CHAPTER VIII
THE MODERN PELOPONNESIAN WAR
The Peloponnesian War was the suicide of Greek civilization. It is the saddest page of history. In the brief Periclean epoch preceding the catastrophe Hellas had shone forth with unparalleled splendor, and even those wonderful achievements seemed but the prelude to still loftier heights of glory. On the eve of its self-immolation the Greek race, far from being exhausted, was bubbling over with exuberant vitality and creative genius.
But the half-blown rose was nipped by the canker of discord. Jealous rivalries and mad ambitions smouldered till they burst into a consuming flame. For a generation Hellas tore itself to pieces in a delirium of fratricidal strife. And even this was not the worst. The “peace” which closed the Peloponnesian War was no peace. It was a mere truce, dictated by the victors of the moment to sullen and vengeful enemies. Imposed by the sword and infused with no healing or constructive virtue, the Peloponnesian War was but the first of a war cycle which completed Hellas’s ruin.
The irreparable disaster had, indeed, occurred: the gulfs of sundering hatred had become fixed, and the sentiment of Greek race-unity was destroyed. Having lost its soul, the Greek race soon lost its body as well. Drained of its best strains, the diminished remnant bowed to foreign masters and bastardized its blood with the hordes of inferior aliens who swarmed into the land. By the time of the Roman conquest the Greeks were degenerate, and the Roman epithet “Græculus” was a term of deserved contempt.
Thus perished the Greeks—the fairest slip that ever budded on the tree of life. They perished by their own hands, in the flower of their youth, carrying with them to the grave, unborn, potencies which might have blessed and brightened the world for ages. Nature is inexorable. No living being stands above her law; and protozoön or demigod, if they transgress, alike must die.
The Greek tragedy should be a warning to our own day. Despite many unlikenesses, the nineteenth century was strangely reminiscent of the Periclean age. In creative energy and fecund achievement, surely, its like had not been seen since “the glory that was Greece,” and the way seemed opening to yet higher destinies.
But the brilliant sunrise was presently dimmed by gathering clouds. The birth of the twentieth century was attended with disquieting omens. The ills which had afflicted the preceding epoch grew more acute, synchronizing into an all-pervading, militant unrest. The spirit of change was in the air. Ancient ideals and shibboleths withered before the fiery breath of a destructive criticism, while the solid crust of tradition cracked and heaved under the premonitory tremors of volcanic forces working far below. Everywhere were seen bursting forth increasingly acute eruptions of human energy: a triumph of the dynamic over the static elements of life; a growing preference for violent and revolutionary, as contrasted with peaceful and evolutionary, solutions, running the whole politico-social gamut from “Imperialism” to “Syndicalism.” Everywhere could be discerned the spirit of unrest setting the stage for the great catastrophe.
Grave disorders were simply inevitable. They might perhaps have been localized. They might even have taken other forms. But the ills of our civilization were too deep-seated to have avoided grave disturbances. The Prussian plotters of “Weltmacht” did, indeed, precipitate the impending crisis in its most virulent and concentrated form, yet after all they were but sublimations of the abnormal trend of the times.
The best proof of this is the white world’s acutely pathological condition during the entire decade previous to the Great War. That fierce quest after alliances and mad piling-up of armaments; those paroxysmal “crises” which racked diplomacy’s feverish frame; those ferocious struggles which desolated the Balkans: what were all these but symptoms denoting a consuming disease? To-day, by contrast, we think of the Great War as having smitten a world basking in profound peace. What a delusion! Cast back the mind’s eye, and recall how hectic was the eve of the Great War, not merely in politics but in most other fields as well. Those opening months of 1914! Why, Europe seethed from end to end! When the Great War began, England was on the verge of civil strife, Russia was in the throes of an acute social revolt, Italy had just passed through a “red week” threatening anarchy, and every European country was suffering from grave internal disorders. It was a strange, nightmarish time, that early summer of 1914, to-day quite overshadowed by subsequent events, but which later generations will assign a proper place in the chain of world-history.