“When they were persuaded to do so, and that a boat was treacherously prepared, as they rowed away they were taken, and the truce being now broken, were all given up into the hands of the Corcyreans. It did much further this plot, by giving to the pretence held out an appearance of reality, and making the agents in it less fearful, that the Athenian generals evidently did not wish the men to be carried home by others, whilst they themselves were to go into Sicily, and the honour of it be ascribed to those that should convoy them. The Corcyreans having received them into their hands, imprisoned them in a large edifice, from whence afterwards they took them out by twenty at a time, and made them pass through a lane of men of arms, bound together, and receiving strokes and thrusts from those on either side, according as any one espied his enemy. And to hasten the pace of those that went slowliest on, others were set to follow them with whips.
“They had taken out of the room in this manner, and slain, to the number of threescore, before they that remained knew it, who thought they were but removed, and carried to some other place. But when they knew the truth, some or other having told them, they then cried out to the Athenians, and bid them, if they wished their death, kill them themselves; and refused any more to go out of the building, nor would suffer, they said, as long as they were able, any man to come in. But neither had the Corcyreans any purpose to force entrance by the door, but getting up to the top of the house, uncovered the roof, and threw tiles, and shot arrows at them. They in prison defended themselves as well as they could; but many also slew themselves with the arrows shot by the enemy, by thrusting them into their throats, and strangling themselves with the cords of certain beds that were in the room, and with halters made of their own garments rent in pieces. And having continued most part of the night (for night overtook them in the action), partly strangling themselves by all such means as they found, and partly shot at from above, they all perished. When day came, the Corcyreans laid them one across another[50] in carts, and carried them out of the city. And of their wives, as many as were taken in the fortification, they made bond–women. In this manner were the Corcyreans that kept the hill,[51] brought to destruction by the commons. And thus ended this far–spread sedition, for so much as concerned this present war: for other seditions there remained nothing worth the relation.”[52]
It would be difficult to find a more thoroughly hateful state of society than that which appears from this passage, and from the description of the plague of Athens, to have existed in Greece at this period. The picture, it is to be remembered, comes to us on the authority of one whose impartiality and deep powers of observation are alike unquestioned, no splenetic, no visionary, but one who had mixed largely and in high station among the stirring times of which he writes. The most astonishing circumstance connected with the depravity here exhibited, is the short period in which it appears to have shot up into such rank growth. We possess, it is true, little knowledge of any thing but the public acts of Greece anterior to the Peloponnesian war, at which time the contemporary historian, and still more the contemporary comedian Aristophanes, supply us with abundant notices of private life, which are continued and enlarged by the philosophers and orators. Still, as far as we have the means of judging, there seems no reason to ascribe to the Greeks, until about the Peloponnesian war, a smaller share of morality and religion than has usually been found among heathen nations. Whence then in so short a time this utter loss of moral sense and disruption of the bonds of society? The question is not an easy one to answer, but the substance of the best answer that we can give is comprised in the introductory chapter to this volume.
To supply a series of parallels to this domestic contest is scarcely possible. Among insurrections and civil wars, events of equal atrocity and more astounding magnitude might be found, but scarcely events of the same character. We naturally turn first to the other great nation of antiquity. Here we are warned against the most obvious comparison by a late eminent scholar. After speaking of the dangers incident to the struggle between the aristocracy and the people in that often–occurring form of a nation’s early existence, when it is divided into a privileged race or caste, whose power is founded on conquest, and a commonalty personally free, but politically dependant, as were the Saxons, while the distinction between Saxon and Norman blood continued in England; after speaking of the dangers which beset that contest which is sure to take place when the spread of wealth and knowledge has equalized the personal qualities of the rulers and the ruled, he continues: “If the nation escapes these, either originally or finally, it enters upon its state of manhood, and is exposed to a somewhat different succession of struggles. The contest is then between property and numbers, and wherever it has come to a crisis, I know not that it has in any instance terminated favourably. Such was the state of Greece in the time of Thucydides; of Rome from the passing of the Publilian laws to the end of the commonwealth: and such has been the state of England since the Revolution of 1688. Comparisons drawn from the preceding period are inapplicable to this; while on the other hand, as the phenomena of this second period arise out of causes connected with the earlier state of things, they cannot be clearly understood unless that former state be fully known to us. Thus, to argue that the Romans were less bloody than the Greeks from a comparison between the factions of the Peloponnesian war, and the struggles of the Roman commons against the patricians, is to compare the two nations under very different circumstances; it is instituting a comparison between the intensity of our passions in manhood and in childhood. The bloody factions of Corcyra and Megara are analogous to the civil wars of Marius and Sylla, of Cæsar and Pompey, of Brutus and Cassius against the Triumvirs: the harmless contests between the commons and patricians can only be compared to those which prevailed in Greece before the Persian invasion, when the party of the coast at Athens was disputing the exclusive ascendency so long enjoyed by the eupatridæ or party of the plain.[53] And the true conclusion is, that the second contest between property and numbers is far more inevitably accompanied by atrocious crimes, than that earlier quarrel, in which property and numbers were united against property and birth.”[54]
The Corcyrean sedition differed from the secession to the Mons Sacer, and other disputes between patricians and plebeians, in being a struggle of parties, not ranks. Very little positive information concerning the constitution of the island has been preserved.[55] Originally, probably, its Corinthian colonists established an oligarchy: but the prosecution of maritime affairs was always held greatly to favour the ascendency of the people, and in Thucydides we find no trace of a privileged body of citizens at Corcyra any more than at Athens. When speaking of the 250, whom the Corinthians selected as a sort of hostages to regain their influence, he calls them, “for the most part the first men of the city in power.”[56] Elsewhere he describes them as “those in possession of things,” or “the few,”[57] but not as the magistracy, or in terms which lead us to suppose that they formed a constitutional aristocracy either of birth or wealth. This, therefore, was a branch of the great struggle which gave its character to the whole Peloponnesian war, whether the oligarchical principle, under the patronage of Lacedæmon, or the democratic under the patronage of Athens, should reign in Greece. The co–existence of the two in peace seems, from the restless and intriguing temper of the people, to have been impossible; and the experience of other cities had shown that for the worsted party there was no security but in flight, attended usually by sentence of exile and confiscation. And there is no authority to which men submit so reluctantly, no hardships which they feel so keenly, as those which arise from the elevation of their former equals. The circumstances of the times, therefore, combined with the spreading moral pestilence to give a desperation to this contest, from which the early dissensions of patricians and plebeians, happily for Rome, were free. Here each party had a definite object to contend for; the one, the relaxation of oppressive privileges; the other, to maintain unimpaired the immunities and dignity of their order: and each had wisdom, the one to be moderate in its demands; the other to concede moderately, rather than hazard the very being of the state by an appeal to arms. No personal or political hatred inflamed the passions, unless where some enslaved debtor was maddened by suffering, or some hot–headed patrician, such as the old legends of Rome represented Coriolanus to be, became impatient that the swinish multitude should believe they had rights; each party felt that the other was necessary to its welfare, and though driven to violence, the plebeians still looked up with respect and affection to their hereditary aristocracy.
As these disturbances belong to an earlier, so the civil wars of Marius and Sylla, and those which ended in the establishment of the Empire, belong, we think, to a more advanced stage of society than does the Corcyrean sedition, which is compared to them in the foregoing quotation. Rome had reached, and had passed the period at which a true democracy becomes impossible except through the medium of representation; while at Corcyra, even when the popular faction was supreme, the government was an oligarchy, in respect of the whole population of the state, of which slaves and foreigners constituted, we may presume, a considerable majority. The legislative and the armed body were identical; a part of that body might triumph over the rest, but no one could mount on the shoulders of the people to a military despotism, and then kick away the step by which he had risen. No leader seems to have risen to the absolute power of Marius, or Sylla, or Cæsar; if there had, it must have been by consent of the prevailing party, who would therefore have been implicated in his actions. At Rome the case was very different: the legislative authority centred in the resident citizens, the military power of the state was more than equally shared with them by the provincial armies, composed partly of barbarians, partly of subjects of the state, entitled to a greater or lesser share of the privileges of citizenship, but not to vote in the assemblies of the people, and partly, it is true, of citizens, but those long absent from the seat of government, and careless about politics, but devoted to the leader who had led them on to plunder, honour, and victory. Some faction therefore was to be courted to gain place and power, but he who had gained them, and with them military command and influence, was in great measure independent of his former associates. Sylla and Marius were terrible to friends as well as foes, and it would be unfair to charge upon the Roman people the enormous crimes committed under the military tyrannies which they established.
If we look for parallels in modern history, the search will not be more successful. The domestic quarrels as well as the structure of the Italian states, bear a close analogy to those of the Greek republics, and the contests of the oligarchical and democratic parties, and the influence of Sparta or Athens, as one or the other prevailed, may be closely exemplified by the bitter quarrels of the Guelphs and Ghibelines, and the interest exerted, by means of these parties, by the Pope and the Emperor. But full as is Italian history of desperate feuds, we cannot call to mind any one worthy to be compared with the transactions at Corcyra. The massacre, called the Sicilian Vespers, when 8000 French were surprised and slain in one night, by a simultaneous insurrection of the native Sicilians, is a memorable and frightful example of popular revenge: but the act of a people rising in defence of its rights, atrocious as is such a method of asserting them, is not to be placed by the side of so cold–blooded, and unprovoked, and faithless a massacre as that of the conquered Corcyreans. The massacre of St. Bartholomew might compete with it in point of treachery, but the ground of quarrel, and the relation of the contending parties, were entirely dissimilar.
The outrages committed in France by the insurgent peasantry, called Jacquerie, are unlike the massacres at Corcyra, inasmuch as they belong to an earlier stage of society, a stage again different from that contemplated by Dr. Arnold, when he speaks of the harmless nature of that earlier quarrel in which property and numbers are united against property and birth. These risings, and the corresponding risings in England, were the acts of men without property, and many of them without a legal capability of acquiring it; men hostile to all the institutions of society, because to them society had been little but an engine of oppression. They were the efforts of brute force against all that is superior to itself; the rage of the untamed wolf after he has broken his chain. We say this not in justification of the conduct of their feudal lords, nor in censure of their earnest desire to break the yoke which bore them down to the ground. But whether their cause was good or bad, the method of their advocating it was brutal; and herein servile wars, if not most formidable as to their result, are most to be deprecated, because the passions of each party are sure to be exasperated to the uttermost: and because the insurgents, being without the pale of the laws of war, have no temptation to show mercy, and no hope but in victory. And so to the Jacquerie, every thing more refined or exalted than themselves was the object of their deadly hate. They had no thought to raise themselves; that was beyond the grasp of their minds: but they were bent on pulling down others to their own level, so that distinctions the most inoffensive or laudable were as odious to them as the rank and power which had been misused to the oppression of the commonalty. “Be it known unto thee by these presence, even the presence of Lord Mortimer, that I am the besom that must sweep the court clear of such filth as thou art. Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar–school: and whereas, before our fore–fathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and contrary to the king, his crown, and his dignity, thou hast built a paper–mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian can endure to hear. Thou hast appointed justices of peace, to call poor men before them about matters that they were not able to answer. Moreover, thou hast put them in prison, and because they could not read thou hast hanged them, when, indeed, only for that cause they have been most worthy to live.”[58]
This picture is somewhat highly coloured, but if the reader will consult Holinshed for the account of Wat Tyler’s rebellion in 1381, he will find that there is good authority for it. “To recite what was done in every part of the realme, in time of these hellish troubles, it is not possible; but this is to be considered, that the rage of the commons was universallie such, as it might seem they had generallie conspired together to do what mischeefe they could devise. As among sundrie other, what wickednesse was it to compell teachers of children in grammar schooles to swear never to instruct any in their art! Again, they could never have a more mischievous meaning than to burn and destroy all old and auncient monuments, and to murder and despatch out of the way all such as were able to commit to memorie either any new or old records. For it was dangerous among them to be known for one that was learned, and more dangerous if any man were found with a penner and inkhorn at his side, for such seldom escaped from them with life.”[59] The fidelity with which Shakspeare has copied the chronicles may be readily exemplified from a variety of passages.
Cade. How now! who’s there?