Act III (31 B. C.-7th cent. A. D.).
- The second rally (final experiment in federation—compromise between city-state autonomy and capitalistic centralization), 31 B. C.-A. D. 180.
- The first dissolution (external front broken by tribesmen, internal by Christianity), A. D. 180-284.
- The final rally (Constantine τον δημον προσεταιριζεται—tribesmen on to the land, bishops into the bureaucracy), A. D. 284-378.
- The final dissolution (break of tradition), A. D. 378-7th cent.
This analysis is and must be subjective. Every one has to make his own, just as every one has to apprehend for himself the form of a work of art. But however the historian may analyse the plot and group it into acts, it must be borne in mind that the action is continuous, and that the first emergence of the Greek city-state in the Aegean and the last traces of municipal self-government in the Roman Empire are phases in the history of a single civilization. It may seem a paradox to call this civilization a unity. But the study of Greek and Latin literature leaves no doubt in one’s mind that the difference of language there is less significant than the unity of form, and that one is really dealing with a single literature, the Hellenic, which in many of its branches was imitated and propagated in the Latin language, just as it was to a lesser extent in Hebrew, or later on in Syriac and Arabic. The unity is even more apparent when, instead of confining our attention to literature, we regard the whole field of civilization. It is not really possible to draw a distinction between Greek history and Roman history. At most one can say that at some point Greek history enters on a phase which it may be convenient to distinguish verbally by connecting it with the name of Rome. To take the case of the Roman Empire—the reader may possibly have been surprised to find the Roman Empire treated as the third act in the tragedy of Greece; yet when one studies the Empire one finds that it was essentially a Greek institution. Institutionally it was at bottom a federation of city-states, a solution of the political problem with which Greek society had been wrestling since the fifth century B. C. And even the non-municipal element, the centralized bureaucratic organization which Augustus spread like a fine, almost impalpable net to hold his federation of municipalities together, was largely a fruit of Greek administrative experience. As papyrology reveals the administrative system of the Ptolemaic Dynasty—the Greek successors of Alexander who preceded the Caesars in the government of Egypt—we are learning that even those institutions of the Empire which have been regarded as most un-Greek may have been borrowed through a Greek intermediary. Imperial jurisprudence, again, interpreted Roman municipal law into the law of a civilization by reading into it the principles of Greek moral philosophy. And Greek, not Latin, was still the language in which most of the greatest literature of the Imperial period was written. One need only mention works which are still widely read and which have influenced our own civilization—Plutarch’s Lives, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and the New Testament. They are all written in Greek, and who will venture to assert that the age in which they were written falls outside Greek history, or that the social experience which produced them was not an act in the tragedy of Hellenic civilization? Even statistically the Empire was more Greek than anything else. Probably a considerable majority of its inhabitants spoke Greek as a lingua franca, if not as their mother-tongue. Nearly all the great industrial and commercial centres were in the Greek or Hellenized provinces. Possibly, during the first two centuries of the Empire, more Greek was spoken than Latin by the proletariat of Rome itself. The Greek core of the Roman Empire played the part of Western Europe in the modern world. The Latinized provinces were thinly populated, backward, and only superficially initiated into the fraternity of civilization. Latinized Spain and Africa were the South America, Latinized Gaul and Britain the Russia of the Ancient Greek world. The pulse of the Empire was driven by a Greek heart, and it beat comparatively feebly in the non-Greek extremities.
IV
The Literary Expression of the Plot
And now, after having suggested a reading of the plot, it is time to let the actors speak for themselves. There is only space to quote half a dozen passages, but they have been chosen to illustrate the critical scenes and situations in the drama as it has been sketched out, and they may persuade the reader that there is something to be said for the present interpretation.
We shall not dwell on the period I have called the first act—that is, the period before 431 B. C. But the reader is recommended, again, not to lay aside the Greek poets when he takes up the Greek historians. Homer will reveal more of the opening scenes than Herodotus; and the exaltation of spirit produced by the repulse of the Persians, and expressed institutionally in the foundation of the Delian League, can hardly be realized emotionally without the poetry of Aeschylus. But the philosophers and scientists are indispensable too. Professor Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy, or his Greek Philosophy from Thales to Plato, throws light on history and not merely on the Greek theory of knowledge. And the reader should make acquaintance with the little work on ‘Atmospheres, Waters, and Localities’ emanating from the Hippokratean school of medicine. It is only thirty-eight pages in the Teubner text (Hippocratis Opera, vol. i), and it gives clearer expression than Herodotus to the fifth-century scientific point of view. Here is one passage which might have been written in Victorian England. The writer is describing a peculiar disease prevalent among the nomads of southern Russia. ‘The natives’, he remarks, ‘believe that this disease is sent by God, and they reverence and worship its victims, in fear of being stricken by it themselves. I too am quite ready to admit that these phenomena are caused by God, but I take the same view about all phenomena and hold that no single phenomenon is more or less divine in origin than any other. All are uniform and all may be divine, but each phenomenon obeys a law, and natural law knows no exceptions.’
It is hard to leave this first act of the tragedy. It is a triumph of youth, and the phrase in which Herodotus sums up the early history of Sparta expresses the prevailing spirit of early Hellenic civilization. Ανα τε εδραμον και ευθενηθησαν: ‘They shot up and throve.’ But there is another phrase in Herodotus which announces the second act—an ominous phrase which came so natural to him that one may notice about a dozen instances of it in his history. Εδει γαρ τω δεινι γενεσθαι κακως: ‘Evil had to befall so-and-so, and therefore’—the story of a catastrophe follows in each case. The thought behind the phrase is expressed in Solon’s words to Croesus (Herodotus, Bk. I, ch. 32): ‘Croesus, I know that God is ever envious and disordering’ (ταραχωδες), ‘and you ask me about the destiny of man!’
Note the epithet translated ‘disordering’; we shall meet the word ταραχη again. It is the bitter phrase of a man who lived on from the great age into the war, but not so bitter as the truth which the writer could not bring himself wholly to express. ‘No single phenomenon’, as contemporary Greek science realized, ‘is more or less divine than any other’, and the ‘envious and disordering’ power, which wrecked Greek civilization, was not an external force, but the very spirit of man by which that civilization had been created. There is a puzzling line in Homer which is applied once or twice to features in a landscape—for instance, to a river: ‘The gods call it Xanthos, mankind Skamandros.’ So we might say of the downfall of Greece: the Greeks attributed it to the malignity of God, but the divine oracles gave a different answer.
Why did the Confederacy of Delos break down and Greece lose her youth in a ruinous war? Because of the evil in the hearts of men—the envy aroused by the political and commercial greatness of Athens in the governing classes of Sparta and Corinth; and the covetousness aroused by sudden greatness in the Athenians, tempting their statesmen to degrade the presidency of a free confederacy into a dominion of Athens over Greece, and tempting the Athenian proletariat, and the proletariat in the confederate states, to misuse democracy for the exploitation of the rich by the poor. Envy and covetousness begat injustice, and injustice disloyalty. The city-states, in their rivalry for dominion or their resentment against the domineering of one state over another, forgot their loyalty to the common weal of Greece and fought each other for empire or liberty. And the wealthy and well-born citizens forgot their loyalty to the city in their blind, rancorous feud against the proletariat that was stripping them of property and power, and betrayed their community to foreign enemies.
‘Strange how mortals blame the gods. They say that evil is our handiwork, when in truth they bring their sufferings on themselves. By their own folly they force the hand of fate. See, now, how Aigisthos forced it in taking the wedded wife of Atreides and slaying her lord when he returned, yet he had sheer destruction before his eyes, for we ourselves had forewarned him not to slay the king nor wed his wife, or vengeance would come by Atreides’ son Orestes, whene’er he should grow to manhood and long for his home. So spake our messenger, but with all his wisdom he did not soften the heart of Aigisthos, and now he has paid in full’ (Odyssey, a 32-43).