The writer can best express his personal feeling about the Empire in a parable. It was like the sea round whose shores its network of city-states was strung. The Mediterranean seems at first sight a poor substitute for the rivers that have given their waters to make it. Those were living waters, whether they ran muddy or clear; the sea seems just salt and still and dead. But as soon as we study the sea, we find movement and life there also. There are silent currents circulating perpetually from one part to another, and the surface-water that seems to be lost by evaporation is not really lost, but will descend in distant places and seasons, with its bitterness all distilled away, as life-giving rain. And as these surface-waters are drawn off into the clouds, their place is taken by lower layers continually rising from the depths. The sea itself is in constant and creative motion, but the influence of this great body of water extends far beyond its shores. One finds it softening the extremes of temperature, quickening the vegetation, and prospering the life of animals and men, in the distant heart of continents and among peoples that have never heard its name.
Arnold Toynbee.
POLITICAL THOUGHT
In a survey of the legacy of Ancient Greece to our modern civilization and its problems, it might well seem at first sight as though the political contribution of Greece could be ignored. Greek art, Greek literature, Greek philosophy are among the world’s abiding possessions, for the human passions and questionings which gave them birth and the human needs to which they minister will last as long as human life itself. But Greek political thinking is so much bound up with the peculiar and evanescent external conditions of fifth and fourth century Greece, centres indeed so exclusively round the special problems of its intellectual metropolis, Athens, that its interest might appear to have passed away with the régime to which it owes its existence. The Agamemnon and the Antigone, with their teachings of destiny and duty, the Hermes of Olympia and the Parthenon frieze, with their ever-irresistible charm of youthfulness, the Phaedo with its discussion of immortality, the Metaphysics of Aristotle with their still subtler and more abstruse speculations, source of so much of our Christian doctrine and apologetic—all these require little defence against the Philistine of to-day, if only he can be induced to gaze at his intended victim before he delivers his blow. But Thucydides with his long and detailed account of an inter-tribal or inter-municipal war, decked out with sham speeches which were never delivered: Plato with his imaginary Utopia, half a small Greek provincial town, half an impossible and unendurably regimented socialist model community, based on a fine-drawn and fallacious comparison between the qualities of the human soul and the class-divisions which happened to prevail in the Greek society of the time: Aristotle with his laborious investigations into the municipal pathology of his day and his detailed prescriptions for the betterment of his fellow-provincials and their institutions—what have we to do with all this in an age of world problems and conflicts and of not merely continent-wide but international ideas and projects of organization? The first duty of any one who seeks to interest the modern reader in Greek political discussion is to be perfectly frank and lucid about its limitations. He need have no cause to be afraid that, when these have been written off from his prospectus, there will be too little of value remaining.
These limitations can be summarized under two main heads. They arise, firstly, from a difference of scale, and secondly, from a difference of outlook, between ancient and modern political thought.
The difference of scale leaps to the eye at once, although its consequences are not all of them so obvious. Ancient Greece was, for political purposes, a congeries of sovereign states, generally centring round the urban metropolis of a rural district smaller than that of an average English county. The material upon which Greek political thought worked was, therefore, from our modern point of view not only small-scale but almost Lilliputian. This can best be appreciated when we consider how many gradations of scale are interposed in the modern world between the government of a town or district of the size of fifth-century Athens and the government of our own sovereign state, the British Commonwealth. Athens was far smaller than Leeds, Johannesburg, or Chicago: yet to be Mayor of any of these is not to fill a position of commanding responsibility, as political responsibility is understood in the large-scale world of to-day. The American State, the South African province and Dominion and (for certain purposes) the English County stand between the giant municipality and the sovereign parliament. To a British Premier passing from a coal strike which reacts upon the trade of the entire world to an Imperial Conference Engaged In Tracing Out An Agreed Line Of Policy On The Pacific Question, The Problems Of A Pericles, Or Even Of An Alexander, Would Seem But Child’s Play.
Let us see what results from this difference of scale. In the first place, Greek political thought although (as we shall see) it aimed at universality, at arriving at certain definite laws or conclusions about politics, never succeeded in divesting itself of a certain element of local or national individuality. When Plato and Thucydides think and write of ‘the State’ they are also thinking of the City—the same word, polis, serves indeed for the two—and not merely of the City, i. e., of any municipality, but of a particular city. There are elements in Greek political thought which, just because they owe their inspiration to Athens, can never be universalized. A treatise on education in which general psychological conclusions were intermingled with conclusions based on experience at some English school with a very unique tradition, would require to be carefully examined and applied with caution to the problems of adolescent life in Japan or Nigeria. Similarly, in so far as Greek political thought is Athenian or (to use a much disputed term in what I hold to be its proper sense) national, it is not truly political.
The distinction that I am trying to draw is a difficult one and cannot be understood without a short digression about the nature of the study of politics. Politics is the study or activity of government, of the management of the public or common affairs of men. We need ‘politicians’, men who will devote themselves to meeting the demand for the management of our common affairs—we need them not because we are Englishmen, Irishmen, or Americans, but because we are human beings living together in society, and because our co-operative relations and activities require to be guided and controlled. Whether the ‘politician’ is a tyrant or a Minister of the people is not here to the point; the point is that he is the manager of what the Romans called res publica, the Latin for the good old English word ‘Commonwealth’. Politics is therefore primarily concerned with the practical problems arising out of the fact that a number of different human beings are living together, and the more different they are and the smaller their greatest common measure, the more truly political do such problems become. The first business, of the politician or governor is, as Aristotle said, to see that men shall live (the twin problems of supply and defence), his second to see that they shall live well (in the first instance the problems of health and physical development and well-being). In the last analysis pure politics, as our great grandchildren may discover if ever the World-State becomes a reality, is mainly concerned with administration, administration of the affairs common to all in the interests of all.