Now ancient Greek politics were entangled, and modern politics also are still too largely entangled, with the discussion of matters which are not common at all, and do not constitute the material of politics in the true sense of the word—with questions arising, not out of the common need for a common law, but out of the inner ultimate and ineradicable differences between the various nations and other groupings of mankind. When the League of Nations or the Dublin City Council is discussing an epidemic of small-pox or the improvement of some dock or wharf, or schools for mothers, or the problem of juvenile employment it is dealing with common interests which affect human beings as human beings: it is on the plane of politics proper. But when the Dublin City Council, following in the wake of the nineteenth century democratic movement throughout Europe, puts forward some proposal in order to give satisfaction to the sentiment that Ireland being the home of a nation ought to be a sovereign state, and when the League of Nations is asked to deal with the political situation created by the clash of contending nationalisms in the British Isles or elsewhere, both bodies, as governing bodies, are out of their depth: for they are faced with an impossible task. Established to deal with politics proper, with the common affairs of men as men, they are bound to flounder helplessly when they are cajoled into the thorny intimate and (let it be added) far more fascinating region of national and individual personality—to a region where, the deeper you penetrate, the less common, uniform, standardized or standardizable are the interests involved, and the less susceptible of being ‘settled’, or even understood, by the rough and ready politician accustomed to deal with matters in the bulk and to measure up the results on a quantitative reckoning in the cold and cosmopolitan language of statistics.
In reading the Greek political writers then, we must be careful to distinguish the universal from the local and ephemeral element. The latter is indeed of great interest and value; but we shall tend to miss the really precious and permanent elements in their thought if we do not take pains to disentangle Thucydides the disillusioned Athenian patriot from Thucydides the scientific historian and psychologist, and Plato the aristocrat born out of due season from Plato the unrivalled student of human nature and of the permanent needs of human society.
The failure to recognize this distinction has led to much misunderstanding and shallow thinking in attempts to apply Greek ideas and maxims too literally to modern life. It is only too common to hear Englishmen, whose knowledge of politics and history, outside the newspapers, is confined to stray reminiscences from a not very ardent pursuit of the classics in their school and college days, basing confident predictions of the failure of modern democracy on some obiter dictum of Thucydides or Plato and assessing the fate of the British Commonwealth in terms borrowed from some judgement of Sallust or Tacitus on its wholly different Roman prototype. It is flippancy or pedantry like this which gives rise to the onslaughts of a Cobden or Herbert Spencer or an H. G. Wells and to the practical man’s suspicion of a classical education. One might as well go to last year’s market reports for guidance in a business deal of to-day as have recourse to Plato, or, for that matter, to Macchiavelli, in an existing political emergency. If a classical education, designed as it is in England to promote ‘character’ rather than ‘intellect’ (a vicious distinction which leaves no room for such a quality as intellectual integrity) often leaves behind it but a meagre residuum of knowledge and ideas, it should at least cause the public school man of yesterday and the London clubman of to-day to realize the limitations of his field of study and to abstain from confident political generalization. The Labour M.P. who once remarked to the writer, à propos of an Indian debate, that he had been in the House just long enough to know that all he knew about India was that he knew nothing about it, had been brought up, if not in a better at least in a cannier school. There is no sounder training for the student of politics and history, or indeed of any serious subject, than to know everything about something, whether it be the chronological order of Plato’s dialogues or the problem of humidity in weaving-sheds, or about placing a field or keeping a wicket. That is why the Duke of Wellington who, if he lacked the intellectuality of a Foch, at least knew both his England and his own job of military science, selected the playing fields rather than the classical classrooms of Eton as the home and training-ground of that concentrated and disinterested endeavour of mind and spirit which had carried his army through patient years of effort to victory. It is all to the good that our classical devotees, faced with criticism and competition from many quarters, should be acquiring both a greater humility and a greater seriousness.
Our first caution then, is that Greek political thought is both national and universal, and that we must learn to distinguish what pertains to nationality from what pertains to government.
A second result which flows from the small-scale character of Greek politics is that we nowhere find an adequate treatment of the problem of foreign relations. Foreign policy is one of the weak spots of modern democracy; it is, perhaps, the element in our political technique which is most in need of thoroughgoing revision. We have yet to induce the modern citizen to pay continuous attention to issues which, although they are seemingly remote from his purview, may at any moment shake the whole fabric of his everyday existence; and, when we have done this, we have to persuade him to approach these world-problems not in the spirit of a competitive aggrandizement but with a view to discovering what is the best line of policy in the interests of the world as a whole. So long as the peoples remain self-absorbed, the governments will continue to conduct their mutual relations on a basis of individual self-interest, and the meetings of the Assembly of the League of Nations will remain what they are at present, not gatherings of statesmen solely bent, each from his own angle and upbringing, on the welfare of humanity, but barterings of politicians who (with rare exceptions) have come to the fair to do the best business they can for their own clients. Now Thucydides and Plato give us no help for the League of Nations. Such a phrase as ‘the interests of humanity as a whole’ would have been politically meaningless to them. They did not think of humanity as a whole; they thought of it as divided sharply into two sections, Greeks and Barbarians, and of the Greek world as a small oasis of intelligence and culture ringed round by a wide and indefinite expanse of barbarism. We also, it is true, speak of ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ peoples: but the latter are not, as they were to the Greeks, a formidable mass, tribe upon tribe, of military power extending up to and beyond the known or legendary confines of the world; they are child-races under our watchful care and control. We have explored and surveyed the whole earth, and where we find weakness or inferiority, we establish a trusteeship. To the Greeks, ever on their guard against barbarian inroads from north, south, east and west, from Scythians and Libyans, Persians and Carthaginians, the mandate clause of the Covenant would have seemed both theoretically undesirable and practically impossible. No Greek writer ever dreamed of a system of international co-operation between the governments of the world as men then knew it. All of them thought in terms of competition and ever-recurrent warfare or, at best, of a precarious balance of power. Even Plato’s Utopia had its soldier class; and they were real soldiers, not merely police. In this respect, at any rate, vanquished Germany, with practically the whole of her population relieved from military duty and available for productive tasks, has the advantage over the most ideal construction of ancient Greece.
There is a further point to be noted under this head. If Greek thought gives us no guidance in foreign policy, it is no more helpful, except very indirectly, in another difficult region, that of industrial policy. The problem of industrial policy, or what is sometimes roughly described as the Labour problem, may perhaps be thus stated: how to secure or maintain for civilized mankind (or for our own particular section of it) the goods and services it needs, whilst at the same time providing justice and freedom for those who produce them. To put it more shortly, how to secure that a good life for the consumer shall be compatible with a good life for the producer. It is a problem which goes to the root of democracy: for the world has never yet known a time when the increase of wealth and the consequent growth of refinement and civilization in the upper section of the community did not lead to degradation and injustice in the lower. Here too the Greeks can give us no help. They did not even face the problem but fail to solve it, like the Romans. Their material civilization was so simple that the problem hardly arose for them at all—except in certain cases, such as that of the mine-slaves. But the fact that they acquiesced, without a twinge of conscience or a trace of repining, in the institution of slavery indicates how they would probably have faced it had it arisen. Confront Plato with the complexity of modern industry, prove to him, as any modern lecturer could, that, for Northern man at any rate, life can only be maintained without degradation on a basis of widespread industrialism and with our familiar equipment of railways, steamships, telephones, et hoc genus omne, and it is safe to predict that he would fail to give the reply which the modern reformer would expect from him. Instead of embracing one of the many current varieties of socialism which masquerade as his bastard progeny, he would either accept his interlocutor’s premisses and tell him to build up his precious northern civilization on a basis of slavery; or he would reject them and advise him, with Samuel Butler, to make a bonfire of the machines. The latter is, indeed, the more probable alternative; for it is that to which the more thoughtful and prophetic (perhaps one can add also, the more Hellenic) of our modern guides are turning. When men so diverse as Tagore the Indian sage and Rathenau the German Trust magnate tell us that the disease from which we are suffering is ‘mechanization’, and that our crying need is for greater simplicity, it seems safe to predict that Plato would not reject the possibility of providing a ‘good life’ for the modern man in a world divested of most of the rattling and tinkling paraphernalia of which the nineteenth century so plumed itself as the inventor.
Let us pass now to our second limitation, that arising not from the difference of scale but from the difference of outlook between Greek and modern speculation. We can best sum this up by saying that whereas modern political thought, like modern thought generally, works from the inner to the outer, from the individual to the state and society, the ancient thinkers habitually work in the opposite direction, setting the interests of the community or state above those of the individual. This is what Fustel de Coulanges intended to convey when he declared that ancient man had no conception of the meaning of liberty. Liberty is no doubt a somewhat confusing and ambiguous term; it is hard to cut it loose from its political associations, from national independence and democratic self-government. We can perhaps therefore improve upon the French writer by saying that the Greek political thinkers do not recognize, or do not make proper allowance for, the rights and responsibilities of the individual soul. Just as they failed to distinguish between Nationality and Government, so they failed also to distinguish between Conscience and Public duty. Socrates, indeed, meeting his death in obedience both to Conscience and Law, had a glimpse of the higher truth; but his followers did not take up this side of his message or, in so far as they did so in their study of individual morality, they did not relate it to their theories of politics. It was a greater than Socrates who summed up and put the problem with his incomparable directness and irony: Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things which are God’s. If this had been said in the presence of Thucydides, the keenest practical brain that applied itself to Greek political thinking, he simply would not have known what it meant. To him Caesar and God, or, to translate them into his own language, Athens and Athena, were not opposing but practically identical terms. When the Athenian, as he described him, ‘spent his body, as a mere external tool, in the city’s service and counted his mind as most truly his own when employed on her behalf,’ he was, according to the universal Greek belief, serving both his God and his neighbour, both his own highest good and the noblest of the world’s causes. His life was a unity: for he had not yet learned to disentangle his soul from the soul of the City or the herd, or his God from the god of Israel or of Athens. The Greek thinkers, as we shall see, sincerely endeavoured to distinguish between the ‘good citizen’ and ‘the good man’ and to base the State on foundations of the spirit; but their work was vitiated by their failure to realize the extent and urgency of the claim of the individual soul. Men must be spiritually free before they can co-operate politically on the highest terms. In the last analysis the weakness of Greek political speculation can be traced back to the weakness of Greek religion. Even Plato played with Pagan orthodoxy and gave the Delphic Apollo a titular place in his Utopia, proving himself as timid in touching Greek superstitions as English thinkers to-day are in touching the Monarchy. It is this basis of insincerity which reveals itself throughout the superstructure. Greek political thought contains already the germs of the disease which, centuries later, led men, plebeians first, later patricians also, to turn away from the outworn symbols that stood for the union of Church and State and to seek comfort in a religion which, if it undermined and eventually overturned the last and greatest of the ancient Empires, established the City of the Soul upon a firm and enduring basis. Julian’s Vicisti Galilaee marked the end of one strain or tradition in ancient political thought which, originating in the local worships of the City-State, had lasted on, with gathering momentum, until, all over the known world, men bowed the knee before the altar of Caesar, the God-Emperor. From this there was no way forward except through revolution; and mankind paid, in the night of the Dark Ages, for sins of compromise and insincerity committed during long centuries of enlightenment.
The liabilities thus frankly stated, let us turn to the assets.
The first valuable contribution the Greeks made to political study was that they invented it. It is not too much to say that, before fifth-century Greece, politics did not exist. There were powers and principalities, governments and subjects, but politics no more existed than chemistry existed in the age of alchemy. An imitation of an idea, as Plato has taught us, is not the same as an idea; nor is the imitation of a science the same as a science. Rameses and Nebuchadnezzar, Croesus the Lydian and Cyrus the Persian, ruled over great empires; but within their dominions there were no politics because there were no public affairs. There were only the private affairs of the sovereign and his ruling class. Government and all that pertained to it, from military service and taxation to the supply of women for the royal harem, was simply the expression of the power and desire of the ruler. The great advance made by Greece was to have recognized that public or common interests exist and to have provided, first for their management, and secondly for their study. In other words, the Greeks were the first to rescue the body politic from charlatans and to hand it over to physicians.
How great an achievement this was we can best recognize when we consider how large a place the true study of politics, and the terms and ideas to which it has given rise, fills in the life of the modern man—especially of the modern Englishman. Justice and liberty, law and democracy, parliament and public opinion—all these and many more we owe to the peasants and craftsmen of the small Greek republics who, having felt the need for a better management of their humble concerns, set to work to provide it, with the same inventiveness, the same adaptation of means to end, which led them, in other fields, to the invention of the classic temple or of the drama. If it is going too far to say that every modern politician owes his stock-in-trade of general ideas to the Greeks, there are certainly few who do not owe them their perorations.