But a far larger and more philosophical objection may be based upon the consideration that no city population, trusting mainly to money for a supply of soldiers and sailors, is likely to hold its own permanently against an agricultural population fighting, not for pay, but for the defence of its liberties, and with the spirit of personal patriotism. If you abolish the yeoman of any country, and trust merely to the artisan, you destroy the backbone of your fighting power; and no outlay will secure your victory if a yeoman soldiery is brought into the field against you and well handled. This was perfectly felt in Thucydides' day; for he makes the Spartan king, when invading Attica, specially comment on the fact that the Athenian power was acquired by money rather than native[113:1]; and on this he bases his anticipation that the army of Peloponnesian farmers will prevail. It would surely have been a safer and a better policy to extend the area of Athenian yeomen, and secure a supply of hardy and devoted soldiers as the basis of a lasting military and naval power.
Advantages of mercenaries against citizen troops.
§ 48. It will be urged, and it was urged in those
days, that mercenary forces could be kept at sea more permanently than a body of farmers, who must go home frequently to look after their subsistence and work their fields. This is quite true; but mercenaries without a citizen force to keep them in order were always a failure, they became turbulent and unmanageable, and left their pay-master in the lurch when any new chance of immediate gain turned up. Besides, as the event proved in the next century, when Philip of Macedon rose to power, a mercenary force under a monarch will always defeat mercenaries under leaders directed by the discussion, the hesitation, the vacillation of a debating assembly[114:1].
The smaller States necessarily separatists.
The only excuse, therefore, for Pericles' policy was the impossibility of doing anything else with the materials he had at his disposal; and his materials were thus crippled because the Athenian democracy as a ruling power had not the confidence of the subject States. In fact, so long as these were subjects, liable to oppression in any moment of panic or of passion, no solidarity, no common feeling of patriotism, no real union could possibly be attained. It has been rather the fashion, since Grote's influence has prevailed, to attribute the breakdown of all attempts at an empire among free Greeks to the incurable jealousy and the love of separatism in their small States. I fancy that at no period in the world's history could any small
communities have easily been persuaded to submit to this kind of union, which was built on far too narrow a foundation, and was far too distinctly worked for the almost exclusive benefit of the leading city.
It is necessary to insist upon these things,—the want of representation in a common assembly, the want of scope for talent in the outlying States, the difficulty of redress against the dominant people if they transgressed their State-treaties,—especially for a practical writer, who holds that historical analogies are most serviceable, and help to explain both ancient and modern history. But we must see clearly that the analogies are genuine, and that we are not arguing from an irrelevant antecedent or to an irrelevant consequent.
Attempt at federation
Yet the necessity of combination was so great, and so keenly felt during the tyrannical ascendency of Sparta at the opening of the next century, that several attempts were made to obtain the advantages, while avoiding the evils, of the old Athenian supremacy. The first, which was made immediately after the battle of Cnidos (394 B.C.) and which seems to have been originated by Thebes, is passed over in silence by all our literary authorities, and was only discovered upon the evidence of coins. We know that Rhodes, Cnidos, Naxos, Samos, Ephesus, belonged to it, and that they adopted for their common coinage an old Theban emblem—Heracles throttling the snakes. The existence of this confederation seems to justify the