Beset with dangers such as this, the Spartans had to tread warily. They drafted Periœcs into their army so as to make it about fifty-six hundred strong. They picked out Helots, trained and emancipated them, and used them abroad as soldiers. They took mercenaries into their service and distributed them according to local needs under Spartan captains, acting always, however, on requests from local governments. They got large contingents of troops from their old allies, whom, however, they left free of tribute, financing their government with a thousand talents raised annually from the former allies of Athens. With the funds thus secured they hired rowers and marines for the warships which their allies furnished and thus patrolled the sea as well as the land. They got a moral mandate for empire by upholding everywhere aristocracy, real or sham, against democracy, and by assuming the rôle of champion of Greece against the barbarians. This did not prevent them, however, from forming an alliance with Dionysius I,[42] who had just made himself tyrant of Syracuse, or from working in harmony with Persia as long as that was possible.
"The growth of Lacedæmon," said Timolaus of Corinth[43] in 394 B.C., "seems to me just like that of some mighty river—at its sources small and easily crossed, but as it further and further advances, other rivers discharge themselves into its channel, and its stream grows ever more formidable. So it is with the Lacedæmonians. Take them at the starting-point and they are but a single community, but as they advance and attach city after city they grow more numerous and more resistless. I observe that when people wish to take wasps' nests—if they try to capture the creatures on the wing, they are liable to be attacked by half the hive; whereas, if they apply fire to them ere they leave their homes, they will master them without scathe themselves. On this principle, I think it best to bring about the battle within the hive itself, or, short of that, as close to Lacedæmon as possible."
The advice was sound; but the wasps could not be caught at home. It was not till Athens had beaten the Spartans at sea, and Thebes had beaten them on land, that Epaminondas reached the hive. He then broke up the Peloponnesian league, emancipated the Helots of Messenia, and substituted, for the once considerable power which had saved the Peloponnesus from serious attack for two hundred years, a multitude of little city-states such as existed elsewhere in Greece—rather, such as came to exist elsewhere in European Greece, when, a few years later, with Epaminondas's death, the supremacy of Thebes ceased, Athens was abandoned by the states which had joined her against Sparta, and the empire of Dionysius I in the west dissolved, shortly after his death, into its constituent parts.
Theoretically, conditions should then have been ideal. In the case of the Greeks the deep-seated human instinct to compare the present disadvantageously with the past was not checked by a theory of evolution conceived as progress, such as misleads many sensible people nowadays to imagine that the farther back they go the more rudimentary political and social conditions become. The golden age of the Greeks lay in "the dark backward and abysm of time." In early days, before the rise of the Spartan and Athenian empires, every city, so it was believed, had "lived in peace, free and autonomous, and in secure possession of its own territory." For more than a century men had struggled to bring back those blessed times, and now at length their efforts, it might have seemed, had been crowned with success. Every city in Greece, great and small, had apparently regained its liberty and autonomy.
At the same time men had made a persistent effort to reëstablish in each city "the constitution of the fathers," and under the Spartan hegemony the favorable opportunity for success in this campaign had seemingly come. But it then appeared that, apart from the general understanding that citizenship was to be reserved to those who could afford to pay taxes and provide themselves with the arms and knowledge of arms necessary for fighting, no two persons agreed as to what the "ancestral constitution" was. It proved to be in reality the ideal of each reformer and each politician, and since the age was one in which most of the ordinary restraints were lacking as they seldom are in the history of civilized man, the transition from an unpopular ideal to a conspiracy was apt to be singularly abrupt. The outcome of the attempts to restore the urban particularism of mediæval Greece and the constitutions of the over-praised olden time was unsatisfactory to everybody. Barren wars of city against city instead of large enterprises directed by imperial ambitions; an atmosphere murky with plots and counter-plots, where once there had blown the strong wind of steady civic progress; and, in addition, national disaster and humiliation despite manifest military superiority—these were the bitter fruits of political reaction in Greece during the Spartan supremacy.
It was in this unhappy age that the science of government was born, and it bears its birthmark to the present day. The midwife, to use his own homely figure, was Socrates, whom the Athenians, tarred on by Aristophanes, put to death "for corrupting the youth and introducing strange gods." He, of course, denied the accusations, and claimed that he deserved the honors of a public benefactor for taking men individually and showing to them how ill they understood the virtues on which all societies are based, to wit, justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage. No one, he thought, could make them better citizens except by promoting truth and dispelling ignorance about these things. His execution consecrated his mission. It was the sowing of dragon's teeth from which sprang up armed warriors, of whom the most doughty were Plato and Aristotle.
The vice of the Socratic school was a noble one—an enormous overestimate of the value of education. "Truth is the beginning of every good thing," says Plato,[44] "both to gods and men; and he who would be blessed and happy, should be from the first a partaker of the truth, that he may live a true man as long as possible, for then he can be trusted; but he is not to be trusted who loves voluntary falsehood and he who loves involuntary falsehood is a fool." There was, of course, only one truth; which, being discovered, should be taught; which, being taught, must be acted upon, since, if men really knew what was right, it was impossible, Plato thought—ignoring the frailty or obstinacy of the human will—that they should not do it. "Discover the truth." "Teach it." These are the two Socratic commandments.
I have no intention to make an exposition of the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,[45] but to do something much more modest: to explain wherein and wherefore they missed the truth in the matter of Greek imperialism, and to notice some of the historic forces which they disregarded. If I deal with the Laws rather than the Republic of Plato, it is because it is his more mature and less imaginative work.