporary events. The future belonged, not, as he dreamed, to the autonomous, archaizing city-state, but to the movement for their unification which he condemned. He tried to mend city constitutions when the world required the creation of larger territorial states. He watched with attention domestic politics when foreign politics were chiefly worth watching.

A glance at the ideal state portrayed by Plato in the Laws[48] shows in what sense he read his history. His citizens are to have "their food and clothing provided for them in moderation," the latter through "entrusting the practice of the arts to others," the former through getting from the land, which slaves till for a part of the produce, "a return sufficient for men living temperately." They are to have "common tables in which the men are placed apart, and near them are the common tables of their families, of their daughters and mothers, which, day by day, the officers, male and female, are to inspect." They are not, however, to live fattening like beasts; for "such a life is neither just nor honorable, nor can he who lives it fail of meeting his due; and the due reward of the idle fatted beast is that he should be torn to pieces by some other valiant beast whose fatness is worn down by brave deeds and toil."

Naturally, Plato does not wish his ideal citizens to meet such an ignominious end. He proceeds to prescribe a rÉgime for them in which, after a most carefully nurtured childhood, three years are spent on reading and writing, three more on learning to play the lyre, and others still on the study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and law, and on the practice of dancing, wrestling, running, hunting, and many kinds of military exercises. The citizens to be protected from fatty degeneration in this way are, it should be observed, the women as well as the men.

The children's stories are prescribed and are unalterable; so are the music and the dancing and the poetry. The law studied is that of the commonwealth, with which every citizen is to be inoculated. The moral and religious ideas are to be fixed, and death is the penalty set for heterodoxy. Everything is to be made and kept rigid, the number of the houses, of the farms, of the citizens, of the children, of traders, artisans, and foreigners, the maximum and minimum wealth of everybody. In other words, the community which Plato in his old age proposed as a model is not a thorough-going communism, like that of his more youthful and more famous Republic. It is simply a system of governmental control carried to its logical extreme—an emended and perfected edition of Sparta.

That a well-born Athenian, disgusted at the license which resulted from letting people live as they pleased, should have planned to put all citizens in an administrative strait-jacket, is not surprising. Many of us to-day object to a "wide-open town." But that Plato, whose practice in discussion was "to follow the argument whithersoever it might lead," should have idealized a state in which freedom of thought and freedom of speech were denied altogether, shows (even if we make all allowances for the idea, that, if things were perfect and there was but one perfection, all changes must be harmful) how unreal and involved in self-contradiction was the thinking of the best Greeks in this age of reaction.

The theory of individual liberty, as applied in Athens, had led, in the economic sphere, thought Plato, to the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and, in the political sphere, to the exploitation of the rich by the poor. Plato, therefore, discarded the theory of individual liberty altogether. He was dominated by a general view of life in which all the natural human instincts and cravings were harmful. The only hope for states was that they should educate their best citizens to be their governors. Plato, accordingly, nailed to the mast the doctrine of salvation by education, and despaired of all states in which the carefully trained few of high intellectual capacity did not make the laws and enforce them. Of all these ideas the Athenian democracy was the negation, and Plato hated it with the bitterness of a passionate nature.

That Plato hated the Periclean democracy as a political system is also intelligible from his hatred of imperialism upon which it was based; and there are those to-day, who, for the same reason and also because of a mistaken notion of its dependence upon slavery, find Athenian democracy justified, if at all, by its fruits; who contemplate its art and literature with the same mingled feelings with which they view the hectic beauty of the consumptive. Plato is not of their company. The fruits he finds even more deleterious than the stock which bore them. "In music," he writes,[49] meaning thereby poetry interpreted by the voice with musical accompaniment,—"in music it was that there first arose the universal conceit of omniscience and general lawlessness;—freedom came following afterwards, and men, fancying that they knew what they did not know, had no longer any fear, and the absence of fear begets shamelessness. For what is this shamelessness, which is so evil a thing, but the insolent refusal to regard the opinion of the better by reason of an over-daring sort of liberty?" Whereto the Spartan who is his interlocutor says: "Very true."

"Consequent upon this freedom," continues the speaker, "comes the other freedom, of disobedience to rulers; and then the attempt to escape the control and exhortation of father, mother, elders, and when near the end, the control of the laws also; and at the very end there is the contempt of oaths and pledges, and no regard at all for the gods,—herein they exhibit and imitate the old so-called Titanic nature, and come to the same point as the Titans when they rebelled against God, leading a life of endless evils."

The modern critic, even if he endorses the sharp indictment of Euripides, the poet of the most radical democracy,—that he destroyed the character of Attic tragedy by introducing into it elements from melodrama and the operatic concert, by perverting the grand style of its text and music by vulgar flippancies and incongruous measures, by substituting for artistic development of characters and plot disturbing discussions of the woman question and the latest sensations in philosophy and science, by turning the ancient gods and heroes into burlesque through having them argue and act like contemporary sycophants and sophists,—the modern critic, even Professor Shorey,[50] for example, in his spirited defense of the Sophoclean drama, would abandon Plato, I fancy, when he makes the drama the fundamental cause for the decline of Athenian greatness.

In his Laws, Plato is dealing with what, chastened by age and experience, he regarded as correctible things. The lust for private possessions, for land and home, wife and children, he once placed in this category, but he does so no longer; and in other respects he makes wide concessions to human frailties. With greed for wealth, however, he concluded no truce. It is Greeks, mark you, of whom Plato[51] says: "Love of wealth wholly absorbs men, and never for a moment allows them to think of anything but their own private possessions; on this the soul of every citizen hangs suspended, and can attend to nothing but his daily gain. Mankind are ready to learn any branch of knowledge, and to follow any pursuit which tends to this end, and they laugh at every other.... From an insatiate love of gold and silver, every man will stoop to any art or contrivance, seemly or unseemly, in the hope of becoming rich; and will make no objection to performing any action, holy or unholy and utterly base, if only like a beast he have the power of eating and drinking all kinds of things, and procuring for himself in every sort of way the gratifications of his lusts."

Such were the evil conditions of the present when one citizen despoiled his fellow and every city its neighbor. It had been different in the past. Before the introduction of luxurious tastes to stimulate inventions and of coined money to destroy a sense for the natural limits of wealth, men had "worked in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot,[52] but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They fed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they served up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle. And they and their children feasted, drinking of the wine which they had made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. They took care that their families did not exceed their means: having an eye to poverty or war." But it was not to an age of such rude simplicity that Plato would recall his contemporaries. He would, indeed, restore the virtues which existed among the early country folk before the rise of modern cities and the establishment of the capitalistic rÉgime; but, while hostile to transmarine commerce, retail trade, industries, banking, interest, and all other accompaniments of interchange between cities, which he regarded as generally undesirable and provocative of wars and conquests, he imagines his ideal people in possession of city culture and the articles of luxury and convenience secured through the capitalistic organization. His citizens are, indeed, farmers, but they are gentlemen farmers, who have their money invested in land and slaves and live on their dividends, free to devote their leisure to athletic, intellectual, and other worthy pursuits. They will be free from greed of wealth because they all possess a competency, which Plato defines as enough to live "temperately," Aristotle as enough to live "with liberality and temperance." Neither philosopher thinks of poverty except as the ordainer of body- and soul-destroying work, work which degrades those who have to perform it, and makes slavery their natural condition. Plato and Aristotle would make all tillers of the soil and workers at the trades and crafts slaves and aliens. They were to exist simply to provide the conditions of "good living" for their masters or superiors; whereupon "we must not conceal from ourselves," says Aristotle,[53] "that a country as large as the Babylonian or some other of boundless extent will be required if it is to support five thousand citizens in idleness." Even in America, where, to use the current formula, ten per cent of the people own ninety per cent of the wealth, the economic situation proposed as ideal by the most enlightened reformers of the fourth century B.C. has hardly been reached. Whether Plato failed to realize that he was condemning nine tenths of people to perpetual bondage and ignorance; or, realizing it, refused to think of anything but the perfection of the few, the conclusion is alike inevitable: he had failed miserably to trace to their historical causes both the cultural barrenness of Sparta and the astounding fertility of his own Athens.

Had Aristotle lived in the commonwealth of Plato's Laws, he must have suffered the same fate that Socrates suffered in Athens. For, though far from ungrateful to his teacher, he was not a docile pupil. By birth he was a Stagirite, by experience a citizen of the world. He did not, like Plato, form his youthful impressions in a milieu that was poisoned with bitterness at a demoralized democracy. The Athens to which he came as a lad of seventeen was still a democracy, and a very unhealthy one at that, and for it he had little liking; but his was a more dispassionate nature than was Plato's. He was not a great historian.[54] That the discovery in Egypt in 1890 of one of his many lost historical works has proven clearly; but he was a very learned man, and perhaps came to as close a comprehension of earlier Greek history as was possible for a political philosopher who had nothing to guide him but the unscientific methods then in vogue for investigating the past.

By its very nature science is objective. It is not inhuman, but it is deliberately impersonal. In this respect it contrasts sharply with the arts. The greatest artist may be the man who embodies in his verse or stone or colors moods and thoughts which must be in "widest commonalty spread," but which constitute in the aggregate his own self or soul. History is of course a science, but not one of the common type. Unlike the ordinary scientist, the scientific historian has to practice, not self-suppression, but self-expansion. He must become conscious, so far as that is possible, of the prejudices and special interests of his own age, and, divested of them, he must migrate into a strange land in order to bring back thence a report that is at once an unbiased account of what he has seen and a story that is comprehensible to his fellow-citizens, or, at least, to his fellow-historians. He dare not treat the past as one in spirit with the present, or as resolvable into precisely the same factors. He must be alive to the existence of many different pasts leading to the present in no pre-determinable succession, much less progression. The points must make a line, but the line may be of any conceivable curve. Aristotle was far from arriving at a full appreciation of the difficulties of historical inquiry; but, unlike Plato, he took infinite pains to acquire historical knowledge.

He did not idealize the constitutions of the olden times. Since all men then carried daggers, the presumption, he says, is that they needed them and used them. Since conditions where violence reigned must have continued indefinitely, if political change had been prohibited, he finds it good as well as inevitable that laws be modified from time to time. The permanency of those of Sparta is worthy of high praise; but he traces the corruption and decay of the Spartan state to failure to make needed reforms. In general he strikes a much more just balance between Spartan and Athenian achievement than does Plato.

The first test he applies to institutions, such as the family and the state, is their naturalness—their source in the nature of man as that is revealed in his history. He was well aware that a political science that was based upon perfected human nature was, indeed, suited only for "gods and sons of gods"; that the only principles of government which had real value were those which had approved themselves in practice. "All discoveries," he says,[55] "have been already made, although in some cases they have not been combined, and in others, when made, are not acted upon." "The Politics of Aristotle," says a recent writer, "is the one great book on the science of government because it is the only one which is wholly empirical."

That is too high praise. For the Politics of Aristotle differs from the Prince of Machiavelli in other respects, of course, but noticeably in that the Greek has moral ideals, the Italian none. With Aristotle, as with Plato, the state has an ethical purpose. He requires it to justify not only its acts but its existence. Iniquitous governments might exist,—Aristotle's world was full of them, in fact,—and his mind was too curious of all things political for him to leave them out of his observation: he has, indeed, considered minutely the ways and means for the preservation of all kinds of states, and has shown therein that he had as keen an eye for the realities as had Machiavelli himself. But he would never have permitted, much less advised, his legislator to use foul means to establish a just government or fair means to establish an unjust one.

On the establishment of governments, moreover, he spends very little thought. This, however, is with Machiavelli the main matter, as he himself says near the opening of the second part of his work: "The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that when they are well armed they have good laws. I shall leave the laws out of the discussion and shall speak of the arms." Had the Greek heard him he would have scoffed at both the argument and the conclusion. The argument is, of course, sophistical, and the conclusion saved only by the fact that Machiavelli had already considered the political weapons with which rulers should operate. The Politics is a handbook for legislators; the Prince a set of instructions for potentates. For the latter the ways and means of acquiring power was, in Machiavelli's judgment, the all-important thing; whereas the legislator's possession of power is taken for granted by Aristotle, and it is assumed throughout his entire treatment that, if the lawgiver knows the constitution, the laws, and the system of education which are best adapted to the economic, social, and political conditions of his state, he can at once introduce them.

In a measure, therefore, the Prince and the Politics supplement each other, though Aristotle would have been horrified at the idea. For in his thinking, in anything approximating to an ideal world, each city was free to order its internal affairs as it thought best, and, having this liberty, if it was shown what was best, it must, according to the Socratic psychology, immediately adopt it; whereas—to give the devil his due—Machiavelli was actuated, in formulating his precepts for Prince Lorenzo, by the vision of a united Italy, the realization of which by his pupil was to wash away the crimes committed in subjecting to his will the city-states of the peninsula. The conquest of Italy was, accordingly, the goal of the ideal Prince's endeavor; whereas, though Aristotle in one passage of the Politics[56] notes that "if the Greeks were united in a single polity they would be capable of universal empire," he regards such a union as highly undesirable. To him a state that was not a city was a rudimentary and very imperfect state. It ceased to be a state at all when it ceased to be free. Hence a city could have subjects, that is to say, slaves, but not dependencies. And since in his thinking it was natural inferiority alone that justified slavery, and this was found especially among the nations of Asia, and not at all in Greece, no Greek city could rightly enslave the inhabitants of any other Greek city: it could wage war and organize slave raids only against barbarians.

The birthmark which we have noted on Plato is an inheritance from unreasoning hatred of democracy. That which mars above all the political thinking of Aristotle comes from the aversion instinctively felt by his age for imperialism. That this, too, is a disfigurement, we may show in a few concluding remarks. "It is necessary," says Aristotle[57] in concluding his plea that a mixed constitution is best for the common run of states, "it is necessary to begin by assuming a principle of general application, viz., that the part of the state which desires the continuance of the polity ought to be stronger than that which does not"; and he proceeds to point out that "strength" consists neither in numbers, nor property, nor military or political ability alone, but in all of them combined, so that regard has to be taken of "freedom, wealth, culture, and nobility, as well as of mere numerical superiority." Nothing could be more cold and objective than the thinking of Aristotle on this important matter. Yet by an extraordinary oversight he lets "strength" exert a decisive influence within the city-states, while he ignores altogether the effect of varying population, wealth, and political and military ability in determining the relations between them.

The whole of the political thinking of Aristotle is dominated by the idea that the world of men is made up of an infinite procession of inferiors and superiors, the desire to forge ahead being one of the most fundamental instincts of human beings. If an omniscient God were to arrange the inhabitants of each city in a line according to their real "strength," he would place few of them abreast. No Greek betrays more naÏvely than Aristotle does the national consciousness of the Hellenes that they stood at the head of the honor roll of peoples. It was, therefore, imperative upon them to conquer the Asiatics; for he finds it to be a beneficent command of nature, issued primarily for the advantage of the weaker, that superiors should rule inferiors.

Among moral philosophers Aristotle is characterized by his refusal to let himself be led astray by a visionary ideal of human equality. Nevertheless, while recognizing that Greek cities, even more than individuals, differed in "strength," he refused to let the "strong" use their advantage. He sets apart the sphere of interurban, that is to say, international, relations as one in which the "universal principle," that superior rule inferior, shall not apply. In a visionary world, the "strong" man, on Aristotle's theory, is a "gentle" man; but in the real world, he is a ruler. Had Aristotle not been blinded by the prejudices of his age against imperialism, he must have seen the necessity that in the real world the "strong" state would also be the ruler. It is one of the enigmas of history that Aristotle was the contemporary and subject of Philip II of Macedon, one of its ironies that he was the tutor of Alexander the Great.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. SchÖmann-Lipsius. Griechische AltertÜmer,^4 I (1892), pp. 197 ff.

2. Bury, J.B. A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great (1900).

3. Meyer, Eduard. Geschichte des Altertums, V (1902).

4. Niese, B. Neue BeitrÄge zur Geschichte und Landeskunde LakedÄmons: Die lakedÄmonischen PeriÖken. In Nachrichten der GÖtt. Gesell. d. Wissenschaften (1906), pp. 101 ff.

5. Arnim, Hans von. Die politischen Theorien des Altertums (1910).

6. Gomperz, Th. Greek Thinkers, III (1905), IV (1912).