FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE
A curious legend about the Spartans arose in the age that followed the
conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. It was then reported that
they were the kinsmen of the Jews. According to one version of the
story, Judæa was founded by a Spartan named Judæus, who had accompanied
the god Dionysus from Thebes on his triumphal progress through Asia.
According to another account, the Spartans were descendants of Abraham,
the strongest of the children of Israel having migrated to Greece at
the time Moses led the remainder out of Egypt to the land of Canaan.[34]
This absurd legend, of which the Greek origin is unmistakable, seems
to have been responsible for a certain rapprochement between the
two peoples. Despite the first book of the Maccabees, which affirms
the contrary, it is, indeed, impossible that Areus I, king of
Sparta between 308 and 264 B.C., wrote to Onias I, Jewish
high priest, demanding and offering a community of goods, and that
Jonathan Maccabæus, one hundred and fifty years afterwards, sent
greetings to the Spartans, together with the word that the Jews "at
all times without ceasing both in their feasts and other convenient
days remembered them in the sacrifices which they offered, and in
their prayers, as reason was, and as it becameth them to think upon
their brethren."[35] Nothing is more unlikely than that the Spartans
volunteered to divide their "cattle" and property with the Jews only
a short time before they crushed with great bloodshed a communistic
movement among their own citizens, unless it be the thought that the
prayers and offerings of the Jews went up continually to Jehovah for
the prosperity of heathen who were also backsliders. Nevertheless, that
communications were actually established between the Judæa of Onias
and Jonathan and the Sparta of Areus and Menalcidas, we cannot doubt;
and, indeed, we have still other evidences that the alleged community
of origin was turned to account by the Jews. There was evidently a
considerable Jewish settlement in Sparta.
When we seek to discover the reason for this strange conjunction of
the warrior community by the Eurotas and the religious community by
the Jordan, we are helped by observing that in another Hellenistic
legend the Jews are made the kinsmen of the gymnosophists, or naked
philosophers, of India. The Greek mind was at this time fascinated
by the great problem of subordinating the species of things to their
proper genera, of perceiving the types by means of which individual
objects became intelligible parts of a cosmos. It was the age of
Aristotle and Theophrastus, Menander and the New Comedy, of idealistic
portraiture. Hence the temptation was irresistible to bring into family
relationship the various societies of men in which the principle of
caste dominated; to regard it as unessential that in Judæa the people
were there to support the priests, in Laconia to support the soldiers,
in India to support the Brahmans. In each case there was found an odd
community, in which, so far at least as the state could accomplish
it, all human interests were subordinated to one, be it war and
preparation for war, religious practices of a ritualistic character, or
theosophical speculation.
Had the Greeks known it, there was a further analogy of an external
sort between the Spartans and the Jews which they would have delighted
to establish. For at about the same time that a richly diversified
national life was narrowed down in Judæa to a single interest under the
stress of complete preoccupation with the means of regaining Jehovah's
favor for his chosen people, Sparta ruthlessly compressed and crushed a
many-sided and progressive culture to the end that her citizens might
become trained soldiers, having but one esprit, the esprit de corps of
a professional army.
Prior to 580 B.C. Sparta was the home of poets and musicians.
It was for a chorus of Spartan maidens, the élite of the noble
families, that Alcman wrote the exquisite lines on the breathless calm
of nature which Goethe has made familiar to all lovers of poetry. In
hollow Lacedæmon—a valley rich with vegetation suggestive of bountiful
harvests, down which the steel-gray Eurotas runs, swift and turbulent,
over its rocky bottom, and over which rise on either side the
snow-capped ridges of Taygetus and Parnon, their slopes resonant with
the songs of the nightingales in the mating season—in this secluded
spot, whose haunting beauty is a joy forever to all who have seen it,
there was reared a famous temple of Athena, "Athena of the Brazen
House," at a time when in Athens itself the city's protecting goddess
had to be content with a crude, primitive sanctuary.
All this, and much besides, was observed, and the proper inferences
drawn, by Eduard Meyer twenty years ago;[36] so that the amazement
with which the English archæologists, who have excavated in Laconia
during the past five or six years, report their remarkable "finds"
is a source of no little amusement to the wary. They have discovered
that prior to 580 B.C. Sparta was the maker of a kind of
artistic pottery which was known and imitated in far-distant Cyrene
and Tarentum; that she then had trade relations with Egypt and Lydia;
that "combs, toilet-boxes, elaborate pins and bronze ornaments, seals,
necklaces, and gold and ivory gewgaws" were made and used—witnesses
for "a golden age of Spartan art," against the puritanical spirit
traditionally attributed to early and middle Sparta.[37]
In Athens, as we have seen, supremacy in art and literature was
attained by making universal among citizens the spirit and culture of
the aristocracy, the whole people, thus ennobled, being supported on
the shoulders of the tributary allies and enriched by the commercial
advantages of maritime empire. The development of Sparta was directly
the reverse of this. There the aristocracy, whose exuberance of life
and responsiveness to sensuous impressions are attested with sufficient
certainty, was destroyed in the sixth century B.C.
This century was one of repression in Greece generally; whence some
historians have called it the epoch of the Greek Reformation. It is the
time of the "Seven Wise Men," from one of whom came the Delphian motto
"nothing in excess," a time in which the riotous joy of living and the
fresh spontaneity of the so-called Ionian Renascence were subdued by a
force, which might have been everywhere a blight,—as in Sparta,—but
which in fact, when later the inspiration of the great Persian War
came, exerted the gentle restraint which marks the classic in Greek
art and letters. In this perilous period the aristocracy of Sparta
perished, and with it the ideals and accomplishments of which it had
been the exponent.
The instrument of repression of all that was superior to the average
in Spartan life was the college of the five ephors, which Cicero
compares with the tribunate in Rome. The ephors acquired such power
that they made the continuance of even the kingship dependent upon the
submission of the kings to their authority; and upon the kings, as upon
all others, they enforced the new rules of law of which they were the
living expositors.
The development of Sparta, like the development of Rome, from
aristocratic to republican government is characterized by the absence
of tyrants. The fact is that the tribunate in the one case and the
ephorate in the other was tyranny in commission, the division of its
powers between ten and five annually changing officers respectively
having proved to be a sufficient safeguard against the concentration
of executive power in the person of a single individual, be he an
inherited king robbed of monarchical rights or an ambitious demagogue
aiming at their restoration.
The new rules of law which the ephors enforced prescribed in minute
detail the life of the citizen from the moment of his birth to the
time of his death. They were the regulations of a military school in
which war alone was taught, of military barracks when war was already
declared. From seven years of age to sixty the entire energies of the
male half of the population were directed toward being prepared for
war. Boys and men drilled and hunted, learned to use their weapons
and campaigned, danced and exercised, ate in the "messes" year in and
year out, and never escaped the watchful eyes of trainers, subalterns,
officers, and ephors.
No one in Sparta had to make his own way in life. His whole course was
mapped out for him before he was born. No citizen had any business
cares; for all trade and industry were tabooed, and the lands which he
inherited he could not sell. Neither could he buy those of another. The
agricultural laborers were serfs, the sullen and recalcitrant Helots,
of whom there were fifteen to every Spartan; the clothing and weapons
were made by the contented and tractable Periœcs, who outnumbered
the Spartans five to one, and formed with their one hundred hamlets
and their contiguous territories an insulating band round Helots and
Spartans alike. Iron money was the only local currency, though silver
had, of course, to be given in payment for the articles which were
imported from abroad. These, however, were reduced to a minimum, and
such foreigners as made their way through the wall of Periœcs were
rounded up at intervals and forcefully expelled.
All the pretty things of their earlier life, the Spartans chose to do
without. Coarse fare and unlovely houses, piazzas devoid of statues
and inclosed in unsightly and flimsy public buildings; no theatres, no
new music, no new ideas of any kind; mothers who gave up their little
children and their grown sons without flinching; wives who violated
fundamental instincts that their offspring might be more perfect;
homeless boys who went half-naked winter and summer, slept in pens in
the open air like cattle and got their food and living by their wits;
girls who would hardly have known their brothers, brides who would
hardly have recognized their husbands, mothers who would hardly have
been able to distinguish their own sons, were it not that there were
less than five thousand brothers, husbands, and sons in all—of such
was the new Sparta, to whose citizens the ephors issued the annual
command "to shave their mustaches and obey the laws." Long-haired and
tangly-bearded, in groups of about fifteen each, they lounged and
ate and slept in the three hundred tents, or barracks, which lined
Hyacinth Street. There they kept their long spears and their armor.[38]
Thence, clad in their scarlet cloaks, they issued in time of danger
or of war to take their places, group by group, in the five carefully
drilled regiments of which the Spartan phalanx was composed. Quietly,
at an appointed hour in a single night, the whole army might steal
away without confusion, trailing after it, on occasion, thirty-five
thousand Helots to attend to the commissariat. Five thousand Periœc
hoplites might follow at its heels, and with machine-like precision,
to the sound of flutes played in the austere Dorian mode, ten thousand
Lacedæmonian soldiers might advance into battle against foemen who were
always comparatively ill-organized, and who often fled before a single
blow was struck.
The secret of this strange perversion of the natural life of man is to
be found in the declaration of war annually made by the ephors upon
the Helots. They could not follow it up by a campaign waged in regular
fashion; for that would have been to destroy their own serfs. But
they picked out young soldiers, and sent them about among the Helots,
with instructions to strike down secretly all who seemed restless or
over-ambitious. The chief centre of Helot disaffection, at least in
the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., was on the far side of
Mount Taygetus, in Messenia. There the yoke of serfdom chafed more than
elsewhere, not least because those whose estates the Helots of Messenia
tilled for one half the yield lived beyond the snow-capped ridge which
shuts in that country on the east. The Messenians aspired to regain
their lost independence. The Helots of the Eurotas Valley had no such
ambition. They were, therefore, slower to revolt against injustice; but
their aim, when an insurrection did come, could be nothing less than
the extermination of their masters, or at least an exchange of position
with them. Moreover, their very proximity to the five villages which
constituted the unwalled city of Sparta, and the very weight of their
numbers made the Spartans live in ever-present fear of a massacre.
Constant preparedness for war was, accordingly, a simple mandate of
self-preservation.
The Spartans thought it unwise that any of their serf-tilled estates
should lie in or outside the ring of Periœc land. It would not do
to have fuses, so to speak, of Helots running through the wall to the
outside world, or to have masses of Helots beyond the wall, exposed
directly to foreign manipulation. Hence the formation of the Periœc
ring set definite limits to the territory of Sparta. It could be
enlarged in but one way—the widening of the ring by the reduction of
more and more outlying states to the status of Periœcs. And it was
in this way that the Spartan dominions were in fact enlarged in the
seventh century B.C.[39]
At the end of this century, however, Sparta came into conflict with
cities which, unlike the mountain and maritime hamlets situated
roundabout Laconia and Messenia, were too strong and high-spirited
to submit to Spartan control. They had, therefore, to be treated
leniently, since Sparta could not crush them altogether and would
not leave them alone. And the reasons for conciliatory action were
strengthened by the fact that Sparta had now to act abroad with a
sharp eye to the possibility of a servile insurrection at home. There
was never anything mechanical or idealistic in the foreign policy of
the ephors. Hence, first with Tegea at about 560 B.C., and
thereafter with all the states in the Peloponnesus, excepting Argos and
Achæa, Sparta concluded a treaty, the imperialistic aspect of which was
that they agreed individually to accept Sparta's leadership in all
defensive wars and in offensive wars to which they had assented.
The Peloponnesian league, thus formed, stood for the autonomy and
freedom of its members; but Sparta, by championing aristocracies
against tyrants and democracies, and using to its own advantage the
jealousies of its allies as well as their fears of outside powers,
dominated it for one hundred and eighty years, and made it during all
that time the main steadying influence in Greek politics. Twice it was
enlarged into an Hellenic league, first during the three years of the
great Persian invasion (480-478 B.C.), and again for ten years
after the dissolution of the Athenian empire (405-395 B.C.).
On the earlier occasion, the ephors felt relieved of an intolerable
burden when in 477 B.C. the Ægean cities, over four hundred
and twenty in number, abandoned Spartan for Athenian leadership. And
in the forty-six years that followed, not they but the Athenians were
the aggressors. During that epoch of democratic fervor,[40] it was an
uphill struggle for the champions of aristocracy to maintain their
position; and the war of political principles was even carried into
Sparta, when, in 464 B.C., the Helots of Messenia made a last desperate
fight for their liberty. The Spartans profited, however, during the
last third of the fifth century B.C., by the discredit into
which democracy came among cultivated people through the mistakes and
excesses of Athens; and at the end of the Peloponnesian War they were
again able to make the Peloponnesian league an Hellenic league by
incorporating into it Athens and the Ægean cities which they had just
"liberated" from Athenian tyranny.
A successful war may strengthen a nation, but not when victory lays
upon it a task that is beyond its powers to perform. Such would have
been the case had Athens won at Syracuse. Such was the issue of
Ægospotami. This we can readily see by examining briefly, first the
situation in Sparta, and then the position of Sparta in Hellas, during
the existence of her second Hellenic league.
The Spartans of military age now numbered only about two thousand. War
had done its part in reducing them to this handful. Close intermarriage
had done even more. In the case of large families, the subdivision of
lots which then occurred impoverished sons so greatly that they could
no longer stand the expense of the military clubs, upon membership in
which, however, citizenship depended. So far did the evil implicit in
this condition go that brothers refused to divide their inheritance,
and possessed not only one house, but one wife in common. Men could
neither buy land nor sell it, but they might acquire it by marriage
or by gift; and since the rich, then as always, tended to marry among
themselves, property, and with it citizenship, remained eventually in
the possession of a very few. Much of the land, which was the only
wealth, came into the hands of women. A plutocracy thus developed
in Sparta as the number of the Spartans diminished; and in this way
the domestic situation became still further ominous by the growth in
the city of a considerable body of disfranchised and discontented
"inferiors" and half-breeds.
The perils which attended this situation are revealed by the following
incident as described by Xenophon in his Hellenica:[41]—
"Now Agesilaus (401-360 B.C.) had not been seated on the
throne one year when, as he sacrificed one of the appointed sacrifices
in behalf of the city, the soothsayer warned him, saying: 'The gods
reveal a conspiracy of the most fearful character'; and when the king
sacrificed a second time, he said: 'The aspect of the victims is now
even yet more terrible'; but when he had sacrificed for the third
time, the soothsayer exclaimed: 'O Agesilaus, the sign is given to
me, even as though we were in the very midst of the enemy.' Thereupon
they sacrificed to the deities who avert evil and work salvation, and
so barely obtained good omens, and ceased sacrificing. Nor had five
days elapsed after the sacrifices were ended, ere one came bringing
information to the ephors of a conspiracy, and named Cinadon as the
ringleader; a young man robust of body as of soul, but not one of the
peers. Accordingly, the ephors questioned their informant: 'How say
you the occurrence is to take place?' and he who gave the information
answered: 'Cinadon took me to the limit of the market-place, and bade
me count how many Spartans there were in the market-place; and I
counted—king, and ephors, and elders, and others, maybe forty. But
tell me, Cinadon, I said to him, why have you bidden me count them?
and he answered me: Those men, I would have you know, are your sworn
foes; and all those others, more than four thousand, congregated there
are your natural allies. Then he took and showed me in the streets,
here one and there two of our enemies, as we chanced to come across
them, and all the rest our natural allies; and so again running through
the list of Spartans to be found in the country districts, he still
kept harping on that string: Look you, on each estate one foeman—the
master—and all the rest allies!' The ephors asked: 'How many do you
reckon are in the secret of the matter?' The informant answered: 'On
that point also he gave me to understand that there were by no means
many in their secret who were prime movers of the affair, but those
few to be depended on; and to make up, said he, we ourselves are in
their secret, all the rest of them—Helots, enfranchised, inferiors,
Periœcs, one and all. Note their demeanor when Spartans chance to be
the topic of their talk. None of them can conceal the delight it would
give him if he might eat up every Spartan raw.' Then, as the inquiry
went on, the question came: 'And where did they propose to find arms?'
The answer followed: 'He explained that those of us, of course, who
are enrolled in regiments have arms of our own already, and as for
the mass—he led the way to the war foundry, and showed me scores and
scores of knives, of swords, of spits, hatchets, and axes, and reaping
hooks. Anything or everything, he told me, which men use to delve
in the earth, cut timber, or quarry stone, would serve our purpose;
nay, the instruments used for other arts would in nine cases out of ten
furnish weapons enough and to spare, especially in dealing with unarmed
antagonists.' Once more being asked what time the affair was to come
off, he replied his orders were not to leave the city."
The ephors, wishing to remove Cinadon from Sparta without suspicion,
sent him on a mission to Aulon. He was to arrest certain persons, and
among them "a woman, the fashionable beauty of the place—supposed
to be the arch-corruptress of all Lacedæmonians, young and old, who
visited Aulon." His escort seized him instead and wrested from him
the names of his accomplices. "His fate was to be taken out forthwith
in irons, just as he was, and to be placed with his two hands and
his neck in the collar, and so under scourge and goad to be driven,
himself and his accomplices, round the city. Thus upon the heads of
those," concludes the pious Xenophon, "was visited the penalty of their
offense."
Beset with dangers such as this, the Spartans had to tread warily. They
drafted Periœcs into their army so as to make it about fifty-six
hundred strong. They picked out Helots, trained and emancipated them,
and used them abroad as soldiers. They took mercenaries into their
service and distributed them according to local needs under Spartan
captains, acting always, however, on requests from local governments.
They got large contingents of troops from their old allies, whom,
however, they left free of tribute, financing their government with a
thousand talents raised annually from the former allies of Athens. With
the funds thus secured they hired rowers and marines for the warships
which their allies furnished and thus patrolled the sea as well as
the land. They got a moral mandate for empire by upholding everywhere
aristocracy, real or sham, against democracy, and by assuming the rôle
of champion of Greece against the barbarians. This did not prevent
them, however, from forming an alliance with Dionysius I,[42] who had
just made himself tyrant of Syracuse, or from working in harmony with
Persia as long as that was possible.
"The growth of Lacedæmon," said Timolaus of Corinth[43] in 394
B.C., "seems to me just like that of some mighty river—at
its sources small and easily crossed, but as it further and further
advances, other rivers discharge themselves into its channel, and its
stream grows ever more formidable. So it is with the Lacedæmonians.
Take them at the starting-point and they are but a single community,
but as they advance and attach city after city they grow more numerous
and more resistless. I observe that when people wish to take wasps'
nests—if they try to capture the creatures on the wing, they are
liable to be attacked by half the hive; whereas, if they apply fire to
them ere they leave their homes, they will master them without scathe
themselves. On this principle, I think it best to bring about the
battle within the hive itself, or, short of that, as close to Lacedæmon
as possible."
The advice was sound; but the wasps could not be caught at home. It
was not till Athens had beaten the Spartans at sea, and Thebes had
beaten them on land, that Epaminondas reached the hive. He then broke
up the Peloponnesian league, emancipated the Helots of Messenia, and
substituted, for the once considerable power which had saved the
Peloponnesus from serious attack for two hundred years, a multitude of
little city-states such as existed elsewhere in Greece—rather, such as
came to exist elsewhere in European Greece, when, a few years later,
with Epaminondas's death, the supremacy of Thebes ceased, Athens was
abandoned by the states which had joined her against Sparta, and the
empire of Dionysius I in the west dissolved, shortly after his death,
into its constituent parts.
Theoretically, conditions should then have been ideal. In the case
of the Greeks the deep-seated human instinct to compare the present
disadvantageously with the past was not checked by a theory of
evolution conceived as progress, such as misleads many sensible people
nowadays to imagine that the farther back they go the more rudimentary
political and social conditions become. The golden age of the Greeks
lay in "the dark backward and abysm of time." In early days, before
the rise of the Spartan and Athenian empires, every city, so it was
believed, had "lived in peace, free and autonomous, and in secure
possession of its own territory." For more than a century men had
struggled to bring back those blessed times, and now at length their
efforts, it might have seemed, had been crowned with success. Every
city in Greece, great and small, had apparently regained its liberty
and autonomy.
At the same time men had made a persistent effort to reëstablish in
each city "the constitution of the fathers," and under the Spartan
hegemony the favorable opportunity for success in this campaign had
seemingly come. But it then appeared that, apart from the general
understanding that citizenship was to be reserved to those who could
afford to pay taxes and provide themselves with the arms and knowledge
of arms necessary for fighting, no two persons agreed as to what the
"ancestral constitution" was. It proved to be in reality the ideal of
each reformer and each politician, and since the age was one in which
most of the ordinary restraints were lacking as they seldom are in
the history of civilized man, the transition from an unpopular ideal
to a conspiracy was apt to be singularly abrupt. The outcome of the
attempts to restore the urban particularism of mediæval Greece and
the constitutions of the over-praised olden time was unsatisfactory
to everybody. Barren wars of city against city instead of large
enterprises directed by imperial ambitions; an atmosphere murky with
plots and counter-plots, where once there had blown the strong wind
of steady civic progress; and, in addition, national disaster and
humiliation despite manifest military superiority—these were the
bitter fruits of political reaction in Greece during the Spartan
supremacy.
It was in this unhappy age that the science of government was born,
and it bears its birthmark to the present day. The midwife, to use
his own homely figure, was Socrates, whom the Athenians, tarred on by
Aristophanes, put to death "for corrupting the youth and introducing
strange gods." He, of course, denied the accusations, and claimed
that he deserved the honors of a public benefactor for taking men
individually and showing to them how ill they understood the virtues
on which all societies are based, to wit, justice, wisdom, temperance,
and courage. No one, he thought, could make them better citizens except
by promoting truth and dispelling ignorance about these things. His
execution consecrated his mission. It was the sowing of dragon's teeth
from which sprang up armed warriors, of whom the most doughty were
Plato and Aristotle.
The vice of the Socratic school was a noble one—an enormous
overestimate of the value of education. "Truth is the beginning of
every good thing," says Plato,[44] "both to gods and men; and he who
would be blessed and happy, should be from the first a partaker of
the truth, that he may live a true man as long as possible, for then
he can be trusted; but he is not to be trusted who loves voluntary
falsehood and he who loves involuntary falsehood is a fool." There was,
of course, only one truth; which, being discovered, should be taught;
which, being taught, must be acted upon, since, if men really knew what
was right, it was impossible, Plato thought—ignoring the frailty or
obstinacy of the human will—that they should not do it. "Discover the
truth." "Teach it." These are the two Socratic commandments.
I have no intention to make an exposition of the political philosophy
of Plato and Aristotle,[45] but to do something much more modest: to
explain wherein and wherefore they missed the truth in the matter of
Greek imperialism, and to notice some of the historic forces which they
disregarded. If I deal with the Laws rather than the Republic of
Plato, it is because it is his more mature and less imaginative work.
It was upon his immediate present that Plato focused his attention;
to the analysis of its political and moral strength and weakness that
he turned his penetrating intelligence; for its betterment that he
wrote and taught and suffered. The past he peopled with creations
of his own exuberant fancy, of popular misconception, of defective
knowledge. He can be easily convicted of gross historical errors. And
what is more serious; he has no real regard for historical truth and
no sense whatever for the real factors in historical developments.
Without the slightest qualm of conscience, and without taking the least
pains to ascertain the facts, Plato alters the divine and profane
history of his people to make it serve his purpose. And he does this
on principle: "The legislator," he says,[46] "has only to reflect and
find out what belief will be of the greatest public advantage, and
then use all his efforts to make the whole community utter one and
the same word in their songs and tales and discourses all their life
long." To disagreeable things in the sacred story he gives a short
shrift. Since the gods are perfect, every report that tends to tarnish
the lustre of their reputation must be false. The history of mankind
is solved by a similar formula; since justice is the sine qua non of
public and private prosperity and happiness, all reports which affirm
the conjunction of injustice with well-being, or of righteousness with
misfortune, need correction or suppression.[47] History, accordingly,
becomes a happy hunting-ground for edifying stories. It at once ceases
to yield lessons, which, being grounded in the realities of human
experience, are less apropos, perhaps, than the political theorist may
like, but are alone valuable.
Plato's absorption in the present led him to misread not only the past,
but also the future. For the false standard with which he measured
past policies and institutions is not less characteristic than the
false judgment which he formed of the drift of contemporary events.
The future belonged, not, as he dreamed, to the autonomous, archaizing
city-state, but to the movement for their unification which he
condemned. He tried to mend city constitutions when the world required
the creation of larger territorial states. He watched with attention
domestic politics when foreign politics were chiefly worth watching.
A glance at the ideal state portrayed by Plato in the Laws[48] shows
in what sense he read his history. His citizens are to have "their
food and clothing provided for them in moderation," the latter through
"entrusting the practice of the arts to others," the former through
getting from the land, which slaves till for a part of the produce, "a
return sufficient for men living temperately." They are to have "common
tables in which the men are placed apart, and near them are the common
tables of their families, of their daughters and mothers, which, day
by day, the officers, male and female, are to inspect." They are not,
however, to live fattening like beasts; for "such a life is neither
just nor honorable, nor can he who lives it fail of meeting his due;
and the due reward of the idle fatted beast is that he should be torn
to pieces by some other valiant beast whose fatness is worn down by
brave deeds and toil."
Naturally, Plato does not wish his ideal citizens to meet such an
ignominious end. He proceeds to prescribe a régime for them in which,
after a most carefully nurtured childhood, three years are spent on
reading and writing, three more on learning to play the lyre, and
others still on the study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and law,
and on the practice of dancing, wrestling, running, hunting, and many
kinds of military exercises. The citizens to be protected from fatty
degeneration in this way are, it should be observed, the women as well
as the men.
The children's stories are prescribed and are unalterable; so are the
music and the dancing and the poetry. The law studied is that of the
commonwealth, with which every citizen is to be inoculated. The moral
and religious ideas are to be fixed, and death is the penalty set for
heterodoxy. Everything is to be made and kept rigid, the number of the
houses, of the farms, of the citizens, of the children, of traders,
artisans, and foreigners, the maximum and minimum wealth of everybody.
In other words, the community which Plato in his old age proposed as a
model is not a thorough-going communism, like that of his more youthful
and more famous Republic. It is simply a system of governmental
control carried to its logical extreme—an emended and perfected
edition of Sparta.
That a well-born Athenian, disgusted at the license which resulted from
letting people live as they pleased, should have planned to put all
citizens in an administrative strait-jacket, is not surprising. Many of
us to-day object to a "wide-open town." But that Plato, whose practice
in discussion was "to follow the argument whithersoever it might
lead," should have idealized a state in which freedom of thought and
freedom of speech were denied altogether, shows (even if we make all
allowances for the idea, that, if things were perfect and there was but
one perfection, all changes must be harmful) how unreal and involved in
self-contradiction was the thinking of the best Greeks in this age of
reaction.
The theory of individual liberty, as applied in Athens, had led, in
the economic sphere, thought Plato, to the exploitation of the poor
by the rich, and, in the political sphere, to the exploitation of the
rich by the poor. Plato, therefore, discarded the theory of individual
liberty altogether. He was dominated by a general view of life in which
all the natural human instincts and cravings were harmful. The only
hope for states was that they should educate their best citizens to be
their governors. Plato, accordingly, nailed to the mast the doctrine
of salvation by education, and despaired of all states in which the
carefully trained few of high intellectual capacity did not make the
laws and enforce them. Of all these ideas the Athenian democracy was
the negation, and Plato hated it with the bitterness of a passionate
nature.
That Plato hated the Periclean democracy as a political system is also
intelligible from his hatred of imperialism upon which it was based;
and there are those to-day, who, for the same reason and also because
of a mistaken notion of its dependence upon slavery, find Athenian
democracy justified, if at all, by its fruits; who contemplate its art
and literature with the same mingled feelings with which they view
the hectic beauty of the consumptive. Plato is not of their company.
The fruits he finds even more deleterious than the stock which bore
them. "In music," he writes,[49] meaning thereby poetry interpreted
by the voice with musical accompaniment,—"in music it was that
there first arose the universal conceit of omniscience and general
lawlessness;—freedom came following afterwards, and men, fancying
that they knew what they did not know, had no longer any fear, and the
absence of fear begets shamelessness. For what is this shamelessness,
which is so evil a thing, but the insolent refusal to regard the
opinion of the better by reason of an over-daring sort of liberty?"
Whereto the Spartan who is his interlocutor says: "Very true."
"Consequent upon this freedom," continues the speaker, "comes the
other freedom, of disobedience to rulers; and then the attempt to
escape the control and exhortation of father, mother, elders, and
when near the end, the control of the laws also; and at the very end
there is the contempt of oaths and pledges, and no regard at all for
the gods,—herein they exhibit and imitate the old so-called Titanic
nature, and come to the same point as the Titans when they rebelled
against God, leading a life of endless evils."
The modern critic, even if he endorses the sharp indictment of
Euripides, the poet of the most radical democracy,—that he destroyed
the character of Attic tragedy by introducing into it elements from
melodrama and the operatic concert, by perverting the grand style of
its text and music by vulgar flippancies and incongruous measures,
by substituting for artistic development of characters and plot
disturbing discussions of the woman question and the latest sensations
in philosophy and science, by turning the ancient gods and heroes
into burlesque through having them argue and act like contemporary
sycophants and sophists,—the modern critic, even Professor Shorey,[50]
for example, in his spirited defense of the Sophoclean drama, would
abandon Plato, I fancy, when he makes the drama the fundamental cause
for the decline of Athenian greatness.
In his Laws, Plato is dealing with what, chastened by age and
experience, he regarded as correctible things. The lust for private
possessions, for land and home, wife and children, he once placed in
this category, but he does so no longer; and in other respects he makes
wide concessions to human frailties. With greed for wealth, however,
he concluded no truce. It is Greeks, mark you, of whom Plato[51] says:
"Love of wealth wholly absorbs men, and never for a moment allows them
to think of anything but their own private possessions; on this the
soul of every citizen hangs suspended, and can attend to nothing but
his daily gain. Mankind are ready to learn any branch of knowledge,
and to follow any pursuit which tends to this end, and they laugh at
every other.... From an insatiate love of gold and silver, every man
will stoop to any art or contrivance, seemly or unseemly, in the hope
of becoming rich; and will make no objection to performing any action,
holy or unholy and utterly base, if only like a beast he have the power
of eating and drinking all kinds of things, and procuring for himself
in every sort of way the gratifications of his lusts."
Such were the evil conditions of the present when one citizen despoiled
his fellow and every city its neighbor. It had been different in
the past. Before the introduction of luxurious tastes to stimulate
inventions and of coined money to destroy a sense for the natural
limits of wealth, men had "worked in summer, commonly, stripped and
barefoot,[52] but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They fed
on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making
noble cakes and loaves; these they served up on a mat of reeds or on
clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew
or myrtle. And they and their children feasted, drinking of the wine
which they had made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the
praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. They took
care that their families did not exceed their means: having an eye to
poverty or war." But it was not to an age of such rude simplicity that
Plato would recall his contemporaries. He would, indeed, restore the
virtues which existed among the early country folk before the rise
of modern cities and the establishment of the capitalistic régime;
but, while hostile to transmarine commerce, retail trade, industries,
banking, interest, and all other accompaniments of interchange between
cities, which he regarded as generally undesirable and provocative of
wars and conquests, he imagines his ideal people in possession of city
culture and the articles of luxury and convenience secured through
the capitalistic organization. His citizens are, indeed, farmers, but
they are gentlemen farmers, who have their money invested in land and
slaves and live on their dividends, free to devote their leisure to
athletic, intellectual, and other worthy pursuits. They will be free
from greed of wealth because they all possess a competency, which Plato
defines as enough to live "temperately," Aristotle as enough to live
"with liberality and temperance." Neither philosopher thinks of poverty
except as the ordainer of body- and soul-destroying work, work which
degrades those who have to perform it, and makes slavery their natural
condition. Plato and Aristotle would make all tillers of the soil and
workers at the trades and crafts slaves and aliens. They were to exist
simply to provide the conditions of "good living" for their masters
or superiors; whereupon "we must not conceal from ourselves," says
Aristotle,[53] "that a country as large as the Babylonian or some other
of boundless extent will be required if it is to support five thousand
citizens in idleness." Even in America, where, to use the current
formula, ten per cent of the people own ninety per cent of the wealth,
the economic situation proposed as ideal by the most enlightened
reformers of the fourth century B.C. has hardly been reached. Whether
Plato failed to realize that he was condemning nine tenths of people
to perpetual bondage and ignorance; or, realizing it, refused to think
of anything but the perfection of the few, the conclusion is alike
inevitable: he had failed miserably to trace to their historical causes
both the cultural barrenness of Sparta and the astounding fertility of
his own Athens.
Had Aristotle lived in the commonwealth of Plato's Laws, he must
have suffered the same fate that Socrates suffered in Athens. For,
though far from ungrateful to his teacher, he was not a docile pupil.
By birth he was a Stagirite, by experience a citizen of the world. He
did not, like Plato, form his youthful impressions in a milieu that
was poisoned with bitterness at a demoralized democracy. The Athens
to which he came as a lad of seventeen was still a democracy, and a
very unhealthy one at that, and for it he had little liking; but his
was a more dispassionate nature than was Plato's. He was not a great
historian.[54] That the discovery in Egypt in 1890 of one of his many
lost historical works has proven clearly; but he was a very learned
man, and perhaps came to as close a comprehension of earlier Greek
history as was possible for a political philosopher who had nothing to
guide him but the unscientific methods then in vogue for investigating
the past.
By its very nature science is objective. It is not inhuman, but it is
deliberately impersonal. In this respect it contrasts sharply with the
arts. The greatest artist may be the man who embodies in his verse or
stone or colors moods and thoughts which must be in "widest commonalty
spread," but which constitute in the aggregate his own self or soul.
History is of course a science, but not one of the common type. Unlike
the ordinary scientist, the scientific historian has to practice, not
self-suppression, but self-expansion. He must become conscious, so far
as that is possible, of the prejudices and special interests of his
own age, and, divested of them, he must migrate into a strange land
in order to bring back thence a report that is at once an unbiased
account of what he has seen and a story that is comprehensible to his
fellow-citizens, or, at least, to his fellow-historians. He dare not
treat the past as one in spirit with the present, or as resolvable
into precisely the same factors. He must be alive to the existence of
many different pasts leading to the present in no pre-determinable
succession, much less progression. The points must make a line, but the
line may be of any conceivable curve. Aristotle was far from arriving
at a full appreciation of the difficulties of historical inquiry; but,
unlike Plato, he took infinite pains to acquire historical knowledge.
He did not idealize the constitutions of the olden times. Since all men
then carried daggers, the presumption, he says, is that they needed
them and used them. Since conditions where violence reigned must have
continued indefinitely, if political change had been prohibited, he
finds it good as well as inevitable that laws be modified from time to
time. The permanency of those of Sparta is worthy of high praise; but
he traces the corruption and decay of the Spartan state to failure to
make needed reforms. In general he strikes a much more just balance
between Spartan and Athenian achievement than does Plato.
The first test he applies to institutions, such as the family and the
state, is their naturalness—their source in the nature of man as that
is revealed in his history. He was well aware that a political science
that was based upon perfected human nature was, indeed, suited only
for "gods and sons of gods"; that the only principles of government
which had real value were those which had approved themselves in
practice. "All discoveries," he says,[55] "have been already made,
although in some cases they have not been combined, and in others, when
made, are not acted upon." "The Politics of Aristotle," says a recent
writer, "is the one great book on the science of government because it
is the only one which is wholly empirical."
That is too high praise. For the Politics of Aristotle differs
from the Prince of Machiavelli in other respects, of course, but
noticeably in that the Greek has moral ideals, the Italian none.
With Aristotle, as with Plato, the state has an ethical purpose. He
requires it to justify not only its acts but its existence. Iniquitous
governments might exist,—Aristotle's world was full of them, in
fact,—and his mind was too curious of all things political for him to
leave them out of his observation: he has, indeed, considered minutely
the ways and means for the preservation of all kinds of states, and
has shown therein that he had as keen an eye for the realities as
had Machiavelli himself. But he would never have permitted, much
less advised, his legislator to use foul means to establish a just
government or fair means to establish an unjust one.
On the establishment of governments, moreover, he spends very little
thought. This, however, is with Machiavelli the main matter, as he
himself says near the opening of the second part of his work: "The
chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are
good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the
state is not well armed, it follows that when they are well armed
they have good laws. I shall leave the laws out of the discussion
and shall speak of the arms." Had the Greek heard him he would have
scoffed at both the argument and the conclusion. The argument is, of
course, sophistical, and the conclusion saved only by the fact that
Machiavelli had already considered the political weapons with which
rulers should operate. The Politics is a handbook for legislators;
the Prince a set of instructions for potentates. For the latter the
ways and means of acquiring power was, in Machiavelli's judgment, the
all-important thing; whereas the legislator's possession of power is
taken for granted by Aristotle, and it is assumed throughout his entire
treatment that, if the lawgiver knows the constitution, the laws, and
the system of education which are best adapted to the economic, social,
and political conditions of his state, he can at once introduce them.
In a measure, therefore, the Prince and the Politics supplement
each other, though Aristotle would have been horrified at the idea.
For in his thinking, in anything approximating to an ideal world, each
city was free to order its internal affairs as it thought best, and,
having this liberty, if it was shown what was best, it must, according
to the Socratic psychology, immediately adopt it; whereas—to give the
devil his due—Machiavelli was actuated, in formulating his precepts
for Prince Lorenzo, by the vision of a united Italy, the realization of
which by his pupil was to wash away the crimes committed in subjecting
to his will the city-states of the peninsula. The conquest of Italy
was, accordingly, the goal of the ideal Prince's endeavor; whereas,
though Aristotle in one passage of the Politics[56] notes that "if
the Greeks were united in a single polity they would be capable of
universal empire," he regards such a union as highly undesirable. To
him a state that was not a city was a rudimentary and very imperfect
state. It ceased to be a state at all when it ceased to be free.
Hence a city could have subjects, that is to say, slaves, but not
dependencies. And since in his thinking it was natural inferiority
alone that justified slavery, and this was found especially among the
nations of Asia, and not at all in Greece, no Greek city could rightly
enslave the inhabitants of any other Greek city: it could wage war and
organize slave raids only against barbarians.
The birthmark which we have noted on Plato is an inheritance from
unreasoning hatred of democracy. That which mars above all the
political thinking of Aristotle comes from the aversion instinctively
felt by his age for imperialism. That this, too, is a disfigurement,
we may show in a few concluding remarks. "It is necessary," says
Aristotle[57] in concluding his plea that a mixed constitution is best
for the common run of states, "it is necessary to begin by assuming
a principle of general application, viz., that the part of the state
which desires the continuance of the polity ought to be stronger than
that which does not"; and he proceeds to point out that "strength"
consists neither in numbers, nor property, nor military or political
ability alone, but in all of them combined, so that regard has to
be taken of "freedom, wealth, culture, and nobility, as well as of
mere numerical superiority." Nothing could be more cold and objective
than the thinking of Aristotle on this important matter. Yet by an
extraordinary oversight he lets "strength" exert a decisive influence
within the city-states, while he ignores altogether the effect of
varying population, wealth, and political and military ability in
determining the relations between them.
The whole of the political thinking of Aristotle is dominated by the
idea that the world of men is made up of an infinite procession of
inferiors and superiors, the desire to forge ahead being one of the
most fundamental instincts of human beings. If an omniscient God were
to arrange the inhabitants of each city in a line according to their
real "strength," he would place few of them abreast. No Greek betrays
more naïvely than Aristotle does the national consciousness of the
Hellenes that they stood at the head of the honor roll of peoples. It
was, therefore, imperative upon them to conquer the Asiatics; for he
finds it to be a beneficent command of nature, issued primarily for the
advantage of the weaker, that superiors should rule inferiors.
Among moral philosophers Aristotle is characterized by his refusal
to let himself be led astray by a visionary ideal of human equality.
Nevertheless, while recognizing that Greek cities, even more than
individuals, differed in "strength," he refused to let the "strong"
use their advantage. He sets apart the sphere of interurban, that
is to say, international, relations as one in which the "universal
principle," that superior rule inferior, shall not apply. In a
visionary world, the "strong" man, on Aristotle's theory, is a "gentle"
man; but in the real world, he is a ruler. Had Aristotle not been
blinded by the prejudices of his age against imperialism, he must have
seen the necessity that in the real world the "strong" state would
also be the ruler. It is one of the enigmas of history that Aristotle
was the contemporary and subject of Philip II of Macedon, one of its
ironies that he was the tutor of Alexander the Great.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Schömann-Lipsius. Griechische Altertümer,^4 I
(1892), pp. 197 ff.
2. Bury, J.B. A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander
the Great (1900).
3. Meyer, Eduard. Geschichte des Altertums, V
(1902).
4. Niese, B. Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte und Landeskunde
Lakedämons: Die lakedämonischen Periöken. In Nachrichten der Gött.
Gesell. d. Wissenschaften (1906), pp. 101 ff.
5. Arnim, Hans von. Die politischen Theorien des Altertums
(1910).
6. Gomperz, Th. Greek Thinkers, III (1905),
IV (1912).
