DISCOVERY 



39 



whelming victory of the Greek at Himera ' had glutted 

 the market. Similarly, a result of the great wars with 

 Carthage and the Eastern Powers was to concentrate 

 the capital of the world in Roman hands, and provide 

 in large quantities the cheap labour of slaves. The 

 art of war may be an " art of acquisition." Clearly, 

 however, such wars must be limited in area and in 

 duration. The German instinct for a short war is 

 sound enough. The victor must not be too exhausted 

 to profit, nor the vanquished to pay. 



The great war in which a handful of Greek states 

 faced and defeated the armies of Persia - was fought " to 

 provide against their enslavement." The victory 

 vindicated that conception of the nature of the state 

 which the Greeks discovered, and which forms to-day 

 the basis of Western political thought. It was a 

 victory for the idea that the community exists in order 

 to provide the good life for its citizens, who are free 

 but responsible members actively participating in the 

 life of a living whole, as against the Oriental concep- 

 tion of irresponsible personal government under which 

 the state exists primarily for the benefit of the governor 

 rather than for that of the governed. 



But while it justified the conception of the state 

 which had been developed in the smaU Greek com- 

 munities, the Persian War put an end to the scale upon 

 which it had been worked out. Hellenism was called 

 upon to play an international poHtical role, and the new 

 conditions demanded the creation of a larger political 

 unit than the city-state. Inevitably the league of 

 maritime cities formed to complete the war with 

 Persia became the Athenian Empire. The league 

 ceased to be a voluntary federation from which members 

 were at liberty to withdraw, and became an aggregate 

 of subject states dominated politically and commerci- 

 ally by the mistress of the seas. And while Athens 

 claimed, with some justice on the material side, that 

 her empire was " for the good of the governed," her 

 subjects had reason to regard it as " the exercise of a 

 general despotism." For the political imagination of 

 the Athenian did not perceive that the principle which 

 held good for the city-state must be extended to the 

 larger unit ; that for empires to endure, subjects must 

 become free and responsible citizens, and the whole a 

 living organism in whose life the parts have an effective 

 share. That, however, is a lesson hardly learned. The 

 Romans learned it only by bitter experience, and it 

 needed the political vision of Julius Ccesar in 49 B.C. and 

 Augustus after 31 B.C. to extend the moral of the 

 Social War^ in which the Italians had extorted by 

 armed revolt the franchise which they had failed to 

 obtain by constitutional means. It needed, too, the 

 rebellion of the American colonies to enlighten British 

 imperial policy. 



' 480 B.C. « 490-479 B.C. ^ 90-89 B.C. 



The true background, however, to the ideals so 

 eloquently stated in the Funeral Speech of Pericles ' is 

 the tyrant empire, which in its very being contradicted 

 the fundamental quality of the Greek political ideal. 

 And this it was which made the Peloponnesian War in- 

 evitable. The revolt of Samos against the Empire had 

 been suppressed, but there could be no enduring peace. 



Thucydides, the great Athenian historian, shows 

 that the moral force of Greek public opinion was on 

 the side of the adversaries of Athens, who were able 

 to make their battle-cry the Hberation of fellow-Greeks 

 from an imperial yoke.^ 



In fact it would seem that his literary sympathies 

 have led Professor Murray astray, when he tells us 

 " that, alas ! there was no America to make sure that 

 the right side won." ' For the Peloponnesian was Hke 

 the European War, inasmuch as the last round was 

 decided by the intervention of a neutral. (It was 

 Persian gold and Persian shipbuilding timber which 

 decisively loaded the scales against Athens at the end.) 

 But it was unlike the European War inasmuch as there 

 was no " right side." The liberators proved, in fact, 

 to have no positive programme. The necessity for a 

 larger pohtical unit than the city-state remained, and 

 empire was forced by circumstance upon them. In 

 proportion as they were stupider, the ever ruder sue 

 cessors of Athens made each a more conspicuous failure 

 than the last. Nor was Dionysios in Sicily in the 

 fourth century B.C. more successful than Sparta and 

 Thebes in Greece. 



In fact the Greeks discovered the true principle of 

 the state, but failed to embody it in a pohtical unit of 

 adequate scale. Greek history after the Persian Wars 

 is a catalogue of their failures in practice, while Aris- 

 totle betrays the degree of their failure in theory, when 

 he preserves the ideal of political society only by 

 mapping the world into a series of self-centred, isolated 

 city-communities. 



There are many points of similarity between the 

 Peloponnesian and the European Wars. How similar 

 were the conditions of life in Athens and in London 

 may be read in the lecture of Professor Murray to which 

 I have referred. The Athenian, like ourselves, knew 

 what it was to be short of food, fuel, and light. Pesti- 

 lence, like influenza, claimed even more victims than 

 the battle-fields. Beside our modern mediums may 

 be placed the oracle-mongers, whom Aristophanes so 

 cordially dishked, and as regards secular credulity the 

 legend of the landing in England of a large contingent 

 in 1914 is paralleled by the fantastic hopes entertained 



• In 431 B.C., the first year of the war of the Peloponnesians 

 against Athens. 



2 Thucydides, II, 8. 



' Creightou Lecture, 191 8, Aristophanes and the War Parly 

 (Allen & Unwin, is. net), p. 9. 



