The Life of Greece
Page 63
Epaminondas came of a distinguished but impoverished family which proudly traced its origin to the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus a thousand years before. He was a quiet man, of whom it was said that no one talked less or knew more.7 His modesty and integrity, his almost ascetic life, his devotion to his friends, his prudence in counsel, his courage and yet selfrestraint in action, endeared him to all the Thebans despite the military discipline to which he subjected them. He did not love war, but he was convinced that no nation could lose all martial spirit and habits and yet maintain its freedom. Elected and many times re-elected boeotarch, he warned those who proposed to vote for him: “Bethink yourselves once more; for if I am made general you will be compelled to serve in my army.”8 Under his command the lax Thebans were drilled into good soldiers; even the “Greek lovers” who were so numerous in the city were formed by Pelopidas into a “Sacred Band” of three hundred hoplites, each of whom was pledged to stand by his friend, in battle, to the death.
When a Spartan army of ten thousand troops under King Cleombrotus invaded Boeotia, Epaminondas met it at Leuctra, near Plataea, with six thousand men, and won a victory that influenced the political history of Greece and the military methods of Europe. He was the first Hellene to make a careful study of tactics; he counted on facing odds in every battle, and concentrated his best fighters upon one wing for offense, while the remainder were ordered to follow a policy of defense; in this way the enemy, advancing in the center, could be disordered by a flank attack on its left. After Leuctra Epaminondas and Pelopidas marched into the Peloponnesus, freed Messenia from its century-long vassalage to Sparta, and founded the city of Megalopolis as a stronghold for all Arcadians. Even into Laconia the Theban army descended—an event without precedent for hundreds of years past. Sparta never recovered from her losses in this campaign: “She could not stand up against a single defeat,” says Aristotle, “but was ruined through the small number of her citizens.”9
Winter coming, the Thebans withdrew to Boeotia. Epaminondas, overreaching himself in typical Greek style, began to dream now of establishing a Theban Empire to replace the unity that Athenian or Spartan leadership had once given to Greece. His plans involved him in a war with the Athenians; and Sparta, thinking to rehabilitate herself, made an alliance with Athens. The hostile armies met at Mantinea in 362. Epaminondas won, but was killed in action by Gryllus, son of Xenophon. The brief hegemony of Thebes left no permanent boon to Hellas; it liberated Greece from the despotism of Sparta, but failed, like its predecessors, to create beyond Boeotia a coherent unity; and the conflicts that it engendered left the Greek states disordered and weakened when Philip came down upon them from the north.
III. THE SECOND ATHENIAN EMPIRE
Athens made a final attempt to forge such a unity. Through her rebuilt walls and fleet, the dependability of her coinage, her long-established facilities for finance and trade, she slowly won back commercial supremacy in the Aegean. Her former subjects and allies had learned from the wars of the last half century the need for a larger security than individual sovereignty could bring; and in 378 the majority of them combined again under Athens’ leadership. By 370 Athens was once more the greatest power in the eastern Mediterranean.
Industry and trade were now the substance of her economic life. The soil of Attica had never been propitious to common tillage; patient labor had made it fruitful through tending the olive tree and the vine; but the Spartans had destroyed these, and few of the peasants were willing to wait half a generation for new olive orchards to yield. Most of the farmers of prewar days were dead; many of the survivors were too discouraged to go back to their ruined holdings, and sold them at low prices to absentee owners who could afford long-term investments. In this way, and through the eviction of peasant debtors, the ownership of Attica passed into a few families, who worked many of the large estates with slaves.10 The mines at Laurium were reopened, fresh victims were sent into the pits, and new riches were transmuted out of silver ore and human blood. Xenophon11 proposed a genial plan whereby Athens might replenish her treasury through the purchase of ten thousand slaves and their lease to the contractors at Laurium. Silver was mined in such abundance that the supply of the metal outran the production of goods, prices rose faster than wages, and the poor bore the burden of the change.
Industry flourished. The quarries at Pentelicus and the potteries in the Ceramicus had orders from all the Aegean world. Fortunes were made by buying cheap the products of domestic handicraft or small factories, and selling them dear in the home market or abroad. The growth of commerce and the accumulation of wealth in money instead of in land rapidly multiplied the number of bankers in Athens. They received cash or valuables for safekeeping, but apparently paid no interest on deposits. Soon discovering that under normal conditions not all deposits were reclaimed at once, the bankers began to lend funds at substantial rates of interest, providing, at first, money instead of credit. They acted as bail for clients, and made collections for them; they lent money on the security of land or precious articles, and helped to finance the shipment of goods. Through their aid, and even more through speculative loans by private individuals, the merchant might hire a ship, transport his goods to a foreign market, and buy there a return cargo—which, on reaching the Piraeus, remained the property of the lenders until the loan was repaid.12 As the fourth century progressed, a real credit system developed: the bankers, instead of advancing cash, issued letters of credit, money orders, or checks; wealth could now pass from one client to another merely by entries in the banker’s books.13 Businessmen or bankers issued bonds for mercantile loans, and every large inheritance included a number of such bonds. Some bankers, like the exslave Pasion, developed so many connections, and acquired by a discriminating honesty so widespread a reputation for reliability, that their bond was honored throughout the Greek world. Pasion’s bank had many departments and employees, mostly slaves; it kept a complex set of books, in which every transaction was so carefully recorded that these accounts were usually accepted in court as indisputable evidence. Bank failures were not uncommon, and we hear of “panics” in which bank after bank closed its doors.14 Serious charges of malfeasance were brought against even the most prominent banks, and the people looked upon the bankers with that same mixture of envy, admiration, and dislike with which the poor favor the rich in all ages.15
The change from landed to movable wealth produced a feverish struggle for money, and the Greek language had to invent a word, pleonexia, to denote this appetite for “more and more,” and another word, chrematistike, for the busy pursuit of riches. Goods, services, and persons were increasingly judged in terms of money and property. Fortunes were made and unmade with a new rapidity, and were spent in lavish displays that would have shocked the Athens of Pericles. The nouveaux riches (the Greeks had a name for them—neoplutoi) built gaudy houses, bedecked their women with costly robes and jewels, spoiled them with a dozen servants, and made it a principle to feed their guests with none but expensive drinks and foods.16
In the midst of this wealth poverty increased, for the same variety and freedom of exchange that enabled the clever to make money allowed the simple to lose it faster than before. Under the new mercantile economy the poor were relatively poorer than in the days of their serfdom on the land. In the countryside the peasants laboriously turned their sweat into a little oil or wine; in the towns the wages of free labor were kept down by the competition of slaves. Hundreds of citizens depended for their maintenance upon the fees paid for attendance at the Assembly or the courts; thousands of the population had to be fed by the temples or the state. The number of voters (not to speak of the general population) who had no property was in 431 some forty-five per cent of the electorate; in 355 it had mounted to fifty-seven per cent.17 The middle classes, which had provided by their aggregate number and power a balance between the aristocracy and the commons, had lost much of their wealth, and could no longer mediate between the rich and the poor, between an unyielding con
servatism and a Utopian radicalism; Athenian society divided itself into Plato’s “two cities”—“one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, the one at war with the other.”18 The poor schemed to despoil the rich by legislation or revolution, the rich organized themselves for protection against the poor. The members of some oligarchic clubs, says Aristotle, took a solemn oath: “I will be an adversary of the people” (i.e., the commons), “and in the Council I will do it all the evil that I can.”19 “The rich have become so unsocial,” writes Isocrates, about 366, “that those who own property had rather throw their possessions into the sea than lend aid to the needy, while those who are in poorer circumstances would less gladly find a treasure than seize the possessions of the rich.”20
In this conflict more and more of the intellectual classes took the side of the poor.21 They disdained the merchants and bankers whose wealth seemed to be in inverse proportion to their culture and taste; even rich men among them, like Plato, began to flirt with communistic ideas. Pericles had used colonization as a safety valve to reduce the intensity of the class struggle;22 but Dionysius controlled the west, Macedonia was expanding in the north, and Athens found it ever more difficult to conquer and settle new lands. Finally the poorer citizens captured the Assembly, and began to vote the property of the rich into the coffers of the state, for redistribution among the needy and the voters through state enterprises and fees.23 The politicians strained their ingenuity to discover new sources of public revenue. They doubled the indirect taxes, the customs dues on imports and exports, and the hundredth on real-estate transfers; they continued the extraordinary taxes of war time into peace; they appealed for “voluntary” contributions, and laid upon the rich ever new opportunities (“liturgies”) to finance public enterprises from their private funds; they resorted every now and then to confiscations and expropriations; and they broadened the field of the property-income tax to include lower levels of wealth.24 Any man burdened with a liturgy could by law compel another to take it over if he could prove that the other was wealthier than he, and had borne no liturgy within two years. To facilitate the collection of revenue the taxpayers were divided into a hundred “symmories” (cosharers); the richest members of each group were required to pay, at the opening of each tax year, the whole tax due from the group for the year, and were left to collect during the year, as best they could, the shares due from the other members of the group. The result of these imposts was a wholesale hiding of wealth and income. Evasion became universal, and as ingenious as taxation. In 355 Androtion was appointed to head a squad of police empowered to search for hidden income, collect arrears, and imprison tax evaders. Houses were entered, goods were seized, men were thrown into jail. But the wealth still hid itself, or melted away. Isocrates, old and rich, and furious at being saddled with a liturgy, complained in 353: “When I was a boy, wealth was regarded as a thing so secure as well as admirable that almost everyone affected to own more property than he actually possessed. . . . Now a man has to be ready to defend himself against being rich as if it were the worst of crimes.”25 In other cities the process of decentralizing wealth was not so legal: the debtors of Mytilene massacred their creditors en masse, and excused themselves on the ground that they were hungry; the democrats of Argos (370) suddenly fell upon the rich, killed twelve hundred of them, and confiscated their property. The moneyed families of otherwise hostile states leagued themselves secretly for mutual aid against popular revolts. The middle classes, as well as the rich, began to distrust democracy as empowered envy, and the poor began to distrust it as a sham equality of votes stultified by a gaping inequality of wealth. The increasing bitterness of the class war left Greece internally as well as internationally divided when Philip pounced down upon it; and many rich men in the Greek cities welcomed his coming as the alternative to revolution.26
Moral disorder accompanied the growth of luxury and the enlightenment of the mind. The masses cherished their superstitions and clung to their myths; the gods of Olympus were dying, but new ones were being born; exotic divinities like Isis and Ammon, Atys and Bendis, Cybele and Adonis were imported from Egypt or Asia, and the spread of Orphism brought fresh devotees to Dionysus every day. The rising and half-alien bourgeoisie of Athens, trained to practical calculation rather than to mystic feeling, had little use for the traditional faith; the patron gods of the city won from them only a formal reverence, and no longer inspired them with moral scruples or devotion to the state.* Philosophy struggled to find in civic loyalty and a natural ethic some substitute for divine commandments and a surveillant deity; but few citizens cared to live with the simplicity of Socrates, or the magnanimity of Aristotle’s “great-minded man.”
As the state religion lost its hold upon the educated classes, the individual freed himself more and more from the old moral restraints—the son from parental authority, the male from marriage, the woman from motherhood, the citizen from political responsibility. Doubtless Aristophanes exaggerated these developments; and though Plato, Xenophon, and Isocrates agreed with him, they were all conservatives who might be relied upon to tremble at any doings of the growing generation. The morals of war improved in the fourth century, and a wave of Enlightenment humanitarianism followed the teachings of Euripides and Socrates, and the example of Agesilaus.27 But sexual and political morality continued to decline. Bachelors and courtesans increased in fashionable co-operation, and free unions gained ground on legal marriage.28 “Is not a concubine more desirable than a wife?” asks a character in a fourth-century comedy. “The one has on her side the law that compels you to retain her, no matter how displeasing she may be; the other knows that she must hold a man by behaving well, or else look for another.”29 So Praxiteles and then Hypereides lived with Phryne, Aristippus with Lais, Stilpo with Nicarete, Lysias with Metaneira, the austere Isocrates with Lagiscium.30 “The young men,” says Theopompus, with a moralist’s exaggeration, “spent all their time among flute-girls and courtesans; those who were a little older devoted themselves to gambling and profligacy; and the whole people spent more on public banquets and entertainments than on the provision necessary for the well-being of the state.”31
The voluntary limitation of the family was the order of the day, whether by contraception, by abortion, or by infanticide. Aristotle notes that some women prevent conception “by anointing that part of the womb upon which the seed falls with oil of cedar, or ointment of lead, or frankincense commingled with olive oil.”*32 The old families were dying out; they existed, said Isocrates, only in their tombs; the lower classes were multiplying, but the citizen class in Attica had fallen from 43,000 in 431 to 22,000 in 400 and 21,000 in 313.33 The supply of citizens for military service suffered a corresponding decrease, partly from the dysgenic carnage of war, partly from the reduced number of those who had a property stake in the state, partly from unwillingness to serve; the life of comfort and domesticity, of business and scholarship, had replaced the Periclean life of exercise, martial discipline, and public office.34 Athletics were professionalized; the citizens who in the sixth century had crowded the palaestra and the gymnasium were now content to exert themselves vicariously by witnessing professional exhibitions. Young men received some grounding, as epheboi, in the art of war; but adults found a hundred ways of escaping military service. War itself had become professionalized by technical complications, and required the full time of specially trained men; citizen soldiers had to be replaced with mercenaries—an omen that the leadership of Greece must soon pass from statesmen to warriors. While Plato talked of philosopher kings, soldier kings were growing up under his nose. Greek mercenaries sold themselves impartially to Greek or “barbarian” generals, and fought as often against Greece as for her; the Persian armies that Alexander faced were full of Greeks. Soldiers shed their blood now not for a fatherland, but for the best paymaster that they could find.
Making honorable exceptions for the archonship of Eucleides (403) and the financial administration of Lycurgus (338-26), the political co
rruption and turbulence that had followed the death of Pericles continued during the fourth century. According to the law, bribery was punished with death; according to Isocrates,35 it was rewarded with military and political preferment. Persia had no difficulty in bribing the Greek politicians to make war upon other Greek states or upon Macedon; at last even Demosthenes illustrated the morals of his time. He was one of the noblest of one of the lowest groups in Athens—the rhetors or hired orators who in this century became professional lawyers and politicians. Some of these men, like Lycurgus, were reasonably honest; some of them, like Hypereides, were gallant; most of them were no better than they had to be. If we may take Aristotle’s word for it, many of them specialized in invalidating wills.36 Several of them laid up great fortunes through political opportunism and reckless demagogy. The rhetors divided into parties, and tore the air with their campaigns. Each party organized committees, invented catchwords, appointed agents, and raised funds; those who paid the expenses of all this frankly confessed that they expected to “reimburse themselves doubly.”37 As politics grew more intense, patriotism waned; the bitterness of faction absorbed public energy and devotion, and left little for the city. The constitution of Cleisthenes and the individualism of commerce and philosophy had weakened the family and liberated the individual; now the free individual, as if to avenge the family, turned around and destroyed the state.
In or near 400 the triumphant democrats, to insure the presence of the poorer citizens at the ekklesia and thereby to prevent its domination by the propertied classes, extended state payment to attendance at the Assembly. At first each citizen received an obol (17 cents); as the cost of living rose this was increased to two obols, then to three, until in Aristotle’s time it stood at a drachma ($ 1) per day.38 It was a reasonable arrangement, for the ordinary citizen towards the end of the fourth century, earned a drachma and a half for a day’s work; he could not be expected to leave his employment without some recompense. The plan soon gave the poor a majority in the Assembly; more and more the well to do, despairing of victory, stayed home. It was of no use that a revision of the constitution in 403 confined the power of legislation to a body of five nomothetai, or lawmakers, selected from the citizens chosen by lot for jury service; this new group also inclined to the side of the commons, and its interposition lowered the prestige and authority of the more conservative Council. Perhaps in consequence of the payment for attendance, the level of intelligence in the Assembly seems to have fallen in the fourth century—though our authorities for this are prejudiced reactionaries like Aristophanes and Plato.39 Isocrates thought that the Assembly should be paid by Athens’ enemies to meet frequently, since it made so many mistakes.40