Part 10

Another less heroic expedient for bringing about a permanent entente between cities was the grant of isopolity, or reciprocity of citizenship. In certain cases this was the concession of the passive rights of citizenship (civitas sine suffragio) to all citizens of a particular city who should take up residence in, or even merely visit, the territory of the grantor. Thus circumscribed, however, it amounted simply to an exchange of commercial privileges, and proved barren of political consequences in that each city reserved to itself complete control of its own policy, thus rendering impossible any advance in state building. It remained for the Romans to render this institution fruitful to an astonishing degree by making the legal exercise of Roman citizenship independent of migration to Rome.

Substantially the same result was achieved by the Greeks through what they termed sympolity, or joint citizenship. This was possessed from of old by rudimentary nations, like the Achæans and the Ætolians, among whom the towns and hamlets had never become independent and self-sufficient political units; so that the inhabitants were Achæans from Ægium, or Achæans from Cerynia, or Achæans from some other of the ten so-called cities of which the Achæan nation or league was constituted. In like fashion the Ætolian hamlets had a double citizenship. An essential part of this scheme, evidently, was that each city had an equal voice in the election of the officials of the league and in the settlement of all federal matters. And so satisfactory a safeguard of urban autonomy did this prove to be that in the last half of the third century B.C. city after city in the Peloponnesus outside the ancient limits of Achæa took the irrevocable step of acquiring Achæan citizenship in addition to its own; while in Central Greece the Ætolians by fair means or foul bestowed a dual citizenship upon all their neighbors. Athens and Sparta alone persisted in their isolation, the former on the strength of an international guarantee of autonomy, the latter in stubborn reliance upon its own powers. The other city-states entrusted to an international board, not for a definite or indefinite term of years, but for all future time, complete control of their foreign relations. Each city put permanently the international authority between itself and the outside world, thus escaping individual danger by the surrender of individual diplomacy.

In this way arose what by the general consent of historians and jurists is the most perfect state which antiquity produced. The antinomy between the city-state and the imperial spirit which had existed for centuries was reduced to a minimum by the nice balance of the federal system.

There were defects in the Achæan and Ætolian leagues which their statesmen did not remove. "Equality," says Aristotle, "is just, but only between equals." The cities which had an equal voice in the international board, like the modern nations which cast a vote each at the Hague Congress, were unequal in population and in wealth.

The Achæans and Ætolians came nearer than any ancient republicans to entrusting power to representatives; but, besides creating a large legislative council, constituted in successive years, in the one case, of different fractions of the citizens of each city, and in the other, of deputies apportioned to the constituent cities according to their size, they showed the ingrained distrust held by all Greeks for oligarchy by requiring the reference to a general assembly of all matters of high importance.

How to satisfy the just claims of those whom distance or lack of leisure prevented from coming to the meeting-place, they did not discover.

However, it was not these institutional imperfections which prevented the unification of Hellas in a single federation. For this result could not now be achieved by any triumph of political science. Antigonus Doson (229-221 B.C.) whose name ought not to be unknown where Callicratidas, Agesilaus, Iphicrates, and Phocion are household words, attempted with equal skill and generosity to combine the new federal idea with the old idea of a representative national congress meeting at Corinth under the hegemony of the king of Macedon; but the best that can be said of the combination he made is that despite its great promise and possibilities it proved unacceptable to Hellas, and hence ineffective. The situation had now got beyond the control of the Greek people. It may, perhaps, be realized best, if we imagine that the European nations of to-day, weakened politically by continuous emigration and incessant conflicts, economically, by the withdrawal of industry and commerce to more favorably situated districts under European control, let us say in the East, were to pool their diplomatic and military interests, and entrust them, not to a European parliament, but to warring Latin and Teutonic parliaments, and were to take this step only to escape the Russian peril and when America was already thundering at their shores, if that be imaginable, coming with irresistible might, at once to save and to destroy.

To describe how the Roman republic emancipated Greece from Macedon, impressed her will upon the Greek kingdoms of the East, and built up a universal empire of diverse fragments, lies beyond the scope of this book. We may note simply that to some cities she gave her citizenship, or polity, thus destroying their identity altogether; that to others she gave isopolity, or reciprocity of citizenship, and with it the local advantages preserved in Greece by sympolity, or joint citizenship, thus creating the municipality and organizing wards, so to speak, of the city of Rome all over Italy; that some (the socii, or Italian allies) she bound to herself by irrevocable treaties till she was forced to give them municipal status, and others (the "friends," amici, or the "friends and allies," amici et socii, in what later became the provinces) by understandings or temporary treaties till she had familiarized herself with deification of rulers, which was the Greek method of legalizing absolutism.

A word on this strange institution and I have finished this survey of the expedients devised by the Greeks to obscure, evade, and finally to justify imperialism. The Greek method of legalizing despotism was Alexander the Great's genial adaptation to state building of an idea which his tutor, Aristotle, had developed in his Politics. It was a means of uniting cities or provinces in an indissoluble whole while preserving, on the one hand, the superiority and freedom of action of the suzerain, be it an emperor or a republic, and, on the other hand, the self-respect of the inferior states, without which their status was politically intolerable. Deification of rulers did the impossible: it reconciled completely the antinomy between the city-state and imperialism. It resolved the antagonism into two harmonious duties; the duty of the ruler to command and of the subject to obey.

To Alexander the Great governments have been in serious debt for over two thousand years. From him to Kaiser Wilhelm II runs an unbroken line. So long as the world had many gods and did not believe in the supernatural power of any of them, there was no religious difficulty in adding to its stock another such deity in the person of the living monarch. With the decadence of polytheism, however, a slight change was necessary. In Constantine's time god-kings suffered the same fate as other pagan gods; but with a difference. The heathen gods became devils or were metamorphosed into saints.

The kings became men chosen for their high office by God, Most High. Crowned, usually by their predecessors, and anointed by God's priests, the patriarchs, they governed by divine right and acknowledged responsibility only to their Creator. In a less ecclesiastical world, as in modern Prussia, the kings crown themselves. But with these later developments we have no concern in this book. I shall endeavor, however, in chapters III-VI, to trace the growth of deification in the world-monarchy of Alexander the Great, and to make clear the purpose it served in the empires of the Ptolemies and Seleucids.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. de Coulanges, Fustel. La cité antique^7 (1879).

2. Busolt, G. Die griechischen Staats- und Rechtsaltertümer,^2 (1892). In Müller's Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, IV, 1.

3. Schömann-Lipsius. Griechische Alterthümer,^4 II (1892).

4. Francotte, H. La Polis grecque (1907).

5. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen (1910). In Hinneberg's Die Kultur der Gegenwart. Teil II, Abteilung IV, 1.

6. Zimmern, Alfred. The Greek Commonwealth (1911).

7. Keil, Bruno. Griechische Staatsaltertümer (1912). In Gercke and Norden's Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft, pp. 297 ff.

FOOTNOTES:

ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY

No form of government, or profession of political idea, saves a state from imperialism. Even this country, which is dedicated, as is no other of the modern great powers, to the concept of popular sovereignty; which uprears the structure of its state upon a belief in the essential equality of men, and treats, or at least aims to treat, as comparatively negligible the differences created by birth and race, education and religion, property and occupation;-even this idealistic republic has become an empire in our own time and almost without our perceiving it. M. Bouché-Leclercq has given a prominent place in his Leçons d'histoire romaine to the discomforting doctrine that the Romans conquered the world in spite of themselves--a debatable question, as he himself shows. It is not our sense of truth that is gratified when we are told that the beatitude, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," designates the English. Yet Seeley has maintained the thesis that the British empire was secured in a "prolonged fit of national absence of mind." Unwittingly, it seems, the modern foster-mother of liberal institutions has become the mistress of countless millions.

There never was a people which made the principle that all its citizens were equal a more live reality than the Athenians made it; and no state to my knowledge was more cunningly contrived to insure the government of the people than was theirs. Yet they became imperialists with ardor and conviction, and with this much of logical consequence, that, while they believed in democracy for everybody, they did not doubt that the Athenians had earned the right to rule both Greeks and barbarians by the acquisition of superior culture. Equality among its citizens Athens carefully distinguished from equality among all men.

The foundations of Athenian democracy and empire were laid by Themistocles, whose figure moves weird and gigantic through the golden mist in which Herodotus has enveloped the great Persian War. And it was this genial statesman, to whose unerring skill in discerning the course of coming events the austere historian Thucydides pays a rare tribute, who mapped out for his city the foreign policy by which it had the best chance of realizing its imperial ambition. Let it use its great fleet, which by fifteen years of persistent advocacy he had led the Athenians to build, as its arm of offense, and its impregnable walls, which he had enabled the Athenians to construct despite the treacherous opposition of Sparta, as a bulwark of defense and a basis for timely advance against its powerful continental rivals. Let it utilize the wave of democratic fervor then sweeping through Greece to consolidate its power within the Confederacy of Delos and to undermine and eventually to overthrow the leadership which Sparta, by the support of dying mediæval aristocracies, had hitherto possessed in Hellenic affairs. Let it make peace on advantageous terms with Persia; use the liberty thus secured to break the power of Sparta, and, on the basis of a consolidated Hellas, strike boldly for Athenian dominion of the world.

It seems almost incredible that a clear-headed man should have entertained a programme of such magnitude. But we must remember that never had human beings more clearly performed the obviously miraculous. We know, on the authority of a German military expert, that, had the host which followed Xerxes to Athens numbered the 5,283,220 men attributed to it by Herodotus "without taking count of women cooks, concubines, eunuchs, beasts of burden, cattle, and Indian dogs," its rear guard must have been still filing out of Sardis while its van was vainly storming Thermopylæ. But what Herodotus reports is what the Athenians believed. They had met and routed the might of all Asia. They had mastered in fair fight the conquerors of all other peoples. The world was theirs: it was merely a question of taking possession.

Themistocles had, accordingly, to reckon with a national self-confidence which knew no bounds. And this had been increased by famous victories of Cimon over the Persians, and a revolt of the Helots which disclosed the fatal weakness of Sparta, when in 461 B.C. the task of conducting the fierce current of national energy, first for fifteen years (461-446 B.C.) in a heroic, but fruitless, struggle by sea and land against the Greeks and Persians simultaneously, and then for fifteen further years (446-431 B.C.) in the prosecution of glorious works of peace, fell upon the broad shoulders of Pericles, Xanthippus's son.

It is conceded that there is no taskmaster so ruthless as one's own will. The impulse to action during this strenuous epoch came from the Athenian people itself, not from its chief statesman. That fact does not, however, diminish the credit of Pericles. The golden age of Greece is, properly speaking, a golden age of Athens, and to its birth many things contributed; but decisive among them, in addition to the intensity of national life already alluded to, was an unrivaled facility for great leaders to get into effective contact with the masses under conditions in which there was the fullest opportunity for men in general to use their natural powers to the utmost. This happy combination of creative genius and receptive multitude arose in the main from the democratic institutions of Athens; but, for the public and private wealth without which Athenian democracy proved unworkable, and for the imaginative stimulus which enterprises of great pitch and moment alone give, the possession of empire was, perhaps, essential.

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