Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Römer (1866), and indeed all his works on Greek history, are always worth consulting.
Some help may be had from the volume on Greece in the Industrial History of the Free Nations by W.T. M'Cullagh (1846); but that fails to throw any light on what should have been its primary problem, the rise of Greek industry, and is rather sentimental than scientific in spirit. For later Greece, Finlay (History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans, revised ed. 7 vols. 1877) becomes illuminating by his interest in economic law, though he holds uncritically enough by some now exploded principles, and exhibits some religious prejudice. His somewhat entangled opening sections express his difficulties as a pioneer in sociological history—difficulties only too abundantly apparent in the following pages. Professor J.B. Bury's History of the Later Roman Empire (2 vols. 1889) is an admirable work; but it does not attempt, save incidentally, to supersede Finlay in matters economic.
§ 1
The political history of ancient Greece, similarly summarised, will serve perhaps even better the purpose of illuminating later evolution. That history has served historian after historian as a means of modern polemic. The first considerable English historians of Greece, Gillies and Mitford, pointed to the evil fate of Greek democracy as a conclusive argument against countenancing democracy now; never stopping to ask whether ancient monarchies had fared any better than the democracies. And it is perfectly true that present-day democracies will tend to bad fortune just as did the ancient unless they bottom themselves more firmly and guide themselves by a deeper political science. It will not suffice that we have rejected the foundation of slavery, on which all the Greek polities rested. The strifes between the demos and the aristocracy in the Greek City-States would have arisen just as surely, though more slowly, if the demos, instead of being an upper-grade populace owning slaves, had included the whole mass of the artisan and serving class.[92] Where population increases at anything like the natural animal rate, and infanticide is not overwhelming, poverty must either force emigration or breed strife between the "have-nots" and the "haves," barring such continuous stress of war as suffices at once to thin numbers and yield conquerors the lands of the slain losers. During some centuries the pressure was in part relieved by colonisation, as had already happened among the Phœnicians;[93] the colonies themselves in turn, with their more rapid evolution, developing the inevitable strife of rich and poor more quickly and more violently than the mother cities.[94] Among these, it was when that relief seemed to be exhausted that strife became most dangerous, being obscurely perceived to be a means to advancement and prosperity for individuals, as well as for the State which could extort tribute or plunder from the others. War, however, limits agriculture, so that food supply is kept proportionately small; and with peace the principle of population soon overtakes lost ground; so that, though the Greek States like others tended to gain in solidarity under the stimulus of foreign war, the pressure of poverty was always breeding fresh division.
If we take up Grecian history after the settling down of the prehistoric invasions, which complicated the ordinary process of rupture and fission, that process is seen occurring so frequently, and in so many different States, that there can be no question as to the presence of a general sociological law, not to be counteracted in any community save by a radical change of conditions. Everywhere the phenomena are broadly the same. The upper class ("upper" in virtue either of primary advantages or of special faculty for acquiring wealth) attains to providing for its future by holding multitudes of poorer citizens in debt—the ancient adumbration of the modern developments of landlordism, national debts, and large joint-stock enterprises, which yield inheritable incomes. In early times, probably, debt led as often to adult enslavement in Greece as in Rome;[95] but in a world of small and warring City-States, shaken by domestic division, constantly making slaves by capture and purchase, and always exposed to the risk of their insurrection, this was too dangerous a course to be long persisted in,[96] and the creditor was led to press his mortgaged debtor in other ways. The son or the daughter was sold to pay the father's dues, or to serve in perpetual payment of interest; and the cultivator's share was ever at the lowest point. The pressure increases till the mass of debtors are harassed into insurrection, or are used by an adventurer to establish himself as despot.[97] Sometimes, in later days, the documents of debt are publicly destroyed;[98] sometimes the land is divided afresh.[99] Landholders burdened with debt would vote for the former course and resist the latter;[100] and as that was clamoured for at Athens in early times, it may be presumed that in some places it was resorted to. Sometimes even a refunding of interest would be insisted on.[101] Naturally such means of rectification availed only for a moment; the despot stood a fair chance of being assassinated; the triumphant demos would be caballed against; the exiled nobles, with the cold rage of Theognis in their hearts, would return; and the last state of the people would be worse than the first; till again slackened vigilance on one side, and intolerable hardship on the other, renewed the cycle of violent change.
In the course of ages there was perforce some approach to equipoise;[102] but it was presumably at the normal cost of a definite abasement of the populace;[103] and it was by a famous stroke of statecraft that Athens was able so to solve her first great crisis as to make possible some centuries of expanding democratic life. The name of Solon is associated with an early crisis (594 B.C.) in which debt and destitution among the Athenian demos (then still for the most part small cultivators, for whom the city was a refuge fortress, but as a rule no longer owning the land they tilled) brought matters to the same point as was marked in Rome by the Secession of the Plebs. The Athenian oligarchy was very much like the Roman; and when the two sides agreed to call in Solon as arbitrator it was with a fairly general expectation that he would take the opportunity to become tyrant. The people knew him to be opposed to plutocratic tyranny; the nobles and traders, anxious for security, thought him sure to be their friend; and both sorts had small objection to such a one as "despot." But Solon, a noble of moderate means, who had gained prestige in the wars of Athens with her neighbour, Megara, and some knowledge of life as a travelling trader, brought to his problem a higher vision than that of a Roman patrician, and doubtless had a less barbarous stock to deal with. Later ages, loosely manipulating tradition, ascribed to him a variety of laws that he cannot have made;[104] but all the records concur in crediting him with a "Seisachtheia," a "shaking-off-of-burdens," and a healing of the worst of the open wounds of the body politic. All existing mortgages were cancelled; all enslavement for debt was abolished; Athenians who had been sold into alien slavery were bought back (probably by a contribution from relieved debtors[105]); and the coinage was recast—whether or not by way of reducing State payments is not clear.
Grote (ii, 471), while eulogising Solon's plan as a whole, accepts the view that he debased the money-standard; while Boeckh (Metrologie, ch. 15) holds him to have further altered the weights and measures. For the former view there is clear support in Plutarch (Solon, c. 15), and for the latter in the lately recovered Aristotelian Polity of Athens (c. 10). But when Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari, in their abridgment of Grote (p. 45), declare that the latter document makes clear that the coinage measure was solely for the promotion of trade, and entirely independent of the Seisachtheia (so also Bury, p. 183), they unduly stress the evidence. The document, which is hardly Aristotelian in structure, proceeds doubtfully on tradition and not upon record;
