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Title: The Evolution of States

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
EVOLUTION OF STATES ***

THE EVOLUTION OF STATES
AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH POLITICS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD.
NEW ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD.
WINNOWINGS FROM WORDSWORTH.
WALT WHITMAN: An Appreciation.
MONTAIGNE AND SHAKESPEARE. (Second Edition, with
additional Essays on cognate subjects.)
BUCKLE AND HIS CRITICS: a Sociological Study.
THE SAXON AND THE CELT: a Sociological Study.
MODERN HUMANISTS: Essays on Carlyle, Mill, Emerson,
Arnold, Ruskin, and Spencer. (Fourth Edition.)
THE FALLACY OF SAVING: a Study in Economics.
THE EIGHT HOURS QUESTION: a Study in Economics.
(Second Edition.)
THE DYNAMICS OF RELIGION: an Essay in English Culture-
History. By "M.W. Wiseman."
A SHORT HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT, Ancient and
Modern. (Second Edition: 2 vols.)
PATRIOTISM AND EMPIRE. (Third Edition.)
STUDIES IN RELIGIOUS FALLACY.
WRECKING THE EMPIRE.
A SHORT HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.

CHRISTIANITY AND MYTHOLOGY. (Second Edition.)
CRITICISMS. 2 vols.
TENNYSON AND BROWNING AS TEACHERS.
ESSAYS IN ETHICS.
ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGY. 2 vols.
LETTERS ON REASONING. (Second Edition.)
DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE "TITUS ANDRONICUS"?
PIONEER HUMANISTS: Essays on Machiavelli, Bacon,
Hobbes, Spinoza, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Gibbon, and Mary
Wollstonecraft.
TRADE AND TARIFFS.
COURSES OF STUDY.
CHAMBERLAIN: A STUDY.
PAPERS FOR THE PEOPLE.
CHARLES BRADLAUGH. By Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner. Part II.
by J.M.R.
PAGAN CHRISTS: Studies in Comparative Hierology. (Second
Edition, Revised and Expanded.)
THE MEANING OF LIBERALISM.

THE

EVOLUTION OF STATES
AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH POLITICS

BY

J.M. ROBERTSON

London:
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1912

"The sociologist has three main quests—first, he must try to discover the
conditions that determine mere aggregation and concourse. Secondly, he
must try to discover the law that governs social choices—the law, that is, of
the subjective process. Thirdly, he must try to discover also the law that

governs the natural selection and the survival of choices—the law, that is,
of the objective process."
—Professor
Giddings.

CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface vii
Part I.
POLITICAL FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY
Chap. I. —The Subject-Matter 1
II. —Roman Political Evolution 8
III. —Greek Political Evolution 36
—The Laws of Socio-
IV. 54
Political Development
Part II.
ECONOMIC FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY
—Roman Economic
Chap. I. 75
Evolution
II. —Greek Economic Evolution 98
Part III.
CULTURE FORCES IN ANTIQUITY
Chap. I. —Greece 121
II. —The Saracens 146
III. —Rome 158
—A General View of
Epilogue 170
Decadence
Part IV.
THE CASE OF THE ITALIAN REPUBLICS
Note on Literature 181
Chap. I. —The Beginnings 183

—The Social and Political
II. 209
Evolution
III. —The Political Collapse 233
Part V.
THE FORTUNES OF THE LESSER EUROPEAN
STATES
—Ideas of Nationality and
Chap. I. 257
National greatness
II. —The Scandinavian Peoples 264
III. —The Hansa 286
IV. —Holland 291
§ 1. The Rise of the Netherlands 293
§ 2. The Revolt against Spain 301
The Supremacy of Dutch
§ 3. 310
Commerce
§ 4. Home and Foreign Policy 318
The Decline of Commercial
§ 5. 321
Supremacy
§ 6. The Culture Evolution 325
§ 7. The Modern Situation 328
V. —Switzerland 331
§ 1. The Beginnings of Union 332
§ 2. The Socio-Political Evolution 338
§ 3. The Modern Renaissance 347
VI. —Portugal 355
The Rise and Fall of
§ 1. 355
Portuguese Empire
§ 2. The Colonisation of Brazil 361
Part VI.

ENGLISH HISTORY TILL THE CONSTITUTIONAL
PERIOD
—Before the Great
Chap. I. 369
Rebellion
—The Rebellion and the
II. 414
Commonwealth
—From the Restoration to
III. 436
Anne
IV. —Industrial Evolution 458
Conclusion 468
Index 473

PREFACE
The following treatise is an expansion, under a new title, of one originally
published (1900) under the name of An Introduction to English Politics.
Several friendly reviewers of that work objected, not unjustly, that its title
was something of a misnomer, or at least an imperfect indication of its
contents. It had, as a matter of fact, originated remotely in a lecture
delivered as preliminary to a course on "Modern English Politicians" (from
Bolingbroke to Gladstone), the aim of the prefatory address being to trace
in older politics, home and foreign, general laws which should partly serve
as guides to modern cases, or at least as preparation for their scientific
study; while the main course dealt with modern political problems as they
have arisen in the careers and been handled by the measures of modern
English statesmen. It was that opening exposition, developed into an essay,
and published as a series of magazine articles, that had been further
expanded into this treatise, by way of covering the ground more usefully;
and the original name is therefore retained as a sub-title.
It is perhaps unnecessary to explain that the book makes no pretension to
being a complete or systematic treatment of political history, or of political
forms and theories. The object in view from the first has been, not the
technical anatomy or documentary history of institutions, but the bringing
into light of the ruling forces in all political life, ancient and modern alike.
It seeks to help the reader to fulfil the precept of Montaigne: "Qu'il ne luy
apprenne pas tant les histoires qu'à en juger."
Since it was first written, there has been so much fresh sociological study of
history that I need not repeat the justification originally offered for my
undertaking. Alike as to ancient and modern history, the effort of scholars is
now more and more towards comprehension of historic causation in terms
of determining conditions, the economic above all; so much so that I have
profited somewhat in my revision from various recent works, and might
with more leisure have done so more fully. Revised as it is, however, the
book may serve to expound views of history which are still not generally

accepted, and to call in question fallacious formulas which seem to me still
unduly common.
On any view, much remains to be done before the statement of historic
causation can reach scientific thoroughness; and it may well be that some of
my theories will incur modification. All I claim for them is that they are
made in the light of a study of the concrete process; and I am satisfied that
fuller light is to be obtained only in that direction. In the end, doubtless,
conflicts of historical interpretation will turn upon problems of psychology.
A contemporary German expert of distinction, Prof. Lamprecht, in his able
lectures on the problem What is History? (Eng. trans. 1905), lays it down
that the main problem of every scientific history of mankind is the
"deducing from the history of the most important communities of men the
evolution of the breadth of consciousness"; and again that "the full
historical comprehension of a single change or of a single phenomenon,
with their historical significance, can only be acquired from the most
general principles; that is to say, from the application of the highest
universal-historical categories." If I understand Prof. Lamprecht aright, he
here means simply that we properly understand the motivation of men in
the past in terms of our own psychosis, conceived as in touch only with
their data. This seems to me substantially sound. But on the other hand I
doubt the utility of his apparent purpose of explaining modern historic
developments in terms of special psychic changes or movements in
communities, considered as forces. That way seems to lie reversion to the
old and vain device of explaining the course of nations in terms of their
"characters."
In any case, however, we have Prof. Lamprecht's avowal that "It would be a
study of great value to establish, by comparative work in universal history,
what are the constantly recurring economic factors of each period which are
so uniformly followed by the development of other higher intellectual
values." That is as full a recognition of the "economic factor" as I am
concerned to contend for, if it be understood that economic motives are on
the one hand recognised as affecting social action in general, and on the
other that varying forms of social machinery react variously on intellectual
life. Upon such hypotheses the following inquiry proceeds; to such
conclusions it leads.

Obviously all critical exposition, historical or other, is an attempt to
influence the psychic processes of the reader, to make him "feel" this and
"think" that; and in this sense any resulting change of conduct means the
play of "the psychic factor." But that is only another way of saying that the
psychic factor is conditioned by material circumstances, by knowledge, and
by ignorance. To insist on the perpetual social significance of all three is the
general aim of this book.
September, 1912.

PART I

POLITICAL FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY

Chapter I

THE SUBJECT MATTER
§1
Politics, in its most general and fundamental character, is the strife of wills
on the ground of social action. As international politics is the sum of the
strifes and compromises of States, so home politics is the sum of the strifes
and compromises of classes, interests, factions, sects, theorists, in all
countries and in all ages. In studying it, then, we study the evolution of an
aggregate, a quasi-organism, in terms of the clashing forces of its units and
of their spontaneous combinations.
This may seem too obvious and simple a truth to need formal telling; and
yet no truth is more often missed or set aside by writers who deal with
political history. The past course of nations, when it is sought to be
explained at all, is by two writers out of three accounted for by certain
supposed qualities of character in the given nation as a whole, instead of by
the specially conditioned play of forces common to all peoples.[1] For
instance, M. Taine, in the preface to the first volume of his fascinating
work, Les origines de la France contemporaine, goes about to justify his
own political indifferentism by stating that in eighty years his country had
thirteen times changed its constitution. "We," he says, have done this; and
"we have not yet found that which suits us."[2] It is here implied that a body
of men collectively and concurrently seeking for a fixed constitution have
failed, and that the failure is discreditable—that those who thus seek and
fail have been badly employed. It is by implication denied that successive
changes of a constitution may fitly be regarded as a process of growth and
healthy adjustment of parts: the ideal of political health is assumed to be a
state of fixity. Thus does indifferentism, naturally if not necessarily, miss
the point of view from which itself is to be studied as one of the forces
whose conflict the true historian ought to analyse.
There is no national "we" aiming collectively at a fixed and final
constitution; nor are the successive constitutions of France as such more
significant of failure or permanent harm than the successive changes in the

professedly unchanged constitution of Great Britain, though the violent
kinds of change are as such harmful. If M. Taine had but applied with rigour
the logic he once before prescribed, soundly if wittily, for all problems
alike, he could not have begun his history with that delusive abstraction of a
one-minded community, failing to achieve "their" or "its" purpose. "Je n'en
sais rien," he remarks with a shrug, over the protest of M. Royer-Collard
that certain scientific reasoning will make Frenchmen revolutionary; "est-ce
qu'il y a des Français?"[3] In dead earnest he now assumes that France
consists just of the single species "Frenchmen," whose constitution-building
is a corporate attempt to build a French house to live in; when all that is
truly historical in his own book goes to show clearly enough that French
constitutions, like all others, are products of ever-varying and conflicting
passions and interests of sets of people in France who are "Frenchmen"
merely when they happen to act in concert against other geographical
groups. At no moment were all of the French people consenting parties to
any one of the thirteen constitutions. Then there was no collective failure.
Of course M. Taine knew this well enough in his capacity of narrator; but as
teacher he could not escape from the rut dug for his thought by his fatalism.
He must needs make the synthetic abstraction of "we," which excludes the
political analysis essential to any practical explanation; and it inevitably
followed that his generalisations were merely pseudo-biological, and not
what is most wanted in history—sociological truth rooted in psychology
and biology. In denuding himself alike of hopes and fears, M. Taine really
gave the great illustration of the truth of his own penetrating comment on
Mérimée,[4] that he who will be duped by nothing ends in being the dupe of
his distrust. He will not be duped by this ideal or that; he will not care
enough for any to have a strong wish to see it realised; and so he comes to
be duped by the wish to disprove all, to work down all sociology to the
plane of cynical pseudo-biology. The enthusiastic amateur can show it, can
convict the critic of hearing only the devil's advocate in every moral
process,[5] and of becoming at length the historic oracle of those, of all
readers, who are most alien to his philosophy.
Such an outcome, in the work of such a critic, is vividly instructive. At
worst, indeed, he has a positive value as the extremest reactionist against
the merely partisan method of history, which is almost all we have had in
England since the French Revolution, down to the other day. After M. Taine

has passed, fools' paradises must needs fall in market value. But when the
devil's advocate has made his round, we must still plough and eat, and the
paradises must just be laid out for new sowing. The evil of theoretical
extremes is not so much their falsehood as their irrelevance. If we are to
instruct each other in conduct, it must be in terms of sympathies and
antipathies; and if we are to profit by a study of politicians, who are among
the most generally typical of men, and of politics, which is the expression
of so much of life, we must go about it as humanists and not as fatalists.
§2
Humanity, however, will not suffice to save us from false philosophy if, as
humanists, we seek to gain our polemical ends by M. Taine's didactic
methods. He, naturally so much of an analyst, took to pseudo-synthesis
when he wished with little labour to discredit certain popular aspirations.
But pseudo-synthesis is the favourite expository process of many men with
ardent aspirations, and of many writers who are friendly enough to the
aspirations of their fellows. By pseudo-synthesis I mean that process, above
exemplified, of "cooking" an intricate moral problem by setting up one or
more imaginary entities, to whose volition or potency the result is
attributed. It was the method of medieval science; and it is still popular
among the experts as well as the amateurs of historical science. It was the
ordinary expedient of Comte, in whose pages history becomes a Jonsonian
masque of personified abstractions; and Buckle too often resorts to it. But
hear a learned and judicious English Liberal, not to be suspected of
doctrinary extravagance:—
"As in time past Rome had sacrificed domestic freedom that she might be the mistress
of others, so now" [in the later Empire] "to be universal she, the conqueror, had
descended to the level of the conquered" [in respect of Caracalla's edict giving to all
subjects of the Empire the rights of Roman citizenship]. "But the sacrifice had not
wanted its reward. From her came the laws and the language that had overspread the
world; at her feet the nations laid the offerings of their labour; she was the head of the
Empire and of civilisation."[6]

The "she" of this passage I take to be as purely imaginary an entity as
Phlogiston; and it is not easy to see how a method of explanation which in
physical science is found worse than barren can give any edification in the
study of history. To say nothing of the familiar explanation that Caracalla's
sole motive in conferring the citizenship on the provincials was the desire to

lay on them corresponding taxes,[7] the proposition has no footing in
political actualities. "Rome's self-abnegation that she might Romanise the
world"[8] expresses no fact in Roman volition, thought, or deed; it is not the
mention of a sentiment which swayed men's action, but the attempt to
reduce a medley of actions to the semblance of a joint volition. There was
no "Rome" capable of "self-abnegation" and susceptible of "reward." Why,
then, should it be said? It is said either because the writer permits himself to
fill in a perspective with a kind of pigment which he would not employ in
his foreground, or because he is still too much under the sway of old
methods when he is generalising conventional knowledge instead of
analytically reaching new.[9] Either way the lapse is only too intelligible.
And if an innovating expert, dealing with old facts, runs such risks, great
must be those run by plain people when they seek to attain a generalised
knowledge of facts which are the battle-ground of current ideals. Only by
perpetual analysis can we hope partly to escape the snare of the pseudo-
synthetic, the traps of rhetoric and exegetic fiction.
§3
The term "pseudo-synthesis" implies, of course, that there may be a true
synthesis. What is necessary to such synthesis is that there shall have been a
preliminary analysis; but a synthesis once justly made is the greatest of
helps to new analyses. Now there is one such which may safely be brought
to bear on the study of practical politics, because it is an axiom alike of
inorganic physics and of biology, and a commonplace of human science,
though seldom used as a means of historic generalisation. This is the simple
principle that all energy divides ostensibly into forces of attraction and of
repulsion.
[The principle thus stated should be compared with the theorem of Kant as to the
correlative forces of sociability and unsociability (Idee zu einer allgemein
Geschichte), and the important and luminous formula of Professor Giddings, that all
sociological processes, properly so called, turn upon "consciousness of kind"
(Principles of Sociology, 1896, 3rd ed. pp. 17-19, and Preface; and in earlier writings
by Professor Giddings, there mentioned). The scientific value of that formula is
obvious; but other ways of stating the case may still serve a purpose. The view in the
text I find to have been partly anticipated by Shaftesbury, Essay on the Freedom of
Wit and Humour, 1709, pt. iii, § 2 (Characteristics, ed. 1733, i, pp. 111-12), who is
followed by Eusèbe Salverte, De la Civilisation depuis les premiers Temps
historiques, 1813, p. 53. Shaftesbury even anticipates in part the formula of Professor
Giddings in the passage: "If anything be natural, in any Creature or any Kind, 'tis that
which is preservative of the Kind itself," and in the sequel. As Professor Giddings

traces (pref. to 3rd ed. p. x) the first suggestion of his "consciousness of kind" to
Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments, which is certainly in the line of
descent from Shaftesbury, there may really be a causal connection.]

That principle obviously holds of the relations of men in society as it does
of their muscular action and of their moral and intellectual life; and so
fundamental is the fact that when we study human history in view of it, we
find it more and more difficult to suppose that it will ever cease to hold.
That is to say, it is almost impossible to conceive state of life in which the
forces of attraction and repulsion shall not operate energetically in the
moral and intellectual relations of human beings. From the primitive and
the barbaric stages in which the sight of an alien moves the savage to such
destructive rage as is seen in some dogs at the sight of others, or in which a
difference of personal odour rouses a no less spontaneous repulsion—as in
Chinese against Europeans, or in Europeans against Chinese[10]—down to
the fierce battle in self-governing countries over every innovating law, or
that strife of opinion in which these lines play their part, the clash of
opposing tendencies is perpetual, ubiquitous, inevitable. And so difficult is
it to conceive any cessation that at once many observers leap from the
general principle to the particular conclusion that all the modes in which the
action and reaction, the attractions and repulsions of individuals and groups,
have operated in the past must needs operate in the future. They conclude,
that is, that the particular phenomenon of WAR, above all, is chronic, and
can never definitely disappear. Thus M. Zola, looking around him and
finding strife everywhere, decides that all the past forms of strife are
inevitably recurrent.[11] It may be well at the outset to insist that the general
principle involves no such particular necessity.
War is simply a form in which the instincts of attraction and repulsion have
operated in human societies during ages in which certain psychological and
physiological types have been normal. It may very well recur, with growing
infrequency, for a long time to come; but it is not rationally to be regarded
as a necessary function of the grand biological forces. What does seem
certain is a different thing—that the forces of attraction and repulsion will
always operate in some form; and that the very fact of their finding less
expression in the mode of physical strife will imply their coming into play
in other modes, such as the strife of ideals, doctrines, and class interests as
they are expressed in politics without bloodshed. The general law is that the
forces of attraction and repulsion, as exhibited in human thought or feeling,

run during the earlier stages of growth in channels which may be broadly
regarded as animal; and that when altered political and social conditions
partly or wholly close these channels, the biological forces open for
themselves new ones.
War is precisely the blindest, the least rational, the least human of all the
forms of human conflict, inasmuch as it is the collective clashing of
communities whose members, divided among themselves by many real
differences of interest, bias, and attraction, are set against each other, as
wholes—if by anything higher than animal pugnacity—either by the mere
ideals or appetites of rulers or leaders, or by more or less imaginary
differences of interest, seen under the moral illusion of the most primitive
of social instincts—the sensus gregis. As evolution proceeds, the blind form
may be expected to disappear, and the more reasoned forms—that is, the
inter-social and intellectual—to develop.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] It is one of the shortcomings of Buckle that, though he at least once (Introd.
to Hist. of Civ. in Eng., Routledge's ed. p. 352) recognises the futility of
explaining history in terms of national character, he repeatedly lapses to that
method, and speaks of peoples as if they were of one will, bent, and mind. (Ed.
cited, edit. notes pp. 354, 385, 540, 553, 558, 719, etc.). See below, pt. iii, ch. iii,
second note, as to Eduard Meyer.
[2] Similarly De Tocqueville begins L'ancien régime et la révolution with "Les
Français ont fait...." (Avant-Propos, 2e éd. p. 5), and makes the successors of the
Revolutionists "les mêmes Français" (p. 12). Soon he makes the Revolution an
entity (p. 35). Compare with Taine's passage the programme of the first number
of Le Play's La Réforme Sociale, 1881 (cited by H. Higgs, Quarterly Journal of
Economics, Boston, July, 1890, p. 418), which might almost have been written
by Taine. In the case of Le Play the ideal of a quasi-patriarchal order, very stable
and very fixed, led to an attitude resembling at points that of Taine. It is easy to
see how the natural recoil from political turmoil has, since the French
Revolution, developed successive schools such as those of Saint Simon, Comte,
and Le Play, all aiming at stability and order, all seeking to elbow out the cosmic
force of Change. In Taine's case the result was an acceptance of Spencer's
"administrative nihilism."
[3] Les philosophes classiques du XIXe siècle en France, 3ième éd. p. 37.
[4] Lettres de Prosper Mérimée à une Inconnue, préf. end. When, however, M.
Taine wrote on Sainte-Beuve's death (1869), he laid down, as one of the
necessities of the search for "the true truth," this very determination "to be the

dupe of nothing and nobody, above all of oneself" (Derniers Essais, p. 52). Years
before an acute critic had said of his literary criticism: "M. Taine, at bottom, let
us say it with bated breath, is the dupe of himself when he supposes himself to
have given a rigorous formula, an exact definition, a chemical analysis of his
author" (Frédéric Morin, Les hommes et livres contemporains, 1862, p. 33).
Compare the brochure of Professor Edouard Droz, La critique littéraire et la
science, 1893, discussed in the present writer's New Essays towards a Critical
Method, 1897, p. 13 sq.
[5] See Napoléon et ses détracteurs, par le Prince Napoléon, p. 13, and passim.
[6] Professor Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed. p. 7.
[7] Gibbon, ch. vi (Bohn ed. i, pp. 201, 212-13). In the same way, Julius Cæsar,
and the triumvirs after him, were in their day moved to extend citizenship in
Italy because of the falling-off in the free Roman population. Widened
citizenship meant a wider field for Italian recruiting. At that time the extension
involved not taxation, but immunities; but, according to Cicero, Antony received
great sums from the Sicilians in payment for the privilege he conferred upon
them. Ad Atticum, xiv, 12; Philipp. ii, 36.
[8] Bryce, p. 9.
[9] A different explanation holds in the case of Hegel, who—after very pointedly
affirming that "nothing great in the world has been accomplished without
passion" (Leidenschaft), in the sense of individual interest and self-seeking aim,
and that "an individual is such and such a one, not a man in general, for that is
not an existence, but one in particular" (Philos. der Geschichte, 2te Aufl. p. 30)
—proceeds to express historical processes in terms of universal spirit, abstract
universality, and so forth. Here the trouble is the cherished tendency to verbal
abstraction.
[10] Cp. Professor H.A. Giles, The Civilisation of China, 1911, pp. 214-15.
Smell appears to be an insuperable bar to any general association of "whites"
with "blacks," and it probably enters into many racial repugnances. Compare the
curious device of Lombard women to set up by an artificial bad smell a
repugnance on the part of their alien suitors such as they themselves may have
felt. Gummere, Germanic Origins, 1892, p. 138.
[11] Cited by Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, ch. vi, end.

Chapter II
ROMAN POLITICAL EVOLUTION
§1
A survey of the ancient history best known to us may help to make clearer
the fatality of strife and the impossibility of solving it save by transcending
the physical plane. The habit of summing up all Roman history as so many
planned actions of "the Romans," or of "Rome," is in singular contrast with
the imbroglio of the records. In the social stage discovered to us by the
analysis of the oldest known institutions, "early" Rome is already an
artificial political organism, far removed from the simple life of tribal
barbarism.[12] There are three tribes; the very name of tribe, it may be,
comes from the number three[13] in the flection tribus; and the subdivisions
are fixed by the numbers three and ten.[14] Behind the artificial "tribe" is a
past in which, it may be, a group of villages forms the pagus or settlement.
[15]

Already privilege and caste are fully established, even between classes of
freemen; and only by inference can we reach the probable first bases of
civic union among the ruling caste. They were clearly a caste of conquerors.
Their curiæ, apparently the oldest form of group after the family or the clan,
[16]
are artificially arranged, numbering thirty, each curia containing
nominally a hundred gentes, each gens nominally ten families.
Eduard Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 511) decides for the view of L. Lange,
that the historic appellation of Roman citizens, Quirites, derives from curia. The
ancients had several theories as to the name. One (Festus) was that the Sabine goddess
Curis gave her name to the Sabine town Cures (cp. Athenê, Athenai), whence,
according to the legend, had come a band under Titus Tatius, who conquered the
Capitoline and Quirinal hills, and had for tribe-god Quirinus. Cp. Ihne, Early Rome, p.
82. Mommsen (Eng. tr. 1862, i, 57, 78, notes) has secured currency for the other
tradition, argued for by F.W. Newman (Regal Rome, 1852, pp. 55-56), that the root is
the Sabine word curis, quiris, a spear. For this somewhat unplausible theory there is
support in the fact that in the cognate Gaelic coir, pronounced quîr, means a spear,
and that there is derived thence curiadh, a warrior. Mommsen is followed by
Merivale, General History of Rome, 5th ed. p. 13; and Greenidge, Roman Public Life,
p. 33. Pott and Becker, who derived Quirites from curia, explain the latter word as co-

viria, the band of warriors. And as the view that "Athenê" comes from "Athenai," not
vice versâ, has the stronger claims to acceptance, the more acceptable presumption is
that "Curis" and Quirinus evolved from the curia. If Quirites meant spearmen, how
could Cæsar be understood to cow mutineers by simply addressing them as Quirites
[= citizens]? The curia theory is supported by the facts that "the Roman constitutional
tradition ... makes the division into curies alone originate with the origin of the city";
that it "appears as an essential part of the Latin municipal system;" and that of all the
old divisions it seems to be the only one that "really fulfilled important functions in
the primitive constitutional organisation" (Mommsen, B. i, ch. v, pp. 73-75).

These curiæ may be conceived as derived from inner tribal or clan groups
formed in the conquering stage, since they are ostensibly united by their
collective or curial sacra, the rites for which the grouped gentes—who each
have their private sacra—assemble in a special place, under a special priest.
They still retain the usage of a common banquet,[17] the earliest form of
collective religion known to us.[18] Apart from the members of the curiæ are
the conquered plebs,[19] "the many" not enslaved, but payers of tribute;
without share in the curiæ or vote in the comitia, or assembly, and without
part in the curial or other sacra.
On this head there has been some gratuitous confusion. Schwegler (i, 621 sq.) gives
convincing reasons for the view that in early times the plebs were not members of the
curiæ. Cp. Ihne, as cited, pp. 110, 127; and Fustel de Coulanges, p. 278 sq. Meyer (ii,
513, 521) asserts, on the contrary, without any specification of periods, that the curiæ
included plebeians as well as patricians. The contradiction seems to arise out of
inattention to chronology, or a misreading of Mommsen. That historian rightly sets
forth in his history (B. ii, ch. i; Eng. trans. ed. 1862, i, 264-65) that the plebs were not
admitted into the comitia curiata before the "Servian" period; adding that these bodies
were "at the same time" almost totally deprived of their prerogatives. In his
Römisches Forschungen, 1864, i, 144 sq., he shows that they were admitted in the
"historic period"—when the comitia in question had ceased to have any legal power,
and when, as he elsewhere states, the admission "practically gave little more than the
capacity for adrogation" (Römisches Staatsrecht, Bd. iii, Abth. i, p. 93). Here again he
states that "to equal rights in the curies, especially to the right of vote in the comitia,
the plebeians attained only in the later times" (Id. p. 72). Yet Professor Pelham, in
asserting (p. 21; cp. p. 46) that "the primitive Roman people of the thirty curiæ
included all the freemen of the community, simple as well as gentle," gives the note:
"The view here taken on the vexed question of the purely patrician character of the
curiæ is that of Mommsen (Röm. Forschungen, vol. i)."
When this error is corrected, the question ceases to be vexed. Schwegler has disposed
of the blunder of Dionysius, who ascribes to the plebeians a share in the curiæ from
the beginning; and it is not disputed that they were allowed to enter when the comitia
curiata had been practically superseded by the comitia centuriata. It is to be noted
that the denial of the inclusion of the plebeians in the original curiæ does not apply to
the clientes, whose status, though non-patrician, had been different from that of the
true plebs. M. Delaunay, who argues that the plebeians were all along admitted to the
curiæ, adds the qualification: "Doubtless not the entire mass of the plebeians, but only

those who were ... attached to the gentes" (Robiou et Delaunay, Les Institutions de
l'ancienne Rome, 1884, i, 21). But who were these gentilitia if not the clientes? (cp.
loc. cit. p. 26).
The populus at this stage, then, is not "the people" in the modern sense; it is the
aggregate of the privileged curiæ, and does not include the plebs,[20] which at this
stage is not even part of the army. But a separate quasi-plebeian class, the clientes of
the patricians, are in a state of special dependence upon the latter, and in a subordinate
fashion share their privileges.
The clientes have very much the air of being primarily the servile or inferior part of
the early clan or gens, as distinct from its "gentlemen." Cp. Burton, Hist. of Scotland,
viii, 524-25, as to the lower and the higher (duniewassal) orders in the Scottish
Highland clans. "In the old life of the pagus and the gens the weaker sought the
protection of the stronger by a willing vassalage" (Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p.
6). The clientes are the nominal as distinct from the real "family" of the chief or
patronus. M. Delaunay (Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome, as cited, i, 27) thinks
with Mommsen (so also Dupond, pp. 20-21) that they were mainly freedmen, but
gives no evidence. As to the meaning and etymology of the word (clientes from cluere
or cliere, "to listen" or "obey"), cp. Newman, Regal Rome, p. 49; Ortolan, p. 29;
Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht, III, i, 1887, p. 63. The theory that the plebeians
were all clientes (Ortolan, pp. 25, 27) seems untenable, though Mommsen
(Staatsrecht, III, i, 63) pronounces that "all non-patricians were clients"; and Meyer
(ii, 521) appears to acquiesce. Only in theory can the mass of the plebs have been
clients at any time. Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, pp. 277-78. The clientes, it seems clear,
were as such admitted to the comitia, whereas the plebs were not. See the citations of
Fustel de Coulanges from Livy, ii, 56-64; also iii, 14 (Dupond, p. 22, doubts the fact).
On any view, the clientela rapidly dwindled, passing into the plebs (cp. Dupond, p.
23; Livy, vi, 18). As to its early status see Fustel de Coulanges, p. 273 sq. Ortolan,
after representing all plebeians as clients, speaks (p. 31) of plebeians belonging to no
gens (so Aulus Gellius, x, 20).

Wealth is not yet a matter of land-owning—the main element of property is cattle;[21]
and the bulk of the land is ager occupatorius, a great "common" on which all men's
cattle feed. The voteless free plebeian has simply his home and homestead, "toft and
croft," the latter being two yokes (= five roods) of land, on which he raises the grain
and olives and vegetables that feed his household.[22] This goes to his heir. Here arises
another problem. E.W. Robertson (as last cited) decides that the "two yokes" can have
been only "the homestead, and could not have included the farm or property attached
to it." The heredium, he holds, following Pliny (Hist. Nat., xix, 19), and citing Livy
(vi, 36), was only in the hortus, the house and garden, "and not in the arable or pasture
land." But surely the arable was on a different footing from the pasture land (ager
compascus). Corn was not grown in common, unless it were by the gentes
(Mommsen, vol. i, pp. 38, 72, 193). The solution seems to be that given by Greenidge,
that as "the heredium consisted only of two jugera (Festus, p. 53), an amount
obviously insufficient for the maintenance of a family," "there must have been ager
privatus as well, owned by some larger unit, and this unit would naturally have been
the gens" (Roman Public Life, p. 15).
Among general historians of Rome Mommsen seems to be the first to note this
circumstance, and he gives neither details nor evidence. Schwegler, discussing (i, 619)

the theory of Puchta that there was no private property in Rome before the "arrival" of
the plebs, admits that among the ancient Germans the land was yearly apportioned
among the groups as such, but finds that "Roman tradition tells of nothing of the
kind." (So Greenidge, p. 15.) In any case, Mommsen, while insisting that "the fields
(sic) of the gentes (Geschlechts-Genossen) in the earliest period lay together"
(Staatsrecht, III, i, 24; cp. p. 94), admits that such gentile ownership had at an early
stage disappeared (früh verschwundenen). There was then no communal tillage in the
historic period. Cincinnatus, in the legend, returns to the plough on his own croft.
Further, the early complaints cited by Livy as to the "two yokes" being "hardly
enough to raise a roof on or to make a grave in" were addressed by the tribunes on
behalf of plebeians to patricians who each had above five hundred yokes. The non-
client plebeians then had no share in the land of the gentes or clans, being themselves
in large part dispossessed by conquest.
Meyer (ii, 519) pronounces that the plot of two yokes was, "of course, no farm, but a
kitchen-garden," adding: "It is also the personal land of the small farmers and day-
labourers who look after the lands of the large landholders, not the original private
holding in contrast to the mark belonging in common to the gens (Geschlecht) or
commune (Gauverband)." But on the previous page Meyer says that "the land was
settled not by the gentes, but communally (genossenschaftlich) by unions of equal
freemen." If these, then, were the curiæ (the Mark, says Meyer in this connection, did
not belong to the gentes), they did not include the plebs; and we come back to the
datum that the free plebeian had no means of support save his five roods and what
beasts he had on the public pasture. The pasture-land, again, is surmised by
Mommsen (ch. xiii, p. 201) to have been small in area relatively to the arable-land
communally owned and cultivated by the gentes or clans—a proposition
irreconcilable with the evidence as to the quantity of cattle. As to the two yokes of
land, Schwegler decides (i, 618) that it was "nowise inadequate" as arable-land, in
view of the extraordinary fruitfulness of Italy, and, further, of the circumstance that
"the free burghers had also the use of the common land" (for pasture). We are to
remember that Italian land could yield two crops in a year. (Niebuhr,
Lebensnachrichten, ii, 245, cited by Schwegler.)
On the general problem as to why or how the land once communally tilled ceased to
be so, we have still no better light than the old generalisation of Hobbes in reply to his
own question: "Upon what impulsives, when all was equally every man's in common,
men did rather think it fitting that every man should have his inclosure?" "I found," he
puts it, "that from a community of goods there must needs arise contention whose
enjoyment should be greatest, and from that contention all kind of calamities must
unavoidably ensue." [Epistle Dedicatory to Philosophical Rudiments concerning
Government and Civil Society (translation of De Cive), 1651. Cp. Goldwin Smith, The
United States, 1893, p. 23.]

The patrician, of course, had a larger homestead, at least "four yokes" in the
earlier stages; later seven; later still twenty-five.[23] But the patricians were
"a class of occupying landholders rather than proprietary landowners."[24]
The "public land" was literally so, save in so far as the patricians would
have the ampler (and often untaxed or low-rented) use of it for their much
larger herds;[25] or, it may be, for cultivation by their clients or slaves.

Heredia, however, were saleable, and herein lay one usual path to the
dispossession and enslavement of freemen; while at all stages there went on
that pressure of population on means of subsistence which underlies all
economic history.
Thus far, however, mere conquest has done less to impoverish and enslave
the mass than the economic process is to do later. The conquerors, probably
highland herdsmen to begin with, take estates for themselves, but leave the
mass of the conquered in possession or use of land for which they pay
tribute, and upon which they can independently live.[26] And thus far they
live mainly as small pastoral farmers.[27]
Trade and artisanship were for long but slightly developed, and were mainly
in the hands of slaves, dependent "clients," or foreigners; and artisans and
aliens were not admitted into the legions.[28] The ruling caste occupied,
potentially[29] if not constantly, the city proper, the two or three fortified
hills[30] on which at this stage it stands. They were certainly not the
founders. The Palatine and the Quirinal hills had been occupied by Latins
and Sabines respectively long before the time traditionally assigned to the
"founding" of Rome; and there were communities there before them.
Modern excavators trace many successive strata of civilisation before that
which we call the Roman; and the probability is that the Romans of history,
like the kindred Sabines, conquered a previous city "aristocracy" of kindred
race, whose place and possessions they took. The previous inhabitants had
presumably grown weak for self-defence by reason of some such
disintegrating economic evolution as was soon to affect the conquerors
themselves. Such a disintegration may well have taken place in the case of
Alba Longa, of which the prior supremacy seems entirely credible.[31] But
before Alba Longa there had been a civilisation[32] on the Roman hills which
perhaps outwent in economic evolution anything attained in the Roman
period until the last century of the Republic.
This was already inferred in the eighteenth century by Ferguson (History of the
Roman Republic, 1783, ch. i, note; perhaps following Maffei [1727], cited by
Schwegler, i, 807), from the nature of the remains of the great cloacæ, which he held
could not have been built by any of the early Roman kings. That view is since adopted
by various authorities; see Middleton's Remains of Ancient Rome, 1892, i, 104-107;
and Robiou et Delaunay, Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome, 1884, vol. ii, ch. i, § 1.
Cp. Merivale, General History of Rome, pp. 9-11; Burton, Etruscan Bologna, 1876,
pp. 170-74. Livy (i, 38) ascribes great cloacæ to the legendary Tarquin the elder.

Professor Ettore Pais, on the other hand, confidently decides that the cloaca maxima
belongs to the republican period, and dates it about 170 B.C. In any case, we know
that an ante-Roman civilisation underlies the historic, and may now decide with Mr.
Mahaffy that "as civilisation of some kind was vastly older on the Hill of Troy than
any of us had imagined, so the site of every historic city is likely to have been the
habitation of countless generations" (Survey of Greek Civ. 1897, p. 28).

§2
There had in fact been a "decline and fall of Rome" before the Rome we
know began to be. Relatively to their predecessors, the early Romans were
even as the northerners who in a later age were to capture historic Rome—
vigorous barbarians beginning a new era on a footing of fraternity in
conquest; and the condition of their early success as State-builders seems to
have been precisely the joining of several tribe-groups in a real federation,
[33]
securing local peace as between the hill-holders. It has been said that
Rome grew up without any known aid from men of political genius such as
Solon.[34] But men of genius have counted for something in all stages of
upward human evolution. The guiders of early Rome are lost in a cloud of
myth and fable; but some man or men of civic faculty there must have been
to shape tendency, though doubtless a main factor in the early union was the
simple collocation of the hills first fortified. Granting that Servius Tullius is
a mythical king, the elaborate constitution assigned to him stood for some
planning by able men, and has several main points in common with that
given to Athens by Solon.
Whatever were the part played by individual leaders, Roman or Etruscan,
there clearly came into play in early Rome as in Athens the important factor
of mixture of stocks. Romans and Sabines united to begin with; and the
conquered plebs, destined later to enter the constitution and share in all the
civic offices, represented some such source of recuperation to the Roman
aristocracy as did the Saxons to that of England after the Norman Conquest.
If we add the probable factor of an Etruscan element, Rome is to be
conceived as standing for a ruling class of more various faculty than was to
be found in any of the rival communities singly. The progressive absorption
of the most enterprising of the plebeians was again, probably, an exception
to the rule of Italic life as to that of other races, so that in following the
class struggles of Rome we are to note not so much the violence of the
process as the fact that, so far as it went, it was relatively fortunate. And its
success, again, is conceivably due to the fact, among others, that from an

early period the region of the seven defensible hills was a refuge or centre
for men breaking away from the other Italian communities, where
conservatism held firm.
Behind the legend of the flocking of all manner of "broken men" to the
standard of Romulus lies the probability that the ancient "asylum" behind
the Capitol brought a variety of types to the place; and as in Athens so in
Rome, such variety of stock might well raise the level of faculty. But it was
a faculty for aggression. Given the initial federation of Romans and
Sabines, the one general force of comity or cohesion, apart from the more
public cults, is the bond of mere collective antagonism to other
communities. The total polity is one of war; and never in the history of
civilisation has that ground of comity long averted the economic process by
which social inequality deepens and widens. It is thus entirely credible that,
through this economic process, which we shall trace later, the early Roman
polity came to a pass at which its conquest by Etruscan "kings" was
welcomed by the plebs, sinking into poverty or held in outlawry under
primitive "capitalistic" exploitation. There is no clear historic record of the
process; but all the better evidence goes to prove its occurrence.[35]
The most plausible theory of the constitution ascribed to Servius Tullius is
that it was imposed by Etruscan conquerors. The earlier Romans had been
quasi-sacerdotally ruled by priest-kings of the primitive type, "kings of the
sacrifice," whose religious powers were balanced by the secular interest of
the patrician heads of families—themselves priests of their family cults.
The "Servian" constitution put down the rex sacrificulus, divided the city
into four tribes, and its territory into twenty-six districts, each under a
headman or headmen. The city at the same time was in part new walled, and
the seven hills united; while the mass of the free population were divided
into five classes according to their property, and enrolled for military
purposes in 193 "centuries." In the first and richest class were forty
centuries of men above forty-six for the defence of the city, and forty of
younger men for service in the field; while the second, third, and fourth
classes were divided into twenty centuries each, and the fifth class into
thirty. The poorest of all were grouped in a separate century, the
"Proletarians," or "breeders," without military duties; and the trumpeters,
armourers, and carpenters in four more. New assemblies, the comitia
centuriata, were formed, in which all members of the centuries shared, the

old comitia curiata being thus virtually superseded. The military
organisation was made the basis of a fiscal one, in which the classes were
taxed on the capital value of their property. As freedom from direct taxation
was the mark of the ancient "free" communities in general, the whole
arrangement seems to be one that only a conqueror could have imposed;
and the tradition ran that Servius was regarded as the friend of the poor,
who made his birthday an annual festival.
But plebeian distress was probably not the sole, perhaps not the primary,
factor in the convulsion. All along, the process of inequality had gone on
among plebeians and patricians alike, some of the former rising to wealth
and some of the latter sinking to relative poverty. Thus arises in effect the
struggle of a "middle class" to share the political and social privileges of the
"upper"; and there is reason to think that the Etruscan conquest was
furthered by rich plebeians as against the patricians. The new constitution
was what the Greeks called a "timocracy," or "rule of property"; and though
in respect of the comitia centuriata plebeians were admitted to the
franchise, it was under such provisions as to voting that the richer classes
easily held the balance of power.[36] At the same time the patricians retained
the religious power of the old kings, as custodians of the ritual mysteries—a
great source of dominion. Thus the crisis was only temporarily relieved, and
the struggle was renewed again and again, both under and after the kings.
We can broadly divine that the anti-patrician rule of the king, who would
rely on the plebs, unified against him the patricians or "free" citizens, who
sought to keep down the masses; while, on the other hand, the increasing
outlaw plebs was unified by its sheer need.[37]
As to the rule of the kings, whether native or Etruscan, no exact knowledge
is now possible. We can but trace some of their functions in certain
constitutional forms. Thus the Senate, or Council of the Elders, appears to
have been the council of the king, selected by him, but capable of
nominating his successor.[38] Whatever were its original function, it became
in time the supreme power in the State, growing alike in numbers and in
power, overruling or eclipsing the comitia curiata, comitia centuriata, and
other bodies in which the general mass, first of patrician citizens and later
of enfranchised plebeians, were enrolled.[39] But it is not through the
complicated archæology of the Roman constitution, latterly compiled with
such an infinity of scholarly labour, that the nature of Roman evolution is

really to be known. The technique of the system resulted from an endless
process of compromise among social forces; and it is in the actual clash and
play of those forces, as revealed in the simple records, that the human
significance of it all is to be felt. In this way we substitute for a vague and
false conception of unitary growth one of perpetual strife of classes,
interests, and individualities.
In the doubtful transition period, as the tradition goes, it is in the time of
discontented plebeian subjection, after the expulsion of the king (510 B.C.),
that the Etruscan enemy captures the city (497); and the surmise that the
battle of Lake Regillus was not really a Roman victory[40] is partly
strengthened by the fact that soon after it there occur the division into
twenty-five tribes, the tumults of the nexi, and the successful Secession of
the Plebs, ending in their incorporation, with two tribunes to represent their
interests (494). There is a clear presumption that only from a weakened
patriciate, forced to seek union, could the plebs have won their tribunate
and enfranchisement. On the other hand, it is after victories over the
Volscians that the consul Spurius Cassius, who had proposed to divide
among landless men the land conquered from the Hernicans, is said to have
been executed (485) by the triumphant aristocracy; and it is in another
period of security, when the Veientines and Sabines are depressed (473),
that the tribune Cneius Genucius is murdered for having ventured to bring a
consular to trial. Always we are in presence of a brutal caste, in the main
utterly selfish, some of whose members are at all times as prone to the use
of the dagger as an Italian camorra of our own day. Yet it is by the forcing
of concessions on this caste that the Roman polity is kept vigorous and
adaptable in comparison with those of the surrounding States which Rome
subordinated or overran.
While Rome thrives, a new project for popular law reform is defeated
(462); and it is after Cincinnatus, according to the legend, barely saves the
State (458) that the tribunes are raised from five to ten, and the land is
divided among the poor (456); though at the same time decemvirs are
appointed and the conservative Twelve (at first Ten) Tables are drawn up
(451-450). Thus partially strengthened, the plebs are able soon to force the
abdication of the decemvirate (449) by the old menace of their withdrawal;
and for a time the commonalty sufficiently holds its own, getting (445) the
right of marriage with patricians, and (444) the institution of military

tribunes with consular power;[41] though fresh distribution of land is
prevented, and the patricians learn to divide the tribunes against each other.
Thus class dissension goes on till the Gauls capture the city (390),
multitudes of the Romans flying to Veii. Then it is that the plebeian party,
after the Gauls have gone, are willing to transfer the seat of government to
Veii; and the threat would doubtless win them some concessions in the
rebuilding of Rome. But population always blindly increases; and the
cancer of poverty spreads, despite the chronic planting of colonies in
subject territory. Manlius is executed for trying to relieve debtors; but some
land is reluctantly distributed. New wars create new popular distress, and
new colonies fail to relieve it. At length the Licinian laws, relieving debtors
and limiting estates, are proposed (376), and after nine years of agitation are
passed at the crisis (367) at which the Gauls (who themselves had in the
meantime undergone dissensions) again attack Rome; while the powers of
the consuls (limited in 443 by the appointment of two Censors) are now
further limited by the creation of a Prætor (patrician) and of Curule ædiles,
alternately taken from the two strata.
This makes a temporary palliation, and in time the now privileged
plebeians[42] lean to the patrician side and status; while fresh wars with
Hernicans, Gauls, Etruscans, and Samnites check class strife, and the
patricians recover preponderance, passing a law (358) to check "new men."
This is immediately followed by counter measures, limiting interest to ten
per cent. and putting a five per cent. tax on manumissions; but the eternal
distress of debtors is renewed, and a vain attempt is made to meet it (352)
by State loans, and again by reducing interest to five per cent. (347).
Increase of plebeian poverty again causes reactions, and after a mutiny
futile laws are passed prohibiting interest altogether (342); the dictator
Publilius carries popular political laws (339) checking the power of the
Senate, and debtors are once more protected (326). After many wars,
checking all domestic progress, popular distress causes a last Secession of
the Plebs (287) and new political concessions to them; but still wars
multiply, till all Italy is Romanised (266). The now mixed warlike
aristocracy of birth, wealth, and office monopolises power in the Senate;
and the residual plebs gradually ceases to be a distinct moral force, its last
great struggle being made under the Gracchi, to whom it gives no valid
support.

If we consider this evolution purely as a play of domestic political forces,
we recognise it from first to last as a simple conflict of class needs and
interests, partially modified at times by movements of true public spirit on
the part of such men as the patricians who supported the Licinian laws, and
such men as the Gracchi. The State-organism is the result of the struggles
and pressures of its elements. What happened in the chronic readjustments
was never a democratisation of the State, but at most an institutional
protection of the poorer plebeians, and an admission of the richer to
something like equal status with the optimates. Never was the "people"
really united by any common home interest beyond the need of extorting
some privileges. Only to that extent were the richer plebeians at one with
the poorer; and there can be little doubt that as soon as the former secured
the privileges they craved they tended to abuse them as the patricians had
done. There was no personnel adequate to the effective working of the
Licinian laws in face of a perpetual process of conquest which infallibly
evoked always the instinct of acquisition, and never the science which
might have controlled it. The early division of the State-territory into
twenty-five tribes (495), of whom twenty-one were rural, determined the
limitation of the political problem to the simple sharing of land; and every
effort of public-spirited men to arrest the aggregation of lands in the hands
of a few meant a convulsive explosion of resistance by the wealthy.
From the Polonian prattle of Cicero to his son we can gather how all
schemes of reconstruction were viewed by the ruling class, whether in
retrospect or prospect. The slaying of Tiberius Gracchus by Scipio Nasica is
a standing theme of praise;[43] the lesson of the course of things social
towards a steep sunderance of "haves" and "have-nots" is angrily evaded.
Cicero knew as well as any the need for social reconstruction in Rome;[44]
and he repeatedly records the sagacity of Lucius Marcus Philippus, who had
been tribune and consul in Cicero's boyhood. As consul, Philippus had
resisted the attempts of M. Livius Drusus to reform the Senate and provide
for the poorer citizens and the Italians; but inasmuch as he had during his
tribuneship avowed the fact that there were not left two thousand men in the
State who owned property, Cicero denounces the avowal as pernicious.[45]
The ideal aristocratic course was to resist all political change and slay those
who attempted it—Drusus as the Gracchi before him. It was as a
consummation of that policy that there exploded the so-called Marsian or

Social War, in which Rome and the Italian States around her grappled and
tore for years together like their ancestors of the tribal period; whereafter
Marians and Sullans in turn rent Rome, till Sulla's iron dictatorship,
restoring class supremacy, marked the beginning of the end of self-
governing institutions, and prepared for the day of autocracy, which was not
to come without another agony of long-protracted civil war. It is the
supreme proof of the deadliness of the path of conquest that for most
Romans the end of Roman "freedom" was a relief.
§3
The effect of continuous foreign war in frustrating democracy is here plain.
On the one hand, the peasant-farmers are reduced to debt and slavery by
their inability to farm their lands in war-time, while the patrician's lands are
worked by his slaves. On the other hand, their distress is met by a share in
the lands conquered; and after the soldiers are allowed pay (406 B.C.) they
are more and more ready to join in conquest. Not only is popular discontent
put off by the prospect of foreign plunder, but the perpetual state of
aggressive war, while tending first to pauperise most of the small cultivators
who make the army, breeds a new public spirit on a low plane, a sinister
fraternity of conquest. Ethics must needs worsen throughout the State when
the primitive instinct of strife developed into a policy of plunder; and
worsened ethics means a positive weakening of a society's total strength.
There is no lesson that men are slower to learn—and this naturally, because
they see the success of unjust conquest—yet there is no truth easier to prove
from history. Early Rome was strong as against strong enemies, because not
only were its people hardily bred, but the majority were on the whole
satisfied that they had just laws: the reciprocal sense of recognised rights
sustained public spirit at the possible maximum. But the rights are
thoroughly selfish at best; and it is the diversion of their selfishness to the
task of continuous conquest that "saves" the community from early
dissolution, preserving it for the life of dominion, which in turn destroys the
old forces of cohesion, and leaves a community fit only for subjection to a
military autocracy. The society of mutual selfish rights has a measure of
cohesion of its own, up to the point of conflict between the "haves" and the
"have-nots." An outwardly similar cohesion can, indeed, be sustained for a
time by mere concurrence in piracy; but it lies in the very nature of society
that union so engineered, cohesion so secured, is fleeting. Men whose main

discipline is the practice of tyranny over aliens become simply incapable of
strict reciprocity towards kin, and there must ensue either internecine strife
or the degradation of the weaker elements, or a sequence of these results.
This is what happened in Rome. One of the first political signs of the
contagion of the life of rapine in the later Republic is the growth of public
bribery as a means to further wealth. Administrative posts being the chief of
these means, candidates for them set about buying votes in the modern
manner.[46] As early as 432 B.C. the law against canvassing by candidates[47]
(lex de ambitu) suggests the recognition of electoral corruption; and later
there followed a whole series of futile vetoes—futile because the social
conditions grew always morally worse. The lex Æmilia Bæbia (182 B.C.)
forbade all money gifts by candidates; and twenty-three years later another
law decreed that offenders should be exiled. This also failing, there
followed the leges tabellariæ, establishing the ballot (139-137). Still the
disease persisted, because there was no stop now possible to the career of
conquest, which had undermined the very instincts whereon law depends;
and on the treacherous struggle for place and pelf by way of bribery there
supervened the direct grapple over the ill-gotten gains. The Roman ruling
class had evolved into a horde of filibustering fortune-hunters, as did the
Greeks under and after Alexander; and the political sequels of despotism
and civil war were substantially the same.
The process was gradual, and the phenomena are at times apt to delude us.
When a political machinery was set up that conduced to systematic and
extending warfare in which the commonwealth was often at stake, the
community had a new albeit fatal bond of cohesion, and the destructive or
repulsive energies for generations found a wide field outside of the State. It
is when the aristocratic Republic, succeeding finally in the long struggle
with Carthage for the wealth of Sicily and Spain and the control of the
Mediterranean, has further overrun Greece and pretty well exhausted the
immediate fields of conquest, that the forces of repulsion again begin to
work destructively within the body politic itself, and men and classes
become the fools of their animosities. The wars of faction, the popular
propaganda of the Gracchi, the murderous strifes of Marius and Sulla, the
rivalries of Pompey and Crassus, Conservatives and Democrats, Cæsar and
Pompey, the pandemonium on Cæsar's death, all in turn represent the
renewed operation within the State of the crude energies of cohesion and

strife which had been so long employed in foreign war. And the strife is
progressively worse, because the materials are more complex and more
corrupt. The aristocracy are more arrogant and hardened, the free farmer
class has in large part disappeared, and the populace are more debauched.[48]
The perpetual wars had multiplied slaves; and the slaves added a new and
desperate element to the social problem. It was the proof of the fatal lack in
Rome of vital ethical feeling—or, let us say, of social science—that this
deadly iniquity was never effectually recoiled from, or even impugned as it
had been, before Aristotle, among the more highly evolved of the Greeks.[49]
As wealth and luxury, pride and power accumulated, the usage of slave
labour spread ever further and ate ever deeper into the population,
brutalising alike the enslaved and the free.
It was doubtless a partial recognition of this that motived, in Cicero's day, the large
number of affranchisements of slaves (Wallon, Hist. de l'Esclavage, ii, 409). But fresh
enslavements went on; the amelioration consisted in the brevity of the period of
enslavement in cases of good conduct. And the evil was in the main a product of
conquest. It is fairly established by Dureau de la Malle (Écon. polit. des Romains,
1840, vol. i, liv. ii, ch. 2) that down to the second Punic War Roman slaves were few.
They would be for the most part nexi, victims of debt. As conquests multiplied
prisoners, the class increased rapidly. Broadly speaking, the house servants were all
slaves, as were the bulk of the shepherds in the great latifundia, the crews of the
galleys, and many of the artisans. The total number has doubtless been greatly
exaggerated, both in ancient and modern times, as has been the population of the
imperial city. Athenæus is responsible for many wild estimates. (Cp. Letronne, as
cited by Dureau, liv. ii, ch. 4.) Dureau arrives by careful calculation at an estimate of
an Italian population of some five millions about the year 529 A.U.C., of whom some
two and three quarter millions were free and some two and a quarter millions were
slaves or metæci, aliens without political rights (i, 296). The population of Rome as
late as Aurelian he puts at between 500,000 and 600,000 (i, 368). (See Prof. Bury's
note in his ed. of Gibbon, iii, 308, for different views. Gibbon, Bunsen, and Hodgkin
put the figure at about a million.) The exact proportion of slaves to free is not of the
essence of the problem. A society with nine slaves for every eleven free was
sufficiently committed to degeneration.

But the fatality of war was as irresistible as the fatality of plebeian
degradation; and the collapse of the slave war in Sicily (132), and the
political movement of the Gracchi, alongside of the new warlike triumphs
in Spain and Southern Gaul (121—the first great successes since the fall of
Carthage), illustrate the general principle that a ruling class or house may
always reckon on checking domestic criticism and popular self-assertion by
turning the animal energies of the people to animal strife with another
nation, in which case union correlates with strife. Wars imply comradeship

and the putting aside of domestic strife for the time being; and a war with
Illyria was made the pretext for suspending the operation of the new land
law passed by the elder Gracchus when the younger later sought to carry it
out. The triumphs of Marius, again, over Jugurtha and the Cimbri availed
nothing to unify the parties in the State, or to secure his own. In
democratising the army by drawing on a demoralised demos, he did but
make it a more facile tool for the general, a thing more detached from the
body politic.[50] The tendency of all classes in Rome to unite against the
claims of the outside Italians was from the first a stumbling-block to the
democrats within Rome; and the final identification of the popular interest,
in the period of Marius and Sulla, with an anti-Roman policy among the
Marians, gave to Sulla, strong in the prestige of recent conquest, the
position of advantage, apart from his own strength. Further, as Montesquieu
very justly notes, civil wars turn an entire nation into soldiers, and give it a
formidable advantage over its enemies when it regains unity.[51] But this
again is only for a time; there is no enduring society where there is no
general sense of reciprocal justice among free men; and systematic
militarism and plunder are the negation of moral reciprocity.
One partial exception, it is true, must be made. In the early days of the
Republic the poor soldier stood to lose his farm by his patriotism. Soon the
fighters had to be paid; and from the day of Marius onwards Roman
commanders perforce provided for their veterans—so often their
accomplices in the violation of their country's laws and liberties. The
provision was made on the one hand by donations from the loot, on the
other by grants of land taken from others, it might be in Italy itself. Sulla so
rewarded his sworders; the triumvirs took the land of eighteen Italian towns
to divide among their legionaries.[52] To the end the emperors had constantly
to provide for their time-expired men by confiscations. Thus did empire pay
for its instrument.
§4
The animal energies themselves, in time, are affected by domestic
conditions; and when Cæsar comes on the scene Rome is visibly far on the
way to a state of things such as had long before appeared in older
civilisations[53]—a state of things commonly but rather loosely called
degenerate, in which the animal energies are grown less robust, and the life

therefore in some respects more civilised. Such a course had been run in
Italy long before the rise of Rome, notably in Etruria, where, after a
conquest of aborigines by a small body of invaders,[54] who were in touch
with early Greek culture, the civilisation remains at that archaic stage while
Greek civilisation continues to progress.[55] There, with a small aristocracy
lording it over a people of serfs,[56] progress of all kinds was arrested, and
even the religion of the conquerors assimilated to that of the aborigines.[57]
In the Rome of Cæsar we see, after much fluctuation, with a more complex
and less enfeebled structure of population, the beginnings of the same
fixation of classes; while, at the same time, there has been such
psychological variation as can begin to give new and ostensibly higher
channels to the immanent forces of union and strife. This is the social
condition that, given the required military evolution, above all lends itself to
imperialism or absolute monarchy; which system in turn best maintains
itself by a policy of conquest, so employing the animal energies and
keeping up the cohesive force of militarist pride throughout all classes.
Even now, of course, in a semi-enslaved populace, as in a slave population
pure and simple,[58] there were possibilities of insurrection; and it was at
length empirically politic for the emperors to give the populace its daily
bread and its daily games, as well as to keep it charmed with the spectacle
of conquest. The expedient of doles of food did not at once condemn itself
by dangerously multiplying mouths, because, although it was only in the
upper classes that men commonly refused to marry and have legitimate
children, population was now restrained by the preventive checks of vice,
city life, and wholesale abortion,[59] which are so much more effective—
alike against child and mother[60]—than the random resort to infanticide,
though that too had greatly increased.[61]
On the other hand, as the field of practicable conquest again approaches
exhaustion and no sufficiently strong rival arises to conquer the conquerors,
nothing can hinder that people of all classes, having no ideals tending to
social and intellectual advance, and no sufficient channel for the instinct of
union in the politics of the autocracy, shall find some channels of a new
kind.[62] These are opened in due course, and take the shape especially of
religious combinations or churches. Such modes had appeared even in the
earlier stages of civic disintegration, when the semi-private or sectarian
cults had begun to compete successfully with the public or civic. They did

so by appealing more freshly and directly to the growths of emotional
feeling (the outcome in part of physiological modification)[63] which no
longer found outlet in primary forms, such as warfare and primitive revelry.
After having themselves consented in times of panic to the introduction of
several cults in the name of the public interest, the ruling classes,
instinctively conservative by the law of their existence, take fright at the
startling popularity of the unofficial Bacchic mysteries, and decide to stamp
out the movement.[64] But the attempt is futile, the causal conditions
remaining; and soon Judaism, Osirianism, Mithraism, the worships of Attis,
Adonis, Bacchus, Isis, Serapis, all more or less bound up with divination
and sorcery, make way in the disintegrating body politic.[65] The wheel of
social evolution had, so to speak, "gone full circle" since the first Roman
curia, the basis of the State, subsisted as groups with their special sacra,
finding in these their reason for cohering. Decadent Rome, all other
principles of subordinate cohesion having been worked out, resolves itself
once more into groups similarly motived. But the principle is newly
conditioned, and the sacra now begin the struggle for existence among
themselves. The rise of Christianity is simply the success of a system
which, on a good economic foundation, copied from that of the Jewish
synagogues, assimilates the main attractions of similar worships, while
availing itself of exoteric and democratic as well as esoteric methods. It
thus necessarily gains ground among the multitude, rich as well as poor;[66]
and its ultimate acceptance by the autocrat was due to the very
exclusiveness which at first made it intolerable. Once diffused widely
enough to set up the largest religious organisation in the Empire, it became
the best possible instrument of centralisation and control, and as such it was
accepted and employed.[67]
And now again we see how inevitably the force of attraction correlates with
the force of repulsion. The new channels of the spirit of union, being dug
not by reason but by ignorance, become new channels for the reverse flow
of the spirit of strife; and as sectarian zeal spreads, in the absence of
openings, good or bad, for public spirit, there arise new forms of domestic
hate and struggle. Crude religious fervours, excluding, or arising in lack of,
the play of the saner and higher forms of thought and feeling, beget crude
antipathies;[68] and Christianity leads back to bloody strifes and seditions
such as had not been seen since the fall of the Republic. There is not

intellectuality enough to raise men above this new superinduced barbarism
of ignorant instinct; half of the old Christendom, disintegrated like the old
politics, is overrun by a more robust barbarism that adopts a simpler creed;
and the new barbaric Christendom exhibits in its turn all the modes of
operation of the biological forces that had been seen in the old.
§5
Thus far we have considered Roman evolution in terms of a moral estimate
of the reactions of classes. But lest we lose sight of the principle of total
causation, it is fitting to restate the process in terms of that conception, thus
explaining it non-morally. We may view Rome, to begin with, as a case of
the unique aggrandisement of a State in virtue of fit conditions and
institutions. Thus (1) the comparatively uncommercial situation of the early
Latins, leaving them, beyond cattle-breeding and agriculture, no occupation
save war for surplus energy, and no readier way of acquiring wealth;[69] (2)
the physical collocation of a group of seven defensive hills, so close that
they must be held by a federated group;[70] (3) the ethnic collocation of a set
of tribe groups of nearly equal vigour and ardour, strengthening each other's
sinews by constant struggling; (4) the creation (not prescient, but purely as
a provision against kingship) of the peculiar institution of the annual
consulate,[71] securing a perpetuity of motive to conquest and a continuous
flow of administrative energy;[72] (5) the peculiar need, imposed by this very
habit of all-round warfare, for accommodation between the ruling and ruled
classes, and for the safeguarding of the interests of the latter by laws and
franchises; (6) the central position of Rome in Italy, enabling her to subdue
it piecemeal; and finally (7) the development by all these means of a
specialist aristocracy, habitually trained to administration[73]—all these
genetic conditions combined to build up the most remarkable military
empire the world has ever seen. They obtrude, it is clear, half of the
explanation of the fact that the Romans rose to empire where the much
more early civilised Greek cities of Italy did not.
Of the latter fact we still receive the old explanation that it came of "the
habit, which had ever been the curse of Hellenism, of jealous separation and
frequent war between town and town, as well as internal feuds in the
several cities themselves."[74] But this is clearly no vera causa, as these
symptoms are duplicated in the history of Rome itself. The determining

forces must, then, be looked for in the special conditions. The Greeks,
indeed, brought with them the tradition of the separate City-State; but just
as the cities remained independent in Greece by reason of natural
conditions,[75] so the Greek cities of Italy remained isolated and stationary at
a certain strength, because their basis and way of life were commercial, so
that while they restricted each other's growth or dominance they were in
times of peace mutually nutritive. They wanted customers, not plunder. For
the Romans plunder was the first social need after agriculture, and as they
began they continued. When Jugurtha learned that anything could be had of
the Romans for gold, he had but read an open secret.
Of course, the functions that were originally determined by external
conditions came in time to be initial causes—the teeth and claws, so to
speak, fixing the way of life for the body politic. The upper-class Romans
became, as it were, the experts, the specialists of war and empire and
administration. Until they became wholly demoralised by habitual plunder,
they showed, despite their intense primeval superstition of citizenship,[76] a
degree of sagacity in the conciliation of their defeated rivals which was a
main cause of their being able to hold out against Hannibal, and which
contrasts markedly with the oppressive and self-defeating policy of imperial
Carthage, Athens, and Sparta. Their tradition in part was still that of
conquering herdsmen, not wholly turned into mere exploiters of humanity.
Pitted against any monarch, they were finally invincible, because a still-
growing class supplied their administrators, as the swarming provinces
supplied their soldiers, and because for all alike war meant plunder and new
lands, as well as glory. Pitted against a republic like Carthage, even when
its armies were led by a man of genius, they were still insuppressible,
inasmuch as Carthage was a community of traders employing mercenaries,
where Rome was a community in arms, producing generals as Carthage
produced merchants. Mithridates failed in turn, as Hannibal failed. The
genius of one commander, exploiting passive material, could not avail
against the accumulated faculty for organisation in the still self-renewing
Roman patriciate.[77]
Carthage had, in fact, preceded Rome on the line of the evolution of class
egoism. Herself an expression of the pressure of the social problem in the
older Semitic world, she began as a colony, staved off domestic strife by
colonies, by empire, and by doles,[78] and was already near the economic

stage reached only centuries later by the Roman Empire. Save for Rome,
her polity might have endured on the imperialist basis for centuries; but, as
it was, it was socially exhausted relatively to the task and the danger,
depending as it did on hired foreign troops and coerced allies. It is idle to
speak, as men still do, of Hannibal's stay in Capua as a fatal mistake.[79] Had
Hannibal taken Rome, the ultimate triumph of the Romans would have been
just as certain. Their State was bound to outlast the other, so long as it
maintained to any extent its old basis of a fecund rural population of free
cultivators, supplying a zealous soldiery, headed by a specialised class
equally dependent on conquest for all advancement. For the trading
Carthaginians, war was, beyond a certain point, a mere act of self-defence;
they could not have held and administered Italy had they taken it. The
supreme general could last only one lifetime; the nation of warriors still
yielded a succession of captains, always learning something more of war,
and raising the standard of capacity as the progress of machinery widens the
scope of all engineers.
The author of a recent and meritorious History of Rome, Mr. Shuckburgh, is satisfied
to quote (p. 231) from Polybius, as explaining the fall of Carthage, the generalisation
that "Italians as a nation are by nature superior to Phœnicians and Libyans, both in
strength of body and courage of soul"; and to add: "That is the root of the matter, from
which all else is a natural growth." This only leaves us asking: "What was the natural
root of the alleged physiological superiority?" There must have been reasons. If they
were "racial" or climatic, whence the later implied degeneration of the Romans in
body or soul, or both? We are driven to the explanation lying in polity and institutions,
which it should have been Mr. Shuckburgh's special aim to give, undertaking as he
does to deal with "the state of the countries conquered by the Romans." And such
explanations are actually offered by Polybius (vi, 53).

§6
And yet the deterioration of the Roman State is visibly as sure a sequence
as its progress. Nothing that men might then have proposed could save it. In
Cicero's day the Senate had become a den of thieves. The spectacle of the
wealth of Lucullus, taken in Napoleonic fashion from the opulent East, set
governor after governor elsewhere upon a course of ruthless extortion
which depraved Rome as infallibly as it devastated the subject States.
Roman exploitation of conquest began in the relatively moderate fashion of
self-supporting victors willing to live and let live. Sicily was at first (210)
taxed by Marcellus in a fashion of which Livy makes boast;[80] and after the

suppression of the slaves' revolt in 131 B.C., the system was further
reformed. Seventeen towns, retaining their lands, paid a fixed tax to the
Republic; eight were immune, save for an annual contribution of 800,000
modius of wheat for free doles in Rome; and the rest of the island paid a
tenth of all produce, as under Hiero.[81] Later, the realms of the kings of
Macedonia, Pergamos, and Bithynia, and the lands of Cyrene and Cyprus,
were made the public patrimony of the conquering State. Sardinia, Spain,
North Africa, and Asia were in general taxed a tenth of their produce of all
kinds. As the exploitation went on, individual governors added to all this
regular taxation a vast irregular plunder on their own account; and nearly
every attempt to impeach them was foiled by their accomplices in the
Senate.[82] Verres in Sicily, Fonteius in Southern Gaul, Piso in Macedonia,
Appius in Cilicia, Flaccus in Asia Minor, wrung infinite gold and loot
immeasurable from the victim races by every device of rapacious
brigandage, trampling on every semblance of justice, and then devised the
ironic infamy of despatching corrupted or terrorised deputations of citizens
to Rome to testify to the beneficence of their rule.[83]
It was a riot of robbery in which no public virtue could live. To moralise on
the scarcity of Catos is an ill way of spending time if it be not recognised
that Catos had latterly become as impossible as eaters of acorns in the upper
grades of the ever-plundering State. Cato himself is a product of the last
vestiges of the stage before universal conquest; and he begins to show in his
own later years all the symptoms of the period of lawless plutocracy. To
yearn for a series of such figures is to ask that men shall be capable of
holding doggedly by an ethic of honest barbarism while living the lives of
pirates and slavers, according no moral sympathy to the larger world of
aliens and slaves, yet cherishing a high public spirit for the small world of
the patrician State. The man himself was a mere moral anomaly; and in
Cato the Younger, dreaming to the last of a loyal republican life, but always
ready at his fellow-citizens' behest to go and beat down the rights or
liberties of any other State,[84] we have the paternal bias reproduced in an
incurable duality. He sought for honour among thieves, himself being one.
Concerning the Catonic attitude towards the "degeneration" of Roman
patrician life in the age of conquest, it has been truly said that "the policy of
shameless selfishness which was pursued by the Roman Senate during this
period, and reached its climax in their abominable conduct towards the

unhappy, prostrate city of Carthage—the frivolous wars, tending to nothing
but aggrandisement and enrichment, waged by Rome continuously after the
second Punic War—destroyed the old Roman character[85] far more
effectually than Grecian art and philosophy could ever have done.
Henceforth there was a fearful increase in internal corruption, immorality,
bribery, an insatiable eagerness for riches, disregarding everything else and
impudently setting aside laws, orders of the Senate, and legal proceedings,
making war unauthorised, celebrating triumphs without permission,
plundering the provinces, robbing the allies."[86] And the ideal of conquest
inspired it all.
We have only to ask ourselves, What was the administrative class to do? in
order to see the fatality of its course. The State must needs go on seeking
conquest, by reason alike of the lower-class and the upper-class problem.
The administrators must administer, or rust. The moneyed men must have
fresh plunder, fresh sources of profit. The proletaries must be either fed or
set fighting, else they would clamour and revolt. And as the frontiers of
resistance receded, and new war was more and more a matter of far-
reaching campaigns, the large administering class at home, men of action
devoid of progressive culture, ran to brutal vice and frantic sedition as
inevitably as returned sailors to debauch; while the distant leader, passing
years of camp life at the head of professional troops, became more and
more surely a power extraneous to the Republic. When a State comes to
depend for its coherence on a standing army, the head of the army
inevitably becomes the head of the State. The Republic passed, as a matter
of course, into the Empire, with its army of mercenaries, the senatorial class
having outlived the main conditions of its health and energetic stability; the
autocracy at once began to delete the remaining brains by banishing or
slaying all who openly criticised it;[87] and the Empire, even while
maintaining its power by the spell of its great traditional organisation, ran
through stage after stage of civic degeneration under good and bad
emperors alike, simply because it had and could have no intellectual life
commensurate with its physical scope. Its function involved moral atrophy.
It needs the strenuous empiricism of a Mommsen to find ground for
comfort in the apparition of a Cæsar in a State that must needs worsen
under Cæsars even more profoundly than it did before its malady gave
Cæsar his opportunity.

Not that the Empire could of itself have died as an organism. There are no
such deaths in politics; and the frequent use of the phrase testifies to a
hallucination that must greatly hamper political science. The ancient
generalisation[88] to the youth, maturity, and decrepitude and death of States
is true only in respect of their variations of relative military and economic
strength, which follow no general rule.
The comparison of the life of political bodies to that of individuals was long ago
rightly rejected as vicious by Volney (Leçons d'Histoire, 1794, 6ième Séance), who
insisted that political destruction occurred only through vices of polity, inasmuch as
all polities have been framed with one of the three intentions of increasing,
maintaining, or overthrowing. The explanation is obscure, but the negation of the old
formula is just. The issue was taken up and pronounced upon to the same effect in the
closing chapter of C.A. Walckenaer's Essai sur l'histoire de l'espèce humaine, 1798.
(Professor Flint, in his History of the Philosophy of History, cites Walckenaer, but
does not mention Volney's Leçons.) Le Play, in modern times, has put the truth clearly
and strongly: "At no epoch of its history is a people fatally doomed either to progress
or decline. It does not necessarily pass, like an individual, from youth to old age"
(cited by H. Higgs in American Quarterly Journal of Economics, July, 1890, p. 428).
It is to be regretted that Dr. Draper should have adhered to the fallacy of the necessary
decay and death of nations in his suggestive work on the Intellectual Development of
Europe (ed. 1875, i, 13-20; ii, 393-98). He was doubtless influenced by the American
tendency to regard Europe and Asia as groups of "old countries." The word "decay"
may of course be used with the implication of mere "sickness," as by Lord Mahon in
the opening sentence of his Life of Belisarius; but even in that use it gives a lead to
fallacy.

Had there been no swarming and aggressive barbarians, standing to later
Rome as Rome had done to Carthage—collectively exigent of moral
equality as Romans had once been, and therefore conjunctly mighty as
against the morally etiolated Italians—the Western Roman Empire would
have gone on just as the Eastern[89] so long did, just as China has so long
done—would have subsisted with little or no progress, most factors of
progress being eliminated from its sphere. It ought now to be unnecessary
to point out that Christianity was no such factor, but rather the reverse, as
the history of Byzantium so thoroughly proves. No Christian writer of
antiquity, save perhaps Augustine[90] in a moment of moral aspiration, shows
any perception of the political causation of the decay and fall of the Empire.
[91]
The forces of intellectual progress that did arise and collapse in the
decline and the Dark Ages were extra-Christian heretical forces—Sabellian,
Arian, Pelagian, anti-ritualistic, anti-monastic, Iconoclastic. These once
deleted, Christianity was no more a progressive force among the new
peoples than it was among the old; and the later European progress

demonstrably came from wholly different causes—new empire, forcing
partial peace; Saracen contact, bringing physics, chemistry, and
mathematics; new discovery, making new commerce; recovery of pagan
lore, making new speculation; printing, making books abundant;
gunpowder, making arms a specialty; and the fresh competition and
disruption of States, setting up fruitful differences, albeit also preparing new
wars. To try to trace these causes in detail would be to attempt a complete
sociological sketch of European history, a task far beyond the scope of the
present work; though we shall later make certain special surveys that may
suffice to illustrate the general law. In the meantime, the foregoing and
other bird's-eye views of some ancient developments may illustrate those of
modern times.

FOOTNOTES:
[12] Cp. A. Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, 1853, i, 610-615; Pelham,
Outlines of Roman History, 1893, p. 25. When Professor Ferrero (Greatness and
Decline of Rome, Eng. trans. 1907, i, 5) pronounces that "The Romans were a
primitive people without the defects peculiar to a primitive people," he sets up a
needless mystification. They had the defects of their own culture stage, which
was far beyond that of "primitives" in the general sense of the term. They were
"semi-civilised barbarians," with a long past of institutional life.
[13] It might be an interesting inquiry whether a grouping by threes could have
arisen from a primary union of two exogamous clans.
[14] Schwegler, i, 616. The origin of tribus from three is not an accident special
to the Romans. Among the Spartans and Dorians likewise there were three
stocks (cp. K.O. Müller, The Dorians, Eng. tr. 1830, i, 35-37; Fustel de
Coulanges, La Cité antique, 8e édit. p. 135, note 2); and the great number of
Greek epithets in which "three" or "thrice" enters is a proof of the special
importance anciently attached to the number. Cp. K.D. Hüllmann, Ursprung der
römischen Verfassung durch Vergleichungen erläutert, 1835, p. 24.
[15] Greenidge, Roman Public Life, 1901, p. 1.
[16] Pelham, p. 20; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 132, sq.; Schwegler, i, 610, 615;
Ihne, Early Rome, 1897, p. 108; Ortolan, Hist. de la Législation romaine, ed.
Labbé, 1880, pp. 35, 36.
[17] Schwegler, i, 611, following Dionysius. Cp. Meyer, ii, 514.
[18] Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, pp. 13, 24, 132, 179; Robertson Smith, Religion of
the Semites, 1889, pp. 245, 247, 251, etc.; Jevons, Introd. to the History of
Religion, ch. xii.

[19] Cp. Schwegler, i, 628; Ihne, Early Rome, p. 107; Dupond, Magistratures
romaines sous la République, 1877, p. 19. The source of the plebs is one of the
vexed points of Roman origins; and the view that they were primarily a
conquered population is not yet generally accepted. See Shuckburgh, History of
Rome, 1894, p. 44. The true solution seems to be that the plebs were always
being added to in various ways—by aliens, by "broken men," by discarded
clients, and by fugitives. Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, p. 279.
[20] Schwegler, i, 621-28, 636-38; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 277. Note the
expression populo plebique in Livy, xxix, 27; Cicero, Pro Murena, i; Macrobius,
Saturnalia, i, 17. Ortolan (endorsed by Labbé) argues (work cited, p. 31) that
populus plebsque no more implies separation than senatus populusque. But this
argument destroys itself. The Senate as such was distinct from the populus, as
having auctoritas, while the populus had only potestas. The phrase then was not
a pleonasm. By this very analogy populus plebsque implies a vital legal
distinction. Niebuhr, who first made the facts clear (cp. his Lectures, Eng. trans.
ed. 1870, p. 107), followed Vico, who was led to the true view by knowledge of
the separateness of the popolo from the commune in the Italian republics.
[21] Schwegler, i, 619; E.W. Robertson, as cited, p. xxvii. Yet the constant
tradition is that not only did the mass of the people live mainly on farinaceous
food and vegetables, but the upper classes also in the early period ate meat only
on festival days. Cp. Guhl and Koner, The Life of the Greeks and Romans, Eng.
trans., pp. 501-2; Pliny, H.N., xviii, 3, 19; Ramsay, Roman Antiquities, 1851, p.
437. The cattle then were presumably sold to the people of the Etruscan and
Campanian cities. Professor Ferrero leaves this problem in a state of mystery.
The early Romans, he writes, had "few head of cattle" (i, 2); but land capture, he
admits, meant increase (p. 5); and at the time of the Roman Protectorate over all
Italy (266 B.C.) he recognises "vast wandering herds of oxen and sheep, without
stable or pen" (p. 9), conducted by slave shepherds. On such lands there must
have been a considerable amount of cattle-breeding at a much earlier period. On
the other hand, noting that the Romans early imported terracottas and metals
from Etruria, Phœnicia, and Carthage, "besides ivory-work and ornaments,
perfumes for funerals, purple for the ceremonial robes of the magistrates, and a
few slaves" (p. 3), Professor Ferrero lightly affirms that "it was not difficult to
pay for these in exports: timber for shipbuilding, and salt, practically made up
the list."
[22] Cp. Schwegler, i, 451, 617-19; ii, 108; E.W. Robertson, Historical Essays in
connection with the Land, the Church, etc., 1872, pp. xxvi-vii, 244.
[23] E.W. Robertson, as cited, pp. 243-44; Schwegler, i, 617-19.
[24] E.W. Robertson, p. xxv.
[25] Schwegler, i, 619, and refs.; Robertson, pp. 244-45; Ferrero, i, 9;
Greenidge, Rom. Pub. Life, p. 35.
[26] Cp. E.W. Robertson, as cited, p. xxv.
[27] Schwegler, i, 629; Robertson, p. xxvii.
[28] Schwegler, i, 620 and refs.

[29] Mommsen (ch. xiii. i, 200) puts this point in some confusion, making the
patricians live mostly in the country. Meyer (ii, 521) seems to put a quite
contrary view. Greenidge (History of Rome, 1904, p. 11) agrees with Mommsen,
putting town houses as a development of the second century B.C.
[30] According to Niebuhr (Lectures, xv; Eng. trans. ed. 1870, p. 81) and
Mommsen (ch. iv), the Palatine and the Quirinal. (But cp. Greenidge, p. 2.) The
Palatine was probably the first occupied by Romans. Schwegler, i, 442. Cp.
Merivale, General History of Rome, 5th ed. p. 3, as to its special advantages.
The Quirinal was held by the Sabines. Cp. Koch, Roman History, Eng. trans. p.
2.
[31] Ihne, Early Rome, p. 82.
[32] Presumably "Pelasgian." Cp. K.O. Müller, The Dorians, Eng. trans. i, 15;
Schwegler, i, 155 sq.
[33] Perhaps the result of a partial conquest. Cp. Mommsen, vol. i, ch. 6, ad init.,
as to the precedence of the Palatine priests over those of the Quirinal.
[34] So Ihne, Early Rome, p. 5.
[35] Cp. Pelham, ch. iii. Ihne, who argues that the narratives concerning the
Etruscan kings are no more trustworthy than those as to their predecessors,
recognises that Pliny's record of the humiliating conditions of peace imposed on
the Romans by Porsenna "would not have been made if the fact of the
subjugation of Rome by an Etruscan king had not been incontestable" (Early
Rome, p. 79; cp. pp. 85-86).
[36] Cp. Mérimée, Études sur l'histoire romaine, t. i, Guerre sociale, 1844, p.
352 sq.; Mommsen, B. ii, ch. i (i, 265).
[37] Cicero (De Officiis, ii, 12) and Sallust (cited by Augustine, De Civ. Dei, iii,
16) preserved the belief (accepted by Niebuhr) that the oppression of the poor by
the rich had been restrained under the kings. Cp. Mahaffy (Problems in Greek
History, pp. 81-83; Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. p. 83) and Wachsmuth (Hist.
Antiq. of the Greeks, Eng. tr. i, 416) as to Greek despots. And see Schwegler,
Römische Geschichte, ii, 203, as to the weakness of Rome through class-strifes
after the expulsion of the kings.
[38] Greenidge, pp. 47-48; Mommsen, i, 72.
[39] Greenidge, pp. 147, 262, 273.
[40] Niebuhr, Lect. xxv, 3rd Eng. ed. p. 134. So Ihne, Early Rome, p. 80; and
also Schwegler, ii, 200. Mommsen takes the traditional view. Cp. Shuckburgh
(History of Rome, p. 71), who remarks that the battle was at least not a decisive
victory. Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 812) gives no verdict.
[41] The demand for the admission of plebeians to the consulate was thus met on
the patrician plea that religion vetoed it. Only in 367 was it enacted that one of
the two consuls should always be a plebeian.
[42] Plebeians first admitted to the Quæstorship, 421 B.C.; to the Military
Tribuneship, 400; to the Consulate, 367; to the Dictatorship, 356; to the

Censorship, 351; to the Prætorship, 337. This left the patricians in possession of
the important privilege of membership of the sacred colleges. But that, in turn,
was opened to plebeians in 300 or 296.
[43] De Officiis, i, 22, 30.
[44] Ad Atticum, i, 19.
[45] De Officiis, ii, 21.
[46] See Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, iv, 272-76, for some interesting
details; and refs. in Mérimée, Guerre Sociale, p. 22.
[47] Livy, iv, 25.
[48] A writer in many respects instructive (W. Warde Fowler, The City State of
the Greeks and Romans, 1893, p. 194), in pursuance of the thesis that "the
Romans" had an "innate political wisdom" and an "inborn genius" for
accommodation, speaks of the process of democratic self-assertion and
aristocratic concession as "leaving no bad blood behind," this when social
disease was spreading all round. The theorem of "national genius" will suffice to
impair any exposition, however judicious otherwise. And this is the fundamental
flaw in the argument of Bagehot in Physics and Politics. Though he notes the
possibility of the objection that he is positing "occult qualities" (p. 24), he never
eliminates that objection, falling back as he does on an assumed "gift" in "the
Romans" (p. 81), instead of asking how an activity was evoked and fostered.
[49] Cp. the Politics, i, 6.
[50] Cp. Professor Pelham's Outline of Roman History, 1893, p. 197; Mérimée,
Guerre Sociale, pp. 217, 220.
[51] Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains, et de leur
décadence, ch. xi. He refers to the many cases in point in modern European
history.
[52] Dio Cassius, xlvii, 14; xlviii, 6; Appian, Bell. Civ. iv, 3; v, 5, 22.
[53] See below, p. 30, as to Carthage.
[54] Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, i, 269.
[55] Idem, i, 272-73.
[56] See Livy, xxxiii, 36, as to the conjuratio servorum throughout Etruria in
557 A.U.C.
[57] Schwegler, i, 270, 275.
[58] Compare the slave wars of Rome in Sicily with the modern disorders
(1892) in the same region, and with Aristotle's testimony as to the constant
tendency of the slave populations in Greece to conspire against their owners
(Politics, ii, 9).
[59] Juvenal, Sat. vi, 368, 593-96; Ovid, Amor. 1. ii, elegg. 13, 14. It is uncertain
whether among the ancients any prudential preventive check was thought of. On

the whole question see Malthus' fourteenth chapter. Malthus, however, omits to
notice that the Romans probably learned the arts of abortion from the Greeks,
Egyptians, and Syrians.
[60] Ovid speaks of the many women killed, Amor. ii. xiv, 38.
[61] Malthus cites Tacitus, De Mor. Germanorum, c. 19; Minucius Felix, c. 30;
Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxix, 4.
[62] Cp. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, Treatise ii, pt. iii, § 2 (i, 114). Guizot
seems to find the process surprising: "Singulier phénomène! C'est au moment où
l'Empire se brise et disparaît, que l'Eglise chrétienne se rallie et se forme
définitivement. L'unité politique périt, l'unité religieuse s'élève" (Histoire de la
civilisation en France, éd. 1874, i, 339). He does not recognise the case as one
of cause and effect. Of course, the fall of the State is not necessary to set up new
combinations. It suffices that men should be without political influence or
national consciousness—e.g., the secret societies of China in recent times.
[63] An inquiry, or series of inquiries, into the physiological side of social and
political development is obviously necessary, and must be made before
sociology can on this side attain much scientific precision. I know, however, no
general treatise on the subject except an old essay on Changes Produced in the
Nervous System by Civilisation, by Dr. Robert Verity (2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1839).
This is suggestive, but, of course, tentative. Cp. Ferrero, Greatness and Decline
of Rome, Eng. trans, i, 298-99.
[64] Livy, xxxix, 8-18. See below, pt. iii. ch. iii.
[65] Cp. Salverte, De la Civilisation, p. 52.
[66] The subject is discussed in the author's essay on Mithraism in Pagan
Christs.
[67] M. Hochart (Études d'histoire religieuse, 1890, ch. ix) argues that
Constantine was never really converted to Christianity; and this is perhaps the
best explanation of his long postponement of his baptism.
[68] Compare episodes in the history of the Salvation Army in England (1890),
where that body was seen prepared to practise continuous fighting. It had no
thought of "Christian" conciliation.
[69] Various causes, the chief being probably Greek piracy, had caused in pre-
Roman Etruria a decay of the original seaports. See Schwegler, Römische
Geschichte, i, 273.
[70] On this cp. Ihne, Early Rome, p. 6; and Mommsen, ch. iv.
[71] This may have been set up in imitation of the Carthaginian institution of
Suffetae, which would be well known to the Etruscans of the monarchic period,
who had much traffic with Carthage. E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii,
701. But it may also be explained by the simple fact that the original army was
divided into two legions (id. ii, 812).
[72] On this see Montesquieu, Grandeur des Romains, c. 1. No one has
elucidated so much of Roman history in so little space as Montesquieu has done

in this little book, which Buckle rightly set above the Esprit des Lois. (Cp. the
eulogy of Taine, in his Tite-Live.) Its real insight may perhaps best be
appreciated by comparing it with the modern work of M. Charles Gouraud,
Histoire des Causes de la Grandeur de l'Angleterre (1856), in which it will be
hard to find any specification of real causes.
[73] The specification of this detail is one of the items of real explanation in Mr.
Warde Fowler's scholarly and sympathetic account of the development of the
Roman City-State (work cited, c. viii). He credits the Romans with an "innate
genius" for combination and constitutionalism as compared with the Greeks, not
noticing the fact that Roman unity was in the main a matter of conquest of non-
Romans by Romans; that the conquest was furthered by the Roman institutions;
that the institutions were first, so to speak, fortuitously shaped in favour of
systematic war and conquest by the revolt against kingship; that war and
conquest, again, were taken to almost inevitably as the main road to wealth; and
that the accommodations of later times were forced on the upper classes by the
career of warfare, to which domestic peace was indispensable. (Cp. Hegel as to
the element of coercion and patrician policy in the Roman social system. Philos.
der Gesch., Theil iii, Abschnitt i, Kap. i.) See below, § 6, as to the very different
conditions of the Greek City-States.
[74] E.S. Shuckburgh, History of Rome, 1894, p. 16.
[75] See below, ch. iii, end; ch. iv, § 2 (c).
[76] Cp. Livy, viii, 3-5.
[77] Cp. Ferrero, Greatness and Decline of Rome, Eng. trans, i, 240.
[78] Cp. Aristotle, Politics, ii, 11; vi, 5.
[79] Already in Montesquieu's Grandeur des Romains it is pointed out that for
Hannibal's soldiers, loaded with plunder, anywhere was Capua. Montesquieu
rightly observes that the stock phrase on that head is one of the things everybody
says because it has once been said. And it is repeated still.
[80] Livy, xxv, 40.
[81] Cicero, In Verrem, iii, 6; iv, 65; v, 21, 22.
[82] Sallust, Bell. Jugurth., c. 36.
[83] Cicero, In Verrem, iii, 20, 38, 81; v, 34; In Pisonem,34-36; Pro Flacco, 12;
Pro Fonteio, 5; Pro lege Manilia, 13. See the record in Dureau de la Malle,
Econ. polit. des Romains, 1840, vol. ii, liv. iv, ch. 8. Cp. Ferrero, i, 113-14, 183.
[84] Cp. Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, ii. 78-81, and Merivale, General
History of Rome, pp. 299-300, as to the plunder and annexation of Cyprus.
"Whether the annals of British India contain so foul a crime," writes Long, "I
leave those to determine who know more of Indian affairs than I do."
[85] An admission that national "character" is not a connatural or fixed bias, but
a simple function of variables.
[86] Teuffel, Hist. of Roman Literature, ed. Schwabe, Eng. trans. i, 122 (§ 91).

[87] See the process traced in W.A. Schmidt's Geschichte der Denk und
Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und des
Christenthums, 1847.
[88] Polybius, vi, 51. See below, ch. iv, § 1 (11).
[89] I am aware that Mr. Bury protests against this division; but his own
difficulty in calling the middle (Byzantine) Empire the "later Roman Empire,"
while implicitly accepting the "Holy" Empire as another "later Roman Empire,"
is the best proof that the established nomenclature is the most convenient.
Nobody is misled by it. A compromise might perhaps be made on the form
"Greek Empire," contended for by M. Sathes (Monumenta Historiæ Hellenicæ, i,
pref. p. 5), following on M. Rambaud.
[90] As cited below, pt. v, ch. i.
[91] Salvian, for instance, sees in the barbarian irruption a punishment of
Christian sins; he never dreams of asking the cause of the Christian and pre-
Christian corruption. Prudentius, again, is a thorough imperialist. See the
critique and citations of M. Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme, ii, 136-141,407.
Origen had set the note a century before Constantine (Contra Celsum, viii, 68-
72).

Chapter III
GREEK POLITICAL EVOLUTION
The politico-economic history of Greece has been less cleared up than that
of Rome, by reason not only of the greater complexity of the problem, but
of the predominance of literary specialism in Greek studies.

The modern Greek historian, Paparrigopoulo, has published in French an Histoire de
la Civilisation hellénique (Paris, 1878), which condenses his learned Greek work in
five volumes; but the general view, though sometimes suggestive, is both scanty and
superficial as regards ancient Greek history, and runs to an unprofitable effort at
showing the "unity" of all Hellenic history, Pagan and Christian, in terms of an
assumed conception of Hellenic character.
The posthumous Griechische Culturgeschichte of Jakob Burckhardt (1898) throws
little light on social evolution. Trustworthy, weighty, and lucid, like all Burckhardt's
work, it is rather a survey of Greek moral conditions than a study of social
development, thus adding something of synthesis to the previous scholarly literature
on the subject without reducing the phenomena to any theory of causation. It includes,
however, good studies of vital social developments, such as slavery, to which Grote
and Thirlwall paid surprisingly little attention, and which Mahaffy handles
inadequately. This is also to be studied in W.R. Patterson's Nemesis of Nations (1907)
—with some caution as regards the political generalisations.
Since the first edition of the present work there has appeared, in Dr. G.B. Grundy's
Thucydides and the History of his Age (1911) a new recognition of the fundamental
character of economic conditions in Greek as in other history. Dr. Grundy, finding no
academic precedent for his sociological method, has urged as new truths propositions
which for economic historians are or should have been axioms. The result, however, is
a really stimulating and valuable presentment of Greek history in terms of causal
forces.
The chapters on Greece in Dr. Cunningham's Western Civilisation (1898), though they
contain not a few explanations of Greek culture-phenomena on the old lines, in terms
of themselves, are helpful for the purposes of the present inquiry, since they really
study causation, as do Meyer's Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung des Alterthums and
some other recent German treatises, of which Dr. Cunningham makes use.
Much use, however, remains to be made of these and previous expert studies.
Boeckh's great work on the Public Economy of the Athenians, which, though
containing economic absurdities, hardly deserves even in that regard the strictures
passed on it by the first English translator (Sir G.C. Lewis, 1828; 2nd ed. 1842;
superior American ed. tr. from 2nd German ed. by A. Lamb, 1857), has not very
fruitfully affected the later historians proper. The third German edition by Fränkel,
1886, typifies the course of scholarship. It corrects details and adds a mass of
apparatus criticus equal in bulk to the whole original work, but supplies no new
ideas. Heeren's section on Greece in his Ideen, etc., translated as a Sketch of the
Political History of Ancient Greece (1829), and also as part of Heeren's Thoughts on
the Politics, etc., of the Ancient World, is too full of early misconceptions to be well
worth returning to, save for its general view. On the other hand, Grote's great History
of Greece, though unmatched in its own species, and though a far more philosophical
performance than that of Mitford (which Professor Mahaffy and the King of Greece
agree in preferring for its doctrine), is substantially a narrative and critical history on
the established lines, and does not aim at being more than incidentally sociological;
and that of Bishop Thirlwall, though in parts superior in this regard, is substantially in
similar case. At several points, indeed, Grote truly illuminates the sociological
problem—notably in his view of the reactions between the Greek drama and the
Greek life. Of the German general histories, that of Holm (Eng. tr. 4 vols. 1894-98) is

a trustworthy and judicious embodiment of the latest research, but has no special
intellectual weight, and is somewhat needlessly prolix. The history of Dr. Evelyn
Abbott, so far as it has gone, has fully equal value in most respects; but both leave the
need for a sociological history unsatisfied. Mr. Warde Fowler's City State of the
Greeks and Romans (1893) points in the right direction, but needs following up.
Apart from Burckhardt and Cunningham, the nearest approach yet made to a
sociological study of Greek civilisation is the series of works on Greek social history
by Professor Mahaffy (Social Life in Greece; Greek Life and Thought from the Age of
Alexander to the Roman Conquest; The Greek World under Roman Sway; Problems of
Greek History; and Survey of Greek Civilisation). These learned and brilliant volumes
have great value as giving more vivid ideas of Greek life than are conveyed by any of
the regular histories, and as constantly stimulating reflection; but they lack method,
omit much, and abound regrettably in capricious and inconsistent dicta. The Survey is
disappointing as emphasising rather than making good the defects of the previous
treatises. G.F. Hertzberg's Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Römer
(1866), and indeed all his works on Greek history, are always worth consulting.
Some help may be had from the volume on Greece in the Industrial History of the
Free Nations by W.T. M'Cullagh (1846); but that fails to throw any light on what
should have been its primary problem, the rise of Greek industry, and is rather
sentimental than scientific in spirit. For later Greece, Finlay (History of Greece from
its Conquest by the Romans, revised ed. 7 vols. 1877) becomes illuminating by his
interest in economic law, though he holds uncritically enough by some now exploded
principles, and exhibits some religious prejudice. His somewhat entangled opening
sections express his difficulties as a pioneer in sociological history—difficulties only
too abundantly apparent in the following pages. Professor J.B. Bury's History of the
Later Roman Empire (2 vols. 1889) is an admirable work; but it does not attempt,
save incidentally, to supersede Finlay in matters economic.

§1
The political history of ancient Greece, similarly summarised, will serve
perhaps even better the purpose of illuminating later evolution. That history
has served historian after historian as a means of modern polemic. The first
considerable English historians of Greece, Gillies and Mitford, pointed to
the evil fate of Greek democracy as a conclusive argument against
countenancing democracy now; never stopping to ask whether ancient
monarchies had fared any better than the democracies. And it is perfectly
true that present-day democracies will tend to bad fortune just as did the
ancient unless they bottom themselves more firmly and guide themselves
by a deeper political science. It will not suffice that we have rejected the
foundation of slavery, on which all the Greek polities rested. The strifes
between the demos and the aristocracy in the Greek City-States would have
arisen just as surely, though more slowly, if the demos, instead of being an
upper-grade populace owning slaves, had included the whole mass of the

artisan and serving class.[92] Where population increases at anything like the
natural animal rate, and infanticide is not overwhelming, poverty must
either force emigration or breed strife between the "have-nots" and the
"haves," barring such continuous stress of war as suffices at once to thin
numbers and yield conquerors the lands of the slain losers. During some
centuries the pressure was in part relieved by colonisation, as had already
happened among the Phœnicians;[93] the colonies themselves in turn, with
their more rapid evolution, developing the inevitable strife of rich and poor
more quickly and more violently than the mother cities.[94] Among these, it
was when that relief seemed to be exhausted that strife became most
dangerous, being obscurely perceived to be a means to advancement and
prosperity for individuals, as well as for the State which could extort tribute
or plunder from the others. War, however, limits agriculture, so that food
supply is kept proportionately small; and with peace the principle of
population soon overtakes lost ground; so that, though the Greek States like
others tended to gain in solidarity under the stimulus of foreign war, the
pressure of poverty was always breeding fresh division.
If we take up Grecian history after the settling down of the prehistoric
invasions, which complicated the ordinary process of rupture and fission,
that process is seen occurring so frequently, and in so many different States,
that there can be no question as to the presence of a general sociological
law, not to be counteracted in any community save by a radical change of
conditions. Everywhere the phenomena are broadly the same. The upper
class ("upper" in virtue either of primary advantages or of special faculty
for acquiring wealth) attains to providing for its future by holding
multitudes of poorer citizens in debt—the ancient adumbration of the
modern developments of landlordism, national debts, and large joint-stock
enterprises, which yield inheritable incomes. In early times, probably, debt
led as often to adult enslavement in Greece as in Rome;[95] but in a world of
small and warring City-States, shaken by domestic division, constantly
making slaves by capture and purchase, and always exposed to the risk of
their insurrection, this was too dangerous a course to be long persisted in,[96]
and the creditor was led to press his mortgaged debtor in other ways. The
son or the daughter was sold to pay the father's dues, or to serve in
perpetual payment of interest; and the cultivator's share was ever at the
lowest point. The pressure increases till the mass of debtors are harassed

into insurrection, or are used by an adventurer to establish himself as
despot.[97] Sometimes, in later days, the documents of debt are publicly
destroyed;[98] sometimes the land is divided afresh.[99] Landholders burdened
with debt would vote for the former course and resist the latter;[100] and as
that was clamoured for at Athens in early times, it may be presumed that in
some places it was resorted to. Sometimes even a refunding of interest
would be insisted on.[101] Naturally such means of rectification availed only
for a moment; the despot stood a fair chance of being assassinated; the
triumphant demos would be caballed against; the exiled nobles, with the
cold rage of Theognis in their hearts, would return; and the last state of the
people would be worse than the first; till again slackened vigilance on one
side, and intolerable hardship on the other, renewed the cycle of violent
change.
In the course of ages there was perforce some approach to equipoise;[102] but
it was presumably at the normal cost of a definite abasement of the
populace;[103] and it was by a famous stroke of statecraft that Athens was
able so to solve her first great crisis as to make possible some centuries of
expanding democratic life. The name of Solon is associated with an early
crisis (594 B.C.) in which debt and destitution among the Athenian demos
(then still for the most part small cultivators, for whom the city was a refuge
fortress, but as a rule no longer owning the land they tilled) brought matters
to the same point as was marked in Rome by the Secession of the Plebs.
The Athenian oligarchy was very much like the Roman; and when the two
sides agreed to call in Solon as arbitrator it was with a fairly general
expectation that he would take the opportunity to become tyrant. The people
knew him to be opposed to plutocratic tyranny; the nobles and traders,
anxious for security, thought him sure to be their friend; and both sorts had
small objection to such a one as "despot." But Solon, a noble of moderate
means, who had gained prestige in the wars of Athens with her neighbour,
Megara, and some knowledge of life as a travelling trader, brought to his
problem a higher vision than that of a Roman patrician, and doubtless had a
less barbarous stock to deal with. Later ages, loosely manipulating tradition,
ascribed to him a variety of laws that he cannot have made;[104] but all the
records concur in crediting him with a "Seisachtheia," a "shaking-off-of-
burdens," and a healing of the worst of the open wounds of the body politic.
All existing mortgages were cancelled; all enslavement for debt was

abolished; Athenians who had been sold into alien slavery were bought
back (probably by a contribution from relieved debtors[105]); and the coinage
was recast—whether or not by way of reducing State payments is not clear.
Grote (ii, 471), while eulogising Solon's plan as a whole, accepts the view that he
debased the money-standard; while Boeckh (Metrologie, ch. 15) holds him to have
further altered the weights and measures. For the former view there is clear support in
Plutarch (Solon, c. 15), and for the latter in the lately recovered Aristotelian Polity of
Athens (c. 10). But when Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari, in their abridgment of Grote
(p. 45), declare that the latter document makes clear that the coinage measure was
solely for the promotion of trade, and entirely independent of the Seisachtheia (so also
Bury, p. 183), they unduly stress the evidence. The document, which is hardly
Aristotelian in structure, proceeds doubtfully on tradition and not upon record; and
there may be some truth in the old view of Androtion (Plut. c. 15), that Solon only
reduced the rate of interest while altering the money-standard. The point is really
obscure. Cp. Abbott, Hist. of Greece, i, 407-8; Grote, ii, 472-76; Meyer, ii, 651-52;
Cox, Gen. Hist. of Greece, 2nd ed. pp. 76-79. So far are we from exact knowledge
that it is still a moot point whether the tenant Hektemorioi or "Sixth-men" paid or
received a sixth part of their total product. Cp. Mitchell and Caspari, abr. of Grote, p.
14, note; Cox, Gen. Hist. of Greece, 2nd ed. p. 77; Bury, Hist. of Greece, ed. 1906, p.
181; Meyer, ii, 642; Abbott, Hist. of Greece, i, 289.

While the burdened peasants and labourers were thus ostensibly given a
new economic outlook on life, they were further humanised by being given
a share in the common polity. To the Ecclesia or "Congregation" of the
people Solon gave the power of electing the public magistrates; and by way
of controlling somewhat the power of the Areopagus or Senate, he
established a "pre-considering" Council or "Lower House" of Four
Hundred, chosen from all save the poor class, thus giving the State "two
anchors." And though the executive was in the hands of the aristocracy,
subject only to popular election, the burdens of the community were
soundly adjusted by a new or improved classification of citizens according
to their incomes ("timocracy"), which worked out somewhat as a graduated
income-tax, whether by way of a money-rate or in respect of their share in
military duties and public "liturgies," which had to be maintained by the
richer citizens.
As to this vexed question, see Boeckh, Staatsaushaltung der Athener, B. iv, c. 5
(Grote's ref. wrong), as expounded and checked by Grote (ii, 485-88). Messrs.
Mitchell and Caspari, in their abridgment of Grote (pp. 22, 49, notes), reject the whole
interpretation (which is reached by a combination of ancient data, Plutarch [c. 18]
telling nothing as to taxation). But they adduce only the negative argument that "as we
know that Peisistratos, the champion of the poorer classes, subsequently levied a
uniform tax of five or ten per cent., it is absurd to suppose that the highly democratic
principle of a sliding-scale had been previously adopted by Solon. Peisistratos would

not have dared to attempt a reaction from a sliding-scale income-tax to a sort of poll-
tax." To this it might be replied that the "flat rate" of Peisistratos—which ought to
modify the conception of him as the "friend of the poor"—may have been an addition
to previous taxes; and that the division of citizens into income-classes must have
stood for something in the way of burdens. The solution would seem to be that these
were not regular money taxes. "Regular direct taxes were as little known in free
Athens as in any other ancient State; they are the marks of absolute monarchy, of
unfreedom" (Meyer, ii, 644). "Seemingly, it was not until later times that this
distribution of classes served the purposes of taxation" (Maisch, Manual of Greek
Antiquities, Eng. tr. p. 40). But already the cost of certain public services, classed
under the head of "liturgies," was laid upon the rich; and there may well have been a
process of collective contribution towards these at a time when very rich citizens
cannot have been numerous.
Doubtless the graduated income-tax would have been unworkable in a systematic
way, though in the "Servian" timocracy of early Rome a tributum seems to have been
imposed on the classes (Livy, ii, 9).

At yet other points Solon prepared the ground for the democratic structure
of the later Athenian polity. By overthrowing the sacrosanct power of the
aristocratic priestly houses, who had aggrandised themselves by it like the
nobles of early Rome, he prevented the growth of a hierocracy. By
constituting out of all the citizens, including the Thetes or peasant
cultivators, a kind of universal jury-court, out of which the panels of judges
were to be taken by lot, he put the people on the way of becoming a court of
appeal against the upper-class archons, who recruited the Areopagus. "The
constitution of the judicial courts (Heliaia) out of the whole people was the
secret of democracy which Solon discovered. It is his title to fame in the
history of the growth of popular government in Europe."[106]
The whole reform was indeed a great achievement; and so far definitive that
from that time forward Athens needed no further resort to "Seisachtheia" or
to alteration of the money-standard. Solon had in fact eliminated the worst
disruptive force at work in the community—the enslavement of the debtor;
a reform so radical,[107] when considered as one man's work, that to note its
moral limits may seem to imply blindness to its value. Henceforth, on the
lines of the democracy which he made possible, Athenians were so far
homogeneous that their slaves were aliens. Beyond that point they could not
rise; after Solon, as before, they were at daggers drawn with neighbouring
Statelets, and to the end it remained tolerable to them to enslave the men of
other Greek-speaking communities. Floated over the first reef by Solon,

they never found a pilot to clear the second—the principle of group-enmity.
Upon that the Hellenic civilisation finally foundered.
Even in respect of what he achieved, Solon received but a chequered
recognition in his own time. The peasantry had expected him to divide the
land among them;[108] and when they found that the abolition of enslavement
for debt did not mean much less stress of life, they were ready to forfeit all
the political rights he had given them for some more tangible betterment.
The simple fact that a generation later Peisistratos was able to become
tyrant in the teeth of the aged Solon's vehement opposition is intelligible
only as standing for the feeling of many of the common people that through
a tyrannos alone could their interests be maintained against the perpetual
conspiracy of the upper class to overreach them.[109] It may be that Solon
had alienated the rural folk by his concern for commerce, which would be
likely to mean the encouragement of imports of food.[110] Peisistratos, we
know, was the leader of the Diakrioi, the herdsmen and crofters of the
uplands, and was "accounted the most thorough democrat" as against the
landlords of the plains (Pediaioi), led by Lycurgos, and the traders of the
coast (Paraloi), led by Megacles.[111] The presumption is that by this time
the fertile plain-lands were largely owned by rich men, who worked them
by hired labour; but the nature of the conflicting forces is not now to be
clearly ascertained. The credit given afterwards to Peisistratos for
maintaining the Solonian laws points to an understanding between him and
the people;[112] and their acceptance of him in Solon's despite suggests that
they even identified the latter with the failure of his laws to secure them
against further aristocratic oppression.
Nonetheless, Solon's recasting of the political structure of the State
determined the future evolution. As Athens grew more and more of an
industrial and trading city, her people reverted more and more surely to the
self-governing ideal; albeit the Solonian constitution preserved the unity of
the State, keeping all the people of Attica "Athenians." The rule of
Peisistratos was twice upset, and that of his house in all did not last much
above fifty years. When the last member was driven out by Kleisthenes
(510 B.C.), the constitution was re-established in a more democratic form
than the Solonian; all freemen of Attica became burghers of Athens; and
thousands of unenfranchised citizens and emancipated slaves obtained full

rights of citizenship. For better and for worse, republican Athens was made
—a new thing in the ancient world, for hitherto "democratical government
was a thing unknown in Greece—all Grecian governments were either
oligarchical or despotic, the mass of the freemen having not yet tasted of
constitutional privilege."[113]
What followed was an evolution of the old conflicting forces on a new
constitutional basis, the balance of power and prestige being on the side of
the demos and its institutions, no longer on that of a land-owning and
dominant aristocracy. But the strife never ceased. Kleisthenes himself found
"the Athenian people excluded from everything" once more, and, "being
vanquished in the party contest with his rival, took the people into
partnership."[114] The economic tendencies of all civic life reproduced the
hostility again and again. One of the most remarkable of the laws of Solon
was that which disfranchised any citizen who in a "stasis" or seditious feud
stood aloof and took no side.[115] He had seen the risks of such apathy in the
attempt of Kylon, in his youth, to become despot of Athens; and his fears
were realised when Peisistratos seized power. The law may have helped to
promote public-spirited action; but in the nature of things it was hardly
necessary when once democracy was established. Again and again the
demos had to fight for its own hand against the cliques who sought to
restore oligarchy; and apathy was not likely to be common. The perpetual
generation of fresh poverty through rapid increase of population, and the
inevitable resort to innovating fiscal and other measures to relieve it,
sufficed to provide grounds of class strife while free Athens endured.
It lies on the face of Aristotle's Politics, however, that even if the population
difficulty had been solved otherwise than by exodus, and even if the
Athenians could have guarded against class strife among themselves, the
fatality of war in the then civilised world would have sufficed to bring
about political dissolution. As he profoundly observes, the training of a
people to war ends in their ruin, even when they acquire supremacy,
because their legislators have not "taught them how to rest."[116] Add the
memorable testimony of Thucydides concerning the deep demoralisation
wrought by the Peloponnesian War—a testimony supported by every page
of the history of the time. Even the sinister virtue of uniting a people within
itself was lacking to the perpetual warfare of the Greeks: the internal
hatreds seemed positively to worsen in the atmosphere of the hatreds of the

communities. But while the spirit of strife is universal, peoples are
inevitably trained to war; and even if the Greek States could have so far
risen above their fratricidal jealousies as to form a stable union, it must
needs have turned to external conquest, and so run the downward course of
the post-Alexandrian Hellenistic Empires, and of the Roman Empire, which
in turn sank to dissolution before the assaults of newer militarisms.
§2
Nothing can save any democratic polity from the alternatives of insane
strife and imperial subjection but a vital prosperous culture, going hand in
hand with a sound economy of industry. The Greek democracies in their
different way split on the rock that wrecked the Roman Republic: there was
(1) no general mental development commensurate with the political
problems which arose for solution, and (2) there was no approach to a
sound economics. The first proposition will doubtless be denied by those
who, nourished on the literature of Greece, have come to see in its relative
excellence, the more confidently because of the abiding difficulty of
mastering it, the highest reach of the faculties of thought and expression.
But this judgment is fundamentally astray, because of the still subsisting
separation, in the literary mind, of the idea of literary merit from the idea of
scientific sanity. Men themselves too often vowed to the defence and
service of a mythology are slow to see that it was not for nothing that the
Athenian people bottomed its culture to the last on myth and superstition.
Yet a little reflection might make it clear that the community which forced
Socrates to drink the hemlock for an alleged and unproved scepticism, and
Anaxagoras to fly for a materialistic hypothesis concerning the sun, could
have no political enlightenment adequate to the Athenian needs. We see the
superstitious Athenian demos playing the part of the ignorant multitude of
all ages, eager for a master, incapable of steadfast self-rule, begging that the
magnificent Alcibiades, who led the sacred procession to Eleusis in despite
of the Spartans near at hand, shall put down his opponents and reign at
Athens as king[117]—this after he had been exiled by the same demos on a
charge of profane parody of the Eleusinian mysteries, and sacerdotally
declared accursed for the offence.[118] A primitive people may stumble along
in primitive conditions by dint of elementary political methods; but a
civilised people with a complex political problem can solve it only by
means of a correspondingly evolved science. And the Athenian people, with

their purely literary and æsthetic culture, never as a body reached even a
moderate height of ethical and scientific thought,[119] or even any such
general æsthetic well-being as we are apt to credit them with. Moderns
think of them, as the great song of Euripides has it, "lightly lifting their feet
in the lucid air,"[120] and are indulgently ready to take by the letter the fine
panegyric of the Athenian polity by Pericles,[121] forgetting that statesmen in
all ages have glorified their State, always making out the best case, always
shunning discouragement for their hearers, and making little account of
evil. But Burckhardt, after his long survey, decides with Boeckh that "the
Hellenes were more unhappy than most men think;"[122] and the saying holds
good of their political and intellectual life above all things.
Our more idealising scholars forget that the philosophy of the philosophers
was a specialism, and that the chance of hearing a tragedy of Sophocles or a
comedy of Aristophanes was no training in political conduct for a people
whose greatest philosopher never learned to see the fatality of slavery. On
the economic side, Periclean Athens was nearly as ill founded as aristocratic
Rome. Citizens often with neither professions nor studies, with no
ballasting occupation for head or hand; average men paid from the unearned
tribute of allied States to attend to affairs without any fundamental study of
political conditions; citizens whose work was paid for in the same fashion;
citizens of merely empirical education, for whom politics was but an
endless web of international intrigue, and who had no higher ideal than that
of the supremacy of their own State in Hellenedom or their own faction in
the State—such men, it is now easy to see, were incapable of saving
Athens, much less of unifying Greece. They were politically raised to a
situation which only wise and deeply instructed men could fill, and they
were neither wise nor deeply instructed, however superior their experience
might make them relatively to still worse trained contemporaries, or to
populations living under a systematic despotism.
On some of the main problems of life the majority had thought no further
than their ancestors of the days of the kings. The spell of religion had kept
them ignorant and superstitious.[123] In applied ethics they had as a body
made no progress: the extension of sympathy, which is moral advance, had
gone no further than the extortion of civic status and power by some new
classes, leaving a majority still enslaved. Above all, they could not learn the
lesson of collective reciprocity; could not see the expediency of respecting

in other communities the liberty they prized as their own chief good. Athens
in her turn "became an imperial or despot city, governing an aggregate of
dependent subjects all without their own active concurrence, and in many
cases doubtless contrary to their own sense of political right.... But the
Athenians committed the capital fault of taking the whole alliance into their
own hands, and treating the allies purely as subjects, without seeking to
attach them by any form of political incorporation or collective meeting and
discussion—without taking any pains to maintain community of feeling or
idea of a joint interest—without admitting any control, real or even
pretended, over themselves as managers. Had they attempted to do this, it
might have proved difficult to accomplish—so powerful was the force of
geographical dissemination, the tendency to isolated civic life, and the
repugnance to any permanent extramural obligations, in every Grecian
community. But they do not appear to have ever made the attempt. Finding
Athens exalted by circumstances to empire, and the allies degraded into
subjects, the Athenian statesmen grasped at the exaltation as a matter of
pride as well as profit. Even Pericles, the most prudent and far-sighted of
them, betrayed no consciousness that an empire without the cement of some
all-pervading interest or attachment, although not practically oppressive,
must nevertheless have a natural tendency to become more and more
unpopular, and ultimately to crumble in pieces."[124]
In fine, a democracy, the breath of whose nostrils is justice, systematically
refused to do as it would be done by; and as was Athens, so were the rest of
the Greek States. When the Athenians told the protesting Melians, in effect,
that might is right,[125] they did even as Sparta and Thebes had done before
them.[126] Hence the instinct of justice was feeble for all purposes, and the
domestic strife of factions was nearly as malignant and animalised as in
Borgian Italy. Mother cities and their colonies fought more destructively
with each other than with aliens; Athens and Syracuse, Corinth and
Corcyra, strove more malignantly than did Greek with barbarian. It was
their rule after a victory to slay their prisoners.[127] Such men had not learned
the secret of stable civic evolution; animal instinct was still enthroned
against law and prudence. Unearned income, private and public; blindly
tyrannous political aggression; ferocious domestic calumny; civic and racial
disruption—these were the due phases and fruits of the handling of a great
political problem by men who in the mass had no ideals of increasing

knowledge, of growing tolerance, of widening justice, of fraternity.[128] Stoic
and Epicurean wisdom and righteousness came too late to save free Hellas:
they were the fruits of retrospect in decadence. The very art and literature
which glorified Athens were in large part the economic products of
impolicy and injustice, being fostered by the ill-gotten wealth accruing to
the city from her tributary allies and subject States, somewhat as the art of
the great period in Italy was fed by the wealth of the Church and of the
merchant princes who grew by the great river of trade. In the one case as in
the other, there was no polity, no science, equal to the maintenance of the
result when the originating conditions disappeared. Greek art and letters
passed away because they were ill rooted. Nobly incorrupt for himself,
Pericles thus fatally fostered a civic corruption that no leader's virtues could
countervail, and his policy in this regard was probably the great force of
frustration to his scheme for a pan-Hellenic congress at Athens, to promote
free trade and intercourse.[129]
For various views on this matter cp. Heeren, Eng. tr. of Researches on the Political
History of Ancient Greece, pp. 129-34; Thirlwall, History of Greece, ch. xviii (1st ed.
iii, 62-70); Grote, iv, 490-504; Abbott, History of Greece, i, 405-9; Holm, History of
Greece, Eng. tr. ii, 268, note 8 to ch. xvii (a vindication). Grote, who vindicates the
policy of Pericles with much care, endorses the statesman's own plea that his use of
the confederate treasure in ennobling the city gave her a valuable prestige. But even to
the Athenian opposition this answer was indecisive, for, as Grote records, the
argument of Thucydides was that Athens was "disgraced in the eyes of the Greeks" by
her use of the treasure. This meant that her prestige was fully balanced by hatred, so
that the civic gain was a new danger.

Not that matters would have gone a whit better if, as our Tory historians
used retrospectively to prescribe, democracy had been permanently
subverted by aristocracy. No other ideal then in vogue would have produced
even so much "good life" as was actually attained. We know that the rich
and the great in the Greek cities were the worst citizens, in the sense of
being the least law-abiding; and that the lower-class Athenians who served
in the fleet were the best disciplined; the middle-class hoplites less so; and
the rich men who formed the cavalry the least orderly of all.[130] Above all,
the aristocrats were cruel and rapacious when in power as the demos never
were, even when they had overthrown the guiltiest of their tyrants.[131] The
leading aristocrats were simply weaker versions of the demagogues, making
up for their weakness by their cruelty; and nothing can be more misleading
than to take the account given of Kleon by Aristophanes for even a

semblance of the truth. The great humorist saw nothing as it really was: his
very genius was as it were a many-faceted mirror that could reflect no
whole, and left his practical judgment worth less than that of any of the men
he ridiculed. Kleon is to be conceived as a powerful figure of the type of a
New York Tammany "Boss," without culture or philosophy, but shrewd,
executive, and abounding in energy. The aristocrats were but slighter
egoists with a varnish of education, as far as he from a worthy philosophy.
And the philosophers par excellence, Plato and Aristotle, were equally
incapable of practical statesmanship. The central truth of the entire process
is that free Greece fell because her children never transcended, in
conception or in practice, that primary ethic of egoism in which even love
for one's country is only a reflex of hate for another people. This is clear in
the whole play of the astounding hatreds of Athenians for Athenians
through every struggle of Athens for her life. The treasons of Alcibiades are
evoked and amply balanced by the murderous plots of his fellows against
him: every figure in the line of leaders, from Solon's self, is hated by some
hetairia; the honest Anytus, the perfect type of brainless conservatism
sitting in the chair of sociological judgment, can be appeased only by the
slaying of Socrates; and to the end the egoisms of Demosthenes, Æschines,
and Isocrates are at grapple, with the national assassin in sight.
And it is the prevailing consciencelessness, the universal lust to tyrannise,
that really consummates the political dissolution. It was not the battle of
Chæronea that made an end of Greek independence. That disaster would
have been retrieved like others if only the Greeks had persistently cared to
retrieve it. They fell because they took the bribe of empire. Philip held it out
at once by his offer of facile terms to Athens: he was planning in his own
way what the pragmatic Isocrates took for the ideal Hellenic course, a
Hellenic war of conquest against Persia; and it was that very war, made by
Alexander, that transformed the Greeks into a mere diluvium of fortune-
hunters, turning away from every ideal of civic stability and dignity to the
overrunning of alien populations and the getting of alien gold. Given the
process of historic determination, moral bias becomes a fatality; and when
it is fixed, "'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus." Republican Greece
passed away because there were no more republican Greeks, but only a
rabble of imperialists. Here again appears the fatality of their past: it was
the sombre memory of unappeasable civil strife, of eternal inequality and

envy and class attrition, that made the new promise so dazzling; any future
seemed fairer than the recent past. But it was through the immediate bait to
their cupidity that the Greeks were led out of their old man-making life of
turbulent counterpoise, the sphere of free equals, into the new unmanning
life of empire, the sphere of slaves. They were easy victims. The men of
Aristotle's day had once more before their eyes, in the squalid drama of
Philip's house—in the spectacle of alienated wife and son deriding and
hating the laurelled conqueror and exulting in his murder—the old lesson of
autocracy, its infallible dishonour, its depravation, its dissolution of the
inmost ties of cordial life. But any countervailing ideal that still lived
among them was overborne by the tide of triumphant conquest; and, with
Aristotle and Plato in her hand, Greece turned back to the social ethic of the
Heraclidæ.
And when once the Circean cup of empire had been drained by the race,
there was no more returning to the status of republican manhood. The new
self-governing combination of cities which arose in Achaia after the
disintegration of Alexander's empire might indeed conceivably have
reached a high civilisation in time; but the external conditions, as summed
up in the existence of Rome, were now overwhelmingly unfavourable. The
opportunity for successful federalism was past. As it was, the Achaian and
Ætolian Leagues were but politic unions as much for aggression as for
defence, even as the Spartan reformers, Agis and Cleomenes, could never
rise above the ideal of Spartan self-assertion and domination. Thus we have
on one hand the Spartan kings, concerned for the well-being of the mass of
the people (always excepting the helots) as a means to restore Spartan pre-
eminence; and on the other hand the Achaian federation of oligarchies,
hating the doctrine of sympathy for the demos as much as they hated Sparta
—the forces of union and strife always repelling the regimen of peace, to
say nothing of fraternity. The spectacle of Cleomenes and Philopœmen at
deadly odds is the dramatic summary of the situation; the ablest men of the
later Greek age could not transcend their barbarian heredity.
The statement of Freeman (History of Federal Government in Greece and Italy, ed.
1893, p. 184) that a federal system in Greece was "utterly impossible," is true in the
bare philosophic sense that that was impossible which did not happen; but such a
proposition would hold equally true of anything else that did not happen at a given
time; and it merely creates confusion to affirm it of one item in particular. Pericles
schemed something like a federal union;[132] and had his practice been in accord with

his ideal, it might conceivably have been at least tried. M. Fustel de Coulanges well
points out how the primary religious conception of the ancient City-State expelled and
negatived that of a composite State (La Cité antique, l. iii, ch. xiv, p. 239); that is a
process of rational explanation. But unless we conceive the "failures" of the past as
lessons to be profited by, there can be neither a social nor a moral science. Freeman,
however, actually proceeds to say that Greek federation was utterly undesirable—an
extraordinary doctrine in a treatise devoted to studying and advocating federalism. On
the principles thus laid down, Dr. Freeman's denunciation of Austria and France in
modern times is irrational, since that which has happened in these countries is that
which alone was possible; and the problem as to the desirable is hopelessly obscured.
To say that "Greece united in a federal bond could never have become the Greece" we
admire (id. p. 184), is only to vary the verbalism. Granted that Hellenic greatness as
we know it was "inseparably limited to the system of independent city
commonwealths," it remains a rational proposition that had the Greek cities federated
they could have developed their general culture further than they actually did, though
the special splendour of Periclean Athens could not in that case have been so quickly
attained. And as the fall of Greece is no less "inseparably linked" with the
separateness of the States, Dr. Freeman's proposition suggests or implies an assertion
of the desirableness of that fall. Mr. T. Whittaker, in his notable essay on The Liberal
State (1907, pp. 70-72), rightly puts it as a fatality of the Greek State that it could
neither enter into nor absorb a larger community, but recognises this as a failure to
solve the great problem. When, however, he writes that "the free development of
Athens as an autonomous State would have been restricted by a real federation in
which other States had a voice of their own," he partly sets up the difficulty created by
Freeman. Wherein would Athens have suffered as to freedom?

The lesson for modern democracies from the story of the ancient is thus
clear enough. To flourish, they must have peace; they must sooner or later
practise a scientific and humane restraint of population—the sooner the
better, as destruction of surplus population is always going on, even with
emigration; they must check inequality, which is the fountain of domestic
dispeace; and they must maintain a progressive and scientific culture. And
the lesson is one that may now be acted on as it never could have been
before. There is no longer a reserve of fecund barbarism ready to
overwhelm a civilisation that ceases to be pugnacious; and the civilised
States have it in their own power to submit their quarrels to bloodless
arbitrament. The inveterate strifes of the Greeks belong to a past stage of
civilisation, and were in any case the product of peculiar geographical
conditions, Greece being physically divided, externally among islands, and
internally into a multitude of glens, which in the days of City-State life and
primitive means of communication preserved a state of cantonal
separateness and feud, just as did the physical conditions of the Scottish
Highlands in the days before effective monarchic rule.

This permanent dissociation of the City-States was only a more intractable form of the
primary divisions of the districts. Thus in Attica itself the divisions of party largely
followed the localities: "There were as many parties among them as there were
different tracts of land in their country"—the mountain-dwellers being democratic,
while the plain-dwellers were for an oligarchy, and the coast-dwellers sought a mixed
government. (Plutarch, Solon, cc. 13, 29; Aristotle, Polity of Athens, c. 13.) See the
question further discussed below, ch. iv, § 2 (c).

Indeed, the fulness of the autonomous life attained by the separate cities
was a psychological hindrance to their political union, given the primary
geographical sunderance. Thus we have in the old Amphictyonic councils
the evidence of a measure of peaceful political attraction among the tribes
before the cities were developed;[133] yet on those ancient beginnings there
was no political advance till the rise of formal federalism in the Ætolian and
Achaian Leagues after the death of Alexander. And that federalism was not
ethically higher than the spirit of the ancient Amphictyonic oath, preserved
by Æschines. The balance of the forces of separateness and political
wisdom is to be conceived in terms of a given degree of culture relatively to
a given set of physical conditions. Happily the deadlock in question no
longer subsists for civilised States.
Again, there is now possible a scientific control of population, without
infanticide, without vice, without abortion. There has been attained a degree
of democratic stability and enlightenment which given peace, permits of a
secure gradual extension of the principle of equality by sound machinery.
And there is now accumulated a treasury of seminal knowledge which
makes possible an endless intellectual progress, the great antiseptic of
political decay, provided only that the foregoing conditions are secured.
This is, in brief, the programme of progressive democracy.

FOOTNOTES:
[92] Cp. Mr. Godkin, Problems of Modern Democracy, 1896, pp. 327-28, as to
the recent rise of class hatred in the United States.
[93] Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 142.
[94] "Freedom flourishes in colonies. Ancient usages cannot be preserved ... as
at home.... Where every man lives by the labour of his hands, equality arises,
even where it did not originally exist" (Heeren, Pol. Hist. of Greece, Eng. tr. p.
88. Cp. Bagehot, Physics and Politics, p. 99). Note, in this connection, the whole
development of Magna Græcia. Sybaris was "perhaps in 510 B.C. the greatest of

all Grecian cities" (Grote, part ii, ch. 37). As to the early strifes in the colonies,
cp. Meyer, ii, 681.
[95] Such was the legal course of things before Solon (Grote, ii, 465-66; Ingram,
History of Slavery, p. 16; cp. Schömann, Griechische Alterthümer, 2te Aufl. i,
341; Aristotle, Polity of Athens, cc. 2, 4, 6; Wachsmuth, Histor. Antiq. of the
Greeks, § 33, Eng. tr. 1837, i, 244).
[96] Cp. Schömann, i, 114; Burckhardt, Griechische Culturgeschichte, i, 159;
Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, ii, 642. In the historic period the majority of
slaves are said to have been of non-Greek race (Schömann, i, 112; Burckhardt, i,
158). But this is said without much evidence. The custom was to kill adult male
captives and enslave the women and children. Men captives who were spared by
the Athenians were put to slavery in the mines (Burckhardt, citing Polyaenus, II,
i, 26).
[97] E.g. Telys at Sybaris, Theagenes at Megara, and Kypselus at Corinth, in the
sixth century B.C.; and Klearchus at Herakleia in the fourth (Grote. ii, 414, 418;
iv, 95; x, 394). Compare the appeals made to Solon by both parties to make
himself despot (Plutarch, Solon, c. 14).
[98] As at Sparta under Agis IV (Plutarch, Agis, c. 13; Thirlwall, c. lxii, 1st ed.
viii, 142). The claims were restored at Agis's death (id. p. 163).
[99] As by Cleomenes, soon after (id. p. 164).
[100] E.g. Agesilaus in the same crisis.
[101] As at Megara (Grote, ii, 418).
[102] See Grote, ii, 381, as to the general development.
[103] But cp. Grote, ii, 420, as to the case of Megara.
[104] Grote, ii, 490-94.
[105] Cp. Meyer, ii, 651.
[106] Bury, pp. 183-84.
[107] Eduard Meyer writes of Solon (ii, 649) that "aller Radicalismus liegt ihm
fern"; and, two pages later, as to the freeing of the peasantry, that "Hier konnte
nur ein radicales Mittel, ein Bruch des formellen Rechts, Hülfe bringen."
[108] Grote (ii, 471) finds this incredible; it is hard to see why. Plutarch (14, 16)
is explicit on the point; so also the Athenian Polity, c. 11.
[109] Friends of Solon's in the upper classes took advantage of a disclosure of
his plans to buy up land in advance, escaping full payment under his law
cancelling debts (Plutarch, Solon, c. 15; Aristotle, Athenian Polity, c. 6). See
Plutarch, c. 16, as to the moderation and popularity of Peisistratos.
[110] See below, pt. ii, ch. ii, § 1.
[111] Plutarch, Solon, 13, 29.

[112] As to his tactic in building up a party see Busolt, Griech. Gesch. 1885, i,
550-53. But the panegyric of Peisistratos as a ruler by Messrs. Mitchell and
Caspari (abr. of Grote, p. 58) is extravagant. The tyrant is there extolled for the
most primitive device of the ruler seeking popularity, the remission of taxes to
individuals.
[113] Grote, ii, 468, 496.
[114] Herodotus, v, 66-69.
[115] Plutarch, Solon, c. 24.
[116] Bk. vii, c. 15.
[117] Plutarch, Alcibiades, c. 34.
[118] Grote, ch. 46.
[119] Cp. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, iv, § 446.
[120] Rev. A.S. Way's translation of Euripides, Medea, 829-30.
[121] Thucydides, ii, 40.
[122] Griechische Culturgeschichte, i, 11; cp. ii, 386-88, 394, etc. And see
Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 727-29, 734, etc. For an able counter-
pleading, see the essay of Mr. Benn, "The Ethical Value of Hellenism," in Intern.
Jour. of Ethics, April, 1902, rep. in his Revaluations, Historical and Ideal, 1909.
[123] Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, La cité antique, ed. 1880, pp. 260-64; E. Meyer,
Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 728.
[124] Grote, iv, 489-90.
[125] Thucydides, v, 85 sq.
[126] Cp. Maisch, Manual of Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. § 66.
[127] Grote, iv, 539. Cp. Thirlwall, i, 181-83.
[128] The view here set forth is fully borne out by the posthumous Griechische
Culturgeschichte of Burckhardt. Cp. i, 249-57.
[129] Plutarch, Pericles, c. 17.
[130] Xenophon, Memorabilia, iii, 5, 18. Cp. Grote, iv, 465. As Grote goes on to
show, the same general statement holds good of Rome after her victory over
Carthage, of the Italian Republics, and of the feudal baronage in England and
elsewhere.
[131] Grote, vi, 315-17, 518, rightly insists on the moderation of the people after
the expulsions of the Four Hundred and the Thirty Tyrants.
[132] Plutarch, Pericles, c. 17; Grote, iv, 510; T. Davidson, The Parthenon
Frieze, 1882, pp. 82-128.

[133] Grote, pt. ii, ch. ii (ed. 1888, ii, 173-78); Freeman, History of Federal
Government, ed. 1893, p. 103.

Chapter IV
THE LAWS OF SOCIO-POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
§1
The word "progressive," however, raises one of the most complex issues in
sociology. It would be needless to point out, were it not well to anticipate
objection, that the foregoing summaries are not offered as a complete theory
of progress even as commonly conceived, much less as sufficing to dismiss
the dispute[134] as to what progress is, or what basis there is for the modern
conceptions bound up with the word. Our generalisations proceed on the
assumption—not of course that human affairs must constantly improve in
virtue of some cosmic law, but—that by most men of any education a
certain advance in range of knowledge, of reflection, of skill, of civic
amenity, of general comfort, is held to be attainable and desirable; that such
advances have clearly taken place in former periods; and that the due study
of these periods and of present conditions may lead to a further and
indefinitely prolonged advance. Conceiving progress broadly as occurring
by way of rise in the quantity and the quality of pleasurable and intelligent
life, we beg the question, for the purposes of this inquiry, as against those
who may regard such a tendency with aversion, and those who may deny
that such increase ever takes place. Taking as proved the evolution of
mankind from lower forms of animal life, we conceive such evolution as
immeasurably slow in the period before the attainment of agriculture, which
may serve as the stage at which what we term "civilisation" begins. Only
with agriculture begins the "civitas," as distinct from the horde or tribe.
Thenceforth all advance in arts and ethics, no less than in political co-
ordination, counts as "civilisation." The problem is, how to diagnose
advance.
All of us, roughly speaking, understand by progress the moving of things in
the way we want them to go; and the ideals underlying the present treatise
are easily seen, though it does not aim at an exhaustive survey of the
conditions and causes of what it assumes to be progressive forms or phases

of civilisation. To reach even a working theory, however, we have to make,
as it were, cross-sections in our anatomy, and to view the movement of
civilisation in terms of the conditions which increase men's stock of
knowledge and extend their imaginative art. To lay a foundation, we have to
subsume Buckle's all-important generalisation as to the effect of food and
life conditions in differentiating what we may broadly term the primary
from the secondary civilisation. Thus we think from "civilisation" to a
civilisation.
Buckle drew his capital distinction, so constantly ignored by his critics, between
"European" and "non-European" civilisations. This broadly holds good, but is a
historical rather than a sociological proposition. The process of causation is one of life
conditions; and the first great steps in the higher Greek civilisation were made in Asia
Minor, in contact with Asiatic life, even as the earlier civilisations, such as the
"Minoan" of Crete, now being traced through recovered remains, grew up in contact
with both Egypt and the East. (Cp. Prof. Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete, 1907,
chs. v, ix.) The distinction here made between "primary" and "secondary" civilisations
is of course merely relative, applying as it does only to the historic period. We can but
mark off the known civilisations as standing in certain relations one to another. Thus
the Roman civilisation was in reality complex before the conquest of Greece,
inasmuch as it had undergone Italo-Greek and Etruscan influences representing a then
ancient culture. But the Roman militarist system left the Roman civilisation in itself
unprogressive, and prevented it from being durably fertilised by the Greek.

Proceeding from general laws to particular cases, we may roughly say that:
—
(1) Primary civilisations arise in regions specially favourable to the regular
production of abundant food, and lying inland, so as not to offer constant
temptation to piratical raids. (Fertile coast land is defensible only by a
strong community.)
(2) Such food conditions tend to maintain an abundant population, readily
lending itself to exploitation by rulers, and so involving despotism and
subordination. They also imply, as a rule, level territories, which facilitate
conquest and administration, and thus also involve military autocracy.
The general law that facile food conditions, supporting large populations in a primary
civilisation, generate despotisms, was explicitly put in the eighteenth century by
Walckenaer (Essai sur l'histoire de l'espèce humaine, 1798, l. v, ch. iv, p. 198).
Montesquieu, whose reasonings on climate and soil tend to be fanciful and non-
economic (cp. Volney, Leçons d'Histoire, 6ième séance; and Buckle, Routledge's ed.
pp. 24, 468-69), noted the fact that sterile Attica was relatively democratic, and fertile
Lakedaimon aristocratic; and further (following Plutarch) decides that mountaineers
tend to be democratic, plain-dwellers subject to rulers, and coast-dwellers something

midway between (Esprit des Lois, l. xviii, ch. i). He is right in his facts, but misses the
economic explanation. The fact that mountaineers as such are not easy to conquer,
doubtless counts for a good deal. See it touched on in Gray's unfinished poem on the
Alliance between Government and Education, written before the appearance of the
Esprit des Lois, and stopped by Gray on the ground that "the Baron had forestalled
some of his best thoughts" (Gray's Works, ed. 1821, p. 274). The point is discussed
more fully in Dr. Dunbar's Essays on the History of Mankind, 1780, Essay vi.

(3) If the nation with such conditions is well aloof from other nations, in
virtue of being much more civilised than its near neighbours, and of being
self-sufficing as regards its produce, its civilisation (as in the cases of China
and Incarial Peru and ancient Egypt) is likely to be extremely conservative.
Above all, lack of racial interbreeding involves lack of due variation. No
"pure" race ever evolved rapidly or highly. Even the conservative primary
civilisations (as the Egyptian, Chinese, and Akkadian) rested on much race
mixture.
As Dr. Draper has well pointed out (Intellect. Develop. of Europe, ed. 1875, i, 84-88),
the peculiar regularity of Egyptian agriculture, depending as it did on the Nile
overflow, which made known in advance the quantity of the crops, lent itself
especially to a stable system of life and administration. The long-lasting exclusion of
foreigners there, as in China and in Sparta, would further secure sameness of culture;
and only by such causes can special unprogressiveness anywhere arise. Sir Henry
Maine's formula, marking off progressive and unprogressive civilisations as different
species, is merely verbal, and is not adhered to by himself. (The point is discussed at
some length by the present writer in Buckle and his Critics, pp. 402-8.) Maine's
distinction was drawn long ago by Eusèbe Salverte (De la Civilisation depuis les
premiers temps, 1813, p. 22, seq.), who philosophically goes on to indicate the
conditions which set up the differentiation; though in later references (Essai sur les
noms d'hommes, 1824, préf. p. ii; Des Sciences occultes, 1829, préf. p. vi) he recurs to
the empirical form of his proposition, which is that adhered to by Maine.

(4) When an old civilisation comes in steady contact with that of a race of
not greatly inferior but less ancient culture, physically so situated as to be
much less amenable to despotism (that is, in a hilly or otherwise easily
defensible region), it is likely so to fecundate the fresher civilisation that the
latter, if not vitiated by a bad political system, will soon surpass it,[135]
provided that the latter community in turn is duly crossed as regards its
stock, and that the former has due resources.
(5) In other words, a primitive but not barbarous people, placed in a region
not highly fruitful but not really unpropitious to human life, is the less
likely to fall tamely under a despotism because its population is not so
easily multiplied and maintained;[136] and such a people, when

physiologically variated by a mixture of stocks, and when mentally
fecundated by contact with older civilisations, tends to develop what we
term a secondary civilisation, higher in all respects than those which have
stimulated it.[137]
(6) A very great disparity in the culture-stages of meeting races, however, is
as unfavourable to the issue of a higher civilisation from their union as to a
useful blending of their stocks.[138] Thus it fares ill with the contact of higher
and lower races even in a climate equally favourable to both; and where it is
favourable to the latter only, there is likely to be no immediate progress in
the lower race, while in the terms of the case the higher will deteriorate or
disappear.[139]
(7) Where a vigorous but barbarian race overruns one much more civilised,
there is similarly little prospect of immediate gain to progress, though after
a period of independent growth the newer civilisation may be greatly
fecundated by intelligent resort to the remains of the older.
The cases of China and the Roman Empire may serve as illustrations. They were,
however, different in that the northern invasion of Rome was by relatively
considerable masses, while the Tartar conquerors of China were easily absorbed in the
vast native population.

(8) Where, again, independent States at nearly the same stage of
civilisation, whether speaking the same or different languages, stand in a
position of commerce and rivalry, but without desperate warfare, the
friction and cross-fertilisation of ideas, together with the mixture of stocks,
will develop a greater and higher intellectual and artistic life than can
conceivably arise in one great State without great or close rivals, since there
one set of ideals or standards is likely to overbear all others, with the result
of partly stereotyping taste and opinion.
This point is well put by Hume as to Greece, in his essay Of the Rise of the Arts and
Sciences (1752); and after him by Gibbon, ch. 53, Bohn ed. vi, 233; Cp. Heeren, Pol.
Hist. of Ancient Greece, Eng. tr. p. 42; Walckenaer, Essai cited, p. 338; Ferguson,
Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767, pp. 182, 183; Dunbar, Essays on the
History of Mankind, 1780, pp. 257, 271; Goguet, De l'origine des lois, des arts, et des
sciences, 1758, iii Epoque, L. ii, ch. 2; Salverte, De la Civilisation, 1813, pp. 83-88;
Grote, History of Greece, pt. ii, ch. i, ed. 1888, ii, 156; Cunningham, Western
Civilisation, i, 75. Grote brings out very clearly the "mutuality of action and reaction"
in the case of the maritime Greeks as compared with the others and with other nations.
See also Hegel, Philos. der Geschichte, Th. ii, Absch. i (ed. 1840, p. 275). Hegel,
besides noting the abstract element of geographical variety, points to the highly mixed

character of the Greek stocks, especially in Attica. So Salverte, as cited. The same
principle is rightly put by Guizot (Hist. de la civilisation en France, i, leçon 2), and
accepted by J.S. Mill (On Liberty, ch. iii, end), as a main explanation of the
intellectual progress of modern Europe. It is therefore worth weighing as regards
given peoples, by those who, like Mr. Bryce, see nothing but harm in the subdivision
of Germany after the Thirty Years' War (Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed. p. 346). Against
the undoubted evils connected with the partition system ought to be set the intellectual
gains which latterly arose from it when the intellectual life of Germany had, as it
were, recovered breath.

(9) Thus, while an empire with a developed civilisation may communicate it
to uncivilised conquered peoples not too far below its own anthropological
level, the secondary civilisation thus acquired is in its nature less "viable,"
less capable of independent evolution, than one set up by the free commerce
of trading peoples. The most rapid growths of civilisation appear always to
have occurred by way of the multiplying of free contacts among trading
communities, and among the free colonies of such.[140] The "money
economy" they introduced was a great instrument of social and industrial
evolution;[141] and on such city civilisations the ancient empires themselves
seem always to have proceeded.[142]
(10) Every phase of civilisation has its special drawbacks, so that great
retrogression may follow on great development, especially when
adventitious sources of wealth are the foundation of a luxurious culture. In
some cases a great development may be dependent on an exhaustible source
of wealth, as in the case of Britain's coal supply, the empire of ancient
Rome, the primacy of the Pope before the Reformation, or even the
Periclean empire of Athens, and the trade monopolies of Venice, the Hansa
Towns, and the Dutch Republic.
(11) The expression "decay" as applied to a people, however, has only a
relative significance: used absolutely, it stands for a delusion. Economic
conditions may worsen, and military power decline; but such processes
imply no physiological degeneration. All the "dead" civilisations of the past
were overthrown or absorbed by military violence; and there is no known
case of a nation physically well placed dying out.
Professor W.D. Whitney, who is usually so well worth listening to, fails to recognise
this fact in his interesting essay on "China and the Chinese" (Oriental and Linguistic
Studies, 2nd series). He declares that "according to the ordinary march of events in
human history, the Chinese empire should have perished from decay, and its culture
either have become extinct or have passed into the keeping of another race, more than

two thousand years ago. It had already reached the limit to its capacity of
development" (p. 88). Similarly Ratzel pronounces (History of Mankind, Eng. tr.
1896, i, 26) that "Voltaire hits the point when he says Nature has given the Chinese
the organ for discovering all that is useful to them, but not for going any further."
Voltaire never penned such a "bull." He wrote (Essai sur les mœurs, Avant-Propos, ch.
i), "Il semble que la Nature ait donné," and "nécessaire," not "useful." Even that has a
touch of paralogism; but the great essayist goes on to suggest two causes for Chinese
conservatism—their ancestral piety and the nature of their method of writing. The
first is a pseudo-explanation; the second is a vera causa, though only one of those
involved. The German specialist of to-day is really further from the scientific point of
view than the French wit of the middle of the eighteenth century, going on as he does
to decide that "defect in their endowments" causes the mediocrity of the Chinese, and
"also is the sole cause of the rigidity in their social system."
This is a vain saying; and it is no less vain to go on to ask, as Professor Whitney does,
what has become of Egypt, of the Phœnicians and Hebrews, of the Persians, of Greece
and Rome, and of Spain. The answer is easy. Egypt was conquered, and the old race
still reproduces itself, in vassalage. The "Pelasgic" civilisation of ancient Greece was
absorbed by the Greek invaders. The "Mycenæan" and "Minoan" civilisations, as seen
in ancient Troy and "Minoan" Crete, were conquered and partly absorbed. The
Phœnicians and Hebrews were destroyed or absorbed. The Persians are at present
retrograde, but may rise again.[143] Rome and Greece were successively overrun by
barbarism. Spain, like Italy, retrograded, but, like Italy, is on the path of regeneration.
In all these cases the process of causation is obvious. No nation dies or disappears
save by violence; and, given the proper conditions, all races are capable of progress
indefinitely. China, though unprogressive in comparison with a European State, has
changed in many respects within two thousand years—nay, within twenty.[144]
Professor Whitney adopts an empirical convention, and accordingly misses any real
elucidation of the problem of Chinese sociology, which he assumes to solve (p. 87) by
saying we must look for our explanations "deep in the foundations of the national
character itself." That is to say, the national character is determined by the national
character.
It is surely time that this palæo-theological fashion of explaining human affairs were
superseded by the more fruitful method of positive science, even as regards China,
which is perhaps the worst explained of all sociological cases. Like others, it had been
intelligently taken up by sociologists of the eighteenth century before the conservative
reaction (see the Esprit des Lois, vii, 6; viii, 21; x, 15; xiv, 8; xviii, 6; xix, 13-20;
Dunbar's Essays, as cited, pp. 257, 258, 262, 263, 321; and Walckenaer, Essai cited,
pp. 175, 176); but that impetus seems to have been thus far almost entirely lost.
Voltaire's fallacy is remembered and his truth ignored; and the methods of theology
continue to be applied to many questions of moral science after they have been wholly
cast out of physics and biology. The old "falsisms" of empirical politics are repeated
even by professed biologists when they enter on the field of social science. Thus we
have seen them accepted by Dr. Draper, and we find Professor Huxley (Evolution and
Ethics, Romanes Lecture for 1893, p. 4) rhetorically putting "that successive rise,
apogee, and fall of dynasties and states which is the most prominent topic of civil
history," as scientifically analogous to the process of growth and decay and death in
the human organism. Any comparative study of history shows the analogy to be
spurious. Professor Whitney was doubtless influenced, like Dr. Draper, by the

American habit of regarding European and ancient civilisations as necessarily decrepit
because "slow" and "old." Cp. Draper as cited, ii, 393-98.

In the cases above dealt with, however, and in many others, there is seen to
have been intellectual decay, in the sense of, first, a cessation of forward
movement, and, next, a loss of the power to appreciate ideas once current. A
common cause of such paralysis of the higher life is the malignant action of
dogmatic religious systems, as in the cases of Persia, Jewry, Byzantium,
Islam, Spain under Catholicism, and Scotland for two centuries under
Protestantism. Such paralysis by religion may arise alike in a highly-
organised but isolated State like Byzantium, and in a semi-civilised country
like Anglo-Saxon England.[145] The special malignity of dogma in these
cases is itself of course a matter for analysis and explanation. Other cases
are partly to be explained by (a) the substitution of systematic militarism,
always fatal to progressive culture, for a life of only occasional warfare,
favourable to study among the leisured class.[146] But (b) there is reason to
surmise a further and profoundly important cause of intellectual
retrogression in the usage which develops the culture of a people for the
most part in one sex only. The thesis may be ventured that whereas vigorous
and creative brains may arise in abundance in a young civilisation, where
the sexes are physiologically not far removed from the approximate
equality of the semi-barbarous stage, the psychological divergence set up by
mentally and physically training the males and not the females is likely to
be unfavourable to the breeding of mentally energetic types.
(12) Whether or not the last hypothesis be valid, it is clear that the co-
efficient or constituent of intellectual progress in a people, given the
necessary conditions of peace and sufficient food, is multiplication of ideas;
and this primarily results from international contact, or the contact of
wholly or partly independent communities of one people. Multiplication of
arts and crafts is of course included under the head of ideas. But unless the
stock of ideas is not merely in constant process of being added to among the
studious or leisured class, but disseminated among the other classes,
stagnation will take place among these, and will inevitably infect the
educated class.
De Tocqueville, balancing somewhat inconclusively, because always in vacuo, the
forces affecting literature in aristocratic and democratic societies, says decisively
enough (Démocratie en Amérique, ed. 1850, ii, 62-63) that "Toute aristocratie qui se
met entièrement à part du peuple devient impuissante. Cela est vrai dans les lettres

aussi bien qu'en politique." This holds clearly enough of Italian literature in the
despotic period. Mr. Godkin's criticism (Problems of Modern Democracy, p. 56) that
"M. de Tocqueville and all his followers take it for granted that the great incentive to
excellence, in all countries in which excellence is found, is the patronage and
encouragement of an aristocracy," is hardly accurate. De Tocqueville puts the case
judicially enough, so far as he goes; and Mr. Godkin falls into strange extravagance in
his counter statement that there is "hardly a single historical work composed prior to
the end of the last [eighteenth] century, except perhaps Gibbon's, which, judged by the
standard that the criticism of our day has set up, would not, though written for the
'few,' be pronounced careless, slipshod, or superficial." Tillemont, by the testimony of
Professor Bury, was a more thorough worker in his special line than Gibbon. It would
be easy to name scores of writers in various branches of history in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries whom no good critic to-day would call careless or slipshod; and
if Hume and Robertson, Clarendon and Burnet, be termed superficial, the "standard"
will involve a similar characterisation of most historical writers of our own day. As
regards present-day literary productions, De Tocqueville and Mr. Godkin alike omit
the necessary economic analysis.

(13) In the intellectual infectiousness of all class degradation, properly
speaking, lies the final sociological (as apart from the primary ethical)
condemnation of slavery. The familiar argument that slavery first secured
the leisure necessary for culture, even were it wholly instead of being
merely partially true, would not rebut the censure that falls to be passed on
slavery in later stages of civilisation. All the ancient States, before Greece,
stood on slavery: then it was not slavery that yielded her special culture.
What she gained from older civilisations was the knowledge and the arts
developed by specialisation of pursuits; and such specialisation was not
necessarily dependent on slavery, which could abound without it. It was in
the special employment, finally, of the exceptionally large free population
of Athens that the greatest artistic output was reached.[147] In later periods,
the slave population was the great nucleus of superstition and anti-culture.
Inasmuch, then, as education is in only a small degree compatible with
toilsome poverty, the betterment of the material conditions of the toiling
class is essential to progress in ideas. That is to say, continual progress
implies gradual elimination of class inequality, and cannot subsist
otherwise. At the same time, a culture-class must be maintained by new
machinery when leisured wealth is got rid of.[148]
(14) Again, it follows from the foregoing (4-10) that the highest civilisation
will be that in which the greatest number of varying culture-influences
meet,[149] in the most happily-crossed stock, under climatic conditions
favourable to energy, on a basis of a civilisation sufficiently matured.[150]

But in order to the effectual action of such various culture-influences
through all classes of the nation in which they meet, there is needed a
constant application of social or political regimen. In the lack of that, a
great conflux of culture-forces may miss fruition. A mere fortuitous
depression of the rich class, and elevation of the poor, will not suffice to
place a society on a sound or even on an improved footing. Such a change
occurred in ancient Athens after Salamis, when the poorer sort, who had
constituted the navy, flourished[151] as against the richer, who had been the
land soldiery, and whose lands had been ravaged. But the forces of
disintegration played afresh. Yet again, transient financial conditions, such
as those of Italy before the Reformation, of Holland until the decline of its
fishing and trade, and of Venice until its final commercial decay, may
sustain a great artistic life, art having always depended on private or public
demand. Thus with a change in the geographical course of trade, a great
phase of culture-life may dwindle. So many and so complex are the forces
and conditions of progress in civilisation.
§2
It will readily be seen that most of the foregoing propositions have direct
reference to well-known facts of history. Thus (a) ancient Egypt represents
a primary civilisation, marked indeed by some fluctuations connected with
dynastic changes which involved mixture of stocks, but on the whole
singularly fixed; while ancient Greek civilisation was emphatically a
secondary one, the fruit of much race-mixture and many interacting culture-
forces, all facilitated by the commercial position and coast-conformation of
Hellas.
This view is partly rejected by Grote in two passages (pt. i, chs. xvi, xvii, ed. 1888, i,
326, 413) in which he gives to the "inherent and expansive force" of "the Greek mind"
the main credit of Greek civilisation. But his words, to begin with, are confused and
contradictory: "The transition of the Greek mind from its poetical to its comparatively
positive stage was self-operated, accomplished by its own inherent and expansive
force—aided indeed, but by no means either impressed or provoked from without." In
the second place, there is no basis for the denial of "impression or provocation" from
without. And finally, what is decisive, the historian himself has in other passages
acknowledged that the Greeks received from Asia and Egypt just such "provocation"
as is seen to take place in varying degrees in the culture-contacts of all nations (chs.
xv, xvi, pp. 307, 329). Of the contact with Egypt he expressly says that it "enlarged
the range of their thoughts and observations." His whole treatment of the rise of
culture, however, is meagre and imperfect relatively to his ample study of the culture
itself. Later students grow more and more unanimous as to the composite character of

the Greek-speaking stock in the earliest traceable periods of Hellenic life (cp. Bury,
History of Greece, ed. 1906, pp. 39-42, and Professor Burrows, The Discoveries in
Crete, 1907, p. 144), and the consequent complexity of the entire Hellenic civilisation.
The case is suggestively put by Eduard Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 155) in
the observation that while the west coast of Greece had as many natural advantages as
the eastern, it remained backward in civilisation when the other had progressed far.
"Here there lacked the foreign stimulus: the west of Greece is away from the source of
culture. Here, accordingly, primitive conditions continued to rule, while in the east a
higher culture evolved itself.... Corinth in the older period played no part whatever,
whether in story or in remains." The same proposition was put a generation ago by A.
Bertrand, who pointed out that the coasts of Elis and Messenia are "incomparably
more fertile" than those of Argolis and Attica (Études de mythologie et d'archéologie
grecques, 1858, pp. 40-41); and again by Winwood Reade in The Martyrdom of Man
(1872, p. 64): "A glance at the map is sufficient to explain why it was that Greece
became civilised before the other European lands. It is nearest to those countries in
which civilisation first arose ... compelled to grow towards Asia as a tree grows
towards the light." But to this generalisation should be put the qualifying clause
(above, p. 55) that fertile coasts when developed are defensible only by a strongly
organised community. Thus an early exploitation of Elis and Messenia would be
checked by piracy.
The question as to the originality of Greek culture, it is interesting to note, was
already discussed at the beginning of the eighteenth century. See Shaftesbury's
Characteristics, Misc. iii, ch. i.

(b) The Greek land as a whole, especially the Attic, was only moderately
fertile, and therefore not so cheaply and redundantly populated as Egypt.
The bracing effect of their relative poverty was fully recognised by the Greeks
themselves. Cp. Herodotus, vii, 102, and Thucydides, i, 123. See on the same point
Heeren, Political History of Ancient Greece, Eng. tr. pp. 24-33; Thirlwall, History of
Greece, small ed. i, 12; Duncker, Gesch. des Alterthums, iii, ch. i, § 1; Wachsmuth,
Hist. Antiq. of the Greeks, § 8; Duruy, Hist. Grecque, 1851, p. 7; Grote, part ii, ch. i
(ed. 1888, ii, 160); Boeckh, Public Economy of Athens, B. i, c. 8; Niebuhr, Lectures, li
(Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 265); Mahaffy, Rambles and Studies in Greece, 4th ed. pp. 137,
164-67. Dr. Grundy (Thucydides and the History of his Age, 1911, p. 58 sq.) lays
stress on the fertility of the valleys, but recognises the smallness of the fertile areas.

(c) Hellas was further so decisively cut up into separate cantons by its
mountain ranges, and again in respect of the multitude of the islands, that
the Greek districts were largely foreign to each other,[152] and their cultures
had thus the advantage of reacting and interacting, as against the
disadvantage of their incurable political separateness—that disadvantage in
turn being correlative with the advantage of insusceptibility to a despotism.
The effect of geographical conditions on Greek history is discussed at length in
Conrad Bursian's essay, Ueber den Einfluss des griechischen Landes auf den
Charakter seiner Bewohner, which I have been unable to procure or see; but I gather

from his Geographie von Griechenlands that he takes the view here set forth. Cp.
Senior's Journal kept in Turkey and Greece, 1859, p. 255, for a modern Greek's view
of the state of his nation, "divided into small districts by mountain ranges intersecting
each other in all directions without a road or canal"; the deduction from the same
perception made by the young Arthur Stanley (Prothero's Life of Dean Stanley, 1-vol.
ed. p. 143); and the impression retained from his travels by M. Bertrand, Études de
mythologie et d'archéologie grecques, 1858, p. 199.
The profound importance of the geographical fact has been recognised more or less
clearly and fully by many writers—e.g., Hume, essay Of the Rise and Progress of the
Arts and the Sciences (ed. 1825 of Essays, i, 115-16); Gillies, History of Greece, 1-
vol. ed. p. 5; Heeren, as cited, pp. 35, 75; Duncker, as last cited, also ch. iii, § 12 (2te
Aufl. 1860, p. 601); Duruy, ch. i; Cox, General History of Greece, bk. i, ch. i;
Thirlwall, ch. x; Wachsmuth, Eng. tr. i, 87; Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive,
Leçon 53ième; Grote, pt. ii, ch. i (ii, 155); Finlay, History of Greece, Tozer's ed. i, 28;
K.O. Müller, Introd. to Scientific Mythology, Eng. tr. p. 179; Hegel, as last cited;
Hertzberg, Geschichte von Hellas und Rom, 1879 (in Oncken's series), i, 9; Winwood
Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, 1872, p. 65 sq.; Bury, History of Greece, ed. 1906, pp.
2-4; Fyffe (very explicitly), Primer of Greek History, p. 8—but it is strangely
overlooked by writers to whom one turns for a careful study of causes. Even Grote,
after having clearly set forth (ii, 150) the predetermining influence of land-form,
attributes Greek divisions to the "character of the race," which even in this
connection, however, he describes as "splitting by natural fracture into a multitude of
self-administering, indivisible cities" (pt. ii, ch. 28, beginning); and Sir George Cox,
after specifying the geographical factor, speaks of it as merely "fostering" a love of
isolation resulting from "political creed." Freeman (History of Federal Government)
does not seem to apply the geographical fact to the explanation of any phase of Greek
history, though he sees in Greece (ed. 1893, pp. 92, 554) "each valley and peninsula
and island marked out by the hand of nature for an independent being," and quotes (p.
559) Cantù as to the effect of land-form on history in Italy. In so many words he
pronounces (p. 101) that the love of town-autonomy was "inherent in the Greek
mind." Mr. Warde Fowler (City-State of the Greeks and Romans) does not once give
heed to the geographical conditions of causation, always speaking of the Greeks as
lacking the "faculty" of union as compared with the Latins, though the Eastern Empire
finally showed greater cohesive power than the Western. Even Mr. Fyffe (Primer
cited, p. 127), despite his preliminary recognition of the facts, finally speaks of the
Greeks as relatively lacking in the "gift for government."
The same assumption is made in Lord Morley's Compromise (ed. 1888, p. 108) in the
allusion to "peoples so devoid of the sovereign faculty of political coherency as were
the Greeks and the Jews." Lord Morley's proposition is that such peoples may still
evolve great civilising ideas; but though that is true, the implied thesis as to "faculty"
weakens even the truth. The case of the Jews is to be explained in exactly the same
way as that of the Greeks, the face of Palestine being disjunct and segregate in a
peculiar degree. Other "Semites," living in great plains, were united in great
monarchies. The sound view of the case as to Rome is put by Hertzberg: "Soll man im
Gegensatze zu der hellenischen Geschichte es in kürzester Fassung bezeichnen, so
kann man etwa sagen, die italische Landesnatur stellte der Ausbildung eines grossen
einheitlich geordneten Staates durchaus nicht die gewaltigen Hindernisse entgegen,
wie das in Griechenland der Fall war" (Gesch. von Hellas und Rom, ii, 7). Cp.
Shuckburgh, History of Rome, 1894, p. 9, as to "the vast heights which effectually

separate tribes." Dr. Cunningham puts it (Western Civilisation, i, 152, 160) that
Roman expansion in Italy came of the need to reach a true frontier of defence, in the
lack of physical barriers to the early States. (So Lord Cromer, Anc. and Mod.
Imperialism, 1910, p. 19.) It seems more plausible to say that all of the States
concerned were positively disposed to conquest, and that the physical conditions of
Italy made possible an overrunning which in early Greece was impossible.
The theory of "faculty," consistently applied on Mr. Fowler's and Lord Morley's lines,
would credit the French with an innate gift of union much superior to that of the
Germans—at least in the modern period—and the Chinese with the greatest "faculty"
of all. But the long maintenance of one rule over all China is clearly due in large part
to the "great facility of internal intercourse" (Davis, The Chinese, Introd.) so long
established. The Roman roads were half the secret of the cohesion of the Empire. Dr.
Draper suggests, ingeniously but inaccurately, that Rome had strength and
permanence because of lying east and west, and thus possessing greater racial
homogeneity than it would have had if it lay north and south (Intel. Devel. of Europe,
i, 11). On the other hand, mountainous Switzerland remains still cantonally separate,
though the pressure of surrounding States, beginning with that of Austria, forced a
political union. Compare the case of the clans of the Scottish Highlands down to the
road-making period after the last Jacobite rising. See the principle discussed in Mr.
Spencer's Principles of Sociology, i, § 17.
It may be well, before leaving the subject, to meet the important criticism of the
geographical principle by Fustel de Coulanges (La Cité antique, liv. iii, ch. xiv, p.
238, édit. 1880). Noting that the incurable division of the Greeks has been attributed
to the nature of their land, and that it has been said that the intersecting mountains
established lines of natural demarcation among men, he goes on to argue: "But there
are no mountains between Thebes and Platæa, between Argos and Sparta, between
Sybaris and Crotona. There were none between the towns of Latium, or between the
twelve cities of Etruria. Physical nature has doubtless some influence on the history of
peoples, but the beliefs of men have a much greater. Between two neighbouring cities
there was something more impassable than a mountain—to wit, the series of sacred
limits, the difference of cults, the barrier which each city set up between the stranger
and its Gods."
All this, so far as it goes, is substantially true, but it does not at all conflict with the
principle as above set forth. Certainly all cities, like all tribes, were primarily
separatist; though even in religious matters there was some measure of early peaceful
inter-influence, and a certain tendency to syncresis as well as to separateness. (Cp.
K.O. Müller, Dorians, Eng. tr. i, 228.) But the principle is not special to the cities of
Greece. Cities and tribes were primarily separatist in Babylonia and in Egypt. How,
then, were these regions nevertheless monarchised at an early period? Clearly by
reason of the greater invitingness and feasibility of conquest in such territories—for
their unification was forcible. The conditions had thus both an objective and a
subjective, a suggestive and a permissive force, both lacking in Greece. Again, the
twelve cities of Etruria formed a league. If they did so more readily and effectually
than the Greeks, is not the level character of their territory, which made them
collectively open to attack, and facilitated intercourse, one of the obviously probable
causes? No doubt the close presence of hostile and alien races was a further unifying
force which did not arise in Greece. Etruria, finally, like Latium, was unified by
conquest; the question is, Why was not Greece? There is no answer save one—that in

the pre-Alexandrian period no Greek State had acquired the military and
administrative skill and resources needed to conquer and hold such a divided territory.
Certainly the conditions conserved the ideal of separateness and non-aggression or
non-assimilation, so that cities which had easy access to each other respected each
other's ideal. But here again it was known that an attempt at conquest would probably
lead to alliances between the attacked State and others; and the physical conditions
prevented any State save Macedonia from becoming overwhelmingly strong. To these
conditions, then, we always return, not as to sole causes, but as to determinants.

(d) In Egypt, again, culture was never deeply disseminated, and before
Alexander was hardly at all fecundated by outside contact. In Greece there
was always the great uncultured slave substratum; and the arrest of
freedom, to say nothing of social ignorance, female subjection, and sexual
perversion, ultimately kept vital culture stationary. In Rome, militarism and
the multiplication of the slave class, along with the deletion of the
independent and industrious middle class, made progressive culture
impossible, as surely as it broke down self-government. In all cases alike,
over-population, not being met by science, either bred poverty or was
obviated by crime and vice.
The so-called regeneration of Europe by the barbarian conquest, finally, was
simply the beginning of a long period of corrupted and internecine
barbarism, the old culture remaining latent; and not till after many centuries
did the maturing barbaric civilisation in times of compulsory peace reach
the capacity of being fecundated by the intelligent assimilation of the old.
But after the Renaissance, as before, the diseases of militarism and class
privilege and the political subjection caused a backthrow and intellectual
stagnation, which was assisted by the commercial decline brought upon
Italy; so that in the feudal period, in one State after another, we have the
symptoms of, as it were, senile "decay" and retrogression.[153] In all cases
this is to be set down proximately to the deficit of new ideas, and in some to
excess of strife, which exhausted spare energy among the leisured class,
deepened the misery of the toilers, and normally prevented the intelligent
intercourse of peoples. It is become a commonplace of historical philosophy
that the Crusades wrought for good inasmuch as they meant fresh
communication between East and West. Yet it may be doubted whether
much more was not done through the quiet contacts of peace between
Saracen and Christian in Western Europe, and by the commerce with the
East which preceded the Crusades,[154] than by the forced intercourse
following on religious war. In any case, the transition from quasi-decay to

progress in Christendom is clearly due to the entrance of new ideas of many
species from many directions into the common stock; Greek letters, Saracen
physics, and new geographical discovery all combining to generate thought.
The case of Japan, again, compares with both that of ancient Greece and
that of modern Europe. Its separate civilisation, advantageously placed in
an archipelago, drew stimulus early in the historic period from that of
China; and, while long showing the Chinese unprogressiveness in other
respects, partly in virtue of the peculiar burdensomeness of the Chino-
Japanese system of ideograms, it made remarkable progress on the side of
art. The recent rapid industrial development (injurious to the artistic life) is
plainly a result of the European and American contact; and if only the
mechanism of reading and writing be made manageable on the European
lines, and the snare of militarism be escaped, the Japanese civilisation may
develop mentally as much as it is doing industrially and in military
organisation.
It suffices the practical political student, then, to note that progress is thus
always a matter of intelligible causation; and, without concerning himself
about predicting the future or estimating the sum of possibilities, to take up
the tasks of contemporary politics as all other tasks are taken up by practical
men, as a matter of adaptation of means to ends. The architect and engineer
have nothing to do with calculating as to when the energy of the solar
system will be wholly transmuted. As little has the politician to do with
absolute estimates of the nature of progress. All alike have to do with the
study of laws, forces, and economics.
§3
We may now, then, set forth the all-pervading biological forces or
tendencies of attraction and repulsion in human affairs as the main primary
factors in politics or corporate life, which it is the problem of human
science to control by counteracting or guiding; and we may without further
illustration set down the principal modes in which these instincts appear.
They are, broadly speaking:—
(a) Animal pugnacities and antipathies of States or peoples, involving combinations,
sanctified from the first by religion, and surviving as racial aspirations in subject
peoples.

(b) Class divisions, economically produced, resulting in class combinations and
hostilities within a State, and, in particular, popular desire for betterment.
(c) The tendency to despotism as a cure for class oppression or anarchy; and the spirit
of conquest.
(d) The beneficent lure of commerce, promoting intercourse, countered by the
commercial jealousies of States.
(e) Designs of rulers, giving rise to popular or aristocratic factions—complicated by
questions of succession and loyalism.
(f) Religious combinations, antipathies, and ambitions, international or sectarian. In
more educated communities, ideals of government and conduct.

In every one of these modes, be it observed, the instinct of repulsion
correlates with the instinct of attraction. The strifes are the strifes of
combinations, of groups or masses united in themselves by sympathy, in
antipathy to other groups or masses. The esprit de corps arises alike in the
species, the horde, the tribe, the community, the class, the faction, the
nation, the trade or profession, the Church, the sect, the party. Always men
unite to oppose; always they must love to hate, fraternise to struggle.
The analogies in physics are obvious, but need not here be dwelt upon. There is a risk
of losing concrete impressions, which are here in view, in a highly generalised
statement of cosmic analogies. But it may be well to point out that a general view will
perfectly reconcile the superficially conflicting doctrines of recent biologists, as to
"progress by struggle" and "progress by co-operation." Both statements hold good, the
two phases being correlatives.

I have said that it is extremely difficult to imagine a state of society in
which there shall be no public operation of any one of these forces. I am
disposed to say it is impossible, but for scientific purposes prefer to put
simply the difficulties of the conception. A cessation of war is not only
easily conceivable, but likely; but a cessation of strife of aspiration would
mean a state of biological equilibrium throughout the civilised world. Now,
pure equilibrium is by general consent a state only momentarily possible;
and the state of dissolution of unions, were that to follow, would involve
strife of opinion at least up to a certain point. But just as evolution is now
visibly towards an abandonment of brute strife among societies, so may it
be reasonably expected that the strife of ideals and doctrines within
societies, though now perhaps emotionally intense in proportion to the
limitation of brute warfare, will gradually be freed of malevolent passion as
organisms refine further. Passion, in any case, has hitherto been at once

motive-power and hindrance—the omnipresent force, since all ideas have
their correlative emotion. A perception of this has led to some needless
dispute over what is called the "economic theory" of history; critics
insisting that men are ruled by non-economic as well as economic motives.
[155]
The solution is perfectly simple. Men are proximately ruled by their
passions or emotions; and the supremacy of the economic factor consists in
its being, for the majority, the most permanent director or stimulant of
feeling. Therefore, the great social rectification, if it ever come, must needs
be economic.
Certainly, on the principle laid down, there is a likelihood that strife of
ideals and doctrines may be for a time intensified by the very process of
social reform, should that go to lessen the stress of the industrial struggle
for existence. It is easy to see that England has in the past hundred and
twenty years escaped the stress of domestic strife which in France wrought
successive revolutions, not so much by any virtue in its partially democratic
constitution as by the fact that on the one hand a war was begun with
France by the English ruling classes at an early stage of the first revolution,
and that on the other hand the animal energies of the middle and lower
classes were on the whole freer than those of the French to run in the
channels of industrial competition. People peacefully fighting each other
daily in trade, not to speak of sports, were thereby partly safeguarded from
carrying the instincts of attraction and repulsion in politics to the length of
insurrection and civil war. When the strife of trade became congested, the
spirit of political strife, fed by hunger, broke out afresh, to be again eased
off when the country had an exciting foreign war on hand. So obvious is
this that it may be the last card of Conservatism to play off the war spirit
against the reform spirit, as was done with some temporary success in
England by Beaconsfield, and as is latterly being done by his successors.[156]
The climaxing movement of political rationalism is evidently dependent on
the limitation of the field of industrial growth and the absence of brute
warfare. And if, as seems conceivable, political rationalism attains to a
scientific provision for the well-being of the mass of the people, we shall
have attained a condition in which the forces of attraction and repulsion, no
longer flowing freely in the old social channels, may be expected to dig
new ones or deepen those lately formed. The future channels, generally
speaking, would tend to lie in the regions of political, ethical, and religious

opinion; and the partial disuse of any one of these will tend to bring about
the deepening of the others.
But this is going far ahead; and it is our business rather to make clear, with
the help of an analysis of analogous types of civilisation, what has
happened in the modern past of our country. The simple general laws under
notice are universal, and will be found to apply in all stages of history,
though the interpretation of many phases of life by their means may be a
somewhat complex matter.
For instance, the life of China[157] (above discussed) and that of India may at
first sight seem to give little colour to the assumption of a constant play of
social attraction and repulsion. The "unprogressiveness of Asia" is dwelt on
alike by many who know Asia and many who do not. But this relative
unprogressiveness is to be explained, like European progress, in terms of
the conditions. China is simply a case of comparative culture-stability and
culture-isolation. The capital condition of progress in civilisation has
always been, as aforesaid, the contact of divergent races whose independent
culture-elements, though different, are not greatly different in grade and
prestige. Now, the outside contacts of China, down till the eighteenth
century, had been either with races which had few elements of civilisation
to give her, like the Mongols, or with a civilisation little different from or
less vigorous than her own, like that of India. Even these contacts counted
for much, and Chinese history has been full of political convulsions, despite
—or in keeping with—the comparative stagnation of Chinese culture. (On
this see Peschel, Races of Men, Eng. tr. pp. 361-74. Cp. Huc, Chinese
Empire, Eng. tr. ed. 1859, p. xvii; Walckenaer, Essai sur l'histoire de
l'espèce humaine, 1798, pp. 175, 176; and Maine, Early History of
Institutions, pp. 226, 227). The very pigtail which for Europe is the symbol
of Chinese civilisation is only two hundred years old, having come in with
the Mantchoo dynasty; and the policy of systematically excluding
foreigners dates from the same period (Huc, p. 236). "No one," writes
Professor Flint, "who has felt interest enough in that singular nation to
study the researches and translations of Remusat, Pauthier, Julien, Legge,
Plath, Faber, Eitel, and others, will hesitate to dismiss as erroneous the
commonplace that it has been an unprogressive nation" (History of the
Philosophy of History, vol. i, 1893, p. 88).

China was in fact progressive while the variety of stocks scattered over her
vast area reacted on each other in virtue of variety of government and way
of life:[158] it was when they were reduced under one imperial government
that unity of state-system, coupled with the exclusion of foreign contacts,
imposed stagnation. But the stagnation was real, and other factors
contributed to its continuance. The fecundity of the soil has always
maintained a redundant and therefore a poor and ignorant population—a
condition which we have described as fatal to progress in culture if not
counteracted, and which further favours the utter subjection of women and
the consequent arrest of half the sources of variation. Mencius, speaking to
the rulers of his day (3rd c. B.C.), declared with simple profundity that
"They are only men of education who, without a certain livelihood, are able
to maintain a fixed heart. As to the people, if they have not a certain
livelihood it follows that they will not have a fixed heart. And if they have
not a fixed heart there is nothing they will not do in the way of self-
abandonment, of moral deflection, of depravity, and of wild license"
(Legge, Life and Works of Mencius, 1875, p. 49). That lesson the rulers of
China could not learn, any more than their European congeners.
We cannot, therefore, accede to Professor Flint's further remark that "The
development and filiation of thought is scarcely less traceable in the history
and literature of China than of Greece"—that is, if it be meant that Chinese
history down till our own day may be so compared with the history of
pagan Greece. The forces of fixation in China have been too strong to admit
of this. The same factors have been at work in India, where, further,
successive conquests, down till our own, had results very similar to those of
the barbarian conquest of the Roman Empire. Yet at length, next door to
China, in Japan, there has rapidly taken place a national transformation that
is not to be paralleled in the world's history; and in India the Congress
movement has developed in a way that twenty years ago was thought
impossible.[159] And while these things are actually happening before the
world's eyes, certain Englishmen vociferate more loudly than ever the
formula of the "unchangeableness of Asia." A saner, though still a
speculative view, is put forth by Mr. C.H. Pearson in his work on National
Character. It was anticipated by—among others—M. Philarète Chasles.
See his L'Angleterre politique, édit. 1878, pp. 250, 251. And Walckenaer,

over a hundred years ago (Essai cited, p. 368), predicted the future
civilisation of the vast plains of Tartary.

FOOTNOTES:
[134] On this may be consulted a suggestive paper by Mr. Lowes Dickinson in
the Free Review, April, 1894, and an instructive study by Mr. T. Whittaker, "A
Critical Essay on the Philosophy of History," in his Essays and Notices, 1895.
Cp. Spencer, "Progress: Its Law and Cause," in Essays, vol. i.
[135] This also is posited by Dunbar, Essays cited, pp. 230, 233.
[136] This again, as well as the general importance of culture-contacts, is noted
by Walckenaer, Essai cited, pp. 202-3.
[137] This was seen in antiquity. Julian, at least, pointed to the fashion in which
the Greeks had perfected studies the rudiments of which they had received from
other peoples (apud Cyrill, v. 8); and Celsus had said it before him (Origen,
Contra Celsum, i. 2).
[138] See some just remarks by Bagehot in Physics and Politics, pp. 67-69,
proceeding on Quatrefages, as to the varying success of given race-mixtures in
different regions, in terms of the difference of the physical environment.
Compare Schäffle, Bau und Körper de Socialen Lebens, 1875-8, ii, 468.
[139] Cp. Dunbar, as cited, p. 211, and Bagehot, as cited, p. 71. In such cases as
those of British India and French Algiers the exception is only apparent, the
European control being kept up by annual drafts of new men.
[140] E.g. the ancient Ægean civilisation, as seen in "Minoan" Crete; the
colonies of the Phœnicians; those of the Greeks in Asia Minor, Italy, and Sicily;
the medieval Italian Republics; the Hansa towns; those of the Netherlands; and
the United States.
[141] See Dr. Cunningham, Western Civilisation, pp. 73, 74, 83-86, 94-97, etc.,
for an interesting development of this principle. Cp. Prof. Ashley, Introduction to
Economic History, 1888-93, i, 43, and Hildebrand, as there cited. The originality
of Hildebrand's ideas on this point has perhaps been overrated by Ochenkowski
and others. Smith recognised the main facts (Wealth of Nations, bk. i, c. iv). See
also the passage from Torrens cited by M'Culloch in his essay on "Money,"
Treatises, ed. 1859, pp. 9, 10.
[142] E.g. Babylonia, Egypt, Alexander's empire, and Rome.
[143] This was written before the recent revolution.
[144] Since this was written China has undergone her new birth.
[145] Cp. Pearson's History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, i,
312, and H.W. C. Davis, England under the Normans and Angevins, 1905, pp. 1,
2, 47.

[146] Japan now runs a grave risk of such retrogression.
[147] Cp. Cunningham's Western Civilisation, i, 109.
[148] The point is argued at greater length by the author in an article on "The
Economics of Genius" in the Forum, April, 1898 (rep. in Essays in Sociology,
vol. ii).
[149] Cp. Tiele, Outlines of the History of Religion, Eng. tr. pp. 205, 207, and
the present writer's Short History of Freethought, 2nd ed. i, 122-24.
[150] The civilisations of North America and the English "dominions," while
showing much diffusion of average culture, produce thus far relatively few of
the highest fruits because of social immaturity and the smallness of their culture
class.
[151] Aristotle, Politics, ii, 12; v, 4.
[152] Grote (ii, 150) argues that the need to move the cattle between high and
low grounds promoted communication between "otherwise disunited villages."
But that would be a small matter. The essential point is that, whatever the
contacts, the communities remained alien to each other.
[153] See Stubbs, Const. Hist. of England, 4th ed. iii, 632-33, as to England in
the fifteenth century; and Michelet, Introd. to Renaissance (vol. vii of Hist. de
France).
[154] See below, pt. vi, ch. i, § 2.
[155] This discussion also goes back for at least two centuries. See Shaftesbury's
Characteristics, Misc. iii, ch. i (vol. iii, pp. 137, 152).
[156] Note, in this connection, the tactic of Mr. Balfour in the election struggle
of 1909-10.
[157] This was written, of course, before the recent uprising.
[158] Cp. Professor Giles, The Civilisation of China, pp. 1-19, as to the little-
recognised diversity of Chinese speech, stock, and climate.
[159] Since these words were written China in turn has had her new birth,
vindicating the doctrine above set forth.

PART II
ECONOMIC FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY

Chapter I
ROMAN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION
By singling out one set of the forces of aggregation and disintegration
touched on in the foregoing general view, it is possible to get a more
concrete idea of what actually went on in the Roman body politic. It is
always useful in economic science, despite protests to the contrary, to
consider bare processes irrespectively of ethical feeling; and the advantage
accrues similarly in the "economic interpretation of history."[160] We have
sufficiently for our purpose considered Roman history under the aspects of
militarism and class egoism: it remains to consider it as a series of
economic phenomena.
This has been facilitated by many special studies. Gibbon covers much of the ground
in chapters 6, 14, 17, 18, 29, 35, 36 and 41; and Professor Guglielmo Ferrero sheds
new light at some points in his great work, The Greatness and Decline of Rome (Eng.
trans. 5 vols. 1907-1911), though his economics at times calls for revision. Cp. Alison
on "The Fall of Rome," in Essays, 1850, vol. iii (a useful conspectus, though flawed
by some economic errors); Spalding's Italy and the Italian Islands, 3rd ed. 1845, i,
371-400; Dureau de la Malle, Économie politique des Romains, 1840, t. ii; Robiou et
Delaunay, Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome, 1888, vol. iii, ch. 1; Fustel de
Coulanges, Le Colonat romain, etc.; Finlay, History of Greece from its Conquest by
the Romans, ed. 1877, ch. i, §§ 5-8; Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, vol. i,
1864, chs. xi, xii, xx (a work full of sound criticism of testimonies); W.T. Arnold,
Roman Provincial Administration, 1879; Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilisation and
Decay, 1897, ch. i; and Dr. Cunningham's Western Civilisation, vol. i, 1899. Among
many learned and instructive German treatises may be noted the Preisschrift of R.
Pöhlmann, Die Uebervölkerung der antiken Grossstädte, Leipzig, 1884. Special
notice is due to the recent work of W.R. Patterson, The Nemesis of Nations, 1907—a
valuable study of slavery.

As we have first traced them, the Romans are a cluster of agricultural and
pastoral tribes, chronically at war with their neighbours, and centring round
certain refuge-fortresses on one or two of the "Seven Hills." Whether before
or after conquest by monarchic Etruscans, these tribes tended normally to
fall into social grades in which relative wealth and power tended to go
together. The first source of subsistence for all was cattle-breeding and
agriculture, and that of the richer was primarily slave labour, a secondary
source being usury. Slaves there were in the earliest historic times. But from

the earliest stages wealth was in some degree procured through war, which
yielded plunder in the form of cattle,[161] the principal species of riches in
the ages before the precious metals stood for the command of all forms of
wealth. Thus the rich tended to grow richer even in that primitive
community, their riches enabling them specially to qualify themselves for
war, so getting more slaves and cattle, and to acquire fresh slave labour in
time of peace, while in time of war the poor cultivator ran a special risk of
being himself reduced to slavery at home, in that his farm was untilled,
while that of the slave-owner went on as usual.[162] Long before the ages
described as decadent, the lapse of the poor into slavery was a frequent
event. "The law of debt, framed by creditors, and for the protection of
creditors, was the most horrible that has ever been known among men."[163]
When the poorer cultivator borrowed stock or seed from the richer, he had
first to pay a heavy interest; and when in bad years he failed to meet that
liability he could be at once sold up and finally enslaved with his family, so
making competition all the harder for the other small cultivators. As against
the plainly disintegrating action of such a system, however, wars of
conquest and plunder became to some extent a means of popular salvation,
the poorer having ultimately their necessary share in the booty, and, as the
State grew, in the conquered lands. Military expansion was thus an
economic need.
In such an inland community, commerce could grow but slowly, the
products being little adapted for distant exchange. The primitive prejudice
of landholders against trade, common to Greece and Rome, left both
handicraft and commerce largely to aliens and pariahs.[164] The traders, as
apart from the agriculturists and vine-and olive-growers, would as a rule be
foreigners, "non-citizens," having no political rights; and their calling was
from the first held in low esteem by the richer natives, were it only because
in comparison it was always apt to involve some overreaching of the
agriculturist,[165] which as between man and man could be seen to be a bad
thing by moralists who had no scruples about usury and enslavement for
debt. And as the scope of the State increased from age to age, the patrician
class found ready to its hand means of enrichment which yielded more
return with much less trouble than was involved in commerce. The
prejudice against trade was no bar to brigandage.

On the other hand, the first practical problem of all communities, taxation,
was intelligently faced by the Roman aristocracy from the outset. The
payment of the tributum or occasional special tax for military purposes was
a condition of the citizen franchise, and so far the patricians were all
burdened where the unenfranchised plebeians were not. But this
contribution "was looked upon as a forced loan, and was repaid when the
times improved."[166] And there were other compensations. The use of the
public pastures (which seem at one time to have been the sole source of the
State's revenue[167]), and the cultivation of public land, were operations
which could be so conducted as to pay the individual without paying the
State. It is clear that frauds in this connection were at all times common: the
tithes and rents due on the ager publicus were evaded, and the land itself
appropriated wherever possible by the more powerful, though still called
public property.[168] "The poorer plebeian, therefore, always strove to have
conquered lands divided, and not kept as ager publicus; while the landless
men who got allotments at a distance were inclined to regard their
migration as an almost equal grievance. If the rich men, they argued, had
not monopolised the public pastures with their herds, and treated the lands
which they leased at a nominal rental as their own, there would have been
enough land at home to divide among those who had been ruined while
serving their country in arms."[169]
But as the sphere of conquest widened, another economic phase
supervened. Where newly conquered territory was too distant to tempt any
save the poorest citizens, or to be directly utilised by the rich, it could still
be made ager publicus and rented to its own inhabitants; and the collection
of this and other exactions from subject provinces gradually grew to be a
main source of Roman wealth. For the mere cattle-looting of the early days
there was substituted the systematic extortion of tribute. "In antiquity
conquest meant essentially the power to impose a tribute upon the
conquered";[170] and "until the time of Augustus the Romans had maintained
their armies by seizing and squandering the accumulated [bullion] capital
hoarded by all the nations of the world."[171] Meanwhile the upper classes
were directly or indirectly supported by the annual tribute which from the
time of the conquest of Greece was drawn solely from the provinces. Paulus
Emilius brought from the sack of Hellas so enormous a treasure in bullion,
as well as in objects of art, that the exaction of the tributum from Roman

citizens, however rich, was felt to have become irrational; and henceforth,
until Augustus re-imposed taxation to pay his troops, Italy sponged
undisguisedly on the rest of the Empire.[172] Cæsar's expeditions were
simply quests for plunder and revenue; and the reason for his speedy retreat
from Britain, for which there have been framed so many superfluous
explanations, is plainly given in the letter of Cicero in which he tells of the
news sent him from Britain by his brother—"no hope of plunder."[173] But
the supreme need was a regular annual tribute, preferably in bullion, but
welcome as corn. On the one hand the exacted revenue supported the
military and the bureaucracy; on the other hand, the business of collecting
taxes and tribute was farmed out in the hands of companies of publicani,
mainly formed of the so-called knights, the equites of the early days; in
whose hands rich senators, in defiance of legal prohibition, placed capital
sums for investment,[174] as they had previously used foreigners, who were
free to take usury where a Roman was not. Of such money-makers Gallia
Provincia was already full in the days of Cicero.[175] Roman administration
was thus a matter of financially exploiting the Empire in the interest of the
Roman moneyed classes;[176] and the ruthless skill with which the
possibilities of the situation were developed is perhaps even now not fully
realised. The Roman financier could secure a tribute upon tribute by lending
to a subject city or State the money demanded of it by the government, and
charge as much interest on the loan as the borrowers could well pay. We
know that the notoriously conscientious Brutus, of sacred memory, thus
lent, or backed a friend who lent, money to tribute-payers at 48 per cent., or
at least demanded 48 per cent. on his loans, and sought to use the power of
the executive to extort the usury.[177]
All this, we are to remember, went on without any furtherance of total
domestic wealth-production. When corn-growing fell off, irrecoverably
depressed by the unearned import from the richer soils of tributary
provinces, there was a transference, partly economic, partly luxurious, of
agricultural labour to vine-and olive-culture, and a wholesale turning of
arable land to pasture. Some export of wine and olives followed, though the
rich Romans tended to drink the wines of Greece. But Italy had ceased to be
self-supporting. The produce she imported was far in excess of her power of
export;[178] so that in sheer factitiousness the revenue of Rome is without
parallel in history. Modern England, which has grown rich by burning up its

coal in manufacture or selling it outright, but in the process has acquired a
share in the national and municipal debts of all other countries—England is
stable in comparison. While it lasts, the coal educes manufactures, which
also earn imports and constitute loans. So with the recent exploitation of
German iron; though in that case there has been much of sheer national
waste in the wholesale export of iron at "dumping" prices in times of trade
depression. But the history of Rome was a progressive paralysis of Italian
production; and the one way in which the administration can be said to have
counteracted the process—as apart from the spontaneous resort to vine-and
olive-culture and to slave manufactures—was by forcing more-or-less
unprofitable mining for gold and silver wherever any could be got, thus
giving what stimulus can be given to demand by the mere placing of fresh
bullion on the market. Roman civilisation was thus irrevocably directed to
an illusory end, with inevitably fatal results. Bullion had come to standfor
public wealth, and wars were made for mines as well as for tribute, Spain in
particular being prized for her mining resources. As a necessary sequence,
therefore, copper money was ousted by silver (B.C. 269), and silver finally,
after a long transition period, by gold, about the time of Severus.[179] The
silver had been repeatedly debased when the treasury was in difficulties;[180]
and in the later days of the Empire it seems to have been base beyond all
historic parallel,[181] though a large revenue was extorted till the end.
Between revenue and tax-farming profits and the yield of the mines, the
Roman moneyed class must indeed have spent a good deal, so long as the
tributaries were not exhausted. But their economic demand was mainly for
—(a) foods, spices, wines, cloths, gems, marbles, and wares produced by
the more prosperous provinces; (b) expensive forms of food, fish, and fowl,
raised chiefly on the estates run by their own class; (c) some wares of home
production; and (d) services[182] from artists, architects, master craftsmen,
slaves, mimes, parasites, and meretrices, whose economic demand in turn
would as far as possible go in the same directions.
As for the mass of the town people, slave or free, which ought on common-
sense principles to have been employed either in industry or on the land, it
was by a series of hand-to-mouth measures on the part of the government,
and by the operation of ordinary self-interest on the part of the rich class,
made age by age more unproductive industrially and more worthless
politically. Despite such a reform as the Licinian law of 367 B.C.,[183] which

for a time seems to have restored a yeoman class to the State and greatly
developed its fighting power, the forces of outside competition and of
capitalism gradually ousted the yeomen cultivators all over Italy, leaving
the land mainly in the hands of the patricians and financiers of the city, who
exploited it either by slave labour or by grinding down the former
cultivators as tenants. Even on this footing, a certain amount of industry
would be forced on the towns. But not only was that also largely in the
hands of slave-masters, with the result that demotic life everywhere was
kept on the lowest possible plane: the emperors gradually adopted on
humane grounds a policy which demoralised nearly all that was left of
sound citizenship.
As of old, monarchy in the hands of the more rational and conscientious
men tended to seek for the mass of the people some protection as against
the upper class; and the taxes and customs laid on by Augustus, to the
disgust of the Senate, were an effort in this direction. But this was rather
negative than positive protection, and the effort inevitably went further. In
the last rally of what may be termed conscientious aristocratic
republicanism, such as it was, we find Caius Gracchus, as tribune, helping
the plebs by causing grain to be sold at a half or a fourth of its market value
—an expedient pathetically expressive of the hopeless distance that then lay
between public spirit and social science. Both of the Gracchi sought by
violent legal measures to wring the appropriated public lands from the
hands of the rich, with the inevitable result of raising against themselves a
host of powerful enemies. The needed change could not be so effected. But
even if it had been, it could not have endured. The Greek advisers of
Tiberius Gracchus, Blossius of Cumæ and Diophanes of Mitylene,[184]
looked solely to redistribution, taking for granted the permanence of
slavery, the deadliest of all inequalities. The one way, if there were any, in
which the people could be saved was by a raising of their social status; and
that was impossible without an arrest of slavery and a cessation of extorted
tribute. But no Roman thinker save the Gracchi and their predecessors and
imitators seems ever to have dreamt of the former, and no one contemplated
the latter remedy. Least of all were the Roman ruling class likely to think of
either; and though Tiberius Gracchus did avowedly seek to substitute free
for slave labour,[185] and wrought to that end; and though Caius Gracchus
did in his time of power employ a large amount of free labour on public

works, one such effort counted for nothing against the normal attitude of the
patriciate. In order to fight the Senate he had to conciliate the publicani and
money-lenders as well as the populace, and the reforms of the two brothers
came to nothing.[186]
There is no record that in the contracts between the treasury and the
companies of publicani any stipulation was ever made as to their employing
free labour, or in any way considering the special needs of the populations
among whom they acted.[187] Thus a mere cheapening of bread could do
nothing to aid free labour as against capitalism using slaves. On the
contrary, such aids would tend irresistibly to multiply the host of idlers and
broken men who flocked to Rome from all its provinces, on the trail of the
plunder. Industrial life in Rome was for most of them impossible, even were
they that way inclined;[188] and the unceasing inward flow would have been
a constant source of public danger had the multitude not been somehow
pacified. The method of free or subsidised distribution of grain,[189]
however, was so easy a way of keeping Rome quiet, in the period of rapidly
spreading conquest and mounting tribute, that in spite of the resistance of
the moneyed classes[190] it was adhered to. Sulla naturally checked the
practice, but still it was revived; and Cæsar, after his triumph in Africa,
found the incredible number of 320,000 citizens in receipt of regular doles
of cheapened or gratis corn. He in turn, though he had been concerned in
extending it,[191] took strong measures to check the corrosion, reducing the
roll to 150,000;[192] but even that was in effect a confession that the problem
was past solution by the policy, so energetically followed by him, of re-
colonising in Italy, Corinth, Carthage, Spain, and Gaul. And if Cæsar sought
to limit the gifts of bread, he seems to have outgone his predecessors in his
provision of the other element in the popular ideal—the circus; his shows
being bloodier as well as vaster than those of earlier days.[193] A public thus
treated to sport must needs have cheap food as well.
Of this policy, the economic result was to carry still further the depression
of Italian agriculture. The corn supplied at low rates or given away by the
administration was of course bought or taken in the cheapest markets—
those of Sardinia and Sicily, Egypt, Africa, and Gaul—and importation once
begun would be carried to the utmost lengths of commercialism. Italian
farms, especially those at a distance from the capital,[194] could not compete
with the provinces save by still further substituting large slave-tilled farms

for small holdings, and grinding still harder the face of the slave. When
finally Augustus,[195] definitely establishing the system of lowered prices
and doles, subsidised the trade in the produce of conquered Egypt to feed
his populace, and thus still further promoted the importation of the cheapest
foreign grain, the agriculture of a large part of Italy, and even of parts of
some provinces, was practically destroyed.

It has been argued by M'Culloch (Treatises and Essays: History of Commerce, 2nd ed.
p. 287, note) that it is impossible that the mere importation of the corn required to
feed the populace—say a million quarters or more—could have ruined the agriculture
of Italy. This expresses a misconception of what took place. The doles were not
universal, and the emperors naturally preferred to limit themselves as far as possible
to paying premiums for the importation and cheap sale of corn. (Cp. Suetonius,
Claudius, c. 19, and the Digest, iii, 4, 1; xiv, i, 1, 20; xlvii, ix, 3, 8; l, v, 3, etc.) All of
the conquered provinces, practically, had to pay a tithe of their produce; and where
corn was specially cheap it would be likely to come to Rome in that form. (Cp.
Dureau de la Malle, Écon. polit. des Romains, ii, 424 sq.) Many of the patrician
families, besides, owned great estates in Africa, and they would receive their revenues
in produce. Egyptian, Sardinian, Sicilian, and African corn could thus easily undersell
Italian for ordinary consumption. For the rest, the produce of Egypt would be a means
of special revenue to the emperor. Cp. M'Culloch's own statement, p. 291.
Prof. Ferrero (Greatness and Decline of Rome, Eng. trans. ii, App. A) has
independently (but in agreement with Weber and Salvioli) carried M'Culloch's thesis
further, and has opposed the view that the "competition" of Sicilian and African wheat
"was the cause of the agricultural depression from which Italy began to suffer in 150
B.C." His own theory is the singular one that the "depression" was caused by "the
increased cost of living" arising out of luxurious habits! This untenable and indeed
unintelligible conclusion he ostensibly reaches by a series of arguments that are
alternately incoherent and rotatory, of propositions some of which are rebutted by
himself, and of assumptions that are plainly astray. The dispute may be condensed
thus:—
(1) "In antiquity," the Professor begins, "each district consumed its own wheat"; yet
he goes on to mention that in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Attica was "obliged to
import, even in good seasons, between 12,000,000 and 15,000,000 bushels." This
contradiction he appears to think is saved by the addendum that "the amount in
question is a very small one, compared with the figures of modern commerce."
Naturally it is, Athens being a small State compared with those of to-day. But the
contradiction stands unresolved. And it follows that larger towns, not placed in fruitful
"districts," would have proportionally larger imports.
(2) "Moreover," writes the Professor, "while the industrial countries of to-day seek so
far as possible to check the import of cereals by protective duties, Athens used every
expedient of war and diplomacy to render the supply of imported corn both regular
and abundant." It is startling to find a professor of history, a sociological historian,
unaware that Britain, Belgium, and Holland have no import duties on corn. (The most
exclusive State in that matter is Portugal, which, with no pretensions to be an
industrial State, prohibits corn imports altogether.)
(3) More plausibly, Prof. Ferrero argues that the policy of Athens proves that "corn
was not easily transported for sale beyond the local market." But the efforts of the
Athenians "to obtain the mastery of the Black Sea, and especially of the Bosphorus, in
order to capture the corn trade for themselves, or to entrust it, on their own
conditions, to whom they pleased," proves that the difficulties of transport were
mainly those set up by hostile States or pirates, and that—as the Professor admits—
the fertile Crimea, with its sparse population, yielded an easy surplus for export.

(4) All this, however, is only partially relevant to the question of the supplies of Rome
from Sicily, Sardinia, Africa, and Spain in the second century B.C. Did such supplies
come, or did they not? As the Professor admits, they were "vital" to the Roman
military policy; and "she had immense granaries at her disposal whenever she
required them." But such sources of supply meant a certain large normal production;
and this would enter Italy in time of peace. If it was purposely maintained in view of
the needs of war-time, so much the more surely would it undersell Italian wheat,
raised on a less fruitful soil. In no other way could Sicily and Africa yield either
annual tribute to Rome or rents to Roman owners of land in those countries. The first
effect of the importation would be to add the pressure of lowered prices to the
discouragement already offered to private cultivators by the inducements of loot in
war, fleecings in administration of newly conquered countries, commerce, and usury.
Of this discouragement the sequel would be the attempt to run by slave labour the
large estates in which the old farms were merged. But slave labour is apt to be bad
labour, and agriculture could not thereby be restored.
(5) The thesis that agriculture was depressed by high cost of living (= high prices for
agricultural products) it is not easy to treat with seriousness. The simple fact is that
sea-carriage to Rome from Sicily, Spain, and Africa must have been cheaper than land
carriage from most parts of Italy to the capital. As Prof. Ferrero notes, food prices in
the valley of the Po were very low—obviously because cost of carriage either to
Rome or to the southern seaports deterred export.
(6) Prof. Ferrero's fallacy is capped by his proposition that "the economic crisis from
which Italy has been suffering during the last twenty years is due to the increased cost
of living occasioned by the introduction, from 1848 onwards, of the industrial
civilisation of England and France into an old agricultural society." The confusion
here defies analysis. Suffice it to say that the high cost of living in modern Italy is due
to tariffs and high taxation. Sugar is dear there not because Italians consume it
luxuriously—they do not and cannot—but because a particularly unintelligent policy
of Protection causes them to pay for beetroot sugar produced in a country ill-suited to
the growth of beetroot. Living costs more in Germany, France, and the United States
than in Britain, not because those countries have only recently become "luxurious,"
but because they heavily tax imports. Costs of living in Rome certainly rose as
Romans raised their standards of consumption; but their importation of corn from
conquered provinces kept food prices lower than they would have been otherwise; and
Italian agriculture was largely abandoned in favour of easier ways of making money.
Prof. Ferrero supplies a partial confutation of his economic theory by his own account
(i, 311) of how, in the time of Pompey, "once more the precious metals were cheap
and abundant" after a time of scarcity, and the decadent slave system of agriculture
was superseded by new forms of production. (See above, p. 79, note.) But abundant
bullion means high prices for produce, which the Professor has declared to be a cause
of depression! As to the new production, the process certainly cannot have taken place
with the rapidity which his description suggests. "The hideous slave-shelters or
compounds [ergastula], with their gangs of forced labourers, vanished from the scene,
together with the huge desolate tracts of pasture where they had spent their days [?],
to be replaced by vineyards, olive-groves, and orchards, now planted in all parts of the
peninsula, ... estates on which the new slave immigrants contentedly cultivated the
vine or the olive, or bred animals for the stable or transport, under the direction of a
Greek or Oriental bailiff; ... pleasant cottages of landlords, who farmed their own

holdings with the help of a few slaves." All this cannot have happened in the time of
Pompey. But in any case, inasmuch as bullion was rife, prices in general must have
been high, yet without "depression"; and the new demand for wine and olives, in the
terms of the case, made their cultivation remunerative. But "huge pastures" cannot
have been "replaced" by vineyards and olive-groves; and Italian agriculture did not in
imperial times become again the thing it had been.

It was not that, as Pliny put it in the perpetually quoted phrase,[196] the
latifundia, the great estates, had ruined Italy and began to ruin the
provinces; it was that, first, the fertile conquered provinces, notably Sicily,
undersold Italy; whereafter the economically advantaged competition of
Egypt, as imperially exploited, and of the African provinces, undersold the
produce of most of the other regions, and would have done so equally had
their agriculture remained in the hands of small farmers. The latifundia
were themselves effects of the policy of conquest and annexation. The
theory that "those large pastoral estates, and that slave-cultivation, which
had so powerful and so deleterious an influence over Italian husbandry and
population, may be principally ascribed to the confiscations and the military
colonies of Sulla and his successors," is clearly wide of the mark.
So M'Culloch, Treatises and Essays: Colonial System of the Ancients, p. 426. No
doubt agriculture went rapidly from bad to worse in the convulsions of Sulla's rule,
when whole territories passed into the hands of his partisans. These would be bent on
the use of slave labour, and would take to the forms of production which gave them
the best money return. On the other hand, in an age of chronic confiscation of whole
areas, steady men were not likely to be attracted to the land. See Prof. Pelham's
Outlines, p. 213; Dureau de la Malle, Écon. polit. des Romains, vol. ii, liv. iii, ch. 22.

Large capitalistic estates were beginning to arise in Attica in the time of
Solon, and were normal in the time of Xenophon.[197] In Carthage, where
they likewise arose in due economic course, they do not seem to have hurt
agriculture, though worked by slave labour;[198] and, on the other hand, the
Roman military colonies were an attempt, albeit vain, to restore a free
farming population. In Italy the disease was older than Sulla. When Tiberius
Gracchus was passing through Etruria on his way from Spain, fifty years
before the rule of Sulla, he saw no free labourers, but only slaves in chains.
[199]
The true account of the matter is this: that if Italy had not conquered
Sicily, North Africa, Egypt, and the other fertile provinces, their
competition could not have come to pass as it did; for any imports in that
case would have had to be paid for by exports, and Italy had nothing
adequate to export. It was the power to exact tribute, or otherwise the
appropriation of conquered territory as estates by the nobles,[200] that upset

the economic balance. Not merely in order to support the policy of cheap or
free food—which was extended to other large Italian cities—but because
corn was the staple product of Sicily and Egypt and North Africa, the
tribute came in large measure in the form of foods; and in so far as it came
in bullion, the coin had to be speedily re-exported to pay for further food
and for the manufactures turned out by the provinces, and bought by the
Italian rich. Save in so far as rich amateurs of agriculture went on farming
at small profit or at a loss,[201] Italy produced little beyond olives and wine
and cattle,[202] and ordinary wares for home consumption. Industrially
considered, the society of the whole peninsula was thus finally a mere shell,
doing its exchanges mainly in virtue of the annual income it extorted from
provincial labour, and growing more and more worthless in point of
character as its vital basis grew more and more strictly factitious. It would
be accurate to say of the Empire, as represented by part of Italy and the
capital, that it was a vast economic simulacrum. The paternal policy of the
emperors,[203] good and bad, wrought to pretty much the same kind of result
as the egoism of the upper classes had done; and though their popular
measures must have exasperated the Senate, that body had in general to
tolerate their well-meaning deeds as it did their crimes.[204]
We may perhaps better understand the case by supposing a certain
economic development to take place in England in the distant future. At
present we remain, as we are likely long to remain, economically
advantaged or beneficed for manufacture by our coalfields, which are
unequalled in Europe, though Germany, through the invention which made
her phosphoric iron workable, has a larger store of the chief industrial
metal. In return for our coal and manufactures and our shipping services,
we import foods and goods that otherwise we could not pay for; and the
additional revenue from British investments in foreign debts and enterprises
further swells the food and raw material import, thus depressing to a
considerable extent our agriculture under a system of large farms. When in
the course of centuries the coalfields are exhausted, unless it should be
found that the winds and tides can be made to yield electric power cheaply
enough, our manufacturing population will probably dwindle. Either the
United States will supersede us with their stores of coal, or—if, as may well
be, their stores are already exhausted by a vaster exploitation—China may
take the lead. The chief advantage left us would be the skill and efficiency

of our industrial population—an important but incalculable factor.[205] A
"return to the land," if not achieved beforehand, might in that case be
assumed to be inevitable; but should Australian, Indian, and North and
South American wheat-production continue (as it may or may not) to have
the same relative advantages of soil, our remaining city populations would
continue to buy foreign corn; and the land might still be largely turned to
pasture. That remaining city population, roughly speaking, would in the
terms of the case consist of (a) those persons drawing incomes from foreign
investments; (b) those workmen, tradesmen, and professional people who
could still be successfully employed in manufactures, or whom the interest-
drawing classes employed to do their necessary home-work, as the Romans
perforce employed to the last many workmen and doctors and scribes, slave
or free; (c) those who might earn incomes by seafaring; and (d) the official
class—necessarily reduced, like every other. Until the incomes from foreign
investments had in some measure disappeared, the country could not
gravitate down to an economically stable recommencement in agriculture.
We need not consider curiously whether things would or will happen in
exactly this way: the actual presumption is that before coal is exhausted the
whole social structure will be modified; and it is conceivable that the idle
class may have been eliminated. But we are supposing a less progressive
evolution for illustration's sake. Suffice it that such a development would be
in a measure economically analogous to what took place in ancient Rome.
If the upper-class population of such a hypothetical future in England,
instead of receiving only dividends from foreign stocks and pensions from
the revenue of India, were able to extort an absolute tribute from India and
other dominions, the parallel would be so much the closer. What held
together the Roman Empire so long was, on the one hand, the developed
military and juridical organisation with its maintaining revenue, and on the
other hand the absence of any competent antagonist. Could a Mithridates or
an Alexander have arisen during the reign of one of the worse emperors, he
might more easily have overrun the Roman world than Rome did Carthage.
As it was, all the civilised parts of the Empire shared its political anæmia;
and indeed the comparative comfort of the Roman peace, with all its burden
of taxation, was in many of the provinces a sufficient though precarious
ground for not returning to the old life of chronic warfare, at least for men
who had lost the spirit of reasoned political self-assertion.

Under good emperors, the system worked imposingly enough; and
Mommsen, echoing Gibbon, not unwarrantably bids us ask ourselves
whether the south of Europe has ever since been better governed than it was
under the Antonines.[206] The purely piratical plunder carried on by
governors under the Republic was now, no doubt, in large measure
restricted. But, to say nothing of the state of character and intellect, the
economic evisceration was proceeding steadily alike under good emperors
and bad, and the Stoic jurists did but frame good laws for a worm-eaten
society. So long as the seat of empire remained at Rome, drawing the tribute
thither, the imperial system would give an air of solidity to Italian life; but
when the Roman population itself grew cosmopolitanised in all its classes,
taking in all the races of the Empire, the provinces were in the terms of the
case as Roman as the capital; and there was no special reason, save the
principle of concentration, why the later emperors should reside there.
Where of old the provincial governors had extorted from their subjects
fortunes for themselves, to be spent in Rome like the public tribute, they
would now tend to act as permanent dwellers in their districts.[207] Once the
palace was set up elsewhere, the accessories of administration inevitably
followed; and the transference of official and other population would partly
balance the restriction of food supply caused by the deflection of Egyptian
corn-tribute to Constantinople—a loss that had to be made good by a drain
on Libya and Carthage.[208] But when under Valentinian and Valens the
Empire came to be definitely divided, the western section, whose main
source of revenue was the African province, speedily fell into financial
straits. Valentinian had on his hands in the ten years of his reign three costly
wars—one to recover Britain, one to repel the Alemanni from Gaul, one to
recover Africa from Firmus; and it was apparently the drain on revenue thus
set up, aggravated by an African famine,[209] that drove Gratian on his
accession to the step of confiscating the revenues of the pagan cults.[210] So
great was the State's need that even the pagan Eugenius could not restore
the pagan revenues. Thenceforth the financial decay headed the military;
and we shall perhaps not be wrong in saying that the growth of medieval
Italy, the new and better-rooted life which was to make possible the
Renaissance, obscurely began when Italy, stripped of Gaul and Spain and
Africa, and cut off from the East, which held Egypt, was deprived of its
unearned income, and the populace had in part to turn for fresh life to
agriculture and industry. The flight of the propertied families at each

successive sack of Rome by Goth and Vandal must have left freedom to
many, and room for new enterprise to the more capable, though in some
districts there seems to have been absolute depopulation. And while Italy
thus fell upon a wholesomer poverty,[211] the provinces would be less
impoverished.
Some of the ruin, indeed, has not been remedied to this day. Part of the
curse of conquest was the extension of the malarious area of Italian soil,
always considerable. The three temples to the Goddess Fever in Rome were
the recognition of a standing scourge, made active by every overflow of the
Tiber; and pestilent areas were common throughout the land. But when the
great plain of Latium was well peopled, the feverous area was in constant
process of reduction by agriculture and drainage; and the inhabitants had
become in large part immune to infection.[212] In the early, the "Social" and
the later civil wars it was devastated and depopulated to such an extent that
Pliny[213] could enumerate fifty-three utterly eliminated stocks or "peoples,"
and could cite the record of thirty-three towns which had stood where now
were the Pontine marshes.[214] As early as 340 B.C. the land round Rome
was counted unhealthy, so that veterans were loth to settle on it;[215] but
population went back instead of forward. It is thus true that the malaria of
the Campagna and other districts was an ancient trouble;[216] but it was the
perpetual march of conquest, for ever sending forth to more attractive soils
the stocks who might have re-peopled and recovered it, that made that and
so much more of Italy fixedly pestilential down to modern times. Thus the
paralysis of Italian production by conquest was a twofold process, direct
and indirect.
In ancient as in later times, doubtless, attempts were made to bring back to
human habitation the stricken deserts that stained Italy like a leprosy. Thus
Cæsar sought early to repeople Campania from the idle populace of Rome.
[217]
But to maintain steady cultivation in unhealthy regions there was
needed an immune stock, and that was reproducible only by the old way of
savage, self-preserving persistence on the part of hardy and primitive rustics
working their own land. The new imported stocks, slave or free, wilted
away before the scourge of fever; and the "principle of population,"
weakened in the spring, failed to surmount the resistance of Nature. Under
the early Empire the labour needed for the culture of the Campagna had to
be brought in annually from distant districts; and when the invading Goths

in the fifth century devastated the whole area there was no energy left to
recover it.
[The theories once current as to ancient knowledge of prophylactics in the shape of
perfumes and the habitual use of woollen clothing may be dismissed as fanciful. The
rational conclusion is that the early races developed a relative immunity, which was
possessed neither by the eastern stocks imported in the period of conquest nor by the
later invading Teutons. It is noteworthy, however, that at all times the dwellers in the
tainted areas learned something of the necessary hygiene. See Dureau de la Malle, as
cited. His investigation is interesting as showing how, in the early decades of the
nineteenth century, long before Pasteur, biology had reached the perception that fevers
come of an organic infection. It was doubtless such knowledge that led the Romans to
burn their dead.]

There remains the question, What is the precise economic statement of the
final collapse? It is easy to figure that in terms of (a) increasing barbarian
enterprise, stimulated by the personal experience of the many barbarians
who served the Empire, and of (b) increasing moral weakness on the part of
the whole administrative system. And doubtless this change in the balance
of military energy was decisive. When utter weaklings sat by heredity in the
imperial chair, at best contemptuously tolerated by their alien officers, the
end was necessarily near. The most incurable disease of empire was just
empire; ages of parasitism had made the Roman ruling class incapable of
energetic action; and the autocracy had long withheld from citizens the use
of arms. But the long subsistence of the Eastern Empire as contrasted with
the Western proves that not only had the barbarians an easier task against
Italy in terms of its easiness of invasion, but the defence was there
relatively weaker in terms of lack of resources. This lack has been wholly or
partly explained by quite a number of writers[218] as a result of a failure in
the whole supply of the precious metals—a proposition which may be
understood of either a falling-off in the yield of the mines or a general
withdrawal of bullion from the Empire. It is difficult to see how either
explanation can stand. There was already an immense amount of bullion in
the Empire, and a general withdrawal could take place only by way of
export to the barbarian east in return for commodities.[219] But the eastern
provinces of the Empire were still in themselves abundantly productive, and
after the fall of Rome they continued to exhibit industrial solvency. No
doubt the plunder of Rome by Alaric (409-10) greatly crippled the west, and
the loss of Gaul and Spain was worse; but while the Empire retained Africa
it had a source of real revenue. The beginning of the end, or rather the

virtual end, came with the conquest of the African province by the Vandals
(430-40). In 455 came the sack of Rome by the Vandals, whereafter there
remains only a shadow of the Roman Empire, till Odoaker, dismissing
Augustulus, makes himself king of Italy.
As for the falling-off in the yield of the Spanish mines, to which some
writers seem to attribute the whole collapse, it could only mean that the
Roman Government at length realised what had been as true before and has
been as true since, that all gold-mining, save in the case of the richest and
easiest mines, separately considered, or of groups of mines which have been
acquired at less cost than went to find and open them, is carried on at a loss
as against the standing competition of the great mass of precious metal
above-ground at any moment, the output of unknown barbarian toil and
infinite slave labour, begun long before the age of written history.[220] When
it was reluctantly realised that the cost of working either the gold or the
silver mines was greater to the State than their product,[221] they would be
abandoned; though under a free government private speculators would have
been found ready to risk more money in reopening them immediately. As a
matter of fact, the Spanish mines were actually worked by the Saracens in
the Middle Ages, and have been since. The Romans had made the natural
blunder of greed in taking all gold and silver mines into the hands of the
State,[222] where speculative private enterprise would have gone on working
them at a loss, and so adding—vainly enough—to the total bullion in
circulation, on which the State could levy its taxes. Even as it was, when
they were losing nothing, but rather checking loss, by abandoning the
mines, a falling-off in revenue from one source could have been made good
by taxation if the fiscal system had remained unimpaired, and if the former
income of Italy had not been affected by other causes than a stoppage of
mining output.
If the mere cessation of public gold-mining were the cause of a general
weakening of the imperial power, and by consequence the cause of the
collapse in Italy, it ought equally to have affected the Eastern Empire,
which we know to have possessed a normal sufficiency of bullion all
through the Dark and Middle Ages, though it had no mines left.[223] The fact
is that, when Valentinian and Valens divided the Empire between them, the
former chose the western half because he shared the delusion that the
Spanish mines were a greater source of real wealth than the fruitful

provinces of the east. Those could always procure the bullion they required,
because they had produce to exchange for it. Gold mines even of average
fertility could have availed no more; and if Italy had remained agriculturally
productive she could have sustained herself without any mines.
Dr. Cunningham, in his study of the economic conditions of the declining Empire,
appears to lay undue stress on the factor of scarcity of bullion, and does not duly
recognise the difference of progression between the case of Italy and that of the east.
"The Roman Empire," he writes (p. 187, note), lacked both treasure and capital, "and
it perished." When? The eastern seat of the Empire survived the western by a
thousand years. "It seems highly improbable," he argues again (p. 185), "that the drain
of silver to the east, which continued during the Middle Ages, was suspended at any
period of the history of the Empire." But such a drain (which means a depletion)
cannot go on for twelve hundred years; and it was certainly not a drain of silver to the
east that ruined the Byzantine Empire. Finlay's dictum (i, 52) that the debasement of
the currency between Caracalla and Gallienus "annihilated a great part of the trading
capital in the Roman Empire and rendered it impossible to carry on commercial
transactions, not only with foreign countries but even with distant provinces," is
another erroneous theorem.

It seems clear that the Italian collapse occurred as it did because, after the
fall of the three great possessions, Gaul, Spain, and Africa, there was left
only the central State, made impotent by long parasitism to meet the
growing barbarian pressure. Italy in the transition period can have yielded
very little revenue, though Rome had for the barbarians plenty of hoarded
plunder; and the country had long ceased to yield good troops. Gaul itself
had been monstrously taxed; and it must have been no less a prudent than a
benevolent motive that led Julian to reduce to £2,000,000 the revenue of
£7,000,000 extorted by Constantine and Constantius.[224] The greater the
depression in the sources of income, and the greater the costs of the frontier
wars, the harder became the pressure of the fiscal system, till the burdens
laid on the upper citizens who formed the curia[225] put them out of all heart
for patriotic action, and drove many to flight, to slavery, or the cloister.
Towards the end, indeed, there was set up a rapid process of economic
change which substituted for slaves a class of serfs, coloni, adscriptitii, and
so on, who though tied to the land paid a rent for it and could keep any
surplus; but under this system agriculture was thus far no more a source of
revenue than before. Latterly the very wine of Italy grew worthless, and its
olives decayed;[226] so that in once fruitful Campania, "the orchard of the
south," Honorius in the year 395 had to strike from the fiscal registers, as
worthless, more than three hundred thousand acres of land[227]—an eighth of

the whole province. After the ruinous invasions of Rhadagast and Alaric,
fresh remissions of taxation had to be given, so that as the danger neared the
defence weakened.[228] In the east, again, there was no impulse to succour
the falling west; and indeed there was not the ability. The fiscal power of
the Emperor was inelastic; his revenues, extorted by cruel pressure, needed
careful husbanding; his own world needed all his attention; and the eastern
upper class of clerics and officials were not the people to strain themselves
for the mere military retention of Britain or Gaul or Italy, as Rome would
have done in the republican period, or as the emperors would have done
before the period of decentralisation. For the rich agricultural provinces of
Africa they did strive with success when Belisarius overthrew the Vandals;
and in that age, when Italy had once more become revenue-yielding through
the revival of her agriculture, it was worth the while of the east to reconquer
Italy also; but the old spirit of resolute dominion and aggression was gone.
Armies could still be enrolled and generalled if there was pay for them; but
the pay failed, not because bullion was lacking, but because the will and
power to supply and apply it in the old fashion was lacking. The new age,
after Theodosius, looked at these matters in a different light—the light of
commercial self-interest and Christian or eastern disregard for Roman
tradition and prestige. The new religion, Christianity, was a direct solvent of
imperial patriotism in the old sense, transferring as it did the concern of
serious men from this world to the next, and from political theory to
theological. In Italy, besides, the priesthood could count on making rather
more docile Christians of the invaders than it had done of the previous
inhabitants; so that Christian Rome, once overrun, must needs remain so.
[Finlay (ed. cited i, 294) suggests that "probably the knowledge which the Emperor
Justin and his cabinet must have possessed of the impossibility of deriving any
revenue from the agricultural districts of Italy offers the simplest explanation of the
indifference manifested at Constantinople to the Lombard invasion." But he had
already noted (p. 236, note) that a great revival of agriculture took place in the reign
of Theodoric. Then it could only be through the exhaustion of the subsequent wars
that Italy was incapable of yielding a revenue. The true explanation of Justin's
inaction is probably not indifference but impotence, the Empire's resources being then
drained.
After the invasion of the Lombards the clergy and Senate of Rome had to send a large
sum in bullion to induce the Emperor Maurice to listen to their prayers for help. Still
the help could not be given, though, save in the case of the coast towns (see below, p.
188), tribute was paid to Byzantium till the final breach between Rome and Leo the
Iconoclast. (Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 114.)

Guizot (Histoire de la Civilisation en France, 13e éd. i, 75, 76) notes the fundamental
difference in the attitude of the Church under the old and eastern emperors and under
the Teutonic rule. Symonds (Renaissance in Italy, 2nd ed. i, 43) thinks this was a
result of Theodoric's not having made Rome his headquarters, and his having treated
it with special respect. But the clergy of Gaul at once gained an ascendency over the
Frankish kings, and the popes would probably have done as well with resident
emperors as with absentees. Their great resource was that of playing one Christian
monarch against another—a plan not open to the patriarch of Constantinople.]

That the Empire could still at a push raise armies and find for them generals
who could beat back the barbarians was sufficiently shown in the careers of
Stilicho and Aetius and Belisarius; but the extreme parsimony with which
Justinian supported his great commander in Italy is some proof of the
economic difficulty of keeping up, even in a period of prudent
administration,[229] a paid force along the vast frontiers of what had been
Hadrian's realm. Only as ruled by one central system, inspired by an ideal
of European empire, and using the finance and force of the whole for the
defence of any part, could that realm have been preserved; and when
Diocletian, while holding mechanically by the ideal of empire, began the
disintegration of its executive, he began the ending of the ideal. The
creation of an eastern capital was now inevitable; and when once the
halving of the Empire had become a matter of course, the west, hollow at
the core, was fated to fall. We should thus not be finally wrong in saying
that "the Roman idea" died out before the Western Empire could fall;
provided only that we recognise the economic and other sociological
causation of the process.
It remains to note, finally, that the process cannot possibly be explained by
the theory that the Eastern Empire was successfully unified by Christianity,
and that the Western remained divided by reason of the obstinate adherence
of the Roman aristocracy to Paganism. The framer of this theory confutes it
by affirming that in Greece "the popular element ... by its alliance with
Christianity, infused into society the energy which saved the Eastern
Empire," while admitting that in Italy also the "great body of the [city]
population" had embraced Christianity. Surely the popular Christian
element ought to have saved Italy also if it were the saving force. Italy was
essentially Christian in the age of Belisarius: if there was any special
element of disunion it was the mutual hatred of Arians and Athanasians and
other sects, which had abundantly existed also in the east, where it finally
furthered the Saracen conquest of the Asiatic provinces and Egypt,[230] but as

regarded the central part of the Empire was periodically got rid of by the
suppression of all heresy.[231] Eastern unification, such as it was, had thus
been the work, not of "Christianity," or of any sudden spirit of unity among
the Greeks, but of the Imperial Government, which in the East had
sufficient command of, and needed for its own sake to use, the resources
that we have seen lost to Italy.[232] As for the established religion, it was the
insoluble conflict of doctrine as to images that finally, in the reign of Leo
the Iconoclast, arrayed the Papacy against the Christian Emperor, and
completed the sunderance of Greek and Latin Christendom; while in the
East the patriarch of Jerusalem became the minister of the Moslem
conquerors in the seventh century, as did the patriarch of Constantinople in
the fifteenth.

FOOTNOTES:
[160] The phrase of Professor Thorold Rogers, whose application of the
principle, however, does not carry us far.
[161] Dr. Cunningham overlooks this form of gain-getting by war, when he says
that the early Romans had no direct profit from it (Western Civilisation, i, 154),
but mentions it later (p. 157). Prof. Ferrero likewise overlooks it when (Eng. tr. i,
4) he specifies "timber for shipbuilding and salt" as practically the whole of the
exportable products of the early Romans. Once more, who consumed their
cattle?
[162] Cp. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, i, 26, following Von
Ihering.
[163] Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome, pref. to Virginia. Cp. Gibbon, Bohn ed.
v, 80-81.
[164] Cp. Dureau de la Malle, Écon. polit. des Romains, vol. ii, liv. iv, ch. 9.
[165] Cp. Cicero, De Officiis, i, 42.
[166] Mommsen, B. i, ch. v. Eng. tr. i, 80.
[167] Pliny, Hist. Nat. xviii, 3
[168] E. Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 518), alleges a common
misconception as to the ager publicus being made a subject of class strife; but
does not make the matter at all clearer. Cp. Niebuhr, Lectures on the History of
Rome, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. pp. 153-54, 407, 503.
[169] Shuckburgh, History of Rome, pp. 93, 94. Cp. Long, Decline of the Roman
Republic, ch. xii, and Pelham, pp. 187-89, as to the frauds of the rich in the
matter of the public lands.

[170] W.T. Arnold, Roman Provincial Administration, 1879, p. 26.
[171] Finlay, History of Greece, Tozer's ed. i, 39.
[172] When Julius Cæsar abolished the public revenue from the lands of
Campania by dividing them among 20,000 colonists, the only Italian revenue left
was the small duty on the sale of slaves (Cicero, Ep. ad Atticum, ii, 16).
[173] Ep. ad Atticum, iv, 15 (16).
[174] Cp. Niebuhr, Lectures on Roman History, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. pp. 227, 449;
Gibbon, Bohn ed. iii, 404; v, 74-75.
[175] Orat. pro M. Fonteio, v. Cp. Long, in loc. (Orationes, 1855, ii, 167).
[176] Dr. Cunningham, preserving the conception of Rome as an entity with
choice and volition, inclines to see a necessary self-protection in most Roman
wars; yet his pages show clearly enough that the moneyed classes were the
active power. He distinguishes (p. 161) "public neglect" (of conquered peoples)
from "public oppression." But the public neglect was simply a matter of the
control of the exploiting class, who were the effective "public" for foreign
affairs. Compare his admissions as to their forcing of wars and their control of
justice, pp. 163, 164.
[177] The fullest English account of the matter is given by Long, Decline of the
Roman Republic, iv, 423-27, following Savigny. Cp. Plutarch's account of the
doings of the publicani in Asia (Lucullus, cc. 7, 20). Lucullus gave deadly
offence at Rome by his check on their extortions, as P. Rutilius Rufus had done
before him (Pelham, Outlines of Roman History, 1893, pp. 198, 283; Ferrero, i,
183). The lowest rate of interest charged by the publicani seems to have been 12
per cent. (Niebuhr, Lectures, 1-vol. ed. p. 449). We shall find the same rates
current in Renaissance Italy.
[178] Cp. R. Pöhlmann, Die Uebervölkerung der antiken Grossstädte, 1884, pp.
14-15, 29-30. Prof. Ferrero (Greatness and Decline of Rome, Eng. tr. i, 123-27;
ii, 131-36) affirms a restoration of Italian "prosperity" from 80 B.C. onwards, by
way first of a general cultivation of the vine and the olive by means of Oriental
slaves used to such culture, and later of slave manufactures in the towns. But the
evidence falls far short of the proposition. The main items are that about 52 B.C.
Italy began to export olive oil, and that certain towns later won repute for
pottery, textiles, arms, and so on. On the new agriculture cp. Dureau de la Malle,
i, 426-27.
[179] W.W. Carlile, The Evolution of Modern Money, 1901, pp. 46, 48.
[180] Cp. M'Culloch, Essays and Treatises, 2nd ed. pp. 58-64, and refs.
[181] Cp. Hodgkin, The Dynasty of Theodosius, 1889, pp. 19-20. From Severus
onwards the silver coinage had in fact become "mere billon money," mostly
copper. Carlile, as cited.
[182] On this cp. Pöhlmann, Die Uebervölkerung der antiken Grossstädte, p.37,
and Engel, as there cited.

[183] As to the probable nature of this much-discussed law see Long, Decline of
the Roman Republic, i, chs. xi and xii. Cp. Niebuhr, Lect. 89.
[184] Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, c. 8.
[185] As Long remarks (i, 171), it does not appear what Tiberius Gracchus
proposed to do with the slaves when he had put freemen in their place. Cp.
Cunningham, p. 150.
[186] Cp. Pelham, Outlines, pp. 191-92; Ferrero, ch. iii.
[187] Robiou et Delaunay, Les institutions de l'ancienne Rome, 1888, iii, 18.
[188] Cp. Juvenal, iii, 21 sq.; 162 sq.
[189] For the history of the practice, see the article "Frumentariae Leges," in
Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities.
[190] The first step by Gracchus does not seem to have been much resisted
(Merivale, Fall of the Roman Republic, p. 22; but cp. Long, Decline of the
Roman Republic, i, 262), such measures having been for various reasons
resorted to at times in the past (Pliny, Hist. Nat. xviii, 1; Livy, ii, 34); but in the
reaction which followed, the process was for a time restricted (Merivale, p. 34).
[191] It seems to have been he who, as consul, first caused the distribution to be
made gratuitous. See Cicero, ad Attic. ii, 19, and De Domo Sua, cc. 10, 15. The
Clodian law, making the distribution gratuitous, was passed next year.
[192] Suetonius, Julius, c. 41.
[193] Dio Cassius, xliii, 24.
[194] It must have been the relative dearness of land transport that kept the price
of corn so low in Cisalpine Gaul in the time of Polybius, who describes a
remarkable abundance (ii, 15).
[195] Suetonius, Aug. cc. 40, 41.
[196] Hist. Nat. xviii, 7 (6).
[197] Cp. his Economicus, chs. 5, 9, 11, 20, etc.
[198] Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, iii, 682 (§ 379).
[199] Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, c. 8.
[200] E.g., in the provinces of Africa (Gibbon, Bohn ed. iii, 445) and Sicily
(Pelham, Outlines, p. 121).
[201] Cp. Pliny, as last cited.
[202] The Italians consumed large quantities of pork, mainly raised in the north
(Polybius ii, 15; xii. fr. 1). Aurelian began a pork as well as a wine and oil ration
for the Romans (Vopiscus, Aurelianus, 35, 47); and under Valentinian III the
annual consumption in the city of Rome was 3,628,000 lbs., there being then a
free distribution to the poor during five months of the year. Gibbon calculates
that it sold at less than 2d. per lb. (Bohn ed. iii, 417-18.)

[203] Cp. Spalding, Italy and the Italian Islands, i, 372-75, 392, 398; Merivale,
History, c. 32; ed. 1873, iv, 42; M'Culloch, as cited, pp. 286-92; Finlay, History
of Greece, i, 43; Gibbon, Bohn ed. iii, 418; Dill, Roman Society in the Last Years
of the Roman Empire, 2nd ed. p. 122 and refs.; and Blanqui, Histoire de
l'économie politique, 2e éd. i, 123, as to the progression of the policy of feeding
the populace. Cp. also Suetonius, in Aug. c. 42.
[204] There is, however, reason to surmise that the murder of Pertinax was
planned, not by the prætorians who did the deed, but by the official and
moneyed class who detested his reforms. See them specified by Gibbon, ch. iv,
end.
[205] It is noteworthy that in the United States the New England region,
producing neither coal nor iron, neither cotton nor (latterly) wheat, continues to
retain a manufacturing primacy as against the South, in virtue of the (in part
climatic) industry and skill of its population.
[206] Mommsen, History of Rome, Eng. tr. large ed. v, 5 (Provinces, vol. i);
Gibbon, ch. iii, near end (Bohn ed. i, 104); cp. Mahaffy, The Greek World under
Roman Sway, p. 397; Milman, History of Christianity, Bk. I, ch. vi; Renan, Les
Apôtres, ed. 1866, p. 312; and Hegewisch, as cited by Finlay (i, 80, note), who
protests that the favourable view cannot be taken of the state of Greece and
Egypt. Mr. Balfour (Decadence, 1908, p. 18) chimes in with Mommsen and the
rest.
[207] Cp. Pelham, Outlines, p. 473.
[208] Gibbon, ch. xvii; Bohn ed. ii, 194, and notes.
[209] Symmachus speaks of a famine about the time of the confiscation of the
temple revenues. Ep. x, 54.
[210] Valentinian had resumed those temple revenues which had been restored
by Julian, but went no further, though he vetoed the acquisition of legacies by
his own church. That Gratian's step was rather financial than fanatical is proved
by his having at the same time endowed the pagan rhetors and grammarians as a
small religious quid pro quo. Beugnot, Hist. de la destr. du paganisme en
occident, 1835, i, 478.
[211] There was a fresh relapse after Theodoric, in the ruinous wars between
Justinian and the Goths and Franks. Revival began in the north under the
Lombards, and was stimulated in the south after the revolt of Gregory II against
Leo the Iconoclast, which made an end of the payment of Italian tribute to
Byzantium. (Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 127, 372, 377.)
[212] Cp. Dureau de la Malle, Écon. polit. des Romains, ii, 24 sq.
[213] Hist. Nat. iii, ix, 16.
[214] Id. ib. 6.
[215] Livy, vii, 38.
[216] Mommsen, i, 36. Mommsen does not deny the deterioration.

[217] Sueton. Julius, c. 20.
[218] E.g. Jacob, Hist. Inq. into the Prod. and Consump. of the Precious Metals,
1831, i, 221 sq.
[219] Cp. Pliny, Hist. Nat. xii, 18 (41).
[220] Cp. Del Mar, History of the Precious Metals, 1880, pref. p. vi; Money and
Civilisation, 1886, introd. p. ix.
[221] Cp. Polybius, cited by Strabo, iii, ii, § 10; Jacob, Hist. of the Precious
Metals, i, 176.
[222] Cp. Dureau de la Malle, Econ. pol. des Romains, ii, 441; Merivale,
History, iv, 44.
[223] Jacob, as cited, i, 179.
[224] Gibbon, ch. xvii, Bohn ed. ii, 237. Cp. Prof. Bury's note in his ed., and
Dureau de la Malle, Econ. polit. des Romains, i, 301 sq.
[225] On this form of oppression cp. Guizot, Essais sur l'histoire de France, i;
his note on Gibbon, Bohn ed. ii, 234; Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of
the Western Empire, B. iii, ch. 2; and Cunningham, Western Civilisation, pp.
188, 189.
[226] Spalding, Italy, i, 398, following Symmachus.
[227] Gibbon, ch. xvii, Bohn ed. ii, 237, citing Cod. Theodos. xi, 28, 2. Cp. Dill,
pp. 259-60.
[228] Cp. Dill, as cited, p. 260.
[229] Anastasius in his reign of twenty-seven years had saved an enormous
treasure, whence it is arguable that Justinian's straits were due to bad
management. But while he enlarged the expenditure, chiefly for military
purposes, he also enlarged the revenue by very oppressive means, and practised
some new economies. The fact remains that where Anastasius could hoard with a
non-imperialist policy, Justinian, re-expanding the Empire, could not. See
Gibbon, ch. 40, passim. Non-military expenditure could not account for the final
deficit in Justinian's treasury. Even the great church of San Sofia does not seem
to have cost above £1,000,000. Id. Bohn ed. iv, 335.
[230] "Here [in Egypt], as in Palestine, as in Syria, as in the country about the
Euphrates, the efforts of the Persians could never have been attended with such
immediate and easy success but for the disaffection of large masses of the
population. This disaffection rested chiefly on the religious differences" (Bury,
History of the Later Roman Empire, ii, 214). Compare Gibbon, ch. 47, Bohn ed.
v, 275; and Mosheim, Eccles. Hist., 5 Cent, pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 2, 4, 5 (Reid's ed. pp.
179-81). As to the welcoming of the Saracens in Egypt by the Monophysites, see
Gibbon, ch. 51, Bohn ed. vi, 59-60. Cp. Sharpe, Hist. of Egypt, 6th ed. ii, 371;
Milman, Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ii, 213; Finlay, i, 370-71.
[231] E.g. the tome of St. Leo, the Laws of Marcian, the Henoticon of Zeno, and
the laws of Justinian; and the ecthesis and typus of Heraclius and Constans II—

all retailed by Gibbon, ch. 47.
[232] Finlay immediately afterwards (p. 139) declares of the choice of
Byzantium by Constantine as his capital that "its first effect was to preserve the
unity of the Eastern Empire." The admission is repeated on p. 140, where the
whole credit of the stand made by the East is given to the administration. Cp.
also the explanations as to Italy on p. 235, and as to Byzantium on p. 184. The
theory of p. 138 is utterly unsupported, and on p. 289 it is practically repudiated
once for all. Cp. finally, pp. 217, 276, 298, 309, 328, 329, 347, 348, and pp. 361
and 371. On p. 276 we have the explicit admission that the hostility to the
Roman Government throughout the East [in the sixth century] was everywhere
connected with an opposition to the Greek "clergy."

Chapter II
GREEK ECONOMIC EVOLUTION
§1
In republican Greece, as in republican Rome, we have already seen the
tendency to the accumulation of wealth in few hands, as proved by the
strifes between rich and poor in most of the States. A world in which
aristocrats were finally wont to take an oath to hate and injure the demos[233]
was on no very hopeful economic footing, whatever its glory in literature
and art. Nor did the most comprehensive mind of all the ancient world see
in slavery anything but an institution to be defended against ethical attack
as a naturally right arrangement.[234] In view of all this, we may reasonably
hold that even if there had been no Macedonian dominance and no Roman
conquest, Greek civilisation would not have gone on progressing
indefinitely after the period which we now mark as its zenith—that the evil
lot of the lower strata must in time have infected the upper. What we have
here briefly to consider, however, is the actual economic course of affairs.
For the purposes of such a generalisation, we may rank the Greek
communities under two classes: (1) those whose incomes, down through the
historic period, continued to come from land-owning, whether with slave or
free labour, as Sparta; and (2) those which latterly flourished chiefly by
commerce, whether with or without military domination, as Athens and
Corinth. In both species alike, in all ages, though in different degrees as
regards both time and place, there were steep divisions of lot between rich
and poor, even among the free. Nowhere, not even in early "Lycurgean"
Sparta, was there any system aiming at the methodical prevention of large
estates, or the prevention of poverty, though the primitive basis was one of
military communism, and though certain sumptuary laws and a common
discipline were long maintained.
Grote's examination (pt. ii, ch. vi; ed. cited, ii, 308-30) of Thirlwall's hypothesis (ch.
viii; 1st ed. i, 301, 326) as to an equal division of lands by Lycurgus, seems to prove
that, as regards rich and poor, the legendary legislator "took no pains either to restrain
the enrichment of the former or to prevent the impoverishment of the latter"—this

even as regards born Spartans. As to the early military communism of Sparta and
Crete, see Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, § 210; and as to the economic
process see Fustel de Coulanges, Nouvelles recherches sur quelques problèmes
d'histoire, 1891, pp. 99-118.

Athens, on the other hand, was so situated as to become a place of industry
and commerce; and from about the time of her great land-crisis, solved by
Solon, her industrial and commercial interests determined her economic
development. It follows from the success of Peisistratos that the mass of the
people, blind to the importance of the political rights conferred upon them,
were conscious of no such betterment from Solon's "shaking-off-of-
burdens" as could make them averse to the rule of a "tyrant" who even laid
upon them a new tax. The solution may perhaps lie in points of fiscal policy
to which we have now no clear clue. Of Solon it is recorded[235] that he
made a law against the export of any food produce of Attica save oil—the
yield of the olive. This implied that of that product only was there in his
opinion a redundancy; and we have it from the same source that he "saw
that the soil was so poor that it could only suffice for the farmers," and so
"gave great honour to trade," and "made a law that a son was not obliged to
support his father if his father had not taught him a trade."[236] Himself a
travelled merchant, he further recognised that "merchants are unwilling to
despatch cargoes to a country which has nothing to export"; and we are led
to infer that he encouraged on the one hand the export of manufactures, plus
oil, and on the other the importation of corn and other food. In point of fact,
grain was already being imported in increasing quantity from the recently
colonised lands of Sicily and the Crimea;[237] and if the imports were free or
lightly taxed the inland cultivators would have a local grievance in the
depression of the prices of their produce.
The town and coast-dwellers, on the other hand, found their account in the
carriage and development of manufactures—vases, weapons, objects of art
—which, with the oil, and latterly the wine export, bought them their food
from afar. Athens could thus go on growing in a fashion impossible to an
agricultural community on the same soil; and could so escape that fate of
shrinkage in the free class which ultimately fell upon purely agricultural
Sparta. The upshot was that, after as before Solon, Athens had commercial
interests among her pretexts for war, and so widened the sphere of her
hostilities, escaping the worst forms of "stasis" in virtue of the expansibility
of commerce and the openings for new colonisation which commerce

provided and widened. But colonisation there had to be. Precisely by reason
of her progressiveness, her openness to the alien, her trade and her
enterprise, Attica increased in population at a rate which enforced
emigration, while the lot of the rural population did not economically
improve, and the probable change from corn-growing to olive-culture[238]
would lessen the number of people employed on the land. Even apart from
the fact of the popular discontent which welcomed the tyrannis of
Peisistratos, we cannot doubt that Solon's plans had soon failed to exclude
the old phenomena of poverty. The very encouragement he gave to artisans
to immigrate,[239] while it made for the democratic development and naval
strength of Athens, was a means of quickening the approach of a new
economic crisis. And yet he seems to have recognised the crux of
population. The traditional permission given by the sage to parents to
expose infants, implicitly avows the insoluble problem—the "cursed
fraction" in the equation, which will not disappear; and in the years of the
approach of Peisistratos to power we find Athens sending to Salamis (about
570) its first kleruchie, or civic colony-settlement on subject territory—this
by way of providing for landless and needy citizens.[240] It was the easiest
compromise; and nothing beyond compromise was dreamt of.
[The statement that Solon by law permitted the exposure of infants is made by
Malthus, who gives no authority, but is followed by Lecky. The law in question is not
mentioned by Plutarch, and I do not find it noticed by any of the historians. It is
stated, however, by Sextus Empiricus (Hypotyp. iii, 24) that Solon made a law by
which a parent could put his child to death; and this passage, which is cited by Hume
in his Essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations, is doubtless Malthus's authority.
Nothing nearer to the purpose is cited by Meursius in his monograph on Solon; but
this could very well stand as a permission of infanticide, especially seeing that the
practice is presumptively prehistoric. Petit writes: "Quemadmodum liberos tollere in
patris erat positum potestate, ita etiam necare et exponere, idque, meo judicio, non
tam moribus quam lege receptum fuit Athenis" (Leges Atticæ, fol. 219, ed. Wesseling,
1742). Grote (ii, 470, note) pronounces that the statement of Sextus "cannot be true,
and must be copied from some untrustworthy authority," seeing that Dionysius the
Halicarnassian (ii, 26) contrasts the large scope of the patria potestas among the
Romans with the restrictions which all the Greek legislators, Solon included, either
found or introduced. Dr. Mahaffy (Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. p. 165) believes "the
notion of exposing infants from economical motives not to have prevailed till later
times" than the seventh century B.C., but he gives no reason for fixing any date. We
may take it as certain that while the laws of Lycurgus, like the Roman Twelve Tables,
enjoined or permitted the destruction of sickly or deformed infants, the general Greek
usage allowed exposure. The express prohibition of it at Thebes (Ælian, Var. Hist. ii,
7) implies its previous normality there and elsewhere (cp. however, Aristotle, Pol. vii,
16); and the sale of children by their (free) parents was further permitted, except in

Attica (Ingram, History of Slavery, p. 16); while even there a freeman's children by a
slave concubine were slaves.]

On the other hand, the laws even of Sparta, framed with a view to the
military strength of the State considered as the small free population, were
ultimately evaded in the interests of property-holding, till the number of
"pure Spartans" dwindled to a handful.[241] Under a system of primogeniture,
with a rigid severance between the upper class and the lower, there could in
fact be no other outcome. Here, apart from the revolts of the helots and the
chronic massacres of these by their lords, which put such a stamp of
atrocity on Spartan history,[242] the stress of class strife seems to have been
limited among the aristocracy, not only by systematic infanticide, but by the
survival of polyandry, several brothers often having one wife in common.
[243]
Whether owing to infanticide, or to in-breeding, or to preventives,
families of three and four were uncommon and considered large, and
special privileges offered to the fathers.[244] As always, such devices failed
against the pressures of the main social conditions. All the while, of course,
the perioikoi and the enslaved helots multiplied freely; hence the policy of
specially thinning down the latter by over-toil[245] as well as massacre. In
other States, where the polity was more civilised, many observers perceived
that the two essential conditions of stability were (a) absolute or
approximate equality of property, and (b) restraint of population, the latter
principle being a notable reaction of reason against the normal practice of
encouraging or compelling marriage.[246] Aristotle said in so many words
that to let procreation go unchecked "is to bring certain poverty on the
citizens; and poverty is the cause of sedition and evil";[247] and he cites
previous publicists who had sought to solve the problem. Socrates and Plato
had partly contemplated it; and the idealist, as usual, had proposed the more
brutal methods;[248] but Aristotle, seeing more clearly the population
difficulty, perhaps on that account is the less disposed towards communism.
As medical knowledge advanced, it seems certain, the practice of abortion must have
been generally added to that of infanticide in Greece, as later in Rome. See Aristotle,
Politics, vii, 16; Plutarch, Lycurgus, c. 3; and Plato, Theætetus, p. 149 (Jowett's trans.
iv, 202), as to the normal resort to abortion. The Greeks must have communicated to
the Romans the knowledge of the arts of abortion, as they did those of medicine
generally. But it does not appear that with all these checks population really fell off in
Greece until after the time of Alexander. Before that time it may very well have fallen
off in Athens when she lost her position as sovereign and tribute-drawing State. The
tribute would tend to maintain a population in excess of the natural amount. Dr.
Mahaffy (Rambles and Studies in Greece, 4th ed. p. 11—a passage not squared with

the data in Greek Life and Thought, pp. 328, 558) accepts the old view of a general
and inexplicable depopulation. One of the loci classici on that head, in the treatise On
the Cessation of Oracles (viii) attributed to Plutarch but probably not by him, is
searchingly examined by Hume at the close of his essay Of the Populousness of
Ancient Nations, and the critic comes to the conclusion that the extreme decay there
asserted cannot have taken place. He was in all probability right in arguing that the
number of slaves in Attica had been enormously exaggerated in the figures of
Athenæus (cp. Cunningham, Western Civilisation, i, 109, note). There is reason to
conclude, however, that Hume was unduly incredulous on some points. Strabo (refs.
in Thirlwall, viii, 460) had found an immense decay of population in Greece more
than a century before Plutarch; and his details prove a process of shrinkage which
must have lasted long. In any case, a relative depopulation took place after the
conquests of Alexander, from the operation of socio-economic causes, which are
indicated by Finlay (History of Greece, Tozer's ed. i, 15; cp. Mahaffy, Greek Life and
Thought, p. 328, and The Greek World under Roman Sway, 1890, p. 218). Broadly
speaking, the Greeks went to lands where wealth was more easily acquired than in
their own. Further depopulation took place under the Romans, partly from direct
violence and deportation, partly from fiscal pressure, partly from the economic causes
already noted.

Thirlwall, in his closing survey, proceeding on Polybius,[249] confidently
decides that the main cause of depopulation was domestic and moral. Such
a theory cannot be sustained. Polybius evidently had no clear idea of the
facts, since he asserts that "in our time" and "rapidly" there took place in
Greece a "failure of offspring" (or "dearth of children"), which left cities
desolate and land waste; and goes on to ascribe it to habits of luxury, which
either kept men from marrying or made them refuse to rear more than a few
of their children. The whole theorem is haphazard. Cities and lands could
not have been so depopulated.[250] There must have been, in addition to
slaughter, a drain of population to lands where the conditions were more
advantageous. Nor is there any good reason for believing that child-
exposure had suddenly and immensely increased. Thirlwall says that
marriages were "unfruitful"; but this is not the statement of Polybius. It is
true that pæderasty would count for much in lowering character; but it had
been common in Greece centuries before the time of Polybius, and had not
affected fecundity. As we have seen,[251] fecundity fell in Sparta for other
reasons.
As between Sparta and Athens, the main difference was that Athenian life
was for a long period more or less expansive, while that of Sparta, even in
the period of special vigour, was steadily contractive, as regarded quantity
and quality of "good life." At Sparta, as above noted, the normal play of
self-interest in the governing class brought about a continuous shrinkage in

the number of enfranchised citizens and of those holding land, till there
were only 700 of the former and 100 of the latter—this when there were
still 4,500 adult Spartans of "pure" descent, and 15,000 Laconians capable
of military service. Even of the hundred landowners many were women, the
estates having thus evidently aggregated by descent through heiresses.[252] It
mattered little that this inner ring of rich became, after the triumph over
Athens and in the post-Alexandrian period, as luxurious as the rest of
Greece:[253] the evil lay not in the mode of their expenditure, but in the mode
of their revenue. Agis IV and his successor Cleomenes thought to put the
community on a sound footing by abolition of debts and forcible division of
the land; but even had Agis triumphed at home or Cleomenes maintained
himself abroad, the expedient could have availed only for a time.
Accumulation would instantly recommence in the absence of a scientific
and permanent system.
Schemes for promoting equality had been mooted in Greece from an early period (see
Aristotle, Politics, ii, 6, 7, 8). Thus, "Pheidon the Corinthian, one of the oldest of
legislators, thought that the families and number of citizens ought to continue the
same." Phaleas of Chalcedon proposed to keep fortunes and culture equal; and
Hippodamus the Milesian had a system of equality for a State of 10,000 persons.
Some States, too, put restraints on the accumulation of land. But, save for transient
successes, such as that of Solon at Athens, and of the compromise at Tarentum (see
Aristotle, v, 5; and Müller, Dorians, Eng. tr. ii, 184-86), there was no adequate
adjustment of means to ends, as indeed there could not be. Aristotle's own practical
suggestions show the hopelessness of the problem.

In the commercial cities, where industry was encouraged and wealth tended
to take the form of invested capital, it could not readily get into so few
hands; and as commerce developed and the investments were more and
more in that direction, there would arise an idle rich class which could be
best got at by way of taxation. In such communities, though the division
and hostility of rich and poor were as unalterable as in Sparta, there was
more elasticity of adjustment; so that we see maritime and trading
communities like Heracleia and Rhodes maintaining their oligarchic
government, with vicissitudes, down into the Roman period,[254] somewhat
as Venice in a later age outlasted the other chief republics of Italy. The ruin
of Corinth, though indirectly promoted by class strifes,[255] need not have
occurred but for the Roman overthrow.[256]
As regards Athens, it is necessary to guard against some misconceptions
concerning the life conditions even of the Periclean period. Public buildings

apart, it was not a rich or rich-looking city; on the contrary, partly by reason
of the force of democratic sentiment, its houses were mostly mean, the
well-to-do people presumably having their better houses in the country,
where the land was now mostly owned by them. After the destruction of the
city by Xerxes (480 B.C.), the first need was felt to be its refortification on
a larger scale, even sepulchres as well as the remains of private houses
being made to yield materials for the walls.[257] At the same time the Piræus
and Munychia were walled on a still greater scale—the whole constituting a
public work of extraordinary scope, rapidly carried through by the co-
operation of the whole of the citizens. The further gradual rebuilding of the
city, as well as the fresh flocking of the foreign trading population to the
now safe Piræus, would help, with the public works of Pericles, to set up
the conditions of general prosperity which prevailed before the
Peloponnesian war.[258] According to Demosthenes, the public men of the
generation of Salamis had houses indistinguishable from those of ordinary
people, whereas in the orator's own day the statesmen had houses actually
finer than the public buildings.[259] This would be the natural result of the
control of the confederate treasure resulting from the Athenian supremacy.
But Dicæarchus belongs to the same period, and his account represents the
mass of the city as poor in appearance, the houses small and with projecting
stairways, and the streets crooked.[260] We know further from Xenophon that
there were many empty spaces, some of them doubtless made by the
customary destruction of the houses of those ostracised. There was thus a
considerable approach to a rather straitened equality among the mass of the
town-dwelling free citizens, who, despite the meanness of their houses, had
luxuries in the form of the public baths and gymnasia.
Before Salamis, again, the revenue drawn from the leases of the silver
mines of Laurium had been equally divided among the enfranchised
citizens—an arrangement which had yielded only a small sum to each, but
which represented a notable adumbration of a communal system, with the
fatal implication of a basis in slavery.[261] The devotion of this fund[262] to the
building of a navy was the making of the Athenian maritime power; whence
in turn came the ability of Athens to extort tribute from the allied States,
and therewith to achieve relatively the greatest and most effective
expenditure on public works[263] ever attempted by any government. It was
this specially created demand for and endowment of the arts and the drama

that raised Athens to the artistic and literary supremacy of the ancient
world, and, by so creating a special intellectual soil, prepared the ensuing
supremacy of Athenian philosophy.[264] But the Periclean policy of
endowment went far beyond even the employment of labour by the State on
the largest scale; it set up the principle of supplying something like an
income to multitudes of poorer free citizens—an experiment unique in
history. The main features of the system were: (1) Payments for service to
the members of the Council of Five Hundred; (2) payments to all jurors, an
order numbering some six thousand; (3) the theorikon or allowance of
theatre money to all the poorer citizens; (4) regular payments to the soldiers
and sailors; (5) largesses of corn, or sales at reduced prices; (6) sacrificial
banquets, shared in by the common people; (7) the sending out of
"kleruchies," or bodies of quasi-colonists, who were billeted on the
confederate cities, to the number of five or six thousand in ten years.
Without taking the a priori hostile view of the aristocratic faction, who
bitterly opposed all this—a view endorsed later by Plato and Socrates—the
common-sense politician must note the utter insecurity of the whole
development, depending as it did absolutely on military predominance.[265]
The mere cessation of the expenditure on public works at the fall of Athens
in the Peloponnesian war was bound to affect class relations seriously; and
parties, already bitter, were henceforth more decisively so divided.[266]
In the second period of Athenian ascendency, after the fall of the Thirty
Tyrants and of Sparta, when the virtual pensioning of citizens begun by
Pericles had been carried to still further lengths,[267] we find Xenophon, the
typical Greek of culture and military experience, proposing a financial
plan[268] whereby Athens, instead of keeping up the renewed practice of
oppressing the confederate cities in order to pay pensions to its own poorer
citizens, should derive a sufficient revenue from other sources. In particular
he proposed (1) the encouraging of foreigners to settle in the city in larger
numbers, by exempting them from military service and from all forms of
public stigma, and by giving them the waste grounds to build on. The taxes
they would have to pay as aliens would serve as revenue to maintain the
citizens proper. (2) A fund should be established for the encouragement of
trade which in some unexplained way should yield a high interest, paid by
the State, to all investors. (3) The State should build inns, shops,
warehouses, and exchanges, chiefly for the use of the foreigners, and so

further increase its revenue. (4) It should build ships for the merchant trade,
and charter them out upon good security. (5) Above all, it should develop by
slave labour the silver mines of Laurium, to the yield of which there was no
limit. The public, in fact, might there employ thrice as many slaves as the
number of citizens; and it should further set about finding new mines.
We have here the measure of the Athenian faculty to solve the democratic
problem as then recognised. The polity of Pericles was bound to perish,
alike because it negated international ethics and because it had no true
economic basis. The comparatively well-meaning plan of Xenophon could
not even be set in motion, so purely fanciful is its structure. The income of
the poorer citizens is to come from the taxes and rents paid by foreigners,
and from mines worked by slave labour; the necessary army of slaves has to
be bought as a State investment. It is as if the Boers of the Transvaal had
proposed to live idly in perpetuity on the dues paid by the immigrants, all
the while owning all the mines and drawing all the profits. It is hardly
necessary to say, with Boeckh,[269] that the thesis as to the yield of the mines
was a pure delusion; and that the idea of living on the taxation of foreigners
was suicidal.[270] The old method, supplemented perforce by some regular
taxation of the taxable citizens, and by the special exaction of "liturgies" or
payments for the religious festival drama and other public services from the
rich, was maintained as long as might be; industry tending gradually to
decay, though the carrying trade and the resumed concourse of foreigners
for a time kept Athens a leading city. Never very rich agriculturally, the
middle and upper classes had for the rest only their manufactures and their
commerce as sources of income; and as the manufactures were mostly
carried on by slave labour, and were largely dependent on the State's control
of the confederate treasure, the case of the poorer free citizens must
necessarily worsen when that control ceased. About 400 B.C. the Athenians
had still a virtual monopoly of the corn trade of Bosporus, on which basis
they could develop an extensive shipping, which was a source of many
incomes; but even these would necessarily be affected by the new regimen
which began with the Macedonian conquest.
The attempt of Boeckh (bk. i, ch. viii) to confute the ordinary view as to the poverty
of the Attic soil cannot be maintained. (See above, p. 99.) Niebuhr (Lectures on
Roman History, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 264) doubtless goes to the other extreme in calling
the Greeks bad husbandmen. Compare the contrary view of Cox, General History,
2nd ed. p. 4. But even good husbandry on a poor soil could not compete with the

output of Bosporus and Egypt. And in the Peloponnesian war Attic agriculture sank to
a low level (Curtius' History, Eng. tr. iv, 71; bk. v, ch. ii).
As to the incomes made in the Bosporus corn-trade, cp. Grote, x, 410, 412, 413. When
it became possible thus to draw a revenue from investment, the Athenian publicists
rapidly developed the capitalist view that the lending of money capital is the support
of trade. See Demosthenes, as cited by Boeckh, bk. i, ch. ix.

§2
In the economic readjustments, finally, which followed on the rise and
subdivision of the empire of Alexander, Greece as a whole took a secondary
place in the Hellenistic world, though Macedonia kept much of its newly
acquired wealth. While commerce passed with industry and population to
the new eastern cities, the remaining wealth of Greece proper would tend to
pass into fewer hands,[271] thus pro tanto narrowing more than ever the free
and cultured class, and relatively enlarging that of the slaves.
[Boeckh (bk. i, ch. viii) dwells on the variety of manufactures, and here gives a juster
view than does Dr. Mahaffy, who (Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. p. 406) oddly speaks
of the lack of machinery as making "any large employment of hands in manufacture
impossible." But the main manufacture, that of arms, was peculiarly dependent on the
Athenian command of the confederate treasure; and it does not appear that the other
manufactures were a source of much revenue till just before the period of political
decline, when other causes combined to check Athenian trade. By that time the
aristocratic class had weakened in their old prejudice against all forms of commerce
(Mahaffy, as cited; Boeckh, as cited), which had hitherto kept it largely in the hands
of aliens, this long after the time when, at Corinth and other ports, the ruling class had
been constituted of the rich traders; and after the special efforts of Solon to encourage
and enforce industry. Apart from this prejudice, which in many States put a political
disability on traders, commerce had always been hampered by war and bad policy. Dr.
Mahaffy (Social Life, p. 405) somewhat over-confidently follows Heeren and Boeckh
in deciding that none of the Greek trade laws were in the interests of particular trades
or traders; but even if they were not, they none the less hampered all commerce. Cp.
Boeckh, bk. i, ch. ix. As Hume observed, the high rates of profit and interest
prevailing in Greece show an early stage of commerce. Cp. Boeckh, bk. i, chs. ix,
xxii.]

Those who had not shared in the plunder of Asia, to begin with, would find
themselves badly impoverished, for the new influx of bullion would raise
all prices. It is notable, on the other hand, that philosophy, formerly the
study of men with, for the most part, good incomes, and thence always
associated more or less with the spirit of aristocracy,[272] was now often
cultivated by men of humble status.[273] The new rich then appear to have
already fallen away somewhat from the old Athenian standards; while the

attraction of poorer men was presumably caused in part by the process of
endowment of the philosophic schools begun by Plato in his will—an
example soon followed by others.[274] It is probable that as much weight is
due to this economic cause as to that of political restraint in the explanation
of the prosperity of philosophy at Athens at a time when literature was
relatively decaying.
The Roman conquest, again, further depressed Greek fortunes by absolute
violence, hurling whole armies of the conquered into slavery,[275] and later
setting up a new foreign attraction to the Greeks of ready wit and small
means. They presumably began to flock to Rome or Egypt or Asia Minor as
the conditions in Greece worsened; and that process in turn would be
promoted by the gradual worsening of the Roman financial pressure. It is
notable that a rebellion of Attic slaves occurred in 133 B.C., synchronously
with the first slave-rising in Sicily—a proof of fresh oppression all round.
[276]
The Romans had retained the Greek systems of municipal government,
and had begun by putting on light taxes.[277] But these surely increased;[278]
and the Mithridatic war, in which Athens had taken the anti-Roman side,
changed all for the worse. Sulla took the city after a difficult siege,
massacred most of the citizens, and entirely destroyed the Piræus;
whereafter Athens practically ceased for centuries to be a commercial
centre. Corinth, which had been razed to the ground by Mummius, was
ultimately reconstructed by Cæsar as a Roman colony, and secured most of
what commerce Greece retained. Twenty years before, Pompey had put
down the Cilician pirates, a powerful community of organised freebooters
that had arisen out of the disbanding of the hired forces of Mithridates and
other Eastern monarchs on the triumph of the Romans, and was further
swelled by a large inflow of poverty-stricken Greeks. While it lasted, it
greatly multiplied the number of slaves for the Roman market by simple
kidnapping.
[The great mart for such sales was Delos, which was practically a Roman emporium
(Strabo, bk. xiv, c. v, § 1). Mahaffy (Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 154) regards
the pirates as largely anti-Roman, especially in respect of their sacking of Delos. But
previously they sold their captives there; and Dr. Mahaffy (p. 7) recognises the
connection. The pirates, in short, became anti-Roman when the Romans, who had so
long tolerated them as slave-traders (as the rulers of Cyprus and Egypt had done
before), were driven to keep them in check as pirates.]

Thus all the conditions deteriorated together; and the suppression of the
pirate state found Greece substantially demoralised, the prey of greedy
proconsuls, poor in men, rich only in ancient art and in wistful memories. In
the civil wars before and after Cæsar's fall, Greece was harried by both
sides in turn; and down to the time of Augustus depopulation and
impoverishment seem to have steadily proceeded under Roman rule.[279]
Every special contribution laid on the provinces by the rulers was made an
engine of confiscation; citizens unable to pay their taxes were sold as
slaves; property owners were forced to borrow at usurious rates in the old
Roman fashion; and the parasitic class of so-called Roman citizens, as such
free of taxation, tended to absorb the remaining wealth.[280] This wealth in
turn tended to take the shape of luxuries bought from the really productive
provinces; and the fatality of the unproductive communities, lack of the
bullion which they in a double degree required, for the time overtook
Greece very much as it overtook Italy. Both must have presented a spectacle
of exterior splendour as regarded their monuments and public buildings,
and as regarded the luxury that was always tending to concentrate in fewer
hands, usurers plundering citizens and proconsuls plundering usurers; but
the lot of the mass of the people must have been depressed to the verge of
endurance if depopulation had not spontaneously yielded relief. As it was,
the Greek populations would tend to consist more and more of the
capitalistic, official, and parasitic classes on the one hand, and of slaves and
poor on the other.[281]
The general depopulation of subject Greece is thus perfectly intelligible.
The "race" had not lost reproductive power; and even its newer artificial
methods of checking numbers were not immeasurably more active than
simple infanticide or exposure had been in the palmy days. In the ages of
expansion the whole Hellenic world in nearly all its cities and all its islands
swarmed with a relatively energetic population, who won from conditions
often in large part unpropitious a sufficiency of subsistence on which to
build by the hands of slaves a wonderful world of art. To these conditions
they were limited by racial hostilities; everywhere there was substantial
though convulsive equipoise among their own warring forces, and between
those of their frontier communities and the surrounding "barbarians." The
conquest of Alexander (heralded and invited by the campaign of the Ten
Thousand) at one blow broke up this equipoise: organised Greek capacity,

once forcibly unified, triumphed over the now lower civilisations of Egypt
and the East, and Greek population at once began to find its economic level
in the easier conditions of some of the conquered lands. They flocked to
Egypt and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin as they do at the present
time, for similar economic reasons. Nothing could now restore the old
conditions; but the Roman conquest and tyranny forced on the
disintegration till Greece proper was but the glorious shell of the life of the
past, inhabited by handfuls of a semi-alien population, grown in a sense
psychically degenerate under evil psychic conditions. In the lower strata of
this population began the spread of Christianity, passing sporadically from
Syria to the Greek cities, as at the same time to Egypt and Rome. A new
conception of life was generated on the plane that typified it.
§3
It is a great testimony to the value of sheer peace that in the Roman Empire
of the second century, with an incurable economic malady, as it were, eating
into its nerve centres, and with no better provision for the higher life than
the schools of rhetoric and the endowments of the Greek philosophic chairs,
there was yet evolved a system of law and administration which, even under
the frightful chances of imperial succession, sustained for centuries a vast
empire, and imposed itself as a model on the very barbarism that overthrew
it. And it is this system which connects for us the life conditions of Greece
as the Romans held it, with its artistic shell almost intact despite all the
Roman plunder,[282] and those of the strangely un-Hellenic Greek-speaking
world which we know as Byzantium, with its capital at Constantinople.
The economic changes in this period can be traced only with difficulty and
uncertainty; but they must have been important. The multiplication of
slaves, which was a feature of the ages of the post-Alexandrian empires, the
Roman conquest, and the Cilician pirate state, would necessarily be
checked at a certain stage, both in town and country, by the continued
shrinkage of the rich class. Agriculture in Greece, as in Italy, could not
compete with that of Egypt; and slave-farming, save in special cultures,
would not be worth carrying on. In the towns, again, the manufactures
carried on by means of slaves had also dwindled greatly; and the small
wealthy class could not and would not maintain more than a certain number
of slaves for household purposes. The records of the religious associations,

too, as we shall see, seem to prove that men who were slaves in status had
practical freedom of life, and the power of disposing of part of their
earnings; whence it may be inferred that many owners virtually liberated
their slaves, though retaining a legal claim over them. In this state of things
population would gradually recover ground, albeit on a low plane. The type
of poor semi-Greek now produced would live at a lower standard of
comfort than had latterly been set for themselves by the more educated,
who would largely drift elsewhere; and a home-staying population living
mainly on olives and fish could relatively flourish, both in town and
country. On that basis, in turn, commerce could to some extent revive,
especially when Nero granted to the Greeks immunity from taxation.[283] We
are prepared then, in the second century, under propitious rulers like
Hadrian and the Antonines, to find Greek life materially improved.[284] The
expenditure of Hadrian on public works, and the new endowments of the
philosophic schools at Athens by the Antonines, would stimulate such a
revival; and the Greek cities would further regain ground as Italy lost it,
with the growth of cosmopolitanism throughout the Empire. While
domestic slavery would still abound, the industries in Athens under the
imperial rule would tend to be carried on by freedmen.
A further stimulus would come from the overthrow of the Parthian empire
of the Arsacidæ by Artaxerxes, 226 A.C. The Arsacidæ, though often at war
with the Romans, still represented the Hellenistic civilisation, whereas the
Sassanidæ zealously returned to the ancient Persian religion, the
exclusiveness of which would serve as a barrier to Western commerce,[285]
even while the cult of Mithra, Hellenised to the extent of being specially
associated with image-worship, was spreading widely in the West.
Commerce would now tend afresh to concentrate in Greece, the Indian and
Chinese trade passing north and south of Persia.[286] The removal of the seat
of government from Rome by Diocletian, greatly lessening the Italian drain
on the provinces, would still further assist the Greek revival after the Gothic
invasion had come and gone. Thus we find the larger Greek world in the
time of Constantine grown once more so important that in the struggle
between him and Licinius his great naval armament, composed chiefly of
European Greeks, was massed in the restored Piræus. The fleet of Licinius,
made up chiefly by Asiatic and Egyptian Greeks, already showed a relative
decline on that side of the Empire's resources.[287] When, finally,

Constantine established the new seat of empire at Byzantium, he tended to
draw thither all the streams of Greek commerce, and to establish there, as
the centre of the revenues of the Eastern Empire, some such population as
had once flourished in Rome; with, however, a definite tendency to
commerce and industry in the lower class population as well as in the
middle class. To the government of this population was brought the highly
developed organisation of the later Pagan Empire, joined with an
ecclesiastical system from which heresy was periodically eliminated by the
imperial policy, aided by the positive intellectual inferiority of the new
Greek-speaking species. There was prosperity enough for material life; and
the political and religious system was such as to prevent the normal result
of prosperity, culture, from developing independently. The much-divided
Greek world had at last, after countless convulsions, been brought to a
possibility of quasi-inert equilibrium, an equilibrium which enabled it to
sustain and repel repeated and destructive irruptions of northern barbarism,
[288]
and on the whole to hold at bay, with a shrunken territory, its
neighbouring enemies for a thousand years.
§4
We have passed, then, through a twilight age, to find a new civilised empire
ruled on the lines of the old, but with a single, albeit much-divided religion,
and that the Christian, all others having been extirpated not by persuasion
but by governmental force, after the new creed, adapting itself to its
economic conditions, had secured for itself and its poor adherents, mainly
from superstitious rich women, an amount of endowment such as no cult or
priesthood possessed in the days of democracy. This process of endowment
itself originated, however, in pagan practice; for in the days of substitution
of emotional Eastern cults for the simpler worships of early Hellas, there
had grown up a multitude of voluntary societies for special semi-religious,
semi-festival purposes—thiasoi, eranoi, and orgeones, all cultivating
certain alien sacrifices and mysteries, as those of Dionysos, Adonis,
Sabazios, Sarapis, Cotytto, or any other God called "Saviour."[289] These
societies, unlike the older Hellenic associations of the same names[290] for
the promotion of native worships, were freely open to women, to
foreigners, and even to slaves;[291] they were absolutely self-governing; the
members subscribed according to their means; and we find them flourishing
in large numbers in the age of the Antonines,[292] when the old state cults

were already deserted, though still endowed. They represent, as has been
said, the reappearance of the democratic spirit and the gregarious instinct in
new fields and in lower strata when general and practical democracy has
been suppressed. In some such fashion did the Christian Church begin,
employing the attractions and the machinery of many rival cults. Its final
selection and establishment by the Empire represented in things religious a
process analogous to that which had forcibly unified the competing
republics of Greece in one inflexible and unprogressive organisation.
Nothing but governmental force could have imposed doctrinal unity on the
chaos of sects into which Christianity was naturally subdividing; but the
power of conferring on the State Church special revenues was an effective
means of keeping it practically subordinate.
The historian who has laid down the proposition that religious unity was the
cause of the survival of the Eastern Empire when the Western fell,[293] has
made the countervailing admission that between Justinian and Heraclius
there was an almost universal centrifugal tendency in the Byzantine State,
which was finally overcome only by "the inexorable principle of Roman
centralisation,"[294] at a time when it was nearly destroyed by its enemies
and its own dissentient forces.[295] Province after province had been taken by
the Persians in the East; Slavs and Avars were driving back the population
from the northern frontiers, even harrying the Peloponnesus; discontent
enabled Phocas to dethrone and execute Maurice (602 A.C.); and Phocas in
turn was utterly defeated by the Persian foe; when Heraclius appeared, to
check the continuity of disaster, and to place the now circumscribed Empire
on a footing of possible permanence. But it is important to realise how far
the economic and external conditions conduced to his success, such as it
was. Hitherto the populace of Constantinople had been supported, like that
of imperial Rome, by regular allowances of bread to every householder,
provided from the tributary grain supplies of Egypt. The Persian conquest
of Egypt in the year 616 stopped that revenue; and the emperor's inability to
feed the huge semi-idle populace became a cause of regeneration, inasmuch
as the State was forcibly relieved of the burden, and many of the idlers
became available for the army about to be led by the emperor against the
menacing Persians. He was reduced, however, to the expedient of offering
to continue the supply on a payment of three pieces of gold from each
claimant, and finally to breaking that contract; whereafter, on his proposing

to transfer his capital to Carthage to escape the discontent, the populace and
the clergy implored him to remain, and thus enabled him to exact a large
loan from the latter,[296] and to dominate the nobility who had hitherto
hampered his action. The victories of Heraclius over the Persians, however,
only left the eastern and Egyptian provinces to fall under the Arabs; the first
financial result of his successes having been to tax to exasperation the
recovered lands in order to repay the ecclesiastical loan with usury; and the
circumscribed Empire under his successors could not, even if the emperors
wished, resume the feeding of the mass of the citizens. Constantinople,
though still drawing some tribute from the remaining provinces in Italy, was
thus perforce reduced to a safe economic basis, even as the people in
general had been coerced into united effort by the imminent danger from
Persia.
From this time forward, with many vicissitudes of military fortune, the
contracted Byzantine State endured in virtue of its industrial and
commercial basis and its consequent maritime and military strength,
managed with ancient military science against enemies less skilled. The
new invention of "Greek fire," like all advances in the use of missiles in
warfare, counted for much; but the decisive condition of success was the
possession of continuous resources. Justinian, among many measures of
mere oppression and restriction, had contrived to introduce from the far
East the silk manufacture, which for the ancient and medieval European
world was of enormous mercantile importance. Such a staple, and the
virtual control of the whole commerce between northern and western
Europe and the East, kept Byzantium the greatest trading power in
Christendom until the triumph of the Italian republics. Even the Saracen
conquests in Asia and Africa did not seriously affect this source of strength;
for the Saracen administration, though often wise and energetic, was in
Egypt too often convulsed by civil wars to permit of trade flourishing there
in any superlative degree. The Byzantines continued to trade with India by
the Black Sea and Central Asian route; and their monopolies and imposts,
however grievous, were relatively bearable compared with the afflictions of
commerce under other powers. As of old, the Greeks or Greek-speaking
folk were the traders of the Mediterranean, the Saracen navy never reaching
sufficient power to check them; and when finally its remnants took to

piracy, they served rather to cut off all weaker competition than to affect the
preponderating naval power of the Empire.
In this period of prevailing commercial vigour, from the sixth to the
eleventh century, the life of the Greek Empire was substantially civic, the
rural districts remaining desolate, and agriculture extremely feeble,[297]
though the Sclavonian immigrants who now inhabited the Peloponnesus[298]
must have lived by that means. Under such circumstances the towns would
be fed by imported grain, presumably that of the Crimea; but as they did not
grow in size, at least in the case of the capital, their industrial prosperity
must have largely depended on the restriction of population, whether by
vice, preventive checks, misery, or the sheer unhealthiness of city life,
which at the present day prevents so many Eastern cities from maintaining
themselves save by influx from the country.[299] It is misleading to point to
the legal veto on infanticide as a great Christian reform without taking these
things into account. The presumption is that misery, vice, child-exposure,
and abortion, rather than prudence, kept the poor population within the
limits of subsistence.
Mr. Oman (Byzantine Empire, p. 145) takes the popular view as to the reformative
effect of Christianity. He goes on to describe Constantine as providing for the children
of the destitute to prevent their exposure, but does not mention that the same thing had
been done under the Antonines, and that Constantine permitted the finder of an
exposed child to enslave it. The punishment of all exposure as infanticide, under
Valentinian, was only an adoption of the pagan practice at Thebes (Ælian, Var. Hist. ii,
7). But in spite of all enactments, under Christian as under pagan rule, exposure and
positive infanticide continued, though Christian sentiment never gave it the toleration
exhibited in the drama of Menander. As to the historic facts, cp. Lecky, Hist. of
European Morals, 6th ed. ii, 24-33.
Broadly speaking, it was inevitable that in such a population as is pictured for us by
Chrysostom—a multitude profoundly ignorant, superstitious, excitable, sensuous—all
the vices of the Græco-Roman period should habitually flourish, while poverty must
have been normally acute after the stoppage of regular free bread. On the general
moral environment, cp. the author's Short History of Freethought, 2nd ed. i, 249-50.

It is necessary, in the same way, to substitute an accurate for a conventional
view as to the treatment of slaves under the Christian Empire. We are still
told[300] that the Christian doctrine or implication of religious equality had
the effect first of greatly modifying the evils of slavery and finally of
abolishing it. Research proves that the facts were otherwise. We have
already seen how economic causes partially limited slavery before
Christianity was heard of; and in so far as the limitation was maintained,[301]

the efficient causes remain demonstrably economic.[302] Indeed, no other
causes can be shown to have existed. Not only is slavery endorsed in the
Gospels,[303] and treated by Paul as not merely compatible with but
favourable to Christian freedom on the part of the slave,[304] but the early
Christians, commonly supposed to have been the most incorrupt, held
slaves as a matter of course.[305] In the laws of Justinian not a word is said as
to slavery being opposed to either the spirit or the letter of Christianity; and
the only expressions that in any degree deprecate it are in terms of the Stoic
doctrine of the "law of nature,"[306] which we know to have been already
current in the time of Aristotle,[307] and to have become widespread in the
age of the Antonines, under Stoic auspices. That "law of nature," however,
was never allowed to override a definite law of society; and the Christian
influence on the other hand set up a new set of arguments for slavery.[308]
Among the Christian Visigoths, slaves who married without authority from
their masters were forcibly separated; and the slave who dared to marry a
free-woman was burnt alive with his wife; while "the bishops were among
the largest slave-holders in the realm; and baptised Christians were bought
and sold without a blush by the successors of St. Paul and Santiago."[309] It
cannot even be said of the Byzantines, any more than of the Protestants of
the southern United States of fifty years ago, that they were more humane
to their slaves than the earlier pagans had been; for we find Christian
Byzantine matrons causing their slave-girls to be tied up and brutally
flogged;[310] even as we have the testimony of Salvian to the atrocities
committed by Christian slave-owners in Gaul.[311] The admission that the
Church, even when encouraging laymen to free their slaves, insisted on
retaining its own,[312] is the proof that the urging force was not even then
doctrinal, but the perception that the Church's secular interests were served
by the growth of an independent population outside its own lands.[313] The
spirit of the Justinian code, despite its allusion to the law of nature, and the
spirit of the enactments of the early Councils of the Church, are alike
opposed to any idea of spiritual equality between bond and free.
On the other hand, the simple restriction of conquest limited the
possibilities of slavery for Byzantium. Captives were enslaved to the last,
[314]
but of these there was no steady supply. In the rural districts, again, the
fiscal conditions made for at least nominal freedom, as is shown by the
historian who has most closely analysed the conditions:—

"The Roman financial administration, by depressing the higher classes and
impoverishing the rich, at last burdened the small proprietors and cultivators of the
soil with the whole weight of the land-tax. The labourer of the soil then became an
object of great interest to the treasury, and ... obtained almost as important a position
in the eyes of the fisc as the landed proprietor himself. The first laws which conferred
any rights on the slave are those which the Roman government enacted to prevent the
landed proprietors from transferring their slaves, engaged in the cultivation of lands
assessed for the land-tax, to other employments which, though more profitable to the
proprietor of the slave, would have yielded a smaller or less permanent return to the
imperial treasury.[315] The avarice of the imperial treasury, by reducing the mass of
the free population to the same degree of poverty as the slaves, had removed one
cause of the separation of the two classes. The position of the slave had lost most of
its moral degradation, and [he] occupied precisely the same political position in
society as the poor labourer from the moment that the Roman fiscal laws compelled
any freeman who had cultivated lands for the space of thirty years to remain for ever
attached, with his descendants, to the same estate.[316] The lower orders were from
that period blended into one class; the slave rose to be a member of this body; the
freeman descended, but his descent was necessary for the improvement of the great
bulk of the human race, and for the extinction of slavery. Such was the progress of
civilisation in the Eastern Empire. The measures of Justinian which, by their fiscal
rapacity, tended to sink the free population to the same state of poverty as the slaves,
really prepared the way for the rise of the slaves as soon as any general improvement
took place in the condition of the human race."[317]

For the rest, it cannot be supposed that the "freedom" thus constituted had
much actuality. Sons of soldiers and artisans were held bound to follow
their father's profession, as in the hereditary castes of the East,[318] and none
of the fruits of freedom are to be traced in Byzantine life. Still, the fact
remains that the commercial and industrial life sustained the political, and
that the political began definitely to fail when the commercial did.
Constantinople could hardly have collapsed as it did before the Crusaders if
its commerce had not already begun to dwindle through interception by
Venice and the Italian trading cities. As soon as these were able to trade
directly with the East they did so, thus withdrawing a large part of the
stream of commerce from Byzantium; and when, finally, they acquired the
secret of her silk manufacture, her industrial revenue was in turn
undermined. On the economic weakening, the political followed; and the
Eastern Empire finally fell before the Turks, very much as the Western had
fallen before the Goths.

FOOTNOTES:

[233] Aristotle, Politics, v, 9.
[234] Id. i, 2.
[235] Plutarch, Solon, c. 24.
[236] Id. c. 22. Cp. Dr. Grundy, Thucydides and the History of his Age, 1911, p.
66, as to Solon's evident purpose of promoting manufactures.
[237] Maisch, Manual of Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. p. 38. Cp. Meyer, ii, 644.
[238] Cp. Cunningham, Western Civilisation, i (1898), 100-2.
[239] Grote, ii, 504. Hitherto Athens was far behind other cities, as Corinth, in
trade. The industrial expansion seems to begin in Solon's time (Plutarch, Solon,
c. 22; Busolt, Griechische Geschichte, i, 501).
[240] Busolt, as cited, i, 549-50. The details, many of them from lately
recovered inscriptions, are full of interest. Cp. Grote, ii, 462.
[241] Plutarch, Agis. c. 5; Aristotle, Politics, ii, 9; Thirlwall, viii, 133.
[242] The arguments of K.O. Müller (Dorians, Eng. tr. b. iii, c. 3, §§ 3-5) in
discredit of the received view, though not without weight, have never carried
general conviction. Cp. Maisch, Manual of Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. p. 17.
[243] See the recovered passage of Polybius (xii, 6, ed. Hultsch) cited (from
Mai, Nov. Collect. Vet. Scriptor. ii, 384) by Müller (Dorians, Eng. tr. ii, 205). Cp.
M'Lennan, Kinship in Ancient Greece, § 2.
[244] Aristotle, Politics, ii, c. 9. On Aristotle's unhesitating assumption (ii, 10) as
to the normality and the effects of pæderasty, cp. the refutation of Müller,
Dorians, Eng. tr. b. iv, c. 4, §§ 6-8; and as to the real causes of decline of
population, see b. iii, c. 10, § 2. Primogeniture was a main factor. As the
propertied class, of whom Aristotle speaks, became small through
accumulations, which often went to heiresses, the whole statistic as to births is
narrow and dubious. But it is safe to decide that the decline of the pure Spartan
population was not a result of vice, any more than the normal dwindling of the
numbers of modern aristocracies. It should be remembered that younger sons
would be likely to have illegitimate offspring among the helots, if not among the
perioikoi. The selfish aristocracy thus wrought for its own class extinction.
[245] Plutarch, Solon, c. 22.
[246] See refs. in Fustel de Coulanges, La cité antique, 1. iii, ch. xviii, p. 265.
[247] Aristotle, Politics, ii, 6.
[248] Cp. the Republic, v, and the Laws (bks. v, xi; Jowett's tr. 3rd ed. v, pp. 122,
313) with the Politics, vii, 16.
[249] Fr. Vat. xxxvii, 9.
[250] Cp. Hume, essay cited, as to the slight effect of the exposure check in
China.

[251] Above, p. 101.
[252] Aristotle, Politics, ii, 9; Plutarch, Agis, c. 7.
[253] Athenæus, citing Phylarchus, iv, 20.
[254] Grote, x, 402; Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, p. 457; Greek World
under Roman Sway, p. 237; M'Culloch, Treatises and Essays, ed. 1859, pp. 276-
78.
[255] Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, p. 452.
[256] M'Culloch, as cited, p. 275.
[257] Thucydides, i, 93.
[258] Grote, iv, 341, 342.
[259] Citations in Boeckh, bk. i, ch. 12.
[260] Boeckh, bk. i, ch. 12. Cp. De Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les
Grecs, 1787, i, 55-60.
[261] See E. Ardaillon, Les mines du Laurion dans l'antiquité, 1897, ch. v.
[262] The mines of Laurium, though anciently worked by the "Pelasgi," do not
figure in Athenian history till the beginning of the fifth century B.C. Ardaillon,
pp. 126-27.
[263] As to the enormous cost in labour and money of such buildings as the
Propylæa and the Parthenon, cp. Mahaffy, Survey of Greek Civilisation, p. 143,
and M'Cullagh, Industrial History of the Free Nations, 1846, i, 166, 167.
[264] "Before the Persian war Athens had contributed less than many other
cities, her inferiors in magnitude and in political importance, to the intellectual
progress of Greece. She had produced no artists to be compared with those of
Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, Ægina, Laconia, and of many cities both in the eastern
and western colonies. She could boast of no poets so celebrated as those of the
Ionian and Æolian Schools. But ... in the period between the Persian and the
Peloponnesian wars both literature and the fine arts began to tend towards
Athens as their most favoured seat" (Thirlwall, vol. iii, ch. xviii, pp. 70, 71).
"Never before or since has life developed so richly" (Abbott, ii, 415). Cp. Holm,
Eng. tr. ii, 156, 157.
[265] This view appears to be substantially at one with the reasoning of Dr.
Cunningham (Western Civilisation, pp. 112-23). I must dissent, however, from
his apparent position (pp. 119-21) that it was the mode of the expenditure that
was wrong, and that Athens might have employed her ill-gotten capital
"productively" in the modern economic sense. The cases of Miletus and Tyre,
cited by him, seem to be beside the argument.
[266] Plutarch, Pericles, c. 11.
[267] Cp. Thirlwall, small ed. iii, 67.
[268] On the Revenues.

[269] As cited, bk. iv, ch. xxi.
[270] Boeckh's arguments, denounced by Lewis, need not be adhered to; but the
whole theorem is so fantastic that Lewis's general vindication of it is puzzling
(Trans. pref. xv, note).
[271] See Hertzberg, Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Römer,
Theil ii, Kap. 2, p. 200, as to the vast estates now acquired by a few.
[272] In Magna Graecia, in particular, the whole Pythagorean movement had
such associations in a high degree. Note the frequency of names beginning αναξ
(= king or chief) in the history of early Greek philosophy.
[273] Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, p. 136.
[274] Idem, pp. 145-49; Gibbon, Bohn ed. iv, 352.
[275] E.g., the whole population of Corinth; and 150,000 inhabitants of Epirus.
[276] Cp. Finlay, i, 23.
[277] They exacted from Macedonia only half the tribute it had paid to its kings;
but there is a strong presumption that it was too impoverished after the war to
pay more.
[278] "The extraordinary payments levied on the provinces soon equalled, and
sometimes exceeded, the regular taxes" (Finlay, i, 39). Cp. Mahaffy, Greek
World under Roman Sway, pp. 145, 156, 159, 161, 162.
[279] Cp. Hertzberg, Gesch. Griechenlands unter der Herrsch. der Römer, Th. i,
Kap. 5, pp. 486-91.
[280] Finlay, i, 45, 46, 74.
[281] "We stand [1st c. A.C.] before a decayed society of very rich men and
slaves" (Mahaffy, Greek World, p. 268).
[282] Finlay, i, 73. But cp. Frazer, Pausanias, 1900, p. 4, as to the decay in the
second century.
[283] This was soon withdrawn by Vespasian, but apparently with
circumspection. In the first century A.C. the administration seems to have been
unoppressive (Mahaffy, Greek World, pp. 233, 237).
[284] Hertzberg (Gesch. Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Römer, Th. ii,
Kap. 2, p. 189) rejects the statement of Finlay that Greece reached the lowest
degree of misery and depopulation under the Flavian emperors ("about the time
of Vespasian" is the first expression in the revised ed. i, 80). But Finlay
contradicts himself: cp. p. 66. Hertzberg again (iii, 116) speaks of a "furchtbar
zunehmende sociale Noth des dritten Jahrhunderts" at Athens, without making
the fact clear. See below.
[285] This is noted by Finlay (i, 143) in regard to the later surrender of a large
Mesopotamian territory by Jovian to Shapur II, when the whole Greek
population of the ceded districts was forced to emigrate.

[286] Cp. Finlay, i, 264, 267-69.
[287] Finlay, i, 141. See p. 142 as to the recognition of the military importance
of Greece by Julian.
[288] Cp. Finlay, i, 161. as to the ruin wrought at the end of the fourth century
by Alaric; and pp. 253, 297, 303, 316, as to that wrought in the sixth century by
Huns, Sclavonians, and Avars.
[289] Σωτηριαοταἱ is one of the group-names preserved.
[290] They are already seen established in the laws of Solon.
[291] Foucart, Des associations religieuses chez les Grecs, 1873, pp. 5-10.
[292] They may have begun as early as the Peloponnesian war (Foucart, p. 66).
[293] Finlay, i, 85-86, notes.
[294] Id. i, 289.
[295] Id. p. 309; cp. pp. 328, 329.
[296] A fair idea of the facts may be had by combining the narratives of Gibbon,
Finlay, and Mr. Oman (The Byzantine Empire, ch. x). Gibbon and Mr. Oman
ignore the threat to make Carthage the capital; Gibbon ignores the point as to the
stoppage of the grain supply; Finlay ignores the Church loan; Mr. Oman (p. 133)
represents it as voluntary, whereas Gibbon shows it to have been compulsory
(ch. 46. Bohn ed. v, 179, note). Mr. Bury alone (History of the Later Roman
Empire, 1889, ii, 217-21) gives a fairly complete view of the situation. He
specifies a famine and a pestilence as following on the stoppage of the grain
supply.
[297] Finlay, i, 425.
[298] Id. ii, 37.
[299] Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 12.
[300] Oman, as cited, pp. 147, 148. The conventional claim, as made by
Robertson and echoed by Guizot, was partly disallowed even by Milman, and
countered by the clerical editor of the Bohn ed. of Gibbon (ii, 50-54). But such
conventional formulas are always subject to resuscitation.
[301] Finlay (i, 81) writes that "at this favourable conjuncture Christianity
stepped in to prevent avarice from ever recovering the ground which humanity
had gained." This clearly did not happen, and his later chapters supply the true
explanation.
[302] Finlay later says so in so many words (ii, 23, 220), explicitly rejecting the
Christian theory (see also p. 321). This historian's views seem to have modified
as his studies proceeded, but without leading him to recast his earlier text.
[303] Luke xvii, 7-10, Gr. The translation "servant" is, of course, an entire
perversion.

[304] 1 Cor. vii, 21-24. The phrase unintelligibly garbled as "use it rather"
clearly means "rather remain a slave." "even" being understood in the previous
clause. This was the interpretation of Chrysostom and most of the Fathers. See
the Variorum Teacher's Bible, ad loc. Cp. the whole first chapter of Larroque, De
l'esclavage chez les nations chrétiennes, 2nd édit. 1864; and the forcible passage
of Frédéric Morin, Origines de la Démocratie, 3e édit. 1865, pp. 384-86. As
Morin points out, the Church has never passed a theological condemnation of
slavery. On the other hand, it was expressly justified by Augustine (De Civ. Dei,
1. xix, c. 15) as a divinely ordained punishment for sin; and by Thomas Aquinas
(De regimine principum, ii, 10) as being further a stimulus to bravery in soldiers.
He cannot have seen the Histories of Tacitus, where (ii, 4) civil wars are declared
to have been the most bloody, because prisoners were not to be enslaved.
[305] Athenagoras, Apology for Christianity, c. 35; Chrysostom, passim.
[306] Instit. Justin. I, iii, § 2, 4; v.
[307] Politics, i, 3.
[308] Cp. Michelet, Hist. de France, vol. vii, Renaissance, note du § v. Introd.
(ed. 1857, pp. 155-57). Michelet argues that the Christian influence was
substantially anti-liberationist.
[309] U.R. Burke, History of Spain, Hume's ed. i, 116, 407.
[310] Chrysostom. 15th Hom. in Eph. (iv, 31); cp. 11th Hom. in 1 Thess. (v. 28).
[311] "Cum occidunt servos suos, jus putant esse, non crimen. Non solum hoc,
sed eodem privilegio etiam in execrando impudicitiæ cæno abutuntur" (De
gubernatione Dei, iv).
[312] See below, pt. iv, ch. ii.
[313] Cp. the whole of Larroque's second chapter.
[314] So Mr. Oman admits, p. 148.
[315] Cod. Theod. xi, 3. 1, 2; Cod. Justin. xi, 47.
[316] Cod. Justin. xi, 47, 13 and 23. [A clear retrogression to quasi-slavery for
the freemen.]
[317] Finlay, i, 200, 201. Cp. p. 153.
[318] Id. ii, 27, and note. Cp. Dill, as cited, p. 233.

PART III
CULTURE FORCES IN ANTIQUITY

Chapter I
GREECE
§1
It is still common, among men who professedly accept the theory of
evolution, to speak of special culture developments, notably those of
sculpture and literature in Greece, art in medieval Italy, and theocratic
religion in Judea, as mysteries beyond solution. It may be well, then, to
consider some of these developments as processes of social causation, in
terms of the general principles above outlined.

[A rational view was reached by the sociologists of the eighteenth century, by whom
the question of culture beginnings was much discussed—e.g., Goguet's De l'origine
des lois, des arts, et des sciences, 1758; Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil
Society, 1767; and Hume's essay on the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences. At
the end of the century we find the solution scientifically put by Walckenaer: "Ainsi le
germe de génie et des talens existe dans tous les tems, mais tous les tems ne sont pas
propres à le faire éclore" (Essai sur l'histoire de l'espèce humaine, 1798, 1. vi, ch. xx,
Des siècles les plus favorables aux productions de génie, pp. 348, 349). In England
forty years later we find Hallam thus exemplifying the obscurantist reaction: "There is
only one cause for the want of great men in any period—nature does not think fit to
produce them. They are no creatures of education and circumstances" (Literature of
Europe, pt. i, ch. iii, § 35). A kindred though much less crude view underlies Sir
Francis Galton's argument in Hereditary Genius. Cp. the present writer's paper on
"The Economics of Genius," in The Forum, April, 1898 (rep. in Essays in Sociology,
vol. ii), and the able essay of Mr. Cooley, there cited. My esteemed friend, Mr. Lester
Ward (Dynamic Sociology, ii, 600, 601), seems to me, as does Mill (System of Logic,
bk. vi, ch. iv, § 4; cp. Bain, J.S. Mill, p. 146), to err somewhat on the opposite side to
that of Hallam and Galton, in assuming that faculty is nearly equal in all, given only
opportunity.]

And first as to Greece. As against the common conception of the Hellenic
people as "innately" artistic, it may be well to cite the judgment of an artist
who, if not more scientific in his method of reaching his opinion, has on the
whole a better right to it in this case than has the average man to his. It is a
man of genius who writes[319]: "A favourite faith, dear to those who teach, is
that certain periods were especially artistic, and that nations, readily named,
were notably lovers of art. So we are told that the Greeks were, as a people,
worshippers of the beautiful, and that in the fifteenth century art was
ingrained in the multitude....Listen! There never was an artistic period.
There never was an Art-loving nation." This, which was sometime a
paradox, is when interpreted one of the primary truths of sociology.
Our theorist goes on to describe the doings of the first artist, and the slow
contagion of his example among men similarly gifted, till the artistic
species had filled the land with beautiful things, which were uncritically
used by the non-artistic; "and the Amateur was unknown—and the
Dilettante undreamed of." Such is the artist's fairy tale of explanation. The
probable fact is that the "first artists" in historic Greece were moved to
imitative construction by samples of the work of foreigners. If, on the other
hand, we decide that the "race" had evolved relatively high artistic
capacities before it reached its Greek or Asian home,[320] it will still hold
good that the early Ægean evolution owed much to ancient Oriental and

Egyptian example. The Greeks as we know them visibly passed from
primitive to high art in all things. Having first had fetish Gods of unshapen
stone, they made Gods in crudely human shape, at first probably of wood,
later of stone. So with vases, goblets, tables, furniture, and ware of all sorts,
all gradually developing in felicity of form up to a certain point, whereafter
art worsened. What we require to know is the why of both processes.
Pace the artist, it is clear that artistic objects were multiplied mainly
because they were in steady economic demand. The shaping impulse is
doubtless special, and in its highest grades rare; but there must also have
been special conditions to develop it in one country in the special degree.
That is to say, the faculty for shaping, for design, was oftener appealed to in
Greece than elsewhere, and was allowed more freedom in the response, thus
reaching new excellence. The early Greeks can have had no very delicate
taste, satisfied as they were with statues as primitive as the conventional
Assyrian types they copied.
Prof. Burrows, in his valuable work on The Discoveries in Crete (1907), somewhat
confuses one of his problems by assuming that, on a given chronological view, the
creators of the early Ægean civilisation were "the most progressive and artistic part of
the race" (p. 193). No such assumption can be valid on any chronology. Every "part"
of a race, broadly speaking, has the same total potentialities. The determinants are the
special evocative conditions, which may be either culture contacts or economic
fostering. A rational view of the growth of Greek art is put by Dr. Mahaffy, despite his
endorsement of Mr. Freeman's extravagant estimate of Athenian intelligence:
—"However national and diffused it [art] became, this was due to careful study, and
training, and legislation, and not to a sort of natural compulsion.... As natural beauty
was always the exception among Greek men, so artistic talent was also rare and
special" (Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. p. 430). All the remains, as well as every
principle of sociological science, go to support this view of the case. When Reber
asserts (Hist. of Ancient Art, Eng. tr. 1883, p. 264) that "the very first carvings of
Greece had a power of development which was wanting in all the other nations of that
period," he is setting up an occult principle and obscuring the problem. The other
nations of that period were not in progressive stages; but some of them had
progressed in art in their time. And many of the "very first" Greek works—that is, of
the "historic" period, as distinguished from the "Minoan"—are enormously inferior to
some very ancient Egyptian work.

The development of taste was itself the outcome of a thousand steps of
comparison and specialisation, art growing "artistic" as children grow in
reasonableness and in nervous co-ordination. And the special conditions of
historic Greece were roughly these:—

(1) The great primary stimulus to Greek art, science, and thought, through
the contact of the early settlers in Asia Minor with the remains of the older
Semitic civilisation,[321] and the further stimuli from Egypt.
(2) Multitude of autonomous communities, of which the members had
intercourse as kindred yet critical strangers, emulous of each other, but
mixing their stocks, and so developing the potentialities of the species.
(3) Multitude of religious cults, each having its local temples, its local
statues, and its local ritual practices.
(4) The concourse in Athens, and some other cities, of alert and capable
men from all parts of the Greek-speaking world,[322] and of men of other
speech who came thither to learn.
(5) The special growth of civic and peaceful population in Attica by the free
incorporation of the smaller towns in the franchise of Athens. Athens had
thus the largest number of free citizens of all the Greek cities to start with,
[323]
and the maximum of domestic peace.
(6) The maintenance of an ideal of cultured life as the outcome of these
conditions, which were not speedily overridden either by (a) systematic
militarism, or (b) industrialism, or (c) by great accumulation of wealth.
(7) The special public expenditure of the State, particularly in the age of
Pericles, on art, architecture, and the drama, and in stipends to the poorer of
the free citizens.
Thus the culture history of Greece, like the political, connects vitally from
the first with the physical conditions. The disrupted character of the
mainland; the diffusion of the people through the Ægean Isles; the
spreading of colonies on east and west, set up a multitude of separate City-
States, no one of which could decisively or long dominate the rest. These
democratic and equal communities reacted on each other, especially those
so placed as to be seafaring. Their separateness developed a multitudinous
mythology; even the Gods generally recognised being worshipped with
endless local particularities, while most districts had their special deities.
For each and all of these were required temples, altars, statues, sacred
vessels, which would be paid for by the public[324] or the temple revenues, or
by rich devotees; and the countless myths, multiplied on all hands because

of the absence of anything like a general priestly organisation, were an
endless appeal to the imitative arts. Nature, too, had freely supplied the
ideal medium for sculpture and for the finest architecture—pure marble.
And as the political dividedness of Hellenedom prevented even an approach
to organisation among the scattered and independent priests, so the
priesthood had no power and no thought of imposing artistic limitations on
the shapers of the art objects given to their temples. In addition to all this,
the local patriotism of the countless communities was constantly expressed
in statues to their own heroes, statesmen, and athletes. And in such a world
of sculpture, formative art must needs flourish wherever it could ornament
life.
We have only to compare the conditions in Judea, Persia, Egypt, and early
Rome to see the enormous differentiation herein implied. In Mazdean
Persia and Yahwistic Judea there was a tabu on all divine images, and by
consequence on all sculpture that could lend itself to idolatry.[325] (This tabu,
like the monotheistic idea, was itself the outcome of political and social
causation, which is in large part traceable and readily intelligible.) In Italy,
in the early historic period, outside of Etruria, there had been no process of
culture-contact sufficient to develop any of the arts in a high degree; and the
relation of the Romans to the other Italian communities in terms of situation
and institutions[326] was fatally one of progressive conquest. Their
specialisation was thus military or predaceous; and the formal acceptance of
the deities of the conquered communities could not prevent the partial
uniformation of worship. Thus Rome had nearly everything to learn from
Greece in art as in literature. In Egypt, again, where sculpture had at more
than one time, in more than one locality, reached an astonishing excellence,
[327]
the easily maintained political centralisation[328] and the commercial
isolation made fatally for uniformity of ideal; and the secure dominion of
the organised priesthood, cultured only sacerdotally, always strove to
impose one stolid conventional form on all sacred and ritual sculpture,[329]
which was copied in the secular, in order that kings should as much as
possible resemble Gods. Where the bulk of Greece was "servile to all the
skyey influences," physically as well as mentally, open on all sides to all
cultures, all pressures, all stimuli, Egypt and Judea and Persia were
relatively iron-bound, and early Rome relatively inaccessible.

Finally, as militarism never spread Spartan-wise over pre-Alexandrian
Greece, and her natural limitations prevented any such exploitation of
labour as took place in Egypt, the prevailing ideal in times of peace, at least
in Attica, was that of the cultured man, καλοκἁγαθὁς, supported by slave
labour but not enormously rich, who stimulated art as he was stimulated by
it. Assuredly he was in many cases a dilettante, if not an amateur, else had
art been in a worse case.
It is to be remembered that in later Greece, from about the time of Apelles, all free
children were taught to draw (Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxxv, 36, 15); and long before, the
same authority tells us, art was taken up by men of rank. The introduction of painting
into the schools at Sicyon took place about 350 B.C., and thence the practice spread
all over Hellas. Aristotle, too (Politics, v [viii], 3), commends the teaching of drawing
to children, noting that it enables men to judge of the arts and avoid blunders in
picture-buying—though he puts this as an inferior and incidental gain. Thus the
educated Greeks were in a fairly good sense all dilettanti and amateurs. On the whole
subject see K.J. Freeman, Schools of Hellas, 1908, pp. 114-17.

§2
In literature Greek development is as clearly consequent as in art. The
Homeric poems are the outcome of a social state in which a class of bards
could find a living by chanting heroic tales to aristocratic households. Lyric
genius is indeed something specially incalculable; and it is startling to
realise that about the time of the rude rule of Peisistratos at Athens, Sappho
in Lesbos was not merely producing the perfect lyrics which to this day
men reckon unmatched, but was the centre of a kind of school of song. But
Lesbos was really the home of an ancient culture—"the earliest of all the
Æolic settlements, anterior even to Kymê"[330]—and Sappho followed
closely upon the lyrists Pittakos and Alkaios. So that here too there is
intelligible causation in environment as well as genius. In other directions it
is patent. The drama, tragic and comic alike, was unquestionably the
outcome of the public worship of the Gods, first provided for by the
community, later often exacted by it from rich aspirants to political power.
Greek drama is a clear evolution, on the tragic side, from the primitive
ritual of Dionysos, Beer-God or Wine-God; individual genius and
communal fostering combining to develop a primitive rite into a literary
florescence.[331] For all such developments special genius is as a matter of
course required, but potential genius occurs in all communities in given
forms at a given culture stage; and what happened in Athens was that the

special genius for drama was specially appealed to, evoked, and maintained.
Æschylus in Egypt and Aristophanes in Persia must have died with all their
drama in them. Further, as Grote has so luminously shown,[332] the juridical
life of Athens, with its perpetual play of special pleading in the dikasteries,
was signally propitious to the spirit of drama. The constant clashing and
contrast of ethical points of view, the daily play of eristic thought, was in
itself a real drama which educated both dramatists and audience, and which
inevitably affected the handling of moral problems on the stage. Athens
may thus be said to have cultivated discussion as Sparta cultivated
"Laconism"; and both philosophy and drama in Greece are steeped in it.
Myths thus came to be handled on the stage with a breadth of reflection
which was nowhere else possible.
Historiography, science, and philosophy, again, were similarly fostered by
other special conditions. Abstract and physical science began for Greece in
the comparison and friction of ideas among leisured men, themselves often
travelled, living in inquisitive communities often visited by strangers. What
Egypt and Syria and Phœnicia had to give in medical lore, in geometry, and
in astronomy, was assimilated and built upon, in an atmosphere of free
thought and free discussion, whence came all manner of abstract
philosophy, analytical and ethical. Plato and Aristotle are the peaks of
immense accumulations of more primitive thought beginning on the soil
laid by Semitic culture in Asia Minor; Socrates was stimulated and drawn
out by the Athenian life on which he didactically reacted; Hippocrates
garnered the experience of many medical priests. History was cultivated
under similar conditions of manifold intercourse and intelligent
inquisitiveness. Herodotus put down the outcome of much questioning
during many travels, and he had an appreciative public with similar tastes.
[333]
The manifold life of Hellas and her neighbours, Egypt, Persia, Syria,
was an endless ground for inquiry and anecdote. The art of writing,
acquired long before from Phœnicia, was thus put to unparalleled uses; and
at length the theme of the Peloponnesian war, in which all the political
passions of Hellas were embroiled for a generation, found in Thucydides a
historian produced by and representative of all the critical judgment of the
critical Athenian age. Plutarch, in a later period, condenses a library of
lesser writers.

Thus in respect of every characteristic and every special attainment of
Greek life we can trace external causation, from the geographical conditions
upwards, without being once tempted to resort to the verbalist explanation
of "race qualities" or "national genius." If Hellas developed otherwise than
Phœnicia from any given date onwards, the causes lay either in the
environment or in the set previously given to Phœnician life by its special
antecedents, which in turn were determined by environment. To suppose
that "the Greeks" started primordially with a unique connatural bent to a
relatively "ideal" method of life, preferring culture to riches and art to
luxury, is to entail the further assumption of a separate biological evolution
from the pre-human stage. To put the problem clearly, let us say that if we
suppose the ancestors of the Greeks three millenniums before Homer to
have been planted in Australia, with none of the domesticable animals
which have played so decisive a part in the development of human
societies, there is no good reason to think that the "race" would have risen
to any higher levels than had been reached by the Australian aborigines at
the time of their discovery by Europeans. One of the most remarkable
things about those aborigines is their disproportionately high cranial
capacity, which seems compatible with a mental life that their natural
environment has always precluded. Many plain traces of gross primeval
savagery remain in Greek literature and religion; and to credit all Greek
progress to a unique racial faculty is to turn the back upon all the
accumulating evidence which goes to show that from the first entrance of
the Greeks into Greece they blended with and assimilated the culture of the
races whom they found there.[334] The futility of the whole racial thesis
becomes evident, finally, the moment we reflect how unequal Greek culture
was; how restricted in Hellas, how special to Athens was it on the
intellectual side when once Athens had reached her stature; how blank of
thought and science was all Hellenic life before the contact of Semitic
survivals in Ionia; how backward were many sections of the pagan Hellenic
stock to the last; and how backward they have been since the political
overturn in antiquity.
The vitiating concept of racial genius appears incidentally, but definitely, in Dr.
Cunningham's contrast of Phœnicians and Greeks as relatively wealth-seekers and
culture-seekers, ingrained barbarians and ingrained humanists (Western Civilisation,
pp. 72, 73, 98, 99, etc.), and in his phrase as to the persistent "principles which the
Greek and the Phœnician respectively represented." The antithesis, it is here
maintained, is spurious. Many Greeks were in full sympathy with the Phœnician

norm; many Phœnicians must have been capable of delighting in the Greek norm had
they been reared to it. At a given period the Phœnicians had a higher life than the
Greeks; and had the Phœnicians evolved for ages in the Greek environment, with an
equivalent blending of stocks and cross-fertilisation of cultures, they could have
become all that the Greeks ever were. The assertion that when we see "the destruction
and degradation of human life in the march of material progress, we see what is alien
to the Greek spirit" (id. p. 99) will not bear examination. Greek slavery, like every
other, was just such a degradation of human life. And to speak of a "consciousness of
her mission" on the part of "Athens" (id. pp. 72, 73) is to set up a pseudo-entity and a
moral illusion.
It is remarkable that even among students well abreast of evolutionary thought there is
still a strong tendency to think of Greek civilisation in terms of some occult virtue of
"Hellenic spirit," something unique in social phenomena, something not to be
accounted for like the process of evolution in other races. Thus so accomplished and
critical a thinker as Prof. Gilbert Murray seems to account for every Greek advance
beyond savagery as a result of "Hellenism." E.g., "Human sacrifice, then, is one of the
barbarities which Hellenism successfully overcame" (The Rise of the Greek Epic,
1907, p. 16); "Solved by the progressive, or, I may say, by the Hellenic spirit" (Id. p.
25). In this way the discrediting and abandonment of the use of poisoned arrows in the
"Homeric" period (Id. pp. 120-21) seems to be ascribed either to the Homeric or to the
Hellenic "spirit."
Now, Mr. Murray himself incidentally notes (p. 121) that poisoned weapons are
forbidden in the Laws of Manu; and it might be pointed out that even among the
barbaric and ill-advantaged Somali, when visited by Burton fifty years ago, the use of
poisoned arrows was already restricted to "the servile class" (First Footsteps in East
Africa, ed. 1910, p. 45; cp. p. 74). The use of poisoned arrows, in short, is common in
savagery, and is transcended by all races alike when they rise some way above that
level. The "Hellenes," to start with, were savages like the rest, and rose like others in
virtue of propitious conditions. So with human sacrifice. According to Herodotus, the
Egyptians had abandoned it before the Greeks. Shall we describe the Egyptian
progress as a matter of "Egypticism" or "the Egyptian spirit"?
Defences of the Greeks, such as that made so ably by Mr. Murray against the
aspersions cast upon "Paganism" by uncritical Christians, are to be sympathetically
received in the light of their purport; but the true historical method is surely not to
exhibit the historic Greeks as "antitheses" to "the pagan man" of modern
anthropology, but to show Christians how they and their creed have evolved from
savagery even as did the Greeks. (Cp. the author's Christianity and Mythology, 2nd
ed. p. 77 sq., as to the pro-Hellenic handling of Greek phenomena by other scholars.)

Should the general line of causation here set forth be challenged, it will
suffice, by way of test, to turn to the special case of Sparta. If it were
"Greek character" that brought forth Greek art, letters, and science, they
ought to have flourished in Greek Sparta as elsewhere. It is, however, the
notorious historic fact that during all the centuries of her existence, after the
pre-Lycurgean period, Sparta contributed to the general deed of man
virtually nothing, either in art or letters, in science or philosophy.

The grounds for holding that choral poetry flourished pre-eminently at Sparta (see
K.O. Müller, History of the Dorians, Eng. tr. ii, 383) are not very strong. See Busolt,
Griechische Geschichte, 1885, i, 158, 159, for what can be finally said on this head.
Ernst Curtius (Griechische Geschichte, 1858, i, 240) writes on this subject as a
romantic enthusiast. Burckhardt (Griechische Culturgeschichte, i, 116-19) examines
the subject with his usual care, but decides only that the Spartans employed music
with a special eye to military education. And Müller acknowledges that though many
Spartan lyrists are named, "there has not been preserved a single fragment of Spartan
lyric poetry, with the exception of Alkman's," the probable reason being "a certain
uniformity and monotony in their productions, such as is perceived in the early works
of art." On the whole question cp. K.J. Freeman's Schools of Hellas, chs. i and xi.

In the story of Hellas, Sparta stands almost alone among the peoples as
yielding no foothold to the life of the mind, bare of nearly all memory of
beauty,[335] indigent in all that belongs to the spirit, morally sterile as steel.
Yet "the Dorians of Laconia are perhaps the only people in Greece who can
be said to have preserved in any measure the purity of their Greek blood."
[336]
Before such a phenomenon the dogma of race-character instantly
collapses, whereas in terms of the reaction of conditions the explanation is
entirely adequate. As thus:—
1. Sparta was by situation one of the most secluded of the Greek States. In
the words of Euripides, it was "hollow, surrounded by mountains, rugged,
and difficult of access to an enemy."[337] Compared in particular with
Athens, it was not only landward and mountain-walled, but out of the way
of all traffic.[338]
2. From the first the Spartans were balanced in a peculiar degree by the
strength of the Achaians, who were in the Peloponnesus before them, the
hostilities between the invaders and the older inhabitants lasting longer in
the valley of the Eurotas than anywhere else.[339] The Spartan militarism was
thus a special product of circumstances, not a result of Doric "character,"
since other Dorian communities did not develop it.
3. Being thus so little open to commercial influence, and so committed to a
life of militarism, Sparta was susceptible of a rigidity of military
constitution that was impossible elsewhere in the Hellenic world, save to
some extent in the similarly aristocratic and undeveloped communities of
Thessaly and Crete, each similarly noted for unintellectuality. Whatever be
the political origins of these societies, it is clear that that of Sparta could not

have been built up or maintained save under conditions of comparative
isolation.
Grote, always somewhat inclined to racial explanations, argues (ed. 1888, ii, 262), as
against K.O. Müller, who had still stronger leanings of the kind, that the Spartans
were not the "true Doric type," in that their institutions were peculiar to themselves,
distinguishing them "not less from Argos, Corinth, Megara, Epidaurus, Sikyôn,
Korkyra, or Knidus, than from Athens or Thebes." This is doubtless true as against
Müller (cp. Kopstadt, cited by Grote; Cox, General History of Greece, 1877, p. 28;
and Ménard, Histoire des Grecs, 1884, pp. 218, 221), but the suggestion that the
Spartans varied in respect of being less "Doric" is equally astray. Grote goes on to
note that "Krête was the only other portion of Greece in which there prevailed
institutions in many respects analogous, yet still dissimilar in those two attributes
which form the real mark and pinch of Spartan legislation—viz., the military
discipline and rigorous private training. There were doubtless Dorians in Krête, but
we have no proof that these peculiar institutions belonged to them more than to the
other inhabitants of the island." The argument cuts both ways. If it was not definitely
"Dorian" to have such institutions, neither was it un-Dorian. As Cox observes (p. 30),
the Spartan constitution in its earlier stages "much resembled the constitution of the
Achaians as described in the Iliad." Equally arbitrary seems Grote's argument (i, 451)
that "the low level of taste and intelligence among the Thessalians, as well as certain
points of their costume, assimilates them more to Macedonians or Epirots than to
Hellenes." He notes the equally low level of taste and intelligence among the
Spartans, who as a rule could not read or write (ii, 307), and to whom he might as
well have assimilated the Thessalians as to the Macedonians. In all cases alike culture
conditions supply the true explanation. All through Greece, barring Sparta, stocks
were endlessly mixed. M. Ménard well points out in reply to Müller that it is
impossible to associate types of government with any of the special "races"—that as
against Sparta there were "Ionian aristocracies at Marseilles and at Chalkis, and
Dorian democracies at Tarentum and Syracuse," while most of the Greek cities had by
turns aristocratic and democratic constitutions.

4. As regards Sparta, the specialisation of all life on the military side
developed a spirit of peculiar separateness and arrogance,[340] which
clinched the geographical influence. Where Greeks of all States were
admitted to the Eleusinian festivals, Sparta kept hers for her own people.[341]
This would limit her literary mythology, and by consequence her art.
Among the names of Greek sculptors only three belong to Sparta, and these are all of
the sixth century B.C., the beginning of the historic period. After that, nothing. See
Radford's Ancient Sculpture, Chron. List at end. Thus Sparta positively retrogressed
into militarism. "There is evidence in the character of Alkman's poetry that he did not
sing to a Sparta at all resembling the so-called Sparta of Lycurgus" (Mahaffy,
Problems in Greek History, p. 77; cp. Burckhardt, Griechische Culturgeschichte, i,
117).

5. Not only does military specialism preclude, so far as it goes, more
intellectual forms of activity: it develops in the highest degree the

conservative spirit[342] when thoroughly rooted in law and custom. Nor is it
any more favourable to moral feeling in general.[343]
As offset to all this it may be urged that the middle unenfranchised class
(the Perioikoi) in Sparta, the Penestai in Thessaly, and the ordinary citizens
in Crete, were in some ways superior types to part of the similar classes of
Attica; while the slaves, as having some military life, were, despite the
flavour of the name "Helot," above the average.[344] But even if that were so,
it would not affect the problem as to culture development, and its solution
in terms of the primary and secondary conditions of life for the given
communities.
It is to be noted that in Crete, less isolated by nature and way of life than either Sparta
or Thessaly, less rigidly militarised than they and more democratic in constitution,
there were more stirrings of mind. Epimenides, the author of the famous saying that
the Cretans were always "liars, evil beasts, idle gluttons," was himself a distinguished
Cretan. But Crete on the whole counts for very little in Greek culture-history. Cp. K.J.
Freeman, Schools of Hellas, p. 38.

§3
Such being, in brief, the process of the building up of culture for Greece, it
remains to note the causes of the process of retrogression, which also
connects broadly with the course of politics. Indeed, the mere expansion of
Hellenistic life set up by the empire-making of Alexander might alone
account for a complete change in the conditions and phases of Greek
civilisation. In the new Hellenistic world wealth and power were to be won
with ease and with amenity[345] where of old there was only an alien
barbarism, or at least a society which to the cultured Greek was barbaric.
When such cities as Alexandria and Antioch beckoned the Greek scholar of
small means, impoverished Athens could hardly retain him. Her extorted
revenue in her most powerful period,[346] as we saw, was the source of her
highest flight of artistic splendour; and even after the Peloponnesian War,
with greatly lessened power, Athens was the most desirable dwelling-place
in Hellas. After Alexander, all this was insensibly changed: Athens, though
for a time filled with Greeks enriched by the plunder of Persia, must needs
gradually dwindle to the point at which the slight natural advantages of her
soil, industry, and situation would maintain her; and the life of ideas, such
as it finally was, passed inevitably to Alexandria, where it was
systematically encouraged and protected, in the fashion in which well-

meaning autocrats do such things. But while these new developments were
not inconsiderable, and included some rare felicities, they were on the
whole fatally inferior to the old, and this for reasons which would equally
affect what intellectual life was left in Greece proper.
The forces of hindrance were political and psychological;[347] and they
operated still more powerfully under the Romans than under the successors
of Alexander. The dominance of the Greeks over the other races in the
eastern provinces did not make them more than a class of privileged tools of
Rome; and they deteriorated none the less.[348] When for the stimulating
though stormy life of factious self-government there was substituted the
iron hand of a conqueror, governing by military force, there was need of a
new and intelligent discipline if the mental atmosphere were not to worsen.
All civilisation, in so far as it proceeds from and involves a "leisured class,"
sets up a perpetual risk of new morbid phases. Men must have some normal
occupation if their life is to be sound; and where that occupation is not
handicraft it can be kept sound and educative only by the perpetual free
effort of the intelligence towards new truth, new conception, and new
presentment.[349] Nor can this effort conceivably take place on any wide
scale, and with any continuity, save in a community kept more or less
generally alert by the agitation of vital issues. For a generation or two after
Alexander, it is true, there is no arrest in the production of good philosophic
minds among the Greeks; indeed, the sudden forcing back of all the best
remaining minds on philosophy, as the one mental employment left to self-
respecting men of leisure,[350] raised the standards of the study, and led to
the ethical systems of Epicurus and Zeno, certainly fit in their way to stand
beside those of Plato and Aristotle. So, too, the thrusting back of the drama
(which in the hands of Aristophanes had meddled audaciously with every
public question) on the study of private life, developed in the highest degree
the domestic and psychological bent of the later comedy,[351] very much as
the autocracy has developed the novel in contemporary Russia. But the
schools of Epicurus and Zeno, both of which outlasted in moral credit and
in moral efficacy that of Plato,[352] and the new comedy of Menander, alike
represent the as yet unexhausted storage of the mental energy generated by
the old political life; and the development is not prolonged in either case.
Evidently something vital was lost: only a renewal of the freer life could
make possible a continuous advance in intellectual power.

On this it is important to insist, as there are plausible grounds for contrary
inferences, which are often drawn. All supposed exceptions to the law,
however, will be found on analysis to be apparent only. A tyranny may
indeed give economic encouragement to art and culture, and a republic may
fail to do so; but the work of the tyranny is inevitably undone or kept within
a fixed limit by its own character; while, if the free community be but fairly
well guided, its potentialities are unlimited. This is the solution of much
modern dispute between the schools of laissez-faire and protection. A
Velasquez, who might otherwise have been condemned to seek his market
with coarser wares, may develop to perfection at the court of an autocrat of
fine taste; but even he partly depends for his progress on intelligent
communion, which the autocrat in this case chances to yield him. And from
Velasquez onward there is no progress. So, in autocratic Assyria, sculpture
reaches a certain point and becomes for ever conventionalised. In Egypt it
conforms more or less exactly to the general stereotyping of life. We may
grant, with some emphatic qualifications, that in some cases "with the
tyrant began the building of large temples, ... the patronage of clever
handicrafts, the promoting of all the arts,"[353] and that he may have
patronised men of letters; but as regards the temples it is certain that in
Hellas he was not the chief temple-builder; and it is also quite certain that
the tyrant never evolved a single generation of important writers, thinkers,
and artists, any more than of intelligent, self-respecting, and self-governing
citizens. The latter constituted, in fact, the necessary nutritive soil for the
former in the communities of antiquity.[354] It has been said[355] that "at the
end of the third century of Rome, when its inhabitants had hardly escaped
from the hands of Porsena, Syracuse contained more men of high genius
than any other city in the world. These were collected at the court of the
first Hiero, during his short reign of ten years, and among them were the
greatest poets of the age: Pindar ... Simonides ... Æschylus." This is true;
but Hiero had not been the means of evolving the powers of any one of the
three. Pindar is manifestly the product of the diversified life of the free
States; Simonides, though much patronised by aristocrats, began to "find
himself" as a chorus teacher at Carthea in Ceos, won countless prizes at the
Greek festivals,[356] and spent only the latter part of his life with Hiero;
Æschylus is the product of the Attic theatre. Not the tyranny, but
democracy, had been the alma mater. It is true that Athens after Æschylus
played the "despot city" in finance, but she so far preserved at home the

democratic atmosphere, in which, according to Demosthenes, slaves had
more freedom of speech than citizens in many other places.[357] Lesbos had
her oscillations between oligarchy and despotism; but the group in which
Sappho stood was that of Pittakos and Alkaios—the elected ten-years
dictator who finally laid down his dictatorship, and the fierce singer who
assailed him. Not in the "Roman peace" of a fixed despotism did Lesbian
song reach its apex.
The old problem of the culture-value of the tyrant has been raised afresh by Messrs.
Mitchell and Caspari, in their abridgment of Grote's History of Greece. Grote's
enthusiasm for democracy, they contend, "undoubtedly prevented him from doing full
justice to much that was good in the non-democratic governments of Greece," notably
"in his estimate of the so-called 'tyrants' of the Greek world and in his attitude towards
the Macedonian Empire" (pref. to work cited, p. xv). Part of their discussion is beside
the case, and proves only their general hostility to Grote as "a rationalist," to whom
"every problem was a matter for rational discussion" (p. xiii). They first assert that
Grote's chapter heading, "Age of the Despots," is "subtly misleading," inasmuch as
there were despots at various periods in Greek history—as has been insisted by
Professor Mahaffy. Then they avow that "this fact is mentioned by Grote himself,"
and that he "quite properly distinguishes" between the early and the late tyrannies.
The counter-claim is first put in the propositions (1) that an early Greek "tyranny" was
in effect "a union of one powerful personality with the poorer and hitherto
unrepresented classes," favourable to individual life among the latter; and (2) that the
tyrants by preserving peace and giving the people individual freedom of life promoted
"the accumulation of wealth and the extension of trade at home and abroad, and
enriched the Greek mind by familiarising it with the natural and artistic products of
other lands" (p. xvii). There is really nothing here that Grote denied; nor do the critics
attempt to show that he denies it. Grote actually said, before them, that "the
demagogue despots are interesting as the first evidence of the growing importance of
the people in political affairs. The demagogue stood forward as representing the
feelings and interests of the people against the governing few.... Even the worst of the
despots was more formidable to the rich than to the poor; and the latter may perhaps
have gained by the change...." (History, pt. ii, ch. ix, ed. 1888, ii, 397). As regards the
case of Peisistratos, on which Messrs. Mitchell and Caspari chiefly found their plea,
Grote notes that his "was doubtless practically milder" than the average despotism,
but that "cases of this character were rare." And to this thesis, which is backed by an
overwhelming mass of Greek testimony, from Herodotus to Aristotle and Plato, the
critics offer no kind of answer.
They do, however, claim for "the tyrants" in general that "in the first place their
orderly government provided for the first time the conditions which are essential to
artistic and literary production. Secondly, it was their policy to foster in all possible
ways everything that contributed to the magnificence of the States." If it be meant to
include under the head of tyrannoi the early feudal chieftains before whom the bards
chanted, the issue is merely confused. If not, the proposition is untenable. If again it
be argued that the Mausoleum was a finer thing than the Parthenon, or quite as well
worth having, the real issue is missed.

It is significant that Grote's anti-rationalistic critics make no attempt to gauge the
respective effects of "tyrannic" and democratic or oligarchic rule on the inner life of
men, which is what Grote chiefly considered. Neither is this, the vital issue, once
faced in the essay of Hegewisch "On the Epoch of Roman History most Fortunate for
the Human Race" (French trans. by Solvet, 1834), or in the encomiums of Gibbon,
Mommsen, and Renan, before cited (p. 89, note). As has been shown above, there is
no instance of a new and great intellectual development taking its rise or visibly going
forward (save as at Alexandria under the Ptolemies) under the auspices of even a good
despot in antiquity; though such a despot might at times usefully preserve the peace
and cherish writers and artists. Here, then, is a sociological clue that should be
followed. The reasonable inference seems to be that democratic conditions, other
things being equal, tend most to elicit human faculty.

And where in modern times certain of the less democratic nations may be
said to have developed certain forms of culture more widely and
energetically than do certain of the more democratic States—as Germany
her learned class, in comparison with France and England and the United
States; or modern Russia in comparison with the States in the matter of the
higher fiction—it can easily be shown (1) that these developments arise not
in virtue of but in reaction against autocracy, and (2) that they were possible
only in virtue of the evocative influence of communities living more freely.
Modern communities differ vitally from the ancient in that printing has
created a species of intercourse which overleaps all political and
geographical restrictions, so that a politically tyrannised community can yet
receive and respond to the stimulus of another. But the stimulus is still
indispensable. Thus the intellectual expansion of France after the death of
Louis XIV[358] drew germinally from the culture of the England of the day;
and that of Germany later in the century was equally a sequence from that
and from the ferment in France. Given the cluster of independent States,
each with its court and its university, which made up the Germany of the
period, the revived spirit of free thought bore the more and the better fruit
because of the multitude of the reactions involved in the circumstances. For
the time, the slackened and lightened petty autocracies counted for
intellectual democracy, though even Kant was made to feel the pressure of
censorship. It was not regal or ducal rule that made Lessing or Herder or
Schiller or Goethe; and it was not mere kingly encouragement that bred
scholars like Hermann and Wachsmuth and Buttmann and Bekker and
Boeckh and Heeren and Ottfried Müller. The school of Tübingen was the
outcome of a movement that proximately began in English Deism; and even
the personal bias of Frederick counted for much less in the evolution than
the general contagion of European debate. In the University of Berlin,

organised after Jena, the inspiring principle was that of intellectual freedom;
and the moving spirits took express pains to guard against the tyranny of
convention which they saw ruling in the universities of England. For the
rest, the production of a very large class of scholarly specialists in Germany
was made possible primarily by the number of universities set up in the
days of separatism, and secondarily by the absence of such economic
conditions (all resting on possession of coal and maritime situation) as drew
English energy predominantly to industry and commerce. It is true that if a
democratic society to-day does not make express economic provision for a
scholarly and cultured class, it is likely to lack such, because the leisured or
idle class in all countries grows less capable of, and less inclined to, such
intellectual production as it contributed to the serious literature of England
during the nineteenth century. But such economic provision has been still
more necessary in monarchic communities. Finally, at every stage Germany
has been reacted upon by France and England; and it is notable that while,
in the last generation, under a strengthening militarism and imperialism, the
number of trained German specialists was maintained, the number of
Germans able to stir and lead European thought fell off.[359]
In the same way the phenomenon of a group of great novelists in the
autocratic Russia of our own age is no fruit of autocracy, save in the sense
that autocratic government checks all other forms of criticism of life, all
liberal discussion, and so drives men back on artistic forms of writing
which offer no disturbing social doctrine. And the artistic development
itself is made possible only by the culture previously or contemporaneously
accumulated in other and freer communities, from whose mental life the
cultivated Russian draws his. It was to some extent a similar restrictive
pressure that specially developed the drama in France under the Third
Empire. Apart from the peculiar case of the Italian cities of the Renaissance,
discussed hereinafter, the most that can be said for the "tyrant" in modern
Europe is that Richelieu and Colbert promoted science in France; that the
German principalities of the eighteenth century fostered music at their
courts; that George III did much for Handel in England; and that the King
of Bavaria did still more for Wagner. On the other hand, the system of
national and municipal theatres on the Continent was an essential adjunct
even in this regard; and the mere comparative freedom accorded to the
drama in Elizabethan England, at a time when surplus intellectual energy

lacked other stimuli, sufficed to develop that art in one generation to a
degree never so speedily reached elsewhere, save in republican Athens.
Where the "tyrant" is most useful is in such a civilisation as that of the
Saracens, for which autocracy is the only alternative to anarchy, and where,
on a basis of derived culture, he can protect and rapidly further the useful
arts and all manner of special studies. But even he cannot command a great
intellectual art, or an inwardly great literature.[360] It will hardly be
pretended that the freethinking which went on in Moslem Persia and Spain
in the eighth and later centuries was evoked by the Caliphs, though some of
them for a time protected it. The Ptolemies for a while fostered science at
Alexandria; but under Roman rule—surely as tyrannous—it died out. And
even under the Ptolemies science was a hothouse plant which never throve
in the open.
It is clear, then, that first the rule of Alexander and his successors, and later
the rule of Rome, over Greece and the Græcised East, put a check on the
intellectual forces there, against which there was no counteractive in
existence. There remained no other free communities whose culture could
fecundate that of the Greek and other cities held in tutelage.
The city of Rhodes, which recovered its independence at the death of Alexander, and
maintained its self-government down till the Roman period, was, in point of fact,
latterly distinguished for its art (Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, pp. 334-38), thus
illustrating afresh the value of free life as an art stimulus; but its pre-eminently
commercial activity, as in the case of Corinth, and as later in the case of Venice, kept
it relatively undistinguished in literature. Rich merchants commissioned pictures and
statues, but not philosophies or books. Holm (Eng. trans. iv, 492) calls Rhodes a seat
of philosophy, etc., naming Theophrastus and Eudemus. But they both studied and
settled at Athens.

From the whole history there emerges the demonstration of what might
reasonably be put a priori—that for a whole community, once self-
governing, to acquiesce in an all-embracing foreign despotism meant the
settling of lethargy on half of its mental life.[361] What the thinkers left in
Greece could do was to lend philosophic ideas and method to the jurists at
work on the problem of adapting Roman law to the needs of a world-
empire, and this was done to good purpose; but it was the last genuine task
that the circumstances permitted of. To discuss vitally the problems of
politics would have meant challenging the despotism. There remained, it is
true, philosophy and the arts; and these were still cultivated; but they finally

subsisted at the level of the spirit of a community which felt itself
degenerate from its past, and so grew soon hopelessly imitative. No
important work, broadly speaking, can ever be done save by men who, like
the most gifted Greeks of the palmy days (innovating in drama and
improving on the science of the foreigner), feel themselves capable of
equalling or transcending the past;[362] and that feeling seems to have
become impossible alike for the students and the sculptors of Greece soon
after the Macedonian conquest, or at least after the Roman. Plato and
Pheidias, Aristotle and Praxiteles, Æschylus and Epicurus, figured as
heights of irrecoverable achievement; and the pupillary generations brooded
dreamily over Plato or drew serenity from Epicurus as their bent lay, and
produced statues of alien rulers, or of the deities of alien temples, where
their ancestors had portrayed heroes for the cities and Gods for the shrines
of Greece. Beneath the decadence of spirit there doubtless lay, not
physiological decay, as is sometimes loosely assumed, but a certain arrest of
psychological development—an arrest which, as above suggested, may be
held to have set in when the life and culture of the "family women" in the
Greek cities began decisively to conform to the Asiatic standard, the men
cultivating the mind, while the women were concerned only with the
passive life of the body. In this one matter of the equal treatment of the
sexes Sparta transcended the practice of Athens, her narrow intellectual life
being at least the same for both; and to this element of equilibrium was
probably due her long maintenance of vigour at the level of her ideal.
[As, however, the Spartan women, whatever their training, could not finally live the
martial life of the men, the results of their chiefly animal training were not exemplary.
See the question vivaciously discussed by De Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur
les Grecs, 1787, ptie. iv, sect. x, § 1—a work which contains many acute
observations, as well as a good many absurdities. The Spartan women, it appears,
were in a special degree carried away by the Bacchic frenzy. Aelian, Var. Hist. iii, 42.
Cp. Aristotle, Politics, ii, 9 (and other testimonies cited by Hermann, Manual of the
Political Antiquities of Greece, § 27, 12), as to their general licence.]

The arrested psychological development, it need hardly be added, would
tend to mean not merely unoriginal thinking among those who did think,
but finally a shrinkage of the small number of those who cared greatly for
thinking. Even in the independent period, the mental life of Greece drew
perforce from a relatively small class—chiefly the leisured middle class and
the exceptional artificers or slaves who, in a democratic community, could
win culture by proving their fitness for it. Under the Roman rule the

endowed scholars (sophists) and artists alike would tend to minister to
Roman taste, and as that deteriorated its ministers would. Rome, it is easy
to see, went the downward intellectual way in the imperial age with fatal
certainty; and her subject States necessarily did likewise at their relative
distance. Finally, when Christianity became the religion of the Empire, all
the sciences and all the fine arts save architecture and metal-work were
rapidly stupefied, the Emperor vetoing free discussion in the fifth century,
and the Church laying the dead hand of convention on all such art as it
tolerated, even as the priesthood of Egypt had done in their day. It is
positively startling to trace the decline of the fine arts after the second
century. On the arch of Constantine, at Rome, all the best sculpture is an
appropriation from the older arch of Trajan: under the first Christian
emperor there are no artists capable of decently embellishing his monument
in the ancient metropolis. All the forms of higher faculty seem to have
declined together; and as the decay proceeded the official hostility to all
forms of free thought strengthened.
[See Finlay, History of Greece, as cited, i, 284-85, as to the veto on discussion by
Theodosius. In the next century Justinian suppressed the philosophic schools at
Athens. Finlay, in one passage (i, 221), speaks of them as nearly extinct before
suppression; but elsewhere (pp. 277-81) he gives an entirely contrary account. There
are too many such contradictions in his pages. Cp. Hertzberg, Geschichte
Griechenlands seit dem Absterben des antiken Lebens, 1876, i, 78-84.]

By the time of Constantine, even the coinage had come to look like that of a
semi-barbarian State; and thought, of course, had already stagnated when
Christianity conquered the "educated" classes. But these classes themselves
were speedily narrowed nearly to those of the priests and the bureaucracy,
save in so far as commerce maintained some semi-leisure. Barbarian
invasion and imperial taxation combined in many districts to exterminate
the former leisured and property-owning class. It is indeed an exaggeration
to say that "the labourer and the artisan alone could find bread ... and, with
the extinction of the wealthy and educated classes, the local prejudices of
the lower orders became the law of society."[363] But the last clause is
broadly true. In this society the priest, with his purely pietistic tastes and
knowledge, became the type and source of culture.
A cultured modern Greek apologist of the Byzantine Empire[364] has
anxiously sought to combine with the thesis that Christianity is a civilising
force, the unavoidable admission that Byzantine civilisation was

intellectually stationary for a thousand years. It is right that every possible
plea for that ill-famed civilisation should be carefully attended to, even
when it takes the form of reminding us[365] that after all the sixth century
produced Procopius and Agathias; the seventh, George of Pisidia; the
eighth, John of Damascus; the ninth, Photius; and so on—one man or two
per century who contrived to be remembered without being annalised as
emperor. Of rather more importance is the item that Christian
Constantinople at one point, following Egyptian and Roman precedent,
improved on the practice of heathen Athens, in that the women of the
imperial court and of the upper classes seem to have received a fair share of
what culture there was.[366] It is further a matter of bare justice to note that
Byzantium had all along to maintain itself against the assaults of Persia, of
Islam, of barbarism, heathen and Christian, and of Latin Christendom. But
there must all the same be made the grieving admission that "We certainly
do not find in the Byzantine authors the same depth and originality which
mark the ancient writers whom they copied";[367] and that this imitation "was
unhappily the essential weakness of Byzantine literature." That is to say, the
intelligence of the Christian Empire, like that of the Greece of the post-
Macedonian and the Roman domination, looked back to pagan Athens as to
an irrecoverable greatness. In that case, if we are to assume comparative
equality of culture between the sexes, there is no escape from the
conclusion that Christianity was in itself a force of fixation or paralysis, the
subsequent counteraction of which in Europe was a result of many causes—
of any cause but the creed and lore itself. The creed, in fact, was a specific
cause of isolation, and so of intellectual impoverishment. As was well said
by Gibbon, the mental paralysis of the Byzantines was "the natural effect of
their solitary and insulated state."[368] The one civilisation from which
Byzantium might latterly have profited—the Saracen—was made tabu by
creed, which was further the efficient cause of the sunderance of Byzantine
and Italian life.
Had the external conditions, indeed, permitted of the maintenance of the
earlier manifold Empire of Constantine, the mere conditions of social
diversity which prepared the countless strifes of speculative sects in Egypt
and Syria might have led to intellectual progress, were it only by arousing
in the more rational minds that aversion to the madness of all the wrangling
sects which we detect in Procopius.[369] The disputes of the Christians were

indeed the most absurd that had ever been carried on in the Greek tongue;
and in comparing the competing insanities it is hard to imagine how from
among themselves they could have evoked any form of rational thought.
But as in Northern Europe in a later age, so in the Byzantine Empire, the
insensate strifes of fanatics, after exhausting and decimating themselves,
might have bred in a saner minority a conviction of the futility of all wars of
creed—this if only external peace could have been secured. But the attacks,
first of Persia and later of Islam, both determined religious enemies, with
whom, on Christian principles, there could be no fruitful intercourse, shore
away all the outlying and diversified provinces, leaving to Byzantium
finally only its central and most homogeneous section, where the power of
the organised Church, backed by a monarchy bent on spiritual as on
political unity, could easily withstand the slight forces of intellectual
variation that remained. The very misfortunes of the Empire, connected as
they were with so many destructive earthquakes and pestilences,[370] would,
on the familiar principle of Buckle, deepen the hold of superstition on the
general mind. On the other hand, the final Christianising of the Bulgarian
and Slav populations on the north, while safeguarding the Empire there,
yielded it only the inferior and retarding culture-contact of a new pietistic
barbarism, more childish in thought than itself. We can see the fatality of
the case when we contemplate the great effort of Leo the Isaurian in the
eighth century to put down image-worship by the arm of the executive. No
such effort could avail against the mindless superstition of the ignorant
mass, rich[371] and poor, on whom the clerical majority relied for their
existence. A Moslem conqueror, with outside force to fall back upon, might
have succeeded; but Leo was only shaking the bough on which he sat.[372] It
seems clear that the Iconoclastic emperors were politically as well as
intellectually progressive in comparison with the orthodox party. The
worshipped images which they sought to suppress were artistically
worthless, and they aimed at an elevation of the people. "If the Iconoclastic
reformers had had their way, perhaps the history of the agricultural classes
would have been widely different. The abolition of the principle which the
first Christian emperors had adopted, of nailing men to the clod, was part of
the programme which was carried out by the Iconoclastic emperors and
reversed by their successors."[373] Thus did it come about that Christian
Byzantium found the rigid intellectual equilibrium in which it outlasted, at a

lower level of mental life, the Caliphate which sought its destruction, but
only to fall finally before the more vigorous barbarism of the Turks.

FOOTNOTES:
[319] Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 1890, pp. 138, 139.
[320] Cp. Prof. Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete, 1907, ch. xi; Bury, History of
Greece, 1906, p. 65. "The supreme inspiration," says Bury, "came to their
minstrels on Asiatic soil."
[321] E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii. 533-36; A.R. Hall, The Oldest
Civilisation of Greece, 1901, pp. 31, 32. Cp. the author's Short History of
Freethought, i, 122-27; and Von Ihering's Vorgeschichte der Indo-Europäer,
Eng. trans. ("The Evolution of the Aryan"), p. 73. Von Ihering's dictum is the
more noteworthy because it counters his primary assumption of race-characters.
[322] Cp. Galton. Hereditary Genius, ed. 1892, p. 329. The contrast between the
policy of Athens, before and after Solon, and that of Megara, which boasted of
never having given the citizenship to any stranger save Hercules (Wachsmuth,
Eng. tr. i, 248), goes far to explain the inferiority of Megarean culture.
[323] "No other Greek city possessed so large an immediate territory" [as
distinct from subject territory, like Laconia] "or so great a number of free and
equal citizens" (Freeman, History of Federal Government, ed. 1893, p. 22, note).
And the number was greatly swelled "after Athens had in 477 taken the lead in
the Delian Maritime League" (Maisch, Greek Antiquities, § 28), so that in 451 it
was felt necessary again to limit citizenship to men born of Athenian parents.
[324] Cicero (in Verrem ii, 59) testifies to the zeal of Greek cities in buying
paintings and statues in his day, and their unwillingness to sell.
[325] The result is a marked poverty of power in such sculpture as the Persians
had. It is in every respect inferior to the Assyrian which it copies. See Reber,
History of Ancient Art, Eng. tr. 1883, pp. 121-28.
[326] See above, p. 28.
[327] See Maspero, Manual of Egyptian Archæology, Eng. tr. 1895, pp. 215,
226, 235, 236, 240, etc.
[328] See above, p. 56.
[329] See Maspero, as cited, pp. 212, 214, 231, etc., as to the religious influence.
M. Maspero recognises several movements of renaissance and reaction through
the ages.
[330] Grote, iii, 21-22.
[331] Cp. Haigh, The Tragic Drama of the Greeks, 1896, ch. i; Miss Harrison,
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 2nd ed. 1908, ch. viii.

[332] Pt. ii, ch. 67.
[333] See Holm's suggestion, cited by Mahaffy, Problems of Greek History, p.
92, note, as to the value of Herodotus to the traders of his day. Holm also
suggests, however, that the political service rendered by Herodotus to the
Athenians was felt by them to be important, as giving them new light on Egypt
and the East (Eng. tr. ii, 290, 291). The reward paid to Herodotus would greatly
stimulate further historical research.
[334] Cp. Bury, History of Greece, pp. 7, 33-34.
[335] The Spartan women were indeed reputed the most beautiful, doubtless a
result of their healthier life. As for the works of "art" claimed by Müller (The
Dorians, ii, 25-26) for Sparta, they are simply objects of utility, and were by his
own avowal (p. 24) the work of non-Spartan Laconians, aliens, or slaves, "since
no Spartan, before the introduction of the Achæan constitution, was allowed to
follow any trade." No one disputes that other Dorian cities, notably Sikyon, did
much for art—another proof that "race" has nothing to do with the matter.
[336] Bury, History of Greece, ed. 1906, p. 59.
[337] Cited in Strabo, bk. viii, ch. v, § 6.
[338] Cp. Müller, i, 80. Müller notes that the Corinthians were "nearly singular
among the Doric States" in esteeming trade, their experience of its
productiveness "having taught them to set a higher value upon it" (work cited, ii,
24).
[339] Cp. Maisch, Manual of Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. § 11; K.O. Müller, The
Dorians, i, 105, 203.
[340] The native Spartans were positively forbidden to go abroad without special
leave, nor were strangers permitted to settle there (Grote, ii, 306; Wachsmuth, i,
248).
[341] Grote, iii, 294, and note.
[342] Cp. Dr. Mahaffy's remark on post-Alexandrian Sparta, "where five
ignorant old men were appointed to watch the close adherence of the State to the
system of a fabulous legislator" (Greek Life and Thought from the Age of
Alexander to the Roman Conquest, 1887, p. 3).
[343] Macaulay, in his youthful review of Mitford (Miscellaneous Writings, ed.
1868, p. 74), draws up a long indictment against the Spartans in the matter of
bad faith and meanness. It is only fair to remember that some similar charges can
be laid against others of the Greek States.
[344] Grote, ii, 204. But cp. Aristotle (Politics, ii, 9) and Plutarch (Lycurgus, c.
27), who agrees with the saying of Plato and others (cp. Müller, Dorians, Eng. tr.
ii, 43, note) that in Sparta a free man was most a freeman, and a slave most a
slave. And see Schömann, Alterthümer, i, 362. Hume (On Populousness) cites
Xenophon, Demosthenes, and Plautus as proving that slaves were exceptionally
well treated at Athens, and this is borne out by the Athenian comedy in general
(cp. Maisch, Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. § 32). But the fact remains that at Athens

slaves, male and female, were frequently tortured to make them give evidence
against their masters, who in turn were free to kill them for doing so (Mahaffy,
Social Life in Greece, pp. 240-41). And Aristotle takes for granted that they were
substantially inferior in character to freemen.
[345] Cp. Finlay, History of Greece, Tozer's ed. i, 15; Mahaffy, Greek Life and
Thought, pp. 4, 105.
[346] Fifth century B.C.
[347] Holm (Eng. tr. iv, 595-98) misses half the problem when he argues that the
Greek cities under the Romans were nearly as free and self-governing as are to-
day those of Switzerland, the United States, or the German Empire. The last-
named may perhaps approximate at some points; but in the other cases the moral
difference is inexpressible. The Greek cities under the Romans were
provincialised, and their inhabitants deprived of the powers of State government
which they formerly possessed. Their whole outlook on life was changed.
[348] Cp. Finlay, i, 76.
[349] In artistic handicraft, of course, such daily renewal of creative intelligent
effort is of great importance to mental health; and the complete lack of it, as in
the conventional sculpture of Egypt, tells of utter intellectual stagnation. In the
least artistic crafts, however, it is not so essential a condition of sound work.
[350] Cp. Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, pp. 4, 10, 15, 131-38, 144.
[351] The change was not so immediately dependent on the Alexandrian régime
as Droysen implies (Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen, 3te Aufl. p. 367): the
New Comedy had been led up to by the Middle Comedy, which already tended
to withdraw from burning questions (cp. K.O. Müller, Lit. of Ancient Greece,
Eng. tr. pp. 436-41); but the movement was clearly hastened.
[352] Cp. Mackintosh, On the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, 4th ed. p. 29;
Lecky, History of European Morals, 6th ed. i, 128.
[353] Mahaffy, Problems of Greek History, p. 85; Survey of Greek Civilisation,
pp. 87, 99, 117; Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. pp. 83, 137, 440. Cp. the remark
of Thirlwall, ch. xii (1st ed. ii, 125), that the tyrants "were the natural patrons of
the lyrical poets, who cheered their banquets, extolled their success," etc.
[354] Holm on this head makes an admission (iii, 168) which countervails the
remark last above cited from him. Noting the prosperity of art in Asiatic Greece,
he writes: "Art as a rule flourishes—we do not say, reaches its highest point, for
that is impossible without freedom—where wealth is to be found combined with
good taste. And good taste is a gift which even tyrants may possess, and semi-
barbarians acquire."
[355] Professor Spalding, Italy and the Italian Islands, i, 117, 118.
[356] K.O. Müller, History of Greek Literature, 1847, pp. 208, 210.
[357] Schömann, Griechische Alterthümer, ii, 362.

[358] The questions of the previous expansion under Richelieu and Mazarin, and
of the decay in the latter part of Louis's reign, are discussed, àpropos of the
laissez-faire argument of Buckle, in the author's Buckle and his Critics, pp. 324-
39.
[359] An interesting corroboration of the above general view was presented in an
article on the state of German art in the Century Magazine for July, 1898. The
writer thus described the position of German art under the Kaiser's patronage:
"Moved by the best of intentions, the Emperor is not very successful in his
efforts to encourage art. They smack too much of personal tastes and one-man
power. Menzel is perhaps a favourite, not because of his great Meissonnier-like
skill in illustrations, but because he is the draftsman and painter of the period of
Frederick the Great. The Emperor is really honouring his own line rather than
the artist when he covers him with rewards.... It is not by making sketches for
the Knackfusses to carry out that the Emperor will raise art in Prussia from its
present stagnation, but by allowing the dangerous breath of liberty to blow
through the art world. The fine arts are under the drill-sergeant, and produce
recruits who have everything except art in them. It is too much to say that this is
the Emperor's fault; but it is true that so long as he insists upon running things
artistic, no one else can, or will—and the artists themselves least of all."
[360] Cp. Mill, Liberty, ch. iii, People's ed. p. 38.
[361] Cp. J.S. Mill's analysis of "benevolent despotism" in ch. iii of his
Representative Government.
[362] Prof. Mahaffy (Greek Life and Thought, p. 112) attributes the same sense
of superiority to the men of the period of the earlier successors of Alexander.
This could well be, and such a feeling would serve to inspire the great art works
of the period in question. Cp. Thirlwall (vii, 120) as to the sense of new growth
set up by the commercial developments of the Alexandrian world.
[363] Finlay. History of Greece, i. 186. Cp. p. 185.
[364] D. Bikélas. Seven Essays on Christian Greece, translated by the Marquess
of Bute, 1890.
[365] Work cited, p. 103.
[366] Work cited, pp. 97-98; Finlay, History of Greece, iv, 351-52. That this was
no Christian innovation becomes clear when we compare the status of women in
Egypt and imperial Rome. Cp. Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, pp. 173-74.
And see his Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 328, as to pre-Christian
developments.
[367] Bikélas, p. 104.
[368] Ch. 53, Bohn ed. vi, 233. Cp. Finlay, ii, 4, 217, as to the internal forces of
routine.
[369] De bello Gothico, i, 3. Cp. Gibbon, ch. 47, note, Bohn ed. v, 243; and Prof.
Bury's App. to his ed. of Gibbon, iv, 516.
[370] Finlay, History of Greece, i, 224-25; Gibbon, ch. 43, end.

[371] "The degrading feature of the end of the seventh century ... was the
ignorant credulity of the richer classes" (Bury, History of the Later Empire, ii,
387). Cp. Gibbon, ch. 54, Bohn ed. vi, 235.
[372] Cp. Bury, as cited, ii, 521.
[373] Bury, App. 12 to ed. of Gibbon, v, 531.

Chapter II
THE SARACENS
While Byzantine civilisation thus stagnated, the Saracen civilisation for a
time actually gained by contact with it, inasmuch as Byzantium possessed,
if it could not employ, the treasures of old Hellenic science and philosophy.
The fact that such a fructification of an alien civilisation could take place
while the transmitting community showed no similar gain, is tolerably
decisive as to (a) the constrictive force of religious systems under certain
conditions, and (b) the nullity of the theory of race genius. Yet these very
circumstances have been made the ground of a preposterous impeachment
of the "Semitic" character in general, and of the Arab in particular.
Concerning no "race" save the Celtic has there been more unprofitable
theorising than over the Semitic. One continental specialist after another[374]
has explained Semitic "faculty" in terms of Semitic experience, always to
the effect that a nation has a genius for becoming what it becomes, but only
when it has become so, since what it does not do it has, by implication, no
faculty for doing.[375] The learned Spiegel, for instance, in his work on the
antiquities of Iran, inexpensively accounts for the Jewish opposition to
sculpture as a matter of race taste,[376] without even asking how a practice to
which the race was averse had to be forbidden under heavy penalties, or
why the same course was held in Aryan Persia. Connecting sculpture with
architecture, he pronounces the Semites averse to that also; and as regards
the undeniable building tendencies of the Babylonians, he argues that we
know not "how far entirely alien models were imitated by the Semites."[377]
Only for music does he admit them to have any independent inclination;
and their lack of epos and drama as such is explained, not by the virtual
inclusion of their epopees and early dramatic writings in their Sacred
Books, and the later tabu on secular literature, but by primordial lack of
faculty for epos and drama. The vast development of imaginative fiction in
the Arabian Nights is credited bodily to the "Indo-Germanic" account,
because it has Hindu affinities, and took place in Persia; and, of course, the
Semites are denied a mythology, as by M. Renan, no question being raised

as to what is redacted myth in the Sacred Books. For the rest, "the Semite"
is not fitted to shine in science, being in all his branches "almost totally
devoid of intellectual curiosity," so that what philosophy and science he has
are not "his own"; and he is equally ill-fitted for politics, wherein, having
no political idea save that of the family, he oscillates between "unlimited
despotism and complete anarchy."[378] Apart from music, his one special
faculty is for religion.
Contemporary anti-Semitism may fairly be surmised to underlie in part
such performances in pseudo-sociology, which, taken by themselves, set up
a depressing suspicion that numbers of deeply learned specialists contrive
to spend a lifetime over studies in departments of the history of civilisation
without learning wherein the process of civilisation consists. On Spiegel's
method—which is that of Mommsen in dealing with the early culture-
history of Rome—the Germanic nations must be adjudged to be naturally
devoid of faculty for art, architecture, drama, philosophy, science, law, and
order, since they had none of those things till they got them in the Middle
Ages through the reviving civilisation of the Mediterranean and France.
And as the Greeks certainly received their first impulse to philosophy and
science through contact with the survivals of the old Semitic civilisations in
Ionia, they in turn must be pronounced to have "neither a philosophy nor a
science of their own"; while the Spartans were no less clearly devoid of all
faculty for the epic and the drama. It is the method of Molière's doctors,
with their virtus dormitivus of opium, applied to sociology.
The method, nevertheless, is steadily popular, and is no less freely applied
to the phenomena of Arab retrogression than to those of imperfect
development in the Semitic life of antiquity, with some edifying results as
regards consistency. Says a French medical writer:—
"There is no such thing as an original Arab medical science. Arab medical science was
a slavish imitation from the Greek. And the same remark is true of all the sciences.
The Arabs have never been inventors. They are enthusiasts, possessed with a passion
for anything new, which renders their enthusiasm itself evanescent. And in
consequence of this incapacity for perseverance, they soon forgot the lessons in
medical science which they had once acquired from the Greeks, and have fallen back
into a state of the most absolute ignorance."[379]

The method by which Arab defects are here demonstrated from the arrest of
Arab civilisation is a simple extension of that by which Spiegel

demonstrates the original deficiencies of the ancient Semites, and
Mommsen the incapacity of the Latins to do what they did not do. A certain
race or nation, having at one time attained a considerable degree of
civilisation, and afterwards lost it, is held to have thus shown a collective
incapacity for remembering what "it" or "they" had learned. The "they" here
is the correlative of M. Taine's "we"—a pseud-entity, entirely self-
determining and strictly homogeneous. The racial misfortune is set down to
a fault pervading the whole national character or intellect, and peculiar to it
in comparison with other national characters. Conditions count for nothing;
totality of inherited character, acting in vacuo, is at once the summary and
the judgment. Anyone who has followed the present argument with any
assent thus far will at once grant the futility of such doctrine. "The Arabs"
had neither more nor less collective faculty of appreciation and oblivion
than any other equally homogeneous people at the same culture-stage. It is
quite true that they had not an "original medical science." But neither have
any other historical "they" ever had such. The Greeks certainly had not. The
beginnings of medical knowledge for all mankind lay of necessity in the
primeval lore of the savage; and the nations which carried it furthest in
antiquity were just those who learned what others had to give, and
improved upon it. The Greeks must have learned from Asia, from Egypt,[380]
from Phœnicia; and the Romans learned from the Greeks. The Arabs,
coming late into the sphere of the higher civilisation, and crossing their
stock in the East with those of Persia, in the West with the already much-
mixed stocks of Spain, passed quite as rapidly as the Greeks had done from
the stage of primitive thought in all things to one of comparative rationality
as regards medicine and the exact sciences; and this not in virtue of any
special "enthusiasm" for new ideas, but by the normal way of gradual
collection of observations and reflection upon them, in communities kept
alert by variety of intercourse, and sufficiently free on the side of the
intellectual life. Such was the state of the Saracens in Persia and Spain in
the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries; and their social evolution before
and after is all a matter of natural sequence, not proceeding upon any
peculiarity of collective character, but representing the normal reactions of
character at a given culture-stage in special political circumstances.
What is peculiar to the Saracen civilisation is its sudden origin (taking
Islam as a history by itself)[381] under conditions reached elsewhere only as

climax in a long evolution. The rise of Islam has the twofold aspect of a
barbarian campaign of plunder and a crusade of fanaticism; and though the
prospect and the getting of plunder were needed to ripen the fanaticism to
full bloom,[382] the latter was ultimately a part of the cementing force that
turned a horde into a community. The great facilitating conditions for both
were the feeble centralised system maintained by the Christianised Empire,
and the disintegrating force of Christianity as a sectarian ferment. In Egypt,
for instance, the hatred between rival schools of Christian metaphysic
secured for the Arabs an unresisted entrance into Alexandria.[383] It needed
only a few generations of contact with higher culture in a richer
environment to put the Saracens, as regards art and science, very much on a
level with the stagnating Byzantines; and where the latter, possessed of their
scientific and philosophical classics, but imprisoned by their religion, made
no intellectual progress whatever, the former, on the same stimulus,
progressed to a remarkable degree. There has been much dispute as to the
exact measure of their achievements; but three things are clear: (1) that they
carried the mathematics of astronomy beyond the point at which it had been
left by the Greeks; (2) that they laid the foundations of chemistry; and(3)
that they intelligently carried on surgery and medicine when the Byzantines,
having early in the Christian period destroyed the Asklepions, which were
in some degree the schools of the medicine of antiquity, had sunk to the
level of using prayers and incantations and relics as their regular means of
cure. Curiously enough, too, the Saracens had the merit, claimed for the
Byzantines, of letting their women share rather freely in their culture of all
kinds.[384] What is more, the later Saracens of Spain, whatever the measure
of their own scientific progress, were without question a great seminal force
in the civilisation of Western Christendom, which drew from them its
beginnings in mathematics, philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, and
medicine, and to some extent even in literature[385] and architecture,[386] to
say nothing of the effect on the useful arts of the contact of the Crusaders
with the Saracens of the East.
As to Arab medicine, see Withington, as cited, pp. 139, 170; and Sprengel, History of
Medicine, French tr. vol. ii (1815), pp. 262-64—a passage which contradicts
Sprengel's previous disparagements. Compare p. 343. The histoire particulière in this
chapter (v of Sect. 6) generally countervails the hostile summaries. Sprengel
proceeded on the prejudice (i, 215) that there was no "rational science" anywhere
before the Greeks; as if there were not many irrational elements in the science not
only of the Greeks but of the moderns. A much better qualified historian of Arab
medicine, Dr. Lucien Leclerc, writes (Histoire de la médecine arabe, 1876, i, 462)

that in the eleventh century "the medical productions [of the Arabs] continue to
develop an independent aspect, and have already a certain stamp of originality.
Already the Arabs feel themselves rich on their own footing. We see appearing certain
writings not less remarkable for the novelty of the form than for the value of the
substance." Again, Dr. Ernst von Meyer, the historian of chemistry, sums up (Hist. of
Chemistry, M'Gowan's tr. 2nd ed. p. 28), that "the germs of chemical knowledge
attained to a marvellous growth among the Arabians." It may be noted that there is
record of a hospital in Bagdad at the beginning of the ninth century, and that there
were many there in the tenth (Leclerc, i, 559).
A rational argument is brought against Semitic "faculty" by Dr. Cunningham, it
should be admitted, in the contention that the Phœnicians figured poorly as copyists of
Greek art (Western Civilisation, p. 69, following Renan). But this argument entirely
ignores the element of time that is needed to develop any art in any civilisation. The
Phœnician civilisation was overthrown before it had time to assimilate Greek art
developments, which themselves were the work of centuries even in a highly
favourable set of conditions. Nöldeke, though less unscientific than Spiegel, partly
follows him in insisting that Phœnician architecture copied Egyptian, and that the
later Semites copied the Greek, as if the Greeks in turn had not had predecessors and
guides. Starting with the fixed fallacy that the Semites were "one-sided," he reasons in
a circle to the effect that their one-sidedness was "highly prejudicial to the
development of science," while compelled to admit the importance of the work of the
Babylonians in astronomy. (Sketches from Eastern History, Eng. tr. pp. 15-18.)

It is now current doctrine that "for nearly eight centuries, under her
Mohammedan rulers, Spain set to all Europe a shining example of a
civilised and enlightened State. Her fertile provinces, rendered doubly
prolific by the industry and engineering skill of her conquerors, bore fruit
an hundredfold. Cities innumerable sprang up in the rich valleys of the
Guadalquivir and the Guadiana.... Art, literature, and science prospered as
they prospered nowhere else in Europe. Students flocked from France and
Germany and England to drink from the fountain of learning which flowed
only in the cities of the Moors. The surgeons and doctors of Andalusia were
in the van of science; women were encouraged to devote themselves to
serious study; and the lady doctor was not unknown among the people of
Cordova. Mathematics, astronomy and botany, history[?], philosophy and
jurisprudence[?] were to be mastered in Spain, and Spain alone. The
practical work of the field, the scientific methods of irrigation, the arts of
fortification and shipbuilding, the highest and most elaborate products of
the loom, the graver and the hammer, the potter's wheel and the mason's
trowel, were brought to perfection by the Spanish Moors."
See Stanley Lane-Poole, The Moors in Spain, pref. It could be wished that Mr. Lane-
Poole had given English readers, as he so well could, a study of Saracen civilisation,
instead of a "Story of the Nation" on the old lines. For corroboration of the passage

see Dozy, Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne, 1861, iii, 109, 110; Prescott, History of
Ferdinand and Isabella, Kirk's ed. 1889, pp. 186-88, 192, 195-99; Draper, Intellectual
Development of Europe, ed. 1875, ii, 30-53; Sismondi, Historical View of the
Literature of the South of Europe, Eng. tr. i, 50-54, 64-68, 76-84, 89. Cp. Seignobos,
Histoire de la Civilisation au Moyen Age, 3e éd. pp. 48-62; Gebhart, Origines de la
Renaissance en Italie, 1879, pp. 185-89; Bosworth Smith, Mohammed and
Mohammedanism, 2nd ed. pp. 217, 286; Nöldeke, as cited, p. 105; Bouterwek, as
cited, i, 3; Baden-Powell, History of Natural Philosophy, 1834, pp. 94-104; U.R.
Burke, History of Spain, Hume's ed. 1900, vol. i, ch. 16.

All this being so, the course of deciding that the Arabs retrogressed because
"they" were impatient and discontinuous is on a level with the thesis that
nature has a horror of a vacuum. The Arab civilisation was arrested and
anchylosed by forces which in other civilisations operated in exactly the
same modes. The first great trouble was the element of perpetual domestic
strife, which was uncured by the monarchic system, since every succession
was liable to dispute. Under such conditions just government could not
flourish; and Moslem taxation always tended to be suicidally unscrupulous.
[387]
Disputes of succession, indeed, wrought hardly more strife among the
Saracens than has taken place among Greeks and Romans, and Christians of
all nations, down to modern times; even the ecclesiastical and feudal
doctrine of legitimacy, developed by the Latin and Greek Churches, having
failed to prevent dynastic wars in Christendom. But the Saracens,
neighboured everywhere by Christians who bore them a twofold hostility,
had peculiar need of union, and ran special risks from dissension; and in
Spain their disunion was their ruin. At the same time their civilisation was
strangled intellectually by a force which, though actually in operation in
Christendom also, was there sufficiently countered by a saving condition
which the Saracens finally lacked. The force of constriction was the cult of
the Sacred Book; the counteracting force in Christendom was diversity and
friction of governments and cultures—a condition which passed out of the
Saracen equation.
How fatally restrictive the cult of the completed Sacred Book can be is
obvious in the history of Byzantium. It was in terms of the claims of the
Christian creed that the Eastern Emperors proscribed pagan philosophy and
science, reducing the life of the whole Eastern world as far as possible to
one rigid and unreasoned code. That the mental life of Italy and France was
relatively progressive even in the Middle Ages was substantially due—(1)
to Saracen stimulus, and (2) to the friction and ferment set up by the

diversity of life in the Italian republics, and the Italian and French and
German universities. Byzantium was in comparison a China or an Egypt.
The saving elements of political diversity, culture competition, and culture
contact have in later Europe completed the frustration of the tendency of
church, creed, and Bible to destroy alike science and philosophy. In Islam,
on the other hand, the arresting force finally triumphed over the progressive
because of the social and political conditions. (1) The political field, though
stormy, finally lacked diversity in terms of the universality of the monarchic
principle, which was imposed by the military basis and bound up with the
creed: uniformity of ideal was thus furthered. (2) There was practically no
fresh culture contact possible after the assimilation of the remains of Greek
science and the stimulus of Jewish philosophy; for medieval Christendom
had no culture to give; and the more thoroughly the Papacy and the
Christian monarchy in Spain were organised, the more hostile they grew to
the Moors. (3) The economic stimulus among the latter tended to be
restricted more and more to the religious class, till that class was able to
suppress all independent mental activity.
The last is the salient circumstance. In any society, the special cultivation of
serious literature and the arts and sciences depends on one or more of three
conditions—(a) the existence of a cultured class living on unearned
incomes, as in ancient Athens, middle Rome, and modern England and
France; (b) public expenditure on art and culture, as in ancient Athens,
Renaissance Italy and modern France, and in the German university system
par excellence; or (c) the personal concern of princes and other patrons to
encourage ability. In the nature of the case it was mainly on this last and
most precarious stimulus that Saracen culture depended. Taking it at its
zenith, under such rulers as Haroun Alraschid and El-Mamoun at Bagdad,
and Abderrahmān III and Hakam II of Cordova, we find its advance always
more or less dependent on the bounty of the caliph; and even if, like
Abderrahmān and his son Hakam, he founded all manner of public and free
schools, it depended on the bias of his successors rather than on public
opinion or municipal custom whether the movement should continue.
Abderrahmān's achievement, seen even through Christian eyes, was so
manifold as to constitute him one of the great rulers of all history; but the
task of making Moorish civilisation permanent was one which no series of
such statesmen could have compassed. The natural course of progress

would have been through stable monarchy to constitutionalism. But
Christian barbarism, with its perpetual assault, kept the Saracens forever at
the stage of active militarism, which is the negation of constitutionalism;
and their very refinement was a political danger, no less than their dynastic
strifes.
On the other hand, the continuous stress of militarism was in ordinary
course much more favourable to fanaticism than to free thought; and to
fanaticism the Koran, like the Bible, was and is a perpetual stimulant. It was
as a militant faith that Islam maintained itself; and in such a civilisation the
Sacred Book, which claimed to be the highest of all lore, and was all the
while so easy a one, giving to ignorance and conceit the consciousness of
supreme knowledge without any mental discipline whatever, was sure of
abundant devotees.[388] In an uninstructed community—and of course the
mass of the Saracen population was uninstructed[389]—the cult of the Sacred
Book needs no special endowment; it can always be depended on to secure
revenues for itself, even as may the medicine-man in an African tribe. To
this day the propagation of the Koran is subscribed for in Turkey as the
Bible Society is subscribed to among ourselves, ignorance earning thus the
felicity of prescribing for human welfare in the mass, and at the same time
propitiating Omnipotence, at the lowest possible outlay of study and
reflection. Enthusiasms which can thus flourish in the twentieth century
were of course abundant in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh;[390] and thus we
find that when a caliph was suspected by the pietists of caring too little for
their lore, he ran the risk of being rebelled against with a speed and zeal in
the ratio of their conviction of divine knowledge. Islam, unlike the State
churches of Greece, Rome, and England, has democratic rootage in the
practice of setting ordinary laymen to recite the prayers and preach the
sermons in the mosques: it, in fact, resembles Methodism more than any of
the established Christian churches in respect of its blending of clerisy and
laity. Such a system, when thoroughly fanaticised, has enormous powers of
turbulence; and in Moorish Spain we find them early exercised.
Abderrahmān I, whose policy of tolerance towards Jews and Christians
transcended all previous Christian practice, and thus won for his realm a
great stimulus in the way of variety of culture-elements and of industry, had
kept the religious class in due control; but his well-meaning son Hishām
was priest-ridden to the last degree; and when his successor Hakam showed

an indisposition to patronise pietists to the same extent they raised revolt
after revolt (806-815), all put down by massacre.
Mr. Lane-Poole notes (p. 73) the interesting fact that the theologers were largely of
Spanish stock, the natives having in general embraced Islam. Thus the fanaticism of
the Berbers was reinforced by that of the older population, which, as Buckle showed,
was made abnormally devout, not by inheritance of character, but by the constant
effect of terrorising environment, in the form of earthquakes.

The elements of the situation remained fundamentally unchanged; and
when the Moorish military power began to feel more and more the pressure
of the strengthening Christian foe, it lay in the nature of the case that the
fanatical species should predominate. The rationalistic and indifferent types
would figure as the enemies of their race, very much as such types would
have done in Covenanting Scotland. At length, in the eleventh century, the
weakened Moorish princes had to call in the aid of the fanatical
Almoravides from Barbary; and these, with the full support of the
priesthood and the pious, established themselves at the head of affairs,
reducing everything as far as possible to the standards of the eighth century.
[391]
And when the new barbarism in time grew corrupt, as that of the Goths
and Vandals had done in earlier ages, the "Unitarian" Almohades in turn
(twelfth century) overthrew the Almoravides in Spain as they had already
done in Africa, only to be themselves overthrown a hundred years later by
the Christians. Thereafter the curtailed Moorish power, pent up in Southern
Spain, reverted to the spirit of fanaticism which national failure generates in
religious minds; and from the thirteenth century to the final overthrow at
the end of the fifteenth the intellectual life of Saracen Spain was but a long
stagnation.
A civilisation driven back on superstition and fanaticism[392] thus gave way
to a revived barbarism, which itself, after a few centuries of power, was
arrested in its progress by the same order of forces, and has ever since
remained in the rear of European development. A remarkable exception,
indeed, is to be noted in the case of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), who in the
narrow world of Tunis attained to a grasp of the science of history such as
no Christian historian up to his time had remotely approached.[393] Such an
intellectual phenomenon sufficiently disposes of the current formulas about
the innate incapacities of "the Semitic mind." But whether it were that he
dared not say what he thought of the fatal influence of the Sacred Book, or

that on that side he was really, as he is ostensibly, quite uncritical, Khaldun
fails, in his telling survey of Arab decadence, to set forth the decisive
condition of intellectual arrest; and his luminous impeachment of the
civilisation of his race failed to enlighten it.
In Persia the same forces wrought closely similar results. The Greek
stimulus, after working wonders in science and rational thought, failed to
sustain a society that could not politically evolve beyond despotism; and
economic evil and intellectual decay together undermined the empire of the
Caliphs,[394] till the Turks could overrun it as the Christians did Moorish
Spain; they themselves, however, adding no new culture developments,
because under them no new culture contacts were possible.
Of the Moslem civilisation as a whole, it must be said that on the material
side, in Spain and the East, it was such a success as had not been attained
under the Romans previously (though it was exceeded in Egypt by the
Lagids), and has not been reached in Christian Spain since the fall of
Boabdil. Economically, the Moorish regimen was sound and stable in
comparison with that of imperial Spain, which, like Rome, merely set up a
factitious civilisation on the basis of imported bullion and provincial tribute,
and decayed industrially while nominally growing in empire and power.
When the history of Spain from the seventeenth century onward is
compared with that of the Saracens up to their overthrow, the nullity of
explanations in terms of race qualities becomes sufficiently plain—unless,
indeed, it is argued that Moorish blood is the secret of Spanish decadence.
But that surmise too is folly. Spanish decadence is a perfectly simple
sociological sequence;[395] and a Spanish renascence is not only conceivable,
but likely, under conditions of free science and free thought. Nor is it on the
whole less likely that the Arab stock will in time to come contribute afresh
and largely to civilisation. The one element which can finally distinguish
one race from another—acquired physiological adaptation to a given
climate—marks the Arab races as best fitted for the recovery of great
southern and eastern regions which, once enormously productive, have
since the fall of the Roman and Byzantine Empires been reduced to sterility
and poverty. The Greeks in their recovered fatherland, and the French in
Algeria, have not thus far been much more successful than the Turks in
developing material prosperity. If North Africa, Syria, and Mesopotamia are

again to be rich and fruitful lands, it must be in the hands of an acclimatised
race; and the Arab stocks are in this regard among the most eligible.
But there is no reason why the Turks should not share in such a renascence.
[396]
Their incivilisation is no more a matter of race character than the
decline of the Moors or the backwardness of the Spaniards: it is the
enforced result of the attitude of special enmity taken up towards the
Turkish intruders from the first by all their Christian neighbours. By sheer
force of outside pressure, co-operating with the sinister sway of the Sacred
Book, Turkey has been kept fanatical, barbarous, uncultured, utterly
militarist, and therefore financially misgoverned. The moral inferiority of
the long-oppressed Christian peoples of the Levant, whose dishonesty was
till lately proverbial, was such as to strengthen the Moslem in the conceit of
superiority; while the need to maintain a relatively great military force as
against dangerous neighbours has been for him a check upon all endowment
of culture. To change all this, it needs that either force or prudence should
so modify the system of government as to give freer course to industry and
ideas; that the military system should be restricted; and that European
knowledge should be brought to bear on education, till the fettering force of
religion is frustrated, as in the progressive countries of Christendom. For
Turkey and Spain, for Moslems and for Christians, the laws of progress and
decadence are the same; and if only the more fortunate peoples can learn to
help instead of hindering the backward, realising that every civilisation is
industrially and intellectually an aid to every other, the future course of
things may be blessedly different from that of the past. But the closest
students of the past will doubtless be as a rule slow to predict such a
transformation.[397]

FOOTNOTES:
[374] Cp. the author's criticism of Dr. Pulszky, in Buckle and his Critics, p. 509.
[375] Thus Milman decides that the Mahommedan civilisation is "the highest, it
should seem, attainable by the Asiatic type of mind" (Latin Christianity, 4th ed.
ii, 222). This in the century which was to witness the renascence of Japan.
[376] Erânische Alterthumskunde, 1871, i, 387.
[377] Id. p. 388.

[378] Erânische Alterthumskunde, p. 389.
[379] Dr. Daremberg, writing on Cairo, "Impressions médicales," in the Journal
des Débats, December 13, 1882, quoted by the K. Bikélas, as cited, tr. p. 100.
Cp. Renan's language as to "l'esprit sémitique, sans étendue, sans diversité, sans
arts plastiques, sans philosophie, sans mythologie, sans vie politique, sans
progrès" (Études d'histoire religieuse, 1862, p. 67).
[380] This has been disputed; cp. Berdoe, Origin of the Healing Art, 1893, p.72;
Withington, Medical History from the Earliest Times, 1894, pp. 21-22. But the
Greeks could hardly have resorted to the Egyptians so much as they admittedly
did for mathematical and astronomical teaching in the early period without
learning something of their medicine. Cp. Berdoe, bk. ii, ch. i, and Kenrick,
Ancient Egypt, 1850, i, 345-48, as to Egyptian medicine. The passage in the
Odyssey, iv, 227-32, is decisive as to its repute in early Greece. Certainly it was
stationary, like everything Egyptian. Whether the Indian and Egyptian medicine
found "neue Bedeutung" in Greek hands, after the fresh contacts made under
Alexander, as is claimed by Droysen (Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen, 3te
Aufl. pp. 367-68), is another question.
[381] As to the inferred development of pre-Islamic civilisation in Arabia, see
Deutsch, Literary Remains, pp. 91, 123, 124, 313, 314; and Nöldeke, Sketches
from Eastern History, Eng. tr. pp. 18, 19.
[382] The first Islamites, apart from the inner circle, were the least religious. See
Renan, Études d'histoire religieuse, pp. 257-65; and Van Vloten, Recherches sur
la domination arabe, Amsterdam, 1894, pp. 1, 2, 4, 7. Nöldeke (p. 15) speaks in
the conventional way of the "wonderful intellectual outburst" which made
possible the early triumphs of Islam. The case is really on all fours with that of
the French Revolution—"la carrière ouverte aux talens." Cp. Milman, Latin
Christianity, 4th ed. ii, 204, as to the readiness with which the followers of
Moseilama turned to Mahommedanism.
[383] See above, p. 97, note 1.
[384] Prescott, History of Ferdinand and Isabella, Kirk's ed. 1889, pp. 187, 188.
[385] Cp. Bouterwek, History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, Eng. tr.
1823, i, 4, and Sismondi, Literature of the South of Europe, Eng. tr. i, 61, 64, 68,
80-90. As to Arabic study of linguistics, cp. Nöldeke, p. 17.
[386] Cp. Testa, History of the War of Frederick I. upon the Communes of
Lombardy, Eng. tr. p. 100.
[387] Van Vloten, Recherches sur la domination arabe, Amsterdam, 1894, pp. 7-
12.
[388] As to the religious zeal of the Berbers in the way of Moslem dissent, on all
fours with the phenomena of Protestantism, see Lane-Poole, as cited, p. 53.
[389] Dozy (Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne, 1861, iii, 109) decides that "in
Andalusia nearly everyone could read and write"; but even if this were true,
which is very doubtful (seeing that on the same page the historian tells how

Hakam founded twenty-three free schools for the children of the poor in
Cordova), the reading would be almost solely confined to the Koran.
[390] The mere preaching and miracle-working of the Marabouts among the
Berbers set up successively the movements of the Fatimites, the Almoravides,
and the Almohades (Lane-Poole, p. 54).
[391] Concerning the intolerance of this reaction, see Dozy, iii, 248-54. Cp. iii,
16-21, as to the normal fanaticism of the Moorish populace.
[392] See Dozy, iii, 286, as to the general lapse from rationalism to faith.
[393] See the whole estimate of Prof. Flint, History of the Philosophy of History,
1893, pp. 157-71.
[394] Cp. Dugat, Histoire des philosophes et des théologiens mussulmans, 1878,
pp. 337-48; Freeman, History and Conquests of the Saracens, p. 124; and the
author's Short History of Freethought, 2nd. ed. i, 267-68, 277-79.
[395] See it discussed in A Short History of Freethought, 2nd. ed. i, ch. x, § 3; ii,
56 sq. And see below, pt. v, ch. iv. § 2.
[396] This was written before 1900.
[397] Deutsch, however (Literary Remains, p. 172), predicted it with confidence.

Chapter III
ROME
The culture conditions of Rome seem to cause no perplexity even to those
who find Greek civilisation a mystery. They are certainly obvious enough.
By reason of the primary natural direction of Roman life to plunder and
conquest, with a minimum of commerce and peaceful contacts, Roman
culture was as backward as that of Greece was forward. The early Etruscan
culture having been relegated to the status of archæology, however
respectfully treated,[398] and the popular language having become that of all
classes, the republican period had to begin again at the beginning. Latin
literature practically commenced in the third century B.C., when that of
Greece was past its meridian; and the fact that Lucius Andronicus and
Nævius, the early playwrights, were men of Greek culture, and that Ennius
translated the Greek rationalist Evêmeros (Euhêmeros), point to the
Hellenic origins of Rome's intellectual life. Her first art, on the other hand,
was substantially derived from the Etruscans, who also laid the simple
beginnings of the Roman drama, later built upon under Greek influence.
But even with the Etruscan stimulus—itself a case of arrested development
—the art went no great way before the conquest of Greece; and even under
Greek stimulus the literature was progressive for only two centuries,
beginning to decline as soon as the Empire was firmly established.
Of the relative poverty of early Roman art, the cause is seen even by
Mommsen to lie partly in the religious environment, religion being the only
incentive which at that culture stage could have operated (and this only with
economic fostering); but the nature of the religious environment he
implicitly sets down as usual to the character of the race,[399] as contrasted
with the character of the Greeks. Obviously it is necessary to seek a reason
for the religious conditions to begin with; and this is to be found in the
absence from early Rome of exactly those natural and political conditions
which made Greece so manifold in its culture. We have seen how, where
Greece was divided into a score of physically "self-contained" states, no
one of which could readily overrun the others, Rome was placed on a

natural career of conquest; and this at a culture stage much lower than that
of Ionic Greece of the same period. Manifold and important culture contacts
there must have been for Hellenes before the Homeric poems were possible;
but Rome at the beginning of the republican period was in contact only with
the other Italic tribes, the Phœnicians, the Grecian cities, and the Etruscans;
and with these her relations were hostile. In early Ionia, again, Greek poetry
flourished as a species of luxury under a feudal system constituted by a
caste of rich nobles who had acquired wealth by conquest of an old and rich
civilisation. Roman militarism began in agricultural poverty; and the
absorption of the whole energies of the group in warfare involved the
relegation of the arts of song and poetry to the care of the women and boys,
as something beneath adult male notice.[400] Roman religion in the same way
was left as a species of archæology to a small group of priests and priestly
aristocrats, charged to observe the ancient usages. It would thus inevitably
remain primitive—that is, it would remain at a stage which the Greeks had
mostly passed at the Homeric period; and when wealth and leisure came,
Greek culture was there to over-shadow it. To say that the Latins racially
lacked the mythopœic faculty is to fall back on the old plan of explaining
phenomena in terms of themselves. As a matter of fact, the mere number of
deities, of personified forces, in the Roman mythology is very large,[401]
only there is lacking the embroidery of concrete fiction which gives
vividness to the mythology of the Greeks. The Romans relatively failed to
develop the mythopœic faculty because their conditions caused them to
energise more in other ways.[402]
There is, however, obvious reason to believe that among the Italian peoples
there was at one time a great deal more of myth than has survived.[403] What
is preserved is mainly fragments of the mythology of one set of tribes, and
that in only a slightly developed form. All the other Italic peoples had been
subdued by the Romans before any of them had come into the general use
of letters;[404] and instead of being put in a position to develop their own
myths and cults, or to co-ordinate the former in the Greek fashion, they
were absorbed in the Roman system, which took their Gods to its pantheon,
and at the same time imposed on them those of Rome. Much of their mythic
lore would thus perish, for the literate Romans had not been concerned to
cultivate even their own. Early Roman life being divided between war and
agriculture, and there being no free literary class to concern itself with the

embellishment of the myths, there subsisted only the simple myths and
rituals of agriculture and folklore, the numerous list of personified functions
connected with all the phases of life, and the customary ceremonial of
augury and invocation in war. The augurs and pontifices were the public
men and statesmen, and they made religion a State function. What occult
lore there was they made a class monopoly—an effectual preventive in
itself of a Hellenic development of myth. Apart from the special sets or
colleges of priests there were specially appointed colleges of religio-
archæological specialists—first, the six augurs and the five pontifices, then
the duoviri sacris faciundis, afterwards increased to ten and to fifteen, who
collected Greek oracles and saw to the Sibylline books; later the twenty
fetiales or heralds, and so on. "These colleges have been often, but
erroneously, confounded with the priesthoods. The priesthoods were
charged with the worship of a specific divinity; the skilled colleges, on the
other hand, were charged with the preservation of traditional rules regarding
the more general religious observances.... These close corporations
supplying their own vacancies, of course from the ranks of the burgesses,
became in this way the depositaries of skilled arts and sciences."[405]
Religion being thus for centuries so peculiarly an official matter of settled
tradition, no unauthorised myth-maker could get a hearing. Even what was
known would be kept as far as possible a corporation secret,[406] as indeed
were some of the mystery practices in Egypt and Greece. But whereas in
Greece the art of sculpture, once introduced, was stimulated by and reacted
on mythology in every temple in every town, the rigid limitation of early
Roman public life to the business of war would on that side have closed the
door on sculpture,[407] even if it could otherwise have found entrance. The
check laid on the efflorescence of the religious instinct was a double check
on the efflorescence of art. The net result is described with some
exaggeration by an eminent mythologist, in a passage which reduces to
something like unity of idea the tissues of contradiction spun by Mommsen:
—

For the Latins their Gods, although their name was legion, remained mysterious
beings without forms, feelings, or passions; and they influenced human affairs
without sharing or having any sympathy with human hopes, fears, or joys. Neither had
they, like the Greek deities, any society among themselves. There was for them no
Olympos where they might gather and take counsel with the father of Gods and men.
They had no parentage, no marriage, no offspring. They thus became a mere
multitude of oppressive beings, living beyond the circle of human interests, yet
constantly interfering with it; and their worship was thus as terrible a bondage as any
under which the world has yet suffered. Not being associated with any definite bodily
shapes, they could not, like the beautiful creations of the Greek mind, promote the
growth of the highest art of the sculptor, the painter, and the poet.[408]

It is necessary here to make some corrections and one expansion. The
statement as to parentage, marriage, and offspring is clearly wrong. Cox
here follows Keightley, whose pre-scientific view is still common.
Keightley admits that the early Latin Gods and Goddesses occur in pairs, as
Saturn and Ops, Janus and Jana; and that they were called Patres and
Matres.[409] To assert after this that they were never thought of as generating
offspring, merely because the bulk of the old folk-mythology is lost, is to
ascribe uncritically to the Latins an abstention from the most universal
forms of primitive myth-making. The proposition as to "terrible bondage,"
again, cannot stand historically; for, to say nothing of the religions of
Mexico and Palestine, and some of those of India, the Roman life was
certainly much less darkened by creed than has been that of many Christian
countries, for instance Protestant Scotland and Catholic Spain.
[M. Boissier (La religion romaine, i, 2) decided that the Romans were religiously
ruled more by fear than hope, and that their worship consisted chiefly of "timid
supplications and rigorous expiations." Mommsen, on the other hand (ch. xii, p. 191),
pronounces that "the Latin religion was grounded mainly on man's enjoyment of
earthly pleasures." Both statements would be equally true of all ancient religions.
Compare M. Boissier's later remarks, pp. 21-25, 26, 28, wherein he contradicts
himself as does Mommsen.]

As regards, again, the failure of the early Latin pantheon to stimulate
sculpture and poetry, it has to be noticed that sculpture and poetry tended to
make as well as to be made by mythology in Greece. The argument against
the Latin pantheon is in fact an argument in a circle. If the Latin Gods were
not "associated with any definite bodily shapes" (parentage, marriage, and
offspring they certainly had), it could only be when and because they were
not yet sculptured. Greek Gods before they were sculptured would be
conceived just as variably. Were they then thought of as formless? The

proposition is strictly inconceivable. Latin Gods must have been imagined
very much as were and are those of other barbarous races, who are
notoriously thought of as having sex, form, and passions. Greek mythology
simply reached the art stage sooner. The cults of Hellas did not start with a
mythology full-blown, thereby creating the arts; the mythology grew step
by step with and in the arts, in a continuous mutual reaction; many Greek
myths being really tales framed to explain the art-figures of other
mythologies, Egyptian and Asiatic. Thus the primitive bareness of the Latin
mythology signifies not a natural saplessness which could give no increase
to art, but (1) loss of lore and (2) a lack of the artistic and literary factors
which record and stimulate higher mythologic growth.
Thus limited in their native culture, the Roman upper class were inevitably
much affected by higher foreign cultures when they met these under
conditions of wealth and leisure. Long before that stage, indeed, they
consulted Greek oracles and collected responses; and they had informally
assimilated before the conquest a whole series of Greek Gods without
giving them public worship.[410] The very Goddess of the early Latin
League, the Aventine Diana, was imaged by a copy of Artemis of Ephesus,
the Goddess of the Ionian League.[411] As time went on the more
psychologically developed cults of the East were bound to attract the
Romans of all classes. What of religious emotion there was in the early days
must have played in large part around the worship which the State left free
to the citizens as individuals—the worship of the Lares and Penates, the
cults of the hearth and the family; and in this connection the primitive
mythopœic instinct must have evolved a great deal of private mythology
which never found its way into literature. But as the very possession of
Lares and Penates, ancestral and domestic spirits, was originally a class
privilege, not shared by the landless and the homeless, these had step by
step to be made free of public institutions of a similar species—the Lares
Praestites of the whole city, festally worshipped on the first day of May,
and other Lares Publici, Rurales, Compitales, Viales, and so on—just as
they were helped to bread. Even these concessions, however, failed to make
the old system suffice for the transforming State; and individual foreign
worships with a specific attraction were one by one inevitably introduced—
that of Æsculapius in the year 291 B.C., in a panic about pestilence; that of
Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, in 205: both by formal decision of the

Senate. The manner of the latter importation is instructive. Beginning the
Hannibalic war in a spirit of religious patriotism, the Senate decreed the
destruction of the temples of the alien Isis and Serapis.[412] But as the war
went on, and the devotion shown to the native Gods was seen to be
unrewarded, the Senate themselves, yielding to the general perturbation
which showed itself in constant resort to foreign rites by the women,[413]
prescribed resort to the Greek sacrificial rites of Apollo.[414] Later they
called in the cult of Cybele from Phrygia;[415] and other cults informally, but
none the less irresistibly, followed.
In all such steps two forces were at work—the readiness of the plebeians to
welcome a foreign religion in which the patricians had, as it were, no vested
rights; and the tendency of the more plastic patricians themselves,
especially the women, to turn to a worship with emotional attractions.
When the plebeians sought admission for their class to the higher offices of
State, they were told with unaffected seriousness that their men had not the
religious qualifications—they lacked the hereditary gift of reading auspices,
the lore of things sacred.[416] So, when they did force entrance, their alleged
blunders in these matters were exclaimed against as going far to ruin the
republic. This was not a way to make the populace revere the national
religion; and as the population of foreign race steadily increased by
conquest and enslavement, alien cults found more and more hold. "It was
always in the popular quarters of the city that these movements began."[417]
The first great unofficial importation seems to have been the orgiastic
worship of Dionysos, who specially bore for the Romans his epithet of
Bacchus, and was identified with their probably aboriginal Liber. This
worship, carried on in secret assemblies, was held by the conservatives to
be a hotbed of vice and crime, and was, according to Livy, bloodily
punished (B.C. 186). So essentially absurd, however, is Livy's childish
narrative that it is impossible to take anything in it for certain save the bare
fact that the worship was put under restrictions, as tending to promote secret
conspiracies.[418] But from this time forward, roughly speaking, Rome may
be said to have entered into the mythological heritage of Greece, even as
she did into her positive treasure of art work and of oriental gold. Every cult
of the conquered Mediterranean world found a footing in the capital, the
mere craving for new sensations among the upper class being sufficient to
overcome their political bias to the old system. It is clear that when

Augustus found scores of Roman temples in disrepair after the long storms
of the civil wars, it was not that "religion" was out of vogue, but that it was
superseded by what the Romans called "superstition"—something
extraneous, something over and above the public system of rites and
ceremonies. In point of fact, the people of Rome were in the mass no longer
of Roman stock, but a collection of many alien races, indifferent to the
indigenous cults. The emperor's restorations could but give a subsidised
continuity to the official services: what vitally flourished were the cults
which ministered to the new psychological needs of a population more and
more divorced from great public interests, and increasingly alien in its
heredity—the stimulant and hysterical worships of Adonis, of Attis, of the
Lover Goddess coupled with the first, or the Mourning Mother Goddess
with the second, of Isis and Osiris and their child—rituals of alternate
lamentation and rejoicing, of initiations, austerities, confessions, penances,
self-abasement, and the promise of immortality. On the general soil of
devotion thus formed, there finally grew up side by side Mithraism and
Christianity, the rival religions of the decadence, of which the second
triumphed in virtue of having by far the larger number of adaptations to its
environment.
But while Rome was thus at length fully possessed by the spirit of religious
imagination which had so fruitfully stirred the art of Greece, there ensued
no new birth of faculty. It was with the arts as with literature: the stimulus
from Greece was received by a society rapidly on the way to that social
state which in Greece had choked the springs of progress. In the last
generations of the Republic the literary development was markedly rapid. In
the century which saw Rome, after a terrific struggle, victorious over
Carthage and prepared for the grapple with Macedon, the first practitioners
of literature were playwrights, or slaves, or clients of great men, or teachers
like Ennius, who could find in the now leisured and in part intelligent or at
least inquisitive upper class a sufficient encouragement to a literary career.
That class did not want recitals of the crude folklore of their fathers, so
completely eclipsed by that of Greece, which was further associated with
the literary form of drama, virtually new to the Romans.[419] Drama, always
the form of literature which can best support itself, is the form most
cultivated down till the period of popular abasement and civil convulsion,
though of a dozen dramatists we have only Plautus and Terence left in

anything like completeness; and while the tragedy of Pacuvius and Attius
was unquestionably an imitation of the Greek, it may have had in its kind as
much merit as the comedies that have been preserved. Even more rapid than
the development, however, is the social gangrene that kills the popular taste;
for when we reach the time of Augustus there is no longer a literary drama,
save perhaps for the small audiences of the wooden theatres, and the private
performances of amateurs;[420] parades and pantomimes alone can attract the
mindless multitude; and the era of autocrats begins on well-laid foundations
of ignorance and artificial incivilisation.
As with the literature of the people, so with that of the lettered class. In the
last generation of freedom, we have in Lucretius and Catullus two of the
great poets of all antiquity, compared with whose forceful inspiration Virgil
and Horace already begin to seem sicklied o'er with the pale cast of decline.
Thenceforth the glory begins to die away; and though the red blade of
Juvenal is brandished with a hand of power, and Lucan clangs forth a stern
memorial note, and Petronius sparkles with a sinister brilliancy, there is no
mistaking the downward course of things under Cæsarism. It is true we find
Juvenal complaining that only the emperor does anything for literature:—
Et spes et ratio studiorum in Caesare
tantum.
Solus enim tristes hac tempestate
Camoenas
Respexit.[421]
It is the one word of praise he ever gives to the autocrat, be it Domitian or
another; and the commentators decide that only at the beginning of
Domitian's reign would it apply. In effect, the satire is a description of the
Roman upper class as grown indifferent to poetry, or to any but their own.
But it is not on the economic side that the autocracy and the aristocracy of
the Empire are to be specially indicted. The economic difficulty was very
much the same under the Republic, when only by play-writing could
literary men as such make a living. As Juvenal goes on to say, Horace when
he cried Evohe was well fed, and if Virgil had lacked slave and lodging the
serpents would have been lacking to the fury's hair, and the tongueless
trumpet have sounded nothing great. Lucretius, Catullus, and Virgil were all
inheritors of a patrimony; and Horace needed first an official post and later

a patron's munificence to enable him to live as a poet. The mere sale of their
books could not possibly have supported any one of them, so low were
prices kept by the small demand.[422] What was true of the poets was still
truer of the historians. Thus in the Republic as in the Empire, the men of
letters, apart from the playwrights, tended to be drawn solely from the small
class with inherited incomes. The curse of the Empire was that even when
the sanest emperors, as the Antonines, sought to endow studies,[423] they
could not buy moral or intellectual energy. The senate of poltroons who
crouched before the Neros and Caligulas were the upper-class version of the
population which lived by bread and the circus; and in that air neither great
art nor great thought could breathe. Roman sculpture is but enslaved Greek
sculpture taken into pay; Latin literature ceases to be Roman with Tacitus.
The noble apparition of Marcus Aurelius shines out of the darkening ages
like some unearthly incarnation, collecting in one life and in one book all
the light and healing left in the waning civilisations; beside the babble of
Fronto his speech is as that of one of the wise Gods of the ancient fantasy.
Henceforth we have but ancillary history, and, in imaginative literature, be
it of Apuleius or of Claudian, the portents of another age. Roma fuit.
The last stages of the transition from the pagan to the Middle Ages can best
be traced in the history of the northern province of Gaul. Subjected to
regular imperial administration within a generation of its conquest by
Cæsar, Gaul for some centuries actually gained in civilisation, the imperial
regimen being relatively more favourable to nearly every species of
material progress than that of the old chiefs.[424] The emperors even in the
fourth century are found maintaining there the professorships of rhetoric,
language, law, philosophy and medicine first founded by Marcus
Antoninus;[425] and until finance began to fail and the barbarians to invade,
the material conditions were not retrograde. But the general intellectual life
was merely imitative and retrospective; and the middle and upper classes,
for which the higher schools existed, were already decaying in Gaul as
elsewhere. The old trouble, besides, the official veto on all vital political
discussion—if indeed any appetite for such discussion survived—drove
literature either into mere erudition or into triviality. On the other hand, the
growing Church offered a field of ostensibly free intellectual activity, and
so was for a time highly productive, in point of sheer quantity of writing; a
circumstance naturally placed by later inquirers to the credit of its creed.

The phenomenon was of course simply one of the passage of energy by the
line of least resistance. Within the Church, to which they turned as did
thoughtful Greeks to philosophy after the rise of Alexander's Empire, men
of mental tastes and moderate culture found both shelter and support; and
the first Gaulish monasteries, unlike those of Egypt and the East, were, as
M. Guizot has noted, places for conference rather than for solitary life.[426]
There, for men who believed the creed, which was as credible as the older
doctrines, there was a constant exercise for the mind on interests that were
relatively real, albeit profoundly divided from the interests of the
community. Thus, at a time when the community needed all its mental
energy to meet its political need, that mental energy was spent in the
discussion of insoluble and insane problems, of predestination and freewill,
of faith and works, of fasts, celibacy, the Trinity, immortality, and the
worship of saints. Men such as Ambrose and Jerome in Italy, Paulinus,
Cassian, Hilary, and Salvian in Gaul, Chrysostom in the East, and
Augustine in the South, represent as it were the last vibrations of the
civilised intelligence; their energy, vainly spent on what they felt to be great
issues, hints of the amount of force that was still running to waste
throughout the Empire.
Soon, however, and even before the barbarian tide had overflowed the
intellectual world, the fatal principle at the core of the new creed began to
paralyse even the life that centred around that. In a world of political
tyranny, an established church claiming to stand for the whole of
supernatural truth must needs resort to tyranny as soon as it could wield the
weapons. The civil strifes which broke out alike in the Eastern and the
Western Empire in the third and fourth centuries, and the multitude of sects
which rapidly honeycombed the Church, wore so many more forces of
social disintegration; and churchmen, reasoning that difference of dogma
was the ground of civil warfare as well as of war in the Church, must needs
take the course that had before been taken in politics.
After the original Arian battle had raged itself out in Egypt, Gregory of
Nazianzun at Constantinople, Ambrose at Milan, and Martin at Tours,[427]
fought it over again. One point secured, others were settled in turn; and as
soon as the influence of Augustine set up a prevailing system of thought,
theology was as much a matter of rule and precedent as government. As we
read Augustine's City of God, with its strenuous demonstration that the

calamities which men ascribe to the new religion are the fruit of their own
misdeeds, we realise to the full the dissolution of antiquity. All that is valid
in his polemic is the exposure of the absurdity of the old faiths, long before
detected by the reason of the few, but maintained by believers and
unbelievers alike for reasons of State. The due Nemesis came in the rise of
a faith which first flourished on and promoted an utter disregard of State
concerns, then helped directly to rob the State of the mental energy it most
needed, and finally wrought for the paralysis of what mental energy itself
had attracted. Of constructive truth, of the thought whereby a State could
live, the polemist had much less than was once possessed by the men who
framed or credited the fables he derided. He could destroy, but could not
build up. And so it was with the Church, as regarded the commonweal. "Of
all the various systems of government that have been attempted on this
earth, theocracy, or more properly hierocracy, is undoubtedly one of the
very worst."[428]
But one thing the Church could construct and conserve—the fabric of her
own wealth and power. Hence it came about that the Church, in itself a
State within the State, was one of the three or four concrete survivals of
antiquity round which modern civilisation nucleated. Of the four, the
Church, often treated as the most valuable, was really the least so, inasmuch
as it wrought always more for the hindrance of progress and the sundering
of communities than for advance and unification. The truly civilising forces
were the other three: the first being the body of Roman law, the product of
Roman experience and Greek thought in combination; and the second, the
literature of antiquity, in large part lost till the time we call the New Birth,
when its recovery impregnated and inspired, though it perhaps also
overburdened and lamed, the unformed intelligence of modern Europe. The
third was the heritage of the arts of life and of beauty, preserved in part by
the populations of the western towns which survived and propagated their
species through the ages of dominant barbarism; in part by the cohering
society of Byzantium. From these ancient germs placed in new soil is
modern civilisation derived.

FOOTNOTES:

[398] See E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 703; cp. A. Schwegler,
Römische Geschichte, i, 274-79, as to the survivals. The reversion of the
remaining Etruscan aristocracy in Rome to the language of the common people,
under stress of strife with Etruria, is a phenomenon on all fours with the
abandonment of French by the upper-class English in the fourteenth century, as a
result of hostility with France.
[399] Even Eduard Meyer decides in this fashion (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii,
530) that to Italy "was denied the capacity to shape a culture for itself, to
energise independently and creatively in the sphere of art, poetry, religion, and
science"—this after expressly noting (ii, 155) how Greece itself developed only
under the stimulus of alien culture. Compare §§ 339, 340 (ii, 533-36).
[400] Mommsen, History of Rome, Eng. tr. 1894, i, 285-300 (bk. i, ch. xv).
[401] "No people has ever possessed a vaster pantheon," observes M. Boissier,
while noting the slightness of the characterisation (La religion romaine
d'Auguste aux Antonins, 4e édition, i, 8). The lack of characterisation would
seem to have encouraged multiplication.
[402] The fact that the Etruscans, like the other Italian peoples, remained at the
stage of unintellectual formalism (Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 528-29;
Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, i, 273), suffices to show that not in race genius
but in stage and conditions of culture lies the explanation. All early religion in
official hands is formalist—witness the Pentateuch. The preoccupied Italians left
their cults, as did the Phœnicians, to archæological officials, while the leisured
Greeks carried them into poetry and art under conditions which fostered these
activities.
[403] The point is discussed in the author's Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed.
pp. 74-90; Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 45-46.
[404] Whether or not we accept Mommsen's view (bk. i, c. xiv) that the use of
the alphabet in Italy dates from about 1000 B.C. On this cp. Schwegler, i, 36.
[405] Mommsen, History of Rome, bk. i, ch. xii, Eng. tr. ed. 1868, i. 189. Cp.
Boissier, as cited, i, 354, as to the respective functions of priests and pontiffs.
[406] It is only through fragmentary vestiges (Servius on Virgil, Georg. i, 21; cp.
Varro in Augustine, De civitate Dei, vi, 7-10) that we know the contents of the
book of Indigitamenta kept by the pontifices. It seems to have been a list, not of
the Dii Indigetes commonly so-called, but of all the multitudinous powers
presiding over the various operations of life. See Schwegler, Römische
Geschichte, i, 32; Teuffel, Hist. of Roman Lit. ed. Schwabe, Eng. trans. 1900, i,
104; Boissier, La religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins, i, 4, and note. "I
have no doubt," writes Mr. Ward Fowler (The Religious Experience of the
Roman People, 1911, p. 168), "that Wissowa is right in explaining Indigitamenta
as Gebetsformeln, formulæ of invocation; in which the most important matter,
we may add, would be the name of the deity. See his Gesammelte
Abhandlungen, p. 177 foll." Corssen put this view before Wissowa.
[407] According to Varro (cited by Augustine, De civ. Dei, iv, 31), the early
Romans for 170 years worshipped the Gods without images.

[408] Rev. Sir G.W. Cox, Mythology of the Aryan Nations, ed. 1882, p. 169.
[409] Keightley, Mythol. of Anc. Greece and Italy, 1838, pp. 506-7.
[410] Meyer, ii, 531.
[411] Mommsen, ch. 12.
[412] Valerius Maximus, i, 3.
[413] Livy, xxv, 1.
[414] Id. xxv, 12.
[415] Id. xxix, 10, 14.
[416] Cp. Boissier, as cited, i, 39.
[417] Boissier, i, 346. Cp. Gibbon, ch. 2, Bohn ed. i, 40-41, and Wenck's note.
[418] Livy, xxxix, 18. The farrago of charges of crime we have no more reason
to credit than we have in regard to the similar charges made later against the
Christians.
[419] Cp. Carl Peter, Geschichte Roms, 1881, i, 550.
[420] Cp. Merivale, History, small ed. iv, 67-70, and Gibbon, ch. 31 (Bohn ed.
iii, 420).
[421] Sat, vii, 1.
[422] Martial, i, 67, 118; xiii, 3. But cp. Becker, Gallus. Sc. iii, Excur. 3.
[423] Vespasian began the endowment of professorships of rhetoric (Suetonius,
Vespasian, 18). As to the Antonines, see Gibbon, ch. ii, note, near end; and cp.
Hatch, Influence of Greek Ideas upon the Christian Church, 1900, pp. 38-39;
and Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme, i, 166. Vespasian's endowments, it should be
noted, were given only to the professors of rhetoric. The philosophers
(presumably the Stoics, but also the astrologers) he banished, as did Domitian.
On this cp. Merivale, History, vol. vii, ch. 60.
[424] Cp. Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en France, 13e éd. i, 48, 49.
[425] Id., pp. 113-15.
[426] Id., i, 121, 122.
[427] Guizot (as cited, i, 135) makes much of the fact that Hilary, Ambrose, and
Martin opposed the capital punishment of heretics. He ignores the circumstance
that Martin led an attack on all the pagan idols and temples of his
neighbourhood, in which the peasants who resisted were slain.
[428] U.R. Burke, History of Spain, M. Hume's ed. 1900, i, 115.

Epilogue
A GENERAL VIEW OF DECADENCE
We are now, perhaps, in a position to contemplate the wood without being
distracted by the trees, and without forgetting, on the other hand, that it is
an aggregate of trees individually conditioned by aggregation.
The record of Græco-Roman, as of all other ancient civilisation, with the
partial exception of that of China, is one of a complete decadence—in this
case a twofold decadence: a passing from collective energy and
achievement to collective decrepitude and mental impotence, from
intellectual freedom and force to the dogmatic arrest of thought, from
artistic splendour to the very negation of the finest forms of art. However
we may dispute about the nature of progress, we all agree that this was
decadence. Not even the Christian Greek, the least freethinking of educated
moderns, supposes that the life of his race went upwards from the time of
Constantine. The Italian to this day aspires—by way of Tripoli, among
other things—to bear some comparison with the Roman, whose "greatness"
he envies. Decadence, then, is confessed. It concerns us, if we would have a
historical philosophy at all, to think it all in terms of general causation.
At the outset, we shall do well to realise that in the long transmutation there
was no day, save those of sudden and dire disaster, on which the human
elements of the State organisms concerned were collectively conscious of
any great change in their way of life. And days of dire disaster had occurred
in the times to which we look back as those of energetic expansion. Early
Rome had been actually captured by Etruscans, by Gauls; "she" had
ostensibly come to the verge of overthrow by Hannibal a whole era before
she was sacked by the Goths; Athens had been sacked by the Persians long
before the Roman invasion. What was the determining difference in the
consciousness of the citizens at the two epochs? Clearly that between the
minds of men wont to "fend for themselves" collectively and of men wont
to be ruled and prescribed for by a master—a difference, therefore, in power
of resistance and of recovery. And this difference had itself been wrought

by long mutations—from the day of Sulla to the day of Tiberius in Rome,
from the day of Alexander to that of Sulla in Greece. No one generation had
been born in full "freedom," to pass away in complete subordination to an
autocrat. The earlier generations, like the later, had been habituated to
slave-owning, superstition, and the thought of war. The substantial and fatal
change was in the degree of simple average manhood among the free.
National decadence, in a word, is loss of manhood—a thing not easily lost.
A Conservative statesman of our day, wont to apply analytic criticism
chiefly for partisan purposes, has attempted a comparatively disinterested
analysis of the problem before us, in a short but not inconsiderate survey of
the decadence of the old world. At the outset he rightly notes the
inconsistency with which men still tend to hold by the old idea of an
inevitable ageing and ultimate decrepitude of States and civilisations, while
holding no less confidently to the modern notion, practically unattained by
the ancients, of an inevitable progress. "Why," he asks, "should civilisations
thus wear out and great communities decay? and what evidence is there that
in fact they do?"[429] It may or may not be by reason of political bias that the
questioner—who indeed avows that he is pursuing one of "those wandering
trains of thought where we allow ourselves the luxury of putting wide-
ranging questions, to which our ignorance forbids any confident reply"—
propounds no clear answer to either query, contenting himself with
suggesting that modern civilisation, in virtue of its strengthening hold on
physical science, stands a chance of escaping the doom that fell on the old.
But such a curtailed answer moves us afresh to seek a more complete one.
Our questioner, contemplating the "fall" of Rome, argues that the cause
cannot have been even so serious an evil as slavery, which had been in
operation from the beginning. He overlooks the fact that it had greatly
increased in the period of far-reaching conquest,[430] and so misses an
element in the solution. Passing over this, he recognises one proximate
"cause," diminution of population; and he in effect seems to trace to this
source the secondary factor of fiscal collapse—the breaking down of the
tax-paying classes everywhere under the ever-increasing burden of State
exaction. The final fiscal process he oddly describes as "a crude experiment
in socialism." Putting the decay of population and the increase of burdens
together, he pronounces that "they absolutely require themselves to be
explained by causes more general and more remote"; and his answer—

confessedly a mere restatement of the problem—is just the word
"Decadence." The process is simply formulated, once more, in terms of its
name. The questioner does not even take the further analytical step of
asking how the Eastern Empire came to endure a thousand years longer
than the Western; and why the decadence did not similarly operate there.
If anything has been made out in the foregoing survey, we have got further
than this; and indeed from any point of view the arrest of the analysis is
surprising. Supposing failure of population to be the central phenomenon,
we have obviously to ask: What were the political differentia of the
progressive and the ostensibly declining states of population? How were the
peoples ruled when they were strong, expansive, and collectively equal to
their burdens? Surely the answer is obvious. Republican Greece and
Republican Rome were self-governing communities, or aggregates of such,
supporting themselves by individualist production of all kinds, breeding
beyond and not under the apparent limit of food-production. When
Romanised Italy ceased to produce a sufficiency of men, she had ceased to
produce a sufficiency of things; and this latter failure, entailing the other,
can be shown to have been a direct result of the exaction of all manner of
subsistence from conquered territories. So far, there is no mystery.
Our querist, however, affirms a diminution of population not only in Italy
but throughout the Empire. Here we must first question the assertion.
Pestilences, such as that of 166 A.C., doubtless visited most parts of the
Empire; but pestilences belong also to the pre-imperial period, and need not
here be specially considered. As to Greece, the facts have been already
given. The depopulation of that, after Alexander, was primarily a matter of
exodus to the richer conquered lands, where a new Hellenistic civilisation
arose under purely monarchic rule, and therefore unaccompanied by the all-
round, self-developing mental energy which had marked the life of "free"
Greece. In Byzantium, of course, the mental stagnation, under Christian
autocracy, was no less complete. But there is no evidence whatever that
after Constantine the principle of population failed in the Eastern Empire,
especially when that was restricted by the amputation of the tributary
territories.[431]
Did population then fail in Gaul and Spain and Africa? If so, when? As to
Gaul, there is evidence that after the conquest population and productivity

increased, though the latter had not previously been low—witness the loot
taken by Cæsar at Toulouse. Gaul was certainly taxed exorbitantly; but
Julian, as we saw, prudently lessened the drain; and Mommsen describes
both Gaul and Spain as flourishing in their Romanised period.[432] They
continued, in fact, to be, with North Africa, the main sources of the revenue
of the Western Empire down to its collapse. Materially, they in some
respects went forward, notably in the case of the region of old Carthage.
The element wherein they were decadent was precisely that of free
manhood, everywhere eviscerated by autocratic and bureaucratic rule.
Therefore it was that, like Britain—similarly productive of revenue in the
imperial period—they were unable to defend themselves against the final
barbarian inroads. Had Honorius carried out his scheme for a measure of
Home Rule in Gaul,[433] and followed it up by a similar scheme for Spain,
Italy indeed might all the sooner have lost her hold on them as milch kine,
but both provinces might conceivably have developed a new life centuries
before they historically did.
The Conservative statesman has in fact, and very naturally, excluded from
consideration the central political factor. Echoing the Gibbon-Mommsen-
Renan thesis as to the excellence of the Antonine government of the
Mediterranean world, he ignores as those writers did the vital problem:
Wherein lies the felicity of a world wholly at the mercy of the chance of the
election of a good emperor by a mercenary soldiery? To fall back on
phrases about the Empire "respecting local feelings, encouraging local
government," and being "accepted by the conquered as the natural
organisation of the world," is merely to burke the real issue as to the
political viability of communities satisfied with such a system, content to
rest the social pyramid forever on its apex. To say that the conditions of the
Empire under the Antonines were "getting better" is merely to close the
eyes to the frightful hazard of imperial succession. A world absolutely
dependent for its betterment—nay, even for its safe continuance—on the
chance of a good succession of despots is a world doomed by the mere law
of variation.
If we will but gauge moral and economic forces in human affairs as we
gauge physical forces in that toil of science of which the Conservative
statesman has learned to recognise the efficacy, we shall deliver ourselves
from the mystery-mongering which he is fain to substitute for the old

shibboleth of "the divine will." To trace causation in a known civilisation is
not to pretend either to understand all social sequences in all ages or to
predict the destinate future: it is but to recognise the real reactions of human
proclivities and procedures which habit and prejudice have been wont to
contemplate uncritically. The late Sir John Seeley, who at times hardly
advances on Kingsley as an interpreter of history, grappled in his day with
our problem; and he too specified the Antonine age as a notably hopeful
period, from which he dates the decadence:—
"A century of unparalleled tranquillity and virtuous government is followed
immediately by a period of hopeless ruin and dissolution. A century of rest is followed
not by renewed vigour, but by incurable exhaustion. Some principle of decay must
have been at work; but what principle? We answer: it was a period of sterility or
barrenness in human beings; the human harvest was bad. And among the causes of
this barrenness we find, in the more barbarous nations, the enfeeblement produced by
the too abrupt introduction of civilisation and universally the absence of industrial
habits, and the disposition to listlessness which belongs to the military character."[434]

One is tempted to apply the theory of human crops to the case of the chair
of history at Cambridge. Prof. Seeley's theory is an edifying variant on that
of Mr. Balfour. Where one thesis finds the key to all in the emperor, the
other sees failure of the human harvest the moment the imperial succession
goes wrong. And while the Professor offers the semblance of a reason for
the alleged failure in the human breed, it is really too nugatory for
discussion. If the "barbarous nations" alluded to were Gaul and Spain, they
had suffered the "abrupt introduction of civilisation" more than two hundred
years before. Egypt and Syria and Greece and North Africa had older
civilisations than the Roman. Germany was not decadent. The decay of
industrial life in Italy had begun long before the Empire. As well might we
say that a bad human crop there had preceded the Etruscan conquest, the
invasion by Hannibal, and the civil wars. To cite, as does Prof. Seeley, the
pestilence of the year 166 as a beginning of depopulation, is to ignore the
problem of three hundred years of previous depopulation in Italy, and to set
up a misconception as to the rest of the Empire. According to Gibbon, the
long pestilence of the years 250-265 was the worst of all.[435]
More plausibly, Prof. Seeley goes on to argue that "what the plague had
been to the population, that the fiscus was to industry. It broke the bruised
reed; it converted feebleness into utter and incurable debility. Roman
finance had no conception of the impolicy of laying taxation so as to

depress enterprise and trade. The fiscus destroyed capital in the Roman
Empire. The desire of accumulation languished where the Government lay
in wait for all savings—locupletissimus quisque in prædam correptus. All
the intricate combinations by which man is connected to man in a
progressive society disappeared."[436] But this is a finally excessive
description of a process which had been in full swing in the time of Cicero,
and which subsisted for three hundred years after Marcus Aurelius in the
West. A generation after Marcus came the powerful Severus, whose son
Caracalla could find millions of money to build his immense baths at Rome,
still monstrous in their ruins; and seventy years after Caracalla, Diocletian,
wielding the Empire at its utmost extension, could build still vaster baths
for the imperial city at which he had ceased to dwell. With a debased silver
coinage,[437] the emperors of that day seemed to feel no fatal lack of real
revenue, and maintained, at great cost, huge armies for the control and
defence of their enormous realm.
It is impossible to see why the age of the Antonines should be taken as a
turning point in the Empire's history rather than the age of Diocletian. That
great organiser seems to have partly provoked the insurrection of the
Bagaudae in Gaul by taxation; but the Bagaudae were a jacquerie oppressed
by the nobles, as their fathers had been before Cæsar, and as their posterity
was long afterwards; and their wrongs may as well have been at the hands
of their lords as at those of the autocrat.[438] However that might be, Roman
rule in Gaul survived the revolt of the Bagaudae, yielding a great revenue to
Constantine; and at the time of the fall of Rome Gaul was much more
productive than Italy. All this is beside the case. To say that "the downfall of
the Empire is accounted for" by the fiscus[439] is to raise the question
whether the Empire, as such, could have been run by any other method. The
Professor himself pronounces that "Government in its helplessness was
driven" to fiscal oppression. Then fiscal oppression belonged to the nature
of the Empire. Once more we return to the true line of sequence and
explanation. Every step and stage in decadence belonged to the process of
conquest, of confiscation, of subjection of foreign races, who were made to
pay for the vast machinery that kept them subject till they were unfit for
self-defence.
[What is true of the Roman fisc was true till the other day of the Turkish, another
product of militarist imperialism, similarly collateral with mental stagnation.
Depopulation and arrest of production in the East under Turkish rule are to be

explained in substantially the way in which we have explained them for ancient
Rome. And it is significant that the prospect of regeneration for Turkey has begun
after the amputation of many of the provinces over which she maintained an alien
rule. Her future visibly depends on the continuance of the processes of self-
maintenance and development of the principle of self-government throughout the
subsisting State.]

There is a danger that, in insisting on the primarily moral causation of the
process of social disease and decay, we may on the one hand relapse into a
delusive sense of moral superiority, and on the other hand fail to realise
how the subjective moral divagation becomes politically effectual in
structural and economic change. It is the understood process of causation
that is alone truly instructive. But the instruction is deepened in the ratio of
our realisation of the decay. Though it is clear that before Rome many a
civilisation had gone to violent wreck, there is in recorded history no more
overwhelming memory of long triumph and long downfall than that "from
the far-distant morning when a small clan of peasants and shepherds felled
the forests on the Palatine to raise altars to its tribal deities, down to the
tragic hour in which the sun of Græco-Latin civilisation set over the
deserted fields, the abandoned cities, the homeless, ignorant, and brutalised
peoples of Latin Europe."[440] And this whole tremendous arc of triumph and
decline is to be understood as the historic expression of the specially
conditioned bias of conquest in one people.
The decline is the due sequence of the "rise": everything roots in the wrong
relation of communities throughout the Empire. The extension of such a
social disease as slavery is one of the symptoms, one of the sequelæ, of the
central malady.[441] A totally progressive State eliminates or minimises
slavery; a declining one fails to do so. The economic malady involved
affects primarily the dominant or parasitic State or central part, its condition
of parasitism being more deadly than its draining effect on the others. Their
malady lay in their state of subjugation, which was an impoverishment of
character and political faculty; and thus it came about that the collapse of
the centre of organisation meant the fall of the entire civilisation of Western
Europe before the new barbarism.
Rome had so visibly ruined all that we are apt to forget how the process of
moral and political retrogression had begun in the Greek world long before.
There, however, the Roman conquest was but a consummation; and the
economic and political continuance of the Eastern Empire was concurrent

with a moral and intellectual contraction which was never recovered from.
In a word, varying conditions determined the differences of continuance
and evolution in the two spheres. But the causation is none the less clear
throughout.
It might be supposed that this reverberating lesson could have been read in
only one way—as a warning to the nations against taking the Roman road
of conquest and dominion. And yet it is doubtful whether modern States
have been at all guided by that lesson, as compared with the extent to which
they have been overruled by the sheer difficulty of repeating the evolution.
The problem has been faced by Lord Cromer, a ripe ruler, in his very
scholarly essay on Ancient and Modern Imperialism. The experienced
administrator is quite alive to the analogy between the part played of old by
Rome around the Mediterranean and in Europe, and that played to-day by
England in India and, in some measure, in Egypt. Raised in some degree
above the ordinary hallucination of mere dominion, the confused pride of
the average man in his country's rule over large portions of the earth, the
veteran governor notes that, whereas there was a general acquiescence of
the subject peoples in the imperial rule of Rome, no imperium to-day has
won any such cordial acceptance.[442] Neither France in Algeria and Tunis
nor Britain in India and Egypt is an assimilating and unifying power. We
may note the proximate explanation, which he does not at first give—to wit,
the sundering force of crystallised religious systems. As he later puts it,
following Sir Alfred Lyall, religions make nations, where the Romans had
to deal with tribes.[443] But that need not greatly affect our view of the
political problem, which would remain if the religious factor were
eliminated; and it is over the political problem that Lord Cromer most
significantly balances.
Falling back on the method of fatalism, he pronounces, like others before
him, "that Rome, equally with the modern expansive Powers, more
especially Great Britain and Russia, was impelled onwards by the imperious
and irresistible necessity of acquiring defensible frontiers; that the public
opinion of the world scoffed 2,000 years ago, as it does now, at the alleged
necessity; and that each onward move was attributed to an insatiable lust for
extended dominion."[444] As in all fatalistic reasoning, we are here faced by
radical self-contradiction. The "public opinion of the world," which Lord
Cromer allows to include a large part of Roman opinion,[445] could not scoff

at an "irresistible necessity": it knew that it was no more irresistibly
necessary for A to conquer B than for B to conquer A; and in ascribing to
Rome an "insatiable lust for extended dominion" it merely credited Rome
with an appetite known to inhere in all States. Rome succeeded in her aim;
others failed. Pisa, overborne by Florence, had in her day overborne other
communities. Lord Cromer has begged the vital question, which is: Can
States, or can they not, live neighbourly? To say that Rome could not
because of the ambitions or menaces of others is idle: the menace was
reciprocal.
For practical purposes, of course, the thesis is sometimes adequate all
round, as when France and Britain, face to face in North America and in
India, strove each to oust the other. But at times the plea becomes visibly
farcical, as in the recent case of Russia in the Far East, and the earlier case
of Britain with regard to Afghanistan. We can all remember the temporary
growth of the doctrine of "a scientific frontier." First you want a river; then
you need the territory beyond the river; then you need the line of hills
commanding that territory; then the territory behind the hills becomes a sine
qua non.[446] In this case the doctrine has disappeared with the policy, and
that disappeared simply because it failed. The event has proved that the
doctrine was a chimera. And nobody to-day probably will maintain that
Russia lay under an imperious and irresistible necessity to go and be
defeated by the Japanese in Manchuria; or that she could not conceivably
have stopped short of that extremity.
The use sometimes made of the word "cupidity" is apt to obscure the
problem. There is cupidity of power and conquest as well as of territory,
revenue, plunder. Roman cupidity was of all kinds. But so was that of "the"
Greeks. Lord Cromer employs the old false dichotomy—above discussed—
that marks the Greeks as "individualistic" and the Romans as somehow
unitary.[447] As we have seen, the original Roman City-State was just the
same kind of thing as the Greek: it was opportunity that made "the Romans"
expand, whereas "the Greeks," down to Alexander, remained segregated in
their States. What was common and fatal to both, what led Greece to
dissolution and Rome to downfall, was the primary impulse to combat, the
inability to refrain from jealousy, hate, and war. And for the moderns,
seeing this, the problem is, Can they refrain?

Either we are thus to learn from history, or all history is as a novel without a
purpose. And Lord Cromer, as a man of action, cannot in effect take this
attitude, though he recoils from any clear statement of the lesson. On the
one hand, he makes the most of the differentia between ancient and modern
Imperialism. English rulers in India, he admits, originally aimed at home
revenue, and did for a time practise sheer plunder;[448] the British rule no
longer does either: which is in effect an admission that one "imperious and
irresistible necessity" of the Roman rule has been successfully resisted—
shall we say, by modern enlightenment? But he will not frankly take the
further step and say that for the ideal of dominion over backward races we
should substitute the ideal of their education and purposive evolution.
Rather he makes the most of the difficulties, enlarging in the familiar
fashion on the dividedness and differentiation of the Indian peoples and the
relative stationariness of Islam: two undeniable propositions, of which the
first is nothing to the purpose, since we are discussing the lines of
progressive policy; while the second merely incurs the rejoinder that
Christendom was long as stationary as Islam, and that Christian Abyssinia
is so still.
As was, indeed, to be expected, Lord Cromer will rather homologate the
whole Roman process, decadence and collapse and all, than pronounce it
what it was, a vast divagation in human progress. Ultimately he does not
even blench at the proposition that the whole ruin "had to" take place[449] by
way of preparing for the civilisation that was to follow, even as he argues
that "the" Romans "had to" undertake fresh wars where they (on the urging,
as he admits, of their wisest men) had sought to evade further conquest by
recognising "buffer States"[450]—as who should say that whatever course a
majority or a Government do take "had to" be taken. The answer to such
reasoning is the mention of the fact, which he admits, that it was "a supreme
principle of the Roman Government to acknowledge no frontier Power with
equal rights."[451] Can it be still a question whether that principle is to be
transcended?
On the final issue as to what the ruling nations "have to" do to-day as
regards the subject peoples, the disinterested student can hardly hesitate,
however the ex-administrator may feel bound to balance. "The
Englishman," Lord Cromer tells us, truly enough as regards the average
citizen, "would be puzzled to give any definite answer" to the question Quo

vadis? in matters imperial.[452] He may well be, when Lord Cromer visibly
is, despite the ostensible emphasis with which he exhorts his countrymen to
keep "the animus manendi strong within them."[453] The danger is that,
noting the formal conclusion rather than the implicit lesson of Lord
Cromer's very able survey, "the Englishman" may turn from his puzzle to
some new insanity of imperialism. Not many years have passed since
English wiseacres were speculating on a "break-up" of China, and a
dominion of some other State over her huge area and multitudinous
millions. He would be a bad sample of modernity who should now regret
that China is apparently on the way, like Japan, to build up a new
progressive civilisation in the "unchanging East."[454] But it is perhaps as
much to the sheer impracticability of further great conquests as to any alert
and conscious reading of the lesson of history that we owe the growing
disposition of modern States to seek their good in their own development. If
so, provided that the ideal be changed, "it is well, if not so well."

FOOTNOTES:
[429] Decadence. (Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture.) By the Right Hon. A.J.
Balfour, 1908, p. 8.
[430] See above, pp. 23-24. On the whole question see the very full survey of
W.R. Patterson, The Nemesis of Nations, 1907, p. 265 sq.
[431] Gibbon's generalisation (end of ch. 10) as to a "diminution of the human
species" throughout the Empire is confessedly founded on very imperfect
evidence, applying only to Alexandria, and very doubtful even at that point.
[432] History, vol. v (The Provinces). Cp. Merivale, General History, p. 682.
[433] See Gibbon, ch. 31, end. On Gibbon's and Guizot's interpretation of the
scheme, see Prof. Bury's note on Gibbon, in loc.
[434] Lectures and Essays, 1870: Lecture on "Roman Imperialism," p. 54.
[435] Ch. 10, end.
[436] Essay cited, p. 56.
[437] Prof. Bury (note to Gibbon in his ed. i, 281) cites the debased silver
coinage as a proof of the "distress of the Empire" and the "bankruptcy of the
Government." This is an unwarranted inference. See above, p. 80.
[438] Cp. Gibbon, ch. 13, Bohn ed. i, 427-28; Merivale, General History, pp.
572-74. Bagaudae seem to have recruited the army of Julian. (Ed. note on
Gibbon, as cited, ii, 474.)

[439] Seeley, as cited, p. 57.
[440] Ferrero, Greatness and Decline of Rome, Eng. tr. 1907, vol. i, pref.
[441] Cp. Patterson, Nemesis of Nations, as cited.
[442] Ancient and Modern Imperialism, 1910, pp. 37-38, 73-91.
[443] Id. p. 91.
[444] Ancient and Modern Imperialism, pp. 19-20.
[445] Id. p. 22.
[446] Compare Lord Cromer's mention (p. 32) of the doubt as to whether the
Himalayas made a secure frontier.
[447] Ancient and Modern Imperialism, p. 14.
[448] Id. pp. 43, 65-68.
[449] Id. p. 62.
[450] Id. p. 22.
[451] Ancient and Modern Imperialism, p. 26, citing Mommsen.
[452] Id. p. 118.
[453] Id. p. 126.
[454] Mr. Balfour, using this egregious expression in his lecture on Decadence
(p. 35), explains that "the 'East' is a term most loosely used. It does not here
include China and Japan, and does include parts of Africa." At the same time it
does not refer to the ancient Jews and Phœnicians. One is moved to ask, Does it
include the Turks and the Persians? If not, in view of all the other exceptions,
might it not be well to drop the "unchanging" altogether?

PART IV
THE CASE OF THE ITALIAN REPUBLICS
Note on Literature
No quite satisfactory history of Italy has appeared in English. The standard modern
Italian history, that of Cesare Cantù, has been translated into French; but in English
there has been no general history of any length since Procter and Spalding. Col.
Procter's History of Italy (published as by G. Perceval, 1825; 2nd ed. 1844) has merit,
but is not abreast of modern studies. Spalding's Italy and the Italian Islands (3 vols.
3rd ed. 1845) is an excellent work of its kind, covering Italian history from the earliest
times, but is also in need of revision. The comprehensive work of Dr. T. Hodgkin,
Italy and her Invaders (2nd ed. 1892-99, 8 vols.) comes down to the death of
Charlemagne.
Of special histories there are several. One of the best and latest is that of The Lombard
Communes, by Prof. W.F. Butler (1906). Captain H.E. Napier, in the preface to his
Florentine History (1846, 6 vols.) rightly contended that "no people can be known by
riding post through their country against time"; but his six learned volumes are ill-
written and ill-assimilated. The best complete history of Florence, the typical Italian
Republic, is the long Histoire de Florence by F.T. Perrens (9 tom. 1877-84; Eng. tr. of
one vol. by Hannah Lynch, 1892). T.A. Trollope's History of the Commonwealth of
Florence (1865, 4 vols.) is less indigestible than Napier's, but is gratuitously diffuse,
and is written in large part in unfortunate imitation of the pseudo-dramatic manner of
Carlyle. It is further blemished by an absurd index. Neither this nor Mr. W. Carew
Hazlitt's History of the Venetian Republic (1860, 4 vols.; new ed. in two large vols.
1900) has much sociological value, though the latter is copious and painstaking, albeit
also diffuse. The Genoa of J. Theodore Bent (1881) is an interesting sketch; but the
well-read author fails in orderly construction.
A good short manual is the Italy of Mr. Hunt (Macmillan's Historical Course); and an
excellent compendium is supplied by the two treatises of Oscar Browning (1894-95),
Guelphs and Ghibellines (covering the period 1250-1409) and The Age of the
Condottieri, covering the Renaissance, to 1530. Bryce and Hallam are alike helpful to
general views; and it is still profitable to return to the condensed History of the Italian
Republics by Sismondi (written for the English "Cabinet Cyclopædia" in 1832),
though it needs revision in detail. In his two volumes entitled The Fall of the Roman
Empire (1834) that author has given a useful conspectus of the period covered by
Gibbon's great work. Sismondi's larger and earlier Histoire des républiques italiennes
has never ceased to be well worth study, though the Geschichte von Italien of H. Leo
(1829) improves upon it in several respects. It has been revised and condensed
(Routledge, 1 large vol. 1906) by Mr. William Boulting. For the early period the most
comprehensive survey is the Geschichte Italiens im Mittelalter of Ludo Moritz
Hartmann (3 Bde. in 5, 1897-1911) which comes down to the tenth century.

Among modern monographs that of Alfred von Reumont on Lorenzo de' Medici (Eng.
tr. 1876, 2 vols.) in nearly every way supersedes the old work of Roscoe, whose Leo
X, again, is practically superseded by later works on the Renaissance, in particular
those of Burckhardt (Eng. tr. of Geiger's ed. in 1 vol. 1892) and the late J.A. Symonds.
Miss Duffy has a good chapter on Florentine trade and finance in her Story of the
Tuscan Republics, 1892; and the short work of F.T. Perrens, La civilisation florentine
du 13e au 16e siècle (1892—in the Bibliothèque d'histoire illustrée) is luminous
throughout; but Ranke's History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations (Eng. tr. 1887),
which deals with the Italy of 1494-1514, is little more than a sand-heap of incident.
On the economic side there is a good research in Pignotti's essay on Tuscan
Commerce in his History of Tuscany (Eng. tr. 1823, vol. iii). Much interesting detail is
given, with much needless rhetoric, in The Guilds of Florence, by Edgcumbe Staley,
1906.
Of great general value is the elaborate work of Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt
Rom im Mittelalter (4te Aufl. 8 Bde. 1886-96; Eng. tr. by Mrs. Hamilton, 8 vols.
1895-1902), which, however, suffers from the disparity of its purposes, combining as
it does, a topographical history of the city of Rome with a full history of its politics. It
remains a valuable mass of materials rather than a history proper. The same criticism
applies to the very meritorious Geschichte der Stadt Rom of A. von Reumont (3 Bde.
1867-70), which begins with the very origin of the city, and comes down to our own
time.
But there has risen in contemporary Italy a school of historical students who are
rewriting the history of the great period in the light of the voluminous archives which
have been preserved by municipalities. One outcome of this line of investigation is
Prof. Villari's The Two First Centuries of Florentine History (Eng. tr. of first 2 vols.
1894). New light, further, has been thrown on the commercial history of Italy in the
Dark Ages and early Middle Ages by the admirable research of Prof. W. von Heyd, of
which the French translation by Furcy Raynaud, Histoire du commerce du Levant an
moyen age (1886, 2 tom.) is recast and considerably enlarged by the author, while the
Renascence period is illuminated by R. Pöhlmann's treatise, Die Wirthschafts Politik
der Florentiner Renaissance und das Princip der Verkehrsfreiheit (Leipzig, 1878).

Chapter I
THE BEGINNINGS
§1
To understand aright the phenomenon of medieval Italian civilisation we
need first to realise that it was at bottom a fresh growth on the culture roots
of the cities of Romanised Italy. When the imperial centre was shifted to the
East, as already remarked, the people of Italy began a fresh adaptation to
their conditions; those of Rome, instead of leading, standing most zealously
to the old way of things. All the barbarian irruptions did but harass and
hinder the new development; they finally counted for little in its upward
course. There is a prevalent hallucination, akin to others concerning the
"Teutonic race," in the shape of a belief that Italy was somehow
"regenerated" by the "free nations of the North." No accepted formula could
well be further away from the facts. If the political qualities of the
"Teutonic race," whatever that may mean, are to be generalised on the facts
of the invasions of Italy by the Germanic tribes, from Theodoric to
Frederick Barbarossa, they must be summed up as consisting in a general
incapacity for progressive civilisation. The invaders were, in fact, too
disparate in their stage of evolution from that of the southern civilisation to
be capable of assimilating it and carrying it on. Living a life of strife and
plunder like the early Romans, they found in the disarmed Italians, and in
their rapidly degenerate predecessors of their own stock, an easier prey than
the Romans had ever known till they went to the East; but in the qualities
either of military or of civil organisation they were conspicuously inferior
to the Romans of the early Republic. Men of the highest executive ability
appeared from time to time among their leaders; a circumstance of great
interest and importance, as suggesting that a percentage of genius occurs in
all stages of human culture; but the mass of the invaders was always
signally devoid of the very characteristics so romantically attributed to them
by German, English, and even French Teutophiles—to wit, the gifts of
union, discipline, order, and self-government. These elements of civilisation
depend on the functioning of the nerve centres, and are not to be evolved by

mere multiplication of animated flesh, which was the main constructive
process carried on in ancient Germania. Precisely because they were, as
Tacitus noted, the most homogeneous of the European races of that era,[455]
they were incapable of any rapid and durable social development. It is only
mixed races that can evolve or sustain a complex civilisation.
"The Germans," as we historically trace them at the beginning of our era,
were barbarians (i.e., men between savagery and civilisation) in the most
rudimentary stage, making scanty beginnings in agriculture; devoid of the
useful arts, save those normally practised by savages; given to drunkenness;
chronically at war; and alternating at other times between utter sloth and
energetic hunting—the pursuit which best fitted them for war. Because the
peoples thus situated were in comparison with the Romans "chaste" and
monogamous—a common enough virtue in savage life[456]—they are
supposed by their admirers to have been excellent material for a work of
racial regeneration. Only in an indirect sense does this hold good. As a new
"cross" to the Italian stocks they may indeed have made for beneficial
variation; but by themselves they were mere raw material, morally and
psychologically. Their reputed virtue of chastity disappeared as soon as the
barbarians passed from a northern to a southern climate,[457] their vices so
speedily exceeding the measure of paganism that even a degree of
physiological degeneration soon set in. Even in their own land, met by a
fiercer barbarism than their own, they collapsed miserably before the Huns.
As regards the arts and sciences, moral and physical, it is impossible to
trace to the invaders any share in the progress of Italy,[458] save in so far as
they were doubtless a serviceable cross with the older native stocks. To
their own stock, which had been relatively too homogeneous, the gain of
crossing was mixed. Aurelian had put the case with rude truth when he told
a bragging embassy of Goths that they knew neither the arts of war nor
those of peace;[459] and so long as the Empire in any section had resources
enough to levy and maintain trained armies, it was able to destroy any
combination of the Teutons. There was always generalship enough for that,
down till the days of Teutonic civilisation. Claudius the Second routed their
swarms as utterly as ever did Marius or Cæsar; Stilicho annihilated
Rodogast, and always out-generalled Alaric; Aetius, after routing Franks,
Burgundians, and Visigoths, overwhelmed the vast host of Attila's Huns;
and in a later age the single unsleeping brain of Belisarius, scantily

weaponed with men and money by a jealous sovereign, could drive back
from Rome in shame and ruin all the barbarian levy of Wittich.[460]
As against the "Teutonic" theory of Italian regeneration, a hearing may reasonably be
claimed for the "Etruscan," thus set forth:—"The Etruscans were undoubtedly one of
the most remarkable nations of antiquity—the great civilisers of Italy—and their
influence not only extended over the whole of the ancient world but has affected
every subsequent age.... That portion of the Peninsula where civilisation earliest
flourished, whence infant Rome drew her first lessons, has in subsequent ages
maintained its pre-eminence.... It was Etruria which produced Giotto, Brunelleschi,
Fra Angelico, Luca Signorelli, Fra Bartolomeo, Michael Angelo, Hildebrand, 'the
starry Galileo,' and such a noble band of painters, sculptors and architects as no other
country of modern Europe can boast. Certainly no other region of Italy has produced
such a galaxy of brilliant intellects.... Much may be owing to the natural superiority of
the race, which, in spite of the revolutions of ages, remains essentially the same, and
preserves a distinctive character." (G. Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria,
3rd ed. 1883, Introd. vol. i, pp. cii-iv.) Assumption for assumption, this is as
defensible as the others.

What happened in Italy after Odoaker was that, for sheer lack of unitary
government on the part of the invaders, the cities, which preserved the
seeds and norms of the old civilisation, gradually grew into new organic
life. Under the early Empire they had been disarmed and unwalled, to make
them incapable of revolt. Aurelian, stemming the barbarian tide, began to
wall them afresh; but, as we have seen, the withdrawal of the seat of empire
left Italy economically incapable of action on an imperial scale; and the
personal imbecility of such emperors as Honorius filled up the cup of the
humiliation of what once was Rome. But the invaders on the whole did
little better; and the material they brought was more hopeless than what
they found. The passage from full barbarism to order and civilisation cannot
conceivably be made in one generation or one age. Athaulf, the able
successor of Alaric, passed his competent judgment on the matter in words
which outweigh all the rhetoric of modern romanticism: "He was wont to
say that his warmest wish had at first been to obliterate the Roman name,
and to make one sole Gothic empire, so that all that which had been
Romania should be called Gothia, and that he, Athaulf, should play the
same part as did Cæsar Augustus. But when by much experience he was
convinced that the Goths were incapable of obedience to laws, because of
their unbridled barbarism, and that the State without laws would cease to be
a State, he had chosen to seek glory in rebuilding its integrity and
increasing the Roman power by Gothic forces, so that posterity should at

least regard him as the restorer of the empire which he was unable to
replace. Therefore he strove to avoid war and to establish peace."[461]
It needed only command of the machinery of systematic government—if
indeed the same qualities had not been in full play long before—to develop
in the Teutons every species of evil that could be charged against the
Southerns. The fallacy of attributing the crimes of Byzantium to the
physiological degeneration of an "old" race is exposed the moment we
compare the record with the history of the Franks, as told by Gregory of
Tours. Christian writers continue to hold up Nero as a typical product of
decadent paganism, saying nothing of the Christian Chilperic, "the Nero of
France," or of his father, less ill-famed, Clothaire, the slayer of children, the
polygamist, the strictly orthodox Churchman, "certain that Jesus Christ will
remunerate us for all the good we do" to his priests.[462] Odious women were
as powerful in Frankish courts as in Byzantine; and the tale of the end of
Brunehild is not to be matched in pagan annals. Savage treachery, perjury,
parricide, fratricide, filicide, assassination, massacre, debauchery, are if
possible more constant notes in the tale of the young barbarism, as told by
the admiring saint, than in that of the long-descended civilisation of
Constantinople; and the rank and file seem to have been worthy of the
heads.
One note of Gibbon's, on "barbaric virtue," àpropos of the character of Totila, has
given one of his editors (Bohn ed. iv, 505) the opportunity to assert that the "natural
superiority" of the invaders was manifest wherever they came in contact with their
civilised antagonists. As if Aurelian and Belisarius were not the moral equals of
Totila. Yet in a previous note (ch. 38, ed. cited, iv, 181) on the Frankish history of
Gregory of Tours, Gibbon had truly remarked that "it would not be easy, within the
same historical space, to find more vice and less virtue." On that head Sismondi
declares (Histoire des Français, ed. 1821, i, 403-4; Fall of the Roman Empire, i, 263)
that "there was not a Merovingian king that was not a father before the age of fifteen
and decrepit at thirty." Dunham (History of the Germanic Empire, 1834, i, 10)
improves on this to the extent of asserting that "those abominable princes generally—
such were their premature vices—died of old age before thirty." It is a fair surmise
that, Clovis being a barbarian of great executive genius (cp. Guizot, Essais sur
l'histoire de France, p. 43), his stock was specially liable to degeneration through
indulgence. But Motley, whose Teutophile and Celtophobe declamation at times
reaches nearly the lowest depth touched by his school, will have it (Rise of the Dutch
Republic, ed. 1863, p. 12) that later "the Carlovingian race had been exhausted by
producing a race of heroes." Any formula avails to support the dogma that "the
German was loyal as the Celt was dissolute" (id. p. 6).
It is perhaps arguable that the early Teuton had a moral code peculiar to himself.
Sismondi (Fall, i, 246) remarks, concerning Clothaire's son Gontran, called by