THERE is no department of Greek life where we feel its modernness more intensely than when we come to consider political and social philosophy. The Greeks, and the Romans that learned from them, write and talk like thoroughly modern men; the discussions of Aristotle and the treatises of Cicero are quite fit to instruct us in the present day on the possibilities of organising human society. The rights of women, for example, are a topic with which they were perfectly familiar. Pass into what are justly called the Dark Ages or early Middle Ages, and you feel that the world has gone centuries back and not forward. The reign of superstition, the tyranny of the priest, the miseries of the churl, the childishness of art, the utter stagnation of literature, the substitution of fortresses for free cities, violence for law, savage rudeness for polished urbanity—these are the astounding conditions of an Europe most of which once had enjoyed real civilisation.

Among other causes of this strange retrogression in history, not the least is the disappearance of Greek life and culture into the East, where Constantinople still adhered to great Hellenic traditions at least in law, in language, and in art. All that Roman life and thought had borrowed from Greece was unable to make Latin culture fruitful and permanent, because it was borrowed from Greece and not really assimilated; so it came to pass that, compared with the brightness and buoyancy of Greek culture, the reign of the Latin through civilised Europe was an epoch of standstill, of formalism, of intellectual barrenness, of ossification. So long as the Romans were mere docile pupils of the Greeks, they made great progress in the arts of life; as soon as they felt themselves the acknowledged masters of the world and came to look down upon their teachers, their inborn coarseness and want of genius began to reassert itself, and but for the influence of an Oriental creed, domesticated among them by the Greeks, they would have relapsed, along with their barbarian invaders, into intellectual insignificance.

When we inquire into the causes that made politics so developed a feature among the Greeks, we shall in the first place find, even in Homer’s societies, the habit of open discussion a leading fact in everyday life. There is a sort of instinct to have things talked over and reasoned out, so much so that the very king, who has come to a decision with his council, and has ample authority to fulfil it, will not do so without calling together an assembly of the soldiers in the camp or the free citizens in the market-place, and seeking to obtain their approval by acclamation. This assembly, called together to approve, without any power of voting or of reversing the prince’s decision, is regarded by all historians as the embryo of the long-subsequent sovran assemblies of citizens in every Greek democracy. There seem even to have been assertions of absolute power in the mouth of the kings in some of the old texts of the Iliad, which were expunged by editors, certainly not those of Alexandria, to whom such an assertion could contain no offence, but by earlier editors who prepared the poems for the free cities of Greece.[38]

The next stimulant to the development of politics was the coexistence of many small city-states, with only a few miles square of territory, each a little sovranty where no king could maintain the mystery of seclusion or the obstacle of a solemn etiquette, which Xenophon perceived to be essential conditions of the great absolute monarchy of the Persians. So it came that the old sovranties, which Aristotle tells us had been hereditary and limited[39] as it were a model to later nations in constitutional sovranty, passed away, often without revolution, into aristocracies, which were the leading type throughout the civilised world both in classical and in mediÆval times, so long as the mass of the people were too ignorant to take upon them the management of public affairs. Aristotle tells us that the masses easily remain quiet and contented, provided they are kept in employment and in comfort by the good management of the few. Such an example you are all familiar with in the Venetian Republic, which, like Carthage of old, maintained for a long period, without serious internal disturbance, a considerable empire with a population busy and rich by their trade.

Where the violence or the selfishness of the few in power who were descendants of the old families of nobles which had once been the council of the kings, or who had themselves been local chiefs—where, I say, the neglect or violence of these men produced intolerable hardships, we have sanguinary revolutions, at first usually under the leadership of an ambitious renegade or soldier of noble origin, who set the masses against the classes. Later, the masses were strong enough to make their revolutions by constitutional or semi-constitutional means, and so gained a political power which they could seldom maintain without putting to death or exiling the leaders of the nobles. A reader of Thucydides or Xenophon will recall the manner in which the exiles worked counter-revolutions, and thus stained the face of Greece with violence and bloodshed. These scenes of violence play so large a part in our Greek histories that you will wonder how any such people could be a model to others in methods of politics, and it is for that reason that I think it necessary to notice the matter. When we look below the surface we shall find that there were elements of order never eradicated, and that the crimes of the leaders of society did not infect the common-sense, or destroy the safety, of the mass of the people, until the general decadence in the days of Polybius and the Roman interference.

What is this evidence? It is not to be found without some reflection, for, as I have said, it is below the surface. There is no commoner phrase in the mouth of Greek revolutionists, or in the mouth of those that dreaded them, than “abolition of debts, and redivision of the land.”[40] Aristotle mentions these as the watchword of the mob-leaders. But when I was asked, years ago, by the late Henry Sidgwick of Cambridge, to find him actual instances of such a revolution in authentic Greek history, I well remember my own surprise, and his also, when I said there were none to be found. Some such things may possibly have happened in the great Sicilian troubles, when a tyrant drove out the old free population, and settled a town with the surrounding churls and his mercenary troops; but on the general face of Greek history, and in the records of the well known states, you will not find an instance.[41] The most radical measure to which I can point is the reduction of debts twenty-seven per cent. by Solon, who was a very conservative statesman, and one most anxious to guard the mercantile good character of his city. As there was no loss of public credit to Athens in his time, it is clear that the debts lightened by this exceptional proceeding must have been only the debts of a class, probably those due from poor farmers or labourers to their oppressive landlords. If so, it was not more trenchant than the present land legislation of the English Government in Ireland and Scotland, where the annual rents of tenants have, in violation of old and formal private contracts, been cut down by the state, often as much as twenty-seven per cent.

The Greeks were great traders by sea and land and no trade can be carried on without assured public credit. Unless investments are fairly safe, no mercantile society can thrive. The ordinary rate of interest in Greece, twelve per cent. per annum, appears at first hearing to be evidence of insecurity. It is nothing of the kind. It was not higher than the average interest[42] at Rome when that dominant people held the trade of the world, and made themselves as safe as could be. The difference between that and our three per cent. arises from the general scarcity at the time of great fortunes in money, owing to the difficulty of transit and the imperfect knowledge of a token currency. Banks and bills of exchange they commonly used, but to lend money to citizens of a neighbouring state, living under different laws and with strange courts of law, was never easy, and so the areas of lending and borrowing were not as they are now, a whole continent or even the whole globe. You might imagine such a state of things here in your country if each State was confined to seek investments within its own limits, in which case you might soon find a rate of interest for imported capital not lower than that among the Greeks.

There was another strong checking power which must always have moderated the revolutionary transports of the Greeks. It was the existence in all the greater cities of a large population of slaves. We know from the history both of Argos and of Sparta that this was a standing danger to the free population, and we may be sure that in many cases free men composed their differences, or at least moderated their victory over their opponents, rather than risk having both subdued by a foreign element.

You will tell me perhaps that the fact that all the Greek world held slaves is another antiquated standpoint, which prevents them from being fit teachers for modern nations. But to me that question does not appear so simple, and perhaps with the experiences of the last forty years, even the American public that has time for reflection may have some doubts on the matter. So great a thinker as Aristotle felt quite clear about it; he believed that there were inferior races fit only to be controlled, not to control, and he held that it was for their good when these were coerced by the superior intelligence and education of Greeks. He does not express himself, so far as I know, about the many slaves who were Greek prisoners of war, but from his general views it is certain that he would not approve of this form of slavery. Let me add in this connection that he repeatedly says analogous things of those occupied with low handicrafts, such as tinkers or cobblers, which require all their time and leave them no leisure to educate themselves or to learn higher things. He thinks these workers wholly unfit to be in the governing class of any state, and maintains that wherever they gained power it was in an extreme democracy which soon displayed the vices of that sort of government.

You must remember that in the small Greek polity, which consisted of a city and a territory of twenty or thirty miles square, the expedient of choosing representatives locally and sending them to the central assembly was never felt to be necessary. The citizen must go himself to the assembly and spend his day there; he was liable to be chosen (often by lot, that considers no convenience) for duties either administrative or judicial. It was evident that those bound to earn their daily bread must stand aside and permit the more leisured classes to do this work. This leisured class, moreover, was greatly enlarged by the existence of slaves, for even the poor Athenian had his manual labour done for him and so had the necessary time for attending public duties. The Greeks never dreamt of giving their judges or politicians large salaries, as we do, holding that the state had a right to claim the whole life and energy of its citizens. Against one another these citizens were amply protected by the laws; there was no protection against the demands of state, even when these involved the sacrifice of life itself.

Such being the general frame of mind among thoughtful Greeks and the great object of the most perfect state being to secure the happiness, and therefore of course the liberty, of the mass of its citizens, we need not wonder that they paid early and constant attention to the framing of their laws, so that these offered, first to the Romans (who used the Attic Code when drawing up the Laws of the XII Tables) and then to other nations, models of prudent legislation. All their theorists further insisted, with no uncertain voice, that the success of any code of laws must depend upon the enlightenment of the public that uses them. I proceed therefore to speak briefly on three aspects of Greek legislation, the criminal, the civil, and what I may call the international, in order to make clear in how many ways the Greeks were our masters, so that we may still study their methods of government with profit. The criminal law naturally comes first, for the most urgent essential of civilised life is public safety, enabling the citizen to go about when and where he likes without fear of personal molestation, or even of being the witness of violence. The Greeks were so well aware of this that they did not think any polity civilised till men had wholly abandoned the habit of carrying weapons, and if Aristotle or Thucydides had been told that in America a number of respectable citizens of free states still go armed, they would have said, “That was once the habit in Greece also, but now we are civilised, and regard such a practice as essentially barbarous.” If there had been any likelihood of its being revived they would certainly have made it penal, and such seems the proper course in any country where the losing of a man’s temper may cause the losing of his life, as well as that of others. In modern Europe we have happily reached that stage, and even in Ireland, where there are often people threatened for agrarian disputes, and protected by the police, the rest of the population walks about securely night and day, in crowded cities and in lonely wilds, without ever thinking of carrying a weapon.

The Attic law, which represents the highest, and also the purest Greek feeling, was extremely jealous not only of the safety, but of the dignity of the citizen, and any assault in the streets, even if it caused no dangerous hurt, was severely punished by the law. As in modern societies, even to touch a man rudely, or against his will, was punished as an assault, and if the man assaulted happened to be performing any official duty for the state, the offence might be considered in the light of lÈse-majestÉ, or treason against the dignity of the state.

The penalty of death was indeed inflicted, especially in the older codes, with a frequency reminding us of the European codes of a hundred years ago. But as regards citizens there were two mitigations which made even these severe laws milder and more civilised than most of ours. In the first place, there was generally facility given to the man who was condemned to escape over the frontier, and except in cases of great crimes against the state, extradition was not thought of. Exile was of course a severe penalty, for it meant living abroad as a foreigner, not protected by the safeguards that encompassed the citizens around him. Secondly, the manner in which the death sentence was carried out was infinitely more humane and polite than our abominable executions. The case of Socrates is no doubt familiar to you all. He was left free of chains to talk with his friends and the cup of poison was placed beside him, to be taken before the setting of the sun. Even the jailor is represented as a humane and civil man, who carried out his function with every consideration. I will not deny that these very advanced features in Greek law were in contrast to some still barbarous survivals; I mean the torturing of slaves and the severity of making a death sentence follow on the majority of one in a very large jury. But survivals of barbarism were but yesterday frequent enough with ourselves.

Let us now turn to the characteristics of the civil law, by which I mean the laws controlling the holding of property, the making of contracts, and bequests by testament. I cannot see in the many contracts we have from Greece, or from Egyptian Greece, when settled by Greece immigrants, that the general spirit or the accuracy of these documents differs from those of our day, except that the penalties for breach of contract seem much severer than ours. In the case of a money obligation, the debtor who did not repay within a fixed date was commonly fined fifty per cent. for his delay. There may have been many cases of loans in kind, e.g., of seed corn, where such a penalty was not unreasonable, for there are things which are very valuable at a certain season, and which after that must lie useless for many months. But on the whole I think the Greek idea of keeping a contract was stricter than ours, and the law more severe. Such was also the case with the Roman law, which was borrowed from the Greek.

In so cursory a review of a large subject, I can only select one or two points as illustrations, and speak of them as specimens of the general enlightenment of the age. I therefore turn to a particular class about which we now know a great deal, more particularly owing to a large discovery of documents which I was fortunate enough to make in 1890. It is the Greek will or testament. Lawsuits concerning such documents also form the majority of the speeches of IsÆus, the collection of which has been edited with great skill and learning by Mr. William Wyse of Trinity College, Cambridge. It used to be thought that all this matter of testament was due to the Romans. It seems now tolerably certain that in this as in most of the other refinements of life the Romans only transmitted to us what the Greeks had taught them.

In most early states it is only gradually, and not without some jealousy, that the individual is permitted to bequeath his property as he pleases. At first, he is regarded as the member of a clan, to which his property reverts under certain fixed conditions; later on, the state controls the division of it among the immediate family of the testator, and will not permit any passing of it away to strangers, still less to those who are not citizens. Whether the Greek states ever left absolute liberty to their citizens in this matter may be doubted, the interest of the state being much more jealously guarded among these small polities than among the large modern States, when an occasional misuse of such a power does no grave public mischief, and only excites moderate censure. But the whole form of the wills we have in Egyptian papyri, and of which we have examples in stone inscriptions, such as the record of the will of one Epicteta who bequeathed her estate to public and religious objects, is perfectly modern. Here I quote you the usual formula. First comes the date according to the years of kings or eponymous magistrates. Then “This is the will of Peisias the Lycian, son of X., of sound mind and deliberate intention. May it be my lot to live on in health and manage mine own property, but should anything human happen to me, I bequeath to my children so much, to my wife such and such things (often specifying the articles), I set free certain slaves, I set apart money for religious purposes. And I appoint as executors such and such people,” in the case of soldiers in Egypt generally the King and Queen and their children; and then there follow the names of several, often seven or eight, witnesses.[43] These habits, which imply a settled society, with ordinary habits and traditions, had spread from Greece to Greek Egypt three centuries before Christ. There is no doubt that they spread similarly not only to the west, but throughout Asia Minor and Syria so far as they were not in these regions already in vogue. I will only add that if you desire to read how clearly and carefully a long case involving the claim of a Greek in Egypt against a native corporation was examined and decided, you will find it in the Papyrus I of Turin[44] which was published years ago by AmÉdÉe Peyron, and which ought to be republished and made easier of access. We have the whole final decision of the court extending over many pages of Greek. The record must have been found intact in the earthen jar in which it was preserved. It rehearses the fortunes of the case from its outset, forty years before the decision. It gives the earlier decisions and a summary of the new evidence adduced; and it sums up the whole and gives judgment for the native corporation against the Greek with a clearness which could not be exceeded by the Supreme Court in America. Every word of it speaks strict law and plain common-sense. It was a case of conflicting evidence, and this is weighed with absolute fairness. There is not a word of superstition, of appeals to the providence of the gods or to any authority beyond that of educated human reason. As such, it is a document absolutely modern in the highest sense. This then was the tone of the civil law transmitted by Greece to succeeding centuries.

I now approach a larger subject, and one of even more permanent interest—the lessons of Greek history regarding the international relations of adjoining civilised states, or the relations of one stronger state to others of lesser force or size. The condition of Greece all through its early history affords an unique field for the study of international law; for these numerous small cities, as we regard them, were perfectly distinct polities or states, each living under its own laws and traditions, and as separate one from the other in idea as are the capitals of any two modern kingdoms. In practice the separation was even greater, for intermarriage between their citizens, or the acquiring of property by citizens of another polity, were against the spirit of the age, and were generally forbidden by law. The number, therefore, of treaties, of alliances, of quarrels between these city states was not only enormous, but offered every variety, so much so that if you look at any good edition of the earliest European work on this sort of law, the famous treatise of Hugo Grotius, De Jure Pacis et Belli, you will find that the great body of his illustrations is taken from Greek history, and acknowledged as Greek in the margin of the text. Let us approach first the question of war.

Even from Homer’s time, there was a growing feeling which softened the hardships of war between Hellenic peoples. Poisoned weapons were not tolerated, and if the prisoners became the slaves of the victors, ransom was very general, and according to Herodotus there was even an acknowledged tariff—two minÆ—accepted throughout Peloponnesus for the release of such a prisoner. I will not pretend that the wars even of the Golden Age were not much fiercer and more cruel than the rose-water campaigns we now carry on, when the wives and children of the enemy are supported in comfort, and he is accordingly encouraged to prolong a conflict which only affects his personal convenience. For war is a shocking thing, and to sweeten it by such amenities is only to enhance its cost of life and of treasure to the victor. But if you were to compare Greek wars with those of the earlier centuries of modern Europe, say the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, you would find the balance of humanity most decidedly on the side of the Greeks. The non-combatants in a stormed Greek city, though by the laws of war they became slaves, were in a far better plight than the unfortunate people of a German town captured by the Pandurs and Croats of Tilly or Wallenstein. I gladly turn from this grievous subject. “War,” says Thucydides, “is a stern taskmaker, and makes men’s hearts as hard as their circumstances.”

Let us enter on a more grateful and more instructive task, the international relations of Greek states in peace and particularly their political combinations or alliances for protection against external dangers. It was obvious that a number of distinct small city-states must be at the mercy of a strong invading force which could conquer them one by one, and that therefore combinations and alliances among them were absolutely necessary. Such combinations could also be made for offensive purposes, as was the case with the Homeric conception of the Siege of Troy, and so in after times many Greek theorists actually recommended this policy as an engine of conquest, the very conquest carried out by Alexander the Great. But for a long time, alliances were only made for the moment, and to ward off an imminent danger, and they soon fell to pieces again, owing usually to the reverting of both parties into a selfish and jealous policy of isolation. From the seventh century B.C., onward, the waxing of the power of Sparta made a sort of semi-compulsory league among the smaller cities of the Peloponnesus, and later on, after the crisis of the Persian war was over, the Asiatic Greeks put themselves under the leadership of Athens. Let me call it by its technical name, hegemony. This was an alliance under a president state, which was to guide the policy of the league in war, but was not supposed to interfere with the several polities in peace. You all know how the leading power gradually encroached upon the liberties of the allies, who really became subjects paying tribute; and when they attempted reassertion of their former independence, it was treated by Athens as revolt, and crushed with military and naval force. The conduct of Sparta when she succeeded to the hegemony of Greece was in no way different; perhaps it was harsher, and so we have a vast amount of protest against the tyranny of these leading states, and their “enslaving” of the rest of Greece. They on their side pointed to the necessity of union to prevent foreign domination; they pointed to the labours and sacrifices the citizens of the leading state had undergone, to the security of the seas from pirates, to the increase of trade, and of the reputation of Greek civilisation, all produced by their efforts; but generally this came in at the end of the argument: that having acquired their power they intended to keep it.

Here then was a great constitutional question and one still under dispute in the last century. Supposing that several independent states combine to promote common objects, and make a solemn league or union; is it lawful for any one of the contracting parties to withdraw from the union if it considers its liberties infringed? I need not to take into account the further complication, when some of the states involved were created subsequently by and for the union, in fact were daughters and not mothers of the union. You know how in this country that constitutional problem was only solved by a great war, and this was but the echo of the same kind of conflict endemic in Greece. Yet the tone and temper of the world had changed in the long interval. The creation and success of many great states led men to appreciate the advantages thus obtained, and though there was, and still is, a strong sentiment in favour of small nationalities coerced by the greater—you remember the sentiment of all the European press during the recent Boer war—yet on the whole the imperial idea is not unpopular. In Greece it was the reverse. From the outset to the end, the right of the smaller members of an union to secede was always maintained in theory and produced fatal results in practice.

The very same problem assumed a slightly different form when twelve insignificant AchÆan cities combined into the AchÆan League which Polybius has made so famous. The council and governing officers were elected in an assembly convened in one of the cities, whither all the members of the League were entitled to go, but which of course only men of leisure could afford to attend. Moreover each city had one collective vote, so that numbers were of no direct consequence. The meetings were confined to three days, and to business prepared for them by the executive. The whole scheme (which was an early and excellent essay in Federation, much studied by the founders of the American Union) shipwrecked on the question whether single states had a right to enter into separate agreements with powers foreign to the League. Perfect internal independence was of course essential to Greek ideas, but that the power of separate alliances with foreign powers should be allowed, seems to us absurd. Nevertheless the sentiment of the Greeks here as elsewhere was in favour of this absolute independence, and so the League was pulled to pieces by the interference of jealous or ambitious neighbours.

Thus you have a conglomerate of civilised communities, all speaking the same language and with similar ideals of culture, not separated by hostile creeds, and with the power, when united, of exercising a dominant influence upon the world around them; and yet their power and their development are paralysed by mutual jealousies and constant quarrels, resulting in frequent and desolating wars. We have no cases in Europe at all parallel except the condition of Italy in the Renaissance and of Germany in the middle of the last century. When I was a boy and we travelled in a carriage through that country (railways had not yet been introduced) we used in the course of a day to pass through a whole principality and across a border with custom houses, and a new flag, and often a new coinage. There were then, I believe, sixty-six reigning personages—grand dukes, electors, etc.—in Germany. You know how all were either absorbed or reduced to one empire, or allowed to live on as vassal states, to use rather a hard word, within the compass of a few years. That was what happened ultimately in Greece, where the Macedonian power played a part analogous to that of Prussia, and made itself by a successful war against a foreign power not only accepted but popular. The important point in which Greece gives modern nations a further lesson is this; Revolutionary or extemporised monarchies in such a case will not succeed. The Greeks, especially in Asia Minor and in Sicily, where there was danger from foreign powers, had come to the conclusion that a monarch was necessary to combine them into a strong military and financial power, and they were therefore again willing to submit themselves to tyrants or despots, as they had been of old, when they wanted relief from the internecine disputes between the classes and the masses. There were some brilliant essays in this direction made, notably by Dionysius of Syracuse, and by Mausollus of Halicarnassus. But they failed to found a dynasty, even as the Bonapartes failed, in spite of their greatness and the benefits they had conferred.

Thus not only the achievements, but the failures of the Greeks may convey to us valuable lessons, because they constituted a thoroughly “modern” society and suffered from the weaknesses and vices of such societies.

As this last statement may seem to some of you a paradox, I proceed in conclusion to illustrate it, by some observations on the condition of Greek society as described to us by Aristotle and by Polybius. The former, in describing his ideal (for he had not yet renounced it) of a small, well-ordered state, governed in the interest of the majority of the citizens by good laws and humane rulers, makes it his sine qua non that the middle class shall outweigh in public importance both the wealthy and the indigent. Now that was exactly the condition which in the days of Polybius was becoming rarer and rarer, nay, practically unknown. This was the very class disappearing rapidly from every state in Greece. And why? The economic conditions were changing, and owing to the great influx of gold from the East and other causes, living was becoming dearer every day. Luxuries were also coming to be regarded as necessities, and so for the poor who had the bribe of large pay and great license offered them in the mercenary service of Hellenistic kings, emigration became the rule, and the want of labour turned farming from the agricultural to the pastoral type. Hence the middle classes, which had no capital to work large farms, became poorer and the rich richer and more selfish.

And what was the remedy adopted by the middle classes to maintain themselves in comfort? An expedient not unknown in this country and for not very dissimilar reasons. It was the limitation of families, the avoidance of the duty and cost of bringing up children, so that Polybius speaks of it as the signal feature of the Greece of his day—the strange barrenness that had come upon the once prolific inhabitants of the land. Such a misfortune can be avoided only when great immigration exists, and even then it results in replacing the old population, the cream of the country, by the scum gathered from abroad. There were no inducements for immigration into Greece and so the country which was once teeming with population sunk into somnolence and decay.

Could I offer you a clearer proof of the modern character of this civilisation, which had not only a youth and an age of gold, but then a silver autumn or a Martinmas summer, when Plutarch lived in his little deserted town, surrounded by a complete and terrible decadence? And it may not be out of place to remind you that even with many differences of age, of place, and of circumstances, the same moral causes that produce decay in one civilisation are likely to produce it in another.

The societies that fell into these vices were not ignorant or uneducated. The average Greek public was probably better trained in the knowledge of great ideas and the enjoyment of great literature than any public nowadays. Grote said very deliberately that the ordinary Attic citizen who attended the assemblies where Pericles and Theramenes and Demosthenes spoke, and where many others of like culture joined in the debate—that such a man was better educated, in the political sense, than the average member of the House of Commons in his day; and Grote had attended to the business of that House for ten years of his life. It was then, moreover, an assembly of English gentlemen, of the middle and upper classes, with a strong aristocratic flavour. What language would he have used had he compared his Periclean citizen to the House of Commons of the twentieth century? But in any case, we may say one thing with certainty, and it is one of the greatest lessons which the Greeks have to tell us: Intellectual culture by itself is no certain antidote to decadence in any society—nay, not even in that of Boston, Massachusetts.

The moral conditions of refined Attic life in these dying days are best known from the remains, or from the Latin translations of the society plays of the famous Menander. The life which Menander portrayed has been discussed and estimated in a chapter of my Greek Life and Thought, and you will there see at length how trivial, how selfish, how immoral, how ignoble that life was. If such was indeed the true character of Attic society in Menander’s days, we may well congratulate the world that the Macedonian conquerer arose to show the world that there were greater ideals than to while away one’s time in the rotten refinements of decadent Athens.

When I wrote that chapter, we were still dependent for our estimate of Menander and his society in the Latin translations, or adaptations, by Plautus and Terence, and there were those that thought the Roman adapters had chosen the trivial side of a society which might be not only refined but serious and thoughtful. The recent discovery of large fragments of four plays on a papyrus roll in Egypt has dissipated any such hopes. The same triviality, the same stupid repetition of vulgar and immoral plots and topics meet us throughout these scenes. If there be any moral lesson conveyed by the picture we here have of Attic society, it is this: that the slave and the prostitute were not only more intelligent, but less immoral than their masters. In all these so-called pictures of life, not a single person of the least distinction appears—not a single philosopher, or politician, or poet, or man of letters, or benefactor—though we know that the walls of temples and cities were being covered with panegyrics of leading citizens and their civic and private virtues. Not a single problem of religious or political importance is ever discussed. There is not even, in the new fragments, any wealth of that vulgar proverbial wisdom, or sententiousness posing as wisdom, which was gathered from the plays of Menander by diligent collectors, and which, surviving in thousands of lines, has given him a false importance in the histories of Greek literature. But here, as elsewhere, the lapse of ages had separated the wheat from the chaff; the later scholiasts and commentators gathered from Menander the stray gems, as one might pick from the array of a gay but stupid lady the real diamonds with which she had adorned her worthless person.

In relation to Greek politics, which is our subject to-day, this is no idle digression. For it shows us clearly that the higher society of Athens had abandoned this great human interest and so had narrowed and impoverished their spiritual life. It is usual to repeat in our histories that the growth of the Macedonian power, of the Hellenistic kings, of the Roman Republic, killed all possibility of any serious Greek politics, and that in consequence serious men were driven into anti-social philosophy at home, active men into mercenary service abroad. In Menander’s day and long after it, there was still plenty of work for honest and capable men in saving the liberties and the dignities of their native cities. A century later, Polybius shows how the total ruin of Greece and the disastrous conquest by Mummius were mainly produced by the follies and violences of stupid and corrupt demagogues. But these demagogues were invested with official power by the votes of those that still practised politics, when the better classes had retired in disgust. If this disgust dated from Menander’s time, then we can only reflect that those who have abdicated their influence in the day of their country’s prosperity, are not likely to regain it when a crisis comes, and when the masses have found for themselves other leaders.

I have seen a very similar catastrophe in the Ireland of my own time. I have seen the old landed gentry, who had long lived a gay, idle, hospitable life, when their privileges and their properties were attacked by a dangerous agitation, show such want of public spirit, such miserable mistrust in one another, such reckless folly in not spending time, money, and energy in resisting their plunderers, that they lost the sympathy of all their friends, and while they called on English influence to protect them, and railed against all concession and compromise, they have seen their land filched from them by successive legislative inroads upon their rights, and their fortunes ruined even by those on whom they relied to defend them. Many a time did I warn those about me of these inevitable consequences, but there I have seen another instance, and one which came home to me with poignant regret, of the miseries induced by mere incompetence. Quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.