10. The Impact of the Solonian Economic Revolution upon the International Politics of the Hellenic World
{IV.C.III(b)10,p.206}
The contrast, which we have just touched upon, between the political
histories of Athens and Rome has brought out the fact that the
comparative success of Athens in her domestic politics was offset by a
signal Athenian political failure in the field of international
affairs; and this may serve to remind us that we have still
{p.207}
to examine the effect, in this field, of the impact of the Solonian
economic revolution upon Hellenic political life. In a previous age,
when exceptionally favourable opportunities for sheer extensive
geographical expansion had made it possible for the Hellenic Society to
provide for a growing population without departing from the
old-fashioned economic system of subsistence farming, the
self-sufficiency (αύτάρκεια) of each single Hellenic city-state,
on every plane of social activity, was a simple matter of fact. The
Solonian economic revolution was needed in order to solve the new
economic problem of continuing to provide for a population which had
not ceased to grow, yet finding this provision within the limits of a
Hellenic World whose expansion had been cut short by the successfully
organized resistance of its Syriac and barbarian neighbours. The
solution lay, as we have seen,1 in changing over from
subsistence farming to a specialized production—industrial as well as
agrarian—with a view to exchange; but this solution involved the
abandonment of economic self-sufficiency, since the new economic system
of specialization and exchange could not be made to yield the enhanced
productivity which was its object, so long as its field of action was
confined within the narrow limits of the standard-size city-state
domain.
In order to produce its fruits, the new economy must
burst the bounds of the single city-state and operate freely over a
vastly larger area, embracing not only the entire Hellenic World but
also Egypt in one direction and Scythia in another and the African and
European hinterlands of the West Mediterranean Basin in a third. In
fact, the Solonian economic revolution could not be carried out without
enlarging the ordinary working unit of Hellenic economic life from a
city-state scale to an oecumenical scale; and the historical fact that
this economic revolution did take place means that this great
enlargement of the field of economic operations was actually achieved.
By the beginning of the fifth century B.C. the immense area whose range
has just been indicated had actually come to be the normal field of
economic activity for the wine-growers and olive-oil producers and
potters and merchants and sailors of economically progressive Hellenic
city-states like Miletus and Corinth and Aegina and Athens. But this
expansion of the range of economic activity from a parochial to an
oecumenical scale solved an economic problem only to create a political
problem; and the solution of the economic problem remained precarious
so long as the consequent political problem had not been solved with
equal success along its own lines.
The Milesians and Aeginetans could never count, for certain,
1 In IV. C (iii) (b) 9, p. 201, above.
{p.208}
on the livelihood which they had learnt to gain through an oecumenical
economic activity, unless their freedom of economic action in this
oecumenical field were guaranteed by the establishment of some kind of
political order on the same oecumenical scale. So long as the ordinary
working unit of Hellenic political life continued to be the city-state
whose limits had now been so far transcended on the economic plane, it
was possible that a political conflict between city-states, in the
shape of war or privateering or piracy, might at any moment arbitrarily
cut short those oecumenical economic activities which had now become
indispensable for the maintenance of the increased and increasing
population of Aegina or Miletus individually and of Hellas as a whole.
In short, in the international field the Solonian economic revolution
confronted the Hellenic Society with the necessity for establishing a
political world order. The accomplished fact of the abolition of
city-state self-sufficiency on the economic plane now called for its
abolition on the political plane as well; and when the transition from
a parochial to an oecumenical range had just been successfully achieved
on the one plane, there was no apparent reason, a priori, why it should not be achieved on the other plane in due course.
The
obstacle in the way was the inherited political institution of
City-State Sovereignty; and the removal of this obstacle to political
solidarity was the task which was set by Fate to Hellas when the fifth
century B.C. opened. The obstacle, however, became more formidable in
the act of being grappled with; for this City-State Sovereignty which
had previously been taken for granted began to draw attention and
inspire affection as soon as it became evident that its existence was
threatened. From the opening of the fifth century B.C. onwards the
whole of the rest of Hellenic political history can be formulated in
terms of an endeavour to transcend City-State Sovereignty and of the
resistance which this endeavour evoked.1 Before the fifth
century closed, the obstinacy of the resistance to the accomplishment
of this urgent political task had brought the Hellenic Civilization to
its breakdown; and though the problem which had baffled an Athenian
first attempt to solve it was eventually solved in a fashion by Rome,
it was not solved in time to prevent the disintegration of the Hellenic
Society from running its course to its final dissolution.2 In this outcome of the impact of the Solonian economic revolution upon the international
1 For the idolization, in the Hellenic World, of the institution of the Sovereign City-State see IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (β), pp. 303-20, below. 2
This explanation of the breakdown and disintegration of the Hellenic
Civilization has been touched upon, by anticipation, in Part III. B,
vol. iii, p. 122, footnote 3, and in III. C (ii) (b), vol. iii, p. 340, footnote 1, above. See also V. C (ii) (b), vol. vi, pp. 287-91, below.
{p.209} politics of the Hellenic World the alternatives of adjustment, revolution, and enormity present themselves once again.
In
this case the solution of the problem through adjustment lay in a
permanent limitation of City-State Sovereignty by voluntary agreement
between the city-states themselves for the sake of providing the
necessary political security for a now indispensable economic
intercourse.
A treaty apparently dating from about the middle
of the fifth century B.C., and embodying an agreement to such effect
between two city-states on the western shore of the Crisaean Gulf, has
come into the hands of the modern Western historian through the
accident of archaeological discovery;1 and since the two
high contracting parties were, both of them, small and obscure
communities, while the district in which they were situated—the Ozolian
or 'colonial' Locris—is included by Thucydides in a region of
North-Western Continental Greece which he takes as a 'living museum’ of
the elsewhere obsolete Hellenic Society of the Dark Age,2 we
may reasonably conjecture that a practice which had spread to this
backward part of Hellas by about the year 440 B.C. had become general
throughout the Hellenic World in the course of the first half of the
fifth century. The type of treaty of which this surviving treaty
between Oeanthea and Chaleum may be taken as a late and unimportant
example, is a bilateral agreement between two city-states for the
enactment between them, ad hoc, of a rudimentary code of
international law to govern their economic relations with each other;
and no doubt this expedient for dealing with the new problem of
international politics was useful as far as it went. At the same time
it is manifest that the results must have fallen far short of what was
needed. For instance, the treaty between Oeanthea and Chaleum, by
itself, can hardly have contributed appreciably to the security of
international trade and seafaring even in the waters of the Crisaean
Gulf; for there were several other equally small and obscure, but also
equally sovereign, city-states which were likewise 'riverain Powers';
and all the 'riverain Powers', between them,
1
The bronze tablet on which the text is inscribed was found at Galaxfdhi
(the latter-day equivalent of the Hellenic Oeanthea) and is now in the
British Museum. The text is printed, with a translation and commentary,
by E. L. Hicks and G. F. Hill in A Manual of Greek Historical Inscriptions,
2nd edition (Oxford 1901, Clarendon Press), pp. 73-6. The treaty
provides that 'no Oeanthean, if he make a seizure, shall carry off a
foreign merchant from Chalean soil, nor a Chalean a merchant from
Oeanthean soil; nor shall either Oeanthean or Chalean seize a
merchant's cargo within the territory of the other city. If any one
breaks this rule, it shall be lawful to seize him with impunity....' On
the same tablet there is also inscribed, in a different hand, the text
of regulations made in one of the two contracting states (presumably in
Oeanthea, where the tablet was found) for assuring to resident aliens
the enjoyment of their treaty-made legal rights. 2
Thucydides, Book I, chap. 5. For this social backwardness of
North-Western and Northern Greece in the second chapter of the history
of the growth of the Hellenic Civilization see III. C (ii) (b), Annex IV, vol. iii, pp. 478-9, above.
{p.210}
would only have accounted for a small fraction of the shipping which
plied within sight of their shores; for this waterway was one of the
main approaches to the Pan-Hellenic shrine at Delphi, and in the fifth
century B.C. Delphi was in communication with almost every community in
the Hellenic World, as far afield as Cyrene and Trebizond and
Marseilles. In order to provide effectively, by means of bilateral
treaties, for the security of all ships and merchandise that had
occasion to traverse the Crisaean Gulf, the single bilateral treaty
between Oeanthea and Chaleum would have to be supplemented by a vast
network of such treaties, not only binding the local riverain Powers
among themselves, but also binding each of them to almost every other
state-member of the Hellenic Society,1 When we consider
further that the Crisaean Gulf, though an important sea-route in
itself, was only a minute fraction of the total surface of the
Mediterranean and its annexes, and that almost the whole of this area
was embraced, at this date, in the field of Hellenic maritime trade,2
we can see at once that the creation of anything like a comprehensive
and uniform system of oecumenical law-and-order in the Hellenic World
on a basis of voluntary bilateral treaties was a Psyche's task.
As
a matter of historical fact, we find that, in those attempts at
establishing a Hellenic world order which came the nearest to success,
a network of voluntary bilateral treaties was only one of several bases
on which the structure was reared. In these relatively successful
experiments a local enterprise in treaty-making was re-inforced by the
stimulus of a general emergency and by the leadership of a single
predominant Power. The Delian League (vivebat 478-454 B.C.) was established under the stimulus of the Pan-Hellenic war of defence and liberation (gerebatur
480-478 B.C.) against the Achaemenian Power, and under the leadership
of Athens, whose naval strength had made her the saviour of Hellas and
left her the mistress of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Roman Empire
was established under the stimulus of a paroxysm of war and revolution
which threatened the Hellenic Society with imminent dissolution in the
last century B.C., and under the leadership of Rome, who had already
(between 220 and 168 B.C.) delivered 'the knock-out blow’
1
It is significant that the bilateral Chaleo-Oeanthean treaty, above
quoted, goes on to say that 'the property of a foreigner (i.e. a
citizen of any third state) may be seized on the sea without incurring
the penalty, except in the actual harbour of the city'. 2 The only Mediterranean waters that were a mare clausum
to the Hellenes at this time were those bounded by the north coast of
North Africa west of a point just north by west of Carthage, by the
south-east coast of Spain as far as a point at some unknown distance
north-east of (the future site of) Cartagena, and by the Carthaginian
insular possessions in the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and the western
tip of Sicily. For the light thrown upon the limits of this
Carthaginian preserve by the terms of successive commercial treaties
between Carthage and Rome see Strachan-Davidaon, J. L.: Selections from Polybius (Oxford 1888, Clarendon Press), pp. 65-70.
{p.211} to all other Great Powers in the Hellenic World of that age.1
The circumstances show that, in Hellenic history, the establishment of
a political world order by process of adjustment was never even
approached without a potent admixture of the untoward elements of
revolution and enormity. The revolutionary way of constructing an
oecumenical political framework for an oecumenical field of economic
activity was to abrogate the institution of City-State Sovereignty
altogether, by force majeure, and to bring the whole of the
ground, when it had been cleared of previous obstructions by this
high-handed method, under the common roof of a single universal state.
The enormity which was the penalty of failure to achieve a world order
by either adjustment or revolution was an agglomeration of city-states
in which a certain measure of city-state autonomy was preserved, but in
which the association between the participating communities was neither
on a voluntary basis nor on an equal footing, but was maintained by a
forcible and selfish domination of some single city-state over all the
rest. This inequitable system of association was evidently the line of
least resistance for arriving at a compromise between an old parochial
tradition and the new necessity of transcending it; but it was none the
less an enormity inasmuch as it only transcended the old parochialism
in a material sense, while morally it capitulated to it by allowing one
strong parochial community to indulge its egotism to an unprecedented
degree at its weaker neighbours' expense. The moral condemnation which
this enormity evoked in Hellenic consciences was not averted by the
euphemistic title of 'hegemony' (das Führerprinzip)
by which a 'tyrant-city’ preferred to describe its twofold exploitation
of its own superiority in military power and of the World's need for
political unity.
If we let our minds run over the course of
Hellenic history, we shall observe that this enormity of 'hegemony’, as
well as the revolutionary alternative of the Gleichschaltung of
City-State Sovereignty by a merger into a universal state, was already
a familiar phenomenon in the Hellenic World before the foundation of
the Delian League; and we shall also observe that in the Roman
Empire—which belatedly and partially succeeded, where the Delian League
had failed, in establishing a Hellenic world order through an
association of city-states—the vicious element of 'hegemony’ far
outweighed the salutary element of freedom, and was only eliminated, in
the course of the Empire's history, by a gradual process of Gleichschaltung which destroyed the autonomy of all Rome's subject cities pari passu with the ascendancy of Rome herself.
If we examine rather more in detail the circumstances in which
1 See the quotation from Polybius in III. C (ii) (b), vol. iii, pp. 312-13, above.
{p.212}
the Delian League was founded in 478 B.C., we shall find, as we might
expect, that its organizer, the Athenian statesman Aristeides, was
working, not in a political vacuum, but in an atmosphere of political
precedents of which his work distinctly bears the marks. It would have
been strange if Aristeides had borrowed nothing from the institution of
'hegemony', when Athens herself had been living under the 'hegemony' of
Sparta, off and on and in varying degrees, ever since the Spartan King
Cleomenes had expelled the Peisistratidae from Athens in 511 B.C.1
Indeed, the very occasion which had called for the establishment of the
Delian League was the renunciation of this Spartan hegemony in 478 B.C.
in respect of Athens and those Asiatic Greek communities which had just
been liberated from Achaemenian rule; and if the Lacedaemonian
Government had not made this deliberate withdrawal2 it is
safe to say that the Delian League would never have been called into
existence at all. In the circumstances it was natural that the
Athenians should step into the Spartans' shoes and should include an
element of Athenian 'hegemony' in the structure of an Athenian-made
experiment in a Hellenic world order.
It was equally natural
that, in framing a new international régime for a constellation of
Hellenic city-states which had been incorporated, for some sixty or
seventy years past, in the Achaemenian Empire, Aristeides should borrow
certain convenient institutions to which these communities had grown
accustomed under the Achaemenian régime from which they had just been
liberated. The Achaemenian precedent is unmistakably accountable for an
arrangement so alien from the indigenous Hellenic tradition of
city-state sovereignty as the imposition of a money-contribution to a
federal war-chest at Delos upon states-members of the League which were
unable, or disinclined, to contribute an effective contingent of
warships to the federal navy;3 and the same alien tendency towards Gleichschaltung, in the characteristic vein of the Achaemenian Empire and of every other universal state,4 may perhaps be discerned
1 See III. C (ii) (b), vol. iii, p. 336, footnote 3, above. 2 For the motives which inspired this Spartan policy see Part III. A, vol. iii, pp. 70-1, above. 3
The majority of the city-states which acquiesced in the payment of a
money-tribute as their contribution to the League, and which accepted
the assessment that was made by Aristeides, were 'liberated'
communities which had previously belonged to the Achaemenian Empire;
and for these the tribute was something to which they had long since
been broken in. It made little difference to them that the money
previously payable to a treasury at Sardis or Dascylium should now be
made payable, instead, to a treasury at Delos. It is perhaps
significant that Scyros and Carystus,- which were the only two
city-states that were brought into the Delian League at the beginning
by coercion instead of by consent, had neither of them ever lost their
independence to the Achaemenian Empire; and it may also be noted that
Naxos and Thasos, which were the first two members of the League that
endeavoured to secede, had neither of them had more than a brief taste
of Achaemenian domination—Thasos for only thirteen years and Naxos for
only eleven years, ending in 479 B.C. 4 For the character and genius of universal states see further Part VI below.
{p.213}
likewise in the progressive centralization, in the courts at Athens, of
private litigation in suits to which citizens of the 'allied' cities
were parties: an infringement of local sovereignty which was perhaps
more bitterly resented than the exaction of the monetary tribute. This
Athenian attempt to establish a Pan-Hellenic common law and a
Pan-Hellenic jurisdiction on an Athenian basis would have been
impossible if the Athenians had not possessed, and employed, the means
of coercion; this coercion was only thinly veiled by the network of
treaties, between Athens and her associates in the Delian League, on
which the process of judicial centralization was formally grounded; and
this expedient of conjuring into existence an oecumenical system of
law-and-order by compelling the city-states to enter into a network of
treaties, wholesale, was demonstrably borrowed by the Athenians from
their Achaemenian predecessors in the dominion over the Asiatic Greeks.
It is recorded that, after the Achaemenian Government had succeeded in
suppressing the great Asiatic Greek revolt of 499-494 B.C., Darius's
brother ‘Artaphernes, the Statthalter at Sardis, summoned delegates
from the [re-subjugated] city-states to his presence, and compelled the
Asiatic Greeks to enter into treaties with one another for the
regulation, by judicial procedure, of disputes [between their
respective ressortissants], in substitution for their
[traditional] practice of seeking satisfaction, in such cases, by
[methods of barbarism like] piracy and brigandage'.1
It
will be seen that if the Delian League was, in one aspect, an endeavour
to provide the Hellenic Society with a political world order by a
process of voluntary adjustment, it was also partly inspired by the
precedents of a Spartan 'hegemony’ and an Achaemenian Gleichschaltung;
and in this light the disastrous failure of this endeavour, and of all
its successors, no longer appears surprising. Every one of these
successive Hellenic attempts at a world order was morally a hybrid
product; and the healthy ingredient in the social compound was always
eventually overcome by the poisonous ingredients with which it had been
contaminated from the outset. Within the brief Time-span of the
Pentecontaetia’ (478-431 B.C.) the Delian League degenerated into the
international tyranny of the Athenian Empire; the chastisement with
whips, which this Athenian imperialism inflicted upon the Hellenic
World during the half-century ending in 404 B.C., was renewed and
out-done by the chastisement with scorpions which a Roman imperialism
inflicted, in its turn, during the two centuries that followed the
outbreak of the Hannibalic War; and even when, at last, the long Roman
oppression was transmuted into a belated Hellenic world
1 Herodotus: Book VI, chap. 42.
{p.214}
order by the genius of Caesar and the remorse of Augustus this
magnified reflexion-or travesty-of the Dehan League did not escape in
the long run the untoward metamorphosis which had so swiftly overtaken
its original. The ultimate fate of the Hellenic cosmos of city-states
under the aegis of the Caesars was a Gleichschaltung of the
kind to which the Asiatic Greek communities had been subjected already
both after the foundation of the Delian League, under the aegis of
Athens, and before the foundation of the Delian League, under the aegis
of the Achaemenidae. In short, the history of Hellenic endeavours to
create a political world order is a tragedy whose gloom is hardly
relieved by one brief gleam of sunshine in a Periclean spring and
another in an Antonine Indian Summer.1
1 For the Age of the Antonines as ‘the Indian Summer’ of the Hellenic decline and fall see IV. C (ii) (b) 1, pp. 58-61, above. |