Part 16

Having considered the domestic life and manners of the ancients compared to those of the moderns, where in the main we seem rather superior so far as the present question is concerned, we shall now examine the political customs and institutions of both ages, and weigh their influence in retarding or forwarding the propagation of mankind.

Before the increase of the Roman power, or rather till its full establishment, almost all the nations which are the scene of ancient history were divided into small territories or petty commonwealths, where of course a great equality of fortune prevailed, and the centre of the government was always very near its frontiers.

This was the situation of affairs not only in Greece and Italy, but also in Spain, Gaul, Germany, Africa, and a great part of the Lesser Asia. And it must be owned that no institution could be more favourable to the propagation of mankind; for though a man of an overgrown fortune, not being able to consume more than another, must share it with those who serve and attend him, yet their possession being precarious, they have not the same encouragement to marriage as if each had a small fortune secure and independent. Enormous cities are, besides, destructive to society, beget vice and disorder of all kinds, starve the remoter provinces, and even starve themselves by the prices to which they raise all provisions. Where each man had his little house and field to himself, and each county had its capital, free and independent, what a happy situation of mankind! How favourable to industry and agriculture, to marriage and propagation! The prolific virtue of men, were it to act in its full extent, without that restraint which poverty and necessity imposes on it, would double the number every generation; and nothing surely can give it more liberty than such small commonwealths, and such an equality of fortune among the citizens. All small states naturally produce equality of fortune because they afford no opportunities of great increase, but small commonwealths much more by that division of power and authority which is essential to them.

When Xenophon returned after the famous expedition with Cyrus, he hired himself and 6000 of the Greeks into the service of Seuthes, a prince of Thrace; and the articles of his agreement were that each soldier should receive a daric a month, each captain two darics, and he himself, as general, four; a regulation of pay which would not a little surprise our modern officers.

Demosthenes and Æschines, with eight more, were sent ambassadors to Philip of Macedon, and their appointments for above four months were a thousand drachmas, which is less than a drachma a day for each ambassador. But a drachma a day—nay, sometimes two, was the pay of a common foot-soldier.

A centurion among the Romans had only double pay to a private man in Polybius’s time, and we accordingly find the gratuities after a triumph regulated by that proportion. But Mark Anthony and the triumvirate gave the centurions five times the reward of the other; so much had the increase of the commonwealth increased the inequality among the citizens.​

It must be owned that the situation of affairs in modern times with regard to civil liberty, as well as equality of fortune, is not near so favourable either to the propagation or happiness of mankind. Europe is shared out mostly into great monarchies, and such parts of it as are divided into small territories are commonly governed by absolute princes, who ruin their people by a mimicry of the greater monarchs in the splendour of their court and number of their forces. Switzerland alone and Holland resemble the ancient republics, and though the former is far from possessing any advantage either of soil, climate, or commerce, yet the numbers of people with which it abounds, notwithstanding their enlisting themselves into every service in Europe, prove sufficiently the advantages of their political institutions.

The ancient republics derived their chief or only security from the numbers of their citizens. The Trachinians having lost great numbers of their people, the remainder, instead of enriching themselves by the inheritance of their fellow-citizens, applied to Sparta, their metropolis, for a new stock of inhabitants. The Spartans immediately collected ten thousand men, among whom the old citizens divided the lands of which the former proprietors had perished.

After Timoleon had banished Dionysius from Syracuse and had settled the affairs of Sicily, finding the cities of Syracuse and Sellinuntium extremely depopulated by tyranny, war, and faction, he invited over from Greece some new inhabitants to repeople them. Immediately forty thousand men (Plutarch says sixty thousand) offered themselves, and he distributed so many lots of land among them, to the great satisfaction of the ancient inhabitants; a proof at once of the maxims of ancient policy, which affected populousness more than riches, and of the good effects of these maxims in the extreme populousness of that small country Greece, which could at once supply so large a colony. The case was not much different with the Romans in early times. “He is a pernicious citizen,” said M. Curius, “who cannot be contented with seven acres.”​ Such ideas of equality could not fail of producing great numbers of people.

We must now consider what disadvantages the ancients lay under with regard to populousness, and what checks they received from their political maxims and institutions. There are commonly compensations in every human condition, and though these compensations be not always perfectly equal, yet they serve, at least, to restrain the prevailing principle. To compare them and estimate their influence is indeed very difficult, even where they take place in the same age, and in neighbouring countries; but where several ages have intervened, and only scattered lights are afforded us by ancient authors, what can we do but amuse ourselves by talking, pro and con, on an interesting subject, and thereby correcting all hasty and violent determinations?

First, we may observe that the ancient republics were almost in perpetual war, a natural effect of their martial spirit, their love of liberty, their mutual emulation, and that hatred which generally prevails among nations that live in a close neighbourhood. Now, war in a small state is much more destructive than in a great one, both because all the inhabitants in the former case must serve in the armies, and because the state is all frontier and all exposed to the inroads of the enemy.

The maxims of ancient war were much more destructive than those of modern, chiefly by the distribution of plunder, in which the soldiers were indulged. The private men in our armies are such a low set of people that we find any abundance beyond their simple pay breeds confusion and disorder, and a total dissolution of discipline. The very wretchedness and meanness of those who fill the modern armies render them less destructive to the countries which they invade; one instance, among many, of the deceitfulness of first appearances in all political reasonings.​

Ancient battles were much more bloody by the very nature of the weapons employed in them. The ancients drew up their men sixteen or twenty, sometimes fifty men deep, which made a narrow front, and it was not difficult to find a field in which both armies might be marshalled and might engage with each other. Even where any body of the troops was kept off by hedges, hillocks, woods, or hollow ways, the battle was not so soon decided between the contending parties but that the others had time to overcome the difficulties which opposed them and take part in the engagement. And as the whole armies were thus engaged, and each man closely buckled to his antagonist, the battles were commonly very bloody, and great slaughter was made on both sides, especially on the vanquished. The long thin lines required by firearms, and the quick decision of the fray, render our modern engagements but partial rencounters, and enable the general who is foiled in the beginning of the day to draw off the greatest part of his army, sound and entire. Could Folard’s project of the column take place (which seems impracticable​) it would render modern battles as destructive as the ancient.

The battles of antiquity, both by their duration and their resemblance of single combats, were wrought up to a degree of fury quite unknown to later ages. Nothing could then engage the combatants to give quarter but the hopes of profit by making slaves of their prisoners. In civil wars, as we learn from Tacitus, the battles were the most bloody, because the prisoners were not slaves.

What a stout resistance must be made where the vanquished expected so hard a fate! How inveterate the rage where the maxims of war were, in every respect, so bloody and severe!

Instances are very frequent in ancient history of cities besieged whose inhabitants, rather than open their gates, murdered their wives and children, and rushed themselves on a voluntary death, sweetened perhaps with a little prospect of revenge upon the enemy. Greeks as well as barbarians have been often wrought up to this degree of fury. And the same determined spirit and cruelty must, in many other instances less remarkable, have been extremely destructive to human society in those petty commonwealths which lived in a close neighbourhood, and were engaged in perpetual wars and contentions.

Sometimes the wars in Greece, says Plutarch, were carried on entirely by inroads and robberies and piracies. Such a method of war must be more destructive in small states than the bloodiest battles and sieges.

By the laws of the twelve tables, possession for two years formed a prescription for land; one year for movables;​ an indication that there was not in Italy during that period much more order, tranquillity, and settled police than there is at present among the Tartars.

The only cartel I remember in ancient history is that between Demetrius Poliorcetes and the Rhodians, when it was agreed that a free citizen should be restored for 1000 drachmas, a slave bearing arms for 500.

But, secondly, it appears that ancient manners were more unfavourable than the modern, not only in times of war but also in those of peace; and that too in every respect, except the love of civil liberty and equality, which is, I own, of considerable importance. To exclude faction from a free government is very difficult, if not altogether impracticable; but such inveterate rage between the factions and such bloody maxims are found, in modern times, amongst religious parties alone, where bigoted priests are the accusers, judges, and executioners. In ancient history we may always observe, where one party prevailed, whether the nobles or people (for I can observe no difference in this respect​), that they immediately butchered all of the opposite party who fell into their hands, and banished such as had been so fortunate as to escape their fury. No form of process, no law, no trial, no pardon. A fourth, a third, perhaps near a half of the city were slaughtered or expelled every revolution; and the exiles always joined foreign enemies and did all the mischief possible to their fellow-citizens, till fortune put it in their power to take full revenge by a new revolution. And as these were very frequent in such violent governments, the disorder, diffidence, jealousy, enmity which must prevail are not easy for us to imagine in this age of the world.

There are only two revolutions I can recollect in ancient history which passed without great severity and great effusion of blood in massacres and assassinations—viz., the restoration of the Athenian democracy by Thrasybulus, and the subduing the Roman republic by Cæsar. We learn from ancient history that Thrasybulus passed a general amnesty for all past offences, and first introduced that word as well as practice into Greece. It appears, however, from many orations of Lysias, that the chief, and even some of the subaltern offenders in the preceding tyranny were tried and capitally punished. This is a difficulty not cleared up, and even not observed by antiquarians and historians. And as to Cæsar’s clemency, though much celebrated, it would not gain great applause in the present age. He butchered, for instance, all Cato’s senate, when he became master of Utica; and these, we may readily believe, were not the most worthless of the party. All those who had borne arms against that usurper were forfeited, and, by Hirtius’s law, declared incapable of all public offices.

These people were extremely fond of liberty, but seem not to have understood it very well. When the Thirty Tyrants first established their dominion at Athens, they began with seizing all the sycophants and informers who had been so troublesome during the Democracy, and putting them to death by an arbitrary sentence and execution. “Every man,” says Sallust and Lysias,​ “rejoiced at these punishments;” not considering that liberty was from that moment annihilated.

The utmost energy of the nervous style of Thucydides, and the copiousness and expression of the Greek language, seem to sink under that historian when he attempts to describe the disorders which arose from faction throughout all the Greek commonwealths. You would imagine that he still labours with a thought greater than he can find words to communicate, and he concludes his pathetic description with an observation which is at once very refined and very solid. “In these contests,” says he, “those who were dullest and most stupid, and had the least foresight, commonly prevailed; for being conscious of this weakness, and dreading to be over-reached by those of greater penetration, they went to work hastily, without premeditation, by the sword and poniard, and thereby prevented their antagonists, who were forming fine schemes and projects for their destruction.”​

Not to mention Dionysius the elder, who is computed to have butchered in cold blood above 10,000 of his fellow-citizens, nor Agathocles, Nabis, and others still more bloody than he, the transactions, even in free governments, were extremely violent and destructive. At Athens, the Thirty Tyrants and the nobles in a twelvemonth murdered, without trial, about 1200 of the people, and banished above the half of the citizens that remained.​ In Argos, near the same time, the people killed 1200 of the nobles, and afterwards their own demagogues, because they had refused to carry their prosecutions further. The people also in Corcyra killed 1500 of the nobles and banished a thousand. These numbers will appear the more surprising if we consider the extreme smallness of these states. But all ancient history is full of such instances.​

When Alexander ordered all the exiles to be restored through all the cities, it was found that the whole amounted to 20,000 men, the remains probably of still greater slaughters and massacres. What an astonishing multitude in so narrow a country as ancient Greece! And what domestic confusion, jealousy, partiality, revenge, heart-burnings must tear those cities, where factions were wrought up to such a degree of fury and despair!

“It would be easier,” says Isocrates to Philip, “to raise an army in Greece at present from the vagabonds than from the cities.”

Even where affairs came not to such extremities (which they failed not to do almost in every city twice or thrice every century), property was rendered very precarious by the maxims of ancient government. Xenophon, in the banquet of Socrates, gives us a very natural, unaffected description of the tyranny of the Athenian people. “In my poverty,” says Charmides, “I am much more happy than ever I was while possessed of riches; as much as it is happier to be in security than in terrors, free than a slave, to receive than to pay court, to be trusted than suspected. Formerly I was obliged to caress every informer, some imposition was continually laid upon me, and it was never allowed me to travel or be absent from the city. At present, when I am poor, I look big and threaten others. The rich are afraid of me, and show me every kind of civility and respect, and I am become a kind of tyrant in the city.”

In one of the pleadings of Lysias, the orator very coolly speaks of it, by the by, as a maxim of the Athenian people, that whenever they wanted money they put to death some of the rich citizens as well as strangers, for the sake of the forfeiture. In mentioning this, he seems to have no intention of blaming them, still less of provoking them who were his audience and judges.