The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

We have passed, then, through a twilight age, to find a new civilised empire ruled on the lines of the old, but with a single, albeit much-divided religion, and that the Christian, all others having been extirpated not by persuasion but by governmental force, after the new creed, adapting itself to its economic conditions, had secured for itself and its poor adherents, mainly from superstitious rich women, an amount of endowment such as no cult or priesthood possessed in the days of democracy. This process of endowment itself originated, however, in pagan practice; for in the days of substitution of emotional Eastern cults for the simpler worships of early Hellas, there had grown up a multitude of voluntary societies for special semi-religious, semi-festival purposes—thiasoi, eranoi, and orgeones, all cultivating certain alien sacrifices and mysteries, as those of Dionysos, Adonis, Sabazios, Sarapis, Cotytto, or any other God called "Saviour."[289] These societies, unlike the older Hellenic associations of the same names[290] for the promotion of native worships, were freely open to women, to foreigners, and even to slaves;[291] they were absolutely self-governing; the members subscribed according to their means; and we find them flourishing in large numbers in the age of the Antonines,[292] when the old state cults were already deserted, though still endowed. They represent, as has been said, the reappearance of the democratic spirit and the gregarious instinct in new fields and in lower strata when general and practical democracy has been suppressed. In some such fashion did the Christian Church begin, employing the attractions and the machinery of many rival cults. Its final selection and establishment by the Empire represented in things religious a process analogous to that which had forcibly unified the competing republics of Greece in one inflexible and unprogressive organisation. Nothing but governmental force could have imposed doctrinal unity on the chaos of sects into which Christianity was naturally subdividing; but the power of conferring on the State Church special revenues was an effective means of keeping it practically subordinate.

The historian who has laid down the proposition that religious unity was the cause of the survival of the Eastern Empire when the Western fell,[293] has made the countervailing admission that between Justinian and Heraclius there was an almost universal centrifugal tendency in the Byzantine State, which was finally overcome only by "the inexorable principle of Roman centralisation,"[294] at a time when it was nearly destroyed by its enemies and its own dissentient forces.[295] Province after province had been taken by the Persians in the East; Slavs and Avars were driving back the population from the northern frontiers, even harrying the Peloponnesus; discontent enabled Phocas to dethrone and execute Maurice (602 A.C.); and Phocas in turn was utterly defeated by the Persian foe; when Heraclius appeared, to check the continuity of disaster, and to place the now circumscribed Empire on a footing of possible permanence. But it is important to realise how far the economic and external conditions conduced to his success, such as it was. Hitherto the populace of Constantinople had been supported, like that of imperial Rome, by regular allowances of bread to every householder, provided from the tributary grain supplies of Egypt. The Persian conquest of Egypt in the year 616 stopped that revenue; and the emperor's inability to feed the huge semi-idle populace became a cause of regeneration, inasmuch as the State was forcibly relieved of the burden, and many of the idlers became available for the army about to be led by the emperor against the menacing Persians. He was reduced, however, to the expedient of offering to continue the supply on a payment of three pieces of gold from each claimant, and finally to breaking that contract; whereafter, on his proposing to transfer his capital to Carthage to escape the discontent, the populace and the clergy implored him to remain, and thus enabled him to exact a large loan from the latter,[296] and to dominate the nobility who had hitherto hampered his action. The victories of Heraclius over the Persians, however, only left the eastern and Egyptian provinces to fall under the Arabs; the first financial result of his successes having been to tax to exasperation the recovered lands in order to repay the ecclesiastical loan with usury; and the circumscribed Empire under his successors could not, even if the emperors wished, resume the feeding of the mass of the citizens. Constantinople, though still drawing some tribute from the remaining provinces in Italy, was thus perforce reduced to a safe economic basis, even as the people in general had been coerced into united effort by the imminent danger from Persia.

From this time forward, with many vicissitudes of military fortune, the contracted Byzantine State endured in virtue of its industrial and commercial basis and its consequent maritime and military strength, managed with ancient military science against enemies less skilled. The new invention of "Greek fire," like all advances in the use of missiles in warfare, counted for much; but the decisive condition of success was the possession of continuous resources. Justinian, among many measures of mere oppression and restriction, had contrived to introduce from the far East the silk manufacture, which for the ancient and medieval European world was of enormous mercantile importance. Such a staple, and the virtual control of the whole commerce between northern and western Europe and the East, kept Byzantium the greatest trading power in Christendom until the triumph of the Italian republics. Even the Saracen conquests in Asia and Africa did not seriously affect this source of strength; for the Saracen administration, though often wise and energetic, was in Egypt too often convulsed by civil wars to permit of trade flourishing there in any superlative degree. The Byzantines continued to trade with India by the Black Sea and Central Asian route; and their monopolies and imposts, however grievous, were relatively bearable compared with the afflictions of commerce under other powers. As of old, the Greeks or Greek-speaking folk were the traders of the Mediterranean, the Saracen navy never reaching sufficient power to check them; and when finally its remnants took to piracy, they served rather to cut off all weaker competition than to affect the preponderating naval power of the Empire.

In this period of prevailing commercial vigour, from the sixth to the eleventh century, the life of the Greek Empire was substantially civic, the rural districts remaining desolate, and agriculture extremely feeble,[297] though the Sclavonian immigrants who now inhabited the Peloponnesus[298] must have lived by that means. Under such circumstances the towns would be fed by imported grain, presumably that of the Crimea; but as they did not grow in size, at least in the case of the capital, their industrial prosperity must have largely depended on the restriction of population, whether by vice, preventive checks, misery, or the sheer unhealthiness of city life, which at the present day prevents so many Eastern cities from maintaining themselves save by influx from the country.[299] It is misleading to point to the legal veto on infanticide as a great Christian reform without taking these things into account. The presumption is that misery, vice, child-exposure, and abortion, rather than prudence, kept the poor population within the limits of subsistence.

Mr. Oman (Byzantine Empire, p. 145) takes the popular view as to the reformative effect of Christianity. He goes on to describe Constantine as providing for the children of the destitute to prevent their exposure, but does not mention that the same thing had been done under the Antonines, and that Constantine permitted the finder of an exposed child to enslave it. The punishment of all exposure as infanticide, under Valentinian, was only an adoption of the pagan practice at Thebes (Ælian, Var. Hist. ii, 7). But in spite of all enactments, under Christian as under pagan rule, exposure and positive infanticide continued, though Christian sentiment never gave it the toleration exhibited in the drama of Menander. As to the historic facts, cp. Lecky, Hist. of European Morals, 6th ed. ii, 24-33.

Broadly speaking, it was inevitable that in such a population as is pictured for us by Chrysostom—a multitude profoundly ignorant, superstitious, excitable, sensuous—all the vices of the Græco-Roman period should habitually flourish, while poverty must have been normally acute after the stoppage of regular free bread. On the general moral environment, cp. the author's Short History of Freethought, 2nd ed. i, 249-50.

It is necessary, in the same way, to substitute an accurate for a conventional view as to the treatment of slaves under the Christian Empire. We are still told[300] that the Christian doctrine or implication of religious equality had the effect first of greatly modifying the evils of slavery and finally of abolishing it. Research proves that the facts were otherwise. We have already seen how economic causes partially limited slavery before Christianity was heard of; and in so far as the limitation was maintained,[301] the efficient causes remain demonstrably economic.[302] Indeed, no other causes can be shown to have existed. Not only is slavery endorsed in the Gospels,[303] and treated by Paul as not merely compatible with but favourable to Christian freedom on the part of the slave,[304] but the early Christians, commonly supposed to have been the most incorrupt, held slaves as a matter of course.[305] In the laws of Justinian not a word is said as to slavery being opposed to either the spirit or the letter of Christianity; and the only expressions that in any degree deprecate it are in terms of the Stoic doctrine of the "law of nature,"[306] which we know to have been already current in the time of Aristotle,[307] and to have become widespread in the age of the Antonines, under Stoic auspices. That "law of nature," however, was never allowed to override a definite law of society; and the Christian influence on the other hand set up a new set of arguments for slavery.[308] Among the Christian Visigoths, slaves who married without authority from their masters were forcibly separated; and the slave who dared to marry a free-woman was burnt alive with his wife; while "the bishops were among the largest slave-holders in the realm; and baptised Christians were bought and sold without a blush by the successors of St. Paul and Santiago."[309] It cannot even be said of the Byzantines, any more than of the Protestants of the southern United States of fifty years ago, that they were more humane to their slaves than the earlier pagans had been; for we find Christian Byzantine matrons causing their slave-girls to be tied up and brutally flogged;[310] even as we have the testimony of Salvian to the atrocities committed by Christian slave-owners in Gaul.[311] The admission that the Church, even when encouraging laymen to free their slaves, insisted on retaining its own,[312] is the proof that the urging force was not even then doctrinal, but the perception that the Church's secular interests were served by the growth of an independent population outside its own lands.[313] The spirit of the Justinian code, despite its allusion to the law of nature, and the spirit of the enactments of the early Councils of the Church, are alike opposed to any idea of spiritual equality between bond and free.

On the other hand, the simple restriction of conquest limited the possibilities of slavery for Byzantium. Captives were enslaved to the last,[314] but of these there was no steady supply. In the rural districts, again, the fiscal conditions made for at least nominal freedom, as is shown by the historian who has most closely analysed the conditions:—

"The Roman financial administration, by depressing the higher classes and impoverishing the rich, at last burdened the small proprietors and cultivators of the soil with the whole weight of the land-tax. The labourer of the soil then became an object of great interest to the treasury, and ... obtained almost as important a position in the eyes of the fisc as the landed proprietor himself. The first laws which conferred any rights on the slave are those which the Roman government enacted to prevent the landed proprietors from transferring their slaves, engaged in the cultivation of lands assessed for the land-tax, to other employments which, though more profitable to the proprietor of the slave, would have yielded a smaller or less permanent return to the imperial treasury.[315] The avarice of the imperial treasury, by reducing the mass of the free population to the same degree of poverty as the slaves, had removed one cause of the separation of the two classes. The position of the slave had lost most of its moral degradation, and [he] occupied precisely the same political position in society as the poor labourer from the moment that the Roman fiscal laws compelled any freeman who had cultivated lands for the space of thirty years to remain for ever attached, with his descendants, to the same estate.[316] The lower orders were from that period blended into one class; the slave rose to be a member of this body; the freeman descended, but his descent was necessary for the improvement of the great bulk of the human race, and for the extinction of slavery. Such was the progress of civilisation in the Eastern Empire. The measures of Justinian which, by their fiscal rapacity, tended to sink the free population to the same state of poverty as the slaves, really prepared the way for the rise of the slaves as soon as any general improvement took place in the condition of the human race."[317]

For the rest, it cannot be supposed that the "freedom" thus constituted had much actuality. Sons of soldiers and artisans were held bound to follow their father's profession, as in the hereditary castes of the East,[318] and none of the fruits of freedom are to be traced in Byzantine life. Still, the fact remains that the commercial and industrial life sustained the political, and that the political began definitely to fail when the commercial did. Constantinople could hardly have collapsed as it did before the Crusaders if its commerce had not already begun to dwindle through interception by Venice and the Italian trading cities. As soon as these were able to trade directly with the East they did so, thus withdrawing a large part of the stream of commerce from Byzantium; and when, finally, they acquired the secret of her silk manufacture, her industrial revenue was in turn undermined. On the economic weakening, the political followed; and the Eastern Empire finally fell before the Turks, very much as the Western had fallen before the Goths.