The Evolution of States Part 15
(4) The concourse in Athens, and some other cities, of alert and capable men from all parts of the Greek-speaking world,[322] and of men of other speech who came thither to learn.
(5) The special growth of civic and peaceful population in Attica by the free incorporation of the smaller towns in the franchise of Athens.
Athens had thus the largest number of free citizens of all the Greek cities to start with,[323] and the maximum of domestic peace.
(6) The maintenance of an ideal of cultured life as the outcome of these conditions, which were not speedily overridden either by (_a_) systematic militarism, or (_b_) industrialism, or (_c_) by great acc.u.mulation of wealth.
(7) The special public expenditure of the State, particularly in the age of Pericles, on art, architecture, and the drama, and in stipends to the poorer of the free citizens.
Thus the culture history of Greece, like the political, connects vitally from the first with the physical conditions. The disrupted character of the mainland; the diffusion of the people through the aegean Isles; the spreading of colonies on east and west, set up a mult.i.tude of separate City-States, no one of which could decisively or long dominate the rest.
These democratic and equal communities reacted on each other, especially those so placed as to be seafaring. Their separateness developed a mult.i.tudinous mythology; even the G.o.ds generally recognised being worshipped with endless local particularities, while most districts had their special deities. For each and all of these were required temples, altars, statues, sacred vessels, which would be paid for by the public[324] or the temple revenues, or by rich devotees; and the countless myths, multiplied on all hands because of the absence of anything like a general priestly organisation, were an endless appeal to the imitative arts. Nature, too, had freely supplied the ideal medium for sculpture and for the finest architecture--pure marble. And as the political dividedness of h.e.l.lenedom prevented even an approach to organisation among the scattered and independent priests, so the priesthood had no power and no thought of imposing artistic limitations on the shapers of the art objects given to their temples. In addition to all this, the local patriotism of the countless communities was constantly expressed in statues to their own heroes, statesmen, and athletes. And in such a world of sculpture, formative art must needs flourish wherever it could ornament life.
We have only to compare the conditions in Judea, Persia, Egypt, and early Rome to see the enormous differentiation herein implied. In Mazdean Persia and Yahwistic Judea there was a tabu on all divine images, and by consequence on all sculpture that could lend itself to idolatry.[325] (This tabu, like the monotheistic idea, was itself the outcome of political and social causation, which is in large part traceable and readily intelligible.) In Italy, in the early historic period, outside of Etruria, there had been no process of culture-contact sufficient to develop any of the arts in a high degree; and the relation of the Romans to the other Italian communities in terms of situation and inst.i.tutions[326] was fatally one of progressive conquest. Their specialisation was thus military or predaceous; and the formal acceptance of the deities of the conquered communities could not prevent the partial uniformation of worship. Thus Rome had nearly everything to learn from Greece in art as in literature. In Egypt, again, where sculpture had at more than one time, in more than one locality, reached an astonishing excellence,[327] the easily maintained political centralisation[328] and the commercial isolation made fatally for uniformity of ideal; and the secure dominion of the organised priesthood, cultured only sacerdotally, always strove to impose one stolid conventional form on all sacred and ritual sculpture,[329] which was copied in the secular, in order that kings should as much as possible resemble G.o.ds. Where the bulk of Greece was "servile to all the skyey influences," physically as well as mentally, open on all sides to all cultures, all pressures, all stimuli, Egypt and Judea and Persia were relatively iron-bound, and early Rome relatively inaccessible.
Finally, as militarism never spread Spartan-wise over pre-Alexandrian Greece, and her natural limitations prevented any such exploitation of labour as took place in Egypt, the prevailing ideal in times of peace, at least in Attica, was that of the cultured man, kalokagathos, supported by slave labour but not enormously rich, who stimulated art as he was stimulated by it. a.s.suredly he was in many cases a dilettante, if not an amateur, else had art been in a worse case.
It is to be remembered that in later Greece, from about the time of Apelles, all free children were taught to draw (Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ x.x.xv, 36, 15); and long before, the same authority tells us, art was taken up by men of rank. The introduction of painting into the schools at Sicyon took place about 350 B.C., and thence the practice spread all over h.e.l.las. Aristotle, too (_Politics_, v [viii], 3), commends the teaching of drawing to children, noting that it enables men to judge of the arts and avoid blunders in picture-buying--though he puts this as an inferior and incidental gain. Thus the educated Greeks were in a fairly good sense all dilettanti and amateurs. On the whole subject see K.J. Freeman, _Schools of h.e.l.las_, 1908, pp. 114-17.
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In literature Greek development is as clearly consequent as in art. The Homeric poems are the outcome of a social state in which a cla.s.s of bards could find a living by chanting heroic tales to aristocratic households. Lyric genius is indeed something specially incalculable; and it is startling to realise that about the time of the rude rule of Peisistratos at Athens, Sappho in Lesbos was not merely producing the perfect lyrics which to this day men reckon unmatched, but was the centre of a kind of school of song. But Lesbos was really the home of an ancient culture--"the earliest of all the aeolic settlements, anterior even to Kyme"[330]--and Sappho followed closely upon the lyrists Pittakos and Alkaios. So that here too there is intelligible causation in environment as well as genius. In other directions it is patent. The drama, tragic and comic alike, was unquestionably the outcome of the public worship of the G.o.ds, first provided for by the community, later often exacted by it from rich aspirants to political power. Greek drama is a clear evolution, on the tragic side, from the primitive ritual of Dionysos, Beer-G.o.d or Wine-G.o.d; individual genius and communal fostering combining to develop a primitive rite into a literary florescence.[331]
For all such developments special genius is as a matter of course required, but potential genius occurs in all communities in given forms at a given culture stage; and what happened in Athens was that the special genius for drama was specially appealed to, evoked, and maintained. aeschylus in Egypt and Aristophanes in Persia must have died with all their drama in them. Further, as Grote has so luminously shown,[332] the juridical life of Athens, with its perpetual play of special pleading in the dikasteries, was signally propitious to the spirit of drama. The constant clashing and contrast of ethical points of view, the daily play of eristic thought, was in itself a real drama which educated both dramatists and audience, and which inevitably affected the handling of moral problems on the stage. Athens may thus be said to have cultivated discussion as Sparta cultivated "Laconism"; and both philosophy and drama in Greece are steeped in it. Myths thus came to be handled on the stage with a breadth of reflection which was nowhere else possible.
Historiography, science, and philosophy, again, were similarly fostered by other special conditions. Abstract and physical science began for Greece in the comparison and friction of ideas among leisured men, themselves often travelled, living in inquisitive communities often visited by strangers. What Egypt and Syria and Phoenicia had to give in medical lore, in geometry, and in astronomy, was a.s.similated and built upon, in an atmosphere of free thought and free discussion, whence came all manner of abstract philosophy, a.n.a.lytical and ethical. Plato and Aristotle are the peaks of immense acc.u.mulations of more primitive thought beginning on the soil laid by Semitic culture in Asia Minor; Socrates was stimulated and drawn out by the Athenian life on which he didactically reacted; Hippocrates garnered the experience of many medical priests. History was cultivated under similar conditions of manifold intercourse and intelligent inquisitiveness. Herodotus put down the outcome of much questioning during many travels, and he had an appreciative public with similar tastes.[333] The manifold life of h.e.l.las and her neighbours, Egypt, Persia, Syria, was an endless ground for inquiry and anecdote. The art of writing, acquired long before from Phoenicia, was thus put to unparalleled uses; and at length the theme of the Peloponnesian war, in which all the political pa.s.sions of h.e.l.las were embroiled for a generation, found in Thucydides a historian produced by and representative of all the critical judgment of the critical Athenian age. Plutarch, in a later period, condenses a library of lesser writers.
Thus in respect of every characteristic and every special attainment of Greek life we can trace external causation, from the geographical conditions upwards, without being once tempted to resort to the verbalist explanation of "race qualities" or "national genius." If h.e.l.las developed otherwise than Phoenicia from any given date onwards, the causes lay either in the environment or in the set previously given to Phoenician life by its special antecedents, which in turn were determined by environment. To suppose that "the Greeks" started primordially with a unique connatural bent to a relatively "ideal"
method of life, preferring culture to riches and art to luxury, is to entail the further a.s.sumption of a separate biological evolution from the pre-human stage. To put the problem clearly, let us say that if we suppose the ancestors of the Greeks three millenniums before Homer to have been planted in Australia, with none of the domesticable animals which have played so decisive a part in the development of human societies, there is no good reason to think that the "race" would have risen to any higher levels than had been reached by the Australian aborigines at the time of their discovery by Europeans. One of the most remarkable things about those aborigines is their disproportionately high cranial capacity, which seems compatible with a mental life that their natural environment has always precluded. Many plain traces of gross primeval savagery remain in Greek literature and religion; and to credit all Greek progress to a unique racial faculty is to turn the back upon all the acc.u.mulating evidence which goes to show that from the first entrance of the Greeks into Greece they blended with and a.s.similated the culture of the races whom they found there.[334] The futility of the whole racial thesis becomes evident, finally, the moment we reflect how unequal Greek culture was; how restricted in h.e.l.las, how special to Athens was it on the intellectual side when once Athens had reached her stature; how blank of thought and science was all h.e.l.lenic life before the contact of Semitic survivals in Ionia; how backward were many sections of the pagan h.e.l.lenic stock to the last; and how backward they have been since the political overturn in antiquity.
The vitiating concept of racial genius appears incidentally, but definitely, in Dr. Cunningham's contrast of Phoenicians and Greeks as relatively wealth-seekers and culture-seekers, ingrained barbarians and ingrained humanists (_Western Civilisation_, pp. 72, 73, 98, 99, etc.), and in his phrase as to the persistent "principles which the Greek and the Phoenician respectively represented." The ant.i.thesis, it is here maintained, is spurious.
Many Greeks were in full sympathy with the Phoenician norm; many Phoenicians must have been capable of delighting in the Greek norm had they been reared to it. At a given period the Phoenicians had a higher life than the Greeks; and had the Phoenicians evolved for ages in the Greek environment, with an equivalent blending of stocks and cross-fertilisation of cultures, they could have become all that the Greeks ever were. The a.s.sertion that when we see "the destruction and degradation of human life in the march of material progress, we see what is alien to the Greek spirit" (_id._ p. 99) will not bear examination. Greek slavery, like every other, was just such a degradation of human life. And to speak of a "consciousness of her mission" on the part of "Athens"
(_id._ pp. 72, 73) is to set up a pseudo-ent.i.ty and a moral illusion.
It is remarkable that even among students well abreast of evolutionary thought there is still a strong tendency to think of Greek civilisation in terms of some occult virtue of "h.e.l.lenic spirit," something unique in social phenomena, something not to be accounted for like the process of evolution in other races. Thus so accomplished and critical a thinker as Prof. Gilbert Murray seems to account for every Greek advance beyond savagery as a result of "h.e.l.lenism." _E.g._, "Human sacrifice, then, is one of the barbarities which h.e.l.lenism successfully overcame" (_The Rise of the Greek Epic_, 1907, p. 16); "Solved by the progressive, or, I may say, by the h.e.l.lenic spirit" (_Id._ p. 25). In this way the discrediting and abandonment of the use of poisoned arrows in the "Homeric" period (_Id._ pp. 120-21) seems to be ascribed either to the Homeric or to the h.e.l.lenic "spirit."
Now, Mr. Murray himself incidentally notes (p. 121) that poisoned weapons are forbidden in the Laws of Manu; and it might be pointed out that even among the barbaric and ill-advantaged Somali, when visited by Burton fifty years ago, the use of poisoned arrows was already restricted to "the servile cla.s.s" (_First Footsteps in East Africa_, ed. 1910, p. 45; cp. p. 74). The use of poisoned arrows, in short, is common in savagery, and is transcended by all races alike when they rise some way above that level. The "h.e.l.lenes," to start with, were savages like the rest, and rose like others in virtue of propitious conditions. So with human sacrifice. According to Herodotus, the Egyptians had abandoned it before the Greeks.
Shall we describe the Egyptian progress as a matter of "Egypticism"
or "the Egyptian spirit"?
Defences of the Greeks, such as that made so ably by Mr. Murray against the aspersions cast upon "Paganism" by uncritical Christians, are to be sympathetically received in the light of their purport; but the true historical method is surely not to exhibit the historic Greeks as "ant.i.theses" to "the pagan man" of modern anthropology, but to show Christians how they and their creed have evolved from savagery even as did the Greeks. (Cp. the author's _Christianity and Mythology_, 2nd ed. p. 77 _sq._, as to the pro-h.e.l.lenic handling of Greek phenomena by other scholars.)
Should the general line of causation here set forth be challenged, it will suffice, by way of test, to turn to the special case of Sparta. If it were "Greek character" that brought forth Greek art, letters, and science, they ought to have flourished in Greek Sparta as elsewhere. It is, however, the notorious historic fact that during all the centuries of her existence, after the pre-Lycurgean period, Sparta contributed to the general deed of man virtually nothing, either in art or letters, in science or philosophy.
The grounds for holding that choral poetry flourished pre-eminently at Sparta (see K.O. Muller, _History of the Dorians_, Eng. tr. ii, 383) are not very strong. See Busolt, _Griechische Geschichte_, 1885, i, 158, 159, for what can be finally said on this head. Ernst Curtius (_Griechische Geschichte_, 1858, i, 240) writes on this subject as a romantic enthusiast. Burckhardt (_Griechische Culturgeschichte_, i, 116-19) examines the subject with his usual care, but decides only that the Spartans employed music with a special eye to military education. And Muller acknowledges that though many Spartan lyrists are named, "there has not been preserved a single fragment of Spartan lyric poetry, with the exception of Alkman's," the probable reason being "a certain uniformity and monotony in their productions, such as is perceived in the early works of art." On the whole question cp. K.J.
Freeman's _Schools of h.e.l.las_, chs. i and xi.
In the story of h.e.l.las, Sparta stands almost alone among the peoples as yielding no foothold to the life of the mind, bare of nearly all memory of beauty,[335] indigent in all that belongs to the spirit, morally sterile as steel. Yet "the Dorians of Laconia are perhaps the only people in Greece who can be said to have preserved in any measure the purity of their Greek blood."[336] Before such a phenomenon the dogma of race-character instantly collapses, whereas in terms of the reaction of conditions the explanation is entirely adequate. As thus:--
1. Sparta was by situation one of the most secluded of the Greek States.
In the words of Euripides, it was "hollow, surrounded by mountains, rugged, and difficult of access to an enemy."[337] Compared in particular with Athens, it was not only landward and mountain-walled, but out of the way of all traffic.[338]
2. From the first the Spartans were balanced in a peculiar degree by the strength of the Achaians, who were in the Peloponnesus before them, the hostilities between the invaders and the older inhabitants lasting longer in the valley of the Eurotas than anywhere else.[339] The Spartan militarism was thus a special product of circ.u.mstances, not a result of Doric "character," since other Dorian communities did not develop it.
3. Being thus so little open to commercial influence, and so committed to a life of militarism, Sparta was susceptible of a rigidity of military const.i.tution that was impossible elsewhere in the h.e.l.lenic world, save to some extent in the similarly aristocratic and undeveloped communities of Thessaly and Crete, each similarly noted for unintellectuality. Whatever be the political origins of these societies, it is clear that that of Sparta could not have been built up or maintained save under conditions of comparative isolation.
Grote, always somewhat inclined to racial explanations, argues (ed.
1888, ii, 262), as against K.O. Muller, who had still stronger leanings of the kind, that the Spartans were not the "true Doric type," in that their inst.i.tutions were peculiar to themselves, distinguishing them "not less from Argos, Corinth, Megara, Epidaurus, Sikyon, Korkyra, or Knidus, than from Athens or Thebes."
This is doubtless true as against Muller (cp. Kopstadt, cited by Grote; c.o.x, _General History of Greece_, 1877, p. 28; and Menard, _Histoire des Grecs_, 1884, pp. 218, 221), but the suggestion that the Spartans varied in respect of being _less_ "Doric" is equally astray. Grote goes on to note that "Krete was the only other portion of Greece in which there prevailed inst.i.tutions in many respects a.n.a.logous, yet still dissimilar in those two attributes which form the real mark and pinch of Spartan legislation--viz., the military discipline and rigorous private training. There were doubtless Dorians in Krete, but we have no proof that these peculiar inst.i.tutions belonged to them more than to the other inhabitants of the island." The argument cuts both ways. If it was not definitely "Dorian" to have such inst.i.tutions, neither was it un-Dorian. As c.o.x observes (p. 30), the Spartan const.i.tution in its earlier stages "much resembled the const.i.tution of the Achaians as described in the _Iliad_." Equally arbitrary seems Grote's argument (i, 451) that "the low level of taste and intelligence among the Thessalians, as well as certain points of their costume, a.s.similates them more to Macedonians or Epirots than to h.e.l.lenes."
He notes the equally low level of taste and intelligence among the Spartans, who as a rule could not read or write (ii, 307), and to whom he might as well have a.s.similated the Thessalians as to the Macedonians. In all cases alike culture conditions supply the true explanation. All through Greece, barring Sparta, stocks were endlessly mixed. M. Menard well points out in reply to Muller that it is impossible to a.s.sociate types of government with any of the special "races"--that as against Sparta there were "Ionian aristocracies at Ma.r.s.eilles and at Chalkis, and Dorian democracies at Tarentum and Syracuse," while most of the Greek cities had by turns aristocratic and democratic const.i.tutions.
4. As regards Sparta, the specialisation of all life on the military side developed a spirit of peculiar separateness and arrogance,[340]
which clinched the geographical influence. Where Greeks of all States were admitted to the Eleusinian festivals, Sparta kept hers for her own people.[341] This would limit her literary mythology, and by consequence her art.
Among the names of Greek sculptors only three belong to Sparta, and these are all of the sixth century B.C., the beginning of the historic period. After that, nothing. See Radford's _Ancient Sculpture_, Chron. List at end. Thus Sparta positively retrogressed into militarism. "There is evidence in the character of Alkman's poetry that he did not sing to a Sparta at all resembling the so-called Sparta of Lycurgus" (Mahaffy, _Problems in Greek History_, p. 77; cp. Burckhardt, _Griechische Culturgeschichte_, i, 117).
5. Not only does military specialism preclude, so far as it goes, more intellectual forms of activity: it develops in the highest degree the conservative spirit[342] when thoroughly rooted in law and custom. Nor is it any more favourable to moral feeling in general.[343]
As offset to all this it may be urged that the middle unenfranchised cla.s.s (the _Perioikoi_) in Sparta, the _Penestai_ in Thessaly, and the ordinary citizens in Crete, were in some ways superior types to part of the similar cla.s.ses of Attica; while the slaves, as having some military life, were, despite the flavour of the name "Helot," above the average.[344] But even if that were so, it would not affect the problem as to culture development, and its solution in terms of the primary and secondary conditions of life for the given communities.
It is to be noted that in Crete, less isolated by nature and way of life than either Sparta or Thessaly, less rigidly militarised than they and more democratic in const.i.tution, there were more stirrings of mind. Epimenides, the author of the famous saying that the Cretans were always "liars, evil beasts, idle gluttons," was himself a distinguished Cretan. But Crete on the whole counts for very little in Greek culture-history. Cp. K.J. Freeman, _Schools of h.e.l.las_, p. 38.
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Such being, in brief, the process of the building up of culture for Greece, it remains to note the causes of the process of retrogression, which also connects broadly with the course of politics. Indeed, the mere expansion of h.e.l.lenistic life set up by the empire-making of Alexander might alone account for a complete change in the conditions and phases of Greek civilisation. In the new h.e.l.lenistic world wealth and power were to be won with ease and with amenity[345] where of old there was only an alien barbarism, or at least a society which to the cultured Greek was barbaric. When such cities as Alexandria and Antioch beckoned the Greek scholar of small means, impoverished Athens could hardly retain him. Her extorted revenue in her most powerful period,[346] as we saw, was the source of her highest flight of artistic splendour; and even after the Peloponnesian War, with greatly lessened power, Athens was the most desirable dwelling-place in h.e.l.las. After Alexander, all this was insensibly changed: Athens, though for a time filled with Greeks enriched by the plunder of Persia, must needs gradually dwindle to the point at which the slight natural advantages of her soil, industry, and situation would maintain her; and the life of ideas, such as it finally was, pa.s.sed inevitably to Alexandria, where it was systematically encouraged and protected, in the fashion in which well-meaning autocrats do such things. But while these new developments were not inconsiderable, and included some rare felicities, they were on the whole fatally inferior to the old, and this for reasons which would equally affect what intellectual life was left in Greece proper.
The forces of hindrance were political and psychological;[347] and they operated still more powerfully under the Romans than under the successors of Alexander. The dominance of the Greeks over the other races in the eastern provinces did not make them more than a cla.s.s of privileged tools of Rome; and they deteriorated none the less.[348] When for the stimulating though stormy life of factious self-government there was subst.i.tuted the iron hand of a conqueror, governing by military force, there was need of a new and intelligent discipline if the mental atmosphere were not to worsen. All civilisation, in so far as it proceeds from and involves a "leisured cla.s.s," sets up a perpetual risk of new morbid phases. Men must have some normal occupation if their life is to be sound; and where that occupation is not handicraft it can be kept sound and educative only by the perpetual free effort of the intelligence towards new truth, new conception, and new presentment.[349] Nor can this effort conceivably take place on any wide scale, and with any continuity, save in a community kept more or less generally alert by the agitation of vital issues. For a generation or two after Alexander, it is true, there is no arrest in the production of good philosophic minds among the Greeks; indeed, the sudden forcing back of all the best remaining minds on philosophy, as the one mental employment left to self-respecting men of leisure,[350] raised the standards of the study, and led to the ethical systems of Epicurus and Zeno, certainly fit in their way to stand beside those of Plato and Aristotle. So, too, the thrusting back of the drama (which in the hands of Aristophanes had meddled audaciously with every public question) on the study of private life, developed in the highest degree the domestic and psychological bent of the later comedy,[351] very much as the autocracy has developed the novel in contemporary Russia. But the schools of Epicurus and Zeno, both of which outlasted in moral credit and in moral efficacy that of Plato,[352] and the new comedy of Menander, alike represent the as yet unexhausted storage of the mental energy generated by the old political life; and the development is not prolonged in either case. Evidently something vital was lost: only a renewal of the freer life could make possible a continuous advance in intellectual power.
On this it is important to insist, as there are plausible grounds for contrary inferences, which are often drawn. All supposed exceptions to the law, however, will be found on a.n.a.lysis to be apparent only. A tyranny may indeed give economic encouragement to art and culture, and a republic may fail to do so; but the work of the tyranny is inevitably undone or kept within a fixed limit by its own character; while, if the free community be but fairly well guided, its potentialities are unlimited. This is the solution of much modern dispute between the schools of _laissez-faire_ and protection. A Velasquez, who might otherwise have been condemned to seek his market with coa.r.s.er wares, may develop to perfection at the court of an autocrat of fine taste; but even he partly depends for his progress on intelligent communion, which the autocrat in this case chances to yield him. And from Velasquez onward there is no progress. So, in autocratic a.s.syria, sculpture reaches a certain point and becomes for ever conventionalised. In Egypt it conforms more or less exactly to the general stereotyping of life. We may grant, with some emphatic qualifications, that in some cases "with the tyrant _began_ the building of large temples, ... the patronage of clever handicrafts, the promoting of all the arts,"[353] and that he may have patronised men of letters; but as regards the temples it is certain that in h.e.l.las he was not the chief temple-builder; and it is also quite certain that the tyrant never evolved a single generation of important writers, thinkers, and artists, any more than of intelligent, self-respecting, and self-governing citizens. The latter const.i.tuted, in fact, the necessary nutritive soil for the former in the communities of antiquity.[354] It has been said[355] that "at the end of the third century of Rome, when its inhabitants had hardly escaped from the hands of Porsena, Syracuse contained more men of high genius than any other city in the world. These were collected at the court of the first Hiero, during his short reign of ten years, and among them were the greatest poets of the age: Pindar ... Simonides ... aeschylus." This is true; but Hiero had not been the means of evolving the powers of any one of the three. Pindar is manifestly the product of the diversified life of the free States; Simonides, though much patronised by aristocrats, began to "find himself" as a chorus teacher at Carthea in Ceos, won countless prizes at the Greek festivals,[356] and spent only the latter part of his life with Hiero; aeschylus is the product of the Attic theatre. Not the tyranny, but democracy, had been the _alma mater_. It is true that Athens after aeschylus played the "despot city" in finance, but she so far preserved at home the democratic atmosphere, in which, according to Demosthenes, slaves had more freedom of speech than citizens in many other places.[357] Lesbos had her oscillations between oligarchy and despotism; but the group in which Sappho stood was that of Pittakos and Alkaios--the elected ten-years dictator who finally laid down his dictatorship, and the fierce singer who a.s.sailed him. Not in the "Roman peace" of a fixed despotism did Lesbian song reach its apex.
The old problem of the culture-value of the tyrant has been raised afresh by Messrs. Mitch.e.l.l and Caspari, in their abridgment of Grote's _History of Greece_. Grote's enthusiasm for democracy, they contend, "undoubtedly prevented him from doing full justice to much that was good in the non-democratic governments of Greece,"
notably "in his estimate of the so-called 'tyrants' of the Greek world and in his att.i.tude towards the Macedonian Empire" (pref. to work cited, p. xv). Part of their discussion is beside the case, and proves only their general hostility to Grote as "a rationalist," to whom "every problem was a matter for rational discussion" (p. xiii). They first a.s.sert that Grote's chapter heading, "Age of the Despots," is "subtly misleading," inasmuch as there were despots at various periods in Greek history--as has been insisted by Professor Mahaffy. Then they avow that "this fact is mentioned by Grote himself," and that he "quite properly distinguishes" between the early and the late tyrannies.
The counter-claim is first put in the propositions (1) that an early Greek "tyranny" was in effect "a union of one powerful personality with the poorer and hitherto unrepresented cla.s.ses,"
favourable to individual life among the latter; and (2) that the tyrants by preserving peace and giving the people individual freedom of life promoted "the acc.u.mulation of wealth and the extension of trade at home and abroad, and enriched the Greek mind by familiarising it with the natural and artistic products of other lands" (p. xvii). There is really nothing here that Grote denied; nor do the critics attempt to show that he denies it. Grote actually said, before them, that "the demagogue despots are interesting as the first evidence of the growing importance of the people in political affairs. The demagogue stood forward as representing the feelings and interests of the people against the governing few.... Even the worst of the despots was more formidable to the rich than to the poor; and the latter may perhaps have gained by the change...." (_History_, pt. ii, ch. ix, ed. 1888, ii, 397). As regards the case of Peisistratos, on which Messrs.
Mitch.e.l.l and Caspari chiefly found their plea, Grote notes that his "was doubtless practically milder" than the average despotism, but that "cases of this character were rare." And to _this_ thesis, which is backed by an overwhelming ma.s.s of Greek testimony, from Herodotus to Aristotle and Plato, the critics offer no kind of answer.
They do, however, claim for "the tyrants" in general that "in the first place their orderly government provided _for the first time_ the conditions which are essential to artistic and literary production. Secondly, it was their policy to foster in all possible ways everything that contributed to the magnificence of the States." If it be meant to include under the head of _tyrannoi_ the early feudal chieftains before whom the bards chanted, the issue is merely confused. If not, the proposition is untenable. If again it be argued that the Mausoleum was a finer thing than the Parthenon, or quite as well worth having, the real issue is missed.
It is significant that Grote's anti-rationalistic critics make no attempt to gauge the respective effects of "tyrannic" and democratic or oligarchic rule on the _inner_ life of men, which is what Grote chiefly considered. Neither is this, the vital issue, once faced in the essay of Hegewisch "On the Epoch of Roman History most Fortunate for the Human Race" (French trans. by Solvet, 1834), or in the encomiums of Gibbon, Mommsen, and Renan, before cited (p.
89, _note_). As has been shown above, there is no instance of a new and great intellectual development taking its rise or visibly going forward (save as at Alexandria under the Ptolemies) under the auspices of even a good despot in antiquity; though such a despot might at times usefully preserve the peace and cherish writers and artists. Here, then, is a sociological clue that should be followed. The reasonable inference seems to be that democratic conditions, other things being equal, tend most to elicit human faculty.
And where in modern times certain of the less democratic nations may be said to have developed certain forms of culture more widely and energetically than do certain of the more democratic States--as Germany her learned cla.s.s, in comparison with France and England and the United States; or modern Russia in comparison with the States in the matter of the higher fiction--it can easily be shown (1) that these developments arise not in virtue of but in reaction against autocracy, and (2) that they were possible only in virtue of the evocative influence of communities living more freely. Modern communities differ vitally from the ancient in that printing has created a species of intercourse which overleaps all political and geographical restrictions, so that a politically tyrannised community can yet receive and respond to the stimulus of another. But the stimulus is still indispensable. Thus the intellectual expansion of France after the death of Louis XIV[358] drew germinally from the culture of the England of the day; and that of Germany later in the century was equally a sequence from that and from the ferment in France. Given the cl.u.s.ter of independent States, each with its court and its university, which made up the Germany of the period, the revived spirit of free thought bore the more and the better fruit because of the mult.i.tude of the reactions involved in the circ.u.mstances. For the time, the slackened and lightened petty autocracies counted for intellectual democracy, though even Kant was made to feel the pressure of censorship. It was not regal or ducal rule that made Lessing or Herder or Schiller or Goethe; and it was not mere kingly encouragement that bred scholars like Hermann and Wachs.m.u.th and b.u.t.tmann and Bekker and Boeckh and Heeren and Ottfried Muller. The school of Tubingen was the outcome of a movement that proximately began in English Deism; and even the personal bias of Frederick counted for much less in the evolution than the general contagion of European debate. In the University of Berlin, organised after Jena, the inspiring principle was that of intellectual freedom; and the moving spirits took express pains to guard against the tyranny of convention which they saw ruling in the universities of England. For the rest, the production of a very large cla.s.s of scholarly specialists in Germany was made possible primarily by the number of universities set up in the days of separatism, and secondarily by the absence of such economic conditions (all resting on possession of coal and maritime situation) as drew English energy predominantly to industry and commerce. It is true that if a democratic society to-day does not make express economic provision for a scholarly and cultured cla.s.s, it is likely to lack such, because the leisured or idle cla.s.s in all countries grows less capable of, and less inclined to, such intellectual production as it contributed to the serious literature of England during the nineteenth century. But such economic provision has been still more necessary in monarchic communities. Finally, at every stage Germany has been reacted upon by France and England; and it is notable that while, in the last generation, under a strengthening militarism and imperialism, the number of trained German specialists was maintained, the number of Germans able to stir and lead European thought fell off.[359]
In the same way the phenomenon of a group of great novelists in the autocratic Russia of our own age is no fruit of autocracy, save in the sense that autocratic government checks all other forms of criticism of life, all liberal discussion, and so drives men back on artistic forms of writing which offer no disturbing social doctrine. And the artistic development itself is made possible only by the culture previously or contemporaneously acc.u.mulated in other and freer communities, from whose mental life the cultivated Russian draws his. It was to some extent a similar restrictive pressure that specially developed the drama in France under the Third Empire. Apart from the peculiar case of the Italian cities of the Renaissance, discussed hereinafter, the most that can be said for the "tyrant" in modern Europe is that Richelieu and Colbert promoted science in France; that the German princ.i.p.alities of the eighteenth century fostered music at their courts; that George III did much for Handel in England; and that the King of Bavaria did still more for Wagner. On the other hand, the system of national and munic.i.p.al theatres on the Continent was an essential adjunct even in this regard; and the mere comparative freedom accorded to the drama in Elizabethan England, at a time when surplus intellectual energy lacked other stimuli, sufficed to develop that art in one generation to a degree never so speedily reached elsewhere, save in republican Athens. Where the "tyrant" is most useful is in such a civilisation as that of the Saracens, for which autocracy is the only alternative to anarchy, and where, on a basis of derived culture, he can protect and rapidly further the useful arts and all manner of special studies. But even he cannot command a great intellectual art, or an inwardly great literature.[360]
It will hardly be pretended that the freethinking which went on in Moslem Persia and Spain in the eighth and later centuries was evoked by the Caliphs, though some of them for a time protected it. The Ptolemies for a while fostered science at Alexandria; but under Roman rule--surely as tyrannous--it died out. And even under the Ptolemies science was a hothouse plant which never throve in the open.
It is clear, then, that first the rule of Alexander and his successors, and later the rule of Rome, over Greece and the Graecised East, put a check on the intellectual forces there, against which there was no counteractive in existence. There remained no other free communities whose culture could fecundate that of the Greek and other cities held in tutelage.
The city of Rhodes, which recovered its independence at the death of Alexander, and maintained its self-government down till the Roman period, was, in point of fact, latterly distinguished for its art (Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 334-38), thus ill.u.s.trating afresh the value of free life as an art stimulus; but its pre-eminently commercial activity, as in the case of Corinth, and as later in the case of Venice, kept it relatively undistinguished in literature. Rich merchants commissioned pictures and statues, but not philosophies or books. Holm (Eng. trans. iv, 492) calls Rhodes a _seat_ of philosophy, etc., naming Theophrastus and Eudemus. But they both studied and settled at Athens.