Transcendent as is the imperial achievement of the Romans, and unrivaled as is the political sagacity with which they consolidated their power and made it enduring, it must still be recognized that they were the heirs, in war, diplomacy, and government, of the Greeks, their predecessors. They worked with greater power and with larger units than did the Spartans and the Athenians. They benefited by the brilliant inventions and the costly errors of the Macedonians whose kingdoms they destroyed. But their success simply brought to a culmination the imperial movement in which Sparta, Athens, and Macedon were worthy co-workers. It is our task in this series of essays to examine in turn the imperial experiments by which the Greeks not only won a field for the display of their own talents, but also prepared the way for the unification of the ancient world in the empire of Rome.
I alluded a moment ago to the smallness of the units with which the imperial policy of Sparta and Athens had to deal. Before proceeding in the latter part of this chapter to trace the development of the forms by which imperialism was obscured, evaded, and ultimately justified in Greece, I should like to try to make clear the qualities which rendered the little Hellenic communities so hard for imperial digestion. In classic Greece, as in renascence Italy, the city was the state. It had not always been so; for in the past the land had been at one time in the possession of rudimentary nations, called ethne. But in the classic epoch these loose organisms persisted only in certain backward regions in the west and north. Elsewhere city-states had everywhere made their appearance as early as the sixth century B.C.
The circumstances in which these city-states arose are shrouded in the mystery which surrounds most beginnings. They, accordingly, present all the better opportunity for the construction of a theory; and perhaps the theory which had once the greatest vogue is that enunciated by Fustel de Coulanges in his brilliant book on The Ancient City. Of its main propositions, however,—that each city-state came into being at a single moment; that it was an artificial structure deliberately modeled on the preëxistent family; that the family was a religious association created and organized for the worship of ancestors; that the spirits of ancestors were the first gods, or, indeed, were gods at all,—not one has stood the test of a searching inquiry. On the contrary, it seems established that the city-state was the result of a natural growth, and that the incidents which accompanied its development, while varied and numerous, were all manifestations of political progress. Growth in the direction of a large number of distinct states was natural in Greece in view of the well-known physical features of the country; but the study of geography does not explain why these states were cities. For the true explanation of this phenomenon we must not confine our observation to Greece. Broadly speaking, high culture is everywhere city-bred, and the cities have regularly been the leaders in political development. In Babylonia that was the case, though the urban centres there were dominated from a very early date by Semitic tribes from the desert. Free cities, like Tyre and Sidon, were the prime sources of Phœnician enterprise. The home of Roman law and government was a city, and when Italy led the world a second time, she was a complex of city-states. The Hanse towns and the Flemish communes, the chartered cities of England and France, acquired political liberty or political rights long before the rest of Central Europe. Where, in fact, the cities have not been the mother, and the territorial states simply the foster-mother, of freedom and culture, exceptional conditions have existed—such as the need of regulating the Nile's overflow in Egypt, and the model and influence of the Roman empire in Mohammedan and Christian Europe.
The city enables men to coöperate easily. In it ideas and feelings spread quickly. Life, property, and privileges are there protected by walls, and, if need be, by street barricades. "Two voices are there," wrote Wordsworth in 1807, his vision limited by the peril of England and Switzerland,—
"one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,
They were thy chosen music, Liberty."
The voice of a city mob—that of Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, Florence, or Paris, for example—was generally raucous and often cruel. But it made tyrants tremble and limited absolutism when the fear of assassination was powerless.
Fortunately, it is not with the origins, but with the characteristics, of the Greek city-states that we have to do mainly when we seek to discover the grounds of their hatred of all imperialistic projects. Let us, therefore, try to form a concrete impression of the salient features of the hundreds of little states with which the progressive parts of Greece were honeycombed at the beginning of the classic period, in the sixth century B.C. Each political cell, so to speak, had its nucleus in a walled town and its substance in a small circuit of grain, pasture, and garden land which the inhabitants of the town owned and cultivated. Most of the towns were simply hives of farmers. Whether the farmers were landlords, small proprietors, or peasants; however much they were divided by lines of social cleavage, they were all able to meet on the common ground of a single occupation. And every day from March to November, from the out-cropping of the grass and foliage in the spring, through the season of the grain harvest, the vintage, and the picking of the olives, to the fall planting and seeding, the ebb and flow of agricultural life carried the population of the city to the country in the morning and back to the city again in the evening.
There were few towns in Greece whose land did not touch the sea; and from the sea another harvest was gathered. Fishing existed, of course; but that was not all. Transmarine commerce is never wholly absent in any maritime country. In Greece it was especially favored by the difficulties of land transit, and by the excellence of the highways which the sea laid while carving the country up into a myriad of islands, head-lands, and estuaries. Hence, by the opening of the sixth century B.C. a second town had generally appeared on the coast of each little state when the chief town had developed, as was commonly the case, a few miles inland. In the new settlement the tone was set by the sailor-folk and the traders; in the old centre by the landed proprietors and the peasants. But the landlords were frequently merchants, and the peasants could easily attach work-places (ergasteria) to their houses—which, though in the towns, were really farmhouses—and become manufacturers in a small way; while it was regularly the ambition of a trader or seaman to crown a successful career by buying a farm, a ranch, or an orchard. There was, accordingly, a very close connection between urban and agrarian pursuits and interests.