MACEDON , 401—301 B.C.

 

CHAPTER XVI

GREEK POLITICAL THOUGHT AND THEORY IN THE FOURTH CENTURY

I.

THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF THE FOURTH CENTURY

 

A DISTINCTION may perhaps be drawn, which is based on a real difference, between political theory and political thought. Political theory is the speculation of individual minds (though it may well become, and in the process of time often does become, the dogma of a school); and, as such, it is an activity of conscious thought, which is aware both of itself as it thinks and of the facts about which it thinks. Political thought is the thought of a whole society; and it is not necessarily, or often, self-conscious. It is an activity of the mind; but one naturally thinks of it as a substance or content rather than as an activity. It is the complex of ideas which is entertained—but not, as a rule, apprehended— by all who are concerned in affairs of state in a given period of time. It is such thought which makes history; and history is the mirrored reflection, or the reverse side, of such thought. Political thought and history are two aspects of one process—the process of the human spirit: they are two sides of a single coin. There is thus a political thought which is immanent in each historical process; and there is a political theory which is distinct from the process, and yet—because it cannot but be influenced by the process, either in the way of attraction, or in the way of repulsion—is part and parcel of it. It is easy to think of political thought as the active and determining maker of history, and to regard political theory as a speculation of the detached mind, remote from the motive forces of events. Such a distinction is perhaps nowhere true. Thinking which is directed to human conduct becomes a factor in human action; speculation that seems airy may bring down an abundant rain of events; the theory of Rousseau, for example, was a stuff which made and unmade states. The distinction is certainly untrue if it is applied to ancient Greece. Here political theory was conceived as a ‘practical science’—a theory, indeed, or speculation, but not a mere theory or speculation, which left things as they were because they could not be otherwise. It was regarded as dealing with those human things which “might be otherwise than they were”, and charged with the duty of showing how they might become otherwise in the sense of becoming better. Because it was practical, it was idealistic; because it was concerned with making men and states better, it issued in the construction of ideal states, which were meant to be realized—immediately and directly realized. Political theory in the modern world only becomes active and practical when it becomes political thought, and the many are converted to the teaching of the few. We submit, as it were, to a mediation between theory and action. The note of Greek political theory is immediacy. It moves directly to action; Plato, for instance, seeks at once to realize his ‘republic’ in Syracuse. If we reflect on the two divi­sions which we may make in the political theory of the fourth century—the politico-oratorical, represented by Isocrates, and the politico-philosophical, represented by Plato—we see that this immediacy is common to both. We see, too, that immediacy does not of itself command success. In the ancient world, as in the modern, the theory that becomes general thought, or reflects general thought, is the theory that succeeds. The spirit of Isocrates, by the end of the fourth century, might rejoice in the success of Isocratean theory. Whether it ought to have succeeded and whether it was better for the world that it should have succeeded, is another question.

The political thought immanent in political action, at the beginning of the fourth century, still owed allegiance to a belief in the sanctity of the self-governing and self-sufficing city-state; and here it agreed with political theory, which was always inspired by this belief. During the fifth century Athens had attempted a unification of cities: her far-flung Empire had embraced the shores and islands of all the Aegean Sea. Her policy had failed; and it had failed because both she and her allies, equally trammelled by the thought of the city-state, could not rise to the conception of a great non-civic state united in a common citizenship. On her side she could not extend her citizenship to them, because her citizenship meant—and could only mean—Athenian birth and a full participation in Athenian local life and ways and temper: on their side they could not have accepted the gift if it had been offered, because their citizenship of their cities meant just as much to them. Without any common cement, and based ultimately on force, the Empire collapsed before the thought of civic autonomy which inspired both the revolting ‘allies’ and the Peloponnesians who supported their cause. But the victory of the thought of civic autonomy over the thought of a unity of cities in some wider form of polity was only apparent; or at any rate it was only temporary. The fourth century moves (deviously; sometimes with halts, and sometimes with regressions) towards some scheme of unity. It begins with a Spartan Empire in Greece—for the champion of autonomy did not disdain an Empire—and with a Syracusan Empire, under Dionysius I, in Sicily and Magna Graecia: it passes into an hegemony of Thebes; it ends with a Macedonian Empire. The principle of autonomy indeed survives: it receives abundant lip-service: it is sometimes made effective, not for its own sake, but to satisfy a grudge and to appease a rancour. We see the lip-service in the clause of the Peace of Antalcidas, which provides that “the Greek cities, great and small, shall be left autonomous”, and again in the renewal of the same provision in the peace of 374; we see actual effect given to the principle, under the terms of the first of these treaties, when in order to satisfy the Spartan grudge against Thebes the Boeotian cities are made autonomous, and the Boeotian League is dissolved. But in spite of constant lip-service and occasional homage, the principle of autonomy recedes gradually and reluct­antly into oblivion; and over the Greek world the city-cells seem to be moving and clustering together in this or that sort of union with this or that degree of permanence.

We may roughly distinguish two sorts of unions—the one based on isopolity, the other on sympolity. Where the union is based on isopolity, each city gives to the other its own citizenship, but each remains a separate and autonomous state, and no new co-ordinating authority—no new and embracing community, with its own citizenship distinct from that of its members—comes into being. Such a form of union is not in itself federal, but it is a preparation for federation. Where the union is based on sympolity, each city still keeps its own citizenship; but a new authority and a new community of a federal character arise, and every man has a double citizenship—the one in his own city, and the other in the new federal community. Such a form of union was perhaps first suggested by Thales of Miletus early in the sixth century, if indeed he did not go further still, and propose the institution of a single unitary state, in which the Ionian city-states would have become mere demes or centres of local administration. In a union based on sympolity the cities remained equal, or at any rate followed a system of proportionate equality, under which each exercised an influence in federal affairs corresponding to the number of its citizens, and each, again, retained its autonomy, though each remitted to the federal authority which it helped to constitute a large control of common affairs, and each admitted the direct action of that authority upon its citizens in the sphere of those affairs. The new Boeotian league, which came into existence after 379, was constructed on this basis; and on the same basis, at an even earlier date, a Chalcidian confederacy had grown round the nucleus of Olynthus, and an Achaean league had established itself in the north of the Peloponnese. The second Athenian league was organized on lines of dualism rather than of sympolity: the Athenian Assembly and the synedrion of the allies were equal partners, with equal rights of initiative, and the measures accepted by either required the assent of the other to attain a common validity. But the Arcadian league, which arose after 370 BC, was a sympolity in the Boeotian style; and about the same time, and on the same model, Thessaly also became a federation—a federation of a peculiar type, in which the constituent members were not city-states, but territorial divisions which were themselves federations of cities.

Yet all these federations—alike in Boeotia, in Chalcidice, in Achaea, in Arcadia and in Thessaly—were but partial: none of them ever showed signs of expanding beyond its own territory; at the best the Boeotian federation attained some acceptance as a general model in the days of the theban hegemony. Nor were they long-lived. If the Thessalian federation lasted till the end of Thessalian history, the Chalcidian confederacy soon succumbed to the enmity of Sparta (always a foe of federations), and the Arcadian league within ten years of its foundation had split into two separate and hostile halves. Partial in scope, and short-lived in time, the spontaneous federal movement within the Greek pale could not give unity to a country desperately resolved on division; and it was from the Macedonian North, and by violence, that unity finally came. One service, indeed, was rendered by the federal principle in the very moment of the death of Greek independence. It became the coffin of the corpse. The Macedonian supremacy disguised itself in federal forms: a nominal Hellenic confederacy, meeting in federal congress at Corinth, was made to elect Philip its general plenipotentiary against Persia, and to vote federal contingents by land and sea for the Persian War. After crushing federal Boeotia at Chaeronea, Philip installed the form of Boeotian federalism at Corinth. In fact, as distinct from form, Macedonian supremacy was as hostile to federalism as Spartan supremacy had been before. Divide et impera was its policy: scattered ‘autonomous’ cities suited that policy better than federal groups; in 324. Alexander, the head of the Greek confederacy, commanded (if we may trust the statement of Hypereides) the dissolution of Greek federations.

The political thought of the fourth century is thus one of unity, which expresses itself partly in the fact of hegemonies and empires, and partly in the fact of small federations; but it is a thought trammelled and thwarted by the survival and vigour of the counter­thought of the autonomous city—so much trammelled, and so much thwarted, that in the event it is no inner thought, but an external force, which achieves a factitious unity. The value of the national unification which Greece eventually achieved may easily be overestimated. The great state of Alexander certainly generalized culture—of a sort: it made economic intercourse easier: combined as it was with the Persian expedition, it made possible a movement of population from the overcrowded cities of Greece to the new lands of the East. But some German writers (under the glamour of their own unification), and some of their English followers, have been too apt to laud the great state, to deplore the tardiness of its coming, to lament the Kleinstaaterei of Plato and Aristotle, and to attack the anachronistic policy of a Demosthenes who sought to postpone the day of greater things. This is short­sightedness. Greek unification, in the form in which it was achieved, meant the purchase of material progress at the price of moral regression. Freedom is not a fetish: it is a fruitful mother of high accomplishment. The freedom of Athens in the fifth century had produced unbounded and unstinted political energy; witness the inscription of 459 BC—"of the Erechtheid tribe these are they who died in the war, in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenice, at Halieis, in Aegina, at Megara, in the same year.” It had produced a great and unexampled art and literature (one may cite the calculation of a German writer, that for the popular festivals of that one free city, in that one century, there were produced at least 2000 plays, and from 4000 to 5000 dithyrambs): it had stimulated the spirit of man in every reach and to every range. Chaeronea, fatal to liberty, was fatal also to its fruits. This has been nobly recognized by a great German classical scholar, whose words are worth remembering. “Let us recognize the tragedy of the fate of Greece, even if it had been deserved: let us not proclaim the wisdom of an Isocrates who, false to ideals he had often loudly proclaimed, hastened to greet the coming master. We must not refuse a human sympathy to those patriots who, in Thebes and Sparta and Athens, refused to believe that the strength for freedom had vanished out of their states. The Greek needed a self-governed commonwealth as the breath of his being…; in spite of all the light that falls on a Ptolemy or an Antiochus, and of all the shadows that lie on the doings of Athens, the democracy of Solon and Pericles represents a higher type of State than the Macedonian monarchy”’ The free city-state is not built for long endurance in the world of politics. But who can deny the achievements of its short span, whether in ancient Greece, or in the Italy and Flanders of the Middle Ages? And who, reflecting on these achievements, can feel otherwise about the great State than that it was a ‘cruel necessity’?

Yet whatever we may feel about the city-state at its best, and however we may lament the tragedy of its fall, we must not idealize the city-state of the fourth century. The old solidarity of the city—the reciprocal nexus of city and citizens, which meant that the city gave its citizen a scope for complete fulfilment, and the citizen gave a devoted energy to his city in return—these were vanished things. The political thought which determines the action of the fourth-century Athens is also a tragedy. There was a reaction against the high demands and the severe strain of the Periclean conception, which involved constant service in law-court or Assembly at home, and in the army or navy abroad. Defeated Athens began to ask ‘Why?’: her citizens relaxed into a slacker fibre: they took for their motto the perverted saying, that it is more blessed to receive than to give. The citizen army began to disappear: the fourth century B.C. in Greek history, like the fifteenth century A.D. in Italian history, was an age of mercenaries; and it was vain for Demosthenes in the one century, as it was vain for Machiavelli in the other, to preach the grand style of an earlier age. Mercenaries involved taxation: taxation could not be levied, even for objects on which the Assembly had solemnly resolved by its vote: the straits to which the Athenian general Timotheus was reduced in 373 were the inevitable result. While giving diminished, receiving grew. It was a little thing, and it was defensible, that in order to provide a quorum at the meetings of the Assembly the principle and the practice were introduced of paying each citizen for his attendance. This might be regarded as a consideration for services rendered; but it was a pure gift, and a serious declension, when the state began to provide free seats at the theatre and to distribute doles among its citizens. The city was ceasing to be a partnership in high achievement and noble living: it was becoming a commercial association for the distribution among its members of dividends which they had not earned; and the principle of a social contract, which makes the state ‘a partnership agreement in a trade, to be taken up for a little temporary interest,’ took the place of the old principle of organic solidarity and reciprocal nexus of service. Democracy ceased to mean a system of collective control of a common life: it came to mean rather the absence of such control, and the freedom of each individual ‘to live his own life.’ The prominent Athenian of the fourth century is apt to be a free-lance who marries a Thracian princess: if he is not that, he is a steady and plodding administrator of the Theoric Fund which ministers to the citizens’ wants.

Individualism has cosmopolitanism for its natural associate. Those who admit and welcome the claim of a particular group on their allegiance will draw a distinction between members and strangers: the enfranchised individual can afford to greet all men as brothers. Athens in the fourth century was not yet cosmopolitan, but she was less Athenian, and more Hellenic, than she had been in the previous century. She was more of a mart of general Greek trade: she was more of a centre of general Greek culture. In spite of autonomy and particularism, the conception of Greek unity gained ground. Plato in the fifth book of the Republic recognizes the existence of a common society of Greek states, in which war is indeed possible, but in which it must be mitigated by the observance of rules peculiar to the members of the society; Isocrates, in the Panegyricus, a few years afterwards (380 BC), proclaims that the Greek world has come to find unity less in blood than in a common education and a common type of mind. Here we touch the finer side of the movement towards unification which marks the century. Whatever it suppressed, and whatever the violence by which it came, it expressed a general sentiment, and it rested on something of a voluntary adhesion. This unitary sentiment is the other side of civic decadence; it is the conjunction of this sentiment and that decadence which explains and excuses the collapse of the city and the foundation of the great state.

If we add to this unitary sentiment two other factors—the factor of monarchism and the factor of anti-Persian prejudice—we shall have constituted the triad of forces which caused the fourth century to issue in the unification of Greece, on a monarchical basis, for the purpose of conquering Persia. Not only is the century marked by the figures of actual monarchs—Dionysius I of Syracuse, Jason of Pherae, Philip and Alexander: it is also a century of monarchist opinion. Plato writes of philosopher kings in the Republic, and of the ‘young tyrant’ in the Laws. Xenophon, half a Socratic and half a soldier, preaches the virtue of a wise sovereign, such as Cyrus, ruling over a state organized in the fashion of an army: Isocrates longs for the coming of the commander-in-chief who shall lead a united Greece to the East; and even Demosthenes can admit, with a reluctant admiration, the superiority of monarchy in secrecy of counsel and energy of execution. This monarchism found its plea, and alleged its justification, in the need which was often proclaimed for a strong hand that should not only repress civic strife in Greece, but should also guide all its cities in union to the common war against barbarism. The cause of monarchy was connected with the idea of a Crusade: a new Agamemnon was needed for a new war of retribution across the seas. Just as the idea of a League of Nations in modern Europe was for centuries based on the need of union against the Turk, and just as modern sovereigns long used the plea of a Crusade to cover their policy, so the idea of a united Greece was throughout the fourth century based on the need of union against Persia, and so the would-be sovereigns of Greece—Jason of Pherae, Philip and Alexander—used the plea of a Persian war to excuse their ambitions. There was a general feeling, which is already expressed in the opening pages of the history of Herodotus, that there was a rhythm and a recurrence in the relations of East and West, and that repayment was due to fourth-century Greece for the wrongs inflicted by the fifth-century Persia. An economic motive reinforced this romantic sentiment. The Greeks stood in need of a new colonial ground. The colonial expansion of earlier centuries must be resumed, under new auspices and in new regions, if provision were to be made for men who could find no place in their cities, and were falling into a life of roaming vagrancy. This is a theme which recurs in the speeches of Isocrates. It was the work of Alexander to satisfy this economic motive, and to find a field for this colonial expansion. His foundation of Greek cities all over his Empire, even in the parts of farthest Asia, will show how thoroughly he did the work. And in this sense the new monarch of these days, like the new monarch of the sixteenth century A.D., was justified by his solution of urgent social problems.

 

II. 

THE POLITICAL THEORY OF THE FOURTH CENTURY

 

Such was the political thought which went to determine the historical process of the fourth century. The political theory of the century, as distinct from its political thought, may be found partly in the field of oratory, and partly in that of philosophy. Oratory, in its nature, lies closer than philosophy to active politics; and oratorical theory, if we may speak of such a thing, is at its best an explication of the deeper political thought implicit in the movement of a period, and at its worst an exposition of current political commonplaces. Isocrates mingles the two, with a good deal of confusion: he is a mixture of a patriotic Athenian democrat, who would somehow reconcile democracy with the good old days of the Areopagus, and a devout Panhellene, who could at one and the same time believe theoretically that monarchy belonged only to barbarians or to countries on the verge of barbarism (such as Macedonia or Cyprus), and welcome in practice any monarch who would guide a united Greece against Persia. He is doubly inconsistent; but he was too much of a voice for his time, which was full of conflicting thoughts, to be otherwise than inconsistent. He was a journalist rather than an orator, who wrote his speeches not for delivery but for publication; and like a journalist he reflected the contemporary world in all its confusion. Demosthenes, a real orator, determined to sway rather than to reflect the move­ment of events, seems consistent enough—and just for that reason one-sided. He is the apostle of civic autonomy against the northern enemy; he has little regard for Greek unity or common Greek action. But he too had his inconsistency. He lived in a fourth-century Athens: he spoke and he acted as if he lived in the Athens of Pericles. In a city which was based on the principles of a commercial association, he preached a loyalty and demanded a service which would only have been possible in a city grounded on an ancient solidarity. It is one of the notes of the theory of the fourth century, at any rate in Athens, that it is always returning in aspiration, and in a spirit of antiquarianism, to the days of a vanished past. Isocrates would hark back to the Areopagus: Aristotle himself would return to an ‘ancestral constitution. Demosthenes, too, turned his face backwards. The difference was that he acted as if the present were actually the past. Others were content to sigh, and to wait and to hope for the past to return.

It may be argued that the theory of Plato and Aristotle has its affinities with the oratory of Demosthenes. Plato, it is true, has a tinge of monarchism—but his monarch is only a civic monarch: he has a belief in the existence of a common Greek society—but his society is an international society, composed of sovereign states which are cities. His political philosophy, like that of Aristotle, remains a philosophy of the Polis—self-governing and self-sufficing: included in no form of union, and dependent on no external assistance. It illustrates the hold of civic life on the Greek mind, and shows how external and indifferent to that mind were sympolities and symmachies and all unions of cities, that in a century full of these things the two great philosophers should simply neglect their existence. We have to remember their conception of the real nature of the city. It was a home of moral life: it was a moral institution, designed to make its citizens virtuous. As such, and as such alone, it caught their attention. Their political philosophy was a part of ethics—or rather ethics was a part of their political philosophy; and the politics they studied were what we should call by the name of social ethics. Unions were only machinery: they existed for material objects, and not for moral purposes: they did not belong to a political philosophy which meant a study of the social ethics of a civic community. Neither Plato nor Aristotle (and least of all Plato) was blind to the signs of the times; but the signs which they studied were the signs which were connected with their studies. It was the signs of an inner moral decay, and not those of any external political expansion, which their point of view led them to seek; and these signs they saw only too abundantly. They are both critics of the democratic city which had turned itself into a loose commercial association, and has cast away moral purpose and moral discipline. They are thus, at one and the same time, prophets and critics of the Greek city-state; at once conservatives and radicals. Believing in the city-state as it should be, they disbelieved in it as it was; disbelieving in it as it was, they sought to show how it might become what it should be.

Plato, anxious for the reign of ‘righteousness’ , was supremely anxious for the reign of that wisdom on which he believed that righteousness depended: he saw salvation in the rule of a civic magistracy trained for its calling in philosophy, and devoted in an austere purity, by a renunciation of property and family life, to its high and solemn duties. The price of righteousness is wisdom: the price of wisdom is that a man should give all that he has, and leave wife and child to follow it. This ideal, as it is set forth in the Republic, is one for which no antiquity can furnish a precedent: Plato leaves the ground of the city, not to return to the past, but to voyage into the future. Aristotle, too, builds an ideal state where righteousness shall reign; but it is a pedestrian sort of ideal, and little more than a pale copy of that second-best ideal which Plato had constructed in his later days in the Raves. More attractive, and more genuinely Aristotelian in essence, is Aristotle’s picture of the mixed constitution which, purging democracy from its dross, adds the best elements of oligarchy to make an alloy. But even the mixed constitution of Aristotle is hardly original. In theory it had already been anticipated by Plato in the Raves (which thus furnishes Aristotle alike with his picture of an ideal, and his principle of a mixed constitution): in fact it seems to approximate to that moderate type of oligarchy which had been practised in Boeotia during the fifth century, and attempted at Athens in the revolution of 411. Indeed it may almost claim Solonian warrant; and it may thus come to be regarded as the ‘ancestral constitution’ of Athens.

 

III. 

XENOPHON AND ISOCRATES

 

Whether oratorical or philosophical—or to speak more exactly (for Isocrates also claimed to be among the philosophers) whether it takes the form of amateur or that of real philosophy—the political theory of the fourth century is derived from Socrates. Xenophon and Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle, are all heirs, directly or indirectly, and in a greater or less degree, of the Socratic tradition. Hence the common theses which they propound— that the State exists for the betterment of its members and the increase of virtue: that virtue depends on right knowledge, and is inculcated by a process of education rather than by the restriction of law; that statesmanship is wisdom, and the only true title to office is knowledge. Such positions occur in their simplest and naivest form in the writings of Xenophon. In him the Socratic tradition was mixed with Persian experience, military training, and Spartan leanings, to produce the blend we find in the Cyropaedeia. Here he draws a picture of ancient Persia, with a pencil borrowed from Socrates, according to a model furnished by Sparta. Its institutions were directed to the training of men to do right rather than to the prevention of wrong-doing: “the Persian youth go to school to learn righteousness, as ours go to learn the rudiments of reading, writing, and reckoning”. At the head of the State, supported by an aristocratic class of or ‘peers’, stood Cyrus, the man born to be king, better and wiser than all his subjects, and devoted in his virtue and his wisdom to their better­ment. Before such a kingdom and such a king, Cyaxares and the Medes were unable to stand: the state which is based on virtue and ruled in wisdom is not only happy within its borders, but irresistible without. Perhaps Xenophon wrote these things as a parable, holding that the Persians, now fallen into decay through the corruption of their kings, were as the Medes had been before, and that out of Sparta might come an impulse and a leader for a Greek conquest of fallen Persia. Of this, however, there is no certain indication in his pages: nor can we be sure, in spite of his praises of Cyrus, that he had any belief in the superiority of monarchy. Cyrus is a limited monarch in Xenophon’s conception: he has made a pact with his people, promising to maintain their liberty and constitution, if they will maintain his throne: the aristocratic body of ‘peers’ are his free coadjutors; in a word, he is a king after the Spartan kind—and Spartan kingship was no monarchy. Yet Xenophon also wrote a dialogue called Hiero, in which he made a former tyrant of Syracuse discourse on the benefits which the absolute ruler could confer on his people. But this may be an academic exercise; and in this matter it is safest to say of Xenophon, that his views are not clear to us, because they were not clear to himself.

Xenophon was a general who had settled down to the life of a country gentleman, and used his leisure to recount reminiscences and to preach what he thought to be a philosophic conservatism. Isocrates, for more than fifty years, from 392 to the year of the battle of Chaeronea, was the head of a school of political oratory at Athens. The instruction which he gave was not only literary, in the sense of being concerned with style, or psychological, in the sense of teaching the methods of affecting and influencing an audience: it was also political, in the sense of con­veying opinions and views about general political principles and contemporary political problems. Greek cities were governed by oratory: to teach the secrets of oratory was also to teach the secrets of government. For this reason Isocrates gave the name of philosophy to what he taught: it was a guide to life, and a clue to its problems. He was an empiric philosopher, who based his views on generally received opinion, which he considered to be the best guide in practical affairs; and here he diverged from Socratic tradition, and set himself against the Platonic demand for exact and grounded knowledge. His philosophy was entirely a political philosophy; but in that philosophy the internal ordering of civic affairs, which we may call ‘legislation’, was assigned a lower place than the conduct of external policy, which he identified with ‘statesmanship’ proper. His empiric leanings, and his view of legislation, are illustrated by a passage in his De Antidosi, in which it is maintained that the task of the legislator is simply to study the mass of existing laws, and to bring together those which have found a general acceptance, “which any man might easily do at will”. Aristotle, at the end of the Ethics, very naturally rejoins that it argues a total ignorance of the nature of political philosophy to maintain that ‘it is easy to legislate by bringing together the laws which have found acceptance’; for selection demands the gift of comprehension, and the use of a right criterion is crucial—and difficult.

In two of his speeches—the Panathenaicus and the De Pace— Isocrates dealt with matter of legislation, and discoursed of the internal affairs of Athens; but his wisdom was not profound. In the former he argues, like Xenophon in the Cyropaedeia (and like Plato in the Republic), that the training of men to do right by education is more important than the prevention of wrong-doing by legislation; and then, taking an antiquarian flight, not into ancient Persia, but into pre-Periclean Athens, he seeks to show how education throve, and men were wise and good and happy, in the days of the moral tutelage of the Areopagus. To go back to the days before Pericles would seem to involve a going back upon democracy; but Isocrates preserves a form of belief in the democratic faith (he could hardly do otherwise in Athens), and only suggests that election should be substituted for the use of the lot in the choice of magistrates, and that the desert of the better should thus be given that reasonable chance of receiving a higher reward which ensures a true or proportionate equality. This is the doctrine of limited democracy, or the mixed constitu­tion, which Aristotle also professed. And as he would purge demo­cracy of the use of the lot, so too Isocrates would purge it of maritime empire and of over-seas dominions. This is the argument of the De Pace, and it also recurs in other speeches. A supremacy over other states, which is based on naval power, will run to despotism and corrupt its possessor. One may date for Athens “she laid the foundation of trouble when she founded a maritime power”.

But it is the higher ‘statesmanship’, which transcends legislation and internal affairs, and is concerned with the conduct of external affairs and international policy, that exercises the mind of Isocrates most vigorously and continuously. Others might teach the art of legislation: he would teach the art of foreign policy. Partly, perhaps, he believed that its themes were ampler and more majestical; partly he felt that the inner troubles of Greek states—overcrowding, pauperism, vagrancy—could best be cured, not by remedial legislation, but by a policy of colonial expansion in which all states must join together under a common chief. The foreign policy which Isocrates was thus led to preach was a natural subject for oratory. When the Greeks gathered together for their common games, and felt themselves one people in spite of all their cities, it was easy for orators to rise and strike the note of Greek concord. Gorgias at Olympia had counselled concord in a famous oration (408 BC), and had sought to turn the Greeks against the barbarians by his eloquence. The orator Lysias had followed his example: at Olympia in 388 he had exhorted the Greeks to end civil strife, and to join in liberating Ionia from the Persian king and Sicily from the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius. Isocrates could not but embrace the same theme; and he wrote in 380, and published without delivering, an Olympic oration under the title of Panegyricus. He said nothing new; but he has the merit of having steadily preached for forty years a line of policy which he was perhaps first led to expound by the fact that it was simply the recognized staple of oratorical effort before a Panhellenic assembly. Others also preached the same sermon: we hear of one Dias of Ephesus, who urged Philip of Macedonia to be the Greek leader, and the Greeks to furnish him with contingents; “for it was worth while to serve abroad if that meant living in freedom at home”. But Isocrates preached most steadily (one can hardly say most effectively; for there is no evidence to show that his pamphlets exercized any effect); and he preached to the principalities and powers of his day—to Dionysius I and to Archidamus of Sparta as well as to Philip of Macedon. It was not that he sought a monarch, or believed in monarchy. He sought only a new Agamemnon, commander-in- chief of the forces of a new Greek symmachy; monarchy, he thought, was an anachronism in the Greece of the fourth century, except in the nominal form in which it existed at Sparta; it was only where there was a large non-Hellenic population (in Mace­onia, for example, or in Cyprus) that an active monarch could exercise a real authority. The symmachy of his dream would thus have been a military entente of autonomous cities under a generalissimo who might be king in his own country, but among his allies was simply a chosen commander.

 

IV.

 PLATO AND ARISTOTLE

 

To Plato and to Aristotle it is legislation and the internal cure of internal evils that are first and foremost, as they are also last and uttermost. Plato, as we have seen, has a certain Panhellenism: Aristotle, though he criticizes Plato for failing to treat of the external relations of the city he builds in the Laws, is even more civic in his outlook than Plato. Both, again, depart from Isocrates in regarding political theory as a matter of first principles and high philosophy, and not of current opinion and generally accepted views; though Aristotle is often Isocratean in his respect for experience and current opinion, and dismisses the communistic novelties of Plato on the ground that they have no warrant in either. Both find their real enemy not in Isocrates (Plato refers to him with a certain tenderness), but in the principle of individualism, whether preached by the sophist or practised by the Athenian citizen of their century; both are apostles of the organic life of the civic community, in which alone man rises to the measure of humanity, and finds himself and enjoys his rights by giving himself and discharging his duties to his city. Both believe that the moral life demands a civic association, because such an association supplies, in its organization and its law, a field for moral action and the content of a moral rule, and furnishes, through its scheme of education and the force of its social opinion, the stimulus and the impulse which can carry men upwards into steadfast action according to the rule of its life. Plato is more of the idealist, and Aristotle more of the realist: Plato would merge men utterly in the common life; Aristotle, the defender of private property and of the integrity of the family, would allow a large scope for the rights of individual personality. Plato, for all his idealism, is the more practical, the more eager for the realization of his ideal—ready to plunge into the ordeal of Syracuse, and prepared, if only success can be purchased by such surrender, to subdue the glowing scheme of the Republic into the paler colours of the Aristotle, for all his realism, is the more theoretical, the more academic, the less torn by conflict between the impulse towards action and the impulse towards pure thought. But whatever their differences, they are at one on the fundamental question. The political theory of both is a study of that system of social ethics, based on the Polis. which is the foundation and the condition of individual morality. “It was not prophets and priests, but poets and philosophers, who sought in ancient Greece for the moral perfection of men; and the best of the Greeks— and above all Plato and Aristotle—believed not in a church, but in their city-state, as the institution charged with the service of this high aim”.

Plato and Aristotle thus believe in the small state. The state of the Republic is to-contain 1000 warriors (Plato does not mention the number of the members of the farming class, which would be larger): for the state of the Laws 5040 citizens are suggested: in the ideal state of the Politics the citizens, who are to know one another and to be addressed by a single herald, must not exceed the number which makes it possible to satisfy these conditions. This limit of size is imposed on the state by its purpose: being a church, it cannot be a Babylon. Small as it is, it is complete: it is self-sufficient, in the sense that it meets from its own resources—from its own accumulated moral tradition and the physical yield of its own territory—all the moral and material needs of its members; and as it does not draw upon others, so it is not conceived as giving, or bound to give, to others, or as having to make its contribution to general Hellenic advancement. A complete whole, with a rounded life of its own, the small state rises to a still higher dignity than that of self-sufficiency: it is conceived as ‘natural’— as a final and indefeasible scheme of life. In this conception of ‘nature’ we touch a cardinal element in the theory of both Plato and Aristotle; and it must therefore receive its measure of investigation.

A distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘convention’—between institutions which existed by nature and those which existed by convention—had already been drawn in the preceding century by several of the sophists. The conventional was regarded as that which might or might not be; which owed its being, if it actually was, to the making or convention of a group of men, and was thereby opposed to the natural, which always and invariably was. It was easy to go still further, and to regard the conventional as that which ought not to be, on the ground that it defeated and over-rode the obvious tendency of nature; and in this way nature was extended to signify not the mere fact of regular recurrence, but the sovereignty of a supposed and ideal tendency or rule. On such a view the state might readily be regarded as conventional in all its customary forms; and nature might be argued, for instance, to demand a form of state based on the good old rule and simple plan that the strong man armed should rule the weak for his own particular benefit. Such a view involves that theory of ‘natural rights’ which has long haunted political philosophy—a theory of rights ‘inherent’ in the individual as such, apart from society, whether the supposed individual be only the strong man armed, and the rights be only his right of domination, or each and all of us be held to be individuals, and the rights be the supposed rights of each and all to life and liberty.

It was the work of Plato and Aristotle to answer this view; and they answered it, as it must always be answered, by the contention that the individual could not be distinguished from political society; that he lived and moved and had his being in such society, and only in such society; that political society, necessary as it was to the life of the individual, was rooted and grounded in the constitution of human nature; and that, so rooted and grounded, it was perfectly and entirely natural. This is the answer implied in the argument of the Republic, that the state is a scheme, and that each of its members finds himself by discharging his function in that scheme: it is the answer explicitly propounded in the opening pages of the Politics. Such an answer, it is obvious, does not imply the view that the state is natural because it has grown. Plato has nothing to say of growth; and if Aristotle uses the language of growth in the beginning of the Politics, and speaks of the growth of household into village, and of village into state, he does not rest his belief in the natural character of political society on the fact of such growth. What makes the state natural is the fact that, however it came into existence, it is the satisfaction of an immanent impulse in human nature towards moral perfection, which drives men up through various forms of society into the final political form. As a matter of fact, Aristotle—like all the Greeks, who thought of politics as a sphere of conscious making in which legislators had always been active—would appear to believe in a creation of the state. ‘By nature there is an impulse in all men to such society; but the first man to construct it was the author of the greatest of benefits.’ There is no contradiction in such a sentence; for there is no contradiction between the immanent impulses of human nature and the conscious art which is, after all, a part of the same nature. There is no necessary gulf fixed between what man does in obedience to the one, and what he does in the strength of the other. Human art may indeed controvert the deepest and best human impulses: it may construct perverted polities, based on the pursuit of mere wealth or the lust of mere power, which defeat the natural human impulse to moral perfection. Equally, and indeed still more, it may help to realize nature. Nature and conven­tion are not in their essence opposites, but rather complements.

The state is therefore natural because, or in so far as, it is an institution for that moral perfection of man, to which his nature moves. All the features of its life—slavery, private property, the family—are justified, and are natural, because, or in so far as, they serve that purpose. If Plato refuses private property and family life to his guardians, it is because he believes that both would interfere with the moral life of the guardians and therefore with the moral life of the state: if Aristotle vindicates both for every citizen, it is because he believes that all moral life requires the ‘equipment’ of private property and the discipline of family life. But both for Aristotle and for Plato there is one end; and the end is the measure of everything else. That end is ruthless. In the Republic it not only deprives the guardians of property and family: it also deprives the labouring class of citizenship, whose high calling cannot be followed by men engaged in getting and spending. In the Politics it serves to justify slavery, which can afford the citizen leisure for the purposes of the state; and it excludes from real membership in the state all persons other than those who possess that leisure. The end justifies: the end condemns: the end is sovereign. It is easy to glide into the view that the state and its well-being are thus made into an end to which the individual and his free development are sacrificed. Generally stated, such a view is erroneous: it is really a return, in another form, of that antithesis between political society and the individual which Plato and Aristotle refuse to recognize. The state (they believe) exists for the perfection of man: the fulfilment of the individual means a perfect state: there is no antithesis. But this is only true, after all, of the man who is citizen and the individual who is a member of the body corporate. The rest are sacrificed: they lose the development which comes from citizenship, because citizenship is keyed so high. Rich things have a high price. A lower ideal of citizenship, purchasable at a price which the many can afford to pay, is perhaps a more precious thing than the rare riches of the Platonic and Aristotelian ideal.

The state which is intended for the moral perfection of its members is an educational institution. Its laws are intended to make men good: its offices ideally belong to the men of virtue who have moral discernment: its chief activity is that of training the young and sustaining the mature in the way of righteousness. That is why we may speak of such a state as really a church: like the Calvinistic Church, it has a presbytery, and it exercises a ‘holy discipline.’ Political philosophy thus becomes moral theology, and sometimes pure theology. Plato in the Republic is the critic of the traditional religion of Greece: in the Laws he enunciates the canons of a true religion, and advocates religious persecution: in both he is the censor of art and poetry and music, and the regulator of all their modes of expression. Aristotle is less drastic: of religion he does not treat; but he would exercise a moral censorship of plays and tales, and he would subject music to an ethical control. The limit of state-interference never suggested itself to the Greek philosophers as a problem for their consideration. They would regulate the family, and the most intimate matters of family life, no less than art and music. Plato’s austerities are famous; but even Aristotle can define the age for marriage, and the number of permissible children. Whatever has a moral bearing may come under moral regulation. Neither Plato nor Aristotle allows weight to the fundamental consideration that moral action which is done ad verba magistri ceases to be moral. The state should promote morality; but the promotion of morality by act of state is the destruction of moral autonomy. The good will is the maker of goodness; and the state can only increase goodness by increasing the freedom of the good will. That is why modern thinkers, bred in the tenets of Plato and Aristotle, would nevertheless substitute the formula of ‘removal of hindrances’ for the formula of ‘administration of stimulus’ implied in the teaching of their masters. But after all we do an injustice to the theorists of the city-state if we compare them with the theorists of the great modern state. Their state, we have to remind ourselves, was a church as well as a state; and most churches believe in moral guidance and stimulus. And there is a stage of moral growth, when the good will is still in the making, at which it is a great gain to be habituated by precept in right­doing. Any state which is an educational institution, like every parent, must recognize the existence of this stage. Yet it is but a stage. The grown man must see and choose his way. Plato and Aristotle perhaps treated their contemporaries too much as if they were ‘eternal children’.

If these are the general principles of politics which Plato and Aristotle assume, we can readily see that they will naturally tend to the construction of ideal states, in which such principles, no­where purely exhibited in actual life, will find their realization for thought. The building of such ideals, whether on the quasi­antiquarian lines which we find in Xenophon and Isocrates, or on the bolder and freer lines traced by the imagination of Plato, was a staple of Greek political speculation. It accorded with an artistic temper, which loved to shape material into a perfect form, and would even, in the sphere of politics, assume a perfect material (in the sense of a population ideal in disposition, endowed with an ideal territory, and distributed on an ideal social system) in order that it might be the more susceptible of receiving an ideal form. It accorded, too, with the experience of a people accustomed to the formation of new colonial cities, on which the ‘oecist’ and legislator might freely stamp an abiding mark. Plato’s ideal, as it is sketched in the Republic, exhibits the philosopher’s demand upon civic life exhibited in its pure logic; yet he hoped that his contemporaries might rise, and in Syracuse he sought to raise Dionysius II, to the height of his demand. Of that ideal nothing need here be said: it is a common and eternal possession of the general human mind. The lower and more practicable ideal which is painted, with a rich and exact detail, in the Laws, has been less generally apprehended; but in practical experience, and perhaps in actual immediate effect (the training of the ephebi suggested in the Laws by Plato seems, for example, to have been actually adopted at Athens within a few years), the Laws transcends the Republic. Aristotle’s ideal state, as we have seen, is largely a copy of the state of Plato’s Laws, it is also a torso; and the profundity and the influence of Aristotle’s thought are rather to be traced in his enunciation of general principles than in his picture of their realization. He is the master of definition and classification; and it is the terse Aristotelian formula which has always influenced thought.

Ideals serve as judges and measuring-rods for the actual. The Greek states of the fourth century came to judgment before the bar of Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideals. Plato in the Republic first constructed his ideal, and then in the later books showed why, and in what degree, actual states were a corruption of that ideal. Aristotle seems to follow a reverse procedure when, early in the Politics, he examines actual states in order that their merits and their defects may throw light on the requirements of an ideal state; but in the issue he too uses ideal principles to criticize and classify actual states. Three results seem to follow from the application of the ideal as a touchstone to the actual—first, an elucidation of the principles on which offices should be assigned, and constitutions should therefore be constructed (for ‘a constitution is a mode of assignment of offices’); secondly, a classification and a grading of actual constitutions; and, finally, a criticism of that democratic constitution which in the fourth century had become general (Thebes herself, the pattern of an ‘oligarchy under a system of equal law’ in the fifth century, had turned democratic after 379 BC), and which, in the populous states of his day, Aristotle regarded as inevitable.

The assignment of office, we are told, must follow the principle of distributive justice. To each the state must assign its awards in proportion to the contribution which each has made to itself; and in estimating the contribution of each we must look to the end of the state, and measure the contribution to that end. Logically, this would seem to mean the enthronement of the virtuous, or an ethical aristocracy: in the last resort, it would involve the enthronement, if he can be found, of the one man of supreme virtue, or an absolute and ‘divine’ monarchy. Practically, Aristotle recognizes that there are various contributions which directly or indirectly tend to the realization of the end. Besides virtue, there is wealth, which is necessary to the end in so far as perfect virtue requires a material equipment; and besides wealth there is ‘freedom’—freedom not only in the sense of free birth, but also in the sense of liberty from that dependence on others and that absorption in mechanical toil, which distract men from the free pursuit of virtue. This is one of the lines along which Aristotle moves to the theory of the mixed constitution, which recognizes various contributions, and thus admits various classes to office. A classification of constitutions readily follows on this line of speculation: its terms, traced already in the speculation of the fifth century, and deepened and broadened by Plato in the Politicus. are firmly established by Aristotle in the third book of the Politics. The criticism of the democratic constitution follows in its turn. It has abandoned ‘proportionate’ for ‘absolute’ equality: it awards the same honour and the same standing to each and every citizen. It is based on recognition of one contribution, and one only—that of ‘freedom’; and that contribution is by no means the highest or weightiest. Nor is this all. Not content with the freedom which means a voice for all in the collective control of common affairs, it has added a freedom which means the absence of control, the surrender of moral discipline, and the random life of chance desires. But this is anarchy: it is the negation of the city-state as it was conceived by Plato and Aristotle. It is this fact, and not aristocratic leanings—it is a dislike of what they regard as anarchy, because anarchy is blank negation—which makes them both the critics of democracy.

We can understand the rigour of their criticism; but we can hardly admit its justice. Democratic government in the fourth century did not mean anarchy. The Athenian citizens had their defects: they loved the free theatre almost more than the free city; yet the last days of Athenian freedom were not a disgrace, either to the city-state or to the democratic constitution, and the career of Demosthenes was an answer to the strictures of Plato and Aristotle. Discipline and order were abroad in the days before Chaeronea: the cautious Eubulus was no demagogue; and, indeed, the statesmen of the fourth century in general stand as a proof that the Athenian people had some sense of merit and its desert. Nor can Aristotle’s censure upon ‘extreme’ democracy, that it means the overthrow of established law by temporary decrees of the sovereign people, be justified at the bar of history. It is a misconception of the facts. Apart from this misinterpretation Aristotle is, on the whole, less critical of democracy than Plato. He recognizes, towards the middle of the third book of the Politics, that there is, after all, much to be said on behalf of the mass of people. They have a faculty of collective judgment, which hits the mark, alike in questions of art and matters of politics; ‘for some understand one part, and some another, but take all together, and they will understand all.’ They know again, from their own experience, how government and its actions pinch; and that knowledge has its value, and deserves its field of expression. These things suggest that the people should have their share in the government of the state; and Aristotle would assign to them those functions of electing the magistrates, and of holding the magistrates to account at the end of their term of office, which their faculty of judgment and their experience of the pressure of government fit them to discharge. Plato never goes so far as this. It is true that in the early part of the Laws he assigns to his 5040 citizens the two functions of serving as an electorate and of acting as a judicature; but it is also true that by the end of the Laws he enthrones a ‘nocturnal council’ which is very like the philosopher kings of the Republic-, and even in the early part of the Laws he contends, in a sense which is the opposite of that of Aristotle, that the masses cannot judge art or politics, and that ‘ theatrocracy ’ and democracy are twin disasters. The conception of politics as a field reserved for the higher wisdom of the few is one which Plato cannot shed.

There is a similar difference between the view of law which we find in Plato and that of Aristotle. Anxious for a free field for the higher wisdom, Plato will have no laws in the state of the Republic. The eternal Ideas matter more than laws; and those who have apprehended these Ideas must be free to stamp them at discretion on the state. At the most Plato lays down a few fundamental principles—articles of belief rather than laws—to bind and guide the ruler: the state, for example, must never be allowed to exceed its due size, and its citizens must always be kept to the due discharge of specific functions. In the Laws, as the title indicates, law comes down to earth: philosophy only remains in the shape of ‘prefaces’ attached to each law for the purpose of explanation and persuasion. It is this admission of law (rather than the surrender of communism, which is by comparison a subsidiary matter), that makes the state of the Laws a ‘second best.’ At the same time, there is a fine philosophy of law in the dialogue; and there is an exact articulation and systemization of law—both criminal and civil—which represents the first real Greek attempt at codification, and influenced the growth both of Hellenistic law and, through it, of the law of Rome. Aristotle rendered less service to law: on the other hand he was, in general and in principle, a steady and consistent advocate of its sovereignty. ‘It is better that law should rule than any individual: if individuals must bear rule, they must be made guardians and servants of law.’ The Aristotelian thesis of the sovereignty of law, and the conception of government as limited by law, had a long history, and was a potent influence through the Middle Ages. The law which Aristotle thus enthrones is no code: it is the custom, written and unwritten, which has developed with the development of a state. Aristotle has a sense of historic development, which is as implicit in his general philosophy as the demand for radical reconstruction is imbedded in the philosophy of Plato. The growth of potential ‘matter’ into actual ‘form’ or ‘end,’ which is the general formula of his philosophy, leaves room for a large appreciation of history and the value of moving time: the Platonic conception of the impress of a timeless and eternally perfect Idea upon a receptive matter, which may take place at any moment when that Idea is apprehended, is inimical to any belief in gradual development. In the same way the Aristotelian formula involves some recognition of progress—though Aristotle believed that progress, alike in poetry and politics, had attained its conclusion and perfection in his time, and he had none of that looking forward to an unending and unresting progress which is a mark of modern thought. The Platonic conception leaves no room for progress: we may even say that Platonism and a belief in progress cannot live together : the process of movement in time is away from the ideal, or back towards the ideal, but never absolutely forward.

In modern times we distinguish between state and society. The one is the area of politics proper, of obligatory rule and involuntary obedience: the other is the area of voluntary co-operation, conducted in and by a variety of societies, educational, ecclesiastical, economic. It would be difficult to apply any such distinction to ancient Greece. The state was the one organization that embraced and contained its citizens: such groups as there were—small religious societies for the worship of Dionysus or the Orphic mysteries, or trade associations with a common hero or god—were insignificant. The Polis included everything; and in the same way the theory of the Polis included studies to which we should now give a separate existence—in particular the theory of economics, and (we may also add) the theory of education. There is much writing on ‘economics’ in the fourth century. It dealt partly with household management, and partly with public economy or state finance. There is the Oeconomicus of Xenophon, which gave inspiration to Ruskin; there is an Oeconomica falsely ascribed to Aristotle; there is a treatise by Xenophon On the Revenues of Athens; there is economic theory in the Republic and the Laws, there is the famous and profoundly influential theory of exchange and of interest in the first book of the Politics, which affected so deeply the canonists of the Middle Ages. Such economic theory, subordinated as it is to political theory, which in turn is subordinated to (or, perhaps one should rather say, is the crown of) ethics, admits of no isolation of the economic motive, and of no abstraction of economic facts as a separate branch of enquiry and subject of science. It is a study of the ways in which households and cities can properly use the means at their disposal for the better living of a good life. Wealth, on this basis, is a means to a moral end; as such a means, it is necessarily limited by the end, and must be neither more (nor less) than what the end requires. This is not socialism; but it is a line of thought inimical to capitalism (which involves the unlimited accumulation of wealth), and through the influence of Ruskin it has, in its measure, tended to foster modern socialism.

There was, however, a certain amount of what we may call quasi-socialistic opinion in Greece in the fourth century. Plato, indeed, was not a socialist: the scheme of his Republic is a scheme for the divorce of political power from economic possession, under which the governing class (but not the governed) surrenders private property for the sake of a pure devotion to public concerns. He may have been misinterpreted (as he is by Aristotle in the second book of the Politics), and have thus come to be regarded as the advocate of a larger and more drastic policy. Some of the later plays of Aristophanes (the Ecclesiazusae and the Plutus, produced about 390 BC) contain a satire upon plans for the general socialization of private property, which must have been current before the Republic appeared (possibly about 387), and with which its scheme may have been confused. But socialist schemes remained matters of airy speculation, which never pene­trated to the people. The citizen of Athens was more often his own employer than an employee: there was little of a wage­system: if there were rich men, they were relieved by ‘liturgies’ of part of their wealth: if there were poor, there was the Theoric Fund and the system of payment for attending Assembly and law- court. The system of private property which Aristotle defends, on the ground that virtue needs its ‘equipment’ and personality its medium of expression, was never in any real danger. It was protected, as it perhaps will always be, by the conservatism of small farmers and small artisans working on their own account. The utmost extremity of the radical politician was a demand for redistribution of land (which is not the same as its socialization) and for cancellation of debts.

Slavery was more of a moot question. It was the enslavement of Greeks by Greeks which first began to raise questionings. What was to be thought of the enslavement of the defeated Athenians at Syracuse in 413 BC? Was not Callicratidas right when at the storming of Methymna in 406 he vowed that no Greek should be enslaved if he could prevent it? An echo of such doubts may be traced in Plato’s protest against the enslavement of Greeks in the fifth book of the Republic. The question became acute when the Thebans liberated the Messenian serfs of the Spartans at the end of 370. Was this a theft of the private property of Sparta? Was it the restoration to the Messenians of the liberty which was their due? Isocrates defended the Spartan case: a certain Alcidamas spoke on the other side, and protested that ‘God has sent all men into the world free, and nature has made no man a slave.’ This was perhaps rhetorical exaggeration: Alcidamas may really have meant Greeks rather than men in general. Certainly neither Plato nor Aristotle protests against any and every form of slavery. If Plato objects in the Republic to the enslavement of Greeks, in the Laws he recognizes slavery and legislates for slaves, whom he couples with children as having imperfectly developed minds. Aristotle, recognizing that there has been much debate, makes no very clear pronouncement on the enslavement of defeated Greeks (Philip of Macedon had enslaved many Greeks since the days when the Thebans liberated the Messenian serfs, and the old rule of war might well seem to have been re-established), but he obviously inclines to regard slavery as only proper for barbarians who are ‘by nature’ slaves. The natural slave, as Aristotle conceives him, is a man whose chief use is his body, but who possesses mind enough, not indeed to control himself, but to understand and to profit by the control of a superior mind. He is a family slave, who is caught up into and elevated by the life of the family: if he serves its purposes, which after all are moral purposes, he enjoys its benefits, which are also moral benefits. There is no great harshness in Aristotle’s view of slavery. From the Ethics we learn that the slave—not indeed as a slave, but as a man—may be his master’s friend; at the end of the Politics we are promised (but not given) an explana­tion of the reason why ‘it is better that all slaves should have freedom set before their eyes as a reward.’ We may not be convinced by his argument for ‘natural’ slavery; but we must admit that, by treating slavery as a moral institution, he lent it the best sanction which it could receive. To defend slavery on the ground of its potential moral benefits is better than defence (or even attack) based merely on an economic calculus.

Another problem of family life debated in the fourth century was the position of women. The tragedies of Euripides show a certain feminism: the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes is a satire upon women’s suffrage: Plato would have women emancipated from household drudgery for political service in his ideal State. In speculation of this order the emancipation of women was connected with community of wives, and it was assumed that women could only be free if the institution of marriage and the monogamous family were abolished. It was the negative assumption, rather than the positive proposal, which attracted attention and criticism; and Aristotle, for example, in his criticism of Plato’s proposal, discusses only the question whether wives and children should be common to all citizens. Upon this line of argument he defends the private family as vigorously as he defends private property, and on the same ground: the family is justified by the moral development which it makes possible. This is very true; but the problem of the position of women is not solved by the justification of the family.

To discuss the theories of education advanced by Plato in the Republic and the Law, and by Aristotle at the end of the Politics would require a separate chapter. All that can be said in this place is that the city-state, conceived as an educational institution for the training of character and the fulfilment of human capacity, was regarded by both as finding its primary function in education; that education was therefore to be conducted by the state (and not by individuals or voluntary associations), and to be directed to the making of character; and that consequently—the consequence was readily apparent to Greeks living in a great age of art, and sensitive to its influence—the curriculum of education (apart from its higher and scientific ranges) was to be in the domain of noble poetry and noble music, such as might insensibly infect the mind and mould the character by its own nobility. No actual system of education in Greece was after this pattern. If Spartan education was conducted by the state, it was merely a military training: if Athenian education had its artistic side, it was neither conducted nor controlled by the state. Here, as in so many respects, the theory of Plato and Aristotle departs from contemporary facts. This is a consideration we have always to bear in mind. We must be very cautious in using the writings of Plato and Aristotle to illustrate or to explain contemporary political conditions, or the actual political thought of their time. Their philosophy is mainly ideal, because it is ethical, and because an ethical philosophy must deal with the ideal. Even when they deal with the actual, and criticize the actual—when, for instance, they are concerned with democracy—they deal with the actual as they saw it rather than as it actually was. The actual as they see it has already been brought into contact with the ideal: it has been, as it were, singed and blackened by the fire of the ideal. This is not to deny that they both started from the ground of the actual to attain their ideals. Nor is it to deny—least of all to Aristotle, who has a large capacity for analysis and appreciation of the given—that they understood the actual which they saw. It is only to say that they understood it in the light of their own philosophy, and condemned it because it was dark in that light.

But we must not do injustice to the sober inductive method of Aristotle, or to the width of the knowledge of facts which underlies his political theory. He made a collection of 158 polities, ‘democratic, oligarchic, aristocratic and tyrannical’: one of these, the Constitution of Athens, discovered some thirty-five years ago, remains to indicate their character. He also made a collection of ‘customs’ (the customs, it would seem, of the ‘barbarians’) in four books: he wrote a treatise on the ‘cases of constitutional law’ submitted by Greek cities to Philip of Macedon at Corinth: he wrote a work ‘On Kingship’ for the benefit of Alexander, in which he seems to have advised his pupil to distinguish between Greeks and barbarians, dealing with the former as ‘leader’ and the latter as ‘master’: he wrote an ‘Alexander or On Colonies,’ in which he may have dealt with Alexander’s policy of planting Greek cities in Asia. The last two treatises bring to the mind the curious question of the relation of Aristotle to his pupil. The imagination of later ages seized on the theme: a medieval fabliau, ‘Le Lai d’Aristote,’ makes the tutor accompany his pupil to India as a sort of chaplain and confessor. The actual facts are scanty enough. In the Politics there is a complete silence about Alexander, and an absorption in the city-state as complete as if Alexander had never existed: it is only from later bibliographies that we learn of the two treatises supposed to have been written by Aristotle for the benefit of his pupil. The connection between Aristotle at Athens and Alexander in Asia would seem to have been confined in the main to the realm of natural science. Alexander is said to have sent an expedition up the Nile, to investigate its sources, at the suggestion of Aristotle: he sent to Athens, for the use of the Peripatetic school, the observations on the fauna and flora of Asia made by the scientific staff which accompanied his expedition. That is perhaps all. Certainly Alexander’s policy in dealing with the relations between Greeks and ‘barbarians’ in Asia was not the policy supposed to have been advocated by Aristotle. It was more in accord with that after­wards enunciated by Eratosthenes, who, ‘refusing to agree with those who divided all mankind into Greeks and barbarians and advised Alexander to treat the former as friends and the latter as foes, declared that it was better to divide men simply into the good and the bad.’

 

V.

THE END OF THE POLIS AND ITS POLITICAL THEORY

 

The policy which Alexander developed during his conquest of Asia was a policy essentially different from that which he had entertained at the beginning of his conquest. In 336 he was the generalissimo of the Greeks in a war against ‘barbarians’ who were the natural enemies and the natural slaves of the Greeks: by 330 he had come to value Persian monarchy and to be attracted by Persian nobility; and he was planning an Empire in which he  should be equally lord of Greek and Persian, and both should be knit together as equals by intermarriage and common military service. This meant a great revolution. It was much that men should rise from the idea of civic autonomy to that of Greek unity: it was more that they should rise from the idea of Greek unity to that of the unity of mankind—so far, at any rate, as mankind was yet known. If we analyse this last idea, we shall see that it really implies two conceptions—the conception of a single Cosmopolis, and the conception of all men (Greek or barbarian, Jew or Gentile) as equal in that Cosmopolis. These are two fundamental conceptions that inaugurate a new epoch—an epoch which succeeds that of the Polis and precedes that of the national state—an epoch which covers the centuries that lie between Aristotle and Alexander at one end, and Machiavelli and Luther at the other, and embraces in its scope the three Empires of Macedon and Rome and Charlemagne. They are the conceptions which dominate the theory of the Cynics and Stoics. They are again the conceptions which we find in the teaching of St Paul, who believed in one Church of all Christians which should cover the world, and held that in that Church there was ‘neither Greek nor Jew. .. barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free.’

The city-state seems already to belong to a remote past, when we reflect on Alexander’s sweeping plans and the revolution of thought which they helped to produce. But it still survived under tutelage. Alexander and his successors recognized a double citizenship in all the members of the Greek cities in their Empire —a citizenship of the city, and a citizenship of the Empire which took the form of adoration (or proskynesis) due to the divinity of the ruler who was ‘God Manifest’ and ‘Saviour’ of his people. In the sphere of their own citizenship the cities retained a certain measure of autonomy; and theorists might still debate about the proper constitution of the city. Such theories were somewhat academic, in days when an Antipater might (as in 322) descend upon Athens, leave a garrison in Munychia, and abolish the democratic constitution in favour of the ‘ancestral constitution’ of Solon’s day. So long, however, as it ran in favour of a mixed constitution, with a moderate suffrage (like that instituted by Antipater at Athens, which left 9000 citizens with the franchise out of a previous 21,000), the politicians of the day were willing to tolerate political theory. Accordingly, the mixed constitution, propounded by Plato in the Laws, where he sought to blend Persian monarchy with Athenian democracy, and expounded by Aristotle in the Politics, under the form of a union of the better elements of democracy with the best of oligarchy, attained a general vogue in the new guise of a combination of the three elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Dicaearchus of Messana, a pupil of Aristotle, identified his name with this scheme: his Tripoliticus, in which Sparta, with its kings, ephors and apella, served as an example and a type, set a fashion; and the ‘tripolity’ became known as ‘the species of Dicaearchus’. The same theory of the mixed constitution, with Sparta still as model, was adopted by the Stoics; and with Rome in place of Sparta, it was in turn accepted and expounded by Polybius and Cicero.

The last word in the political theory of the fourth century was but a barren formula. The ‘tripolity’ is only mechanism, and doctrinaire mechanism at that. The Republic of Plato had contained a genuine and profound philosophy of society and human order—its purposes as well as its methods: its life as well as its form, a form for which there is no matter—the skeleton of something which has never existed. The one feature of historic interest which it possessed was its cult of Sparta. Once it had been the Spartan system of moral training which had attracted political theorists. There are imitations of this system in the ideal state of Plato’s Republic, though we have to remember that on the whole Plato regards the Spartan constitution, which really supplies the model for his ‘timocracy,’ as a corruption of the ideal. In the Laws Plato is the critic of Spartan training, on the ground that it is merely directed to the one virtue of courage, and neglects the greater things which belong to peace; but none the less he admires the mixed character of the Spartan constitution, so curiously and so subtly blended that it is difficult to decide whether it is tyranny, monarchy, aristocracy or democracy. In the Politics Aristotle is entirely inimical: he repeats the criticism of Plato, and adds a number of criticisms of his own; he has no praise for the mixed constitution of Sparta, and his own conception of such a constitution is some­thing entirely different. It was left for his disciples, such as Dicaearchus, to renew and develop the admiration of Plato for the Spartan constitution. So Sparta, discredited in one part, entered the stage again, amid new applause, in another. She was more fortunate than deserving. If any state deserved ill of fourth-century Greece, it was Sparta. She was in league with the Persian king in the East and the tyrant of Syracuse in the West.

She suppressed federations, and sought to ensure the disunity of Greece, which she thought to be the condition of her own power, and which proved to be the cause of the victory of Macedonia. If she had not broken the Chalcidian confederacy in 379, the power of Philip might never have been established. It is idle to speculate about the consequences which might have ensued. Sparta perhaps served a purpose. The Greek cities might never have achieved their own unification by their own efforts; and a larger instrument was perhaps needed for the large end of a general diffusion of Greek culture. But those who have been touched by the tradition, and educated by the philosophy, of the Greek city-state may be permitted to stand by its grave and remember its life: to wonder what, under happier auspices, it might have achieved, and to lament that it was not given to a Greece inspired by Athens to lead the Mediterranean world to a unity deeper and more pervading, because more surely rooted in a common culture—larger and more permanent, because more firmly planted in a general freedom—than Rome was ever destined to achieve.