FOOTNOTES:

Mr. Oman (Byzantine Empire, p. 145) takes the popular view as to the reformative effect of Christianity. He goes on to describe Constantine as providing for the children of the destitute to prevent their exposure, but does not mention that the same thing had been done under the Antonines, and that Constantine permitted the finder of an exposed child to enslave it. The punishment of all exposure as infanticide, under Valentinian, was only an adoption of the pagan practice at Thebes (Ælian,Var. Hist.ii, 7). But in spite of all enactments,under Christian as under pagan rule, exposure and positive infanticide continued, though Christian sentiment never gave it the toleration exhibited in the drama of Menander. As to the historic facts, cp. Lecky,Hist. of European Morals, 6th ed. ii, 24-33.Broadly speaking, it was inevitable that in such a population as is pictured for us by Chrysostom—a multitude profoundly ignorant, superstitious, excitable, sensuous—all the vices of the Græco-Roman period should habitually flourish, while poverty must have been normally acute after the stoppage of regular free bread. On the general moral environment, cp. the author'sShort History of Freethought, 2nd ed. i, 249-50.

Broadly speaking, it was inevitable that in such a population as is pictured for us by Chrysostom—a multitude profoundly ignorant, superstitious, excitable, sensuous—all the vices of the Græco-Roman period should habitually flourish, while poverty must have been normally acute after the stoppage of regular free bread. On the general moral environment, cp. the author'sShort History of Freethought, 2nd ed. i, 249-50.

It is necessary, in the same way, to substitute an accurate for a conventional view as to the treatment of slaves under the Christian Empire. We are still told[300]that the Christian doctrine or implication of religious equality had the effect first of greatly modifying the evils of slavery and finally of abolishing it. Research proves that the facts were otherwise. We have already seen how economic causes partially limited slavery before Christianity was heard of; and in so far as the limitation was maintained,[301]the efficient causes remain demonstrably economic.[302]Indeed, no other causes can be shown to have existed. Not only is slavery endorsed in the Gospels,[303]and treated by Paul as not merely compatible with but favourable to Christian freedom on the part of the slave,[304]but the early Christians, commonly supposed to have been the most incorrupt, held slaves as a matter of course.[305]In the laws of Justinian not a word is said as to slavery being opposed to either the spirit or the letter of Christianity; and the only expressions that in any degree deprecate it are in terms of the Stoic doctrine of the "law of nature,"[306]which we know to have been already current in the time of Aristotle,[307]and tohave become widespread in the age of the Antonines, under Stoic auspices. That "law of nature," however, was never allowed to override a definite law of society; and the Christian influence on the other hand set up a new set of arguments for slavery.[308]Among the Christian Visigoths, slaves who married without authority from their masters were forcibly separated; and the slave who dared to marry a free-woman was burnt alive with his wife; while "the bishops were among the largest slave-holders in the realm; and baptised Christians were bought and sold without a blush by the successors of St. Paul and Santiago."[309]It cannot even be said of the Byzantines, any more than of the Protestants of the southern United States of fifty years ago, that they were more humane to their slaves than the earlier pagans had been; for we find Christian Byzantine matrons causing their slave-girls to be tied up and brutally flogged;[310]even as we have the testimony of Salvian to the atrocities committed by Christian slave-owners in Gaul.[311]The admission that the Church, even when encouraging laymen to free their slaves, insisted on retaining its own,[312]is the proof that the urging force was not even then doctrinal, but the perception that the Church's secular interests were served by the growth of an independent population outside its own lands.[313]The spirit of the Justinian code, despite its allusion to the law of nature, and the spirit of the enactments of the early Councils of the Church, are alike opposed to any idea of spiritual equality between bond and free.

On the other hand, the simple restriction of conquest limited the possibilities of slavery for Byzantium. Captives were enslaved to the last,[314]but of these there was no steady supply. In the rural districts, again, the fiscal conditions made for at least nominal freedom, as is shown by the historian who has most closely analysed the conditions:—

"The Roman financial administration, by depressing the higher classes and impoverishing the rich, at last burdened the small proprietors and cultivators of the soil with the whole weight of the land-tax. The labourer of the soil then became an object of great interest to the treasury, and ... obtained almost as important a position in the eyes of the fisc as the landedproprietor himself. The first laws which conferred any rights on the slave are those which the Roman government enacted to prevent the landed proprietors from transferring their slaves, engaged in the cultivation of lands assessed for the land-tax, to other employments which, though more profitable to the proprietor of the slave, would have yielded a smaller or less permanent return to the imperial treasury.[315]The avarice of the imperial treasury, by reducing the mass of the free population to the same degree of poverty as the slaves, had removed one cause of the separation of the two classes. The position of the slave had lost most of its moral degradation, and [he] occupied precisely the same political position in society as the poor labourer from the moment that the Roman fiscal laws compelled any freeman who had cultivated lands for the space of thirty years to remain for ever attached, with his descendants, to the same estate.[316]The lower orders were from that period blended into one class; the slave rose to be a member of this body; the freeman descended, but his descent was necessary for the improvement of the great bulk of the human race, and for the extinction of slavery.Such was the progress of civilisation in the Eastern Empire.The measures of Justinian which, by their fiscal rapacity, tended to sink the free population to the same state of poverty as the slaves, really prepared the way for the rise of the slavesas soon as any general improvement took place in the condition of the human race."[317]

For the rest, it cannot be supposed that the "freedom" thus constituted had much actuality. Sons of soldiers and artisans were held bound to follow their father's profession, as in the hereditary castes of the East,[318]and none of the fruits of freedom are to be traced in Byzantine life. Still, the fact remains that the commercial and industrial life sustained the political, and that the political began definitely to fail when the commercial did. Constantinople could hardly have collapsed as it did before the Crusaders if its commerce had not already begun to dwindle through interception by Venice and the Italian trading cities. As soon as these were able to trade directly with the East they did so, thus withdrawing a large part of the stream of commerce from Byzantium; and when, finally, they acquired the secret of her silk manufacture, her industrial revenue was in turn undermined. On the economic weakening, the political followed; and the Eastern Empire finally fell before the Turks, very much as the Western had fallen before the Goths.

FOOTNOTES:[233]Aristotle,Politics, v, 9.[234]Id.i, 2.[235]Plutarch,Solon, c. 24.[236]Id.c. 22. Cp. Dr. Grundy,Thucydides and the History of his Age, 1911, p. 66, as to Solon's evident purpose of promoting manufactures.[237]Maisch,Manual of Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. p. 38. Cp. Meyer, ii, 644.[238]Cp. Cunningham,Western Civilisation, i (1898), 100-2.[239]Grote, ii, 504. Hitherto Athens was far behind other cities, as Corinth, in trade. The industrial expansion seems to begin in Solon's time (Plutarch,Solon, c. 22; Busolt,Griechische Geschichte, i, 501).[240]Busolt, as cited, i, 549-50. The details, many of them from lately recovered inscriptions, are full of interest. Cp. Grote, ii, 462.[241]Plutarch,Agis.c. 5; Aristotle,Politics, ii, 9; Thirlwall, viii, 133.[242]The arguments of K.O. Müller (Dorians, Eng. tr. b. iii, c. 3, §§ 3-5) in discredit of the received view, though not without weight, have never carried general conviction. Cp. Maisch,Manual of Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. p. 17.[243]See the recovered passage of Polybius (xii, 6, ed. Hultsch) cited (from Mai,Nov. Collect. Vet. Scriptor.ii, 384) by Müller (Dorians, Eng. tr. ii, 205). Cp. M'Lennan,Kinship in Ancient Greece, § 2.[244]Aristotle,Politics, ii, c. 9. On Aristotle's unhesitating assumption (ii, 10) as to the normality and the effects of pæderasty, cp. the refutation of Müller,Dorians, Eng. tr. b. iv, c. 4, §§ 6-8; and as to the real causes of decline of population, see b. iii, c. 10, § 2. Primogeniture was a main factor. As the propertied class, of whom Aristotle speaks, became small through accumulations, which often went to heiresses, the whole statistic as to births is narrow and dubious. But it is safe to decide that the decline of the pure Spartan population was not a result of vice, any more than the normal dwindling of the numbers of modern aristocracies. It should be remembered that younger sons would be likely to have illegitimate offspring among the helots, if not among theperioikoi. The selfish aristocracy thus wrought for its own class extinction.[245]Plutarch,Solon, c. 22.[246]See refs. in Fustel de Coulanges,La cité antique, 1. iii, ch. xviii, p. 265.[247]Aristotle,Politics, ii, 6.[248]Cp. theRepublic, v, and theLaws(bks. v, xi; Jowett's tr. 3rd ed. v, pp. 122, 313) with thePolitics, vii, 16.[249]Fr. Vat.xxxvii, 9.[250]Cp. Hume, essay cited, as to the slight effect of the exposure check in China.[251]Above, p. 101.[252]Aristotle,Politics, ii, 9; Plutarch,Agis, c. 7.[253]Athenæus, citing Phylarchus, iv, 20.[254]Grote, x, 402; Mahaffy,Greek Life and Thought, p. 457;Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 237; M'Culloch,Treatises and Essays, ed. 1859, pp. 276-78.[255]Mahaffy,Greek Life and Thought, p. 452.[256]M'Culloch, as cited, p. 275.[257]Thucydides, i, 93.[258]Grote, iv, 341, 342.[259]Citations in Boeckh, bk. i, ch. 12.[260]Boeckh, bk. i, ch. 12. Cp. De Pauw,Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs, 1787, i, 55-60.[261]See E. Ardaillon,Les mines du Laurion dans l'antiquité, 1897, ch. v.[262]The mines of Laurium, though anciently worked by the "Pelasgi," do not figure in Athenian history till the beginning of the fifth centuryB.C.Ardaillon, pp. 126-27.[263]As to the enormous cost in labour and money of such buildings as the Propylæa and the Parthenon, cp. Mahaffy,Survey of Greek Civilisation, p. 143, and M'Cullagh,Industrial History of the Free Nations, 1846, i, 166, 167.[264]"Before the Persian war Athens had contributed less than many other cities, her inferiors in magnitude and in political importance, to the intellectual progress of Greece. She had produced no artists to be compared with those of Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, Ægina, Laconia, and of many cities both in the eastern and western colonies. She could boast of no poets so celebrated as those of the Ionian and Æolian Schools. But ... in the period between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars both literature and the fine arts began to tend towards Athens as their most favoured seat" (Thirlwall, vol. iii, ch. xviii, pp. 70, 71). "Never before or since has life developed so richly" (Abbott, ii, 415). Cp. Holm, Eng. tr. ii, 156, 157.[265]This view appears to be substantially at one with the reasoning of Dr. Cunningham (Western Civilisation, pp. 112-23). I must dissent, however, from his apparent position (pp. 119-21) that it was themodeof the expenditure that was wrong, and that Athens might have employed her ill-gotten capital "productively" in the modern economic sense. The cases of Miletus and Tyre, cited by him, seem to be beside the argument.[266]Plutarch,Pericles, c. 11.[267]Cp. Thirlwall, small ed. iii, 67.[268]On the Revenues.[269]As cited, bk. iv, ch. xxi.[270]Boeckh's arguments, denounced by Lewis, need not be adhered to; but the whole theorem is so fantastic that Lewis's general vindication of it is puzzling (Trans. pref. xv,note).[271]See Hertzberg,Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Römer, Theil ii, Kap. 2, p. 200, as to the vast estates now acquired by a few.[272]In Magna Graecia, in particular, the whole Pythagorean movement had such associations in a high degree. Note the frequency of names beginning αναξ (= king or chief) in the history of early Greek philosophy.[273]Mahaffy,Greek Life and Thought, p. 136.[274]Idem, pp. 145-49; Gibbon, Bohn ed. iv, 352.[275]E.g., the whole population of Corinth; and 150,000 inhabitants of Epirus.[276]Cp. Finlay, i, 23.[277]They exacted from Macedonia only half the tribute it had paid to its kings; but there is a strong presumption that it was too impoverished after the war to pay more.[278]"The extraordinary payments levied on the provinces soon equalled, and sometimes exceeded, the regular taxes" (Finlay, i, 39). Cp. Mahaffy,Greek World under Roman Sway, pp. 145, 156, 159, 161, 162.[279]Cp. Hertzberg,Gesch. Griechenlands unter der Herrsch. der Römer, Th. i, Kap. 5, pp. 486-91.[280]Finlay, i, 45, 46, 74.[281]"We stand [1st c.A.C.] before a decayed society of very rich men and slaves" (Mahaffy,Greek World, p. 268).[282]Finlay, i, 73. But cp. Frazer,Pausanias, 1900, p. 4, as to the decay in the second century.[283]This was soon withdrawn by Vespasian, but apparently with circumspection. In the first centuryA.C.the administration seems to have been unoppressive (Mahaffy,Greek World, pp. 233, 237).[284]Hertzberg (Gesch. Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Römer, Th. ii, Kap. 2, p. 189) rejects the statement of Finlay that Greece reached the lowest degree of misery and depopulation under the Flavian emperors ("about the time of Vespasian" is the first expression in the revised ed. i, 80). But Finlay contradicts himself: cp. p. 66. Hertzberg again (iii, 116) speaks of a "furchtbar zunehmende sociale Noth des dritten Jahrhunderts" at Athens, without making the fact clear. See below.[285]This is noted by Finlay (i, 143) in regard to the later surrender of a large Mesopotamian territory by Jovian to Shapur II, when the whole Greek population of the ceded districts was forced to emigrate.[286]Cp. Finlay, i, 264, 267-69.[287]Finlay, i, 141. See p. 142 as to the recognition of the military importance of Greece by Julian.[288]Cp. Finlay, i, 161. as to the ruin wrought at the end of the fourth century by Alaric; and pp. 253, 297, 303, 316, as to that wrought in the sixth century by Huns, Sclavonians, and Avars.[289]Σωτηριαοταἱ is one of the group-names preserved.[290]They are already seen established in the laws of Solon.[291]Foucart,Des associations religieuses chez les Grecs, 1873, pp. 5-10.[292]They may have begun as early as the Peloponnesian war (Foucart, p. 66).[293]Finlay, i, 85-86,notes.[294]Id.i, 289.[295]Id.p. 309; cp. pp. 328, 329.[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.[297]Finlay, i, 425.[298]Id.ii, 37.[299]Robertson Smith,Religion of the Semites, p. 12.[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.[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.[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.[303]Luke xvii, 7-10, Gr. The translation "servant" is, of course, an entire perversion.[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 chrétiennes, 2nd édit. 1864; and the forcible passage of Frédéric Morin,Origines de la Démocratie, 3e édit. 1865, pp. 384-86. As Morin points out, the Church has never passed 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 bloody,becauseprisoners were not to be enslaved.[305]Athenagoras,Apology for Christianity, c. 35; Chrysostom,passim.[306]Instit. Justin.I, iii, § 2, 4; v.[307]Politics, i, 3.[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.[309]U.R. Burke,History of Spain, Hume's ed. i, 116, 407.[310]Chrysostom. 15th Hom. in Eph. (iv, 31); cp. 11th Hom. in 1 Thess. (v. 28).[311]"Cum occidunt servos suos, jus putant esse, non crimen. Non solum hoc, sed eodem privilegio etiam in execrando impudicitiæ cæno abutuntur" (De gubernatione Dei, iv).[312]See below, pt. iv, ch. ii.[313]Cp. the whole of Larroque's second chapter.[314]So Mr. Oman admits, p. 148.[315]Cod. Theod.xi, 3. 1, 2;Cod. Justin.xi, 47.[316]Cod. Justin.xi, 47, 13 and 23. [A clear retrogression to quasi-slavery for the freemen.][317]Finlay, i, 200, 201. Cp. p. 153.[318]Id.ii, 27, andnote. Cp. Dill, as cited, p. 233.

[233]Aristotle,Politics, v, 9.

[234]Id.i, 2.

[235]Plutarch,Solon, c. 24.

[236]Id.c. 22. Cp. Dr. Grundy,Thucydides and the History of his Age, 1911, p. 66, as to Solon's evident purpose of promoting manufactures.

[237]Maisch,Manual of Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. p. 38. Cp. Meyer, ii, 644.

[238]Cp. Cunningham,Western Civilisation, i (1898), 100-2.

[239]Grote, ii, 504. Hitherto Athens was far behind other cities, as Corinth, in trade. The industrial expansion seems to begin in Solon's time (Plutarch,Solon, c. 22; Busolt,Griechische Geschichte, i, 501).

[240]Busolt, as cited, i, 549-50. The details, many of them from lately recovered inscriptions, are full of interest. Cp. Grote, ii, 462.

[241]Plutarch,Agis.c. 5; Aristotle,Politics, ii, 9; Thirlwall, viii, 133.

[242]The arguments of K.O. Müller (Dorians, Eng. tr. b. iii, c. 3, §§ 3-5) in discredit of the received view, though not without weight, have never carried general conviction. Cp. Maisch,Manual of Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. p. 17.

[243]See the recovered passage of Polybius (xii, 6, ed. Hultsch) cited (from Mai,Nov. Collect. Vet. Scriptor.ii, 384) by Müller (Dorians, Eng. tr. ii, 205). Cp. M'Lennan,Kinship in Ancient Greece, § 2.

[244]Aristotle,Politics, ii, c. 9. On Aristotle's unhesitating assumption (ii, 10) as to the normality and the effects of pæderasty, cp. the refutation of Müller,Dorians, Eng. tr. b. iv, c. 4, §§ 6-8; and as to the real causes of decline of population, see b. iii, c. 10, § 2. Primogeniture was a main factor. As the propertied class, of whom Aristotle speaks, became small through accumulations, which often went to heiresses, the whole statistic as to births is narrow and dubious. But it is safe to decide that the decline of the pure Spartan population was not a result of vice, any more than the normal dwindling of the numbers of modern aristocracies. It should be remembered that younger sons would be likely to have illegitimate offspring among the helots, if not among theperioikoi. The selfish aristocracy thus wrought for its own class extinction.

[245]Plutarch,Solon, c. 22.

[246]See refs. in Fustel de Coulanges,La cité antique, 1. iii, ch. xviii, p. 265.

[247]Aristotle,Politics, ii, 6.

[248]Cp. theRepublic, v, and theLaws(bks. v, xi; Jowett's tr. 3rd ed. v, pp. 122, 313) with thePolitics, vii, 16.

[249]Fr. Vat.xxxvii, 9.

[250]Cp. Hume, essay cited, as to the slight effect of the exposure check in China.

[251]Above, p. 101.

[252]Aristotle,Politics, ii, 9; Plutarch,Agis, c. 7.

[253]Athenæus, citing Phylarchus, iv, 20.

[254]Grote, x, 402; Mahaffy,Greek Life and Thought, p. 457;Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 237; M'Culloch,Treatises and Essays, ed. 1859, pp. 276-78.

[255]Mahaffy,Greek Life and Thought, p. 452.

[256]M'Culloch, as cited, p. 275.

[257]Thucydides, i, 93.

[258]Grote, iv, 341, 342.

[259]Citations in Boeckh, bk. i, ch. 12.

[260]Boeckh, bk. i, ch. 12. Cp. De Pauw,Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs, 1787, i, 55-60.

[261]See E. Ardaillon,Les mines du Laurion dans l'antiquité, 1897, ch. v.

[262]The mines of Laurium, though anciently worked by the "Pelasgi," do not figure in Athenian history till the beginning of the fifth centuryB.C.Ardaillon, pp. 126-27.

[263]As to the enormous cost in labour and money of such buildings as the Propylæa and the Parthenon, cp. Mahaffy,Survey of Greek Civilisation, p. 143, and M'Cullagh,Industrial History of the Free Nations, 1846, i, 166, 167.

[264]"Before the Persian war Athens had contributed less than many other cities, her inferiors in magnitude and in political importance, to the intellectual progress of Greece. She had produced no artists to be compared with those of Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, Ægina, Laconia, and of many cities both in the eastern and western colonies. She could boast of no poets so celebrated as those of the Ionian and Æolian Schools. But ... in the period between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars both literature and the fine arts began to tend towards Athens as their most favoured seat" (Thirlwall, vol. iii, ch. xviii, pp. 70, 71). "Never before or since has life developed so richly" (Abbott, ii, 415). Cp. Holm, Eng. tr. ii, 156, 157.

[265]This view appears to be substantially at one with the reasoning of Dr. Cunningham (Western Civilisation, pp. 112-23). I must dissent, however, from his apparent position (pp. 119-21) that it was themodeof the expenditure that was wrong, and that Athens might have employed her ill-gotten capital "productively" in the modern economic sense. The cases of Miletus and Tyre, cited by him, seem to be beside the argument.

[266]Plutarch,Pericles, c. 11.

[267]Cp. Thirlwall, small ed. iii, 67.

[268]On the Revenues.

[269]As cited, bk. iv, ch. xxi.

[270]Boeckh's arguments, denounced by Lewis, need not be adhered to; but the whole theorem is so fantastic that Lewis's general vindication of it is puzzling (Trans. pref. xv,note).

[271]See Hertzberg,Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Römer, Theil ii, Kap. 2, p. 200, as to the vast estates now acquired by a few.

[272]In Magna Graecia, in particular, the whole Pythagorean movement had such associations in a high degree. Note the frequency of names beginning αναξ (= king or chief) in the history of early Greek philosophy.

[273]Mahaffy,Greek Life and Thought, p. 136.

[274]Idem, pp. 145-49; Gibbon, Bohn ed. iv, 352.

[275]E.g., the whole population of Corinth; and 150,000 inhabitants of Epirus.

[276]Cp. Finlay, i, 23.

[277]They exacted from Macedonia only half the tribute it had paid to its kings; but there is a strong presumption that it was too impoverished after the war to pay more.

[278]"The extraordinary payments levied on the provinces soon equalled, and sometimes exceeded, the regular taxes" (Finlay, i, 39). Cp. Mahaffy,Greek World under Roman Sway, pp. 145, 156, 159, 161, 162.

[279]Cp. Hertzberg,Gesch. Griechenlands unter der Herrsch. der Römer, Th. i, Kap. 5, pp. 486-91.

[280]Finlay, i, 45, 46, 74.

[281]"We stand [1st c.A.C.] before a decayed society of very rich men and slaves" (Mahaffy,Greek World, p. 268).

[282]Finlay, i, 73. But cp. Frazer,Pausanias, 1900, p. 4, as to the decay in the second century.

[283]This was soon withdrawn by Vespasian, but apparently with circumspection. In the first centuryA.C.the administration seems to have been unoppressive (Mahaffy,Greek World, pp. 233, 237).

[284]Hertzberg (Gesch. Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Römer, Th. ii, Kap. 2, p. 189) rejects the statement of Finlay that Greece reached the lowest degree of misery and depopulation under the Flavian emperors ("about the time of Vespasian" is the first expression in the revised ed. i, 80). But Finlay contradicts himself: cp. p. 66. Hertzberg again (iii, 116) speaks of a "furchtbar zunehmende sociale Noth des dritten Jahrhunderts" at Athens, without making the fact clear. See below.

[285]This is noted by Finlay (i, 143) in regard to the later surrender of a large Mesopotamian territory by Jovian to Shapur II, when the whole Greek population of the ceded districts was forced to emigrate.

[286]Cp. Finlay, i, 264, 267-69.

[287]Finlay, i, 141. See p. 142 as to the recognition of the military importance of Greece by Julian.

[288]Cp. Finlay, i, 161. as to the ruin wrought at the end of the fourth century by Alaric; and pp. 253, 297, 303, 316, as to that wrought in the sixth century by Huns, Sclavonians, and Avars.

[289]Σωτηριαοταἱ is one of the group-names preserved.

[290]They are already seen established in the laws of Solon.

[291]Foucart,Des associations religieuses chez les Grecs, 1873, pp. 5-10.

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

[293]Finlay, i, 85-86,notes.

[294]Id.i, 289.

[295]Id.p. 309; cp. pp. 328, 329.

[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.

[297]Finlay, i, 425.

[298]Id.ii, 37.

[299]Robertson Smith,Religion of the Semites, p. 12.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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

[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 chrétiennes, 2nd édit. 1864; and the forcible passage of Frédéric Morin,Origines de la Démocratie, 3e édit. 1865, pp. 384-86. As Morin points out, the Church has never passed 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 bloody,becauseprisoners were not to be enslaved.

[305]Athenagoras,Apology for Christianity, c. 35; Chrysostom,passim.

[306]Instit. Justin.I, iii, § 2, 4; v.

[307]Politics, i, 3.

[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.

[309]U.R. Burke,History of Spain, Hume's ed. i, 116, 407.

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

[311]"Cum occidunt servos suos, jus putant esse, non crimen. Non solum hoc, sed eodem privilegio etiam in execrando impudicitiæ cæno abutuntur" (De gubernatione Dei, iv).

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

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

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

[315]Cod. Theod.xi, 3. 1, 2;Cod. Justin.xi, 47.

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

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

[318]Id.ii, 27, andnote. Cp. Dill, as cited, p. 233.

CULTURE FORCES IN ANTIQUITY

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'sDe l'origine des lois, des arts, et des sciences, 1758; Ferguson'sEssay on the History of Civil Society, 1767; and Hume's essay on theRise 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 génie et des talens existe dans tous les tems, mais tous les tems ne sont pas propres à le faire éclore" (Essai sur l'histoire de l'espèce humaine, 1798, 1. vi, ch. xx,Des siècles les plus favorables aux productions de génie, 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 circumstances" (Literature of Europe, pt. i, ch. iii, § 35). A kindred though much less crude view underlies Sir Francis Galton's argument inHereditary Genius. Cp. the present writer's paper on "The Economics of Genius," inThe Forum, April, 1898 (rep. inEssays 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 ofLogic, 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 assuming that faculty is nearly equal in all, given only opportunity.]

And first as to Greece. As against the common conception of the Hellenic 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, worshippers of the beautiful, and that in the fifteenth century art was ingrained in the multitude....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 Ægean evolution owed much to ancient Oriental and Egyptian example. The Greeks as we know them visibly passed from primitive to high art in all things. Having first had fetish Gods of unshapen stone, they made Gods 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.

Pacethe 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 countryin 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 Assyrian types they copied.

Prof. Burrows, in his valuable work onThe Discoveries in Crete(1907), somewhat confuses one of his problems by assuming that, on a given chronological view, the creators of the early Ægean civilisation were "the most progressive and artistic part of the race" (p. 193). No such assumption can be valid on any chronology. Every "part" of a race, broadly speaking, has the same total potentialities. The determinants are the specialevocativeconditions, 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 endorsement 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 asserts (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 ofthat periodwere 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) Multitude 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) Multitude of religious cults, each having its local temples, its local statues, and its local ritual practices.

(4) The concourse in Athens, and some other cities, of alert and capable men from all parts of the Greek-speaking world,[322]and of men of other speech who came thither to learn.

(5) The special growth of civic and peaceful population in Attica by the free incorporation of the smaller towns in the franchise of Athens. Athens had thus the largest number of free citizens of all the Greek cities to start with,[323]and the maximum of domestic peace.

(6) The maintenance of an ideal of cultured life as the outcome of these conditions, which were not speedily overridden either by (a) systematic militarism, or (b) industrialism, or (c) by great accumulation of wealth.

(7) The special public expenditure of the State, particularly in the age of Pericles, on art, architecture, and the drama, and in stipends to the poorer of the free citizens.

Thus the culture history of Greece, like the political, connects vitally from the first with the physical conditions. The disrupted character of the mainland; the diffusion of the people through the Ægean Isles; the spreading of colonies on east and west, set up a multitude of separate City-States, no one of which could decisively or long dominate the rest. These democratic and equal communities reacted on each other, especially those so placed as to be seafaring. Their separateness developed a multitudinous mythology; even the Gods generally recognised being worshipped with endless local particularities, while most districts had their special deities. For each and all of these were required temples, altars, statues, sacred vessels, which would be paid for by the public[324]or the temple revenues, or by rich devotees; and the countless myths, multiplied on all hands because of the absence of anything like a general priestly organisation, were an endless appeal to the imitative arts.Nature, too, had freely supplied the ideal medium for sculpture and for the finest architecture—pure marble. And as the political dividedness of Hellenedom prevented even an approach to organisation among the scattered and independent priests, so the priesthood had no power and no thought of imposing artistic limitations on the shapers of the art objects given to their temples. In addition to all this, the local patriotism of the countless communities was constantly expressed in statues to their own heroes, statesmen, and athletes. And in such a world of sculpture, formative art must needs flourish wherever it could ornament life.

We have only to compare the conditions in Judea, Persia, Egypt, and early Rome to see the enormous differentiation herein implied. In Mazdean Persia and Yahwistic Judea there was a tabu on all divine images, and by consequence on all sculpture that could lend itself to idolatry.[325](This tabu, like the monotheistic idea, was itself the outcome of political and social causation, which is in large part traceable and readily intelligible.) In Italy, in the early historic period, outside of Etruria, there had been no process of culture-contact sufficient to develop any of the arts in a high degree; and the relation of the Romans to the other Italian communities in terms of situation and institutions[326]was fatally one of progressive conquest. Their specialisation was thus military or predaceous; and the formal acceptance of the deities of the conquered communities could not prevent the partial uniformation of worship. Thus Rome had nearly everything to learn from Greece in art as in literature. In Egypt, again, where sculpture had at more than one time, in more than one locality, reached an astonishing excellence,[327]the easily maintained political centralisation[328]and the commercial isolation made fatally for uniformity of ideal; and the secure dominion of the organised priesthood, cultured only sacerdotally, always strove to impose one stolid conventional form on all sacred and ritual sculpture,[329]which was copied in the secular, in order that kings should as much as possible resemble Gods. Where the bulk of Greece was "servile to all the skyey influences," physically as well as mentally, open on all sides to all cultures, all pressures, all stimuli, Egypt and Judea and Persia were relatively iron-bound, and early Rome relatively inaccessible.

Finally, as militarism never spread Spartan-wise over pre-Alexandrian Greece, and her natural limitations prevented any such exploitation of labour as took place in Egypt, the prevailing ideal in times of peace, at least in Attica, was that of the cultured man, καλοκἁγαθὁς, supported by slave labour but not enormously rich, who stimulated art as he was stimulated by it. Assuredly he was in many cases a dilettante, if not an amateur, else had art been in a worse case.

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