CHAPTER II
The Greek State
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THE GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GREEK STATE
In Greece, as also in Italy, the unit of political life throughout classical times was the city. Men were ‘political animals’ in the sense that they were members of a πόλις; and though, in the process of time, under the Macedonian and Roman Empires, the πόλις might be enclosed in a larger unit, it was enclosed without being absorbed, and it still remained a centre of loyalty and a system of government, attracting the devotion and inspiring the munificence of its citizens, and continuing its functions (one may almost venture to say) not so much under, as side by side with the larger schemes of political life into which it had been drawn. There were, it is true, many parts of Greece in which the city was not indigenous: the Aetolians, for instance, were still, in the days of Aristotle, leading a tribal life in unfortified villages. But civic life was none the less the normal life of the Greek; and aware of that fact, he could draw a distinction between his own civilization, which was that of the city, and the civilization of the Celts or the Germans who lived in the countryside, and whose civilization was that of the tribe (ἔθνος).
The distinction between the civic life of Greece and the rural life of northern Europe in classical times finds its parallel, during the Middle Ages, in the distinction between the urban life of Italy, still, as it had been in classical times, a country of cities, and the predominantly rural life of England and France and Germany. It is natural, indeed, to compare the towns of medieval Italy with the cities of classical Greece;1 and the comparison is one that will recur in these pages. Like the Italian town of the Middle Ages, the Greek city is the one unit of life. It is the home of all occupations; it combines the growing of corn and of olives with the making of pottery and leather. It is the home of all classes; it unites the nobility of the land with the craftsman and the retailer. From this fundamental fact flow many of the essential traits of the Greek πόλις. In the first place, even if it is a city, it is redolent of the country. If it is the home of urbanity and of that ‘civility’ from which we have drawn our word civilization, it is also the home of summa rusticitas. ‘There is,’ says a French writer, ‘a flavour of the barnyard about the comedies of Aristophanes’.1 Immediately outside the walls of Athens lay the orchards of gnarled olives, the vineyards, and the sown fields; and within sight of the city rose the sheep-walks on the hills where the shepherds pastured their flocks. For centuries agriculture was the one occupation of the Greeks; nor was it until about the seventh century that trade and industry developed on any scale. Even afterwards the tradition long remained that agriculture was the only proper pursuit of the citizen. ‘The belief that it is the only foundation of life which is physically and politically sound is common to the Delphic God, to Aristophanes, and to Aristotle.’2 There are many passages of the Politics in which Aristotle shows much of the countryman’s instinct. When he is discoursing of economics, he lays it down that agriculture is the only natural method of acquisition. He has a certain contempt – a contempt hardly warranted by the facts of Greek life, and partly, perhaps, due to philosophic prepossessions as well as to agrarian prejudice – for the occupations of the retailer and the craftsman. The democracy which finds most favour in his eyes is a democracy of country peasants.3 When he allots the land of his ideal State among its citizens, he is careful to allot to each citizen two holdings, one near the town, and one in the country.4 When he is discussing the theory of communism, the one problem to which he addresses himself is whether the land of a civic community should be held in common or in severalty.
Aristotle was perhaps preaching, in this respect, a definitely conservative doctrine. By the fifth century Athens, at any rate, was definitely committed by the paucity of her agricultural produce, and by the growth of her population, to an ‘Athenian economy’ of selling what she could and buying what she must. From the time of Solon she had encouraged industrial production, in order to gain a margin for exportation; and from the sixth century onwards she had come to depend largely on foreign imports. The city-state was not, as a matter of fact, so economically self-sufficing as Aristotle’s theory desired; but it was, on the other hand, what it was all the better for being, the home of a varied activity, in which industry and exchange found their place by the side of agriculture. As it was the place where all occupations met on a common ground, so again it was (and this is a second essential trait) the place of a common life and the home of a union of classes. Life within common walls drew men together in a natural intimacy. If it did not abolish the prestige of wealth and birth and culture, it established a tradition of easy intercourse between all classes. There was no physical segregation between the house of the nobleman and the workman’s cottage. Climatic conditions made life very largely a matter for the open air. Men met, marketed, and talked in the market-place: they took their exercise together in the public gymnasia or athletic grounds;1 if it rained they walked together in the colonnades or covered walks which were common in most Greek cities. In the market-place, the gymnasia, the colonnades, the city had its brain-centres; and when men met in the assembly for deliberation, they met to settle matters which had been discussed before, and on which an opinion had already been formed, in all these centres. The city was not only a unit of government: it was also a club. It was not only politically self-governed: it had also (what made its self-government possible) a large freedom of social discussion. The home meant much less to the Greeks than it does to us: the open life of the market-square meant much more. In the frequent contact of such a life, men of all classes met and talked with one another; and the democratic ideals of equality and of freedom of speech found their natural root. Knots of talkers and circles for discussion formed themselves from day to day; and in public talk and open discussion, the business of the community would be a natural staple.2 Men would come to know one another intimately, and in the common discussion of the market-square and the common exercise of the wrestling-grounds would learn one another’s worth. Such a society is the background and basis of the theory of the Greek philosophers. It is of such a society that Aristotle is speaking when he advocates the allocation of offices in the community according to worth; for ‘mutual acquaintance with one another’s characters is necessary to the citizens, both for decision on points of justice and for the proper award of office according to worth’. It is of such a society, again, that he is thinking when he justifies the right of the masses to have a share in political power by the consideration ‘that the masses have a better faculty of judging [than the few]; for some see one aspect, some another, but all together see every side’.1
A last characteristic of the Greek State follows naturally on that which had just been mentioned. The Greek State, in point of extent, was municipal: one may almost say that it was only parochial. It is easy to explain this fact by geographical conditions; but though it is easy, it is not therefore true. Geography may have carved Greece into small enclaves by arms of the sea and ranges of high mountains; but man is made what he is, not by geography, but by the spirit. The consciousness of a common nationality would have impelled the Greeks towards a larger State, if it had not been overborne by a still stronger consciousness of the value of the common life they loved and of the need of a civic organization for the attainment of that life. The city-state was not a geographical datum; it was the necessary spiritual environment of a society that lived on discussion, that found its elixir in talking in common ‘into the midst’ of others, and that felt a necessity upon it to convert discussion and talk into concerted action through joint deliberation and common self-government. The Greeks were well enough aware of their unity. They knew that they had ‘one blood and one speech, and establishments of Gods and sacrifices in common, and habits of life after the same fashion’.2 They could contrast themselves as a common stock with the barbarians; and Aristotle found in the Hellenic race the golden mean between the races of northern Europe and those of Asia – ‘whence it continues free, and is the best governed of any race, and if it found a single government could rule the world’.3 But it is significant that Aristotle speaks of the Greeks in one and the same breath as the best governed of all peoples, and as destitute of a single government. They were the best governed, because they lived in cities; and for the very same reason they were destitute of a single government. They knew the price they paid for their civic commonwealths, and on the whole they paid it cheerfully. They hardly felt the impulse, so strong among modern peoples, towards the achievement of national unity in and through a common national government. There were some, indeed, like Isocrates, who heard the call of Empire, and felt that Greece could not take ‘its place in the world’, or fulfil ‘its mission in the East’, unless some sort of national unity, possibly under some form of monarchy, were first of all established. But they were the exceptions of their times; and Plato and Aristotle, who are philosophers of the πόλις, are also philosophers of the actual politics of Greece. We may call it Kleinstaaterei – and such, in point of size, it is; but few States have occupied as large an area of the kingdom of the mind, and few have unfolded so much the dignity of the human spirit, as some of the cities of ancient Greece. We must recognize that there is a reverse side to their achievement. City fell into feud with city; and in spite of, or rather perhaps just because of the intensity and intimacy of its common life, each city became the prey of civic dissension. The result was collapse in the days when a great State arose in the north under Philip of Macedon. The Greeks knew their weakness; but they clung to their ideal. State and πόλις remained for them convertible terms, down to the end of their great period. Their philosophers know no State that is not a πόλις. The tribe (ἔθνος) is not a State, but at most the primitive rudiments of a State; and the aggregation of cities in a federal form is not a State, but a sum in addition badly done. Aristotle never mentions the remarkable federal system which existed in Bœotia from about the middle of the fifth century down to 387, and that though it seems to have formed the model for Philip’s reorganization of Greece at the congress of Corinth in 338;1 nor does he mention the great territorial State which had arisen in Macedonia in his days, and in which he himself had lived.
It is not blindness. It is prepossession with a higher type, or with what was regarded as a higher type, to the exclusion of all others. And we must remember, if we would understand the development of political theory, that this higher type was so ingrained that it did not disappear when great territorial States and Empires arose. The city was not absorbed by Macedonia or by Rome. It remained as a unit of life and government in their Empires. Alexander and his successors practically recognized a double allegiance in the citizens of the numerous cities under their sway – the civic allegiance due to the city, and the personal allegiance due to themselves. They superimposed on the old civic loyalty a new personal loyalty; and to gain this loyalty they made themselves gods, and claimed as gods the ‘adoration’ of their cities. The Empire of the Seleucids in western Asia, for instance, during the third and second centuries, was largely an empire of cities. Each city was something of a State: ‘its sovereign was not, or not simply, the king: it was the body of its franchised inhabitants assembled in general assembly, and it proceeded to manage its public affairs by means of discussion and resolutions, by delegating functions to a council and magistrates, and by determining its own domestic and foreign policies’.1 The cities spoke Greek: they had Greek codes of law: they had Greek gymnasia. Above them stood the king who was also a god – a god ‘manifest’, as Antiochus Epiphanes called himself; and to him, as such, the citizens owed a second allegiance, which would, if his mandates conflicted with their laws, be a superior allegiance. He was not himself a citizen of any city; he stood outside and above them all, ‘like a god among men’, as Aristotle says of the παμβασιλεὐς, who in some respects seems an anticipation of the deified ruler of later days.2 But the city remains none the less, and the city is the real and intimate nucleus of life under all the Seleucid kings.
The city still remained, and was equally the nucleus of life, under the Roman Empire, almost till the fourth century of our era. Rome herself was a city-state; and the growth of the Roman Empire took the form of a union of other city-states, first in Italy and then in the provinces, under the zgis of the premier city-state. The civic constitution of Rome proved unequal to the burden; and the Roman Empire had to develop, what the Macedonian Empires had developed, a deified ruler, or divus Cæsar, to whom all the cities of the Empire could pay adoration. But the rise of the deified ruler did not hinder – on the contrary, it rather tended to aid – the development of cities in the Empire. The old city-states of Italy and the Greek East still continued to exist; and to these were added a number of others, as kingdoms were dissolved into cities, or as the Celtic tribal units of the West, in Spain and Gaul and Britain, were turned into civitates and equipped with civic government.1 Here again we find two citizenships – one of the local civitas, and one of Rome; and here again the central citizenship is not so much citizenship as personal allegiance to a deified ruler. The city becomes the foundation, and the essential unit, of all local administration, alike in the East and in the West.2 It is true that Rome imposed a uniform civic constitution of an oligarchical type, similar to her own constitution in Republican times, with its mainspring in a senate (or ordo) composed of ex-officials.3 But the local vitality of each city long remained vigorous; and the old characteristics of the city-state long continued to exist in the cities of the Roman Empire. Local feuds were as heated as ever, and everything tended to be drawn into their orbit: Trajan cannot permit the existence of a volunteer fire-brigade in Nicomedia, though a great fire has shown its necessity, because he knows that its organization will add a new weapon to civic dissensions.4 The old feuds of city with neighbouring city also recurred; and under Septimius Severus we may find rival cities taking part in a civil war which distracts the Empire in order to fight out their local rivalries under the opposing banners.5 Finally the old spirit of devotion to the civic commonwealth, and the old instinct of public munificence, still remained to inspire the hearts of the citizens. Rich men spent their means, generation after generation, until they were bankrupt, in providing meals and amusements for the poorer citizens, or in building baths and foundling hospitals for the benefit of their cities. Their motive may often have been a desire for statues or public funerals: their actions showed that the old civic spirit of Athens was not dead, and that the same outlook on life which made the rich Athenians furnish a chorus or equip a trireme, and which helped the building of the Acropolis, was still a potent force. The rich still felt, as Aristotle had taught, that if wealth was a ‘private possession’, it must be put to the ‘common use’ and held as a trust for the community; and the poor, feeling that they had a lien on the rich man’s wealth, were saved from the communistic outbursts which the misery of the third century A.D. might otherwise have provoked.6 But from the end of the second century these things had begun to change. The old system of life had depended on two things: on the conception that the city was something of a State, well worth a man’s loyalty, and on the belief that office in the city was an honour and not a burden (honos, non onus). That conception and that belief began to disappear. Loyalty was diverted to the central government, and men sought to get central office in order to attain its privileges and exemptions. Again, the management of civic finances had never been really sound, and public munificence had only contributed to its unsoundness; and when the Emperors, with the best of intentions, tried to set local finances in order, they were forced to interfere with the autonomy of towns, and to deprive their life of its spontaneity. Office became a burden: men fled from cities into the country to escape its incidence.1 By the fourth century A.D. the city is dying; but until that century, the city had never ceased to be a centre and an inspiration of the lives of men.
Such, as far as the briefest of outlines can show, was the πόλις, and such was the part which it played in history for nearly a thousand years, from the seventh century B.C. to the third century A.D. We may now turn from considering what it was to considering what it was not. Errors are easy in dealing with an institution remote from us in time and different from our own in spirit. It may help towards the correction of errors, into which it is easy to fall, if we seek to discuss three propositions, or to enunciate three paradoxes. First, the city was not a city, or at any rate not always a city; and it was certainly never a city in our sense of that term. Secondly, the city was not necessarily the home of ‘leisure’, nor did the life of its citizens rest on a basis of slavery, nor were they prone to a contempt of labour. Lastly, the city was not devoid of representative institutions, nor unacquainted with the political machinery which is connected with those institutions.
CITY-STATES AND TRIBAL STATES
‘The city was not a city.’ In the first place, it was not a mass of buildings or an urban area. The ‘city’ of Athens contained, on a rough estimate, the population of Bristol (the estimates vary between 300,000 and 400,000), and the area of Derbyshire. Half of the population lived in a central town, which was double, and contained a port as well as the inland town itself four miles away; half lived in the country.1 The whole ‘city’, including both town and country, was divided into about a hundred demes; and these, though cunningly distributed in different tribes by Cleisthenes, so that a group of contiguous demes was never joined to constitute a tribe, were individually centres of a vigorous local life, and active organs of the central government. They had their local assembly and their elected officials; they managed the property and the religious ceremonies of their district; and they played a large part in central affairs by keeping a roll of the civic body (for every citizen had to be enrolled as a member of a deme); by raising direct taxes (when they were necessary) and, above all, by proposing lists of candidates from which Athenian jurymen and Athenian councillors were selected by the use of the lot. Athens was indeed in many respects peculiar. Few cities had any local life comparable to that of her demes. Sparta, for instance, was a State with a larger area of territory than Athens. But all the Spartan territory was dominated by the town of Sparta on the Eurotas – a town composed of five villages, which even after their union still preserved something of a separate existence. Only the inhabitants of the town itself had political rights: the rest of the population fell into various degrees of subjection. Some were Perioeci, and managed their local affairs, though they had no voice in the central government: the great mass were Helots, or serfs, who cultivated, in return for part of the produce, the land of their masters in the town. But however unlike Athens in other respects, Sparta was like her in this: she was not, any more than Athens was, a city in the modern sense of the word. They were both States, combining town and country, though they differed greatly in the terms on which they made the combination.
But there is also another sense in which it may be urged that the city was not a city. A city, we must remember, always meant to the Greeks a community of persons rather than an area of territory. They spoke in terms of men where we, with feudal ideas unconsciously present in our minds, tend to speak in terms of acres. The question arises: What was the idea by which these men were grouped and by which their community in one society was established? Two answers are possible. We may answer that it was contiguity; or we may answer that it was kinship. If we give the first answer, we are entitled to speak of the Greek commonwealth as a city-state (Stadtstaat); if we give the second, we are bound to speak of it, not as a city-state, but as a tribal-state (Stammstaat). One of the greatest of Greek scholars1 has pressed the second of these views. Rome, he admits, was a city-state, though she only gradually became such; and in Ionia, again, the confusion and dislocation of old groupings in the period of the migrations had loosened and destroyed the blood-bond of the tribe, and replaced it by the local tie of the city. But ‘Athens and Sparta had only any political importance so long as their constitutions had not the least trace of a city about them’. The State, in Athens and Sparta and Greece generally, was a living tribe and a personal order of men, ‘belonging to one another by birth, and therefore by nature herself, and only able to be parted by doing violence to nature’. The tribe or stem seldom attributed its unity to descent from a single common ancestor, but it was none the less a unity, and conscious of its unity; and it incorporated its consciousness in a common and special cult of one of the great deities. The stem of the Athenians worshipped Athena, and called itself by her name, ‘the folk of Athena’, just as conversely, in process of time, the representation of the goddess owed many of its traits to the characteristics of her people, so that if she gave her people their name, they gave her back their own character, and made of her their own mirror. Such a society, united by the natural bond of blood, and expressing its union in its cult, has its inner societies of ‘brotherhoods’ (ϕρατρίαι) and clans (γένη), equally based on blood, and equally natural – just as a tree has its rings; but they have not combined to create the State, any more than the rings have combined to create the tree, and the society of the stem is ‘prior’ to their societies, as the tree is ‘prior’ to its rings. The society of the stem may take to living in towns, and it may even, as it did at Athens, organize itself on the lines of radical democracy; it still remains a stem-state. Citizenship depends on birth, and not on residence; in the period of Athenian splendour there is legally no city, and the demes of the city are fused with those of the country, in the system of Cleisthenes, as divisions of the people of Athena; nor was it until Hellenistic times that the city of Athens came to control the Athenian State. Until that time the city is an economic fact: it is not a political scheme; and the stem remains the basis and the dominating idea of political life.
From this conception of the Greek State as a stem, several corollaries may be drawn. In the first place, it follows that citizenship goes by descent. Membership of a society based on the principle of blood can be acquired only by birth in that society, though the society may resolve, by general consent expressed in its assembly, to ‘adopt’ new members. Even Athens, in the radical days of Pericles, enacted by the law of 451 B.C. that only those whose father and mother were Athenian citizens legitimately married could attain Athenian citizenship. When citizenship was thus regarded as membership of a society, based on blood and united by a common cult, it was a natural corollary that it could not easily, if at all, be extended. Athens could not give citizenship even to her ‘allies’ in the Delian league; they were not of the blood; and to make one stem out of many would have been, to the religious consciousness of each of the stems of the league, an intolerable monotheism. In the second place, it follows from the nature of the stem that the State, which is based upon it, is essentially a living group of kinsmen. The State is a family circle; and it is divided into smaller family circles, arranging itself by the principle of blood in brotherhoods and clans, and not by the principle of contiguity in quarters and wards.
‘The family aspect of the Greek city is accentuated by the fact that the town-hall was a town-hearth; that the chief subdivisions of the citizens were brotherhoods, and that all permanent associations of them for public purposes assumed the descent of their several members from common ancestors, who were naturally gods or demi-gods.’1
The living society thus articulated was naturally and necessarily sovereign of itself; the autonomy of the Greek commonwealth is the essential and inevitable outcome of the nature of the kin-group. A society based on contiguity may have grades: a society based on kinship must recognize the legal rights of all who are of the kin. The Romans, who followed the principle of contiguity, spoke of the ‘State’ and imperium; the Greeks, who followed the principle of kin, spoke of κοινωνία and autonomy. As in politics, so in religion. Since the society is united in a common cult, all its members share alike in the control of that cult. ‘In its relations to its gods the Greek State still observes the principle, that the sovereign is the people and the society of free men, who by nature, or practically by nature, are a unity.’1 Lastly, to put the converse side, a society of this order, so entirely free and self-governed, expects and receives the last measure of devotion from its members. ‘She is ours and we are hers’: such is their attitude to the State. United by blood with his society, bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, the individual does not think of a separate individual life or of separate individual rights. ‘We must not think that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, but that they all belong to the State.’2 The tone of the funeral speech of Pericles echoes the old idea: ‘Athenians’, such is his gist, ‘are made for the city, not the city for Athenians’.3 And the idea persists in Greek political thought. While modern thought starts from the rights of the individual, and conceives the State as existing to secure the conditions of his development, Greek thought starts from the right of the State to a self-governing and self-sufficing existence, and conceives the individual as existing to further that existence. ‘He who showed the obedience of a child to his country, even unto death, is Socrates, the freest of all mortal men, who obeyed nothing but his reason.’4
The view that the Greek State was not a city-state, but a tribal state, cannot, however, be accepted without large modifications. It is true that the State in Greece, as elsewhere, begins as an association united by the tie of blood. The original stem (ἔθνος) constituted a religious and legal unit, with its own cult and its own custom; and it was in societies of this order that the Greeks were divided when they entered into Greece. But as soon as such societies settled in permanent dwellings, the principle of contiguity began to modify the principle of blood, and become gradually dominant over a large area.5 First of all villages arose, with a fortified place or ‘burh’ on high ground near running water (an ἀκρόπολις, or, as it is often called in early times, a πόλος), not, indeed, intended for habitation, and not even perhaps as an asylum to which the villagers could fly with their cattle when threatened, but rather perhaps as a stronghold to prevent any permanent occupation of their territory. In these fortified places we may detect the germ of the city; and we may recognize with Aristotle that it begins ‘for the sake of life’. But there were further developments which preceded the rise of the city. Villages formed themselves into groups or ‘systems’, such as the tetrapolis of Marathon, or the Four Villages (τετρακωμία) round the Peiraeus; and local units became practically sovereign in their spheres, while the old groups, based on blood, became merely religious associations, and retained only the common cult. Finally, about the seventh century, cities proper came into existence. The early settlers in Greece, like the early Germans, had shunned the towns of an earlier civilization, and contented themselves with village forts. But as the needs of life created the fort, so the needs of ‘good life’ in time produced the city. It was found more convenient and more efficient to come and live permanently under one ἀκρόπολις, instead of using several for protection in times of need; and still more, perhaps, it was found that better and more impartial justice could be secured if men gathered themselves in large communities with regular organs of government.1 An open city (ἄστυ) arose at the foot of the fort; and when the two were united in a common ring-wall (though sometimes, as at Athens, this was not done till later days) the city (πόλις) definitely emerged. The union of adjacent villages to the city by way of syncecism is a later development, and the terms on which that union was effected might, as we have seen, vary in different States.2 But the general result of the formation of cities was the dependence of the country on the city, and the institution of a definitely civic life in which the old blood-bond of the stem gradually disappeared. Relics of the old days, it is true, persist: we may even see how, when Cleisthenes creates his demes, each deme takes to itself the cult of a hero founder, and (still more strange) membership of a local deme is made hereditary, so that a man who removes to a new deme still belongs, with his children after him, to the deme of his forefathers. Here the old ideas are imitated in a new institution; but it remains true that with the city the principle of contiguity triumphs, and men live in the bonds of neighbourliness rather than the bonds of blood. The city-state, after all, is a city-state. The life of the Athenians hinged on Athens; and in the Peloponnesian War, Pericles could surrender the country to the invader, while he gathered the Athenians in the intimate home of their life. But the tribe played its part in Greek history nevertheless. We must admit that it was the one unit of early Greece. The Greek State first appears in history as a tribe. The Greek city, after all, had a long history behind it, and there are elements in that history which Aristotle, who does not go beyond the village and the city, fails to reproduce in the Politics. We must admit again that the tribe left its influence on the city, and that the basis of citizenship in the city, and the division of the city into brotherhoods and clans, still rest on the principle of blood. Finally, we must admit that throughout the great classical period, and down to the end of the fourth century, there were many parts of Greece in which the city had not developed, and the tribe remained the basis of political life. The Phocians were a tribe living in villages; and the same is true of the Aetolians and many other peoples. It is difficult to speak of the Greek State as if it were a single type. Actual life presents us with many varieties. Not to speak of the difference between aristocracy and democracy (much that is said of the Greek State is true only of the Greek democracy), there is the great difference between the stem-state, or tribal-state, and the city-state. But so far as we can speak of a type, the city-state, and more particularly the city-state of the democratic order, is that type. For political theory at any rate, it is the one type that counts. Aristotle’s conception of the State, and especially of citizenship, is a conception which really suits only the city-state, and the city-state of the democratic order. And when he builds an ideal State, that too has its centre in an ideal city, and it is the construction of that ideal city which engages his thoughts and inspires his imagination.
THE GREEK STATE AND SLAVERY
‘The city,’ it was said above, ‘was not necessarily the home of “leisure”, nor did the life of its citizens rest on a basis of slavery, nor were they prone to a contempt of labour.’ Here we have to distinguish on the one hand between Sparta and Athens, and on the other between philosophy and actual practice. Leisure, a basis of slavery, and a contempt for labour, were all attributes of Spartan life: they were not of Athenian. The Greek philosophers, again, unite in postulating for the citizens of their ideal cities abundant leisure for high things, in admitting slavery as the necessary basis of that leisure, and in excluding from full participation in the State those who have not the leisure they consider necessary; but actual life, in Athens at any rate and in many other cities, did not square with their postulates, nor agree with their theories. We can judge the Greeks only by the facts, and we can judge the facts only by what we know of Athens; for of other cities we know but little. What we do know suggests that in cities of an aristocratic type, the ideals of leisure and freedom from base mechanic toil were cherished.1 That is only what we should expect from aristocracies at all times. But aristocracy, as we have seen, is not the typical form of Greek State; and we must turn to Athens in order to discover the social ideals and the social basis of the normal Greek community.
Athens in her great days governed and defended herself by the service of over 7,000 citizens, out of a total resident citizen population of about 40,000. One out of every six Athenians, in other words, was engaged in regular and daily State-duty, either civil or military.2 This seems to imply the existence of a large lesiured class; but we have to remember that under the Periclean system the citizen was paid for his work. He was paid for service in the army and navy, and for attendance in the Council and the courts of law. Plato and Aristotle both objected to the system of pay, on the ground that it degraded the recipient, and attracted the mob into politics. But the alternatives would have been either peculation or a close oligarchy; and the Periclean system was intended to attract into politics, and succeeded in attracting into politics, those whose time was worth money and could not be had for nothing. ‘Our officials,’ Pericles could boast, ‘can attend at the same time to public and private affairs, and the rest of the citizens are not prevented by attention to their own business from knowing adequately that of the city.’3
The Athenians had, in the literal sense of the words, ‘their own business’, and they gave it their attention. The population of Athens was a population of farmers and artisans; and the assembly of Athens was almost altogether composed of men who worked with their hands. One cannot trace at Athens any distinction, far less any gulf, between the ‘working’ and the ‘professional’ classes. All stood on a level; and the same word (δημιουργός, or ‘folk-worker’) could be used to designate the magistrate who worked for the State, and the doctor or potter who sold his services or his commodities to the public. The Athenians of the age of Pericles were like the Florentine artisans depicted by George Eliot in Romola: they combined wit, and an interest in politics and literature, with a decent and gentlemanly profession of their craft. Far from counting work any stigma, they took their glory from their membership of their craft,1 and their pleasure in its artistic practice; but, being for the most part their own employers, they did not work to excess, nor lose themselves in their work. The aim of the artisan, it has been said, was ‘to preserve his full personal liberty and freedom of action, to work when he felt inclined and his duties as a citizen permitted him, to harmonise his work with all the other occupations which filled the life of a Greek, to participate in the government, to take his seat in the courts, to join in the games and festivals….’2 Work was part of a full and harmonious life, but it could not be so if it were pursued in excess. The Athenian would have objected to occupation in a modern factory, on the ground that its monotonous duration did not permit him to lead his own life; and he did object, in his own day, to some occupations as ‘menial’, because they were unduly monotonous or prejudical to a good physique. But he worked without any shame, and with a good deal of pride, in making good blades in a sword-factory, or artistic vases in a pottery, or even in fulling or tanning. Of the politicians who came into prominence after Pericles’ death, one was a leather-seller, one a lamp-maker, and a third a rope-dealer. The life of Athens does not correspond in the least to Aristotle’s dictum that ‘mechanics or any other class which is not a producer (δημιουργός) of virtue have no share in the State’;3 and his suggestion that ‘no mechanic or farmer or any such person should be allowed to enter the market-square of the free’1 in his ideal state, is curiously remote from what we know of Greek life outside Sparta. The fact is that while the philosophers conceive of politics as an art or craft, and thereby pay an implicit compliment to the arts and crafts, they use the analogy in a sense which is ultimately detrimental to the craftsman. Since all arts require specialized knowledge, Plato argues, and since one man can attain this specialized knowledge only in one art, it follows that the art of politics can be practised only by a professional class which has acquired such specialized knowledge. This is the opposite of Pericles’ conception that an adequate knowledge of politics can be combined with attention to private business. Aristotle’s point of view is slightly different from that of Plato, but it leads to the same result. Since the state is, by its essence, an association in the good life of virtue, it follows that its members are only those who are ‘producers of virtue’; and an artisan, who is producing commodities, cannot at the same time be producing moral service. Here again the philosopher puts asunder, as incompatible, two things which, in the conception of Pericles, might well be joined together, and at Athens actually were.
‘In point of political influence, each of us is preferred in the administration of public affairs, according as he distinguishes himself in any branch, nor is a man honoured because he belongs to a particular class more than for his merit; while no man who is poor, but can render any good service to the city, is excluded from public affairs by the obscurity of his rank.’2
If the Athenians were a people of artisans, their life can hardly have rested on a basis of slavery. It is true that at Athens there were perhaps some 80,000 slaves of both sexes, as compared with about 40,000 citizens,3 and that this would allow two slaves to every citizen. But we have to remember two things. In the first place, a large number of slaves belonged to or worked for the State. Apart from the public slaves, who acted as policemen and clerks, it is calculated that there were 20,000 slaves employed in the public silver-mines at Laurium. Many, if not all, of these slaves were the property of private individuals, who took concessions and used slave-labour to work them. Nicias is said to have owned 1,000 slaves in the mines. This is slave-labour pure and simple, in its worst or ‘plantation’ form; and in so far as mining royalties enriched the State, and thereby made possible the achievements of Athenian democracy, the Athenian State and democracy may be said to have rested to that extent on a basis of slavery. In the second place, wealthy Athenians had often a large number of private slaves, whom they either hired out, for instance to building contractors, or employed in business on their own account, as, for example, in sword-factories. The wealthy Athenian, therefore, whether he used his slaves to work a concession in the mines, or hired them out to contractors, or used them in his own business, certainly owed his wealth to the labour of slaves. But this cannot be said of the ordinary Athenian artisan and farmer; and since such artisans and farmers were the great majority of the Athenians, it is in the light of their position, and their relation to slavery, that we have to decide how far Athenian life rested upon a slave basis. It must at once be admitted that many Athenian potters and other artisans had slave-apprentices at work in their shops; but when we have allowed for the slaves owned by wealthy men (and it is probable that a majority of the slaves of Athens were owned by men of means,1 or, as we should say, capitalists), we cannot allow an average of even one slave to each Athenian artisan and farmer. Those artisans and farmers who were able to use the labour of slaves owed their superior position in life largely to their service; but there was always a large number of Athenians who had time to serve on juries and sit in the Assembly, or to attend the theatre and watch the games, who had no slaves at all. In other words, slavery was necessary to social superiority: it was not necessary for political privilege or intellectual development. An Athenian could enjoy the benefits of the political and intellectual life of Athens without the possession of any slaves. It is only fair to add, in conclusion, that apart from the slaves in the mines, the position of slaves at Athens was, on the whole, good. The majority of slaves were skilled workers – potters, masons, sword-makers, and the like – and they could be made to give the best of their skill only by good treatment. A slave might buy emancipation, or be promised emancipation at the end of a definite time, or be emancipated by his master’s will. Personal outrage on a slave was at Athens, from early times, an indictable offence. In social life slaves were treated as equals, and in dress they were often indistinguishable from freemen. ‘The last extreme of popular liberty’, Plato writes in the Republic (563 B), obviously thinking of Athens, ‘is when the slave bought with money, whether male or female, is just as free as his or her purchaser.’
Two things may thus be safely asserted. In the first place, the political life of Athens did not rest on a basis of slavery, except in so far as the State profits derived from the silver mines depended on slave labour, and in so far as the political life of Athens depended on those profits – which, to any considerable extent, it hardly did.1 On the other hand, both the wealth of the wealthy citizen and the comfort of the comfortable artisan largely depended on the services of slaves. In the second place, there were two kinds of slavery at Athens: the unskilled ‘plantation’ slavery of the mines, and the skilled slavery of the pottery, the sword-factory, and domestic life. The lot of the unskilled slave was hard: the lot of the skilled slave might fall to him in pleasant places. To the Phrygians, the Lydians, and the other Asiatics who were imported to Athens as slaves, the change from slavery at home to slavery at Athens may have been a veritable emancipation. But the fact remains that slavery penetrated the social life of Athens at every turn, even if it was not the condition and basis of Athenian political life, and that slavery, however charitably we may interpret its character, can never have made for righteousness. One out of every eight or nine of the inhabitants of Athens was a citizen: one out of every four or five was a slave. One out of every five or six of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom has a vote: it is difficult to estimate how many are labouring for wages on the very margin, or below the margin, of subsistence. It is equally difficult to compare the comfort of Athenian slavery with the discomfort of such free labour. Its comfort does not justify the former: its freedom does not justify the latter. But freedom, in any scale of values, is greater than comfort, for it is a thing of the spirit, and the very root and condition of all values. And the Athenian slave, after all, was not free.1
THE GREEK STATE AND REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS
‘The city,’ it was said above, ‘was not devoid of representative institutions, nor unacquainted with the political machinery which is connected with those institutions.’ If we look at the ἐκκλησία of Athens, which every one of the 40,000 Athenian citizens was entitled to attend at each of its meetings, about three times in every month (but at which, on the one occasion of which we know, the number actually present was 3616), we shall think of Greek democracy as primary democracy, and we shall say that the Greeks knew nothing of the principle of representation. If we do so, we shall, in the first place, be taking an unduly narrow view of the scope of representation. An executive body may be as much representative as an assembly: the English Cabinet may be, and indeed is, as much a representative body as the English Parliament. ‘The expression of the general will is not necessarily confined to ad hoc elective bodies, but may take any sufficient and convenient shape without violation of the theory of democratic self-government.’2 Before we can say that representation was unknown to Athenian democracy, we have to prove that the Athenian executive had no representative position or basis of its own. In the second place, to deny the existence of representation at Athens is to forget the existence of the Council (βουλή). In nearly every Greek State, and apart from a number of narrow oligarchies where the two were fused in one body, we find a Council and an Assembly existing side by side. The function of the Council was generally to introduce measures; the function of the Assembly was to decide on their fate; but the Assembly, as a rule, could give a decision only on proposals which the Council consented to introduce. The power of framing the issue, and deciding the question to be put, is no small power;3 and if the composition of the body which enjoys this power is in any way representative, we cannot say that the principle of representation is absent or unknown.
The composition of the Council at Athens was representative, and the demes acted as the local constituencies or electorates. The demes did not directly elect the 500 members of the Council; but each deme elected, and, what is more, elected on a proportional system, according to the number of its inhabitants, a list of candidates—who, provided that they passed a test (δοκιμασία) of their qualifications, were duly eligible for selection by lot for a seat in the Council.1 After all, Athens knew not only representation, but proportional representation; and she had not only parliamentary elections, but she had them annually, for the Council was renewed annually and, we may add, no councillor was eligible for more than a second term. When we reflect that the demes also elected candidates, from whom the nine archons of the year were selected by lot, we can see that the annual elections of the deme were no inconsiderable thing. Party clubs (συνωμοσίαι) formed themselves to run the elections in an oligarchical sense:2 and in them we may detect something of the nature of a caucus. In fact, the qualification of election by the additional use of the lot was perhaps largely due to the desire to avoid election intrigues.3 But in spite of the use of the lot, there was room left for the elective principle at Athens; and the attempts to restrict the number of citizens by the oligarchical party, which tried, for instance, in 411 to substitute for the adult suffrage of free-born Athenians a property suffrage resting on the possession of heavy armour, are not only meant to restrict membership of the Assembly, but also the number of electors. It must be admitted, however, that election is one thing, and representation is another. No body, even if directly elected, is really representative unless it has representative authority, or, in other words, is entitled to deliberate and to decide as the exponent of the general will within its sphere. It is here that the Athenian Council was deficient. It was, to some extent, elected, but it had little representative authority. The Assembly was sovereign, and the Assembly was its own representative. Yet Athens had in some sense a bicameral system; and the formula of enactment ran, ‘It is enacted by the Council and Assembly’. The Council not only joined in enactments: it introduced them; and while the Assembly could amend its proposals, it had not itself the right of initiation.1 Further, the Council executed, and sometimes amplified enactments: it was the channel of foreign relations: it was the centre of the administration, and supervised the executive officials. We cannot but consider it as something, after all, of a representative authority.
The synod of the Boeotian League, to which reference has already been made, was more definitely a representative body. It consisted of 660 members, elected in equal numbers from the eleven electoral divisions of the league; and in each division the members were elected by its component parts on a proportional system.2 The Boeotian system, which ceased in Boeotia itself on the dissolution of the league by Sparta, seems to have been the model of the organization of Greece by Philip of Macedon in 338; and the Synod of Corinth was an imitation of the Boeotian Synod. Aristotle, therefore, when he wrote the Politics, could not be ignorant of the existence of such representative institutions; and when, in Book IV, he discusses the possible varieties in the structure of the deliberative body, he comes near to suggesting a representative Assembly. ‘It is a good plan that those who deliberate should be chosen in equal numbers, by election or by lot, from the upper classes and the masses’ – a suggestion reminiscent of the three-class system of modern Prussia.3 A similar suggestion, similarly reminiscent of Prussia, appears in the method of election of the Council proposed by Plato in the Laws; while the methods of election which he suggests for the ‘guardians of the law’ and other officials are also decidedly modern.4
So far we have spoken of deliberative bodies: it remains to consider whether any of the executive authorities of the city-state had a representative character. At Athens, at any rate, we may detect the signs of a representative executive. The ten generals of Athens were something of a cabinet. They were directly elected by the people: they could be continued in their office for years at a time, unlike the other officials; and unlike the other officials, they had direct access to the Assembly. When a dominating spirit controlled the rest of the generals, as Pericles did for fifteen years in succession, he was virtually Prime Minister of the Athenian Republic, and Prime Minister in virtue of the fact that he represented the general will. After Pericles the function fell to the ‘demagogue’, or προστάτης τοῦ δήμου, who took over the functions hitherto exercised by the στρατηγοί or the dominant στρατηγός. A demagogue was by no means what the term implies in modern times. He was what we should call a parliamentarian of experience and standing, who had gained the ear and the confidence of the Assembly, and who advocated, and sought through his influence with the Assembly to carry into effect, a line of policy. He held no office, and he ruled by influence. In the days when ostracism was in vogue at Athens, a successful demagogue could procure a vote of confidence by securing the expulsion of his rival; and the value of ostracism lay in the fact that it gave the direction of policy into the hands of one accredited adviser, and made for stability and continuity. When it disappeared at the end of the fifth century, the people had two or more rival ‘leaders of the house’, and followed now one, and now another, with disastrous results. But in the fifth century we may say that Athens, either in the person of the leading general, or in that of the leading ‘demagogue’, enjoyed something of a representative executive.1
THE GREEK STATE AND EDUCATION
But representation, after all, is in no sense the fundamental idea of the Greek State, as it is conceived by the Greek philosophers. Their key-word is not representation, but education. And this involves a different approach to the State, and a different conception of the State, from those which are involved in the theory of representation. We have already seen that the Greek State was regarded by the philosophers as an ethical society; and if we push that point of view further, we shall see that the State is necessarily a community in a common spiritual substance, and that the activity of its organs is necessarily an activity of education, and the imparting to its members of their share in that common substance. Society is an educational institution, by dwelling wherein each man has his human capacities elicited to the fullest extent; and conversely, education is a social fact, which makes society cohere in virtue of a common substance of the mind. Again the State, in the sense of the organized government of political society, is an organ of education, gathering into one focus all the social influences that make for the education of humanity – all the suggestions that radiate from social opinion into the life of the individual; all the training and ‘drill’ which are involved in taking and keeping one’s station in an organized society. Conversely, again, education is not merely, and not mainly, the education of the individual by the individual teacher and by individual study: it is education of a political society, and of the whole of that society in unison, by the social system in which they share, and by which they are modified and made. This, as we shall see, is the gist and kernel of the teaching of Plato in the Protagoras and still more in the Republic: it is the core of the thought of the Politics of Aristotle. It is also the lesson learned by Hegel from the Greeks, and transmitted by Hegel to his school.1
The community, then, is a community in a common spiritual substance, which it has inherited and which it must transmit. It is a community because it has inherited this substance; and because it must transmit this substance, it is also an educational structure. Now this substance was for the Greeks no mere abstraction: it was concrete and embodied in the law, written and unwritten, whether set in the statute-book and the constitution, or in the hearts of men. Law is thus the cohesive force of the State: it is what brings together and holds together society (τὺ συνοικ
ζον καὶ τὸ συνέχον). To Pindar it is ‘the King’: to Herodotus it is ‘the Master’: to Plato the citizens are ‘the Slaves’ of the law. It is not only the cohesive force of the State: it is also, and because it is that, the Sovereign.1 ‘All morality, not only civic, but also human – all the benefits of civilization – appear as the gifts of the law, which the society recognises as its lord.’2 Nowhere in Greek literature does the fundamental sovereignty of the law appear in a more striking form than in that passage of the Crito, in which Socrates, as he lies in prison awaiting his death, is made by Plato to hold converse with the laws, and to acknowledge their claim on his final and supreme allegiance.3 Freely as the spirit of Socrates ranged, he acknowledged himself the slave of the law. And what is true of Socrates is true of the Athenian people. They might appear, as they stood assembled in their Pnyx, sovereign under heaven. But they too recognized the sovereignty of the laws.4
Law is thus the common spiritual substance of a society, expressed in concrete form, and as such it is the cohesive force and the sovereign of a society. And further, since this substance has to be transmitted and imparted by education, it follows that the business of a State is to educate its citizens according to the law, so that they may receive its content into their being and thereby come into their heritage. Here we touch the two fundamental and interconnected principles of Aristotle – the sovereignty of the law, and the education of the citizens into conformity with the law. ‘The rule of law is preferable to that of any single individual; and on the same principle, even if it be better that a number of individuals should rule, they must be made guardians and servants of the law.’5 ‘There is no profit of the best laws, even if they have been sanctioned by every citizen of the State, unless men have been trained by habit and formed by education in the spirit of their society.’6 The function of the State is to train men according to its laws, and this function the magistrates, as agents of the State and servants of the law, have it for their duty to discharge. And thus we may draw a distinction between the problem of the ancient State and that of the modern State, which will help us to see why representation played a less part in the former than it does in the latter. The Greeks believed in the need of education to tune and harmonize social opinion to the spirit and tone of a fixed and fundamental and sovereign law. The modern belief is in the need of representation to adjust and harmonize a fluid and changing and subordinate law to the movement of a sovereign public opinion or ‘general will’.
It is obvious that there is a different conception of law behind these different beliefs. To the Greek, law was the inherited substance of sanctions, both moral and legal, which stood sovereign over a society. To us, it is a set of regulations, gradually accumulated, but needing constant revision, which determines the play of relations – relations which in the complex industrial societies of today are very largely economic – between the members of a given State. It is true that the Greeks changed their law; but it is also true that on the whole they regarded it as something given and permanent, which it was better not to change – ‘for the law has no power to command obedience except that of habit (gained through education in its spirit), and this can be given only by length of time, so that a readiness to change from existing laws to others enfeebles the power of law’.1 This is a different atmosphere from that in which we live today. We think in terms of progress, and we invert the relation of law and public opinion. We know that public opinion is always moving, and we believe that it is moving onward; and we conceive that, like a tide, it must carry the law along its course. We devise representative legislatures to mediate between public opinion and law, and, acting as the organs and exponents of the former, to modify the latter accordingly. It is the difference between a society looking back to a hallowed past, expressed in a sovereign law, and a society looking forward to a more attractive future, to be prepared by some new change of an ever-changing law. It is the difference again between a society with a static conception of public opinion as something already formed, and sovereign in its formed state, and a society with a dynamic conception of that opinion, as something constantly transformed, and as sovereign in each transformation. There are indeed points on which the conception of the representative state and the conception of the educational state meet. Mill’s defence of representative government, on the ground of the education which character and intelligence gain from participation in public functions, shows such an approximation. But there is a broad gulf, in spite of any such points of contact, between the two conceptions.
There is one Greek thinker, Plato, who departs from the Greek conception of the sovereignty of law. In the Crito, indeed, and again in the Laws, he follows that conception; but in the Republic and the Politicus he specifically rejects the sovereignty of the law. That rejection was, however, the outcome of a zeal for an ideal moral basis of society transcending any rigid body of law: it was in no sense the result of a belief in a sovereign law-making body superior to the laws which it makes. Nor was it connected with any falling away from the educational ideal of the State. On the contrary, it was the result of a further extension of that idea. If the rulers of the State are to educate the citizens into conformity with the moral basis of society, Plato felt they must themselves be educated to grasp that basis. And further, when once they have grasped it, so that it dwells in their minds and lives in their intelligence, then their living intelligence is the true sovereign, and, in accordance with its truth, they must educate their fellow-citizens. Plato, in fact, approached the problem of education from the point of view of the ruler more than from the point of view of the citizen. He had seen, or thought that he saw, the incompetence of ordinary rulers to grasp the fundamental principles of political society; and he had denounced in the Gorgias that incompetence, not sparing Pericles himself. He saw in philosophy and its study the cure of that incompetence, and he set himself in the Academy to provide the cure, and by a course of philosophic training to educate a school of trained rulers. The Republic is the programme of that course. But men trained in this course would have gone beyond the moral basis of society expressed in inherited law: they would have laid hold of the eternal basis, which varies not from time to time, nor from society to society. The Republic shows the Greek ideal of the educational state at its highest point; but just because it is pushed so high, the ideal departs from Greek ideas. In the Laws, Plato returns within their limits; and his philosophy ends, as it began, in the circle in which Greek thought always moved – the sovereignty of a fundamental law, and the education of the citizens in conformity with that law.1 ἡπολιτική – political science or political art – is the science of lifting social man, through social education, into communion in the spiritual substance of social life expressed in a sovereign law.
τες or χειρότεχναι). Other ‘artisans’ (τεχν
ν ϕίλων), to Zimmern’s Greek Commonwealth, and especially Part III, chapters VII. and xv. I cannot follow the whole of his romantic view of the Greek commonwealth; and I confess that slavery at Athens seems to me to have been slavery.