CITY against city, class against class, Greece was in a state of continual conflict. The extension of commercial relations aggravated the effects of a system which set neighbouring cities in violent antagonism. Many attempts had been made to unite these scattered “snow-flakes” into one compact mass, but the audacity of imperialistic ventures and the prudence of federal unions had been equally unsuccessful. In Athens the struggles between oligarchs and democrats were rendered less savage by the immense wealth accumulated in that city, but almost everywhere else exasperated hatred placed arms in the hands of poor and rich. For this evil, too, remedies had been sought, but theories of patriarchal socialism only proposed an impossible return to a dead past, and the generation of tyrants which sprang up in the IVth century simply gave to the individualism of the time its supreme expression, unscrupulous egoism. How, then, was the old framework of political and social life to be broken? How would the new societies organize themselves?
When Alexander broke down the barriers which separated Greece from the barbarian world, by the same act he overthrew all those which stood in Greece itself. From that day the political horizon widened. Instead of suffocating in confined cities, the Greek race saw boundless spaces opening before it; it spread out freely into great states. It had all the eastern basin of the Mediterranean; it had the vast empires of the East. The young hero, whom it had followed willy-nilly, aspired to the kingdom of the world. Checked in his course by death, he bequeathed to his successors, as their model, conquered Persia, Persia where the Great King had ruled over twenty satrapies. Macedonia, which had once crushed Thebes and Athens with its weight, was itself small, with its 35,000 square miles and its three or four million inhabitants, in comparison with the kingdoms which fell to the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. Egypt, in the 47,000 square miles of the valley alone, contained seven million souls, and the kings of Syria were the lords of 1,400,000 square miles and about thirty million subjects.
The distinctions which had so long sundered the Greeks were gone. From every city immigrants came pouring into the newly opened countries, and their descendants no longer knew what was their original home. Even the dislike of the Greek for the barbarian, which a Macedonian like Aristotle believed to be based on a natural fact, was to weaken. As Hellenism spread, the East reacted on the Greeks. Races, which had at first lived side by side, blended. In the heterogeneous mass of mercenaries settled in Egypt we And, by the side of proud Macedonians and haughty Greeks, Thracians, Asiatics, Persians, Libyans. As time went on many of these foreigners married native girls, and we see in a list of “Greek farmers” names like Harphaesis son of Petosiris. Greece proper could not resist the movement of ideas which the new world brought with it. Citizen rights, which had once been granted in recompense for distinguished services, were now lavished on whole classes of foreigners; more, they were sold, and at Ephesos anybody could have them for six minas. Besides, what was the good of them? The Metics traded freely in every port, and very often they could acquire houses and land. Pagasae in Thessaly was so full of foreigners that one wondered where the natives of the place were.
We see the most extraordinary exchanges of population going on. A Lucanian bronze-worker establishes himself in Rhodes; a silk manufacturer of Antioch dies in Naples. Look at the population of Delos. First of all, the proxenoi of every country meet on the island. The Egyptians open chapels, the merchants and ship-owners of Berytos found a brotherhood, and bankers from Taras, Tenos, and Syracuse fight as rivals or combine as partners. You need not be a citizen to obtain a contract for public works, the farming of the sacred domains, or the choregia in a religious festival. Then the Phoenician and Arab traders Hellenize their names. The Roman community on the island, which is connected with that in Alexandria, receives into its bosom any individual of Italian or Sicilian origin, as if to prepare, just when the Greek city is expanding, for the final expansion of the city of Rome. Even at this date documents of general interest are dtawn up “in the name of the Athenians, of the Romans, and of the other Greeks established or temporarily residing in Delos.” All sorts of things are done which would have seemed impossible in the preceding period. Branches of a family of Cypriot merchants settle in Delos, Athens, and Taras. The president of the Berytian Association at Delos is the brother of an ephebos who represents Athens at the festivals of Delphi. The banker Philostratos of Ascalon dedicates monuments at Delos as a citizen of Naples. This mobility of individuals and this pluralism in nationalities show how the facts forced philosophers to preach Hellenistic cosmopolitanism in theory and constitutions to create it in law. The different parts of the Mediterranean world merged one into another, and difference of states made no obstacle to the unity of civilization, which was essential to a world market.
In the big countries, where the Greeks were in contact with barbarians, and there were so many conflicting private interests, the assembly of citizens no longer sufficed as the organ of the common interest. Now antiquity never rose to the conception of representative government. Henceforward the idea of the State had to be embodied in a chief. For a long time the system-builders, Xenophon, Plato, Isocrates, had called in their writings or looked in real life for the good tyrant who should undertake to make justice reign. They were prophets. Monarchy appeared as a necessity, to hold together the opposing classes, to govern the relations between different races, and to define the rights and to mark the place of each. On the king, the son of God, fell the superhuman mission of arbitrating the destinies of men. The State enjoyed omnipotence in order to organize society.
But political and economic relations had become so complex that only a scientific organization could maintain them in harmony. Such was the technical progress which had been made everywhere that even the division of social labour was perfected. It no longer seemed true that an understanding of public affairs was compatible with the exercise of a trade, nor that the same man could obey and command in turn. A permanent distinction became necessary. It was not enough that the king, assisted by his ministers, should divide the work of administration; offices, elaborately graded and specialized, must be filled by permanent officials. The defence of the country became less and less a duty of the citizen; it was the business of the mercenary. But the State had no bigger or harder task than the supervision of economic matters with a view to ensuring a fair division of wealth and labour.
For this purpose it made the fullest use of its sovereign power. The collective ownership of the soil, described in the romance of Euhemeros, was simply the law of Ptolemaic Egypt. Foreign trade constituted a public service, not only in the ancient land of the Pharaohs, where it was treated in the same way as agriculture and industry, but in a small colony on the Adriatic, Apollonia. Nearchos was sent on a mission to the Persian Gulf, Patrocles to the Caspian, Megasthenes to India, Euthymenes and Pytheas to the Atlantic. Everywhere attention was turned to great works of public utility. Demetrios Polyorcetes dreamed, like Cypselos long before, of cutting the Isthmus of Corinth, Pyrrhos proposed to build a bridge between Dyrrhachion and Brindisi, Antiochos I planned a canal from the Euxine to the Caspian, and the Ptolemies fulfilled the project of Necho and Darius by connecting Alexandria with the Red Sea by water. The kings of Pergamon issued town regulations which would one day serve as models to the Roman emperors. The Agoranomoi no longer confined themselves to inspecting weights and measures; they fixed compulsory units for each class of goods, they enforced the use of Government weighing- machines, and they decreed tariffs of prices. Many cities had official registries for private contracts, and public banks. The king had his threshing-floor, his granary, and his bank in almost every village in Egypt.
Since, in a well regulated society, each should have his occupation and be completely adapted to it, would it not have been best to imitate the close castes which travellers studied with such interest in India? This ideal was not, however, reached, except in the dreams of over-logical philosophers. But the successors of the Pharaohs found in the eternal tradition of the country laws which were sufficiently strict to keep soldiering or farming for ever in the same family. Even in places where a profession might be chosen with complete liberty, the growing need of technical knowledge and skill worked steadily towards the development of apprenticeship and the hereditary transmission of acquired experience. One might quote a dozen Athenian families in which, from the Illrd to the 1st century, the statuary’s art was handed from father to son. The accounts of works carried out at Delos justify the statement that this practice was general. The son succeeded his father in every profession, and at every turn we meet obscure lines of farmers, masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, wood-merchants, and contractors.
This heredity in callings was clearly the result of the division of labour. The Hellenistic period carried specialization very far. At Delos the joiner who fits a door does not set up the post which is to hold it. Before the carpenter lays upon the top course of a wall the elm plank which is to support the cross-beams of the ceiling, the mason is called in to level that course. The stone-masons attached to the temple do not sharpen their own tools. At Miletos the workmen who do the fine cutting of the marble squares of the facing are not the men who rough-hew the stone blocks of the inner core. It has been possible to draw up from the papyri an endless list of the trades practised in Egypt. A man may make his living as bee-keeper, pig-breeder, goose- breeder, onion-seller, fruit-grower, corn-measurer, or mat- maker. The sack-carrier and the milk-carrier are quite different from the baggage-porter. There is a special baker for fancy bread. Among the medical specialists Monsieur Purgon would rejoice to see the clysterizer. The forges and pot-banks have their oven-men and stokers. The quarry- man, the man who cuts the stone, refuses to sweep away the sand or to remove a layer of gravel; it is not his job. The men who sell beer, oil, and clothes are not the manufacturers; in the oil-mills there are grain-crushers, and special workmen for castor oil; garments of common cloth and fine othonia are neither made nor sold by the same people; and the textile trade includes a wool-waste-gatherer. Everyone to his trade.
Between the two ends of the social ladder there was a vast distance; but, however highly placed or humble they might be, all the king’s subjects worked under the common protection and for the common good of the State. Therefore ideas on labour in the Hellenistic period present a singular mixture of lofty disgust and human sympathy for the craftsman. Now that the differentiation which the philosophers had desired, between the occupations which required leisure and those which left none, had been in great part realized, the officials and warriors, the writers and artists, and even the big merchants and wealthy manufacturers felt for manual labour some of the contempt which was once bestowed on it by doctrinaires and oligarchs. But there is no creature so low that he is not raised by his contribution to a work which is far above him; there is no condition so vile but it is ennobled by a universal solidarity. In these temperate, composite beliefs Greek and Oriental were in communion; one brought the pride of individual thought, and the other a vague feeling of social pantheism. From Judaea, the land where prophets used to leave their work-bench to lecture kings, comes the voice which gives the most striking expression to the new opinions. Listen to Jesus son of Sirach. “The wisdom of the man read in the Scriptures is acquired thanks to leisure. How can a man become wise when he drives the plough? And so it is with the workman and the master mason, and the blacksmith whose skin is cracked by the smoke, and the potter, bowed over his work and thinking only how many pieces he must deliver. These men do not come forward in the Assembly, they do not know the code of the laws, they never sit in the seats of the judges. But without them no city is built. They maintain everlasting production, those whose prayers are about the practice of a trade.” A man must belong to that age if he thinks thus of the necessity and the advantages of the division of labour, and extols the work of the head while proclaiming respect for the work of the hand.
The steady development of the division of labour and of the classes gradually led to the formation of new groups. Aristotle had known only associations “formed to offer sacrifices and to give their members opportunities for meeting.” The most solid and active of these had been brotherhoods of a religious nature, in which men of the same profession honoured a patron deity. At the very most some of them had a vague purpose of mutual assistance. At bottom they were all very much the same, in consequence of the absence of any economic idea. It could not be otherwise at a time when the city satisfied the material and moral needs of individuals and, as Aristotle says again, the political community left to the associations nothing but “the pretext for agreeable recreation.”
But when the cities were reduced to the condition of mere administrative centres they left a terrible void. From the moral point of view there was no longer anything between the individual and mankind, and the State worships, with their cold, distant ceremonies, hardly warmed the heart. Then, more and more, community of national and religious sentiment was reinforced by professional solidarity. Just as before, it was in the commercial towns, where men of every country, every religion, and every trade mingled, that the need for association was most keenly felt. It appears in Delos in every form. For a whole century a family of wood- merchants absorbed all its competitors by marriages, and formed a kind of family corporation. The goldsmiths, the importers of oil, or the importers of wine acted in concert. Foreigners formed associations the name of which indicated their profession, their nationality, and their god. The “Merchants and Ship-Owners of Heracles of Tyre” and the “Merchants, Ship-Owners, and Forwarding Agents of Poseidon of Berytos” did not only employ themselves in holding sumptuous festivals, like the Association of Sarapis and the Syrians, or in praying, like the Jews. The Italians of Hermes or Mercury owned enormous premises for doing business. At Rhodes the foreigners, both merchants and soldiers, forgathered in innumerable clubs in which, in the intervals of banqueting, they drafted rhetorical decrees or pompous epitaphs in the honour of generous patrons. In Egypt the Ptolemies kept up the Pharaonic tradition of groups according to trade; it was so convenient for the Government to give orders to the farmers of a village as a body, and to settle the service of the donkey-men through their Secretary. But the men of various professions took advantage of these arrangements to organize real trade unions. The millers, with their Managing Committee of elders, the pastry-cooks, or the ditchers were evidently out for the defence of their professional interests. The country teemed with associations of farmers, craftsmen, and merchants.
The trade unions even began to form federations. There were some in Egypt which covered a whole nome. The forwarding agents of Alexandria were incorporated in a synodos, a union of different societies with a branch at Delos. Outside Egypt we find remarkable examples of federations among the Dionysiac artists. At this time, when a refined civilization gave an important place to the theatre, all those who lived by it, authors, managers, flute-players, comedians, tragedians, and costumiers formed a trade union. But, since the companies frequently went on tour, the unions were obliged to expand, and combined in a federation covering a certain district. The artists of Athens formed the earliest group of this kind. They soon encountered the competition of the Isthmic-Nemeian society, which transferred its headquarters from Corinth to Thebes and there gave birth to a multitude of affiliated groups. In the East these big societies placed themselves under the patronage of princes. The Artists of Ionia and the Hellespont at first had Tenos as their centre, and then they formed the company of the Theatre Royal at Pergamon. In the West similar institutions operated at Rhegion and Syracuse.
Let us take a general view of the constitution of the Hellenistic societies. The downfall of the cities causes cosmopolitan doctrines to prevail. But political necessities range individuals in big states, administrative necessities and the division of social labour divide them by provinces and subject them to a graded organization of officials, and the division of economic labour groups them by trades and drives corporative associations to organize themselves by districts,