the hostility again and again. One of the most remarkable of the laws of Solon was that which disfranchised any citizen who in a "stasis" or seditious feud stood aloof and took no side.[115] He had seen the risks of such apathy in the attempt of Kylon, in his youth, to become despot of Athens; and his fears were realised when Peisistratos seized power. The law may have helped to promote public-spirited action; but in the nature of things it was hardly necessary when once democracy was established. Again and again the demos had to fight for its own hand against the cliques who sought to restore oligarchy; and apathy was not likely to be common. The perpetual generation of fresh poverty through rapid increase of population, and the inevitable resort to innovating fiscal and other measures to relieve it, sufficed to provide grounds of class strife while free Athens endured.
It lies on the face of Aristotle's Politics, however, that even if the population difficulty had been solved otherwise than by exodus, and even if the Athenians could have guarded against class strife among themselves, the fatality of war in the then civilised world would have sufficed to bring about political dissolution. As he profoundly observes, the training of a people to war ends in their ruin, even when they acquire supremacy, because their legislators have not "taught them how to rest."[116] Add the memorable testimony of Thucydides concerning the deep demoralisation wrought by the Peloponnesian War—a testimony supported by every page of the history of the time. Even the sinister virtue of uniting a people within itself was lacking to the perpetual warfare of the Greeks: the internal hatreds seemed positively to worsen in the atmosphere of the hatreds of the communities. But while the spirit of strife is universal, peoples are inevitably trained to war; and even if the Greek States could have so far risen above their fratricidal jealousies as to form a stable union, it must needs have turned to external conquest, and so run the downward course of the post-Alexandrian Hellenistic Empires, and of the Roman Empire, which in turn sank to dissolution before the assaults of newer militarisms.
§ 2
Nothing can save any democratic polity from the alternatives of insane strife and imperial subjection but a vital prosperous culture, going hand in hand with a sound economy of industry. The Greek democracies in their different way split on the rock that wrecked the Roman Republic: there was (1) no general mental development commensurate with the political problems which arose for solution, and (2) there was no approach to a sound economics. The first proposition will doubtless be denied by those who, nourished on the literature of Greece, have come to see in its relative excellence, the more confidently because of the abiding difficulty of mastering it, the highest reach of the faculties of thought and expression. But this judgment is fundamentally astray, because of the still subsisting separation, in the literary mind, of the idea of literary merit from the idea of scientific sanity. Men themselves too often vowed to the defence and service of a mythology are slow to see that it was not for nothing that the Athenian people bottomed its culture to the last on myth and superstition. Yet a little reflection might make it clear that the community which forced Socrates to drink the hemlock for an alleged and unproved scepticism, and Anaxagoras to fly for a materialistic hypothesis concerning the sun, could have no political enlightenment adequate to the Athenian needs. We see the superstitious Athenian demos playing the part of the ignorant multitude of all ages, eager for a master, incapable of steadfast self-rule, begging that the magnificent Alcibiades, who led the sacred procession to Eleusis in despite of the Spartans near at hand, shall put down his opponents and reign at Athens as king[117]—this after he had been exiled by the same demos on a charge of profane parody of the Eleusinian mysteries, and sacerdotally declared accursed for the offence.[118] A primitive people may stumble along in primitive conditions by dint of elementary political methods; but a civilised people with a complex political problem can solve it only by means of a correspondingly evolved science. And the Athenian people, with their purely literary and æsthetic culture, never as a body reached even a moderate height of ethical and scientific thought,[119] or even any such general æsthetic well-being as we are apt to credit them with. Moderns think of them, as the great song of Euripides has it, "lightly lifting their feet in the lucid air,"[120] and are indulgently ready to take by the letter the fine panegyric of the Athenian polity by Pericles,[121] forgetting that statesmen in all ages have glorified their State, always making out the best case, always shunning discouragement for their hearers, and making little account of evil. But Burckhardt, after his long survey, decides with Boeckh that "the Hellenes were more unhappy than most men think;"[122] and the saying holds good of their political and intellectual life above all things.
Our more idealising scholars forget that the philosophy of the philosophers was a specialism, and that the chance of hearing a tragedy of Sophocles or a comedy of Aristophanes was no training in political conduct for a people whose greatest philosopher never learned to see the fatality of slavery. On the economic side, Periclean Athens was nearly as ill founded as aristocratic Rome. Citizens often with neither professions nor studies, with no ballasting occupation for head or hand; average men paid from the unearned tribute of allied States to attend to affairs without any fundamental study of political conditions; citizens whose work was paid for in the same fashion; citizens of merely empirical education, for whom politics was but an endless web of international intrigue, and who had no higher ideal than that of the supremacy of their own State in Hellenedom or their own faction in the State—such men, it is now easy to see, were incapable of saving Athens, much less of unifying Greece. They were politically raised to a situation which only wise and deeply instructed men could fill, and they were neither wise nor deeply instructed, however superior their experience might make them relatively to still worse trained contemporaries, or to populations living under a systematic despotism.
On some of the main problems of life the majority had thought no further than their ancestors of the days of the kings. The spell of religion had kept them ignorant and superstitious.[123] In applied ethics they had as a body made no progress: the extension of sympathy, which is moral advance, had gone no further than the extortion of civic status and power by some new classes, leaving a majority still enslaved. Above all, they could not learn the lesson of collective reciprocity; could not see the expediency of respecting in other communities the liberty they prized as their own chief good. Athens in her turn "became an imperial or despot city, governing an aggregate of dependent subjects all without their own active concurrence, and in many cases doubtless contrary to their own sense of political right. … But the Athenians committed the capital fault of taking the whole alliance into their own hands, and treating the allies purely as subjects, without seeking to attach them by any form of political incorporation or collective meeting and discussion—without taking any pains to maintain community of feeling or idea of a joint interest—without admitting any control, real or even pretended, over themselves as managers. Had they attempted to do this, it might have proved difficult to accomplish—so powerful was the force of geographical dissemination, the tendency to isolated civic life, and the repugnance to any permanent extramural obligations, in every Grecian community. But they do not appear to have ever made the attempt. Finding Athens exalted by circumstances to empire, and the allies degraded into subjects, the Athenian statesmen grasped at the exaltation as a matter of pride as well as profit. Even Pericles, the most prudent and far-sighted of them, betrayed no consciousness that an empire without the cement of some all-pervading interest or attachment, although not practically oppressive, must nevertheless have a natural tendency to become more and more unpopular, and ultimately to crumble in pieces."[124]
In fine, a democracy, the breath of whose nostrils is justice, systematically refused to do as it would be done by; and as was Athens, so were the rest of the
