40 



DISCOVERY 



by Athenians of their Tliracian allies. Labour, both 

 domestic and skilled, with them as with ns, though for 

 different reasons, became diflicult to handle. 1 hcsc and 

 other similarities lead uptothcmain thcmeof thelecturc, 

 an exceedingly interesting study of the effect of a world- 

 war then and now upon the psychology of politics. 



Of the soundness of the parallel in essentials the 

 reader of the lecture will be able to judge. There is 

 in passing a small but curious coincidence which 

 Professor Murray has omitted. Even ruthless sea 

 warfare is a novelty onlj' in its instrument. In this 

 struggle between a maritime empire and a militarj' 

 state, the weaker naval power declared rutliless war 

 upon all sea-borne commerce. Precisely in the same 

 way twenty-three centuries earlier " the Lacedaemonians 

 killed as enemies all whom they took at sea ; whether 

 confederates of the Athenians or neutral." * The 

 policy was ineffectual, for Sparta was weak above water 

 and lacked the furtive weapon of the submarine. And 

 in ancient as in modem times it had diplomatic dis- 

 advantages. \^'e read of representations made to a 

 Spartan admiral that it is a bad way of setting the 

 Greeks at liberty to kill men who have not been guiltj' 

 of hostile action, and who are not enemies to the 

 Peloponnesians, but confederates to the Athenians by 

 constraint ; and that, unless he gave up that course, 

 he would make few of his enemies friends, but turn 

 many now friends into enemies. - 



The Pelopormesian War differed from the wars of 

 national expansion, or the wars of independence against 

 a foreign invader, in being a w-ar of long duration in 

 which all parties fought to the pitch of exhaustion. In 

 the course of the struggle every Greek state of import- 

 ance became involved, and from the Greek point of 

 \-iew it was a world-war. Its conclusion left Athens 

 humbled, and her empire shorn away, Sparta, with her 

 domestic institutions strained to the point of revolu- 

 tion, faced with a task abroad with which she was 

 wholly unable to cope, and the rest of the Greek world, 

 like Europe to-day, worn out. 



Professor Murray's lecture suggests the possibility 

 of a sequel, ^^'hile historj' does not repeat herself w ith 

 the exactitude in which Thucj'dides believed, her 

 similarities are not uninstructive. In Athens, as in this 

 country, war-expenditure, depleted resources, inflated 

 currency, and high prices lent a grave importance to 

 financial questions. 



The art of the statesman in the fourth century 

 becomes largely the art of making ends meet. Then, 

 as now, there were those who believed that nationalisa- 

 tion provided apanaccafor national financial difficulties, 

 and Xenophon's treatise upon V/ays and Means is 

 largely a plea for the working by the state of the silver- 

 mines, which, though the property of the state, were 



' Thucydidcs, II, 67, 4. = Thucj-dides, III, 32. 



leased for a premium and rent to the private prospector 

 or industrialist. The financial rescr\'es of Athens, 

 which Pericles had stored in the Parthenon, had in 

 the course of the war been coined and put into circula- 

 tion. Inflated currency had assisted the scarcity of 

 necessaries in raising prices. 'J he purchasing power of 

 money in the age of Demosthenes was five times less 

 than in the age of Solon.' Increase in the cost of living 

 had led to an increase in the amount of state payment 

 for public service, a vicious circle with which we are 

 familiar enough. 



Individuals of the middle class were in many cases 

 in financial straits. The landowner and the agricultural 

 middle class had been ruined by the Spartan invasions 

 of Attica. Devastated farms glutted the market, and 

 prudent capitaUsts like Ischomachus and his father 

 found land a cheap investment. Large estates worked 

 industrially by slave-labour thus supplanted the yeo- 

 man's holding. Individuals, again, who had held pro- 

 perty in the empire came back to Athens, having lost 

 their possessions. We hear of persons, pre\iously 

 affluent, who are taught by misfortune that working 

 for a living is no disgrace, and Socrates solves the 

 difficulties of a friend, who has a large number of female 

 relations dependent upon him, by suggesting that they 

 should be set spinning and weaving for the market. 

 Capitalism increases, but wealth had passed to a new- 

 class. Munition makers almost alone had come out of 

 the war with profit. The fourth centurj' sees the rise 

 of bankers, an ex-slave like Pasion, and the tj^sically 

 spendthrift son of the par\-enu like ApoUodorus.^ 



Athens maintained her relative importance in the 

 Greek world parti}' because she became, in a sense 

 other than that intended bj' Pericles, " the school of 

 Hellas," but mainly because of the sea-borne traffic 

 which inevitably flowed to her great harbour the 

 Peirseus as the central port of Greece. If her condition 

 was bad, that of the rest of the Greek world was 

 worse. Disorder ruled upon land and sea. The land 

 was full of broken men, bandits and desperadoes, while 

 the fall of Athenian power had filled the sea with 

 pirates. Peace was impossible, and the recurring 

 combinations against the paramount power of the day 



' Boeckh,P!(WiV£'rowom>'o/.4//:«^«s (translated by Lewis), p. 6. 



Prices were of course rising throughout the period. The 

 spoils of the Persian War enormously increased the amount of 

 coin in circulation. But the rate of inflation increased with war- 

 expenditure, and prices went up with a bound. The deprecia- 

 tion of the value of money continued through the fourth 

 century, in the course of which the Phokians put the treasures 

 of Delphi into circulation. The value of money, particularly 

 of gold, reached its lowest when the conquests of Alexander 

 flooded the money market with the immense reserves of the 

 Persian Empire. 



• The general reader will find further information in a most 

 attractive form in Glover's From Pericles to Philip (Methuen, 

 1917). 



