TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIAL AND POLITICAL LIFE
I
Classes
As soon as family and national sentiment began to grow weaker, communal interests necessarily took on new forms and impelled individuals and even cities themselves into new combinations.
There had always existed in Greece a very considerable number of private societies. Between the great community which included all families and the small community which was the family itself, there were free associations of a utilitarian or sentimental character. Some had an aristocratic stamp; others made their appeal to the lower classes. Since Homeric times certain warriors, and those the most illustrious, had been united by special bonds, took their meals together and considered it their duty to have the same friends and the same enemies: they were called among themselves hetairoi1 Later the rich or the well born formed hetaireiai, clubs whose members gave each other mutual support in elections and law suits,2 or else met together for festive banquets, to throw ridicule upon popular beliefs or to discuss philosophy and politics.3 Completely different in recruitment as in purpose were certain fraternities, the oldest of which bore the name of thiasoi. These had united since pre-Hellenic days the humbler folk who wished to maintain the worship of divinities excluded from the official pantheon. In earlier times they had done much to spread belief in the mysteries, the dogma of the passion and the resurrection, the doctrine of personal survival and posthumous justice.
Whether aristocratic or popular all these societies had a special attraction for generations imbued with individualist ideas. What became of the hetaireiai, as they multiplied in order to satisfy the love of material pleasures, we have seen above in the example of the Boeotians who disinherited their collaterals and often even their children and devoted their wealth to feasting and drinking fraternities.4 As for the confraternities they found an increasingly favourable field in commercial towns, especially in the ports and suburbs where the metics attracted unceasingly new influxes of strangers. As freedom of association was unrestricted groupings by nationalities, by professions, by religions—by religions especially—were very easily made. Old pupils of gymnasiums formed little republics with their magistrates and their assemblies. Philosophers, who in the old days had poured forth their ideas anywhere, in the street or on the agora, in a palæstra or in a shop, were now heads of schools and shut themselves up with their disciples in private gardens, such as the Lyceum or the Academy. Merchants in foreign costume together with common slaves assembled in chapels where ceremonies, moving the whole audience to a profound degree, were celebrated. The gods of the barbarians had always been well received: since the fifth century the Great Phrygian Mother and the Egyptian Ammon had had their disciples, not only in Asia Minor and in Cyrene, but in numerous cities of Greece proper; Plato went to the Piræus with the Athenian crowd to take part in the procession of the Thracian Bendideia. There was a very different state of affairs when the public cults, with their cold ritual, had become incapable of satisfying religious cravings, of firing men’s imagination and stirring their hearts. Men and women sought exaltation in the moving festivals of the Orientals, in the exotic mysteries of the Egyptian Isis and the Syrian Adonis. Upon the heights of their acropolis the city deities felt themselves deserted and saw their people thronging into the confraternities where each one, no longer turning his thoughts towards the terrestrial world, strove to assure his salvation in the world to come.
Dangerous in another way was the responsibility which bound citizens to a party. This was the special vice of the Greeks. It had always existed, but never had it raged with so complete a disregard of the common interest as in the fourth century. Athens had still a certain discipline in this respect, because, in spite of everything, after a century and a half of democratic tradition she preserved some principles of civic loyalty, while the remnants of material prosperity, outliving political supremacy, prevented hatreds from becoming too bitter. But in Greece as a whole there existed almost everywhere a glaring contrast between the equality promised by the constitution and the inequality created by social and economic conditions.
The power of money was spreading and corrupting morality.5 Those who had just enough to live on wished to be rich; the rich wished to be still richer. It was the triumph of that insatiable passion for gain which the Greeks called πλεονεξία. There was no longer a profession which escaped the clutches of capitalism, of chrematistike. Agriculture was commercialized to such an extent that by the progressive eviction of small peasants and the concentration of estates in the same hands the system of large estates was recreated.6 Rhetoricians, advocates and artists, who had formerly reckoned it a dishonour to commercialize their talent, now felt no scruples in selling their goods as dearly as possible. Everything could be bought, everything had its price,7 and wealth was the measure of social values.8 By gain and by extravagance fortunes were made and unmade with equal rapidity. Those who had money rushed into pleasure-seeking and sought every occasion for gross displays of luxury. The newly rich (νεόπλουτοι) were cocks of the walk.9 Men speculated and rushed after money in order to build and furnish magnificent houses, to display fine weapons, to offer to the women of their family and to courtesans jewels, priceless robes and rare perfumes, to place before eminent guests and fashionable parasites fine wines and dishes prepared by a famous chef, or to commission some popular sculptor to carve their bust.10
What happened to public affairs when “love of money left no one the smallest space in which to deal with other things, to such an extent that the mind of each citizen, passionately absorbed in this one purpose, could attend to no other business than the gain of each day”?11 Politics also was a business concern; the most honest worked for a class, the others sought for themselves alone the profits of power and barely concealed their venality.12 We are dealing with a time when “riches and rich men being held in honour virtue and honest men are at a discount,” when “no one can become rich quickly if he remains honest.”13 Were these merely the capricious outbursts of a philosopher in love with the ideal or of a character in a comedy ? Listen to the terrible words uttered before a tribunal: “ Those who, citizens by right of birth, hold the opinion that their country extends wherever their interests are, those obviously are people who will desert the public good in order to run after their personal gain, since for them it is not the city which is their country, but their fortune.”14
What was there beneath this class which flung itself so eagerly into its business and its pleasures ? In the declining city the distress of the exchequer and the development of capitalism resulted in the extension of pauperism over a great part of the population. The peasants laboured with the sweat of their brow without winning a yield sufficient to keep them alive.15 In the towns free labour was crushed by the competition of slavery. Innumerable were those who relied upon the fee for attendance at the tribunals, who on festival days jostled before the temples in order to receive a handful of barley meal.16 Thousands of Athenians could recognize themselves in the unfortunate wretch described by Plato, 44 who dwells within the city without falling into any of the categories of the city, whom one can call neither trader nor artisan, neither knight nor hoplite, but only poor or indigent.”17 Their next meal depended upon the drawing of lots for juries at the gate of the tribunals, and a man who danced in the theatre in robes of cloth of gold shivered in winter beneath his rags.18 Unceasingly from this proletariat came groans ready to change into cries of revolt. The percentage of those who possessed nothing increased with an alarming regularity. About 431, they numbered from 19,000 to 20,000 out of a total of more than 42,000 citizens (about 45 per cent.) ; about 355, they were already a majority;19 forty years or so later, they numbered 12,000 out of 21,000 citizens (57 per cent.).
Although colonization was no longer a way of escape for down-and-outs, they still emigrated. “They wandered in strange lands with their wives and children, and many of them, forced by their daily needs to hire themselves out as mercenaries, died in fighting for their enemies against their fellow-citizens.”20 It was useless to send these voracious bands off to foreign countries; new ones always formed in their stead. In the East, after the Peloponnesian war, Cyrus the Younger took into his service more than a thousand mercenaries drawn for the most part from Achæa, Arcadia, Crete and Rhodes; the Spartan Thibron threw himself upon Asia Minor with the remnant of the Ten Thousand; finally, the Great King and the rebel satraps, the king of Egypt and the princes of Cyprus made unceasing appeals to the Greek condottieri. In the West Dionysius the Tyrant raised a great army by appealing particularly to the Peloponnesians. That was only a half-evil: Greece was ridding itself of a plethora of starvelings. But she kept more than enough of these formidable adventurers for herself. Jason of Pheræ followed the example of Dionysius; the Phocian chiefs for ten years procured with the gold of Delphi as many veteran soldiers as they wanted; and all the cities filled the gaps in their armies by means of foreign contingents. Here, there and everywhere roamed savage bands whose increasing force was becoming a danger to the whole of Greece.21
As for the multitude which remained in its native city it only too often justified the dictum: “Poverty’s sister is Mendicity.”22 Poverty exhibited at every street corner was the disgrace of the towns.23 It gave the lie direct to the noble principles upon which democracy prided itself. The title of citizen is sorry consolation indeed for the man who has nothing to eat. He was assured that the government was based upon liberty and equality, that there existed no distinctions save those established by talent, that poverty was no disgrace for the man who attempted to escape from it.24 But what is that liberty which allows only those who have the means of leisure to take part in politics ? What is that equality which places workers in dependence on those who control the purse-strings ? Liberty ? It has not the same value for the weak as for the strong: through it the latter become rich to excess, and the former completely destitute ;25 and in consequence while annihilating itself it destroys equality. To these purely theoretical rights was opposed, therefore, a disillusioning reality. In this demos which was called sovereign there was a majority in subjection to masters, bound to a sort of servitude, more wretched than the serfs under an oligarchy.26 For a large proportion of the king- people to go to the Assembly, to sit in the Council or the tribunal was less the fulfilment of a duty or the exercise of a right than the means of earning a livelihood.27 What a contrast between political theory and the social system !
The contrast was exacerbated by the glaring opposition between luxury and indigence. On the one hand the rich, grasping and voluptuous, but refined by education, displayed an insulting arrogance and sought to justify their attitude by the ignorance and the grossness of the vile mob.28 On the other hand, the proletariat, in whose eyes all wealth was unjustly acquired, envious and embittered, refused to exert themselves, on the ground that it was useless to suffer and to labour in order that another might reap the benefit and act the great lord. In small towns where contacts were perpetual and comparisons inevitable, “the poor man when he sees the leisured man able to spend all his life in doing nothing, realizes in a flash how hard and wretched existence is for himself.”29 Democratic sentiment had to endure so violent and so constant a trial in this that the harmony necessary for the working of the constitution was necessarily strained. Aristotle gives a good description of this state of affairs :
“By reason of the luxury in which they are brought up they never learn, even at school, the habit of obedience. On the other hand, the very poor, who are in the opposite extreme, are too degraded. So that the one class cannot obey, and can only rule despotically; the others know not how to command and must be ruled like slaves. Thus arises a city, not of free men, but of masters and slaves, the one despising, the other envying; and nothing can be more fatal to friendship and good fellowship in states than this. . . .”30
The philosopher was right. With those who are humiliated by life, consciousness of personal dignity produces an exaggerated moral sensibility, a morbid susceptibility. Love of liberty and equality may therefore become a sort of collective hysteria. It ends by no longer tolerating even subjection to the social contract. “The main result of all these things,” Plato tells us, “is that it makes the souls of the citizens so sensitive that they take offence, and will not put up with the faintest suspicion of slavery that anyone may introduce. For finally you know they set entirely at naught both unwritten and written laws, so afraid are they of any kind of master.”31 To have no master—this conception of personality is so tender, this pride rejects so completely the slightest suggestion of subordination, that a friend of Socrates, Eutherus, who was reduced to poverty in his old age, yet refused the position of steward, which would have made him a free man, and preferred to live from hand to mouth on the proceeds of manual labour.32 As for egalitarian susceptibilities everything excited and wounded them. Deinarchus reproached Demosthenes for having been carried to the Piræus in a litter and insulting in this way ordinary pedestrians; and a law of Lycurgus forbade women to go to the feast of Eleusis in carriages, in order that the poor women should not be offended by the great ladies.33
There was thus a class psychology because there were class interests; and this psychology and these interests opposed with increasing intensity the wider spirit which the solidarity of the city had long inspired. Aristotle, who defined man as “a political being,” himself observed that man is also 44 an economic being.”34 As soon as the two classes into which the city was divided clearly recognized that truth a gulf was created between them : latent antagonism or open conflict. Neither of them after that admitted any restriction upon the principle which it judged most advantageous for its cause : the one wished to extend to the economic sphere the constitutional rules which conferred supremacy on the majority in the political sphere; the other persuaded itself that wealth ought to confer power upon it.35 Let us hear what Aristotle has to say about this:
“Justice is thought by them to be, and is, equality, not, however, for all, but only for equals. And inequality is thought to be, and is, justice; neither is this for all but only for unequals. . . . The reason is that they are passing judgment on themselves, and most people are bad judges in their own case. . . . Because both the parties to the argument are speaking of a limited and partial justice, but imagine themselves to be speaking of absolute justice . . . and any who are equal in one respect, for example freedom, consider themselves to be equal in all.”36
These two conceptions developed side by side in contrary directions, for ever incapable of meeting. An insoluble conflict was the result. The city was henceforth composed of two opposing and antagonistic sections, of two enemy cities.37
This was no new situation in Greece, but never had it been so dangerous. Formerly, in the days when a bad system of landed property had brought creditors and debtors into violent conflict, on the one hand were men “gorging themselves with wealth to the point of satiety,” and on the other men “rushing to the plunder, full of rich hopes.” Only then a Solon had been able to throw himself between the extreme factions, “to arise and cover both parties with his solid buckler,” “to stand, a staunch pillar, between the two armies.”38 He could do this because he rested upon the support of a middle class.39 In the fifth century, too, the State was in a position to support, assist and preserve this class of self-sufficing landowners. Living was not dear, and Athens found sufficient wealth in her empire to relieve the necessities of the poor, and even to enable the thetes to ascend in the social scale to the rank of zeugitai. At that time she sent thousands of citizens as cleruchs into the lands of the federal domain; she made liberal distributions of meat and corn; she provided for the payment of rowers and officials; and she paid good wages to the artisans and workmen continually engaged upon works of public utility or adornment.
But in the fourth century the middle class was steadily declining. There was no longer anything which approximated to a third party. There still appeared, however, a few isolated men to adopt on occasion the attitude of conciliators. Here for example is the cry of an orator, with the eloquence of reason impassioned by the imminence of the danger which threatened all:
“We ought to find out some other means of supplying their necessities. If the rich proceed on these principles, they will act agreeably, not to justice only, but to good policy; for to rob some men of their necessary subsistence is to raise a number of enemies to the commonwealth. To men of lower fortunes I give this advice : that they should remove those grievances of which the wealthier members complain so loudly and so justly (for I now proceed in the manner I proposed, and shall not scruple to offer such truths as may be favourable to the rich). Look out, not through Athens alone, but through every other State, and, in my opinion, you will not find a man of so cruel, so inhuman a disposition, as to complain when he sees poor men, men who even want the necessaries of life, receiving these appointments. Where then lies the difficulty ? Whence this animosity ? When they behold certain persons charging private fortunes with those demands which were usually answered by the public . . . then it is that their indignation is raised; for justice requires, Athenians, that the advantages of society should be shared by all its members. The rich should have their lives and fortunes well secured; that so, when any danger threatens their country, their opulence may be applied to its defence. Other citizens should regard the public treasure as it really is, the property of all, and be content with their just portion ; but should esteem all private fortunes as the inviolable rights of their possessors. . . ,”40
The same counsels of moderation are naturally found scattered in the Politics of Aristotle, always the supporter of the happy mean. According to him, the city, whatever it may be, procures for man the benefit of satisfying the social instinct which is natural to him ; the perfect city would be that which assured to all the greatest sum of happiness; a city which understands its duty, which acquits itself of its choregia, is one which at the least ensures their subsistence, and if it has the means, their well-being. Though he does not agree with community of property on an obligatory basis Aristotle recommends community of usufruct as a voluntary measure. Though he declaims against the demagogues who distribute to the people the surplus from receipts, a measure which does no one any good, he nevertheless desires that the sincere union of the people shall prevent the excess of property which perverts democracy, that it shall devote all its efforts to the spreading of comfort, and that all surpluses shall be placed in a reserve fund from which money may be borrowed for the purchase of land, for the establishing of a business or for agricultural improvements.41 But, since he was an observer as well as a theorist, Aristotle was compelled to recognize that he was a voice crying in the wilderness, that oligarchs and democrats committed everywhere the same mistake in looking always solely to their own interests, and that the element in society which had been capable of reconciling extreme passions was now in a state of decay. He saw clearly that a return to that mixed constitution which he called “constitution” par excellence (ποΧιτβία) was impossible, because it required a middle class sufficiently numerous and sufficiently strong to balance the proletariat, and possessing a sufficiently large proportion of the public wealth to counterbalance the share held by the rich—two conditions necessary in order that the “constitution” should not be converted into a democracy or an oligarchy.42
CONFLICT OF CLASSES
The organization of property, the distribution of wealth, this, therefore, was the major problem of internal policy, the source of intestine struggles and revolutions. In many cities the poor demanded the redistribution of land and the cancellation of debts43— when a people has reached that point the recognition of duties towards the State is very near disappearing. Each party exploited power for its own ends and crushed all opposing factors. Democracy thought only of favouring the poor, oligarchy recognized only the rich, and the two factions, closing their eyes to the needs and interests of the city, worked towards its ruin.44 Finally, social conflicts became so bitter that they no longer had for object merely the acquisition of material advantages, but the satisfaction of vile hatreds. The oligarchs in certain towns took this terrible oath : “I will be an adversary of the people and in the Council I will do to it all the evil which I can.”45 The democrats were in a state of open or secret hostility to all those whose fortune rendered them suspect; when they despoiled them it was as much for the pleasure of impoverishing them as for the purpose of enriching themselves.46 Isocrates epitomizes these reciprocal attitudes in a sentence which throws much light on the Greece of his day:
“Instead of securing general conditions of well-being by means of mutual understanding, the anti-social spirit has reached such a pitch that the wealthy would rather throw their money into the sea than relieve the lot of the indigent, while the very poorest of the poor would get less satisfaction from appropriating to their own use the property of the rich than from depriving them of it.”47
Led on by the logic of principles and passions, some of the democrats came to desire complete equality, a ruthless levelling. For a long time no privilege had been accorded to birth. The sophist Lycophron said that nobility of blood was a mere word: the people whom a foolish convention calls well born are born as other people are.48 Men took this to mean that all distinctions of person among citizens should be abandoned. On this point the feeling of the people was at one with the reasoning of thinkers. But on others there was divergence, because the principle of equality was pushed to its extreme in two different directions. For the sophists, since men are of identical birth, the barbarian is of the same stuff as the Greek, “nature does not make slaves,” and the power of the master is founded solely on the right of might consecrated by law:49 cosmopolitanism and the abolition of slavery, such were in the eyes of certain intellectuals the consequences of equality. The multitude, however, attacked another kind of superiority, which was precisely that represented by the sophists, a superiority born of education. Good style, culture ? —what is all that to people who “think themselves equal in all things ”? Simply another means of rising above the commonalty ! It is a by-word that education has envy for its companion.50 As early as the fifth century Cleon saw nothing superior to unassuming ignorance and proudly asserted that “States are better governed by mediocrities than by the finest brains.”51 Aristophanes seized upon this maxim joyfully. And he did not forget it; the Sausage-seller who, in his comedy, wishes to take the place of the Paphlagonian in power, knows his letters, but “very slightly and very badly ” yet the servitor of Demos finds that even this is too much.52 Thus, without taking into account the native or acquired differences which exist between men from an intellectual point of view, men came to desire the establishment of “an equality which shall give the same share to those who are equal and to those who are not.”53 In brief the notion of quality was lost, and all grading of social values tended to disappear. In wishing to convert equality of right into equality in fact the inequalities of nature were regarded as null and void.
Minds so Utopian as to contemplate the levelling of intelligence would be still more apt to contemplate the levelling of fortunes. The fourth century saw the birth of innumerable theories of communism and socialism in Greece.54 But, in a country which knew nothing of big industry and where the mass of the population lived on agriculture, these theories, of necessity, assumed a special form.
The philosophers who elaborated them were, in general, full of contempt for merchants and artisans as well as for workmen: they saw in equality of wealth the best means of returning to the patriarchal regime of old times or at least of procuring for cities perverted by democratic pre-judices the advantages of Laconian institutions.55 Plato thought by this system to suppress egoism, to prevent divisions, to realize justice by sacrificing the individual to the State. In the Republic he is still full of illusions in spite of his first voyage to Sicily. He hoped to establish an immutable order by means of communism; but this communism, which was to extend to women and children as well as to material things,56 was only to apply to the two superior classes of philosophers and soldiers, and not to the inferior class of producers, whose duty it was merely to provide for the needs of the two others : his postulates were privilege and servitude. In the Laws, disillusioned by two further attempts in Sicily and now very old, the idealist, in order to render his ideal more practicable, strikes a bargain with prejudices and modifies his scheme with elements borrowed from Sparta. Property shall be private, granted; but it shall at least belong to the family and not to the individual; in order that it shall remain inalienable and indivisible it shall belong to a fixed number of citizens, the 5,040; and strict precautions shall be taken to prevent the people, by an abuse of its legislative and judicial power, from assailing these fundamental principles.57 The communist ideals of the hilosophers seem to have had a moral rather than an economic character: they disdained mere observation of facts and proceeded by an a priori method; they seemed made to gratify aristocratic coteries.
But when they descended into the market-place the same ideas, the same words took on a very different colour. Let us take our stand in the years of distress when the State had been compelled to abolish the salaries of officials and the fees of the heliasts, to put a stop to the public works which provided work for craftsmen, to abandon at the command of the victor the naval constructions which gave wages to so many workmen and rowers. Heads were raised in protest, suffering caused discontent to grow rife, imaginations grew hot with desires and cherished insensate hopes. A fine subject for comedy, when conditions had improved. In 392 Aristophanes seized upon it. In the Assembly of Women Praxagora expounds the system:
“All goods must be held by all in common, so that all live from an equal portion. It must not be allowed that one should be rich and another wretched, that one should have a great farm and another not enough ground to bury him, nor that one should have a whole army of slaves and another not a single servant. No, I shall make one common life for all, the same for all. . . . The women shall belong to all the men and they shall have children by anyone they wish. . . . The children shall regard as their fathers all men older than themselves.”58
The placid husband of this impassioned virago found of course many objections to bring forward, but Dona Quixote easily overrules Sancho Panza. One of her replies, however, is worth noting. If everyone spends his time going from banquet to banquet and no one is compelled to work, who then will cultivate the land ? Slaves. Thus communist democracy itself was nothing more than an aristocracy which was to be maintained by means of a class bound to the soil. The principle was always the same: no city is possible without slavery. But Aristophanes goes still further. In 388, when the maritime strength of Athens was being reconstituted and when tolls levied on ships coming from the Euxine supplemented the treasury, he came to grips with the problem. In the Plutus he attacks the foolhardy men who wished to give sight to the blind god of Riches and to drive out Poverty. If Plutus should recover his sight and share himself among all equally, there would remain no one to ply a trade or learn an art; for it is to Poverty, the sole author of all wealth, that everyone owes his subsistence.59 It is by the sacred law of labour, whose celestial origin and splendid dignity Hesiod affirmed,60 that individuals ought to be stimulated and society regenerated.
When a comic poet ceases to utter large obscenities and adopts the tone of the preacher without fear of being howled down, his counsels must be in accord with the profoundest convictions of his hearers. There was, indeed, a great gulf between the numerous cities which allowed themselves to be dragged into all the horrors of social wars and Athens, preserved from the worst excesses by her comparative wealth and her traditions. Let us see the difference.
When Polybius, following the example of Aristotle, drew a picture of revolutions he described the Greece of the fourth century as well as that of his own day.
“When they have made the populace ready and greedy to receive bribes, the virtue of democracy is destroyed, and it is transformed into a government of violence and the strong hand. For the mob, habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbours, as soon as it has got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, being excluded by poverty from the sweets of civil honours, produces a reign of mere violence. Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land.”61
Examples of such revolutions are innumerable.62 Let us take three of them in the East, the centre and the West of the Greek world. At Mitylene the debtors massacred their creditors wholesale and then pleaded in excuse passion and the absolute necessity created by their financial position.63 The democrats of Argos, in 370, using the pretext of conspiracy, threw themselves upon the rich and important citizens; carried away by reckless madness, they butchered more than twelve hundred of them and confiscated their property. Then calm ensued once more, whilst the whole of Greece, though accustomed to incidents of this kind, resounded with a great cry of indignation.64 In Sicily landed property was the bone of contention in the civil wars. Previously Dionysius the Elder had deprived the knights of their estates and divided them in equal lots among his veterans and the serfs: it was by this measure that he had consolidated his power.65 After the expulsion of Dionysius the Younger (356) the liberator Dion had to struggle against the extreme party which, incited by a man named Hippon, was clamouring for a new distribution of lands. “For the disinherited,” the demagogue violently asserts, “equality is the beginning of liberty, as poverty is of servitude.”66 A decree of spoliation was voted and Dion left Syracuse; only Hippon’s fall, after the recall of Dion; prevented the application of this decree. After lying dormant for the space of a generation, the social problem woke to terrible life. In 317 Agathocles hurled his soldiers and the mass of the people against the Six Hundred and their partisans. A man-hunt began. At the end of two days four thousand citizens had perished and six thousand had taken the road of exile. Agathocles was then able to seize absolute power and to put a stop to the shedding of blood ; he knew how to win over the people: he went to the Assembly to promise the cancellation of all debts and the distribution of land to the poor.67
At no time did the history of Athens present such sights. In a city which held economic domination in the Mediterranean world, democracy, the mistress of power, had no reason for allowing itself to be embroiled in social revolution. It was content to effect from day to day in the Assembly and the tribunal a fragmentary and piece-meal revolution. Let other cities decree the division of landed property, of capitals and revenues, or let them content themselves with seizing inheritances for the exchequer;68 in Athens there were no measures of that kind. Every year the archon, on his entry into office, proclaimed that, whilst he was in power, every man should enjoy full and complete possession of his property.69 But acquired wealth was subject to a variety of taxes, and in particular sumptuary expenditure. In a very great number of suits the heliasts delivered what were essentially class sentences. Even in the fifth century they were unfavourably disposed towards the rich. They felt the joy of kings or gods when they were making “great personages of four cubits in stature” tremble before them, or listening with a malicious glee to their supplications and their flatteries.70 Everything goes to prove, however, that for a long time they had too high a conception of their mission to allow themselves to rejoice in miscarriages of justice, since even in the time when Aristophanes represented Philocleon assuming the airs of Zeus, an oligarch complained that the number of unjust sentences was not sufficiently great to swell the body of malcontents.71 But at the close of the fourth century, especially in the unhappy years which followed the Peloponnesian war and the “social” war, men who had grown degenerate as a result of the universal distress found it difficult to keep themselves within the limits of impartiality.
“It is a known fact,” says the orator Lysias with a naïveté which borders upon impudence, “that the annual Council does not commit injustices when it has resources sufficient for administration, but that in years of distress it is simply compelled to welcome denunciations, to confiscate the property of citizens and to obey the suggestions of the most dishonest of the rhetoricians.”72
Sycophants found the system to their liking; they had a fine opportunity for exciting jealousy against the great and for demanding judgments in favour of the small.73 And one hears certain plaintiffs excusing their wealth or recalling how much of it they have devoted to the service and amusement of the people; others in a cynical fashion plead their poverty as a claim upon the benevolence of the judges.74 If an occasion offered itself for the infliction of a heavy fine or a total confiscation, the plaintiff did not hesitate to point out that the treasury was empty and that it must be restored to a condition in which it would be able to pay salaries.75 It was of course partisan exaggeration to assert that it was more dangerous at Athens to appear rich than to be criminal; it was merely a witty flash to deplore the misfortune of the rich man who is a slave, and to vaunt the happiness of the poor man who is a king.76 Nevertheless, at certain moments the mass of fiscal edicts, the too frequent incidence of “ liturgies,” the heaviness of the taxes which weighed upon the members of symmoriai, the perpetual fear of seeing oneself compelled by another tax payer to an interchange of fortune, gave some appearance of reasoned foundation to these apparent paradoxes.77
Athens, therefore, had a place apart in the class struggles. She was none the less carried away by the general agitation. The gravest danger to the regime of the city in the fourth century lay in the fact that party spirit reared itself above patriotism. We have already noted many instances of exiles seeking foreign help in order to return to their native country and regain power there. Athens had undergone that bitter experience twice in the course of the fifth century, when ambition and the desire for vengeance turned the Pisistratid into the ally of the Great King and led Alcibiades into placing himself successively at the service of the Spartans and the Persians. The novel fact was that individuals who had no injury to avenge armed themselves against their native city simply from sympathy with the institutions of another city, that factions would rather see the loss of national independence than the triumph of the opposing faction.
Xenophon is the perfect type of the Greek who was completely detached from his native country,—a Laconian by political and social prejudice. He began by making himself known as the leader of the countryless men lost by the death of a pretender in the heart of Asia. When he returned to Europe he felt not the slightest scruple, Athenian though he was, in fighting against the Athenians at the side of his friend Agesilaus. Then, worn out, he retired to a beautiful estate at Seillus in Elis to live on the fruits of his plunder, peacefully, gloriously, as the hunting squire steeped in piety. Finally, when he had been driven out by war, he rejected the offers of his countrymen who, forgiving everything, recalled him, and established himself at Corinth where he died.
The cold indifference of a Xenophon is even more significant than the resentment of an Alcibiades. What is even more so is the solidarity of whole parties from town to town. It did not merely create moral bonds; it tended towards the effective suppression of frontiers. Since the fifth century democrats everywhere had fallen into the habit of appealing to Athens for help, and Athens had been dragged, in spite of herself at first, into restricting by her intervention the autonomy of the federal cities. Then Lysander set himself the task of grouping the oligarchies of the whole of Greece under the hegemony of Sparta. His attempts were premature and too ambitious for his day. But soon a particular incident shows clearly how political passion might work against the city. In 393 Corinth was torn asunder by civil strife: the democrats wished for war against Sparta in line with Thebes, Athens and Argos; the oligarchs were supporters of peace and the Spartan alliance. The oligarchs prepared a surprise attack; but the democrats forestalled them, surprised them during a banquet and massacred a great number. After that, despairing of saving the independence of the town without help from without, they decided to unite with Argos in a single State. Frontier lines between the two countries were destroyed ; the name of Argos alone appeared on official documents. Corinth of its own consent disappeared from the list of Greek cities. It is true that the fury of the surviving oligarchs soon destroyed the revolutionary work; but by what means ? They opened a gate in the long walls to the Lacedaemonian army.78 Corinth, placed between Argos and Sparta, could only maintain its autonomy by some sort of balance between parties, a matter which they no longer troubled about.