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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