The Evolution of States. J. M. Robertson
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_8c23a2c4-97ae-5774-a36b-a0b5de02cdca">[88] Polybius, vi, 51. See below, ch. iv, § 1 (11).
[89] I am aware that Mr. Bury protests against this division; but his own difficulty in calling the middle (Byzantine) Empire the "later Roman Empire," while implicitly accepting the "Holy" Empire as another "later Roman Empire," is the best proof that the established nomenclature is the most convenient. Nobody is misled by it. A compromise might perhaps be made on the form "Greek Empire," contended for by M. Sathes (Monumenta Historiæ Hellenicæ, i, pref. p. 5), following on M. Rambaud.
[90] As cited below, pt. v, ch. i.
[91] Salvian, for instance, sees in the barbarian irruption a punishment of Christian sins; he never dreams of asking the cause of the Christian and pre-Christian corruption. Prudentius, again, is a thorough imperialist. See the critique and citations of M. Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme, ii, 136–141,407. Origen had set the note a century before Constantine (Contra Celsum, viii, 68–72).
Chapter III
GREEK POLITICAL EVOLUTION
The politico-economic history of Greece has been less cleared up than that of Rome, by reason not only of the greater complexity of the problem, but of the predominance of literary specialism in Greek studies.
The modern Greek historian, Paparrigopoulo, has published in French an Histoire de la Civilisation hellénique (Paris, 1878), which condenses his learned Greek work in five volumes; but the general view, though sometimes suggestive, is both scanty and superficial as regards ancient Greek history, and runs to an unprofitable effort at showing the "unity" of all Hellenic history, Pagan and Christian, in terms of an assumed conception of Hellenic character.
The posthumous Griechische Culturgeschichte of Jakob Burckhardt (1898) throws little light on social evolution. Trustworthy, weighty, and lucid, like all Burckhardt's work, it is rather a survey of Greek moral conditions than a study of social development, thus adding something of synthesis to the previous scholarly literature on the subject without reducing the phenomena to any theory of causation. It includes, however, good studies of vital social developments, such as slavery, to which Grote and Thirlwall paid surprisingly little attention, and which Mahaffy handles inadequately. This is also to be studied in W.R. Patterson's Nemesis of Nations (1907)—with some caution as regards the political generalisations.
Since the first edition of the present work there has appeared, in Dr. G.B. Grundy's Thucydides and the History of his Age (1911) a new recognition of the fundamental character of economic conditions in Greek as in other history. Dr. Grundy, finding no academic precedent for his sociological method, has urged as new truths propositions which for economic historians are or should have been axioms. The result, however, is a really stimulating and valuable presentment of Greek history in terms of causal forces.
The chapters on Greece in Dr. Cunningham's Western Civilisation (1898), though they contain not a few explanations of Greek culture-phenomena on the old lines, in terms of themselves, are helpful for the purposes of the present inquiry, since they really study causation, as do Meyer's Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung des Alterthums and some other recent German treatises, of which Dr. Cunningham makes use.
Much use, however, remains to be made of these and previous expert studies. Boeckh's great work on the Public Economy of the Athenians, which, though containing economic absurdities, hardly deserves even in that regard the strictures passed on it by the first English translator (Sir G.C. Lewis, 1828; 2nd ed. 1842; superior American ed. tr. from 2nd German ed. by A. Lamb, 1857), has not very fruitfully affected the later historians proper. The third German edition by Fränkel, 1886, typifies the course of scholarship. It corrects details and adds a mass of apparatus criticus equal in bulk to the whole original work, but supplies no new ideas. Heeren's section on Greece in his Ideen, etc., translated as a Sketch of the Political History of Ancient Greece (1829), and also as part of Heeren's Thoughts on the Politics, etc., of the Ancient World, is too full of early misconceptions to be well worth returning to, save for its general view. On the other hand, Grote's great History of Greece, though unmatched in its own species, and though a far more philosophical performance than that of Mitford (which Professor Mahaffy and the King of Greece agree in preferring for its doctrine), is substantially a narrative and critical history on the established lines, and does not aim at being more than incidentally sociological; and that of Bishop Thirlwall, though in parts superior in this regard, is substantially in similar case. At several points, indeed, Grote truly illuminates the sociological problem—notably in his view of the reactions between the Greek drama and the Greek life. Of the German general histories, that of Holm (Eng. tr. 4 vols. 1894–98) is a trustworthy and judicious embodiment of the latest research, but has no special intellectual weight, and is somewhat needlessly prolix. The history of Dr. Evelyn Abbott, so far as it has gone, has fully equal value in most respects; but both leave the need for a sociological history unsatisfied. Mr. Warde Fowler's City State of the Greeks and Romans (1893) points in the right direction, but needs following up.
Apart from Burckhardt and Cunningham, the nearest approach yet made to a sociological study of Greek civilisation is the series of works on Greek social history by Professor Mahaffy (Social Life in Greece; Greek Life and Thought from the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest; The Greek World under Roman Sway; Problems of Greek History; and Survey of Greek Civilisation). These learned and brilliant volumes have great value as giving more vivid ideas of Greek life than are conveyed by any of the regular histories, and as constantly stimulating reflection; but they lack method, omit much, and abound regrettably in capricious and inconsistent dicta. The Survey is disappointing as emphasising rather than making good the defects of the previous treatises. G.F. Hertzberg's Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Römer (1866), and indeed all his works on Greek history, are always worth consulting.
Some help may be had from the volume on Greece in the Industrial History of the Free Nations by W.T. M'Cullagh (1846); but that fails to throw any light on what should have been its primary problem, the rise of Greek industry, and is rather sentimental than scientific in spirit. For later Greece, Finlay (History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans, revised ed. 7 vols. 1877) becomes illuminating by his interest in economic law, though he holds uncritically enough by some now exploded principles, and exhibits some religious prejudice. His somewhat entangled opening sections express his difficulties as a pioneer in sociological history—difficulties only too abundantly apparent in the following pages. Professor J.B. Bury's History of the Later Roman Empire (2 vols. 1889) is an admirable work; but it does not attempt, save incidentally, to supersede Finlay in matters economic.
§ 1
The political history of ancient Greece, similarly summarised, will serve perhaps even better the purpose of illuminating later evolution. That history has served historian after historian as a means of modern polemic. The first considerable English historians of Greece, Gillies and Mitford, pointed to the evil fate of Greek democracy as a conclusive argument against countenancing democracy now; never stopping to ask whether ancient monarchies had fared any better than the democracies. And it is perfectly true that present-day democracies will tend to bad fortune just as did the ancient unless they bottom themselves more firmly and guide themselves by a deeper political science. It will not suffice that we have rejected the foundation of slavery, on which all the Greek polities rested. The strifes between the demos and the aristocracy in the Greek City-States would have arisen just as surely, though more slowly, if the demos, instead of being an upper-grade populace owning slaves, had included the whole mass of the artisan and serving class.[92] Where