A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF HELLENISM

CHAPTER I

GRAECO-ROMAN CIVILIZATION IN ITS POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

 

BROADLY, the political history of classical antiquity almost from the opening of the historic period may be described as a slow passage from the condition of self-governing commonwealths with a subordinate priesthood to the condition of a theocratic despotism. This was a reduction of the West to the polity of the civilized East. In the old Oriental monarchies known to the classical world, the type was that of a consecrated despot ruling with the support and under the direction of a priesthood socially supreme. Immemorial forms of it were to be seen in Egypt and in the Assyrio-Babylonian civilization on which the conquering Persian monarchy was superimposed. In Persia had appeared the earliest type of a revealed as distinguished from an organized natural religion. And here were the beginnings of the systematic intolerance at first so puzzling to the Greeks. Intolerance, however, did not till later and from a new startingpoint assume a permanently aggressive form. With the Persians, conquest over alien nationalities led to some degree of tolerance for their inherited religions.

The origin of the monarchies of Egypt and of Western Asia is a matter of conjecture. To the classical world they appeared as a finished type. The ancient European type of polity was new and independent. It did not spring out of the Oriental type by way of variation. In investigating its accessible beginnings we probably get nearer to political origins than we can in the East. We have there before our eyes the plastic stage which cannot in the East be reconstructed. The Greek tragic poets quite clearly distinguished their own early constitutional monarchies with incompletely developed germs of aristocracy and democracy from Oriental despotism. While these monarchies lasted, they were probably not very sharply marked off, in the general consciousness, from other monarchical institutions. The advance to formal republicanism revealed at once a new type of polity and the preparation for it at an earlier stage. That this was to be the conquering type might very well be imagined. Aeschylus puts into the mouth of the Persian elders a lamentation over the approaching downfall of kingship in Asia itself. Yet this prophecy, as we know, is further from being realized now than it may have appeared then. And, though organized despotism on the great scale was thrown back into Asia by the Persian wars, the later history of Europe for a long period is the history of its return.

The republican type of culture was fixed for all time, first in life and then in literature, by the brief preeminence of Athens. The Greek type of free State, however, from its restriction to a city, and the absence of a representative system, with other causes, could not maintain itself against the inroads of the monarchical principle, which at that time had the power of conferring unity on a larger aggregate. The Macedonian monarchy, originally of the constitutional type, became, through its conquests at once over Greece and Asia, essentially an Oriental monarchy—afterwards a group of monarchies—distinguished only by its appropriation of the literary culture of Greece. Later, the republican institutions of Rome, which succeeded those of Greece as the type of political freedom, broke down, in spite of their greater flexibility and power of incorporating subjects, through a combination of the causes that affected Greece and Macedon separately. Perhaps the imperial monarchy was a necessity if the civilized world was to be kept together for some centuries longer, and not to break up into warring sections. Still, it was a lapse to a lower form of polity. And the republican resistance can be historically justified. The death of Caesar showed his inheritors that the hour for formal monarchy was not yet come. The complete shaping of the Empire on the Oriental model was, in fact, postponed to the age of Diocletian and Constantine. Meanwhile, the emperor not being formally monarch, and the republic remaining in name, the whole system of education continued to be republican in basis. The most revered classics were those that had come down from the time of freedom. Declamations against tyrants were a common exercise in the schools. And the senatorial opposition, which still cherished the ethical ideal of the republic, came into power with the emperors of the second century. What it has become the fashion to call the "republican prejudices" of Tacitus and Suetonius were adopted by Marcus Aurelius, who, after citing with admiration the names of Cato and Brutus, along with those of later heroes of the Stoical protestation against Caesarean despotism, holds up before himself "the idea of a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed. Here the demand for administrative unity might seem to be reconciled with the older ideal; but the Stoic emperor represented the departing and not the coming age.

There was a discrepancy between the imperial monarchy on the one hand, potentially absolute, though limited by the deference of the ruler for ancient forms, and on the other hand the ideal that had come down from the past. The ethics of antiquity had never incorporated absolutism. Now the new religion that was already aiming at the spiritual dominance of the Empire had no tradition that could separate it from the monarchical system. Christian ethics from the first accepted absolutism as its political datum. The Christian apologists under the Antonines represent themselves as a kind of legitimists,—praying, in the time of Marcus Aurelius, that the right of succession of Commodus may be recognized and the blessing of hereditary kingship secured'. Christianity therefore, once accepted, consecrated for the time an ideal in accordance with the actual movement of the world. In substituting the notion of a monarch divinely appointed for the apotheosis of the emperors, it gave a form less unendurable in civilized Europe to a servility which, in its pagan form, appearing as an Asiatic superstition, had been something of a scandal to the rulers who were in a manner compelled to countenance it. The result, unmodified by new factors, is seen in the Byzantine Empire. The Roman Empire of the East remained strong enough to throw off the barbarian attack for centuries. It preserved much of ancient Greek letters. In distinction from the native monarchies of Asia, it possessed a system of law that had received its bent during a period of freedom. But, with these differences, it was a theocratic monarchy of the Oriental type. It was the last result, not of a purely internal development, but of reaction on the Graeco-Roman world from the political institutions and the religions of Asia.

The course of things in the West was different. Having been for a time reduced almost to chaos by the irruptions of the Germanic tribes, the disintegrated and then nominally revived Western Empire furnished the Church with the opportunity of erecting an independent theocracy above the secular rule of princes. This type came nearest to realization in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It broke down partly through internal decay and partly through the up-growth of a stronger secular life. With immense difficulty and with the appearance almost of accident, a new kind of free State arose. The old Teutonic monarchies, like the old Greek monarchies, were not of the Asiatic type. They contained elements of political aristocracy and democracy which could develop under favoring circumstances. In most cases the development did not take place. With the cessation of feudal anarchy, the royal power became too strong to be effectively checked. There was formed under it a social hierarchy of which the most privileged equally with the least privileged orders were excluded as such from all recognized political authority. Thus on the Continent, during the early modern period, the prevailing type became Catholic Absolutism, or, as it has been called, "European monarchy,"—a system which was imitated in the Continental Protestant States. By the eighteenth century this had become, like the Byzantine Empire or the old Asiatic monarchies, a fixed type, a terminal despotism from which there could be no peaceful issue. It was destroyed—so far as it has since been destroyed—by the revolutionary influence of ideas from the past and from without. In England the germs of freedom, instead of being suppressed, were developed, and in the seventeenth century, after a period of conflict, the modern system of constitutional monarchy was established. To the political form of the modern free State, early English institutions by their preservation contributed most. Classical reminiscences, in England as elsewhere, enkindled the love of freedom; but deliberate imitation was unnecessary where the germs from which the ancient republics themselves had sprung were still ready to take a new form. From England the influence of revived political freedom diffused itself, especially in France, where it combined with the emulation of classical models and with generalizations from Roman law, to form the abstract system of "natural rights." From this system, on the intellectual side, have sprung the American and the French Republics.

In the general European development, the smaller constitutional States may be neglected. The reappearance of a kind of city-republic in mediaeval Italy is noteworthy, but had little practical influence. The Italian cities were never completely sovereign States like the Greek cities. Politically, it is as if these had accepted autonomy under the supremacy of the Great King. Spiritually, it is as if they had submitted to a form of the Zoroastrian religion from which dissent was penal. Nor did the great Italian poets and thinkers ever quite set up the ideal of the autonomous city as the Greeks had done. In its ideal, their city was rather a kind of municipality: with Dante, under the "universal monarchy" of the restored Empire; with Petrarch and more distinctly with Machiavelli, under Italy as a national State, unified by any practicable means. Even in its diminished form, the old type of republic was exceedingly favorable to the reviving culture of Europe; but the prestige of the national States around was too strong for it to survive except as an interesting accident.

The present type of free State is one to which no terminal form can be assigned. In England and in America, in France and in Italy, not to speak of the mixed forms existing elsewhere, it is still at the stage of growth. The yet living rival with which it stands confronted is the Russian continuation or reproduction of Christian theocracy in its Byzantine form.