Part 12

The office assigned by Pericles to this assembly of high-class amateurs was to choose the best among divergent policies proposed to it by citizens of exceptional endowment. The ecclesia by no means closed the door in the face of such real experts as it possessed. Thus it did not leave it to the council to draw up the specifications for the construction of the naval arsenals or any similarly technical job, but it could and did delegate such tasks to men of special competence. Nor was it so doctrinaire as to entrust the command of its expeditions or the conduct of its diplomacy to chance persons; but it both elected its generals, reëlected them as often as it cared to, and gave them special rights of calling and canceling meetings of the ecclesia and of laying proposals directly before them. It was, accordingly, aware of the difficulty and danger which it faced in settling questions of foreign policy, where the elements involved, being the resources, aims, sentiments, and traditions of other states, far transcended the knowledge of the common citizen; and where error might mean irreparable disaster; where, in fact, error did mean irreparable disaster.

The surest way to avoid error was to pick out a single individual of high character, intelligence, and competence, and give him cordial and resolute support in the policy he advocated. The ecclesia was accordingly a great "contest," or agon, of statesmen. The Athenians believed in competition. A public contest, in which excellence might be displayed and determined, was arranged to encourage effort in every conceivable employment. To digress a little, there was a contest of potters, as we learn from a gravestone on which an unknown affirms by a mighty oath that he was adjudged the first of all the potters of Attica. There were probably contests of painters and sculptors as well. There were contests of horse-breeders--the chariot- and running-races; contests of athletes of all ages in all kinds of physical exercises, of torch-racers on foot and on horseback; there were contests between the successive prytanies of the council, between detachments of cavalry, and between regiments of foot; at each of many festivals there were contests in singing of five choruses of boys and five choruses of men, each fifty voices strong, so that a single festival called for the training of five hundred singers annually and the production of ten new musical compositions; there were contests of rhapsodists in reciting Homer, contests of rhetoricians; above all contests of tragedians and contests of comedians, each tragic contest demanding twelve new plays annually and the participation of one hundred and eighty choral singers and dancers, each comic contest involving six new plays yearly and one hundred and forty-four choral singers and dancers. The rivalry which produces Olympic records and superdreadnaughts nowadays, the Athenians turned to advantage in art and music as well: with the result that the taste and skill of the artisan as well as the sculptor and painter, of the consumer as well as the producer, became well-nigh faultless; that in the hundred years of the empire close to two thousand plays of picked quality were written and staged in Athens, while during the same time from five to six thousand new musical compositions were made and presented. It is estimated that upwards of two thousand Athenians had to memorize the words and practice the music and dance figures of a lyric or dramatic chorus every year. Hence, a normal Athenian audience must have been composed in large part of ex-performers, a fact which students of Sophocles and Aristophanes would do well to bear constantly in mind.

The reward of victory in an athletic or musical contest was the glory and the prize. Great, indeed, was the reward which the victor in the supreme contest, the struggle for political leadership in the ecclesia, obtained. The man to whom the Athenians gave their confidence became stronger than a king. "In form," says Thucydides, "their government was a democracy: in reality it was the rule of their ablest citizen." The man who was vanquished in a chariot-race might be the victor on the next occasion. Not so the victim of a decisive political defeat. His fate was ostracism. That is to say, he was exiled without dishonor or loss of property for ten years. The way was thereby cleared for the victor. By this strange device the Athenians saved themselves for over two generations from the procrastination and uncertainty of distracted counsels. It was ostracism which made possible the uncrowned kingship of Themistocles, Cimon, and Pericles; and when, after the death of Pericles in 429 B.C., this institution failed them utterly, the Athenians were pulled this way and that by rival leaders; till finally, misled by Alcibiades and Cleophon, they were convicted by disaster of being unsound judges of foreign policy.

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There is nothing that dies so hard as a well-nurtured delusion. In the romantic-idealizing view of the Greeks which was long current, the Athenians found leisure for art, literature, and philosophy by having all their work done for them by their slaves. By this means, too, they were enabled to devote themselves freely to politics. If this were so, the inference of Calhoun was a sound one, that seen "in its true light" slavery was "the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world." The "first lie" is that the Athenians of the great age, whose dominant characteristic was their vibrant mental and physical activity, were in any sense men of leisure. The few among them who had slaves and other property to the extent of great wealth had to make and manage their own investments. The majority of the farmers had to till the land with their own hands. Many citizens--at least one third of the whole, in all probability--had to earn their living by selling their labor. This they could do easily in the time of the empire. For during that period of rapid commercial and industrial expansion the demand for labor was so great that the price could be regulated only by the constant import of slaves and by a steady stream of immigration from less prosperous parts of Greece. Outside labor served the purpose in Athens which immigrant labor serves in the United States to-day. With its growth grew the need that the material prosperity which occasioned it should endure. The problem of food-supply became progressively acute and the control of the sea was soon seen to be an economic necessity. More than one half of the grain sold on the Athenian market came ultimately from abroad, as did an even larger proportion of the raw materials of Athenian industry. "The Athenians are the only people in the Hellenic and barbarian world," wrote an Athenian aristocrat in about 420 B.C., "who are able to control an abundant supply of raw materials. For if a state is rich in timber for shipbuilding, where will it find a market for it if not with the masters of the sea? If another abounds in iron or bronze or linen yarn, where will it find a market except with the sea-lord? Yet this is the stock from which ships are made in Athens. One city yields timber to her, another iron, a third bronze, a fourth linen yarn, a fifth wax, and so on. Moreover, Athens prevents her rivals from transporting goods to other countries than Attica by the threat of driving them from the sea altogether."

The demands put upon the time of Athenian citizens by the state were enormous, but not such as to cripple economic production. A comparison with modern conditions will make this clear. A little less frequently than once a week the ecclesia met, but the attendance was generally less than one tenth of those qualified. That represents a suspension of work roughly equivalent to our Saturday afternoons and legal holidays. A little oftener than once a week a contest or other public festival occurred, and to these there was, it seems, a pretty general resort. They correspond to our fair-days and Sundays. Preparation for the contests was, perhaps, not more destructive of money-earning time than are our collegiate and university courses. During their nineteenth and twentieth years young Athenians of the upper third trained for the army; but it was not till a century after Pericles's death that universal military service for a similar period was made compulsory--as in modern Europe. We may assume that at least two years of every citizen's life was required for deliberative and administrative work; and, having regard to the imperial service, we may, perhaps, advance this requirement to three. That is an enormous enlargement of modern demands. The same ratio would give the United States two million and a half or three million public employees, exclusive of postmasters and postal clerks, tax-collectors, and day laborers of every description. But a bald comparison of this sort is misleading. Athens regularly employed a committee of ten to do one man's work, with the result that all of them were free to give nine tenths of their time to their private business. The council during the year and the jury courts at its expiry were there to insure the state that, even if his colleagues would let him, any particular official did not neglect his public duties. Nor was the Athenian practice wildly extravagant so long as the magistrate received, not a living salary, but an indemnity equal only to a common workman's daily wage. The Athenians employed four hundred or even two thousand jurors where we employ twelve; but they had neither high salaried judges nor exacting lawyers to pay, since the judicial system worked without either. The juryman's fee, moreover, was a meagre indemnity, comparable to the old-age pension paid in the progressive countries of modern Europe.

The payment of indemnities for service in the council, the magistracies, the jury courts, and for attendance in the theatre, music-hall, and stadion, was a Periclean innovation. He did not intend to create a class of salaried officials; nor yet to make an advance toward communism. His ideal was political, not economic, equality--to enable all, irrespective of wealth or station, to use the opportunities and face the obligations which democracy brought in its train. Like all the great democratic leaders who preceded him, he was a nobleman by birth and breeding, and, like them, he did not doubt for a moment that the culture which ennobled the life of his class would dignify and uplift that of the masses also. To give the workingman the political insight and knowledge of the Eupatrids; to lend to him the grace and elasticity of movement which physical culture gave them; to fill his memory with the noble thoughts set in melodious and stirring words which they got from their intimacy with great poetry; to inspire in him, though a mere artisan, an artist's taste and fervor for formal beauty--that was to bless him with more than leisure. It was to unite the whole people in a community of high ideas and emotions. It was to make them a nation of noblemen. We do not wonder much that in the furtherance of this cause the men of large wealth in Athens volunteered to assume in turn financial and personal responsibility for the support of the theatre, the opera-house, the stadion, and the gymnasia. It was a heavy burden, but, in the absence of a regular property or income tax, generosity became at once a duty and a wise precaution.

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A nation of noblemen is a luxury for which somebody has to pay. Athens, in Pericles's memorable phrase, was "the school of Hellas." It was right, he thought, that the Hellenes should sacrifice something for their education. He had tried to make them all contributory allies of Athens, but had failed in the attempt. As a good schoolmaster he was determined, none the less, to hold those "well in hand" whom he had under his care.

The physical means to this end was the control of the sea. The advantages of sea power in warfare, in enabling the holder of it to circumscribe according to his convenience the area of military action, as well as in facilitating mobilization, transport, and communications, were not perceived for the first time by the English Admiralty, much less by Clausewitz and Captain Mahan. They are stated in the clearest terms by a contemporary of Pericles. Here is what he says: "The subjects of a power which is dominant by land have it open to them to form contingents from several small states and to muster in force to battle. But with the subjects of a naval power it is different. As far as they are groups of islands (and the whole world, we may remark in passing, is now simply a magnified Ægean Archipelago) it is impossible for their states to meet together for united action, for the sea lies between them, and the dominant power is master of the sea. And even if it were possible for them to assemble in some single island unobserved, they would only do so to perish of famine. And as to the states subject to Athens which are not islanders, but situated on the continent, the larger are held in check by need and the small ones absolutely by fear, since there is no state in existence which does not depend upon imports and exports and these she will forfeit, if she does not lend a willing ear to those who are masters of the sea. In the next place, a power dominant by sea can do certain things which a land power is debarred from doing; as, for instance, ravage the territory of a superior, since it is always possible to coast along to some point, where either there is no hostile force to deal with or merely a small body; and in case of an advance in force on the part of the enemy they can take to their ships and sail away. Such a performance is attended by less difficulty than that experienced by the army marching along the seaboard to the rescue. Again, it is open to a power so dominating by sea to leave its own territory and sail off on as long a voyage as you please. Whereas the land power cannot place more than a few days' journey between itself and its own territory, for marches are slow affairs; and it is not possible for an army on the march to have food supplies to last for any great length of time. Such an army must either march through friendly territory or it must force a way by victory in battle. The voyager meanwhile has it in his power to disembark at any point where he finds himself in superior force; or, at the worst, to coast by until he reaches either a friendly district or an enemy too weak to resist. Again, those diseases to which the fruits of the earth are liable as visitations from heaven fall severely on a land power, but are scarcely felt by the naval power, for such sicknesses do not visit the whole earth everywhere at once.... There is just one thing which the Athenians lack. Supposing they were the inhabitants of an island, and were still, as now, rulers of the sea, they would have had it in their power to work whatever mischief they liked and suffer no evil in return."

At all costs Athens must retain control of the sea. That meant to keep the fleet constantly in fighting trim. In the effort the Athenians made the most heroic financial and personal sacrifices, demonstrating clearly that popular government need not be self-indulgent. Neither the aristocracy in England nor Napoleon in France was as hard a taskmaster of the people as the majority which ruled in Athens. Between 410 and 402 B.C.--a time of great economic distress--a well-to-do citizen was called upon to expend twenty thousand franks--which are perhaps equal in purchasing power to as many dollars--on what we may call national education and entertainment. His taxes on the account of the fleet amounted in the same years to double as much, or forty-three thousand franks. Great as was the burden of the rich, that of the commons was conceded by their adversaries to have been still greater. "In the first place," writes an aristocrat in about 420 B.C., "it is only just that the poorer classes and the 'people' of Athens should have the advantage over the men of birth and wealth, seeing that it is the people who man the fleet and put round the city her girdle of power. The steersman, the boatswain, the lieutenant, the look-out-man at the prow, the shipwright--these are the people who engird the city with power far rather than her heavy infantry and men of birth and quality." Plutarch tells us that on a peace footing Athens kept a fleet of sixty ships on the sea for eight months of every year. To man such a squadron 10,200 rowers, 480 officers, and 600 marines would be required. In other words, one quarter of all the citizens of Athens would have lived on their battleships for three quarters of every year. We might believe this report, if it were not contradicted by Aristotle, who in a place, where exaggeration, not reduction, is suspected, makes the fleet of Athens, which was constantly in service in time of war, consist only of twenty guard-ships. Hence one twelfth and not one quarter of all the Athenians were on active naval duty during the sailing season of almost every year. In addition, two thousand men were drafted yearly by lot to serve in garrisons throughout the empire; so that, if these are added to the seven hundred (?) imperial magistrates, and the five hundred guards of the arsenals, nearly another one twelfth of the citizens was involved.

This computation takes no account of the demands of naval warfare. In the Athenian dockyards lay ready for action four hundred battleships, from which the requisite number was selected for each particular expedition. If two hundred and fifty vessels were mobilized, as occasionally happened, nearly fifty thousand additional sailors were required. With the use of every possible citizen Athens could not produce such a number. She commonly did her utmost and called upon the allies for the rest.

It is true that tribute was collected from the allies to enable Athens to build the ships and pay the sailors; but it is also true that, in addition, huge sums were contributed for mobilization expenses by rich Athenians and were advanced for heavy war expenses by the Athenian treasury. And Athens gave freely not only of her money but also of her blood. The death roll of one of the ten corps into which the Athenians were divided for army and navy purposes is extant for the year 459 B.C. "Of the Erechtheid phyle," it runs, "these are they who died in the war, in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, at Halieis, in Ægina, at Megara, in the same year"; and one hundred and seventy-two names follow. It was not the year of a great battle, or of an Athenian disaster, yet in it the death rate must have been nearly twice as great as the birth rate; so costly in lives was the empire to its lords in war-time.

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On three specific points and on one general ground, contemporaries both within and without Athens assailed the treatment accorded by the Periclean democracy to its subjects. In no instance, however, is the charge of misbehavior established conclusively, though in this matter, as in so many others in the history of Greece, our judgment is dependent upon the point at which we transfer our sympathy from the city-states, which were the bearers of culture in the Greek Middle Ages, to the whole people, for whose progress and independence urban particularism was finally fatal. "Surely Hellas is insulted with a dire insult," declared the opponents of Pericles, "and manifestly subjected to tyranny when she sees that, with her own enforced contributions for the war, we are gilding and bedizening our city, which, for all the world like a wanton woman, adds to her wardrobe precious stones and costly statues and temples worth their millions." To this accusation the proper retort was, not that having provided adequate protection against Persia, Athens was free to spend the money contributed by the subjects in any way she pleased; for the logical inference was then that the contributions were excessive. Pericles may not have cared to be logical, but he could not ignore forms. Had he been able to show, as has been claimed recently, that he used for building purposes only the sixtieth of the tribute, which had been dedicated as the first fruits to Athena, he would never have been attacked at all. Evidently, he spent on Athenian public works much larger sums derived indirectly from the tribute, for which course the defense actually made seems to have been that the money was due Athens for losses sustained during the invasion of Xerxes and for sums advanced to the war fund during the continuance of the struggle with Persia. In any case the tribute paid was a mere bagatelle as compared with what the subjects saved through having no fleets of their own to maintain.

The charge is more serious that in order to enjoy "the steady receipt of salaries throughout the year derived from the court fees"; to "manage the affairs of the subjects while seated at home without the expense of naval expeditions"; to "preserve the partisans of democracy and ruin its opponents"; to boost the business of hotel keepers and such ilk in Athens, and to win for the common citizens the flattery and consideration that would be shown otherwise only to generals and ambassadors, the Athenians "compelled the allies to voyage to Athens in order to have their cases tried." For it seems clear that the law courts at Athens were usually so clogged with litigation that the gain in having a model code of law and in escaping the fierce partisanship of the local tribunals was largely neutralized by the added expense and humiliation. The real justification of the practice was that it obviated the necessity of sending out naval expeditions.

In the third place Athens took from the allies lands and settled them with impecunious Athenians; but in payment therefor reductions of tribute were given. On the other hand, thousands from the allied cities migrated to Athens, and, while not escaping military or financial service, or obtaining Athenian citizenship, they were cordially welcomed, and enjoyed to the full the commercial and industrial advantages of the metropolis. Again, Athenians often found it less profitable to invest capital in Attic land, which was exposed to hostile attack, than in lands on the islands of the empire, which the fleet protected. Hence there were many Attic farmers in the subject territory, their right to own foreign real estate being secured by commercial treaties. There was accordingly economic give and take, the military preponderance of Athens being, however, responsible for the result that the Athenians abroad were often policemen, the allies in Athens, hostages.

In all three instances of alleged misbehavior, it must be admitted that the defense offered by the Athenian apologists simply added insult to injury in the view of a majority of the subjects. But for them Athens, arrogant or conciliatory, malefactor or benefactor, was always a foreign governor to be gotten rid of at any cost. Such uncompromising sentiments time alone could alter, and to secure the benefits of time Pericles endeavored to avoid an Hellenic war. His policy of peace after 446 B.C. was, therefore, the sound policy of an imperialist.

The general ground on which contemporaries criticized the Athenian régime was that under it every assistance was given by the state to the least cultivated portion of the inhabitants both of Athens and of its four hundred and twenty subject cities, at the expense of the most intelligent and cultivated elements; that the highest goal of endeavor was moral and intellectual mediocrity. There may be some truth in this contention. The case would be more conclusive, however, if the tendency of the critics to identify intelligence with wealth and cultivation with birth were less obvious. If the point be granted, we must accept the opinion of those historians who affirm that Athens was great in this age despite, and not because of, its democracy. Personally, I do not believe that this was so. I cannot admit that extirpation of the best was practiced in an age in which ideas were created and forms were perfected for their literary and artistic expression which have been the wonder and despair of the men of the highest cultivation from that day to this. Does it not seem like irony that a régime is charged with promoting mediocrity under which rose Sophocles, Herodotus, Phidias, Pericles, Euripides, Hippocrates, Socrates, and Thucydides? Much more important than the leveling tendency of the democracy was the facility it afforded for men of ability both to rise to the top and to find there a sympathetic and critical audience. So much for democracy.

The empire stands approved by the fact that the sharpest accusation now made against the democracy is that it failed to make the empire enduring. On this point the last word--unless it be that no political order has ever been enduring, and that those which have lasted the longest have been generally of the least worth--was said by Thucydides over twenty-three hundred years ago, and I present in conclusion his masterly account of the circumstances which led to the downfall of the Athenian Empire:--

"During the peace while Pericles was at the head of affairs he ruled with prudence; under his guidance Athens was safe, and reached the height of her greatness in his time. When the war began, he showed that here, too, he had formed a true estimate of the Athenian power. He survived the commencement of hostilities two years and six months; and, after his death, his foresight was even better appreciated than during his life. For he had told the Athenians that if they would be patient and would attend to their navy, and not seek to enlarge their dominions while the war was going on, nor imperil the existence of the city, they would be victorious; but they did all that he told them not to do, and in matters which seemingly had nothing to do with the war, from motives of private ambition and private interest they adopted a policy which had disastrous effects in respect both of themselves and of their allies; their measures, had they been successful, would have brought honor and profit only to individuals, and, when unsuccessful, crippled the city in the conduct of the war. The reason of the difference was that he, deriving authority from his capacity and acknowledged worth, being also a man of transparent integrity, was able to control the multitude in a free spirit; he led them rather than was led by them; for, not seeking power by dishonest arts, he had no need to say pleasant things, but, on the strength of his own high character, could venture to oppose and even to anger them. When he saw them unseasonably elated and arrogant, his words humbled and awed them; and when they were depressed by groundless fears, he sought to reanimate their confidence. Thus Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact ruled by her greatest citizen. But his successors were more on an equality with one another, and, each struggling to be first himself, they were ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of affairs to the whims of the people. Such weakness in a great and imperial city led to many errors, of which the greatest was the Sicilian expedition; not that the Athenians miscalculated their enemy's power, but they themselves, instead of consulting for the interests of the expedition which they had sent out, were occupied in intriguing against one another for the leadership of the democracy, and not only grew remiss in the management of the army, but became embroiled, for the first time, in civil strife. And yet, after they had lost in the Sicilian expedition the greater part of their fleet and army, and were distracted by revolution at home, still they held out three years not only against their former enemies, but against the Sicilians who had combined with them, and against most of their own allies who had risen in revolt. Even when Cyrus, the son of the King, joined in the war and supplied the Peloponnesian fleet with money, they continued to resist, and were at last overthrown, not by their enemies, but by themselves and their own internal dissensions."

A summarization such as this, in style austere and authoritative, in content the product of penetrating insight and wonderful sense for political realities, not only bears witness to the greatness of Thucydides; when it is contrasted with similar analyses in Plato and Aristotle it testifies to the loss of power for sustained historical thinking which Greece suffered when men of genius were no longer enriched by the experience which came through living in a state like the imperial democracy of Athens. Not the least of its merits is its self-restraint. Having concluded that the reckless rivalries of her would-be leaders and the reckless dissensions of her citizens ruined Athens, he refrains from assigning a cause for the spirit of lawlessness. It is not Thucydides, but Alcibiades, who declared that democracy was "manifest folly"; not he, but Cleon, who reiterated that "a democracy cannot manage an empire." Thucydides does not despair of democracy. In the case of Athens it was less the unsoundness of the "majority" than the selfishness of the "remnant" that caused the nation to perish. For the demoralization of their leaders, however, the Athenians themselves held Socrates responsible, meaning to incriminate the Sophistic movement. Who shall say that they were wrong? And who shall hold democracy responsible for the evils of the Sophistic movement?

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. Von des attischen Reiches Herrlichkeit (1877). In Reden und Vorträge, pp. 27 ff.

2. Jebb, R.C. The Age of Pericles (1889). In Essays and Addresses, pp. 104 ff.

3. Meyer, Eduard. Geschichte des Altertums, IV (1901).

4. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen (1910): C. Die athenische Demokratie, pp. 95 ff.

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