Athenians told the protesting Melians, in effect, that might is right,[125] they did even as Sparta and Thebes had done before them.[126] Hence the instinct of justice was feeble for all purposes, and the domestic strife of factions was nearly as malignant and animalised as in Borgian Italy. Mother cities and their colonies fought more destructively with each other than with aliens; Athens and Syracuse, Corinth and Corcyra, strove more malignantly than did Greek with barbarian. It was their rule after a victory to slay their prisoners.[127] Such men had not learned the secret of stable civic evolution; animal instinct was still enthroned against law and prudence. Unearned income, private and public; blindly tyrannous political aggression; ferocious domestic calumny; civic and racial disruption—these were the due phases and fruits of the handling of a great political problem by men who in the mass had no ideals of increasing knowledge, of growing tolerance, of widening justice, of fraternity.[128] Stoic and Epicurean wisdom and righteousness came too late to save free Hellas: they were the fruits of retrospect in decadence. The very art and literature which glorified Athens were in large part the economic products of impolicy and injustice, being fostered by the ill-gotten wealth accruing to the city from her tributary allies and subject States, somewhat as the art of the great period in Italy was fed by the wealth of the Church and of the merchant princes who grew by the great river of trade. In the one case as in the other, there was no polity, no science, equal to the maintenance of the result when the originating conditions disappeared. Greek art and letters passed away because they were ill rooted. Nobly incorrupt for himself, Pericles thus fatally fostered a civic corruption that no leader's virtues could countervail, and his policy in this regard was probably the great force of frustration to his scheme for a pan-Hellenic congress at Athens, to promote free trade and intercourse.[129]
For various views on this matter cp. Heeren, Eng. tr. of Researches on the Political History of Ancient Greece, pp. 129–34; Thirlwall, History of Greece, ch. xviii (1st ed. iii, 62–70); Grote, iv, 490–504; Abbott, History of Greece, i, 405–9; Holm, History of Greece, Eng. tr. ii, 268, note 8 to ch. xvii (a vindication). Grote, who vindicates the policy of Pericles with much care, endorses the statesman's own plea that his use of the confederate treasure in ennobling the city gave her a valuable prestige. But even to the Athenian opposition this answer was indecisive, for, as Grote records, the argument of Thucydides was that Athens was "disgraced in the eyes of the Greeks" by her use of the treasure. This meant that her prestige was fully balanced by hatred, so that the civic gain was a new danger.
Not that matters would have gone a whit better if, as our Tory historians used retrospectively to prescribe, democracy had been permanently subverted by aristocracy. No other ideal then in vogue would have produced even so much "good life" as was actually attained. We know that the rich and the great in the Greek cities were the worst citizens, in the sense of being the least law-abiding; and that the lower-class Athenians who served in the fleet were the best disciplined; the middle-class hoplites less so; and the rich men who formed the cavalry the least orderly of all.[130] Above all, the aristocrats were cruel and rapacious when in power as the demos never were, even when they had overthrown the guiltiest of their tyrants.[131] The leading aristocrats were simply weaker versions of the demagogues, making up for their weakness by their cruelty; and nothing can be more misleading than to take the account given of Kleon by Aristophanes for even a semblance of the truth. The great humorist saw nothing as it really was: his very genius was as it were a many-faceted mirror that could reflect no whole, and left his practical judgment worth less than that of any of the men he ridiculed. Kleon is to be conceived as a powerful figure of the type of a New York Tammany "Boss," without culture or philosophy, but shrewd, executive, and abounding in energy. The aristocrats were but slighter egoists with a varnish of education, as far as he from a worthy philosophy. And the philosophers par excellence, Plato and Aristotle, were equally incapable of practical statesmanship. The central truth of the entire process is that free Greece fell because her children never transcended, in conception or in practice, that primary ethic of egoism in which even love for one's country is only a reflex of hate for another people. This is clear in the whole play of the astounding hatreds of Athenians for Athenians through every struggle of Athens for her life. The treasons of Alcibiades are evoked and amply balanced by the murderous plots of his fellows against him: every figure in the line of leaders, from Solon's self, is hated by some hetairia; the honest Anytus, the perfect type of brainless conservatism sitting in the chair of sociological judgment, can be appeased only by the slaying of Socrates; and to the end the egoisms of Demosthenes, Æschines, and Isocrates are at grapple, with the national assassin in sight.
And it is the prevailing consciencelessness, the universal lust to tyrannise, that really consummates the political dissolution. It was not the battle of Chæronea that made an end of Greek independence. That disaster would have been retrieved like others if only the Greeks had persistently cared to retrieve it. They fell because they took the bribe of empire. Philip held it out at once by his offer of facile terms to Athens: he was planning in his own way what the pragmatic Isocrates took for the ideal Hellenic course, a Hellenic war of conquest against Persia; and it was that very war, made by Alexander, that transformed the Greeks into a mere diluvium of fortune-hunters, turning away from every ideal of civic stability and dignity to the overrunning of alien populations and the getting of alien gold. Given the process of historic determination, moral bias becomes a fatality; and when it is fixed, "'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus." Republican Greece passed away because there were no more republican Greeks, but only a rabble of imperialists. Here again appears the fatality of their past: it was the sombre memory of unappeasable civil strife, of eternal inequality and envy and class attrition, that made the new promise so dazzling; any future seemed fairer than the recent past. But it was through the immediate bait to their cupidity that the Greeks were led out of their old man-making life of turbulent counterpoise, the sphere of free equals, into the new unmanning life of empire, the sphere of slaves. They were easy victims. The men of Aristotle's day had once more before their eyes, in the squalid drama of Philip's house—in the spectacle of alienated wife and son deriding and hating the laurelled conqueror and exulting in his murder—the old lesson of autocracy, its infallible dishonour, its depravation, its dissolution of the inmost ties of cordial life. But any countervailing ideal that still lived among them was overborne by the tide of triumphant conquest; and, with Aristotle and Plato in her hand, Greece turned back to the social ethic of the Heraclidæ.
And when once the Circean cup of empire had been drained by the race, there was no more returning to the status of republican manhood. The new self-governing combination of cities which arose in Achaia after the disintegration of Alexander's empire might indeed conceivably have reached a high civilisation in time; but the external conditions, as summed up in the existence of Rome, were now overwhelmingly unfavourable. The opportunity for successful federalism was past. As it was, the Achaian and Ætolian Leagues were but politic unions as much for aggression as for defence, even as the Spartan reformers, Agis and Cleomenes, could never rise above the ideal of Spartan self-assertion and domination. Thus we have on one hand the Spartan kings, concerned for the well-being of the mass of the people (always excepting the helots) as a means to restore Spartan pre-eminence; and on the other hand the Achaian federation of oligarchies, hating the doctrine of sympathy for the demos as much as they hated Sparta—the forces of union and strife always repelling the regimen of peace, to say nothing of fraternity. The spectacle of Cleomenes and Philopœmen at deadly odds is the dramatic summary of the situation; the ablest men of the later Greek age could not transcend their barbarian heredity.
The statement of Freeman (History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy, ed. 1893, p. 184) that a federal system in Greece was "utterly impossible," is true in the bare philosophic sense that that was impossible which did not happen; but such a proposition would hold equally true
