The Evolution of States. J. M. Robertson
and Robertson, Clarendon and Burnet, be termed superficial, the "standard" will involve a similar characterisation of most historical writers of our own day. As regards present-day literary productions, De Tocqueville and Mr. Godkin alike omit the necessary economic analysis.
(13) In the intellectual infectiousness of all class degradation, properly speaking, lies the final sociological (as apart from the primary ethical) condemnation of slavery. The familiar argument that slavery first secured the leisure necessary for culture, even were it wholly instead of being merely partially true, would not rebut the censure that falls to be passed on slavery in later stages of civilisation. All the ancient States, before Greece, stood on slavery: then it was not slavery that yielded her special culture. What she gained from older civilisations was the knowledge and the arts developed by specialisation of pursuits; and such specialisation was not necessarily dependent on slavery, which could abound without it. It was in the special employment, finally, of the exceptionally large free population of Athens that the greatest artistic output was reached.[147] In later periods, the slave population was the great nucleus of superstition and anti-culture.
Inasmuch, then, as education is in only a small degree compatible with toilsome poverty, the betterment of the material conditions of the toiling class is essential to progress in ideas. That is to say, continual progress implies gradual elimination of class inequality, and cannot subsist otherwise. At the same time, a culture-class must be maintained by new machinery when leisured wealth is got rid of.[148]
(14) Again, it follows from the foregoing (4–10) that the highest civilisation will be that in which the greatest number of varying culture-influences meet,[149] in the most happily-crossed stock, under climatic conditions favourable to energy, on a basis of a civilisation sufficiently matured.[150] But in order to the effectual action of such various culture-influences through all classes of the nation in which they meet, there is needed a constant application of social or political regimen. In the lack of that, a great conflux of culture-forces may miss fruition. A mere fortuitous depression of the rich class, and elevation of the poor, will not suffice to place a society on a sound or even on an improved footing. Such a change occurred in ancient Athens after Salamis, when the poorer sort, who had constituted the navy, flourished[151] as against the richer, who had been the land soldiery, and whose lands had been ravaged. But the forces of disintegration played afresh. Yet again, transient financial conditions, such as those of Italy before the Reformation, of Holland until the decline of its fishing and trade, and of Venice until its final commercial decay, may sustain a great artistic life, art having always depended on private or public demand. Thus with a change in the geographical course of trade, a great phase of culture-life may dwindle. So many and so complex are the forces and conditions of progress in civilisation.
§ 2
It will readily be seen that most of the foregoing propositions have direct reference to well-known facts of history. Thus (a) ancient Egypt represents a primary civilisation, marked indeed by some fluctuations connected with dynastic changes which involved mixture of stocks, but on the whole singularly fixed; while ancient Greek civilisation was emphatically a secondary one, the fruit of much race-mixture and many interacting culture-forces, all facilitated by the commercial position and coast-conformation of Hellas.
This view is partly rejected by Grote in two passages (pt. i, chs. xvi, xvii, ed. 1888, i, 326, 413) in which he gives to the "inherent and expansive force" of "the Greek mind" the main credit of Greek civilisation. But his words, to begin with, are confused and contradictory: "The transition of the Greek mind from its poetical to its comparatively positive stage was self-operated, accomplished by its own inherent and expansive force—aided indeed, but by no means either impressed or provoked from without." In the second place, there is no basis for the denial of "impression or provocation" from without. And finally, what is decisive, the historian himself has in other passages acknowledged that the Greeks received from Asia and Egypt just such "provocation" as is seen to take place in varying degrees in the culture-contacts of all nations (chs. xv, xvi, pp. 307, 329). Of the contact with Egypt he expressly says that it "enlarged the range of their thoughts and observations." His whole treatment of the rise of culture, however, is meagre and imperfect relatively to his ample study of the culture itself. Later students grow more and more unanimous as to the composite character of the Greek-speaking stock in the earliest traceable periods of Hellenic life (cp. Bury, History of Greece, ed. 1906, pp. 39–42, and Professor Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete, 1907, p. 144), and the consequent complexity of the entire Hellenic civilisation. The case is suggestively put by Eduard Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 155) in the observation that while the west coast of Greece had as many natural advantages as the eastern, it remained backward in civilisation when the other had progressed far. "Here there lacked the foreign stimulus: the west of Greece is away from the source of culture. Here, accordingly, primitive conditions continued to rule, while in the east a higher culture evolved itself. … Corinth in the older period played no part whatever, whether in story or in remains." The same proposition was put a generation ago by A. Bertrand, who pointed out that the coasts of Elis and Messenia are "incomparably more fertile" than those of Argolis and Attica (Études de mythologie et d'archéologie grecques, 1858, pp. 40–41); and again by Winwood Reade in The Martyrdom of Man (1872, p. 64): "A glance at the map is sufficient to explain why it was that Greece became civilised before the other European lands. It is nearest to those countries in which civilisation first arose … compelled to grow towards Asia as a tree grows towards the light." But to this generalisation should be put the qualifying clause (above, p. 55) that fertile coasts when developed are defensible only by a strongly organised community. Thus an early exploitation of Elis and Messenia would be checked by piracy.
The question as to the originality of Greek culture, it is interesting to note, was already discussed at the beginning of the eighteenth century. See Shaftesbury's Characteristics, Misc. iii, ch. i.
(b) The Greek land as a whole, especially the Attic, was only moderately fertile, and therefore not so cheaply and redundantly populated as Egypt.
The bracing effect of their relative poverty was fully recognised by the Greeks themselves. Cp. Herodotus, vii, 102, and Thucydides, i, 123. See on the same point Heeren, Political History of Ancient Greece, Eng. tr. pp. 24–33; Thirlwall, History of Greece, small ed. i, 12; Duncker, Gesch. des Alterthums, iii, ch. i, § 1; Wachsmuth, Hist. Antiq. of the Greeks, § 8; Duruy, Hist. Grecque, 1851, p. 7; Grote, part ii, ch. i (ed. 1888, ii, 160); Boeckh, Public Economy of Athens, B. i, c. 8; Niebuhr, Lectures, li (Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 265); Mahaffy, Rambles and Studies in Greece, 4th ed. pp. 137, 164–67. Dr. Grundy (Thucydides and the History of his Age, 1911, p. 58 sq.) lays stress on the fertility of the valleys, but recognises the smallness of the fertile areas.
(c) Hellas was further so decisively cut up into separate cantons by its mountain ranges, and again in respect of the multitude of the islands, that the Greek districts were largely foreign to each other,[152] and their cultures had thus the advantage of reacting and interacting, as against the disadvantage of their incurable political separateness—that disadvantage in turn being correlative with the advantage of insusceptibility to a despotism.
The effect of geographical conditions on Greek history is discussed at length in Conrad Bursian's essay, Ueber den Einfluss des griechischen Landes auf den Charakter seiner Bewohner, which I have been unable to procure or see; but I gather from his Geographie von Griechenlands that he takes the view here set forth. Cp. Senior's Journal kept in Turkey and Greece, 1859, p. 255, for a modern Greek's view of the state of his nation, "divided into small districts by mountain ranges intersecting each other in all directions without a road or canal"; the deduction from the same perception made by the