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GREEK IMPERIALISM

GREEK IMPERIALISM

IMPERIALISM AND THE CITY-STATE

It is my purpose in this opening chapter to define some terms which I shall have to use repeatedly in the book; to make a somewhat detailed examination of the character of the Greek states whose political integrity was threatened by imperialism; to trace the development of imperialism to its culmination in the divine monarchy of Alexander the Great and his successors; and, at the same time, to arrange a general political setting for the topics to be discussed in the six succeeding chapters.

An empire is a state formed by the rule of one state over other states. It is immaterial in this connection what form of government the ruling people prefers. Power may be exercised there by a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a majority without altering in any essential the relation of the sovereign to its dependencies. Still less does it matter whether the subject people is governed by the one, the few, or the many; for all kinds of governments may exist, and have existed, in dependencies.

Naturally, an empire is compatible with any kind of an administrative service among both governors and governed. The suzerain may attend to its affairs with the aid of professional and specially trained officials, as in a bureaucracy; and a vassal may entrust the details of its public business to successive fractions of its citizens, as in some republics: no imperial relation is established unless separate states or parts of states are involved. But when these are related in a whole as superiors and inferiors, an empire at once arises.

The relation of inferiority and superiority is, however, essential in any empire. In modern times this is acknowledged with the utmost frankness. Upon the higher capacity for government claimed by the Christian peoples, the Western cultures, or the Anglo-Saxons, as the case may be, modern pride, greed, or conscience bases its right to control inferior races. "Take up the white man's burden" is the modern substitute for the ancient commandment, "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature." The possession of a better rule of public life imposes--it is affirmed--a missionary obligation no less weighty than the possession of a special rule of eternal life.

Less exasperating, perhaps, than this assumption of moral and political superiority is the candid profession of the right of the stronger. The right of conquest gives a title which is valid in international law when every other right is lacking. When superiority is stipulated to be absent, the product is a federation or something similar from which the name empire is withheld. When, in course of time, superiority dies out till a common right eventually embraces subject and sovereign alike, a new state arises, to which, as in the case of the present-day British world, the title empire is applied with some impropriety.

The policy by which a people or an autocrat acquires and maintains an empire, we call imperialism. The term is, of course, a legacy from Rome--a mute witness to the peculiar importance of the Roman empire in the history of state-building. And, I suppose, it is the policy of Rome that we think of most instinctively when we allude to imperialism. This is by no means an accident. For not simply the type, but also many of the most noteworthy varieties of this kind of policy, are found in the experience of the Romans; and the course of political progress has been such that in the triumph of Rome imperialism reached its logical issue more closely than either before or since in the history of the world.

Transcendent as is the imperial achievement of the Romans, and unrivaled as is the political sagacity with which they consolidated their power and made it enduring, it must still be recognized that they were the heirs, in war, diplomacy, and government, of the Greeks, their predecessors. They worked with greater power and with larger units than did the Spartans and the Athenians. They benefited by the brilliant inventions and the costly errors of the Macedonians whose kingdoms they destroyed. But their success simply brought to a culmination the imperial movement in which Sparta, Athens, and Macedon were worthy co-workers. It is our task in this series of essays to examine in turn the imperial experiments by which the Greeks not only won a field for the display of their own talents, but also prepared the way for the unification of the ancient world in the empire of Rome.

The city enables men to co?perate easily. In it ideas and feelings spread quickly. Life, property, and privileges are there protected by walls, and, if need be, by street barricades. "Two voices are there," wrote Wordsworth in 1807, his vision limited by the peril of England and Switzerland,--

"one is of the sea, One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice: In both from age to age thou didst rejoice, They were thy chosen music, Liberty."

The voice of a city mob--that of Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, Florence, or Paris, for example--was generally raucous and often cruel. But it made tyrants tremble and limited absolutism when the fear of assassination was powerless.

Fortunately, it is not with the origins, but with the characteristics, of the Greek city-states that we have to do mainly when we seek to discover the grounds of their hatred of all imperialistic projects. Let us, therefore, try to form a concrete impression of the salient features of the hundreds of little states with which the progressive parts of Greece were honeycombed at the beginning of the classic period, in the sixth century B.C. Each political cell, so to speak, had its nucleus in a walled town and its substance in a small circuit of grain, pasture, and garden land which the inhabitants of the town owned and cultivated. Most of the towns were simply hives of farmers. Whether the farmers were landlords, small proprietors, or peasants; however much they were divided by lines of social cleavage, they were all able to meet on the common ground of a single occupation. And every day from March to November, from the out-cropping of the grass and foliage in the spring, through the season of the grain harvest, the vintage, and the picking of the olives, to the fall planting and seeding, the ebb and flow of agricultural life carried the population of the city to the country in the morning and back to the city again in the evening.

There were few towns in Greece whose land did not touch the sea; and from the sea another harvest was gathered. Fishing existed, of course; but that was not all. Transmarine commerce is never wholly absent in any maritime country. In Greece it was especially favored by the difficulties of land transit, and by the excellence of the highways which the sea laid while carving the country up into a myriad of islands, head-lands, and estuaries. Hence, by the opening of the sixth century B.C. a second town had generally appeared on the coast of each little state when the chief town had developed, as was commonly the case, a few miles inland. In the new settlement the tone was set by the sailor-folk and the traders; in the old centre by the landed proprietors and the peasants. But the landlords were frequently merchants, and the peasants could easily attach work-places to their houses--which, though in the towns, were really farmhouses--and become manufacturers in a small way; while it was regularly the ambition of a trader or seaman to crown a successful career by buying a farm, a ranch, or an orchard. There was, accordingly, a very close connection between urban and agrarian pursuits and interests.

It is true that with the Greek occupation of the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Seas in the seventh century B.C. some Greek towns, like Miletus, Samos, Corinth, AEgina, Chalcis, and Eretria, became cities in the modern sense of the term, with commercial and industrial interests predominant. But even there the advantages of urban life were within reach of the farmers, as well as of the traders, artisans, and merchants, since all alike were residents of the city. The only difference was that life in those cities was more rich and diversified than elsewhere.

The contrast between life in cities, with its complex social organization, its playhouses, its excitements, its stimuli to effort and to vice, its intolerance of oddities in manners and dress, and life in the country, with its simplicity which degenerates so easily into brutality, its monotony, its fanaticism in the pursuit of wealth, its contempt for the effeminacy of the shopkeeper, its piety and sobriety which easily accord with a longing to see the world and the wickedness thereof--this contrast which is so distressing an aspect of life in modern America, was almost entirely absent in classic Greece, at least among the enfranchised part of the population.

None of the cities was so large as to shut off the view of the country. After only a few minutes' walk Socrates and his companions might escape from the noise and confusion of Athens into the cool and fragrant groves of the suburbs. It was probably only into the biggest of the Greek cities that the olive trees and the grapevines did not push, as they and the late-come orange and lemon orchards push into the modern Greek hamlets. Even in Athens the crowing of the cock sounded the reveille for almost everybody, and it would never have come into the mind of an Athenian to suggest, as has been done in Boston, that a zoo should be stocked first with the common varieties of the domesticated animals. There is, says a French writer, a flavor of the barnyard about the comedies of Aristophanes. Yet this is the same Athens in which there were engaged in the building trades alone, according to Plutarch, carpenters, moulders, bronze-smiths, stone-cutters, dyers, veneerers in gold and ivory, painters, embroiderers, embossers, factors, sailors, pilots, wagon-makers, trainers of yoked beasts, drivers, rope-makers, weavers, cobblers, road-builders, and miners. This, too, is the Athens into which, as an ancient Athenian wrote, were swept, because of its maritime empire, the choice things of Sicily and Italy, of Cyprus, and Egypt, and Lydia, of Pontus and Peloponnesus, and many another place besides. When the farmer lived side by side in Athens, the largest city in the whole Greek world, with the trader and the artisan, the fusion of town and country must have been still more complete in the forty-three cities of Crete, the ten cities of Euboea, and the four cities of Ceos--an island only ten miles broad and fourteen long. This being the case, economic conditions tended to make the citizens of each state homogeneous to a degree foreign in modern experience; for, however rapid be its approach, the age has not yet arrived in America in which the "country is to be urbanized"; in which, to speak with a recent essayist, farming is to be "of necessity a specialized department of urban life"; "the task of agricultural production is to be taken over by the classes of modern industrial organization; by the capitalist, the manager and the laborer"; in which "there is to be a continual shifting of laborers of the poorer classes back and forth between the town and the country," and "the distinction implied in the terms 'townsman' and 'countryman' is to be obliterated."

Whether our essayist be right or wrong in his forecast of the future of farming in America, we will not stop to discuss. It is enough to point out that the early age of Greece was such a one as he desiderates; that then life was exclusively and uniformly urban: with the result that the entire population of any given city-state could be regarded as merely a great family. And it not only could be, but it was in fact so regarded. Were not all citizens descendants of a common ancestor? This query aristocrats might answer in the negative, mindful of the special god or demigod of whom each nobleman thought himself the offspring. But his negative was generally qualified by the admission that he, too, if he were an Athenian, had Zeus and Apollo--Zeus of the home-stead and Apollo of the fatherland--as his progenitors; that he, too, like all his fellow-citizens, was a descendant of Ion and a foster-child of Athena. The gods and goddesses of the Greeks were their creators in the literal physical sense of the word. Men projected backward, even to the age of the gods and heroes, with which the world began, the fact of paternity to which all animal origins were attributable; and since each city had its peculiar demigods, from which its citizens were directly sprung, all its inhabitants were bound to one another by a peculiar tie of blood.

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 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 demigods. When heroes had to be discovered, with the help of the Pythian prophetess, to act as progenitors for the groups of citizens artificially united in the new electoral divisions which Clisthenes established in Athens in 508 B.C., it is conceivable that popular regard for purity of stock helped Pericles to enact the notorious law of 451 B.C. limiting citizenship at Athens to those sprung from the legitimate union of Athenian parents. Every city in Greece inherited from its distant tribal past a strong feeling of the kinship of its inhabitants, in comparison with which the sense of ethnic and racial unity was weak and watery. To destroy the political identity of a city was like taking human life.

We must make allowance, moreover, in appraising the strength of local attachments among both Greeks and Romans, for their beliefs as to the fate of the dead. The ancient world, like modern Japan, was saturated with the idea that the spirits of departed ancestors needed the ministrations of the living. Without the meat and drink which the relatives brought to the grave; without the coins--or the articles of use and pleasure which money might buy--that were buried with the body; without the covering of earth that was strewn over the dead, loved ones might lack life altogether in the underworld, or might lack everything that made the spirit life tolerable. "The beasts of the field and the birds of the air," rang the impassioned plea of Tiberius Gracchus in introducing his agrarian reforms, "have their holes and their hiding-places, but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy but the blessings of light and air. Our generals urge their soldiers to fight for the graves and the shrines of their ancestors. The appeal is idle and false. You cannot point to a paternal altar. You have no ancestral tomb. No! you fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others. You are called the masters of the world: yet there is no clod of earth that is really yours." Plutarch, with a touch which shows that despite his modernity he belongs to the civilization which he interprets, tells us that the Athenians before Salamis were disposed to count victory dear which was purchased by the desertion of the temples and the tombs of their fathers. No man who neglected the plot where his dead lay might hold the chief magistracies in Athens. The soil of his fatherland was thus in a peculiar sense holy ground to the citizen of a Greek city. He might leave it, but not to an enemy; and if he were, like AEneas, the last of his family, he was expected to carry his Lares and Penates with him. Into a pit dug on the new site every companion of Romulus, we are told in a legend which merely transfers into the past later-day practice, threw a morsel of earth brought from his old home land. This he did not simply from an intensification of the feeling which led the Scotch girl in the well-known ballad to take with her, when starting for America, not baggage, but sods from her mother's grave. He did it from the sentiment which led General Nogi the other day to provide for the spirits of his ancestors before committing suicide. Thereby the colonist brought his dead along with him to the new city. The Greeks and the Romans had, accordingly, a very special reason for local patriotism. Like the Hebrew Christians, they were "also compassed about with so great a crowd of witnesses."

We have made our peace with economics by considering first the effect of occupation and residence in giving to the citizens of each city-state solidarity of interest and attitude. We have dwelt a little on the force which beliefs as to their origin and their destiny hereafter exerted in keeping the city-states apart. We have still to notice the centrifugal influence on the Greek race of their urban institutions and politics.

Each city in Greece had its own laws and customs. These were not, as with us, cold abstractions, but real, ever active, almost living, personal forces, moulding incessantly their subjects according to a given model. The citizens of each city had, in fact, a general family resemblance, due to the imprint set upon them by their social and political institutions. Cities acquired by this means clear-cut individualities which were capable of definition, not simply by narrating their history, but also in terms of physical, intellectual, and emotional qualities. We may illustrate this point by observing that the Hellenes created one literary type which we have not borrowed from them: they wrote the biographies of cities as well as of men. Their philosophers studied the effects upon urban character of climate, prevailing winds and pursuits, location with reference to the sun and the sea, contact with foreigners, and other similar agencies. They even had specifics which they prescribed for the physiological and pathological ills of cities, just as our sciolists, on a much more slender basis of facts, however, diagnose the diseases and classify the good and evil qualities of nations.

The truth is that cities meant to all the Greeks what the city and the nation combined mean to those of us who do not live in the country. They were the source and object at once of municipal and national pride. The problems which city-states had to consider and solve were not simply those in which good citizens find it so hard nowadays to develop a wholesome interest. Questions of police, education, public works, appointments; conflicts of racial, sectional, class, and religious ambitions; rivalries with neighboring cities for commercial, political, and cultural leadership--controversies of this order are common to all cities in all times and places. But the politics of the Greek cities had a high seriousness of their own. Each town had its own foreign policy to determine, its own army to train and direct, its own church to equip with shrines and deities, its own gods to honor with games and tragedies. Every move on the complex chessboard of the Mediterranean world might be pregnant with meaning to it. On one day it might decide that the time had come to seize some borderland in dispute with its immediate neighbors. On another it might conclude an alliance which imposed the obligation to wage a great war against frightful odds. On another the subject of voting might be the recognition of a new god or goddess, which, in fact, was often tantamount to a new creation. And in considering all these matters citizens were simply doing what their fathers and forefathers had done from time immemorial. Memories of great actions done in olden times were preserved by monuments of bronze or marble, and revived annually by appropriate ceremonies. Legend and fact, blended in an edifying tradition,--the repository of the yearnings and ideals of dead generations,--inspired the living to bear themselves worthily in all national crises. "Love thou thy land with love far-brought from out the storied past" was an admonition of which Greek cities of the classic epoch stood in little need. The mischief was that the land which they loved was not all Greece, but merely the territory of a single town.

The national fanaticism of the countries of modern Europe is probably more tolerant of foreign interference than was the passionate patriotism of the little urban units with which the imperial policy of Athens and Sparta had to deal.

If you were to look at a map of Greece which distinguished the states, and not the meaningless ethnical or tribal divisions of the people, you would observe that from the outset Sparta and Athens were destined to greatness, if by nothing else, by the size and material resources of their territories. They were, however, themselves city-states, and inferior to none in the strength with which they held to the conviction that no greater humiliation could befall them than to have to submit to the domination of another city or the will of a foreign lord. With what show of reason, therefore, could they adopt a policy of imperialism? They had to deal with Greeks, and not with barbarians. Hence they could not invoke in the interest of their ambition the convenient doctrine that inferior races need a political guardian.

In estimating the territory of Sparta we have included in it not simply the land of the citizens which the serfs or Helots tilled for them, but also the much larger, but less valuable, mass of enveloping land which belonged to the Perioecs; for the hamlets of the latter were really Spartan municipalities. It was, moreover, with the resources of the whole complex that Sparta held the Peloponnesians united under her leadership for one hundred and eighty years . On the other hand, it was with the combined strength of the Peloponnesians that Sparta broke up the Athenian empire in 405 B.C., and widened the area of her leadership so as to include all Hellas. Thereafter Sparta's Peloponnesian league was simply the core of a general Hellenic league. The question is: What position did Sparta occupy in it?

With the outbreak of the great duel for national leadership between Sparta and Athens which fills the final third of the fifth century B.C., the war was carried in the form of stasis into every city of the two confederacies. For the leaders of both the one third and the two thirds, says Thucydides in a famous passage of his history of the Peloponnesian War "used specious names, the one professing to uphold the constitutional equality of the many, the other the wisdom of an aristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in name they were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in every way to overcome each other, they committed the most monstrous crimes; yet even these were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges, which they pursued to the very utmost, neither party observing any definite limits either of justice or public expediency, but both alike making the caprice of the moment their law. Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, or grasping power with the strong hand, they were eager to satiate the impatience of party spirit. Neither faction cared for religion; but any fair pretence which succeeded in effecting some odious purpose was greatly lauded. And the citizens who were of neither party fell a prey to both; either they were disliked because they held aloof, or men were jealous of their surviving. Thus stasis gave birth to every form of wickedness in Greece." The singleness of purpose with which Sparta made vocational training the aim of her public education achieved the happy result that she had no men of letters to betray to posterity damaging secrets of state. Hence no one has done for her what Thucydides has done for Athens: let us have an insight into the conscience of the city at the time of its greatness. With brutal candor Cleon and others in Thucydides' narrative brush aside the formal justification of the Athenian empire and lay bare the fact that it was in reality a tyranny, a sovereignty exercised without a moral sanction, one which self-respecting people had a solemn duty to overthrow. "You should remember," said Cleon to the Athenians in 427 B.C., "that your empire is a despotism exercised over unwilling subjects who are always conspiring against you; they do not obey in return for any kindness which you do them to your own injury, but in so far as you are their mistress; they have no love of you, but they are held down by force."

The reformers strove to alter the untoward circumstances, and in a later chapter we shall have occasion to note how Plato and Aristotle, with a blind faith in the power of education and of legislation, aimed to divert citizens from work to leisure and from war to peace, and both to eradicate the greed for land and money and to restrict the natural increase of population to which they traced the imperialistic spirit. Some of the statesmen followed their lead. Others, however, conceding that unity was demanded for the preservation and spread of civilization, and that the world needed not fewer but more Greeks, either, like the great publicist Isocrates, advocated an hegemony on the old lines but endowed with stability through being based on general consent, or favored one of several new devices for welding cities into a permanent territorial state. Respect for progress bids us to view at this point somewhat narrowly these unitarian movements.

A notable start in the direction of uniting city-states legally in a larger whole had been made by Athens during the epoch of her empire. She had then founded many colonies , which, though organized as separate cities, retained for their residents citizenship in Athens. Why not grant citizenship to the inhabitants of other cities as well? There were some, and among them the comedian Aristophanes, who canvassed this idea. "Let us assume," he says, "that our city is a heap of wool, and that each of our allied cities is a fleck of wool. Let us take all the wool and spin it into yarn, and weave the yarn into a great blanket with which to protect our lord Demos against the cold." But for this drastic measure the times were not ripe. It was altogether repugnant to the pride of the Athenians to share with everybody advantages which they had sacrificed so much to acquire; and there was little in the advantages thus diluted to compensate other cities for the at least partial loss of identity which they were bound to sustain on acquiring Athenian citizenship. In the one instance in which this course was taken, the Samians, to whom Athens gave her full civic rights in the supreme agony of the Peloponnesian War, had both earned them and come to appreciate them by sacrificing their own territory rather than desert their ally.

In this way arose what by the general consent of historians and jurists is the most perfect state which antiquity produced. The antinomy between the city-state and the imperial spirit which had existed for centuries was reduced to a minimum by the nice balance of the federal system.

There were defects in the Achaean and AEtolian leagues which their statesmen did not remove. "Equality," says Aristotle, "is just, but only between equals." The cities which had an equal voice in the international board, like the modern nations which cast a vote each at the Hague Congress, were unequal in population and in wealth.

The Achaeans and AEtolians came nearer than any ancient republicans to entrusting power to representatives; but, besides creating a large legislative council, constituted in successive years, in the one case, of different fractions of the citizens of each city, and in the other, of deputies apportioned to the constituent cities according to their size, they showed the ingrained distrust held by all Greeks for oligarchy by requiring the reference to a general assembly of all matters of high importance.

How to satisfy the just claims of those whom distance or lack of leisure prevented from coming to the meeting-place, they did not discover.

However, it was not these institutional imperfections which prevented the unification of Hellas in a single federation. For this result could not now be achieved by any triumph of political science. Antigonus Doson whose name ought not to be unknown where Callicratidas, Agesilaus, Iphicrates, and Phocion are household words, attempted with equal skill and generosity to combine the new federal idea with the old idea of a representative national congress meeting at Corinth under the hegemony of the king of Macedon; but the best that can be said of the combination he made is that despite its great promise and possibilities it proved unacceptable to Hellas, and hence ineffective. The situation had now got beyond the control of the Greek people. It may, perhaps, be realized best, if we imagine that the European nations of to-day, weakened politically by continuous emigration and incessant conflicts, economically, by the withdrawal of industry and commerce to more favorably situated districts under European control, let us say in the East, were to pool their diplomatic and military interests, and entrust them, not to a European parliament, but to warring Latin and Teutonic parliaments, and were to take this step only to escape the Russian peril and when America was already thundering at their shores, if that be imaginable, coming with irresistible might, at once to save and to destroy.

To describe how the Roman republic emancipated Greece from Macedon, impressed her will upon the Greek kingdoms of the East, and built up a universal empire of diverse fragments, lies beyond the scope of this book. We may note simply that to some cities she gave her citizenship, or polity, thus destroying their identity altogether; that to others she gave isopolity, or reciprocity of citizenship, and with it the local advantages preserved in Greece by sympolity, or joint citizenship, thus creating the municipality and organizing wards, so to speak, of the city of Rome all over Italy; that some she bound to herself by irrevocable treaties till she was forced to give them municipal status, and others by understandings or temporary treaties till she had familiarized herself with deification of rulers, which was the Greek method of legalizing absolutism.

To Alexander the Great governments have been in serious debt for over two thousand years. From him to Kaiser Wilhelm II runs an unbroken line. So long as the world had many gods and did not believe in the supernatural power of any of them, there was no religious difficulty in adding to its stock another such deity in the person of the living monarch. With the decadence of polytheism, however, a slight change was necessary. In Constantine's time god-kings suffered the same fate as other pagan gods; but with a difference. The heathen gods became devils or were metamorphosed into saints.

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FOOTNOTES:

ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY

There never was a people which made the principle that all its citizens were equal a more live reality than the Athenians made it; and no state to my knowledge was more cunningly contrived to insure the government of the people than was theirs. Yet they became imperialists with ardor and conviction, and with this much of logical consequence, that, while they believed in democracy for everybody, they did not doubt that the Athenians had earned the right to rule both Greeks and barbarians by the acquisition of superior culture. Equality among its citizens Athens carefully distinguished from equality among all men.

The foundations of Athenian democracy and empire were laid by Themistocles, whose figure moves weird and gigantic through the golden mist in which Herodotus has enveloped the great Persian War. And it was this genial statesman, to whose unerring skill in discerning the course of coming events the austere historian Thucydides pays a rare tribute, who mapped out for his city the foreign policy by which it had the best chance of realizing its imperial ambition. Let it use its great fleet, which by fifteen years of persistent advocacy he had led the Athenians to build, as its arm of offense, and its impregnable walls, which he had enabled the Athenians to construct despite the treacherous opposition of Sparta, as a bulwark of defense and a basis for timely advance against its powerful continental rivals. Let it utilize the wave of democratic fervor then sweeping through Greece to consolidate its power within the Confederacy of Delos and to undermine and eventually to overthrow the leadership which Sparta, by the support of dying mediaeval aristocracies, had hitherto possessed in Hellenic affairs. Let it make peace on advantageous terms with Persia; use the liberty thus secured to break the power of Sparta, and, on the basis of a consolidated Hellas, strike boldly for Athenian dominion of the world.

Themistocles had, accordingly, to reckon with a national self-confidence which knew no bounds. And this had been increased by famous victories of Cimon over the Persians, and a revolt of the Helots which disclosed the fatal weakness of Sparta, when in 461 B.C. the task of conducting the fierce current of national energy, first for fifteen years in a heroic, but fruitless, struggle by sea and land against the Greeks and Persians simultaneously, and then for fifteen further years in the prosecution of glorious works of peace, fell upon the broad shoulders of Pericles, Xanthippus's son.

It is conceded that there is no taskmaster so ruthless as one's own will. The impulse to action during this strenuous epoch came from the Athenian people itself, not from its chief statesman. That fact does not, however, diminish the credit of Pericles. The golden age of Greece is, properly speaking, a golden age of Athens, and to its birth many things contributed; but decisive among them, in addition to the intensity of national life already alluded to, was an unrivaled facility for great leaders to get into effective contact with the masses under conditions in which there was the fullest opportunity for men in general to use their natural powers to the utmost. This happy combination of creative genius and receptive multitude arose in the main from the democratic institutions of Athens; but, for the public and private wealth without which Athenian democracy proved unworkable, and for the imaginative stimulus which enterprises of great pitch and moment alone give, the possession of empire was, perhaps, essential.

In the age of Pericles, Athens was a city with a population of about 150,000. Attica, the territory of the Athenians, had an approximately equal number of inhabitants. Of the 300,000 thus accounted for, about one third was servile and one sixth foreign. The free and franchised population made up one half of the total, and yielded about 50,000 males of military age.

The empire of the Athenians consisted of five provinces, the Thracian, Hellespontine, Insular, Ionian, and Carian, with a total population of perhaps, 2,000,000. It formed a complex of islands, peninsulas, and estuaries, the most remote extremities of which were distant two hundred or two hundred and fifty miles from Athens. The highways of this empire were the land-locked channels and lakes which make up the AEgean Archipelago. Their greatest length in normal circumstances was a continuous voyage of about eight days. On the other hand, no land way of more than a single day's march need be traversed by an Athenian expedition aimed at any of its subject cities. Without the control of the sea the empire was, accordingly, unthinkable. This absent, the district fell at once into more than four hundred fragments, the thousand "cities" from which, according to the comedian Aristophanes, the Athenians gathered tribute.

The Athenian sphere of naval operations and of political and commercial interests reached far beyond the frontiers of the empire. It included points like Sicily, Egypt, Phoenicia, and the Euxine, distant over six hundred miles from the Piraeus. An Athenian fleet might thus require the best part of a month to reach its destination. The world which had to take careful account of the Athenian naval power in all its political and military calculations, the world which Athens under Pericles sought to dominate, must have had a population of over 20,000,000.

If, then, we take into account the ratio of dominant, subject, and foreign elements, and also the time consumed in reaching with ships, orders, or explanations, the outer limits of authority, the magnitude of Athens's imperial undertaking will stand comparison with that of England in modern times.

In Sparta the gravestone of a citizen was inscribed regularly with his name alone. No epitaph was needed there to tell the tale of a life; for the life of one citizen was the well-known life of all. If, however, a man had died for his country, two words, ????????, "in war," expressed with laconic brevity his ground of distinction.

The statesman did not linger long over the legendary glories of Athens. Her alleged boons to humanity--grain, the norms of civilized life, the drama; the services, that is to say, upon which the later Athenians dwelt with special pride--had no meaning for him. Two things their ancestors had done: they had defended their country successfully, and had transmitted to their descendants a free state. "And if these were worthy of praise," proceeds his splendid exordium, "still more were our fathers, who added to their inheritance, and after many a struggle transmitted to us their sons this great empire. And we ourselves assembled here to-day, who are still most of us in the vigor of life, have chiefly done the work of improvement, and have richly endowed our city with all things, so that she is sufficient for herself both in peace and war. Of the military exploits by which our various possessions were acquired, or of the energy with which we or our fathers drove back the tide of war, Hellenic or Barbarian, I will not speak; for the tale would be long and is familiar to you. But ... I should like to point out by what principles of action we rose to power, and under what institutions and through what manner of life our empire became great."

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