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, kalokagathos, 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 Phoenicia 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 Phoenicia, 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 Phoenicia from any given date onwards, the causes lay either in the environment or in the set previously given to Phoenician 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 Phoenicians 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 Phoenician respectively
represented." The antithesis, it is here maintained, is spurious.
Many Greeks were in full sympathy with the Phoenician norm; many
Phoenicians must have been capable of delighting in the Greek
norm had they been reared to it. At a given period the
Phoenicians had a higher life than the Greeks; and had the
Phoenicians 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:

[Footnote 319: Whistler, _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_, 1890, pp. 138, 139.]

[Footnote 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."]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 326: See above, p. 28.]

[Footnote 327: See Maspero, _Manual of Egyptian Archæology_, Eng. tr. 1895, pp. 215, 226, 235, 236, 240, etc.]

[Footnote 328: See above, p. 56.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 330: Grote, iii, 21-22.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 332: Pt. ii, ch. 67.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 334: Cp. Bury, _History of Greece_, pp. 7, 33-34.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 336: Bury, _History of Greece_, ed. 1906, p. 59.]

[Footnote 337: Cited in Strabo, bk. viii, ch. v, § 6.]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 339: Cp. Maisch, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, Eng. tr. § 11; K.O. Müller, _The Dorians_, i, 105, 203.]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 341: Grote, iii, 294, and _note_.]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 345: Cp. Finlay, _History of Greece_, Tozer's ed. i, 15; Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 4, 105.]

[Footnote 346: Fifth century B.C.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 348: Cp. Finlay, i, 76.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 350: Cp. Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 4, 10, 15, 131-38, 144.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 352: Cp. Mackintosh, _On the Progress of Ethical Philosophy_, 4th ed. p. 29; Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 6th ed. i, 128.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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."]

[Footnote 355: Professor Spalding, _Italy and the Italian Islands_, i, 117, 118.]

[Footnote 356: K.O. Müller, _History of Greek Literature_, 1847, pp. 208, 210.]

[Footnote 357: Schömann, _Griechische Alterthümer_, ii, 362.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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."]

[Footnote 360: Cp. Mill, _Liberty_, ch. iii, People's ed. p. 38.]

[Footnote 361: Cp. J.S. Mill's analysis of "benevolent despotism" in ch. iii of his _Representative Government_.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 363: Finlay. _History of Greece_, i. 186. Cp. p. 185.]

[Footnote 364: D. Bikélas. _Seven Essays on Christian Greece_, translated by the Marquess of Bute, 1890.]

[Footnote 365: Work cited, p. 103.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 367: Bikélas, p. 104.]

[Footnote 368: Ch. 53, Bohn ed. vi, 233. Cp. Finlay, ii, 4, 217, as to the internal forces of routine.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 370: Finlay, _History of Greece_, i, 224-25; Gibbon, ch. 43, end.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 372: Cp. Bury, as cited, ii, 521.]

[Footnote 373: Bury, App. 12 to ed. of Gibbon, v, 531.]