Ernst Curtius, a German savant of the highest type, has so little thought out this subject that on one page we find him saying that the voluntary submission of the people to a single man, Pericles, was a proof of the high condition of their State; whereas on another he says their voluntary submission to a single man, Cleon, is a proof of its degeneracy. But we can hardly expect any real appreciation of the working of a democracy from a German professor brought up in the last generation. Indeed his inconsistencies, and his hypotheses of decay and regeneration in the Athenian Demos at various moments, are ably dissected by Holm in a valuable appendix to his chapter on Athens in 360 B.C.[111:1] But our dealing is rather with Grote, who knew perfectly the conditions of the problem. He argues that Cleon, on the whole, and without military ability, tried to carry out the policy of Pericles, and that the policy of Pericles was a sound and far-seeing one, which would have preserved Athens through all her dangers, had she steadily adhered to it.
§ 47. I have already discussed at length the narrow basis of the Athenian imperial democracy, and expressed my judgment that even great successes would soon have brought about its fall.
compared with Plato's.
The war policy of Pericles.
But I join issue with Grote, and side with Plato, in thinking that the policy of Pericles, even within the conditions imposed upon him by the circumstances
just mentioned, was so dangerous and difficult that no cautious and provident thinker could have called it secure. Plato goes so far as to say that Pericles had made the Athenians lazy, frivolous, and sensual. Without actually indorsing this, we are warranted by the course of history to say that the hope of holding a supremacy by merely keeping up with all energy and outlay a naval superiority already existing and acknowledged, was truly chimerical. Pericles thought that by making the city impregnable—which was then, against the existing means of attack, quite feasible—and by keeping the sea open, he could amply support his city population and make them perfectly independent even of the territory of Attica. While they could derive money and food from their subjects and their commerce, they might gather in the rural population from the fields, and laugh at the enemy from their walls until his means were exhausted, or he was compelled to retreat for the purpose of protecting his own coasts against a hostile fleet.
His miscalculations.
Thucydides tells us in affecting language how this experiment actually turned out,—what was the misery of the country people crowded into the city without proper houses or furniture, sleeping in sheds and nooks of streets; what was the rage of the farmers when they saw their homesteads go up in flames, and the labour of years devastated with ruthless completeness. Pericles had not even reckoned with the immediate effects of his singular
policy. Still less had he thought of the sanitary consequences of overcrowding his city, which must in any case have produced fatal sickness, and therefore deep indignation among those who suffered from its visitation, even though no one could have anticipated the frightful intensity of the plague which ensued.
He depended on a city population against an army of yeomen.