Problems in Greek history

by J. P. Mahaffy

which mark an epoch in the history of their respective subjects, and have been ever since gradually moulding even the most obstinate opponents, who at first rejected his theories with scorn[15:1]. There are chapters of narrative, such as that on the battle of Platæa, or the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, where he so saturates himself with the tragic grandeur of the events, and with the consummate art of his great Greek predecessors, that his somewhat clumsy and unpolished style takes their colour and rises to the full dignity of his great subject. But the greatest novelty among the many which adorn his immortal work is his admirable apologia for democracy,—for that form of government where legislation is the result of discussion; where the minority feels bound to acquiesce in the decision of the majority; and where the administrators of the law are the servants, not the masters, of the nation, appointed with defined powers to terminable magistracies, and liable to indictment for exceeding or abusing these powers. He occupied the whole body of the book in illustrating how the voluntary submission of the free citizen to control of this kind, the alternation in the same men of commanding

and obeying, and the loyalty and patriotism thus engendered, were far higher social factors than the enforced or unreasoning submission of the masses to the dictates of a monarch or a close aristocracy.

Objections: that democracies are short-lived;

§ 7. To the first great objection,—that of the Greek theorists,—that the greatness of democracies is but transient, and must rapidly degenerate into the fickle and violent rule of a mob, he might have answered, that these theorists themselves never contemplated human institutions as permanent, and even assumed that the ideal State of their dreams must be subject to exhaustion and decay. Still more might he have urged that not a long life, but a great life, was the real test of the excellence of the body politic, and that centuries of Spartan respectability had done nothing for the world in comparison with the brief bloom of Attic genius.

that the Athenian democrat was a slaveholder and a ruler over subjects.

Another and more serious objection to the position that Athens was a typical democracy, and that its high culture was the direct result of its political institutions, he seems to me to have practically ignored. The Athenian citizen, however poor, had indeed equal rights with every other citizen, could succeed to the same high offices, and appeal to the same laws. But the Athenian citizen, however poor, was a slaveholder, and the member of an imperial class, ruling with more or less absolutism over communities of subjects, treating as manifest inferiors even the many resident aliens, who promoted the mercantile wealth of his city. Hence, after all, he was one of a minority, controlling a

vast majority of subjects and slaves with more or less despotic sway. Lord Redesdale[17:1] tells us that this was the point which his brother Mitford thought of capital importance, and which prompted him to write his history. He met, all through revolutionary France, and among the democrats in England, perpetual assertions that Greek democracy was the ideal at which modern Europe should aim, and he felt that these enthusiasts had considered neither the size of modern States, nor the essential difference just stated between the Athenian and the modern democrat.

The Athenian not the ideal of the Greeks.

And it is to me certain, that many of the virtues as well as the vices of the Athenian arose from his being an aristocrat in the strictest sense,—the member of a privileged and limited society ruling over inferiors, with the leisure obtainable by the poorest slaveholder, and the dignity always resulting from the consciousness of inherent superiority. And yet with all this, the type of perfection which the Greeks, as a people, ever held before them was not the polished democrat of Athens, but the blunt aristocrat of Sparta. This latter was admired and copied, so far as he could be copied, in like manner as the English aristocrat has been admired by all the nations of the world,—not because he lives under free institutions, but because he shows in him the traditions and the breeding of a dominant race long accustomed to the dignity and the splendour of ancient wealth and importance.

As Grote could see no superiority whatever in aristocracy over democracy, so he ignored completely this, the aristocratic side of all the Hellenic democracies.