Problems in Greek history Part 15

[Sidenote: The modern ground of acquittal.]

-- 61. The modern ground of acquittal urged is this, that we cannot for a moment conceive a pure and high-souled patriot, who had risked all for the national cause, to have been guilty of taking bribes or embezzling money. Schafer indeed distinctly says[148:1] that his judgment is determined by his estimate of the moral character of its hero; and so not only weak and illogical speeches, but immoral or dishonest acts, are simply to be set aside as inconceivable in so lofty and unsullied a nature. Whether this be a sensible way of writing history, I leave the reader to decide. What I am now going to urge is this, that in the morality of Attic politics, taking money privately was not thought disgraceful, but was, with certain restrictions, openly a.s.serted to be quite justifiable.

[Sidenote: Morality of politicians expounded by Hypereides.]

Hypereides puts it plainly in his speech in this very case. Seeing that it was not the practice at Athens to pay salaries to politicians for their services, the public, he says, was quite prepared that they should make indirect profits and receive money privately for their work; the one thing intolerable was that they should take it from the enemies of their country or to prejudice Athenian interests.

[Sidenote: Modern sentiment at least repudiates these principles.]

In England we have had the good fortune to find rich men of high traditions to carry on the affairs of the nation, and even where we do not, or used not, to give salaries, it has been long thought disgraceful to make politics the source of private gain. How far it was done or not, in spite of this feeling, we need not inquire. There can be no doubt that now, at all events, there are large numbers of men supporting themselves by a parliamentary career; and it is usually said of America also, that politics are there regarded as a lucrative profession, and that the men who spend their lives in politics from mere ambition or from pure patriotism are very rare indeed. Still I think modern sentiment, theoretically at least, brands these indirect profits as disgraceful; nor do I think any modern advocate would describe such a practice as perfectly excusable in the way that Hypereides expresses it.

We are dealing, therefore, with a condition of public morality in which taking bribes, to put it plainly, was not at all considered a heinous offence, provided always that they were not taken to injure the State.

You might therefore be a patriot at Athens, and yet make that patriotism a source of profit.

[Sidenote: As regards practice we have Walpole]

This combination of high and sordid principles seems so shocking to modern gentlemen that I must remind them of two instances not irrelevant to the question in hand. In the first place men who were thoroughly honourable and served their country faithfully, as, for example, Sir Robert Walpole, have thought it quite legitimate to corrupt with money those under them and those opposed to them. Though they would scorn to receive bribes, they did not scruple to offer them; and they have left it on record that they found few men unwilling to accept such bribes in some indirect or disguised form.

[Sidenote: and the Greek patriots of our own century.]

Again, if the reader will turn to the narratives of the great War of Liberation in Greece, which lasted some ten years of this century (1821-1831), and will study the history of the national leaders who fought all the battles by sea and land, and contributed far more than foreign aid to the success of that remarkable Revolution, he will find that on the one hand they were actuated with the strongest and most pa.s.sionate feelings of patriotism, while on the other they did not scruple to turn the war to their own profit[150:1]. They were klephts, bandits, a.s.sa.s.sins. They often took bribes to save the families of Turks, and then allowed them to be ma.s.sacred. They made oaths and broke them, signed treaties and violated them. And yet there is not the smallest doubt that they were strictly patriots, in the sense of loving their country, and even shedding their blood for it.

[Sidenote: a.n.a.logous to the case of Demosthenes.]

[Sidenote: The end justified the means.]

-- 62. Let us now come back to the case of Demosthenes. At the opening of his career he would have gladly obtained money and men from Macedon to use against Persia; for Persia then seemed a danger to Greece. Later on, his policy was to obtain money from Persia to attack Macedon; and we are told that in the crisis before Chaeronea he had control of large funds of foreign gold, which he administered as he chose. The one great end was to break the power of Macedon. And so I have not the smallest doubt that if he thought the gold of Harpalus would enable him to emanc.i.p.ate Athens, he was perfectly ready to accept it, even on the terms of screening Harpalus from any personal danger, provided this did not balk the one great object in view. Thus the telling of a deliberate lie, which to modern gentlemen is a crime of the same magnitude as taking a bribe, is in the minds of many of our politicians justified by urgent public necessity[151:1]. It is hardly worth while to give instances of this notorious laxity in European public life. Is it reasonable, is it fair, to try Demosthenes by a far higher standard?

This is why I contend that it is illogical and unhistorical to argue that because Demosthenes was an honourable man and a patriot, therefore he could not have done what he was convicted of doing by the Areopagus[152:1].

[Sidenote: Low average of Greek national morality.]

At no time was the average morality of the Greeks very high. From the days of Homer down, as I have shown amply in my _Social Life in Greece_, we find a low standard of truth and honesty in that brilliant society, which is gilded over to us by their splendid intellectual gifts. As Ulysses in legend, Themistocles in early, Aratus in later history are the types which speak home to Greek imagination and excite the national admiration, so in a later day Cicero, in a remarkable pa.s.sage, where he discusses the merits and demerits of the race[152:2], lays it down as an axiom that their honesty is below par, and will never rank in court with a Roman's word.

[Sidenote: Demosthenes above it.]

Exceptions there were, such as Aristides, Socrates, Phocion; but they never enlisted the sympathy, though they commanded the respect, of the Greek public. Nay, all these suffered for their honesty. I do not believe Demosthenes to have been below the average morality of his age,--far from it; he was in all respects, save in military skill, much above it: but I do not believe he was at all of the type of his adversary, Phocion, who was honest and incorruptible in the strictest modern sense.

[Sidenote: Deep effect of his rhetorical earnestness.]

[Sidenote: The perfection of his art is to be apparently natural.]

The illusion has here again been produced by the perfect art of Demosthenes, whose speeches read as if he spoke the inmost sentiments of his mind and laid his whole soul open with all earnestness and sincerity to the hearer. I suppose there was a day when people thought this splendid, direct, apparently unadorned eloquence burst from the fulness of his heart, and found its burning expression upon his lips merely from the power of truth and earnestness to speak to the hearts of other men.

We know very well now that this is the most absurd of estimates. Every sentence, every clause, was turned and weighed; the rythm of every phrase was balanced; the very interjections and exclamations were nicely calculated. There never was any speaking or writing more strictly artificial since the world of literature began. But as the most perfect art upon the stage attains the exact image of nature, so the perfection of Greek oratory was to produce the effect of earnestness and simplicity by the most subtle means, adding concealed harmonies of sound, and figures of thought, by which the audience could be charmed and beguiled into a delighted acquiescence. This is the sort of rhetorician with whom we have to deal, and who regarded the simple and trenchant Phocion as the most dangerous 'pruner of his periods.' To many persons such a school of eloquence, however perfect, will not seem the strictest school for plain uprightness in action; and they will rather be surprised at the eagerness of modern historians to defend him against all accusations, than at the decisive, though reluctant, condemnation which he suffered at the hands of his own citizens[154:1]. All the life of Demosthenes shows a strong theatrical tendency, even as he is said to have named [Greek: hypokrisis] (the art of delivery) as the essence of eloquence. It is in this connection that Holm justly finds fault with the modern critics, who reject indeed the ribaldry of aeschines as mendacious, but set down that of Demosthenes as a source of sober history. The scandalous accusations made by all these orators against their opponents have one distinct parallel in earlier history--the sallies of the Old Comedy. This kind of political play died out with the rise of dramatic oratory, which was fully as libellous. Holm's remark is also worth repeating in this connection, that the dialectical discussions of the later tragedy were appropriated by the philosophers, whose dialogues satisfied the strong taste of the Athenians for this kind of intellectual exercise.

FOOTNOTES:

[132:1] He says indeed in one place (_Panegyr._ p. 51) that h.e.l.lenedom is rather a matter of common culture, than of common race. But nowhere does he ever acknowledge that foreign races as such can attain this culture, and he shows the respect of every old-fas.h.i.+oned h.e.l.lene for the Spartans, who belonged to the race, but were devoid of this culture.

[132:2] The texts are all cited in my _History of Greek Literature_, ii.

215, when treating of Isocrates.

[134:1] Cf. the texts in my _Greek Lit._ ii. 2, pp. 87, 105.

[135:1] As it did Niebuhr, who was brought up in the great struggle of Germany with Napoleon.

[136:1] This absurd feeling has gone so far as to lead Demosthenes'

admirers to blacken the character of all those who opposed him, not only of Philip of Macedon, but of Eubulus and other Attic politicians. Holm has very well defended Eubulus (G. G. iii. 252 _sq._), and has also vindicated Philip from the usual accusations of treachery, cruelty, and tyranny (_ibid._ 327).

[137:1] I cannot avoid citing a parallel from contemporary history, which is by no means so far-fetched as may appear to those who have not studied both cases so carefully as I have been obliged to do. The Irish landlords, a rich, respectable, idle, uncohesive body, have been attacked by an able and organized agitation, unscrupulous, mendacious, unwearied, which has carried point after point against them, and now threatens to force them to capitulate, or evacuate their estates in the country. It has been said a thousand times: Why do not these landlords unite and fight their enemy? They have far superior capital; they have had from the outset public influence far greater; they have a far stronger case, not only in law, but in real justice: and yet they allow their opponents to push them from position to position, till little remains to be conquered. Even after a series of defeats we tell them still that if they would now combine, subscribe, select, and trust their leaders, they could win. And all this is certain. But it is not likely that they will ever do it. One is fond of his pleasures, another of his idleness, a third is jealous of any leader who is put forward, a fourth is trying underhand to make private terms with the enemy. A small and gallant minority subscribe, labour, debate. They are still a considerable force, respected and feared by their foes. But the main body is inert, jealous, helpless; and unless their very character be changed, these qualities must inevitably lead to their ruin.

[138:1] Holm, in his remarkable estimate of the Greek policy of this time, goes so far as to say that Demosthenes' efforts even before Chaeronea were mischievous, and that the idea he constantly puts forward, of making Athens great by weakening her old rivals Sparta and Thebes, is no better than supporting that old particularism which always made the Greeks inferior to any powerful or wealthy foreign State. Holm thinks that a larger and truer policy was that of Isocrates, who would have loyally accepted the hegemony of Philip, that he might lead the whole nation against a foreign enemy. We may be able to see things in that light now, yet I cannot blame Demosthenes, and the patriotic party at Athens, for neglecting the essay of Isocrates, and desiring to maintain Athens upon the old lines. But their effort was neither honestly nor persistently supported by the main body of the Athenians.

[139:1] _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 4.

[140:1] Above, -- 10.

[147:1] It is nevertheless not likely that Hypereides was personally intimate with Demosthenes, for he was not, as is usually stated, his contemporary, but a man of a younger generation, as I have argued in my _Greek Lit._ ii. 2, p. 371. I invite the critics either to refute or to accept the arguments there stated.

I can now cite several scholars of the first magnitude whose estimate of Demosthenes agrees in almost every detail with what I had argued in my _History of Greek Literature_. They are H. Weil, in his admirable edition of Demosthenes (Paris, 1886), and Holm in the third volume of his History (1891), especially the pa.s.sage (pp. 247-9), which shows that there is now a general tendency to judge Demosthenes less leniently than Grote and Schafer have done. Beloch, Sittl, Spengel, and other considerable critics are quoted in his summary. It is no small satisfaction to me to see the opinions I put forth in the first edition of _Social Life in Greece_ (1871), which were then treated as paradoxes, now adopted, quite independently, by a large body of the best critics. I do not, however, think that they have sufficiently appreciated the low standard of political honesty at Athens, as compared with ours. This affords the best apology for Demosthenes' faults. He was, after all, the child of his time.

[148:1] _Demosthenes_, iii. 239 _et pa.s.sim_: cf. Curtius, G. G. iii. 774 (note 44).

[150:1] Finlay even goes so far as to say that the islanders of Hydra, who were certainly the most prominent in the cause of patriotism, were actuated by no higher motives than despair at the loss of the lucrative monopoly they had enjoyed of visiting all the ports of Europe during the great Napoleonic wars under the protection of the neutral flag of Turkey! The patriotism of these people did not include grat.i.tude.

[151:1] But according to our evidence, Demosthenes did not deny that he had taken the money; he pleaded as an excuse that he had advanced for the Theoric Fund, for the benefit of the Athenians, twenty talents, and that he had recouped himself for this money. This is the plea put into his mouth by Hypereides (_in Demosth._ 10). Such a defence, which merely amounted to making the Athenian public an unwitting accomplice, is so suicidal in Demosthenes' mouth, that I hesitate to accept it as it stands, though Holm (G. G. iii. 420) does so.

[152:1] All the evidence has been justly weighed by Holm, G. G. iii.

420-4, who comes to the same conclusion which I had put forward twenty years ago, long before the recent change of opinion concerning Demosthenes. That the Athenians condemned the orator justly, and to a moderate penalty, can be demonstrated from his own admissions. Political expediencies doubtless secured his conviction; they do not prove it to have been unjust.

[152:2] _Pro Flacco_, cap. iv. _Graeca fides_ was a stock phrase.

[154:1] Cf. now the sensible remarks of Holm, G. G. 501 _sq._, who criticises this exceedingly studied oratory from the very same standpoint.

CHAPTER VIII.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT.

[Sidenote: The further course of Greek history.]

-- 63. As I have said already, the death of Demosthenes is the favourite terminus for the political historians of Greece. But let us not grow weary,--let us survey the fortunes of the race for some centuries more, touching upon those turning-points or knotty points where it seems that the evidence has not been duly stated or weighed.

[Sidenote: Droysen's _Geschichte des h.e.l.lenismus_.]