At the Hellespont a halt was made for the king to review his forces. On a lofty throne of white marble he watched the army filling shores and plain, and the ships crowding so close, they hid the water. Thus gazing he shed tears. “There came upon me,” he told one standing by, “a sudden pity when I thought of the shortness of man’s life and considered all this host, so numerous, fated so soon to die.” “Nay, King,” the other answered. “Weep rather for this, that brief as life is there never yet was or will be a man who does not wish more than once to die rather than to live.”
The great army swept on to Greece, drinking the rivers dry as they advanced. Town after town at their approach sent the earth and water which showed that they were no longer free, but already under the Persian yoke. Athens did not send them. There was terror and despair there, too. The oracle at Delphi had spoken to Athenian envoys and had told them to fly to the ends of the earth and make their minds familiar with horrors. Still, the Athenians did not submit. Their cause seemed hopeless. Sparta was as determined as Athens to resist, but her policy was shortsighted. Her heart was in defending only the Peloponnesus; she refused at first to consider anything else. And still the Athenians stood firm. Xerxes’ general sent an ambassador to Athens to offer most generous terms, everything good, in short—except freedom. “Tell the general,” was the answer, “that the Athenians say, as long as the sun moves in his present course we will never come to terms with Xerxes.” When that spirit takes possession of men miracles may be looked for.
Sparta was finally aroused. She sent a little band of soldiers north to defend Thermopylæ, the pass over which the Persians must advance. There was a long and heroic defense which in the end failed. Leonidas, the Spartan commander, sent away the other Greeks who had been fighting with him, “being anxious,” Herodotus says, “that they should not perish, but he and the Spartans would not desert their post, for they held that to be dishonorable.” As they waited for the attack which they knew would be the last, one of them said he had heard the Persians were so numerous that when they shot their arrows they hid the sky. “Good,” said another. “Then we will fight in the shade.” Men like that would make the enemy suffer before they fell. Herodotus describes them “advancing from the fortification which had hitherto protected them, as for certain death, while on the other side the Persian officers flogged their men forward. Thus they fought at Thermopylæ.” And Xerxes, coming to the battlefield when all was over, looked at the many dead and sent for a Greek exile he had in his train. “In what way can we conquer these men?” he asked. “Come, tell me.” But no one could tell him that.
Athens had been abandoned. The priestess at Delphi had spoken again. “Zeus gives a wooden wall to Pallas Athena,” she said, “which shall preserve you and your children.” When the messengers brought this answer back there was great dispute as to what it meant, but, Herodotus says, “a certain man lately risen to eminence whose name was Themistocles, prevailed.” He said the wooden wall was the ships, and the entire populace left the city. The women and children were taken to places of safety; the fleet sailed to the island of Salamis, where the other Greeks assembled. Athens had the largest force and was entitled to the leadership, but she did not press her claim when she saw it would be bitterly contested. “She thought,” Herodotus explains, “the great thing was that Greece should be saved,” not that she should get the honor which was clearly her due. She withdrew and saw, without a protest, Sparta, always her rival, chosen in her stead. That was the greatest moment in her history. If she could have kept that vision of what was really important and what was not, there would have been no Peloponnesian War.
The victory, even so, belonged to the Athenian Themistocles. He made the plan which forced the Persians to fight in the narrow waters around Salamis where their numbers helped to defeat them. Xerxes watched the battle from the shore.
A king sat on the rocky brow
That looks on sea-born Salamis,
And ships by thousands lay below,
And men by nations—all were his.
He counted them at break of day,
And when the sun set where were they?
The victorious Greeks distrusted the evidence of their own eyes. They had gone into battle almost despairing. “The night before,” Herodotus says, “fear and dismay had taken possession of them.” Now they could not believe the awful menace was ended. They held themselves ready for another attack. But the Persian ships put out to sea; they were gone never to return. Liberty had again proved her power. Just before the attack the Greek leaders told their men, “When we join battle with the Persians, before all else remember freedom.” Æschylus, who was there, says they advanced upon the foe with a shout of:
For freedom, sons of Greece,
Freedom for country, children, wives,
Freedom for worship, for our fathers’ graves.
Awe fell upon the victors as they watched the mighty armament depart. “It is not we who have done this,” Themistocles said.
IX
Thucydides
The Thing That Hath Been Is That Which Shall Be
THE SPINNING BALL
The greatest sea power in Europe and the greatest land power faced each other in war. The stake was the leadership of Europe. Each was fighting to strengthen her own position at the expense of the other: in the case of the sea power to hold her widely separated empire; in the case of the land power to challenge that empire and win one for herself. Both, as the war began, were uneasily conscious that an important and even decisive factor might be an Asiatic nation, enormous in extent of territory, which had a foothold in Europe and was believed by many to be interested in watching the two chief Western powers weaken and perhaps destroy each other until in the end she herself could easily dominate Europe.
The year was 431 B.C., when Athens was mistress of the sea, when Sparta had the best army in the world—and Persia saw a prospect of being rid of both at no more cost than encouraging first one and then the other.
Historians to-day generally reject the idea that history repeats itself and may therefore be studied as a warning and a guide. The modern scientific historian looks at his subject very much as the geologist does. History is a chronicle of fact considered for itself alone. There is no pattern in the web unrolled from the loom of time and no profit in studying it except to gain information. That was not the point of view of the Greek historian of the war between Athens and Sparta, whose book is still a masterpiece among histories. Thucydides would never have written his history if he had thought like that. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge had little attraction for the Athenians. They were realists. Knowledge was to be desired because it had value for living; it led men away from error to right action. Thucydides wrote his book because he believed that men would profit from a knowledge of what brought about that ruinous struggle precisely as they profit from a statement of what causes a deadly disease. He reasoned that since the nature of the human mind does not change any more than the nature of the human body, circumstances swayed by human nature are bound to repeat themselves, and in the same situation men are bound to act in the same way unless it is shown to them that such a course in other days ended disastrously. When the reason why a disaster came about is perceived people will be able to guard against that particular danger. “It will perhaps be found,” he writes, “that the absence of storytelling in my work makes it less attractive to listen to, but I shall be satisfied if it is considered useful by all who wish to know the plain truth of the events which happened and will according to human nature happen again in the same way. It was written not for the moment, but for all time.”
The man who looked thus at the historian’s task was a contemporary of the events he related. Thucydides was one of the Athenian generals during the first years of the war. Then fate intervened and turned a soldier into an investigator, for he was exiled when the war was in its tenth year. He tells the reason:
The general sent to the other commander of the district, Thucyd
ides son of Olorus, the author of this history, who was about half a day’s sail from Amphipolis, and urged him to come to their aid. He sailed in haste with seven ships which happened to be at hand, wishing above all to reach Amphipolis before it surrendered. But the citizens capitulated. On the evening of the same day Thucydides and his ships arrived.
He reached the town just too late. Athens punished unsuccessful officers, and from then on Thucydides occupied the post of an observer. “Because of my exile,” he writes, “I was enabled to watch quietly the course of events.”
Extraordinary as the statement is, it is proved true by the book he wrote. From being one of the men his country trusted most he had become a man without a country, a fate in those days little better than death, and, as far as we can judge, he had done nothing to deserve it. Yet he was able “to watch quietly the course of events,” free from bitterness and bias, and to produce a history as coldly impartial as if it had dealt with a far-distant past. He looked at Athens exactly as he did at Sparta, with no concern to give a bit of praise here or blame there. What occupied his mind was something above and beyond the deadly and destructive contest he was recounting. He saw his subject in its eternal aspect—sub specie æternitatis. Underneath the shifting surface of the struggle between two little Greek states he had caught sight of a universal truth. Throughout his book, through the endless petty engagements on sea and land which he relates with such scrupulous care, he is pointing out what war is, why it comes to pass, what it does, and, unless men learn better ways, must continue to do. His History of the Peloponnesian War is really a treatise on war, its causes and its effects.
The war broke out in 431. A succession of petty quarrels had led up to it, insufficient, all put together, to give any adequate reason for a fight to the death between the two chief states of Greece. Aristophanes held them up to ridicule, declaring that the whole business started because some tipsy youngsters from Athens went off to a neighboring town and
stole from Megara a hussy there.
Then men of Megara came here and stole
Two of Aspasia’s minxes. And those three,
No better than they should be, caused the war.
For then in wrath Olympian Pericles
Thundered and lightened and confounded Greece.
What Aristophanes parodied Thucydides dismissed. The real cause of the war was not this or that trivial disturbance, the revolt of a distant colony, the breaking of an unimportant treaty, or the like. It was something far beneath the surface, deep down in human nature, and the cause of all the wars ever fought. The motive power was greed, that strange passion for power and possession which no power and no possession satisfy. Power, Thucydides wrote, or its equivalent wealth, created the desire for more power, more wealth. The Athenians and the Spartans fought for one reason only—because they were powerful, and therefore were compelled (the words are Thucydides’ own) to seek more power. They fought not because they were different—democratic Athens and oligarchical Sparta—but because they were alike. The war had nothing to do with differences in ideas or with considerations of right and wrong. Is democracy right and the rule of the few over the many wrong? To Thucydides the question would have seemed an evasion of the issue. There was no right power. Power, whoever wielded it, was evil, the corruptor of men.
A historian who lived some two hundred years later, Polybius, also a Greek, gives an admirably clear and condensed account of Thucydides’ basic thesis. Human history, he says, is a cycle which excess of power keeps revolving. Primitive despots start the wheel rolling. The more power they get the more they want, and they go on abusing their authority until inevitably opposition is aroused and a few men, strong enough when they unite, seize the rule for themselves. These, too, can never be satisfied. They encroach upon the rights of others until they are opposed in their turn. The people are aroused against them, and democracy succeeds to oligarchy. But there again the evil in all power is no less operative. It brings corruption and contempt for law, until the state can no longer function and falls easily before a strong man who promises to restore order. The rule of the one, of the few, of the many, each is destroyed in turn because there is in them all an unvarying evil—the greed for power—and no moral quality is necessarily bound up with any of them.
The revolution of the cycle Thucydides watched brought results so terrible that he believed an account of them would be a warning which men could not disregard. The fact of first importance for them to realize, which the Peloponnesian War threw into clear relief, was that great power brought about its own destruction. Athens’ triumphant career of empire building ended in ruin. Her immensely rich sea empire had seemed for a long time the exemplar of successful power politics. In reality she had grown too powerful. She acted in the invariable way with the invariable result; she abused her power and she was overwhelmingly defeated. So far Thucydides saw.
We can see farther. The cause of humanity was defeated. Greece’s contribution to the world was checked and soon ceased. Hundreds of years had to pass before men reached again the point where Greek thought left off.
At the beginning of the sixth century, a hundred and fifty years before Thucydides’ war, the Athens we know was born. She had been a little state ruled by a landed aristocracy that slowly as commerce increased turned into an aristocracy of wealth. Wars were infrequent. The main fighting up to the fifth century had been within the state itself, where the idea of the rights of man was gaining ground and the old order was weakening. Fortunately for the city, the early sixth century was marked by the coming forward of a great and good man, Solon, too great and too good to want power for himself. He saw as keenly as Thucydides that power worked out in evil and that greed was its source and its strength. “Men are driven on by greed to win wealth in unrighteous ways,” he wrote, “and he who has most wealth always covets twice as much.” Of power he said, “Powerful men pull the city down,” than which there could be no greater condemnation from a Greek, utterly dependent as every man in those days was upon his city. Solon made over the government in accordance with the new spirit of the times. He gave the common people a share in it, and he laid the foundation for the first democracy in the world. It is true that an interlude followed after his retirement when a strong man profited by violent quarrels between the classes to take control himself, but on the whole he respected Solon’s constitution. Democracy even under a tyranny continued to advance, and the city kept peace with her neighbors. The important island of Salamis, it is true, was taken away from Megara, a near neighbor, at the instigation of no less a person than Solon himself; but it was the only case of its kind.
That was well for Athens. A few years after the tyrant had been put down, in the great and memorable year 490 when the little city had to decide between fighting Persia or being enslaved, she did not have to guard also against enemies in Greece. There has never been a war fought for purer motives than the war against Persia. Marathon and Salamis are still words that “send a ringing challenge down through the generations.” Their victories still seem a miracle as they seemed to the men who won them. The mighty were put down from their seats and those of low degree exalted, and for fifty years and more Persia could do nothing to Greece.
What followed was one of the most triumphant rebirths of the human spirit in all history, when the bitter differences that divide men were far in the background and freedom was in the air—freedom in the great sense, not only equality before the law, but freedom of thought and speech. Surely, we think, then, at any rate, in this sad and suffering world
Joy was it at that season but to live.
There is no joy in the pages of Thucydides. A great change came over Athens in a brief space of time. Two quotations are enough to show it.
As the curtain rises in the Suppliants (held by many, and in my opinion with truth, to be one of Euripides’ early plays) an expedition sent by Argos against Thebes has been defeated, and the Thebans have done what was utterly abhorrent to every Greek: they have refu
sed to allow the enemy to bury their dead. Their leader comes to Athens for help “because,” he tells Theseus, the Athenian king, “Athens of all cities is compassionate.” As Theseus hesitates to take on the quarrel, however righteous, of another state his mother tells him it is his duty. The city’s honor is at stake as well as his own.
Look to the things of God.
Know you are bound to help all who are wronged.
Bound to constrain all who destroy the law.
What else holds state to state save this alone,
That each one honors the great laws of right.
Theseus acknowledges that what she says is true. Athens is the defender of the defenseless, the enemy of the oppressor. Wherever she goes freedom follows.
Only a few years later, Thucydides has Pericles, his ideal statesman, give this warning to the Athenians:
Do not think you are fighting for the simple issue of letting this or that state become free or remain subject to you. You have an empire to lose. You must realize that Athens has a mighty name in the world because she has never yielded to misfortunes and has to-day the greatest power that exists. To be hated has always been the lot of those who have aspired to rule over others. In face of that hatred you cannot give up your power—even if some sluggards and cowards are all for being noble at this crisis. Your empire is a tyranny by now, perhaps, as many think, wrongfully acquired, but certainly dangerous to let go.
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