The Evolution of States Part 14

[Footnote 292: They may have begun as early as the Peloponnesian war (Foucart, p. 66).]

[Footnote 293: Finlay, i, 85-86, _notes_.]

[Footnote 294: _Id._ i, 289.]

[Footnote 295: _Id._ p. 309; cp. pp. 328, 329.]

[Footnote 296: A fair idea of the facts may be had by combining the narratives of Gibbon, Finlay, and Mr. Oman (_The Byzantine Empire_, ch.

x). Gibbon and Mr. Oman ignore the threat to make Carthage the capital; Gibbon ignores the point as to the stoppage of the grain supply; Finlay ignores the Church loan; Mr. Oman (p. 133) represents it as voluntary, whereas Gibbon shows it to have been compulsory (ch. 46. Bohn ed. v, 179, _note_). Mr. Bury alone (_History of the Later Roman Empire_, 1889, ii, 217-21) gives a fairly complete view of the situation. He specifies a famine and a pestilence as following on the stoppage of the grain supply.]

[Footnote 297: Finlay, i, 425.]

[Footnote 298: _Id._ ii, 37.]

[Footnote 299: Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, p. 12.]

[Footnote 300: Oman, as cited, pp. 147, 148. The conventional claim, as made by Robertson and echoed by Guizot, was partly disallowed even by Milman, and countered by the clerical editor of the Bohn ed. of Gibbon (ii, 50-54). But such conventional formulas are always subject to resuscitation.]

[Footnote 301: Finlay (i, 81) writes that "at this favourable conjuncture Christianity stepped in to prevent avarice from ever recovering the ground which humanity had gained." This clearly did not happen, and his later chapters supply the true explanation.]

[Footnote 302: Finlay later says so in so many words (ii, 23, 220), explicitly rejecting the Christian theory (see also p. 321). This historian's views seem to have modified as his studies proceeded, but without leading him to recast his earlier text.]

[Footnote 303: Luke xvii, 7-10, Gr. The translation "servant" is, of course, an entire perversion.]

[Footnote 304: 1 Cor. vii, 21-24. The phrase unintelligibly garbled as "use it rather" clearly means "rather remain a slave." "even" being understood in the previous clause. This was the interpretation of Chrysostom and most of the Fathers. See the Variorum Teacher's Bible, _ad loc_. Cp. the whole first chapter of Larroque, _De l'esclavage chez les nations chretiennes_, 2nd edit. 1864; and the forcible pa.s.sage of Frederic Morin, _Origines de la Democratie_, 3e edit. 1865, pp. 384-86.

As Morin points out, the Church has never pa.s.sed a theological condemnation of slavery. On the other hand, it was expressly justified by Augustine (_De Civ. Dei_, 1. xix, c. 15) as a divinely ordained punishment for sin; and by Thomas Aquinas (_De regimine principum_, ii, 10) as being further a stimulus to bravery in soldiers. He cannot have seen the Histories of Tacitus, where (ii, 4) civil wars are declared to have been the most b.l.o.o.d.y, _because_ prisoners were not to be enslaved.]

[Footnote 305: Athenagoras, _Apology for Christianity_, c. 35; Chrysostom, _pa.s.sim_.]

[Footnote 306: _Inst.i.t. Justin._ I, iii, -- 2, 4; v.]

[Footnote 307: _Politics_, i, 3.]

[Footnote 308: Cp. Michelet, _Hist. de France_, vol. vii, _Renaissance_, note du -- v. Introd. (ed. 1857, pp. 155-57). Michelet argues that the Christian influence was substantially anti-liberationist.]

[Footnote 309: U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, Hume's ed. i, 116, 407.]

[Footnote 310: Chrysostom. 15th Hom. in Eph. (iv, 31); cp. 11th Hom. in 1 Thess. (v. 28).]

[Footnote 311: "c.u.m occidunt servos suos, jus putant esse, non crimen.

Non solum hoc, sed eodem privilegio etiam in execrando impudicitiae caeno abutuntur" (_De gubernatione Dei_, iv).]

[Footnote 312: See below, pt. iv, ch. ii.]

[Footnote 313: Cp. the whole of Larroque's second chapter.]

[Footnote 314: So Mr. Oman admits, p. 148.]

[Footnote 315: _Cod. Theod._ xi, 3. 1, 2; _Cod. Justin._ xi, 47.]

[Footnote 316: _Cod. Justin._ xi, 47, 13 and 23. [A clear retrogression to quasi-slavery for the freemen.]]

[Footnote 317: Finlay, i, 200, 201. Cp. p. 153.]

[Footnote 318: _Id._ ii, 27, and _note_. Cp. Dill, as cited, p. 233.]

PART III

CULTURE FORCES IN ANTIQUITY

CHAPTER I

GREECE

-- 1

It is still common, among men who professedly accept the theory of evolution, to speak of special culture developments, notably those of sculpture and literature in Greece, art in medieval Italy, and theocratic religion in Judea, as mysteries beyond solution. It may be well, then, to consider some of these developments as processes of social causation, in terms of the general principles above outlined.

[A rational view was reached by the sociologists of the eighteenth century, by whom the question of culture beginnings was much discussed--_e.g._, Goguet's _De l'origine des lois, des arts, et des sciences_, 1758; Ferguson's _Essay on the History of Civil Society_, 1767; and Hume's essay on the _Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences_. At the end of the century we find the solution scientifically put by Walckenaer: "Ainsi le germe de genie et des talens existe dans tous les tems, mais tous les tems ne sont pas propres a le faire eclore" (_Essai sur l'histoire de l'espece humaine_, 1798, 1. vi, ch. xx, _Des siecles les plus favorables aux productions de genie_, pp. 348, 349). In England forty years later we find Hallam thus exemplifying the obscurantist reaction: "There is only one cause for the want of great men in any period--nature does not think fit to produce them. They are no creatures of education and circ.u.mstances" (_Literature of Europe_, pt. i, ch.

iii, -- 35). A kindred though much less crude view underlies Sir Francis Galton's argument in _Hereditary Genius_. Cp. the present writer's paper on "The Economics of Genius," in _The Forum_, April, 1898 (rep. in _Essays in Sociology_, vol. ii), and the able essay of Mr. Cooley, there cited. My esteemed friend, Mr. Lester Ward (_Dynamic Sociology_, ii, 600, 601), seems to me, as does Mill (_System of Logic_, bk. vi, ch. iv, -- 4; cp. Bain, _J.S. Mill_, p.

146), to err somewhat on the opposite side to that of Hallam and Galton, in a.s.suming that faculty is nearly equal in all, given only opportunity.]

And first as to Greece. As against the common conception of the h.e.l.lenic people as "innately" artistic, it may be well to cite the judgment of an artist who, if not more scientific in his method of reaching his opinion, has on the whole a better right to it in this case than has the average man to his. It is a man of genius who writes[319]: "A favourite faith, dear to those who teach, is that certain periods were especially artistic, and that nations, readily named, were notably lovers of art.

So we are told that the Greeks were, as a people, wors.h.i.+ppers of the beautiful, and that in the fifteenth century art was ingrained in the mult.i.tude....Listen! There never was an artistic period. There never was an Art-loving nation." This, which was sometime a paradox, is when interpreted one of the primary truths of sociology.

Our theorist goes on to describe the doings of the first artist, and the slow contagion of his example among men similarly gifted, till the artistic species had filled the land with beautiful things, which were uncritically used by the non-artistic; "and the Amateur was unknown--and the Dilettante undreamed of." Such is the artist's fairy tale of explanation. The probable fact is that the "first artists" in historic Greece were moved to imitative construction by samples of the work of foreigners. If, on the other hand, we decide that the "race" had evolved relatively high artistic capacities before it reached its Greek or Asian home,[320] it will still hold good that the early aegean evolution owed much to ancient Oriental and Egyptian example. The Greeks as we know them visibly pa.s.sed from primitive to high art in all things. Having first had fetish G.o.ds of unshapen stone, they made G.o.ds in crudely human shape, at first probably of wood, later of stone. So with vases, goblets, tables, furniture, and ware of all sorts, all gradually developing in felicity of form up to a certain point, whereafter art worsened. What we require to know is the why of both processes.

_Pace_ the artist, it is clear that artistic objects were multiplied mainly because they were in steady economic demand. The shaping impulse is doubtless special, and in its highest grades rare; but there must also have been special conditions to develop it in one country in the special degree. That is to say, the faculty for shaping, for design, was oftener appealed to in Greece than elsewhere, and was allowed more freedom in the response, thus reaching new excellence. The early Greeks can have had no very delicate taste, satisfied as they were with statues as primitive as the conventional a.s.syrian types they copied.

Prof. Burrows, in his valuable work on _The Discoveries in Crete_ (1907), somewhat confuses one of his problems by a.s.suming that, on a given chronological view, the creators of the early aegean civilisation were "the most progressive and artistic part of the race" (p. 193). No such a.s.sumption can be valid on any chronology.

Every "part" of a race, broadly speaking, has the same total potentialities. The determinants are the special _evocative_ conditions, which may be either culture contacts or economic fostering. A rational view of the growth of Greek art is put by Dr.

Mahaffy, despite his endors.e.m.e.nt of Mr. Freeman's extravagant estimate of Athenian intelligence:--"However national and diffused it [art] became, this was due to careful study, and training, and legislation, and not to a sort of natural compulsion.... As natural beauty was always the exception among Greek men, so artistic talent was also rare and special" (_Social Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p.

430). All the remains, as well as every principle of sociological science, go to support this view of the case. When Reber a.s.serts (_Hist. of Ancient Art_, Eng. tr. 1883, p. 264) that "the very first carvings of Greece had a power of development which was wanting in all the other nations of that period," he is setting up an occult principle and obscuring the problem. The other nations of _that period_ were not in progressive stages; but some of them had progressed in art in their time. And many of the "very first" Greek works--that is, of the "historic" period, as distinguished from the "Minoan"--are enormously inferior to some very ancient Egyptian work.

The development of taste was itself the outcome of a thousand steps of comparison and specialisation, art growing "artistic" as children grow in reasonableness and in nervous co-ordination. And the special conditions of historic Greece were roughly these:--

(1) The great primary stimulus to Greek art, science, and thought, through the contact of the early settlers in Asia Minor with the remains of the older Semitic civilisation,[321] and the further stimuli from Egypt.

(2) Mult.i.tude of autonomous communities, of which the members had intercourse as kindred yet critical strangers, emulous of each other, but mixing their stocks, and so developing the potentialities of the species.

(3) Mult.i.tude of religious cults, each having its local temples, its local statues, and its local ritual practices.