Problems in Greek history Part 14

-- 56. This estimate is totally at variance with the judgment of the ancients, his contemporaries and immediate successors, who openly accused, and indeed convicted, him of embezzling money in his public capacity, as well as of accepting briefs and fees from both sides in a private litigation.

[Sidenote: Conditions of the conflict]

[Sidenote: made Philip's victory certain.]

To this question of his private character I shall revert. But as regards the struggle which he carried on for years, not so much against Philip as against the apathy of his fellow-citizens, it must have been plain from the beginning that he was playing a losing game. The dislike of military service in what is called by Grote the 'Demosthenic Athenian'

was notorious; the jealousies of parties within, and of other States without, hampered any strong and consistent line of action. The gold of Philip was sure to command, not only at Athens, but at Thebes, at Argos, in Arcadia, partisans who, under the guise of legitimate opposition, would carry adjournments, postponements, limitations, of all vigorous policy. Mercenary troops, which were now in fas.h.i.+on, if not amply paid and treated with regard to their convenience, became a greater scourge to their own side than to the enemy. It was therefore quite plain that Philip must win, though none of us can fail to appreciate and to admire the persistent and n.o.ble efforts of Demosthenes, who is never weary of urging that if the free States, especially Athens, would do their duty, and make some sacrifices for the good of Greece, the impending foreign domination would be indefinitely postponed. But this only means that if the Athenians had changed their character, and adopted that of another generation or another race, the issue of the contest might have been different[137:1].

[Sidenote: Demosthenes fights a losing game.]

This is the sort of up-hill game that Demosthenes played for twenty years. At first Athens seemed quite the stronger to superficial observers. But because she was so strong it seemed unnecessary to act with full vigour. Presently she begins to lose, and Philip to make way.

Even still she can win if she will rouse herself. But soon he makes further advances, and she is involved in difficulties. Then the faint-hearted begin to fear, and the disloyal to waver. It is not till the very end of the struggle, when Athens is in direct danger of immediate siege, that the whole population wakes up, the traitors are silenced, and the city, in conjunction with Thebes, makes a splendid struggle. But the day for victory had long gone by, and Demosthenes has the bitter satisfaction of at last attaining his full reputation for wisdom and patriotism because his gloomiest prophecies are fulfilled.

[Sidenote: The blunders of his later policy.]

[Sidenote: Compared with Phocion.]

-- 57. It is from this time onward[138:1] that his public acts seem to me hardly consistent with common-sense, or with that higher idea of patriotism which seeks the good of the State at the sacrifice of personal theories or prejudices. Grote has observed of the other leading Athenian of that time, the general Phocion, that while his policy of submission and despair was injurious, nay, even fatal, up to the battle of Chaeronea, this tame acquiescence when the struggle was over was the practical duty of a patriot, and of decided advantage to his country.

Grote ought to have insisted with equal force that the policy of resistance and of hope, while highly commendable and patriotic up to the same moment, was deeply mischievous to the conquered people, and led them into many follies and many misfortunes. And yet this was the policy which Demosthenes hugged to the last, and which cost the lives and fortunes of hundreds of Athenians.

[Sidenote: Old men often ruinous politics.]

I have spoken elsewhere[139:1] of the peculiar mischief to a nation of having her fortunes at a great crisis intrusted to _old_ men.

Demosthenes was indeed only fifty years of age when the genius of Alexander showed itself beyond any reasonable doubt. But at fifty Demosthenes was distinctly an old man. His delicate const.i.tution, tried by the severest early studies, had been worn in political conflicts of nearly thirty years' duration; and we may therefore pardon him, though we cannot forget the fatal influence he exercised in keeping both Athens and the other Greek cities from joining heartily in the great new enterprise of the Macedonian king. All the Attic politicians were then past middle life, with the exception of Hypereides.

[Sidenote: h.e.l.lenism despised.]

So then the old republican glories of Athens, the old liberties of the Greeks, which had been tried and found wanting, were praised and hymned by all the orators, and the great advent of a new day, the day of _h.e.l.lenism_, was cursed as the setting of the sun of Greece. Modern scholars, led, as usual, by literary instead of political greatness, have in general adopted this view; and so strongly do they feel that the proper history of Greece is now over that they either close their work with the battle of Chaeronea, or add the conquests of Alexander and the wars of the Diadochi as a sort of ungrateful and irrelevant appendix. On this subject I have already spoken in connection with the work of Grote[140:1].

[Sidenote: The author feels he is fighting a losing game against democracy and its advocates.]

The love of political liberty, and the importance attached to political independence, are so strong in the minds of the Anglo-Saxon nations that it is not likely any one will persuade them, against the splendid advocacy of Grote, that there may be such losses and mischiefs in a democracy as to justify a return to a stronger executive and a greater restriction of public speech. Nevertheless, the conviction derived from a life-long study of Greek history is so strong in me on this question that I feel compelled to state my opinions. It is all the more a duty as I hold that one of the greatest lessons of ancient history is to suggest guiding-posts and advices for the perplexities of modern life. So far is mankind the same in all places and countries, that most civilized peoples will stumble upon the same difficulties and will apply the same experiments to their solution.

[Sidenote: The education of small free States.]

[Sidenote: Machiavelli and Aristotle.]

-- 58. There is no one more convinced than I am that this complex of small, independent cities, each forming a separate State in the strictest sense of the term, each showing modifications of internal const.i.tution, each contending with the same obstacles in varied ways,--this wonderful political Many-in-one (for they were one in religion, language, and general culture) afforded an intellectual education to Greek citizens such as the world has not since experienced.

The _Politics_ of Aristotle is a summary of the theoretical side of that experience, which could find no parallel till the days of Machiavelli, whose scheme, if completed by the promised _Repubblica_, would have been very similar. For his _Principe_ is plainly suggested by the then re-discovered _Politics_ of Aristotle, which naturally struck the Florentine statesman with its curiously close and various a.n.a.logies to the history of the Italian republics of the Middle Ages.

[Sidenote: Greek democratic patriotism.]

Even far more deeply did the lessons of Athenian political life act upon the practical character of the citizen, and train him to be a rational being submitting to the will of the majority, to which he himself contributed in debate, taking his turn at commanding as well as obeying, regarding the labours of office as his just contribution to the public weal, regarding even the sacrifices he made as a privilege,--the outward manifestation of his loyalty to the State which had made him in the truest sense an aristocrat among men. Even when he commanded fleets or armies he did so as the servant of the State; and any attempt to redress private differences by personal a.s.sertion of his rights, other than the law provided, was regarded as essentially a violation of his civility and a return to barbarism. To carry arms for personal defence, to challenge an adversary to mortal combat, to take forcible possession of disputed property,--these things were greater outrages and greater violences to civilization at Athens than they are in most of the civilized countries of the nineteenth century.

[Sidenote: Its splendid results]

To have attained this high level, four centuries before Christ, without the aid of a really pure system of State religion, without the aid of that romantic sentiment which is so peculiar to Northern nations, is to have achieved a triumph which no man can gainsay. Had the Greeks not been subjected to this splendid training, which radiated from politics into art and letters, and which stimulated, though it did not create, that national genius that has since found no rival, all the glories of h.e.l.lenism, all the splendours of Alexander's successors, all the victories over Western barbarism would have been impossible.

[Sidenote: appear to be essentially transitory,]

[Sidenote: from internal causes.]

-- 59. But when all this is said, and however fully and eloquently it may be urged, the fact remains that the highest education is not all-powerful in producing internal concord and external peace. There seems, as it were, a national strain exercised by a conquering and imperial democracy, which its members may sustain for a generation or two, but which cannot endure. The sweets of acc.u.mulated wealth and domestic comfort in a civilized and agreeable society become so delightful that the better cla.s.ses will not keep up their own energy.

All work, says Aristotle, to which men submit, is for the purpose of having leisure; and so there is a natural tendency in the cultivated cla.s.ses to stand aside from politics, and allow the established laws to run in their now accustomed grooves. Hence the field of politics is left to the poorer, needier, more discontented cla.s.ses, who turn public life into a means of glory and of gain, and set to work to disturb the State that they may satisfy their followers and obtain fuel to feed their own ambition. To such persons either a successful war upon neighbours, or an attack upon the propertied cla.s.ses at home, becomes a necessity.

[Sidenote: The case of America.]

Let me state a modern case. The natural resources of America are still so vast that this inevitable result has not yet ensued. But whenever a limit has been reached and the pinch of poverty increases, we may expect it to arise in the United States. Even the Athenian democracy, when its funds were low and higher taxes were threatened, hailed with approval informations against rich citizens, in the hope that by confiscations of their property the treasury might be replenished.

[Sidenote: The demagogue.]

This is the heyday of the demagogue, who tells the people--the poorer crowd--that they have a right to all the comforts and blessings of the State, and that their pleasures must not be curtailed while there are men of large property living in idle luxury. Such arguments produce violences instead of legal decisions; the demagogue becomes a tyrant over the richer cla.s.ses; the public safety is postponed to private interests; and so the power of the democracy as regards external foes is weakened in proportion as the harmony among its citizens is disturbed.

[Sidenote: Internal disease the real cause of decadence.]

[Sidenote: The Greek States all in this condition,]

Such are the changes which Greek theorists regarded as inevitable in a democracy, and as certain to bring about its ultimate fall. Whatever may be the case with the great States of modern days, this prognosis was thoroughly verified in Greek history. It may safely be said that no State was ever crushed by external adversaries at the period of its perfection. In every case internal decay has heralded the overthrow from without. There is no reasonable probability that, had there never been a Philip or an Alexander, Athens, Sparta, Thebes, or Argos would have risen into a glorious future and revived the splendours of Leonidas or of Pericles. We may deeply regret that the maintenance of such prosperity should seem impossible; we may laud in the strongest words the condition of things which had once made it actual: but the day for this splendour was gone by; and far better than the impotence of an unjust mob, and the chicanery of an unprincipled leader, is the subjection of all to external control, even with the impairing or abolis.h.i.+ng of universal suffrage.

[Sidenote: as Phocion saw,]

This was evidently the opinion of Phocion, an honourable and experienced man, whose contempt for the floods of talk in Athens, leading to waste of time and delay in action, made him the persistent opponent of Demosthenes, but nevertheless trusted and respected even by the mob whom he openly despised. We may indeed feel glad that his policy did not earlier prevail,--we should have lost the speeches of Demosthenes; and to the after world this loss would not have been compensated, had the Athenians merely escaped their troubles and lived in peaceful submission.

[Sidenote: but which Demosthenes ignored.]

Demosthenes says proudly, in a famous pa.s.sage of his immortal _De Corona_, that even in presence of his life's failure, even after all he had attempted had been wrecked by circ.u.mstances, he would not recall one act of his life, one argument in his speeches, no, not by the heroes that stood the brunt of battle at Marathon, by the memory of all those who died for their country's liberty!

[Sidenote: The dark shadows of his later years.]

-- 60. We may all applaud this n.o.ble self-panegyric, but not the irritating agitation which he had adopted and continued for fifteen years against the Macedonian supremacy, and which involved his country in further distresses, and cost him and his brother-agitators their lives. For the very means he used to carry on his policy of revolt were more than doubtful in their honesty, and have thrown a dark shade upon his memory. The fact is, as I have already said, that while Phocion, the enemy of the democratic policy, is above all suspicion, both contemporaries and survivors had their doubts about Demosthenes.

[Sidenote: His professional character as an advocate.]

I need not discuss here the allegation that he made speeches for money on opposite sides in the successive trials of the same case. The fact appears to me clear enough, for it is only evaded by his panegyrists with their stock expedient of declaring one of such opposing speeches, though accepted by the best ancient critics, to be spurious. But the morals of the bar from that day to this are so peculiar--I will not say loose--as to make the layman hesitate in offering an opinion. That a man should take fees for a case in which he cannot appear, or retain them when he is debarred by lucrative promotion from appearing for his client, seems to be consistent with the morality of the modern bar. Why then try Demosthenes by a severer standard?

[Sidenote: The affair of Harpalus.]

But a larger question arises when we find him arraigned for embezzling a sum of money brought to Athens by a fugitive defaulter from Alexander's treasury, and moreover convicted of the embezzlement. The chorus of modern critics, with a very occasional exception, cry out that of course the accusation was false, and the verdict simply a political move to escape the wrath of the formidable Macedonian. But the facts remain, and this moreover among them, that the princ.i.p.al accuser of Demosthenes was his brother-patriot Hypereides, who afterwards suffered death for the anti-Macedonian cause[147:1].

[Sidenote: Was the verdict against Demosthenes just?]

The evidence left to us seems to me not sufficient to overthrow the Athenian verdict on political grounds, and is certainly not such as to justify us in acquitting Demosthenes without further consideration. The real ground, however, which actuates modern historians is quite a different one from that of the evidence adduced, and is, I think, based on a historical misprision, a false estimate of the current morals of the day. I think it well to state the case here; for it is a test case, and affects many of our judgments of other Greek politicians as well as of Demosthenes.