The Glory That Was Greece: a survey of Hellenic culture and civilisation

by J. C. Stobart

Alexander and his Work

HE fate of that old god Cronos, supplanted by his own children whom he had tried in vain to devour, is more or less the common lot of all parents of vigorous offspring. The Athenians had a nocturnal festival in which young men ran in relays, each member of the team handing his torch to another, and, as Æschylus says in a fine metaphor, “the first is the victor, even though he be last in the running.” So at this point of our history we begin to be aware of new forces arising in the Greek world, new powers on the fringe of the Hellenic circle now stepping into the light and taking their places in the torch-race of civilisation. Such were Rhodes, the new commercial republic, Caria under Mausolus, Thessaly under Jason, Cyprus under Evagoras, Pergamum under Attalus, the two Leagues, Ætolian and Achæan, and above all Macedon under Philip and Alexander. The stream of culture and intelligence that emanated from Athens and the other ancient cities was now pulsing in the finger-tips of Greece. Many of these new powers are more than half barbarian. They are either monarchies or confederations. What generally happens is that leaders arise who are themselves sufficiently endowed with civilised intelligence to utilise the latent force in a race of untamed and uncivilised warriors. In the military sense the case is that the old powers had grown into the habit of replacing their citizen militias by paid professional soldiers, and their citizens accordingly had grown slack and unwarlike. Rulers like Philip of Macedon were able to raise much larger native levies and to drill them into the professional tactics of the day. Economically it was wealth that told. The old cities were, partly, no doubt through their own lack of foresight, in a state of financial exhaustion, while Philip, by his control of the gold-mines, Attalus and Evagoras by their private wealth, and the Phocians by their sacrilegious seizure of the treasures of Delphi, were still able to bring large forces into the field. The old powers were thus left behind in the race through the force of circumstances beyond their control. In fact, the day of the city-state seemed for a time to be drawing to a close, and larger units, either kingdoms or confederacies, to be taking its place according to their natural superiority.

Modern historians, therefore, suckled on Bismarckism and devoted to physical force, turn aside from the old cities and pronounce them hopelessly degenerate. This is a proposition that deserves examination. In some respects it is false. If it be the mark of historical decadence that the motive power of a race is in some mysterious way paralysed so that invention ceases and no more new forms or experiments are made in culture or politics, then we may assert with some confidence that Greece was not yet even in the third century in such a condition. We shall see something of her new inventions in literature, philosophy, and art in this chapter. In politics the federal systems of Western Greece were distinctly novel and promising. Even in warfare she fought bravely enough at Chæroneia, as she did much later against the invading Gauls. Even Athens, when her dark hour came and she had to submit to garrisons and alien governors, never acquiesced, but rose again and again in rebellion against them. Sparta for a short time in the third century performed the most difficult of all political feats, namely, a reformation and regeneration of herself from within. At Sellasia under Cleomenes III. in 222 B.C. the few Spartans who remained fought against tremendous odds with all their ancient sublime devotion, and died to a man as their ancestors had done under Leonidas. So true is it that moral and spiritual qualities in a people do not come to the sudden end that often befalls a state when it depends for its greatness on material prosperity or physical force.

But the most serious symptom of later Greece was a real racial decline, for which history has no remedy and no mercy, a decline of population. The Spartiate race of Lacedæmon, for example, became almost extinct. There were no more than 1500 of them at the date of the battle of Leuctra, and after that we hear of expeditions containing no more that thirty genuine Spartiates. In a less degree it was the same all over old Greece, and whether it was due to malarial fever or to economic distress, it made the political decline of these states inevitable.

Now it is necessary to go back a little into the earlier part of the fourth century to glance at the rise of Macedon and its conquerors. At the opening of the century Macedon was still almost uncivilised; it was ruled by a monarchy surrounded with an aristocracy of knights very much after the Homeric model. At that time its kings had begun to acquire enough education to mingle a little in Greek politics, and Archelaus in particular had the good taste to invite Euripides and Agathon to his court. Philip II. obtained the throne by suppressing his young ward, the rightful king. At that time Macedon was overrun by wilder barbarians from the west, and it was long before Philip could make head against them. He did so at last by the organising genius which he displayed in remodelling his army, the astute statesmanship with which he made and broke treaties, and still more by the wealth he secured and the use he made of it in bribing his enemies. Philip was, in short, the organiser who occasionally precedes the conqueror and grows the laurels for his successor to wear. Expansion to the west would be difficult and unprofitable. To the east lay the important cities of the Chalcidian peninsulas, the gold-mines of Mount Pangæus, protected by the city of Amphipolis, the rather decrepit kingdom of Thrace, and then the way was clear to the Black Sea and to Asia. Now this was the chosen field of commercial enterprise for Athens and her reviving fleets. A conflict was therefore inevitable.

The statesman who led the anti-Macedonian party at Athens was the orator Demosthenes. His brilliant series of Philippics and Olynthiac Orations are full of denunciations of the crafty monarch, full of trumpet-calls to the ancient valour of Athens which sometimes ring rather hollow to modern ears. Demosthenes was not exceptionally honest, but there is no warrant for suspecting the purity of his patriotism. He himself set the example of bearing a shield personally in the ranks, and he must have been conscious throughout his public career that he was in danger of assassination or of execution if the enemy triumphed. The wisdom of his opposition to Philip has also been questioned. Events were to prove that these Macedonian kings were not barbarians; on the contrary, their warmest aspiration was to be counted as Greeks, and they had, as they frequently testified, a great love of Greek culture and a deep veneration for Athens as the home of it. This the future was to prove; the present only showed a foreign monarch devouring piecemeal the markets of Athens in the north. Perhaps Demosthenes ought to have realised that Macedon was too strong for Athens, but no one could seriously expect old Greece to succumb to this upstart without a struggle. For one thing, Macedon had not and never acquired a really strong fleet. But her army was certainly irresistible.

Philip had learnt strategy at the feet of the Theban Epaminondas. The army he created included a corps d’élite of noble horse-guards, the Companions of the King. These were the earliest first-rate mounted troops in history, and it was by their means that the dashing exploits of Alexander were subsequently achieved. For the infantry his great invention was the phalanx. This was clearly a modification of the deep formation invented by Epaminondas. It consisted of sixteen ranks armed with a spear 21 feet long. They stood in close order so that the points of the first five ranks projected from the front to present a bristling hedge of spears. The remaining eleven ranks, we are gravely informed, held their spears obliquely in the air to ward off missiles! Let the military reader find a military justification for this extraordinary arrangement. To me it seems a further confirmation of my civilian view that Greek tactics were primarily designed to prevent armies from running away. We observe that when Alexander took Persian troops into his phalanx he put twelve ranks of Persians into the lines, with a row of Macedonians at their rear. In any case troops standing in close formation armed with weapons 7 yards long must have been useless for any but defensive purposes; and, as a matter of fact, the victories of Alexander were generally gained by the lightning charge of the king at the head of his knights.

We need not touch upon the shabby “Sacred Wars” which caused Philip to enter Greece on the invitation of Thebes. It was at Chæroneia in 338 that Philip defeated a mixed Greek army in whose ranks Demosthenes was fighting as a hoplite. Philip was generous to the Greeks, and especially to Athens. Next year the darling wish of his heart was obtained, for he was elected president of a Panhellenic union destined to fulfil his great scheme of avenging the Persian invasions of Greece by a march to Babylon. In the next year he was murdered, and his brilliant son Alexander cannot be acquitted of complicity in the crime.

The grand idea was Philip’s, begotten perhaps from the study of Isocrates, and certainly inspired by the examples of Xenophon and Agesilaus. Unfortunately it was far from arousing any enthusiasm in Greece. Persia was a long way off, and money could be had from the Great King without fighting for it. There was a sordid scramble for bribes among the Greek statesmen. As soon as they heard of Philip’s death they broke into unseemly jubilation, and voted compliments to his murderers; they hoped that things would return to their old routine, and that there would be no more talk of antediluvian crusades. They had reckoned without Alexander, for it is seldom that a Philip is succeeded by an Alexander.

This young man who conquered the world and died at the age of thirty-three has quite naturally captivated the imagination of posterity and formed a model for ambitious generals of later days. Julius Cæsar sighed to think of his inferiority in achievement. Augustus paid a visit to his tomb, and wore his portrait on a ring. Napoleon consciously imitated him. As a soldier he was not only an organiser of victory, though of course he owed a great deal to his father in this respect, and a strategist with an eye for a battlefield, but also a dashing cavalry leader, the sort of man to ride straight for the enemy’s king, to be the first in the breach, and to leap down alone into the enemy’s town. He did this sort of thing with impunity; he never lost a battle. He was chivalrous to ladies, Bayard and Bluebeard by turns. He married a beautiful Eastern princess called Roxana, he rode a beautiful war-horse called Bucephalus. If Lysippus and Apelles may be trusted, he had the face of a Greek god. He had just that touch of dissipation which somehow rounds off the conception of a popular hero. He had the good fortune to die young, in the hour of victory.

And what is to be the sober historian’s estimate of this dazzling person? We may minimise his triumphs by pointing out that the Persian empire was helpless before him, like ripe fruit waiting to be gathered. We may certainly charge him with conquering insanely without stopping to organise, and with neglecting his own kingdom and failing to deal adequately with the political condition of old Greece. We may point to the extraordinarily rapid collapse of his empire. But then he died suddenly in the midst of his work, and left no grown heir to succeed him. In some respects I think we must all admit that he showed very remarkable gifts of statesmanship. Though

Plate 82.—Alexander at Issus (Pompeii mosaic.)

Brogi.

half a barbarian by origin, he was an enthusiast for Hellenism, and his plan was to spread it at the point of the spear all over the civilised world. When he destroyed Thebes he spared one house—the house of Pindar. It was as a missionary of Greek culture that he marched over the burning deserts of Asia. He took poets and artists in his train. He would stop his march every now and then to exhibit Greek athletics and Greek arts to the wondering Orientals. He planted Greek cities wherever he had time to stop, from Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile to Candahar (another version of his name). He had the art which makes a successful apostle, the gift of being all things to all men. In Egypt, the land of religion and mystery, he made a solemn pilgrimage into the desert, and got himself accepted as the son of the god called by the Greeks Ammon. In Persia he recognised the merits of the Persian provincial system, and appointed his own satraps, or even retained the existing ones. He treated Persian women with the deference to which they were accustomed, and added one to his household in the manner to which they were also accustomed. His Macedonians murmured at his Oriental dress and manners, but Alexander was always a Greek at heart, the lines of Homer always rang in his ears, and he fancied himself a reincarnation of Achilles pursuing his Phrygian Hectors over the dusty plains of Troy. He was mad, no doubt, to march so far over those weary deserts into Turkestan, through those dreadful defiles of the Hindu Khush. Only the mutiny of his army turned him back when he reached the farthest of the Five Rivers of the Punjaub. And then it was frantic lunacy to lead his army home along the burning coasts of the Persian Gulf. That experience taught him, it seems, a lesson which he might well have learnt earlier, namely, the value of sea-power for conquerors and empire-builders. When he died he was projecting a naval expedition along the coasts of Africa. The disaffection of Athens had deprived him of the fleet which ought to have belonged to a Panhellenic army, and Alexander had been forced to destroy the Persian fleet by a siege of its arsenal and headquarters, the island city of Tyre. Most conquerors have a touch of insanity, no doubt. The sanest of them is Julius Cæsar, and the maddest is Charles XII. But Alexander the Great had lucid intervals of consummate statesmanship. It is in this respect that he differs from the vulgar type of adventurer and stands among civilising conquerors like William the Norman with his Domesday Book, Napoleon with his Code, and Julius Cæsar with his Julian Laws and his calendar. This intellectual suppleness was the mark of Alexander’s Greek education, though it still remains a difficulty to trace in his career the influence of Aristotle, his tutor.

On his death at Babylon in 323 the whole empire flew to pieces. He had unwisely divided his veteran armies among his various generals, and each of them found himself established as the monarch of a large territory. Most of them naturally desired to emulate their master and secure as much of his empire as they could for themselves. Out of the confusing struggles of the next generation three great kingdoms gradually emerged: that of Macedonia, warlike and turbulent under various shortlived dynasties, that of Asia, huge and wealthy under a line of Seleucids, and that of Egypt under a long family of Ptolemies. All these kingdoms were mainly Greek. In the country, no doubt, Oriental life and language continued, but in the towns and for purposes of government both the language and the civilisation were Greek. Thus Alexander had done his work. He had actually added the whole of Asia Minor, Phœnicia, and Egypt to the Greek world. Curious traces of Hellenism are found even in distant India.

In this world of “the Successors,” as they are called, the ancient states of Greece are not altogether negligible. Rhodes continued to be free, rich, and happy. Athens, as I have remarked, was occasionally oppressed and sometimes enslaved by the Macedonian rulers to the north, but for the most part she continued as a free democracy, conducting her own affairs as vehemently as ever, though now, of course, as a second-class power. Sparta stood sullenly aloof, joining no confederacies,

Plate LXXXIII. “THE SARCOPHAGUS OF ALEXANDER” FROM SIDON: LION-HUNT

Seban & Joaillier

but dreadfully shrunken in population. I have alluded to her notable experiments at reform in the third century under Agis and Cleomenes. It was ended by the crushing defeat at Sellasia from the Achæan League and the Macedonians. Towns like Argos and Corinth preserved their liberties by joining the Leagues. Epirus was a new Power rising to fame by the same road as Macedon under an adventurous king called Pyrrhus. He unfortunately turned west instead of east in his search for worlds to conquer, and there met another rising power, a race of real soldiers who made short work of the Greek phalanx, even when supported by heavy cavalry in the form of Indian elephants. It was these Romans who, when they came in due course to return his visit, put “Finis” to this chapter of Greek history, and proceeded themselves to undertake the task of writing the next.