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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."

"It is true," said Pericles, "we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized, and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private intercourse we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private intercourse, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for authority and for the laws, having an especial regard to those ordained for the protection of the injured as well as to those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment.... Wealth we employ not for talk and ostentation, but when there is a real use for it. To avow poverty with us is no disgrace: the true disgrace is in doing nothing to avoid it. An Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes care of his own household; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless but as a useless character; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy. The great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not discussion but the want of that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act and of acting too.... And we have not forgotten to provide for our weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games and sacrifices throughout the year; at home the style of our life is refined; and the delight which we daily feel in all these things helps to banish melancholy. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as of our own.... We are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.... To sum up: I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace. This is no passing and idle word, but truth and fact; and the assertion is verified by the position to which these qualities have raised the state.... And we shall assuredly not be without witnesses; there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages; we shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may please for the moment, although his representation of the facts will not bear the light of day. For we have compelled every land and every sea to open a path for our valor, and have everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friendship and of our enmity."

Such were the proud claims of the great Athenian statesman. Of art there was said no word except in so far as art was embodied in the monuments of empire. Music and the drama are alluded to, but in the same breath with athletic contests, as the relaxation of overworked men. The speaker has no apology to make for democracy. He gloried in imperialism. Had he met Plato in Elysium--Plato who was born in the year after Pericles's death, and both embodied and expressed the higher ideals of a later generation of Athenians--he would have disdained to reply to the philosopher's accusation that he had filled the city with traders and shops and ships and dockyards and such rubbish, instead of with righteousness and justice.

The work of Parliament was divided between the ecclesia and the heliaea; for legislation in the strict sense of the term could be enacted only by the joint action of the two bodies. Administrative decrees, moreover, by means of which the ecclesia disposed of all important public business, and which might differ from laws only in a formal way, could be suspended at the initiative of individuals and were incontestable only when passed on, as to constitutionality or public expediency, by the heliaea. The men who sat in the heliaea were but common citizens like those who voted in the ecclesia; but they came to sit in judgment on both laws and decrees by the accident of the lot and not because of any particular interest in the questions concerned. In other words, the courts could not be packed with partisans as the meetings of the ecclesia commonly were. This fact, together with the delay which necessarily occurred, protected the state against the verdict of a chance majority, which was in fact usually a minority of all the citizens. There was no such thing in Athens as the final settlement of controversial matters by a single popular vote.

The heliaea acted as sovereign in one further particular. Upon it devolved the duty of determining whether the magistrates and councilors observed the laws and conducted themselves honestly during their years of office. It was to the sworn assembly of the Athenians, accordingly, that all those engaged in civil administration were responsible. The ecclesia, on the other hand, had the right to impeach and dismiss those officials who, being given discretionary powers, abused them.

The main work of the heliaea was of course to settle domestic and imperial litigation. As we shall see, the judicial power of the heliaea gave it a large measure of political control over all the subject cities of Athens.

It was constituted anew each year and was made an exact miniature of the ecclesia which it was to serve. Every ward and township of Attica, to the number of one hundred and over, first eliminated such of its members as had not yet reached their thirtieth year or had already served two terms in the council, and then selected by lot from among the rest the councilor or councilors to which it was entitled on the basis of population. Accordingly, each successive council had from two hundred and fifty to five hundred new and inexperienced members. Not desire or fitness but pure chance determined its personnel. Every section, interest, and class of Attica--if we exclude young men between eighteen and thirty--was adequately represented in it. There was, therefore, a general presumption that it would take the same view of public questions as the ecclesia; that it would do a disservice to its own members should it foster their temporary rights as councilors at the expense of their lifelong rights as members of the ecclesia; that it would, in other words, labor to the best of its ability to present to the ecclesia a well-considered and sufficiently inclusive programme of business. Otherwise, the heliaea had to be faced at the end of the twelve months.

A committee of five hundred impresses us as little less unwieldy than an assembly of five thousand. Clisthenes was of the same opinion. Hence he divided his council into ten sections, or prytanies, of fifty members each, and arranged that each prytany should act for the whole for thirty-six days in an order determined by lot at the latest possible moment. The prytany was constituted in such a way that it was a miniature of the council, just as the council was a miniature of the ecclesia. The lot, again applied at the latest possible moment, determined, furthermore, which of its fifty members should be its chairman, and be present with one third of his colleagues in the council chamber for the single twenty-four hours for which he served. The same man was chairman of the council at its daily session, and he also presided at the ecclesia, should a meeting of the citizens be held on his day of office. A chance nomination for a single day's service, at a time not previously known, was, Clisthenes thought, a sufficient safeguard of council and ecclesia against successful scheming, conspiracy, collusion, or other interference with the popular will on the part of the chairman. He was mistaken; and the later democracy took the further precaution of requiring the chairman to relinquish the presidency at the meetings of the council and ecclesia to a board of nine men chosen by lot for that specific purpose from the non-officiating prytanies of the council. One of the nine, designated likewise by lot, was given the special honor and responsibility of putting the motions and declaring the votes.

All committees were reconstituted annually. No man could be a member of the same committee twice in his lifetime. At the end of his year each magistrate was required to render an indescribably minute accounting of his public acts, first to specially appointed auditing committees, and finally to the heliaea. It was an easy matter to get an office in Athens, but a very difficult task to get honorably rid of it. For the lot was used to select the requisite number of members for each committee from among the citizens thirty years old or older who had not disqualified themselves by earlier service. The theory that one citizen was as competent as another for public office was thus put into practice. Every office was refilled annually by a chance group of new and necessarily inexperienced men.

The demands put upon the time of Athenian citizens by the state were enormous, but not such as to cripple economic production. A comparison with modern conditions will make this clear. A little less frequently than once a week the ecclesia met, but the attendance was generally less than one tenth of those qualified. That represents a suspension of work roughly equivalent to our Saturday afternoons and legal holidays. A little oftener than once a week a contest or other public festival occurred, and to these there was, it seems, a pretty general resort. They correspond to our fair-days and Sundays. Preparation for the contests was, perhaps, not more destructive of money-earning time than are our collegiate and university courses. During their nineteenth and twentieth years young Athenians of the upper third trained for the army; but it was not till a century after Pericles's death that universal military service for a similar period was made compulsory--as in modern Europe. We may assume that at least two years of every citizen's life was required for deliberative and administrative work; and, having regard to the imperial service, we may, perhaps, advance this requirement to three. That is an enormous enlargement of modern demands. The same ratio would give the United States two million and a half or three million public employees, exclusive of postmasters and postal clerks, tax-collectors, and day laborers of every description. But a bald comparison of this sort is misleading. Athens regularly employed a committee of ten to do one man's work, with the result that all of them were free to give nine tenths of their time to their private business. The council during the year and the jury courts at its expiry were there to insure the state that, even if his colleagues would let him, any particular official did not neglect his public duties. Nor was the Athenian practice wildly extravagant so long as the magistrate received, not a living salary, but an indemnity equal only to a common workman's daily wage. The Athenians employed four hundred or even two thousand jurors where we employ twelve; but they had neither high salaried judges nor exacting lawyers to pay, since the judicial system worked without either. The juryman's fee, moreover, was a meagre indemnity, comparable to the old-age pension paid in the progressive countries of modern Europe.

The payment of indemnities for service in the council, the magistracies, the jury courts, and for attendance in the theatre, music-hall, and stadion, was a Periclean innovation. He did not intend to create a class of salaried officials; nor yet to make an advance toward communism. His ideal was political, not economic, equality--to enable all, irrespective of wealth or station, to use the opportunities and face the obligations which democracy brought in its train. Like all the great democratic leaders who preceded him, he was a nobleman by birth and breeding, and, like them, he did not doubt for a moment that the culture which ennobled the life of his class would dignify and uplift that of the masses also. To give the workingman the political insight and knowledge of the Eupatrids; to lend to him the grace and elasticity of movement which physical culture gave them; to fill his memory with the noble thoughts set in melodious and stirring words which they got from their intimacy with great poetry; to inspire in him, though a mere artisan, an artist's taste and fervor for formal beauty--that was to bless him with more than leisure. It was to unite the whole people in a community of high ideas and emotions. It was to make them a nation of noblemen. We do not wonder much that in the furtherance of this cause the men of large wealth in Athens volunteered to assume in turn financial and personal responsibility for the support of the theatre, the opera-house, the stadion, and the gymnasia. It was a heavy burden, but, in the absence of a regular property or income tax, generosity became at once a duty and a wise precaution.

A nation of noblemen is a luxury for which somebody has to pay. Athens, in Pericles's memorable phrase, was "the school of Hellas." It was right, he thought, that the Hellenes should sacrifice something for their education. He had tried to make them all contributory allies of Athens, but had failed in the attempt. As a good schoolmaster he was determined, none the less, to hold those "well in hand" whom he had under his care.

The physical means to this end was the control of the sea. The advantages of sea power in warfare, in enabling the holder of it to circumscribe according to his convenience the area of military action, as well as in facilitating mobilization, transport, and communications, were not perceived for the first time by the English Admiralty, much less by Clausewitz and Captain Mahan. They are stated in the clearest terms by a contemporary of Pericles. Here is what he says: "The subjects of a power which is dominant by land have it open to them to form contingents from several small states and to muster in force to battle. But with the subjects of a naval power it is different. As far as they are groups of islands it is impossible for their states to meet together for united action, for the sea lies between them, and the dominant power is master of the sea. And even if it were possible for them to assemble in some single island unobserved, they would only do so to perish of famine. And as to the states subject to Athens which are not islanders, but situated on the continent, the larger are held in check by need and the small ones absolutely by fear, since there is no state in existence which does not depend upon imports and exports and these she will forfeit, if she does not lend a willing ear to those who are masters of the sea. In the next place, a power dominant by sea can do certain things which a land power is debarred from doing; as, for instance, ravage the territory of a superior, since it is always possible to coast along to some point, where either there is no hostile force to deal with or merely a small body; and in case of an advance in force on the part of the enemy they can take to their ships and sail away. Such a performance is attended by less difficulty than that experienced by the army marching along the seaboard to the rescue. Again, it is open to a power so dominating by sea to leave its own territory and sail off on as long a voyage as you please. Whereas the land power cannot place more than a few days' journey between itself and its own territory, for marches are slow affairs; and it is not possible for an army on the march to have food supplies to last for any great length of time. Such an army must either march through friendly territory or it must force a way by victory in battle. The voyager meanwhile has it in his power to disembark at any point where he finds himself in superior force; or, at the worst, to coast by until he reaches either a friendly district or an enemy too weak to resist. Again, those diseases to which the fruits of the earth are liable as visitations from heaven fall severely on a land power, but are scarcely felt by the naval power, for such sicknesses do not visit the whole earth everywhere at once.... There is just one thing which the Athenians lack. Supposing they were the inhabitants of an island, and were still, as now, rulers of the sea, they would have had it in their power to work whatever mischief they liked and suffer no evil in return."

At all costs Athens must retain control of the sea. That meant to keep the fleet constantly in fighting trim. In the effort the Athenians made the most heroic financial and personal sacrifices, demonstrating clearly that popular government need not be self-indulgent. Neither the aristocracy in England nor Napoleon in France was as hard a taskmaster of the people as the majority which ruled in Athens. Between 410 and 402 B.C.--a time of great economic distress--a well-to-do citizen was called upon to expend twenty thousand franks--which are perhaps equal in purchasing power to as many dollars--on what we may call national education and entertainment. His taxes on the account of the fleet amounted in the same years to double as much, or forty-three thousand franks. Great as was the burden of the rich, that of the commons was conceded by their adversaries to have been still greater. "In the first place," writes an aristocrat in about 420 B.C., "it is only just that the poorer classes and the 'people' of Athens should have the advantage over the men of birth and wealth, seeing that it is the people who man the fleet and put round the city her girdle of power. The steersman, the boatswain, the lieutenant, the look-out-man at the prow, the shipwright--these are the people who engird the city with power far rather than her heavy infantry and men of birth and quality." Plutarch tells us that on a peace footing Athens kept a fleet of sixty ships on the sea for eight months of every year. To man such a squadron 10,200 rowers, 480 officers, and 600 marines would be required. In other words, one quarter of all the citizens of Athens would have lived on their battleships for three quarters of every year. We might believe this report, if it were not contradicted by Aristotle, who in a place, where exaggeration, not reduction, is suspected, makes the fleet of Athens, which was constantly in service in time of war, consist only of twenty guard-ships. Hence one twelfth and not one quarter of all the Athenians were on active naval duty during the sailing season of almost every year. In addition, two thousand men were drafted yearly by lot to serve in garrisons throughout the empire; so that, if these are added to the seven hundred imperial magistrates, and the five hundred guards of the arsenals, nearly another one twelfth of the citizens was involved.

This computation takes no account of the demands of naval warfare. In the Athenian dockyards lay ready for action four hundred battleships, from which the requisite number was selected for each particular expedition. If two hundred and fifty vessels were mobilized, as occasionally happened, nearly fifty thousand additional sailors were required. With the use of every possible citizen Athens could not produce such a number. She commonly did her utmost and called upon the allies for the rest.

On three specific points and on one general ground, contemporaries both within and without Athens assailed the treatment accorded by the Periclean democracy to its subjects. In no instance, however, is the charge of misbehavior established conclusively, though in this matter, as in so many others in the history of Greece, our judgment is dependent upon the point at which we transfer our sympathy from the city-states, which were the bearers of culture in the Greek Middle Ages, to the whole people, for whose progress and independence urban particularism was finally fatal. "Surely Hellas is insulted with a dire insult," declared the opponents of Pericles, "and manifestly subjected to tyranny when she sees that, with her own enforced contributions for the war, we are gilding and bedizening our city, which, for all the world like a wanton woman, adds to her wardrobe precious stones and costly statues and temples worth their millions." To this accusation the proper retort was, not that having provided adequate protection against Persia, Athens was free to spend the money contributed by the subjects in any way she pleased; for the logical inference was then that the contributions were excessive. Pericles may not have cared to be logical, but he could not ignore forms. Had he been able to show, as has been claimed recently, that he used for building purposes only the sixtieth of the tribute, which had been dedicated as the first fruits to Athena, he would never have been attacked at all. Evidently, he spent on Athenian public works much larger sums derived indirectly from the tribute, for which course the defense actually made seems to have been that the money was due Athens for losses sustained during the invasion of Xerxes and for sums advanced to the war fund during the continuance of the struggle with Persia. In any case the tribute paid was a mere bagatelle as compared with what the subjects saved through having no fleets of their own to maintain.

The charge is more serious that in order to enjoy "the steady receipt of salaries throughout the year derived from the court fees"; to "manage the affairs of the subjects while seated at home without the expense of naval expeditions"; to "preserve the partisans of democracy and ruin its opponents"; to boost the business of hotel keepers and such ilk in Athens, and to win for the common citizens the flattery and consideration that would be shown otherwise only to generals and ambassadors, the Athenians "compelled the allies to voyage to Athens in order to have their cases tried." For it seems clear that the law courts at Athens were usually so clogged with litigation that the gain in having a model code of law and in escaping the fierce partisanship of the local tribunals was largely neutralized by the added expense and humiliation. The real justification of the practice was that it obviated the necessity of sending out naval expeditions.

In the third place Athens took from the allies lands and settled them with impecunious Athenians; but in payment therefor reductions of tribute were given. On the other hand, thousands from the allied cities migrated to Athens, and, while not escaping military or financial service, or obtaining Athenian citizenship, they were cordially welcomed, and enjoyed to the full the commercial and industrial advantages of the metropolis. Again, Athenians often found it less profitable to invest capital in Attic land, which was exposed to hostile attack, than in lands on the islands of the empire, which the fleet protected. Hence there were many Attic farmers in the subject territory, their right to own foreign real estate being secured by commercial treaties. There was accordingly economic give and take, the military preponderance of Athens being, however, responsible for the result that the Athenians abroad were often policemen, the allies in Athens, hostages.

In all three instances of alleged misbehavior, it must be admitted that the defense offered by the Athenian apologists simply added insult to injury in the view of a majority of the subjects. But for them Athens, arrogant or conciliatory, malefactor or benefactor, was always a foreign governor to be gotten rid of at any cost. Such uncompromising sentiments time alone could alter, and to secure the benefits of time Pericles endeavored to avoid an Hellenic war. His policy of peace after 446 B.C. was, therefore, the sound policy of an imperialist.

The general ground on which contemporaries criticized the Athenian r?gime was that under it every assistance was given by the state to the least cultivated portion of the inhabitants both of Athens and of its four hundred and twenty subject cities, at the expense of the most intelligent and cultivated elements; that the highest goal of endeavor was moral and intellectual mediocrity. There may be some truth in this contention. The case would be more conclusive, however, if the tendency of the critics to identify intelligence with wealth and cultivation with birth were less obvious. If the point be granted, we must accept the opinion of those historians who affirm that Athens was great in this age despite, and not because of, its democracy. Personally, I do not believe that this was so. I cannot admit that extirpation of the best was practiced in an age in which ideas were created and forms were perfected for their literary and artistic expression which have been the wonder and despair of the men of the highest cultivation from that day to this. Does it not seem like irony that a r?gime is charged with promoting mediocrity under which rose Sophocles, Herodotus, Phidias, Pericles, Euripides, Hippocrates, Socrates, and Thucydides? Much more important than the leveling tendency of the democracy was the facility it afforded for men of ability both to rise to the top and to find there a sympathetic and critical audience. So much for democracy.

The empire stands approved by the fact that the sharpest accusation now made against the democracy is that it failed to make the empire enduring. On this point the last word--unless it be that no political order has ever been enduring, and that those which have lasted the longest have been generally of the least worth--was said by Thucydides over twenty-three hundred years ago, and I present in conclusion his masterly account of the circumstances which led to the downfall of the Athenian Empire:--

"During the peace while Pericles was at the head of affairs he ruled with prudence; under his guidance Athens was safe, and reached the height of her greatness in his time. When the war began, he showed that here, too, he had formed a true estimate of the Athenian power. He survived the commencement of hostilities two years and six months; and, after his death, his foresight was even better appreciated than during his life. For he had told the Athenians that if they would be patient and would attend to their navy, and not seek to enlarge their dominions while the war was going on, nor imperil the existence of the city, they would be victorious; but they did all that he told them not to do, and in matters which seemingly had nothing to do with the war, from motives of private ambition and private interest they adopted a policy which had disastrous effects in respect both of themselves and of their allies; their measures, had they been successful, would have brought honor and profit only to individuals, and, when unsuccessful, crippled the city in the conduct of the war. The reason of the difference was that he, deriving authority from his capacity and acknowledged worth, being also a man of transparent integrity, was able to control the multitude in a free spirit; he led them rather than was led by them; for, not seeking power by dishonest arts, he had no need to say pleasant things, but, on the strength of his own high character, could venture to oppose and even to anger them. When he saw them unseasonably elated and arrogant, his words humbled and awed them; and when they were depressed by groundless fears, he sought to reanimate their confidence. Thus Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact ruled by her greatest citizen. But his successors were more on an equality with one another, and, each struggling to be first himself, they were ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of affairs to the whims of the people. Such weakness in a great and imperial city led to many errors, of which the greatest was the Sicilian expedition; not that the Athenians miscalculated their enemy's power, but they themselves, instead of consulting for the interests of the expedition which they had sent out, were occupied in intriguing against one another for the leadership of the democracy, and not only grew remiss in the management of the army, but became embroiled, for the first time, in civil strife. And yet, after they had lost in the Sicilian expedition the greater part of their fleet and army, and were distracted by revolution at home, still they held out three years not only against their former enemies, but against the Sicilians who had combined with them, and against most of their own allies who had risen in revolt. Even when Cyrus, the son of the King, joined in the war and supplied the Peloponnesian fleet with money, they continued to resist, and were at last overthrown, not by their enemies, but by themselves and their own internal dissensions."

A summarization such as this, in style austere and authoritative, in content the product of penetrating insight and wonderful sense for political realities, not only bears witness to the greatness of Thucydides; when it is contrasted with similar analyses in Plato and Aristotle it testifies to the loss of power for sustained historical thinking which Greece suffered when men of genius were no longer enriched by the experience which came through living in a state like the imperial democracy of Athens. Not the least of its merits is its self-restraint. Having concluded that the reckless rivalries of her would-be leaders and the reckless dissensions of her citizens ruined Athens, he refrains from assigning a cause for the spirit of lawlessness. It is not Thucydides, but Alcibiades, who declared that democracy was "manifest folly"; not he, but Cleon, who reiterated that "a democracy cannot manage an empire." Thucydides does not despair of democracy. In the case of Athens it was less the unsoundness of the "majority" than the selfishness of the "remnant" that caused the nation to perish. For the demoralization of their leaders, however, the Athenians themselves held Socrates responsible, meaning to incriminate the Sophistic movement. Who shall say that they were wrong? And who shall hold democracy responsible for the evils of the Sophistic movement?

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FOOTNOTES:

FROM SPARTA TO ARISTOTLE

A curious legend about the Spartans arose in the age that followed the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great. It was then reported that they were the kinsmen of the Jews. According to one version of the story, Judaea was founded by a Spartan named Judaeus, who had accompanied the god Dionysus from Thebes on his triumphal progress through Asia. According to another account, the Spartans were descendants of Abraham, the strongest of the children of Israel having migrated to Greece at the time Moses led the remainder out of Egypt to the land of Canaan.

When we seek to discover the reason for this strange conjunction of the warrior community by the Eurotas and the religious community by the Jordan, we are helped by observing that in another Hellenistic legend the Jews are made the kinsmen of the gymnosophists, or naked philosophers, of India. The Greek mind was at this time fascinated by the great problem of subordinating the species of things to their proper genera, of perceiving the types by means of which individual objects became intelligible parts of a cosmos. It was the age of Aristotle and Theophrastus, Menander and the New Comedy, of idealistic portraiture. Hence the temptation was irresistible to bring into family relationship the various societies of men in which the principle of caste dominated; to regard it as unessential that in Judaea the people were there to support the priests, in Laconia to support the soldiers, in India to support the Brahmans. In each case there was found an odd community, in which, so far at least as the state could accomplish it, all human interests were subordinated to one, be it war and preparation for war, religious practices of a ritualistic character, or theosophical speculation.

Had the Greeks known it, there was a further analogy of an external sort between the Spartans and the Jews which they would have delighted to establish. For at about the same time that a richly diversified national life was narrowed down in Judaea to a single interest under the stress of complete preoccupation with the means of regaining Jehovah's favor for his chosen people, Sparta ruthlessly compressed and crushed a many-sided and progressive culture to the end that her citizens might become trained soldiers, having but one esprit, the esprit de corps of a professional army.

Prior to 580 B.C. Sparta was the home of poets and musicians. It was for a chorus of Spartan maidens, the ?lite of the noble families, that Alcman wrote the exquisite lines on the breathless calm of nature which Goethe has made familiar to all lovers of poetry. In hollow Lacedaemon--a valley rich with vegetation suggestive of bountiful harvests, down which the steel-gray Eurotas runs, swift and turbulent, over its rocky bottom, and over which rise on either side the snow-capped ridges of Taygetus and Parnon, their slopes resonant with the songs of the nightingales in the mating season--in this secluded spot, whose haunting beauty is a joy forever to all who have seen it, there was reared a famous temple of Athena, "Athena of the Brazen House," at a time when in Athens itself the city's protecting goddess had to be content with a crude, primitive sanctuary.

In Athens, as we have seen, supremacy in art and literature was attained by making universal among citizens the spirit and culture of the aristocracy, the whole people, thus ennobled, being supported on the shoulders of the tributary allies and enriched by the commercial advantages of maritime empire. The development of Sparta was directly the reverse of this. There the aristocracy, whose exuberance of life and responsiveness to sensuous impressions are attested with sufficient certainty, was destroyed in the sixth century B.C.

This century was one of repression in Greece generally; whence some historians have called it the epoch of the Greek Reformation. It is the time of the "Seven Wise Men," from one of whom came the Delphian motto "nothing in excess," a time in which the riotous joy of living and the fresh spontaneity of the so-called Ionian Renascence were subdued by a force, which might have been everywhere a blight,--as in Sparta,--but which in fact, when later the inspiration of the great Persian War came, exerted the gentle restraint which marks the classic in Greek art and letters. In this perilous period the aristocracy of Sparta perished, and with it the ideals and accomplishments of which it had been the exponent.

The instrument of repression of all that was superior to the average in Spartan life was the college of the five ephors, which Cicero compares with the tribunate in Rome. The ephors acquired such power that they made the continuance of even the kingship dependent upon the submission of the kings to their authority; and upon the kings, as upon all others, they enforced the new rules of law of which they were the living expositors.

The development of Sparta, like the development of Rome, from aristocratic to republican government is characterized by the absence of tyrants. The fact is that the tribunate in the one case and the ephorate in the other was tyranny in commission, the division of its powers between ten and five annually changing officers respectively having proved to be a sufficient safeguard against the concentration of executive power in the person of a single individual, be he an inherited king robbed of monarchical rights or an ambitious demagogue aiming at their restoration.

The new rules of law which the ephors enforced prescribed in minute detail the life of the citizen from the moment of his birth to the time of his death. They were the regulations of a military school in which war alone was taught, of military barracks when war was already declared. From seven years of age to sixty the entire energies of the male half of the population were directed toward being prepared for war. Boys and men drilled and hunted, learned to use their weapons and campaigned, danced and exercised, ate in the "messes" year in and year out, and never escaped the watchful eyes of trainers, subalterns, officers, and ephors.

No one in Sparta had to make his own way in life. His whole course was mapped out for him before he was born. No citizen had any business cares; for all trade and industry were tabooed, and the lands which he inherited he could not sell. Neither could he buy those of another. The agricultural laborers were serfs, the sullen and recalcitrant Helots, of whom there were fifteen to every Spartan; the clothing and weapons were made by the contented and tractable Perioecs, who outnumbered the Spartans five to one, and formed with their one hundred hamlets and their contiguous territories an insulating band round Helots and Spartans alike. Iron money was the only local currency, though silver had, of course, to be given in payment for the articles which were imported from abroad. These, however, were reduced to a minimum, and such foreigners as made their way through the wall of Perioecs were rounded up at intervals and forcefully expelled.

All the pretty things of their earlier life, the Spartans chose to do without. Coarse fare and unlovely houses, piazzas devoid of statues and inclosed in unsightly and flimsy public buildings; no theatres, no new music, no new ideas of any kind; mothers who gave up their little children and their grown sons without flinching; wives who violated fundamental instincts that their offspring might be more perfect; homeless boys who went half-naked winter and summer, slept in pens in the open air like cattle and got their food and living by their wits; girls who would hardly have known their brothers, brides who would hardly have recognized their husbands, mothers who would hardly have been able to distinguish their own sons, were it not that there were less than five thousand brothers, husbands, and sons in all--of such was the new Sparta, to whose citizens the ephors issued the annual command "to shave their mustaches and obey the laws." Long-haired and tangly-bearded, in groups of about fifteen each, they lounged and ate and slept in the three hundred tents, or barracks, which lined Hyacinth Street. There they kept their long spears and their armor. Thence, clad in their scarlet cloaks, they issued in time of danger or of war to take their places, group by group, in the five carefully drilled regiments of which the Spartan phalanx was composed. Quietly, at an appointed hour in a single night, the whole army might steal away without confusion, trailing after it, on occasion, thirty-five thousand Helots to attend to the commissariat. Five thousand Perioec hoplites might follow at its heels, and with machine-like precision, to the sound of flutes played in the austere Dorian mode, ten thousand Lacedaemonian soldiers might advance into battle against foemen who were always comparatively ill-organized, and who often fled before a single blow was struck.

The Spartans thought it unwise that any of their serf-tilled estates should lie in or outside the ring of Perioec land. It would not do to have fuses, so to speak, of Helots running through the wall to the outside world, or to have masses of Helots beyond the wall, exposed directly to foreign manipulation. Hence the formation of the Perioec ring set definite limits to the territory of Sparta. It could be enlarged in but one way--the widening of the ring by the reduction of more and more outlying states to the status of Perioecs. And it was in this way that the Spartan dominions were in fact enlarged in the seventh century B.C.

At the end of this century, however, Sparta came into conflict with cities which, unlike the mountain and maritime hamlets situated roundabout Laconia and Messenia, were too strong and high-spirited to submit to Spartan control. They had, therefore, to be treated leniently, since Sparta could not crush them altogether and would not leave them alone. And the reasons for conciliatory action were strengthened by the fact that Sparta had now to act abroad with a sharp eye to the possibility of a servile insurrection at home. There was never anything mechanical or idealistic in the foreign policy of the ephors. Hence, first with Tegea at about 560 B.C., and thereafter with all the states in the Peloponnesus, excepting Argos and Achaea, Sparta concluded a treaty, the imperialistic aspect of which was that they agreed individually to accept Sparta's leadership in all defensive wars and in offensive wars to which they had assented.

The Peloponnesian league, thus formed, stood for the autonomy and freedom of its members; but Sparta, by championing aristocracies against tyrants and democracies, and using to its own advantage the jealousies of its allies as well as their fears of outside powers, dominated it for one hundred and eighty years, and made it during all that time the main steadying influence in Greek politics. Twice it was enlarged into an Hellenic league, first during the three years of the great Persian invasion , and again for ten years after the dissolution of the Athenian empire . On the earlier occasion, the ephors felt relieved of an intolerable burden when in 477 B.C. the AEgean cities, over four hundred and twenty in number, abandoned Spartan for Athenian leadership. And in the forty-six years that followed, not they but the Athenians were the aggressors. During that epoch of democratic fervor, it was an uphill struggle for the champions of aristocracy to maintain their position; and the war of political principles was even carried into Sparta, when, in 464 B.C., the Helots of Messenia made a last desperate fight for their liberty. The Spartans profited, however, during the last third of the fifth century B.C., by the discredit into which democracy came among cultivated people through the mistakes and excesses of Athens; and at the end of the Peloponnesian War they were again able to make the Peloponnesian league an Hellenic league by incorporating into it Athens and the AEgean cities which they had just "liberated" from Athenian tyranny.

A successful war may strengthen a nation, but not when victory lays upon it a task that is beyond its powers to perform. Such would have been the case had Athens won at Syracuse. Such was the issue of AEgospotami. This we can readily see by examining briefly, first the situation in Sparta, and then the position of Sparta in Hellas, during the existence of her second Hellenic league.

The Spartans of military age now numbered only about two thousand. War had done its part in reducing them to this handful. Close intermarriage had done even more. In the case of large families, the subdivision of lots which then occurred impoverished sons so greatly that they could no longer stand the expense of the military clubs, upon membership in which, however, citizenship depended. So far did the evil implicit in this condition go that brothers refused to divide their inheritance, and possessed not only one house, but one wife in common. Men could neither buy land nor sell it, but they might acquire it by marriage or by gift; and since the rich, then as always, tended to marry among themselves, property, and with it citizenship, remained eventually in the possession of a very few. Much of the land, which was the only wealth, came into the hands of women. A plutocracy thus developed in Sparta as the number of the Spartans diminished; and in this way the domestic situation became still further ominous by the growth in the city of a considerable body of disfranchised and discontented "inferiors" and half-breeds.

The ephors, wishing to remove Cinadon from Sparta without suspicion, sent him on a mission to Aulon. He was to arrest certain persons, and among them "a woman, the fashionable beauty of the place--supposed to be the arch-corruptress of all Lacedaemonians, young and old, who visited Aulon." His escort seized him instead and wrested from him the names of his accomplices. "His fate was to be taken out forthwith in irons, just as he was, and to be placed with his two hands and his neck in the collar, and so under scourge and goad to be driven, himself and his accomplices, round the city. Thus upon the heads of those," concludes the pious Xenophon, "was visited the penalty of their offense."

Beset with dangers such as this, the Spartans had to tread warily. They drafted Perioecs into their army so as to make it about fifty-six hundred strong. They picked out Helots, trained and emancipated them, and used them abroad as soldiers. They took mercenaries into their service and distributed them according to local needs under Spartan captains, acting always, however, on requests from local governments. They got large contingents of troops from their old allies, whom, however, they left free of tribute, financing their government with a thousand talents raised annually from the former allies of Athens. With the funds thus secured they hired rowers and marines for the warships which their allies furnished and thus patrolled the sea as well as the land. They got a moral mandate for empire by upholding everywhere aristocracy, real or sham, against democracy, and by assuming the r?le of champion of Greece against the barbarians. This did not prevent them, however, from forming an alliance with Dionysius I, who had just made himself tyrant of Syracuse, or from working in harmony with Persia as long as that was possible.

"The growth of Lacedaemon," said Timolaus of Corinth in 394 B.C., "seems to me just like that of some mighty river--at its sources small and easily crossed, but as it further and further advances, other rivers discharge themselves into its channel, and its stream grows ever more formidable. So it is with the Lacedaemonians. Take them at the starting-point and they are but a single community, but as they advance and attach city after city they grow more numerous and more resistless. I observe that when people wish to take wasps' nests--if they try to capture the creatures on the wing, they are liable to be attacked by half the hive; whereas, if they apply fire to them ere they leave their homes, they will master them without scathe themselves. On this principle, I think it best to bring about the battle within the hive itself, or, short of that, as close to Lacedaemon as possible."

The advice was sound; but the wasps could not be caught at home. It was not till Athens had beaten the Spartans at sea, and Thebes had beaten them on land, that Epaminondas reached the hive. He then broke up the Peloponnesian league, emancipated the Helots of Messenia, and substituted, for the once considerable power which had saved the Peloponnesus from serious attack for two hundred years, a multitude of little city-states such as existed elsewhere in Greece--rather, such as came to exist elsewhere in European Greece, when, a few years later, with Epaminondas's death, the supremacy of Thebes ceased, Athens was abandoned by the states which had joined her against Sparta, and the empire of Dionysius I in the west dissolved, shortly after his death, into its constituent parts.

Theoretically, conditions should then have been ideal. In the case of the Greeks the deep-seated human instinct to compare the present disadvantageously with the past was not checked by a theory of evolution conceived as progress, such as misleads many sensible people nowadays to imagine that the farther back they go the more rudimentary political and social conditions become. The golden age of the Greeks lay in "the dark backward and abysm of time." In early days, before the rise of the Spartan and Athenian empires, every city, so it was believed, had "lived in peace, free and autonomous, and in secure possession of its own territory." For more than a century men had struggled to bring back those blessed times, and now at length their efforts, it might have seemed, had been crowned with success. Every city in Greece, great and small, had apparently regained its liberty and autonomy.

At the same time men had made a persistent effort to re?stablish in each city "the constitution of the fathers," and under the Spartan hegemony the favorable opportunity for success in this campaign had seemingly come. But it then appeared that, apart from the general understanding that citizenship was to be reserved to those who could afford to pay taxes and provide themselves with the arms and knowledge of arms necessary for fighting, no two persons agreed as to what the "ancestral constitution" was. It proved to be in reality the ideal of each reformer and each politician, and since the age was one in which most of the ordinary restraints were lacking as they seldom are in the history of civilized man, the transition from an unpopular ideal to a conspiracy was apt to be singularly abrupt. The outcome of the attempts to restore the urban particularism of mediaeval Greece and the constitutions of the over-praised olden time was unsatisfactory to everybody. Barren wars of city against city instead of large enterprises directed by imperial ambitions; an atmosphere murky with plots and counter-plots, where once there had blown the strong wind of steady civic progress; and, in addition, national disaster and humiliation despite manifest military superiority--these were the bitter fruits of political reaction in Greece during the Spartan supremacy.

It was in this unhappy age that the science of government was born, and it bears its birthmark to the present day. The midwife, to use his own homely figure, was Socrates, whom the Athenians, tarred on by Aristophanes, put to death "for corrupting the youth and introducing strange gods." He, of course, denied the accusations, and claimed that he deserved the honors of a public benefactor for taking men individually and showing to them how ill they understood the virtues on which all societies are based, to wit, justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage. No one, he thought, could make them better citizens except by promoting truth and dispelling ignorance about these things. His execution consecrated his mission. It was the sowing of dragon's teeth from which sprang up armed warriors, of whom the most doughty were Plato and Aristotle.

The vice of the Socratic school was a noble one--an enormous overestimate of the value of education. "Truth is the beginning of every good thing," says Plato, "both to gods and men; and he who would be blessed and happy, should be from the first a partaker of the truth, that he may live a true man as long as possible, for then he can be trusted; but he is not to be trusted who loves voluntary falsehood and he who loves involuntary falsehood is a fool." There was, of course, only one truth; which, being discovered, should be taught; which, being taught, must be acted upon, since, if men really knew what was right, it was impossible, Plato thought--ignoring the frailty or obstinacy of the human will--that they should not do it. "Discover the truth." "Teach it." These are the two Socratic commandments.

Plato's absorption in the present led him to misread not only the past, but also the future. For the false standard with which he measured past policies and institutions is not less characteristic than the false judgment which he formed of the drift of contemporary events. The future belonged, not, as he dreamed, to the autonomous, archaizing city-state, but to the movement for their unification which he condemned. He tried to mend city constitutions when the world required the creation of larger territorial states. He watched with attention domestic politics when foreign politics were chiefly worth watching.

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