J. M. Robertson

GREEK ECONOMIC EVOLUTION

§ 1

In republican Greece, as in republican Rome, we have already seen the tendency to the accumulation of wealth in few hands, as proved by the strifes between rich and poor in most of the States. A world in which aristocrats were finally wont to take an oath to hate and injure the demos[233] was on no very hopeful economic footing, whatever its glory in literature and art. Nor did the most comprehensive mind of all the ancient world see in slavery anything but an institution to be defended against ethical attack as a naturally right arrangement.[234] In view of all this, we may reasonably hold that even if there had been no Macedonian dominance and no Roman conquest, Greek civilisation would not have gone on progressing indefinitely after the period which we now mark as its zenith—that the evil lot of the lower strata must in time have infected the upper. What we have here briefly to consider, however, is the actual economic course of affairs.

For the purposes of such a generalisation, we may rank the Greek communities under two classes: (1) those whose incomes, down through the historic period, continued to come from land-owning, whether with slave or free labour, as Sparta; and (2) those which latterly flourished chiefly by commerce, whether with or without military domination, as Athens and Corinth. In both species alike, in all ages, though in different degrees as regards both time and place, there were steep divisions of lot between rich and poor, even among the free. Nowhere, not even in early "Lycurgean" Sparta, was there any system aiming at the methodical prevention of large estates, or the prevention of poverty, though the primitive basis was one of military communism, and though certain sumptuary laws and a common discipline were long maintained.

Grote's examination (pt. ii, ch. vi; ed. cited, ii, 308-30) of Thirlwall's hypothesis (ch. viii; 1st ed. i, 301, 326) as to an equal division of lands by Lycurgus, seems to prove that, as regards rich and poor, the legendary legislator "took no pains either to restrain the enrichment of the former or to prevent the impoverishment of the latter"—this even as regards born Spartans. As to the early military communism of Sparta and Crete, see Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, § 210; and as to the economic process see Fustel de Coulanges, Nouvelles recherches sur quelques problÈmes d'histoire, 1891, pp. 99-118.

Athens, on the other hand, was so situated as to become a place of industry and commerce; and from about the time of her great land-crisis, solved by Solon, her industrial and commercial interests determined her economic development. It follows from the success of Peisistratos that the mass of the people, blind to the importance of the political rights conferred upon them, were conscious of no such betterment from Solon's "shaking-off-of-burdens" as could make them averse to the rule of a "tyrant" who even laid upon them a new tax. The solution may perhaps lie in points of fiscal policy to which we have now no clear clue. Of Solon it is recorded[235] that he made a law against the export of any food produce of Attica save oil—the yield of the olive. This implied that of that product only was there in his opinion a redundancy; and we have it from the same source that he "saw that the soil was so poor that it could only suffice for the farmers," and so "gave great honour to trade," and "made a law that a son was not obliged to support his father if his father had not taught him a trade."[236] Himself a travelled merchant, he further recognised that "merchants are unwilling to despatch cargoes to a country which has nothing to export"; and we are led to infer that he encouraged on the one hand the export of manufactures, plus oil, and on the other the importation of corn and other food. In point of fact, grain was already being imported in increasing quantity from the recently colonised lands of Sicily and the Crimea;[237] and if the imports were free or lightly taxed the inland cultivators would have a local grievance in the depression of the prices of their produce.

The town and coast-dwellers, on the other hand, found their account in the carriage and development of manufactures—vases, weapons, objects of art—which, with the oil, and latterly the wine export, bought them their food from afar. Athens could thus go on growing in a fashion impossible to an agricultural community on the same soil; and could so escape that fate of shrinkage in the free class which ultimately fell upon purely agricultural Sparta. The upshot was that, after as before Solon, Athens had commercial interests among her pretexts for war, and so widened the sphere of her hostilities, escaping the worst forms of "stasis" in virtue of the expansibility of commerce and the openings for new colonisation which commerce provided and widened. But colonisation there had to be. Precisely by reason of her progressiveness, her openness to the alien, her trade and her enterprise, Attica increased in population at a rate which enforced emigration, while the lot of the rural population did not economically improve, and the probable change from corn-growing to olive-culture[238] would lessen the number of people employed on the land. Even apart from the fact of the popular discontent which welcomed the tyrannis of Peisistratos, we cannot doubt that Solon's plans had soon failed to exclude the old phenomena of poverty. The very encouragement he gave to artisans to immigrate,[239] while it made for the democratic development and naval strength of Athens, was a means of quickening the approach of a new economic crisis. And yet he seems to have recognised the crux of population. The traditional permission given by the sage to parents to expose infants, implicitly avows the insoluble problem—the "cursed fraction" in the equation, which will not disappear; and in the years of the approach of Peisistratos to power we find Athens sending to Salamis (about 570) its first kleruchie, or civic colony-settlement on subject territory—this by way of providing for landless and needy citizens.[240] It was the easiest compromise; and nothing beyond compromise was dreamt of.

[The statement that Solon by law permitted the exposure of infants is made by Malthus, who gives no authority, but is followed by Lecky. The law in question is not mentioned by Plutarch, and I do not find it noticed by any of the historians. It is stated, however, by Sextus Empiricus (Hypotyp. iii, 24) that Solon made a law by which a parent could put his child to death; and this passage, which is cited by Hume in his Essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations, is doubtless Malthus's authority. Nothing nearer to the purpose is cited by Meursius in his monograph on Solon; but this could very well stand as a permission of infanticide, especially seeing that the practice is presumptively prehistoric. Petit writes: "Quemadmodum liberos tollere in patris erat positum potestate, ita etiam necare et exponere, idque, meo judicio, non tam moribus quam lege receptum fuit Athenis" (Leges AtticÆ, fol. 219, ed. Wesseling, 1742). Grote (ii, 470, note) pronounces that the statement of Sextus "cannot be true, and must be copied from some untrustworthy authority," seeing that Dionysius the Halicarnassian (ii, 26) contrasts the large scope of the patria potestas among the Romans with the restrictions which all the Greek legislators, Solon included, either found or introduced. Dr. Mahaffy (Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. p. 165) believes "the notion of exposing infants from economical motives not to have prevailed till later times" than the seventh century B.C., but he gives no reason for fixing any date. We may take it as certain that while the laws of Lycurgus, like the Roman Twelve Tables, enjoined or permitted the destruction of sickly or deformed infants, the general Greek usage allowed exposure. The express prohibition of it at Thebes (Ælian, Var. Hist. ii, 7) implies its previous normality there and elsewhere (cp. however, Aristotle, Pol. vii, 16); and the sale of children by their (free) parents was further permitted, except in Attica (Ingram, History of Slavery, p. 16); while even there a freeman's children by a slave concubine were slaves.]

On the other hand, the laws even of Sparta, framed with a view to the military strength of the State considered as the small free population, were ultimately evaded in the interests of property-holding, till the number of "pure Spartans" dwindled to a handful.[241] Under a system of primogeniture, with a rigid severance between the upper class and the lower, there could in fact be no other outcome. Here, apart from the revolts of the helots and the chronic massacres of these by their lords, which put such a stamp of atrocity on Spartan history,[242] the stress of class strife seems to have been limited among the aristocracy, not only by systematic infanticide, but by the survival of polyandry, several brothers often having one wife in common.[243] Whether owing to infanticide, or to in-breeding, or to preventives, families of three and four were uncommon and considered large, and special privileges offered to the fathers.[244] As always, such devices failed against the pressures of the main social conditions. All the while, of course, the perioikoi and the enslaved helots multiplied freely; hence the policy of specially thinning down the latter by over-toil[245] as well as massacre. In other States, where the polity was more civilised, many observers perceived that the two essential conditions of stability were (a) absolute or approximate equality of property, and (b) restraint of population, the latter principle being a notable reaction of reason against the normal practice of encouraging or compelling marriage.[246] Aristotle said in so many words that to let procreation go unchecked "is to bring certain poverty on the citizens; and poverty is the cause of sedition and evil";[247] and he cites previous publicists who had sought to solve the problem. Socrates and Plato had partly contemplated it; and the idealist, as usual, had proposed the more brutal methods;[248] but Aristotle, seeing more clearly the population difficulty, perhaps on that account is the less disposed towards communism.

Thirlwall, in his closing survey, proceeding on Polybius,[249] confidently decides that the main cause of depopulation was domestic and moral. Such a theory cannot be sustained. Polybius evidently had no clear idea of the facts, since he asserts that "in our time" and "rapidly" there took place in Greece a "failure of offspring" (or "dearth of children"), which left cities desolate and land waste; and goes on to ascribe it to habits of luxury, which either kept men from marrying or made them refuse to rear more than a few of their children. The whole theorem is haphazard. Cities and lands could not have been so depopulated.[250] There must have been, in addition to slaughter, a drain of population to lands where the conditions were more advantageous. Nor is there any good reason for believing that child-exposure had suddenly and immensely increased. Thirlwall says that marriages were "unfruitful"; but this is not the statement of Polybius. It is true that pÆderasty would count for much in lowering character; but it had been common in Greece centuries before the time of Polybius, and had not affected fecundity. As we have seen,[251] fecundity fell in Sparta for other reasons.

As between Sparta and Athens, the main difference was that Athenian life was for a long period more or less expansive, while that of Sparta, even in the period of special vigour, was steadily contractive, as regarded quantity and quality of "good life." At Sparta, as above noted, the normal play of self-interest in the governing class brought about a continuous shrinkage in the number of enfranchised citizens and of those holding land, till there were only 700 of the former and 100 of the latter—this when there were still 4,500 adult Spartans of "pure" descent, and 15,000 Laconians capable of military service. Even of the hundred landowners many were women, the estates having thus evidently aggregated by descent through heiresses.[252] It mattered little that this inner ring of rich became, after the triumph over Athens and in the post-Alexandrian period, as luxurious as the rest of Greece:[253] the evil lay not in the mode of their expenditure, but in the mode of their revenue. Agis IV and his successor Cleomenes thought to put the community on a sound footing by abolition of debts and forcible division of the land; but even had Agis triumphed at home or Cleomenes maintained himself abroad, the expedient could have availed only for a time. Accumulation would instantly recommence in the absence of a scientific and permanent system.

In the commercial cities, where industry was encouraged and wealth tended to take the form of invested capital, it could not readily get into so few hands; and as commerce developed and the investments were more and more in that direction, there would arise an idle rich class which could be best got at by way of taxation. In such communities, though the division and hostility of rich and poor were as unalterable as in Sparta, there was more elasticity of adjustment; so that we see maritime and trading communities like Heracleia and Rhodes maintaining their oligarchic government, with vicissitudes, down into the Roman period,[254] somewhat as Venice in a later age outlasted the other chief republics of Italy. The ruin of Corinth, though indirectly promoted by class strifes,[255] need not have occurred but for the Roman overthrow.[256]

As regards Athens, it is necessary to guard against some misconceptions concerning the life conditions even of the Periclean period. Public buildings apart, it was not a rich or rich-looking city; on the contrary, partly by reason of the force of democratic sentiment, its houses were mostly mean, the well-to-do people presumably having their better houses in the country, where the land was now mostly owned by them. After the destruction of the city by Xerxes (480 B.C.), the first need was felt to be its refortification on a larger scale, even sepulchres as well as the remains of private houses being made to yield materials for the walls.[257] At the same time the PirÆus and Munychia were walled on a still greater scale—the whole constituting a public work of extraordinary scope, rapidly carried through by the co-operation of the whole of the citizens. The further gradual rebuilding of the city, as well as the fresh flocking of the foreign trading population to the now safe PirÆus, would help, with the public works of Pericles, to set up the conditions of general prosperity which prevailed before the Peloponnesian war.[258] According to Demosthenes, the public men of the generation of Salamis had houses indistinguishable from those of ordinary people, whereas in the orator's own day the statesmen had houses actually finer than the public buildings.[259] This would be the natural result of the control of the confederate treasure resulting from the Athenian supremacy. But DicÆarchus belongs to the same period, and his account represents the mass of the city as poor in appearance, the houses small and with projecting stairways, and the streets crooked.[260] We know further from Xenophon that there were many empty spaces, some of them doubtless made by the customary destruction of the houses of those ostracised. There was thus a considerable approach to a rather straitened equality among the mass of the town-dwelling free citizens, who, despite the meanness of their houses, had luxuries in the form of the public baths and gymnasia.

Before Salamis, again, the revenue drawn from the leases of the silver mines of Laurium had been equally divided among the enfranchised citizens—an arrangement which had yielded only a small sum to each, but which represented a notable adumbration of a communal system, with the fatal implication of a basis in slavery.[261] The devotion of this fund[262] to the building of a navy was the making of the Athenian maritime power; whence in turn came the ability of Athens to extort tribute from the allied States, and therewith to achieve relatively the greatest and most effective expenditure on public works[263] ever attempted by any government. It was this specially created demand for and endowment of the arts and the drama that raised Athens to the artistic and literary supremacy of the ancient world, and, by so creating a special intellectual soil, prepared the ensuing supremacy of Athenian philosophy.[264] But the Periclean policy of endowment went far beyond even the employment of labour by the State on the largest scale; it set up the principle of supplying something like an income to multitudes of poorer free citizens—an experiment unique in history. The main features of the system were: (1) Payments for service to the members of the Council of Five Hundred; (2) payments to all jurors, an order numbering some six thousand; (3) the theorikon or allowance of theatre money to all the poorer citizens; (4) regular payments to the soldiers and sailors; (5) largesses of corn, or sales at reduced prices; (6) sacrificial banquets, shared in by the common people; (7) the sending out of "kleruchies," or bodies of quasi-colonists, who were billeted on the confederate cities, to the number of five or six thousand in ten years. Without taking the a priori hostile view of the aristocratic faction, who bitterly opposed all this—a view endorsed later by Plato and Socrates—the common-sense politician must note the utter insecurity of the whole development, depending as it did absolutely on military predominance.[265] The mere cessation of the expenditure on public works at the fall of Athens in the Peloponnesian war was bound to affect class relations seriously; and parties, already bitter, were henceforth more decisively so divided.[266]

In the second period of Athenian ascendency, after the fall of the Thirty Tyrants and of Sparta, when the virtual pensioning of citizens begun by Pericles had been carried to still further lengths,[267] we find Xenophon, the typical Greek of culture and military experience, proposing a financial plan[268] whereby Athens, instead of keeping up the renewed practice of oppressing the confederate cities in order to pay pensions to its own poorer citizens, should derive a sufficient revenue from other sources. In particular he proposed (1) the encouraging of foreigners to settle in the city in larger numbers, by exempting them from military service and from all forms of public stigma, and by giving them the waste grounds to build on. The taxes they would have to pay as aliens would serve as revenue to maintain the citizens proper. (2) A fund should be established for the encouragement of trade which in some unexplained way should yield a high interest, paid by the State, to all investors. (3) The State should build inns, shops, warehouses, and exchanges, chiefly for the use of the foreigners, and so further increase its revenue. (4) It should build ships for the merchant trade, and charter them out upon good security. (5) Above all, it should develop by slave labour the silver mines of Laurium, to the yield of which there was no limit. The public, in fact, might there employ thrice as many slaves as the number of citizens; and it should further set about finding new mines.

We have here the measure of the Athenian faculty to solve the democratic problem as then recognised. The polity of Pericles was bound to perish, alike because it negated international ethics and because it had no true economic basis. The comparatively well-meaning plan of Xenophon could not even be set in motion, so purely fanciful is its structure. The income of the poorer citizens is to come from the taxes and rents paid by foreigners, and from mines worked by slave labour; the necessary army of slaves has to be bought as a State investment. It is as if the Boers of the Transvaal had proposed to live idly in perpetuity on the dues paid by the immigrants, all the while owning all the mines and drawing all the profits. It is hardly necessary to say, with Boeckh,[269] that the thesis as to the yield of the mines was a pure delusion; and that the idea of living on the taxation of foreigners was suicidal.[270] The old method, supplemented perforce by some regular taxation of the taxable citizens, and by the special exaction of "liturgies" or payments for the religious festival drama and other public services from the rich, was maintained as long as might be; industry tending gradually to decay, though the carrying trade and the resumed concourse of foreigners for a time kept Athens a leading city. Never very rich agriculturally, the middle and upper classes had for the rest only their manufactures and their commerce as sources of income; and as the manufactures were mostly carried on by slave labour, and were largely dependent on the State's control of the confederate treasure, the case of the poorer free citizens must necessarily worsen when that control ceased. About 400 B.C. the Athenians had still a virtual monopoly of the corn trade of Bosporus, on which basis they could develop an extensive shipping, which was a source of many incomes; but even these would necessarily be affected by the new regimen which began with the Macedonian conquest.

§ 2

In the economic readjustments, finally, which followed on the rise and subdivision of the empire of Alexander, Greece as a whole took a secondary place in the Hellenistic world, though Macedonia kept much of its newly acquired wealth. While commerce passed with industry and population to the new eastern cities, the remaining wealth of Greece proper would tend to pass into fewer hands,[271] thus pro tanto narrowing more than ever the free and cultured class, and relatively enlarging that of the slaves.

Those who had not shared in the plunder of Asia, to begin with, would find themselves badly impoverished, for the new influx of bullion would raise all prices. It is notable, on the other hand, that philosophy, formerly the study of men with, for the most part, good incomes, and thence always associated more or less with the spirit of aristocracy,[272] was now often cultivated by men of humble status.[273] The new rich then appear to have already fallen away somewhat from the old Athenian standards; while the attraction of poorer men was presumably caused in part by the process of endowment of the philosophic schools begun by Plato in his will—an example soon followed by others.[274] It is probable that as much weight is due to this economic cause as to that of political restraint in the explanation of the prosperity of philosophy at Athens at a time when literature was relatively decaying.

The Roman conquest, again, further depressed Greek fortunes by absolute violence, hurling whole armies of the conquered into slavery,[275] and later setting up a new foreign attraction to the Greeks of ready wit and small means. They presumably began to flock to Rome or Egypt or Asia Minor as the conditions in Greece worsened; and that process in turn would be promoted by the gradual worsening of the Roman financial pressure. It is notable that a rebellion of Attic slaves occurred in 133 B.C., synchronously with the first slave-rising in Sicily—a proof of fresh oppression all round.[276] The Romans had retained the Greek systems of municipal government, and had begun by putting on light taxes.[277] But these surely increased;[278] and the Mithridatic war, in which Athens had taken the anti-Roman side, changed all for the worse. Sulla took the city after a difficult siege, massacred most of the citizens, and entirely destroyed the PirÆus; whereafter Athens practically ceased for centuries to be a commercial centre. Corinth, which had been razed to the ground by Mummius, was ultimately reconstructed by CÆsar as a Roman colony, and secured most of what commerce Greece retained. Twenty years before, Pompey had put down the Cilician pirates, a powerful community of organised freebooters that had arisen out of the disbanding of the hired forces of Mithridates and other Eastern monarchs on the triumph of the Romans, and was further swelled by a large inflow of poverty-stricken Greeks. While it lasted, it greatly multiplied the number of slaves for the Roman market by simple kidnapping.

Thus all the conditions deteriorated together; and the suppression of the pirate state found Greece substantially demoralised, the prey of greedy proconsuls, poor in men, rich only in ancient art and in wistful memories. In the civil wars before and after CÆsar's fall, Greece was harried by both sides in turn; and down to the time of Augustus depopulation and impoverishment seem to have steadily proceeded under Roman rule.[279] Every special contribution laid on the provinces by the rulers was made an engine of confiscation; citizens unable to pay their taxes were sold as slaves; property owners were forced to borrow at usurious rates in the old Roman fashion; and the parasitic class of so-called Roman citizens, as such free of taxation, tended to absorb the remaining wealth.[280] This wealth in turn tended to take the shape of luxuries bought from the really productive provinces; and the fatality of the unproductive communities, lack of the bullion which they in a double degree required, for the time overtook Greece very much as it overtook Italy. Both must have presented a spectacle of exterior splendour as regarded their monuments and public buildings, and as regarded the luxury that was always tending to concentrate in fewer hands, usurers plundering citizens and proconsuls plundering usurers; but the lot of the mass of the people must have been depressed to the verge of endurance if depopulation had not spontaneously yielded relief. As it was, the Greek populations would tend to consist more and more of the capitalistic, official, and parasitic classes on the one hand, and of slaves and poor on the other.[281]

The general depopulation of subject Greece is thus perfectly intelligible. The "race" had not lost reproductive power; and even its newer artificial methods of checking numbers were not immeasurably more active than simple infanticide or exposure had been in the palmy days. In the ages of expansion the whole Hellenic world in nearly all its cities and all its islands swarmed with a relatively energetic population, who won from conditions often in large part unpropitious a sufficiency of subsistence on which to build by the hands of slaves a wonderful world of art. To these conditions they were limited by racial hostilities; everywhere there was substantial though convulsive equipoise among their own warring forces, and between those of their frontier communities and the surrounding "barbarians." The conquest of Alexander (heralded and invited by the campaign of the Ten Thousand) at one blow broke up this equipoise: organised Greek capacity, once forcibly unified, triumphed over the now lower civilisations of Egypt and the East, and Greek population at once began to find its economic level in the easier conditions of some of the conquered lands. They flocked to Egypt and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin as they do at the present time, for similar economic reasons. Nothing could now restore the old conditions; but the Roman conquest and tyranny forced on the disintegration till Greece proper was but the glorious shell of the life of the past, inhabited by handfuls of a semi-alien population, grown in a sense psychically degenerate under evil psychic conditions. In the lower strata of this population began the spread of Christianity, passing sporadically from Syria to the Greek cities, as at the same time to Egypt and Rome. A new conception of life was generated on the plane that typified it.

§ 3

It is a great testimony to the value of sheer peace that in the Roman Empire of the second century, with an incurable economic malady, as it were, eating into its nerve centres, and with no better provision for the higher life than the schools of rhetoric and the endowments of the Greek philosophic chairs, there was yet evolved a system of law and administration which, even under the frightful chances of imperial succession, sustained for centuries a vast empire, and imposed itself as a model on the very barbarism that overthrew it. And it is this system which connects for us the life conditions of Greece as the Romans held it, with its artistic shell almost intact despite all the Roman plunder,[282] and those of the strangely un-Hellenic Greek-speaking world which we know as Byzantium, with its capital at Constantinople.

The economic changes in this period can be traced only with difficulty and uncertainty; but they must have been important. The multiplication of slaves, which was a feature of the ages of the post-Alexandrian empires, the Roman conquest, and the Cilician pirate state, would necessarily be checked at a certain stage, both in town and country, by the continued shrinkage of the rich class. Agriculture in Greece, as in Italy, could not compete with that of Egypt; and slave-farming, save in special cultures, would not be worth carrying on. In the towns, again, the manufactures carried on by means of slaves had also dwindled greatly; and the small wealthy class could not and would not maintain more than a certain number of slaves for household purposes. The records of the religious associations, too, as we shall see, seem to prove that men who were slaves in status had practical freedom of life, and the power of disposing of part of their earnings; whence it may be inferred that many owners virtually liberated their slaves, though retaining a legal claim over them. In this state of things population would gradually recover ground, albeit on a low plane. The type of poor semi-Greek now produced would live at a lower standard of comfort than had latterly been set for themselves by the more educated, who would largely drift elsewhere; and a home-staying population living mainly on olives and fish could relatively flourish, both in town and country. On that basis, in turn, commerce could to some extent revive, especially when Nero granted to the Greeks immunity from taxation.[283] We are prepared then, in the second century, under propitious rulers like Hadrian and the Antonines, to find Greek life materially improved.[284] The expenditure of Hadrian on public works, and the new endowments of the philosophic schools at Athens by the Antonines, would stimulate such a revival; and the Greek cities would further regain ground as Italy lost it, with the growth of cosmopolitanism throughout the Empire. While domestic slavery would still abound, the industries in Athens under the imperial rule would tend to be carried on by freedmen.

A further stimulus would come from the overthrow of the Parthian empire of the ArsacidÆ by Artaxerxes, 226 A.C. The ArsacidÆ, though often at war with the Romans, still represented the Hellenistic civilisation, whereas the SassanidÆ zealously returned to the ancient Persian religion, the exclusiveness of which would serve as a barrier to Western commerce,[285] even while the cult of Mithra, Hellenised to the extent of being specially associated with image-worship, was spreading widely in the West. Commerce would now tend afresh to concentrate in Greece, the Indian and Chinese trade passing north and south of Persia.[286] The removal of the seat of government from Rome by Diocletian, greatly lessening the Italian drain on the provinces, would still further assist the Greek revival after the Gothic invasion had come and gone. Thus we find the larger Greek world in the time of Constantine grown once more so important that in the struggle between him and Licinius his great naval armament, composed chiefly of European Greeks, was massed in the restored PirÆus. The fleet of Licinius, made up chiefly by Asiatic and Egyptian Greeks, already showed a relative decline on that side of the Empire's resources.[287] When, finally, Constantine established the new seat of empire at Byzantium, he tended to draw thither all the streams of Greek commerce, and to establish there, as the centre of the revenues of the Eastern Empire, some such population as had once flourished in Rome; with, however, a definite tendency to commerce and industry in the lower class population as well as in the middle class. To the government of this population was brought the highly developed organisation of the later Pagan Empire, joined with an ecclesiastical system from which heresy was periodically eliminated by the imperial policy, aided by the positive intellectual inferiority of the new Greek-speaking species. There was prosperity enough for material life; and the political and religious system was such as to prevent the normal result of prosperity, culture, from developing independently. The much-divided Greek world had at last, after countless convulsions, been brought to a possibility of quasi-inert equilibrium, an equilibrium which enabled it to sustain and repel repeated and destructive irruptions of northern barbarism,[288] and on the whole to hold at bay, with a shrunken territory, its neighbouring enemies for a thousand years.

§ 4

We have passed, then, through a twilight age, to find a new civilised empire ruled on the lines of the old, but with a single, albeit much-divided religion, and that the Christian, all others having been extirpated not by persuasion but by governmental force, after the new creed, adapting itself to its economic conditions, had secured for itself and its poor adherents, mainly from superstitious rich women, an amount of endowment such as no cult or priesthood possessed in the days of democracy. This process of endowment itself originated, however, in pagan practice; for in the days of substitution of emotional Eastern cults for the simpler worships of early Hellas, there had grown up a multitude of voluntary societies for special semi-religious, semi-festival purposes—thiasoi, eranoi, and orgeones, all cultivating certain alien sacrifices and mysteries, as those of Dionysos, Adonis, Sabazios, Sarapis, Cotytto, or any other God called "Saviour."[289] These societies, unlike the older Hellenic associations of the same names[290] for the promotion of native worships, were freely open to women, to foreigners, and even to slaves;[291] they were absolutely self-governing; the members subscribed according to their means; and we find them flourishing in large numbers in the age of the Antonines,[292] when the old state cults were already deserted, though still endowed. They represent, as has been said, the reappearance of the democratic spirit and the gregarious instinct in new fields and in lower strata when general and practical democracy has been suppressed. In some such fashion did the Christian Church begin, employing the attractions and the machinery of many rival cults. Its final selection and establishment by the Empire represented in things religious a process analogous to that which had forcibly unified the competing republics of Greece in one inflexible and unprogressive organisation. Nothing but governmental force could have imposed doctrinal unity on the chaos of sects into which Christianity was naturally subdividing; but the power of conferring on the State Church special revenues was an effective means of keeping it practically subordinate.

The historian who has laid down the proposition that religious unity was the cause of the survival of the Eastern Empire when the Western fell,[293] has made the countervailing admission that between Justinian and Heraclius there was an almost universal centrifugal tendency in the Byzantine State, which was finally overcome only by "the inexorable principle of Roman centralisation,"[294] at a time when it was nearly destroyed by its enemies and its own dissentient forces.[295] Province after province had been taken by the Persians in the East; Slavs and Avars were driving back the population from the northern frontiers, even harrying the Peloponnesus; discontent enabled Phocas to dethrone and execute Maurice (602 A.C.); and Phocas in turn was utterly defeated by the Persian foe; when Heraclius appeared, to check the continuity of disaster, and to place the now circumscribed Empire on a footing of possible permanence. But it is important to realise how far the economic and external conditions conduced to his success, such as it was. Hitherto the populace of Constantinople had been supported, like that of imperial Rome, by regular allowances of bread to every householder, provided from the tributary grain supplies of Egypt. The Persian conquest of Egypt in the year 616 stopped that revenue; and the emperor's inability to feed the huge semi-idle populace became a cause of regeneration, inasmuch as the State was forcibly relieved of the burden, and many of the idlers became available for the army about to be led by the emperor against the menacing Persians. He was reduced, however, to the expedient of offering to continue the supply on a payment of three pieces of gold from each claimant, and finally to breaking that contract; whereafter, on his proposing to transfer his capital to Carthage to escape the discontent, the populace and the clergy implored him to remain, and thus enabled him to exact a large loan from the latter,[296] and to dominate the nobility who had hitherto hampered his action. The victories of Heraclius over the Persians, however, only left the eastern and Egyptian provinces to fall under the Arabs; the first financial result of his successes having been to tax to exasperation the recovered lands in order to repay the ecclesiastical loan with usury; and the circumscribed Empire under his successors could not, even if the emperors wished, resume the feeding of the mass of the citizens. Constantinople, though still drawing some tribute from the remaining provinces in Italy, was thus perforce reduced to a safe economic basis, even as the people in general had been coerced into united effort by the imminent danger from Persia.

From this time forward, with many vicissitudes of military fortune, the contracted Byzantine State endured in virtue of its industrial and commercial basis and its consequent maritime and military strength, managed with ancient military science against enemies less skilled. The new invention of "Greek fire," like all advances in the use of missiles in warfare, counted for much; but the decisive condition of success was the possession of continuous resources. Justinian, among many measures of mere oppression and restriction, had contrived to introduce from the far East the silk manufacture, which for the ancient and medieval European world was of enormous mercantile importance. Such a staple, and the virtual control of the whole commerce between northern and western Europe and the East, kept Byzantium the greatest trading power in Christendom until the triumph of the Italian republics. Even the Saracen conquests in Asia and Africa did not seriously affect this source of strength; for the Saracen administration, though often wise and energetic, was in Egypt too often convulsed by civil wars to permit of trade flourishing there in any superlative degree. The Byzantines continued to trade with India by the Black Sea and Central Asian route; and their monopolies and imposts, however grievous, were relatively bearable compared with the afflictions of commerce under other powers. As of old, the Greeks or Greek-speaking folk were the traders of the Mediterranean, the Saracen navy never reaching sufficient power to check them; and when finally its remnants took to piracy, they served rather to cut off all weaker competition than to affect the preponderating naval power of the Empire.

In this period of prevailing commercial vigour, from the sixth to the eleventh century, the life of the Greek Empire was substantially civic, the rural districts remaining desolate, and agriculture extremely feeble,[297] though the Sclavonian immigrants who now inhabited the Peloponnesus[298] must have lived by that means. Under such circumstances the towns would be fed by imported grain, presumably that of the Crimea; but as they did not grow in size, at least in the case of the capital, their industrial prosperity must have largely depended on the restriction of population, whether by vice, preventive checks, misery, or the sheer unhealthiness of city life, which at the present day prevents so many Eastern cities from maintaining themselves save by influx from the country.[299] It is misleading to point to the legal veto on infanticide as a great Christian reform without taking these things into account. The presumption is that misery, vice, child-exposure, and abortion, rather than prudence, kept the poor population within the limits of subsistence.

Mr. Oman (Byzantine Empire, p. 145) takes the popular view as to the reformative effect of Christianity. He goes on to describe Constantine as providing for the children of the destitute to prevent their exposure, but does not mention that the same thing had been done under the Antonines, and that Constantine permitted the finder of an exposed child to enslave it. The punishment of all exposure as infanticide, under Valentinian, was only an adoption of the pagan practice at Thebes (Ælian, Var. Hist. ii, 7). But in spite of all enactments, under Christian as under pagan rule, exposure and positive infanticide continued, though Christian sentiment never gave it the toleration exhibited in the drama of Menander. As to the historic facts, cp. Lecky, Hist. of European Morals, 6th ed. ii, 24-33.

Broadly speaking, it was inevitable that in such a population as is pictured for us by Chrysostom—a multitude profoundly ignorant, superstitious, excitable, sensuous—all the vices of the GrÆco-Roman period should habitually flourish, while poverty must have been normally acute after the stoppage of regular free bread. On the general moral environment, cp. the author's Short History of Freethought, 2nd ed. i, 249-50.