The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

Those who had not shared in the plunder of Asia, to begin with, would find themselves badly impoverished, for the new influx of bullion would raise all prices. It is notable, on the other hand, that philosophy, formerly the study of men with, for the most part, good incomes, and thence always associated more or less with the spirit of aristocracy,[272] was now often cultivated by men of humble status.[273] The new rich then appear to have already fallen away somewhat from the old Athenian standards; while the attraction of poorer men was presumably caused in part by the process of endowment of the philosophic schools begun by Plato in his will—an example soon followed by others.[274] It is probable that as much weight is due to this economic cause as to that of political restraint in the explanation of the prosperity of philosophy at Athens at a time when literature was relatively decaying.

The Roman conquest, again, further depressed Greek fortunes by absolute violence, hurling whole armies of the conquered into slavery,[275] and later setting up a new foreign attraction to the Greeks of ready wit and small means. They presumably began to flock to Rome or Egypt or Asia Minor as the conditions in Greece worsened; and that process in turn would be promoted by the gradual worsening of the Roman financial pressure. It is notable that a rebellion of Attic slaves occurred in 133 B.C., synchronously with the first slave-rising in Sicily—a proof of fresh oppression all round.[276] The Romans had retained the Greek systems of municipal government, and had begun by putting on light taxes.[277] But these surely increased;[278] and the Mithridatic war, in which Athens had taken the anti-Roman side, changed all for the worse. Sulla took the city after a difficult siege, massacred most of the citizens, and entirely destroyed the Piræus; whereafter Athens practically ceased for centuries to be a commercial centre. Corinth, which had been razed to the ground by Mummius, was ultimately reconstructed by Cæsar as a Roman colony, and secured most of what commerce Greece retained. Twenty years before, Pompey had put down the Cilician pirates, a powerful community of organised freebooters that had arisen out of the disbanding of the hired forces of Mithridates and other Eastern monarchs on the triumph of the Romans, and was further swelled by a large inflow of poverty-stricken Greeks. While it lasted, it greatly multiplied the number of slaves for the Roman market by simple kidnapping.

[The great mart for such sales was Delos, which was practically a Roman emporium (Strabo, bk. xiv, c. v, § 1). Mahaffy (Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 154) regards the pirates as largely anti-Roman, especially in respect of their sacking of Delos. But previously they sold their captives there; and Dr. Mahaffy (p. 7) recognises the connection. The pirates, in short, became anti-Roman when the Romans, who had so long tolerated them as slave-traders (as the rulers of Cyprus and Egypt had done before), were driven to keep them in check as pirates.]

Thus all the conditions deteriorated together; and the suppression of the pirate state found Greece substantially demoralised, the prey of greedy proconsuls, poor in men, rich only in ancient art and in wistful memories. In the civil wars before and after Cæsar's fall, Greece was harried by both sides in turn; and down to the time of Augustus depopulation and impoverishment seem to have steadily proceeded under Roman rule.[279] Every special contribution laid on the provinces by the rulers was made an engine of confiscation; citizens unable to pay their taxes were sold as slaves; property owners were forced to borrow at usurious rates in the old Roman fashion; and the parasitic class of so-called Roman citizens, as such free of taxation, tended to absorb the remaining wealth.[280] This wealth in turn tended to take the shape of luxuries bought from the really productive provinces; and the fatality of the unproductive communities, lack of the bullion which they in a double degree required, for the time overtook Greece very much as it overtook Italy. Both must have presented a spectacle of exterior splendour as regarded their monuments and public buildings, and as regarded the luxury that was always tending to concentrate in fewer hands, usurers plundering citizens and proconsuls plundering usurers; but the lot of the mass of the people must have been depressed to the verge of endurance if depopulation had not spontaneously yielded relief. As it was, the Greek populations would tend to consist more and more of the capitalistic, official, and parasitic classes on the one hand, and of slaves and poor on the other.[281]

The general depopulation of subject Greece is thus perfectly intelligible. The "race" had not lost reproductive power; and even its newer artificial methods of checking numbers were not immeasurably more active than simple infanticide or exposure had been in the palmy days. In the ages of expansion the whole Hellenic world in nearly all its cities and all its islands swarmed with a relatively energetic population, who won from conditions often in large part unpropitious a sufficiency of subsistence on which to build by the hands of slaves a wonderful world of art. To these conditions they were limited by racial hostilities; everywhere there was substantial though convulsive equipoise among their own warring forces, and between those of their frontier communities and the surrounding "barbarians." The conquest of Alexander (heralded and invited by the campaign of the Ten Thousand) at one blow broke up this equipoise: organised Greek capacity, once forcibly unified, triumphed over the now lower civilisations of Egypt and the East, and Greek population at once began to find its economic level in the easier conditions of some of the conquered lands. They flocked to Egypt and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin as they do at the present time, for similar economic reasons. Nothing could now restore the old conditions; but the Roman conquest and tyranny forced on the disintegration till Greece proper was but the glorious shell of the life of the past, inhabited by handfuls of a semi-alien population, grown in a sense psychically degenerate under evil psychic conditions. In the lower strata of this population began the spread of Christianity, passing sporadically from Syria to the Greek cities, as at the same time to Egypt and Rome. A new conception of life was generated on the plane that typified it.

§ 3

It is a great testimony to the value of sheer peace that in the Roman Empire of the second century, with an incurable economic malady, as it were, eating into its nerve centres, and with no better provision for the higher life than the schools of rhetoric and the endowments of the Greek philosophic chairs, there was yet evolved a system of law and administration which, even under the frightful chances of imperial succession, sustained for centuries a vast empire, and imposed itself as a model on the very barbarism that overthrew it. And it is this system which connects for us the life conditions of Greece as the Romans held it, with its artistic shell almost intact despite all the Roman plunder,[282] and those of the strangely un-Hellenic Greek-speaking world which we know as Byzantium, with its capital at Constantinople.

The economic changes in this period can be traced only with difficulty and uncertainty; but they must have been important. The multiplication of slaves, which was a feature of the ages of the post-Alexandrian empires, the Roman conquest, and the Cilician pirate state, would necessarily be checked at a certain stage, both in town and country, by the continued shrinkage of the rich class. Agriculture in Greece, as in Italy, could not compete with that of Egypt; and slave-farming, save in special cultures, would not be worth carrying on. In the towns, again, the manufactures carried on by means of slaves had also dwindled greatly; and the small wealthy class could not and would not maintain more than a certain number of slaves for household purposes. The records of the religious associations, too, as we shall see, seem to prove that men who were slaves in status had practical freedom of life, and the power of disposing of part of their earnings; whence it may be inferred that many owners virtually liberated their slaves, though retaining a legal claim over them. In this state of things population would gradually recover ground, albeit on a low plane. The type of poor semi-Greek now produced would live at a lower standard of comfort than had latterly been set for themselves by the more educated, who would largely drift elsewhere; and a home-staying population living mainly on olives and fish could relatively flourish, both in town and country. On that basis, in turn, commerce could to some extent revive, especially when Nero granted to the Greeks immunity from taxation.[283] We are prepared then, in the second century, under propitious rulers like Hadrian and the Antonines, to find Greek life materially improved.[284] The expenditure of Hadrian on public works, and the new endowments of the philosophic schools at Athens by the Antonines, would stimulate such a revival; and the Greek cities would further regain ground as Italy lost it, with the growth of cosmopolitanism throughout the Empire. While domestic slavery would still abound, the industries in Athens under the imperial rule would tend to be carried on by freedmen.

A further stimulus would come from the overthrow of the Parthian empire of the Arsacidæ by Artaxerxes, 226 A.C. The Arsacidæ, though often at war with the Romans, still represented the Hellenistic civilisation, whereas the Sassanidæ zealously returned to the ancient Persian religion, the exclusiveness of which would serve as a barrier to Western commerce,[285] even while the cult of Mithra, Hellenised to the extent of being specially associated with image-worship, was spreading widely in the West. Commerce would now tend afresh to concentrate in Greece, the Indian and Chinese trade passing north and south of Persia.[286] The removal of the seat of government from Rome by Diocletian, greatly lessening the Italian drain on the provinces, would still further assist the Greek revival after the Gothic invasion had come and gone. Thus we find the larger Greek world in the time of Constantine grown once more so important that in the struggle between him and Licinius his great naval armament, composed chiefly of European Greeks, was massed in the restored Piræus. The fleet of Licinius, made up chiefly by Asiatic and Egyptian Greeks, already showed a relative decline on that side of the Empire's resources.[287] When, finally, Constantine established the new seat of empire at Byzantium, he tended to draw thither all the streams of Greek commerce, and to establish there, as the centre of the revenues of the Eastern Empire, some such population as had once flourished in Rome; with, however, a definite tendency to commerce and industry in the lower class population as well as in the middle class. To the government of this population was brought the highly developed organisation of the later Pagan Empire, joined with an ecclesiastical system from which heresy was periodically eliminated by the imperial policy, aided by the positive intellectual inferiority of the new Greek-speaking species. There was prosperity enough for material life; and the political and religious system was such as to prevent the normal result of prosperity, culture, from developing independently. The much-divided Greek world had at last, after countless convulsions, been brought to a possibility of quasi-inert equilibrium, an equilibrium which enabled it to sustain and repel repeated and destructive irruptions of northern barbarism,[288] and on the whole to hold at bay, with a shrunken territory, its neighbouring enemies for a thousand years.

§ 4