Britannica History of Greece

5. The Great Age (480–338 bc)—The effects of the repulse of Persia were momentous in their influence upon Greece. The effects upon Elizabethan England of the defeat of the Spanish armada would afford quite an inadequate parallel. It gave the Greeks a heightened sense, both of their own national unity and of their superiority to the barbarian, while at the same time it helped to create the material conditions requisite alike for the artistic and political development of the 5th century. Other cities besides Athens were adorned with the proceeds of the spoils won from Persia, and Greek trade benefited both from the reunion of Ionia with Greece, and from the suppression of piracy in the Aegean and the Hellespont. Do these developments justify us in giving to the period, which begins with the repulse of Xerxes, and ends with the victory of Philip, the title of “the Great Age”? If the title is justified in the case of the 5th century, should the 4th century be excluded from the period? At first sight, the difference between the 4th century and the 5th may seem greater than that which exists between the 5th and the 6th. On the political side, the 5th century is an age of growth, the 4th an age of decay; on the literary side, the former is an age of poetry, the latter an age of prose. In spite of these contrasts, there is a real unity in the period which begins with the repulse of Xerxes and ends with the death of Atexander, as compared with any preceding one. It is an age of maturity in politics, in literature, and in art; and this is true of no earlier age. Nor can we say that the 5th century is, in alt these aspects of Greek life, immature as compared with the 4th, or, on the other hand, that the 4th is decadent as compared with the 5th. On the political side, maturity is, in one sense, reached in the earlier century. There is nothing in the later century so great as the Athenian empire. In another sense, maturity is not reached till the 4th century. It is only in the later century that the tendency of the Greek constitutions to conform to a common type, democracy, is (at least approximately) realized, and it is only in this century that the principles upon which democracy is based are carried to their logical conclusion. In literature, if we confine our attention to poetry, we must pro­nounce the 5th century the age of completed development; but in prose the case is different. The style even of Thucydides is immature, as compared with that of Isocrates and Plato. In philosophy, however high may be the estimate that is formed of the genius of the earlier thinkers, it cannot be disputed that in Plato and Aristotle we find a more mature stage of thought. In art, architecture may perhaps be said to reach its zenith in the 5th, sculpture in the 4th century. In its political aspect, the history of the Great Age resolves itself into the history of two movements, the imperial and the democratic. Hitherto Greece had meant, politically, an aggregate of independent states, very numerous, and, as a rule, very small. The principle of autonomy was to the Greek the most sacred of all political principles; the passion for autonomy the most potent of political factors. In the latter half of the 6th century Sparta had succeeded in combining the majority of the Peloponnesian states into a loose federal union; so loose, however, that it appears to have been dormant in the intervals of peace. In the crisis of the Persian invasion the Peloponnesian League was extended so as to include all the states which had espoused the national cause. It looked on the morrow of Plataea and Mycale (the two victories, won simul­taneously, in 479 bc by Spartan commanders, by which the danger from Persia was finally averted) as if a permanent basis for union might be found in the hegemony of Sparta. The sense of a common peril and a common triumph brought with it the need of a common union; it was Athens, however, instead of Sparta, by whom the first conscious effort was made to transcend the isolation of the Greek political system and to bring the units into combination. The league thus founded (the Delian League, established in 477 bc was under the presidency of Athens, but it included hardly any other state besides those that had conducted the defence of Greece. It was formed, almost entirely, of the states which had been liberated from Persian rule by the great victories of the war. The Delian League, even in the form in which it was first established, as a confederation of autonomous allies, marks an advance in political conceptions upon the Peloponnesian League. Provision is made for an annual revenue, for periodical meetings of the council, and for a permanent executive. It is a real federation, though an imperfect one. There were defects in its constitution which rendered it inevitable that it should be transformed into an empire. Athens was from the first “the predominant partner.” The fleet was mainly Athenian, the commanders entirely so; the assessment of the tribute was in Athenian hands; there was no federal court appointed to determine questions at issue between Athens and the other members; and, worst omission of all, the right of secession was left undecided. By the middle of the century the Delian League has become the Athenian empire. Henceforward the imperial idea, in one form or another, dominates Greek politics. Athens failed to extend her authority over the whole of Greece. Her empire was overthrown; but the triumph of autonomy proved the triumph of imperialism. The Spartan empire succeeds to the Athenian, and, when it is finally shattered at Leuctra (37 bc), the hegemony of Thebes, which is established on its ruins, is an empire in all but name. The decay of Theban power paves the way for the rise of Macedon.

Thus throughout this period we can trace two forces contending for mastery in the Greek political system. Two causes divide the allegiance of the Greek world, the cause of empire and the cause of autonomy. The formation of the confederacy of Delos did not involve the dissolution of the alliance between Athens and Sparta. or seventeen years more Athens retained her place in the league, “which had been established against the Mede” under the presidency of Sparta in 480 bc (Thuc. i. 102) The ascendancy of Cimon and the Philolaconian party at Athens was favourable to a good understanding between the two states, and at Sparta in normal times the balance inclined in favour of the party whose policy is best described by the motto “quieta non movere.”

In the end, however, the opposition of the two contending forces proved too strong for Spartan neutrality. The fall of Cimon (461 bc) was followed by the so-called “First Peloponnesian War,” a conflict between Athens and her maritime rivals, Corinth and Aegina, into which wars Sparta was ultimately drawn. Thucydides regards the hostilities of these years (460–454 bc), which were resumed for a few months in 446 bc, on the expiration of the Five Years’ Truce, as preliminary to those of the great Peloponnesian War (431–404 bc). The real question at issue was in both cases the same. The tie that united the opponents of Athens was found in a common hostility to the imperial idea. It is a complete misapprehension to regard the Peloponnesian War as a mere duel between two rival claimants for empire. The ultimatum presented by Sparta on the eve of the war demandedthe restora­tiorl of autonomy to the subjects of Athens. There is no reason for doubting her sincerity in presenting it in this form. It would, however, be an equal misapprehension to regard the war as merely a struggle between the cause of empire and the cause of autonomy. Corresponding to this fundamental contrast there are other contrasts, constitutional, racial and military. The military interest of the war is largely due to the fact that Athens was a sea power and Sparta a land one. As the war went on, the constitutional aspect tended to become more marked. At first there were democracies on the side of Sparta, and oligarchies on the side of Athens. In the last stage of the war, when Lysander’s influence was supreme, we see the forces of oligarchy everywhere united and organized for the destruction of demo­cracy. In its origin the war was certainly not due to the rivalry of Dorian and Ionian. This racial, or tribal, contrast counted for more in the politics of Sicily than of Greece; and, though the two great branches of the Greek race were represented respectively by the leaders of the two sides, the allies on neither side belonged exclusively to the one branch or the other. Still, it remains true that the Dorian states were, as a rule, on the Spartan side, and the Ionian states, as a rule, on the Athenian—a division of sentiment which must have helped to widen the breach, and to intensify the animosities.

As a political experiment the Athenian empire possesses a unique interest. It represents the first attempt to fuse the principles of imperialism and democracy. It is at  once the first empire in history possessed and administered by a sovereign people, and the first which sought to establish a common system of democratic institutions amongst its subjects. It was an experiment that failed, partly owing to the inherent strength of the oligarchic cause, partly owing to the exclusive character of ancient citizen­ship. The Athenians themselves recognized that their empire depended for its existence upon the solidarity of democratic interests (see Thuc. iii. 47; Pseudo‑Xenophon, de Rep. Ath. i. I4, iii. 10). An understanding existed between the democratic leaders in the subject-states and the democratic party at Athens. Charges were easily trumped up against obnoxious oligarchs, and conviction as easily obtained in the Athenian courts of law. Such a system forced the oligarchs into an attitude of opposition. How much this opposition counted for was realized when the Sicilian disaster (413 bc) gave the subjects their chance to revolt. The organization of the oligarchical party throughout the empire, which was effected by Lysander in the last stage of the war, contributed to the overthrow of Athenian ascendancy hardly less than the subsidies of Persia. Had Athens aimed at establishing a community of interest between herself and her subjects, based upon a common citizenship, her empire might have endured. It would have been a policy akin to that which secured the permanence of the Roman empire. And it was a policy which found advocates when the day for it was past (see Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 514 ff.; cf. the grant of citizenship to the Samians after Aegospotami, C.I.A. iv. 2. 1b). But the policy pursued by Athens in the plenitude of her power was the reverse of the policy pursued by Rome in her treatment of the franchise. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the fate of the empire was sealed by the law of Pericles (451 bc), by which the franchise was restricted to those who could establish Athenian descent on both sides. It was not merely that the process of amalgamation through intermarriage was abruptly checked; what was more serious was that a hard and fast line was drawn, once and for all, between the small body of privileged rulers and the great mass of unprivileged subjects. Maine (Early Institutions, lecture 13) has classed the Athenian empire with those of the familiar Oriental type, which attempt nothing beyond the raising of taxes and the levying of troops. The Athenian empire cannot, indeed, be classed with the Roman, or with the British rule in India; it does not, therefore, deserve to be classed with the empires of Cyrus or of Jenghiz Khan. Though the basis of its organization, like that of the Persian empire under Darius, was financial, it attempted, and secured, objects beyond the mere payment of tribute and the supply of ships. If Athens did not introduce a common religion, or a common system of educa­tion, or a common citizenship, she did introduce a common type of political institutions, and a common jurisdiction. She went some way, too, in the direction of establishing a common system of coins, and of weights and measures. A common language was there already. In a word, the Athenian empire marks a definite stage of political evolution.

The other great political movement of the age was the progress of democracy. Before the Persian invasion democracy was a rare phenomenon in Greek politics. Where it was found it existed in an undeveloped form, and its tenure of power was precarious. By the beginning of the Peloponnesian War it had become the prevalent form of government. The great majority of Greek states had adopted democratic constitutions. Both in the Athenian sphere of influence and in the colonial world outside that sphere, demo­cracy was all but the only form of constitution known. It was only in Greece proper that oligarchy held its own. In the Peloponnese it could count a majority of the states; in northern Greece at least a half of them. The spread of democratic insti­tutions was arrested by the victory of Sparta in the East, and the rise of Dionysius in the West. There was a moment at the end of the 5th century when it looked as if democracy was a lost cause. Even Athens was for a brief period under the rule of the Thirty (404–403 bc). In the regions which had formed the empire of Athens the decarchies set up by Lysander were soon overthrown, and democracies restored in most cases, but oligarchy continued to be the prevent form in Greece proper until Leuctra (371 bc), and in Sicily tyranny had a still longer tenure of power. By the end of the Great Age oligarchy has almost disappeared from the Greek world, except in the sphere of Persian influence. The Spartan monarchy still survives; a few Peloponnesian states still maintain the rule of the few; here and there in Greece itself we meet with a revival of the tyrannts; but, with these exceptions, democracy is everywhere the only type of constitution. And democracy has developed as well as spread. At the end of the 5th century the constitution of Cleisthenes, which was a democracy in the view of his contemporaries, had come to be regarded as an aristocracy (Aristot. Ath. Pol. 29. 3). We can trace a similar change of sentiment in Sicily. As compared with the extreme form of constitution adopted at Syracuse after the defeat of the Athenian expedition, the democracies established two generations earlier, on the fall of the tyranis, appeared oligarchical. The changes by which the character of the Greek democracies was revolutionized were four in number: the substitution of sortition for election, the abolition of a property qualification, the payment of officials and the rise of a class of professional politicians. In the democracy of Cleisthenes no payment was given for service, whether as a magistrate, a juror or a member of the Boule. The higher magistracies were filled by election, and they were held almost exclusively by the members of the great Athenian families. For the highest office of all, the archonship, none but Pentacosiomedimni (the first of the four Solonian classes) were eligible. The introduction of pay and the removal of the property qualification formed part of the reforms of Pericles. Sortition had been instituted for election a generation earlier (487 bc). What is perhaps the most important of all these changes, the rise of the demagogues, belongs to the era of the Peloponnesian War. From the time of Cleisthenes to the outbreak of the war every statesman of note at Athens, with the exception of Themistocles (and, perhaps, of Ephialtes), is of aristocratic birth. Down to the fall of Cimon the course of Athenian politics is to a great extent determined by the alliances and antipathies of the great clans. With the Peloponnesian War a new epoch begins. The chief office, the strategia, is still, as a rule, held by men of rank. But leadership in the Ecclesia has passed to men of a different class. The demagogues were not necessarily poor men. Cleon was a wealthy man; Eucrates, Lysicles and Hyperbolus were, at any rate, tradesmen rather than artisans. The first “labour member” proper is Cleophon (411–404 bc), a lyre-maker. They belonged, however, not to the land‑owning, but to the industrial classes; they were distinguished from the older race of party‑leaders by a vulgar accent, and by a violence of gesture in public speaking, and they found their supporters among the population of the city and its port, the Peiraeus, rather than among the farmers of the country districts. In the 4th century the demagogues, though under another name, that of orators, have acquired entire control of the Ecclesia. It is an age of professionalism, and the professional soldier has his counterpart in the professional politician. Down to the death of Pericles the party‑leader had always held office as Strategus. His rival, Thucydides, son of Melesias, forms a solitary exception to this statement. In the 4th century the divorce between the general and the statesman is complete. The generals are professional soldiers, who aspire to no political influence in the state, and the statesmen devote themselves exclusively to politics, a career for which they have prepared themselves by a professional training in oratory or administrative work. The ruin of agriculture during the war had reduced the old families to insignificance. Birth counts for less than nothing as a political asset in the age of Demosthenes.

But great as are the contrasts which have been pointed out between the earlier and the later democracy, those that distinguish the ancient conception of democracy from the modern are of a still more essential nature. The differences that distinguish the democracies of ancient Greece from those of the modern world have their origin, to a great extent, in the difference between a city-‑state and a nation-state. Many of the most famous Greek states had an area of a few square miles; the largest of them was no larger than an English county. Political theory put the limit of the citizen‑body at 10,000. Though this number was exceeded in a few cases, it is doubtful if any state, except Athens, ever counted more than 20,000 citizens. In the nation-states of modern times, democratic government is possible only under the form of a representative system; in the city‑state representative government was unnecessary, and therefore unknown. In the ancient type of democracy a popular chamber has no existence. The Ecclesia is not a chamber in any sense of the term; it is an assembly of the whole people, which every citizen is entitled to attend, and in which every one is equally entitled to vote and speak. The question raised in modern political science, as to whether sovereignty resides in the electors or their representatives, has thus neither place nor meaning in ancient theory. In the same way, one of the most familiar results of modern analysis, the distinction between the executive and the legislative, finds no recognition in the Greek writers. In a direct system of government there can be no executive in the proper sense. Executive functions are discharged by the ecclesia, to whose decision the details of administration may be referred. The position of the strategi, the chief officials in the Athenian democracy of the 5th century, was in no sense comparable to that of a modern cabinet. Hence the individual citizen in an ancient democracy was concerned in, and responsible for, the actual work of government to a degree that is inconceivable in a modern state. Thus participation in the administrative and judicial business of the state is made by Aristotle the differentia of the citizen (. . . Aristot. Politics, p. 1275 a 20). A large proportion of the citizens of Athens, in addition to frequent service in the courts of law, must in the course of their lives have held a magistracy, great or small, or have acted for a year or two as members of the Boule. It must be remembered that there was nothing corre­sponding to a permanent civil service in the ancient state. Much of the work of a government office would have been transacted by the Athenian Boule. It must be remembered, too, that political and administrative questions of great import­ance came before the popular courts of law. Hence it follows that the ordinary citizen of an ancient democracy, in the course of his service in the Boule or the law-courts, acquired an interest in political questions, and a grasp of administrative work, which none but a select few can hope to acquire under the conditions of the modern system. Where there existed neither a popular chamber nor a distinct executive, there was no opportunity for the growth of a party‑system. There were, of course, political parties at Athens and elsewhere—oligarchs and democrats, conservatives and radicals, a peace-party and a war‑party, according to the burning question of the day. There was, however, nothing equivalent to a general election, to a cabinet (or to that collective responsibility which is of the essence of a cabinet), or to the government and the opposition. Party organization, therefore, and a party system, in the proper sense, were never developed. Whatever may have been the evils incident to the ancient form of democracy, the “boss,” the caucus and the spoils-system were not among them.

Besides these differences, which, directly or indirectly, result from the difference of scale, there are others, hardly less profound, which are not connected with the size of the city-state. Perhaps the most striking contrast between the democracies of ancient and of modern times is to be found in their attitude towards privilege. Ancient democracy implies privilege; modern democracy implies its destruction. In the more fully developed democracies of the modern world (e.g. in the United States, or in Australia), the privilege of class is unknown; in some of them (e.g. New Zealand, Australia, Norway) even the privilege o f sex has been abolished. Ancient democracy was bound up with privilege as much as oligarchy was. The transition from the latter to the former was effected by enlarging the area of privilege and by altering its basis. In an oligarchical state citizenship might be confined to 10% of the free population; under a democracy 50% might enjoy it. In the former case the qualifica­tion might be wealth or land; in the latter case it might be, as it was at Athens, birth, i.e. descent, on both sides, from a citizen family. But, in both cases alike, the distinction between a privileged and an unprivileged body of free‑born residents is fundamental. To the unprivileged class belonged, not only foreigners temporarily resident (xenoi) and aliens permanently domiciled (metoikoi), but also those native-born inhabitants of the state who were of foreign extraction, on one side or the other. The privileges attaching to citizenship included, in addition to eligibility for office and a vote in the assembly, such private rights as that of owning land or a house, or of contracting a marriage with one of citizen status. The citizen, too, was alone the recipient of all the various forms of pay (e.g. for attend­ance in the assembly, for service in the Boule or the law-courts, or for the celebration of the great festivals) which are so con­spicuous a feature in the developed democracy of the 4th century. The metoeci could not even plead in a court of law in person, but only through a patron . . . . It is intelligible that privileges so great should be jealously guarded. In the demo­cracies of the modern world naturalization is easy; in those of ancient Greece admission to the franchise was rarely accorded. In modern times, again, we are accustomed to connect democracy with the emancipation of women. It is true that only a few democratic constitutions grant them the suffrage; but though, as a rule, they are denied public rights, the growth of popular government has been almost everywhere accompanied by an extension of their private rights, and by the removal of the restrictions imposed by law, custom or public opinion upon their freedom of action. In ancient Greece the democracies were as illiberal in their policy as the oligarchies. Women of the respectable class were condemned to comparative seclusion. They enjoyed far less freedom in 4th-century Athens than in the Homeric Age. It is not in any of the democracies, but in conservative Sparta, that they possess privilege and exercise influence.

The most fundamental of all the contrasts between democracy in its ancient and in its modern form remains to be stated. The ancient state was inseparable from slavery. In this respect there was no difference between democracy and the other forms of government. No inconsistency was felt, therefore, between this institution and the democratic principle. Modern political theory has been profoundly affected by the conception of the dignity of labour; ancient political theory tended to regard labour as a disqualification for the exercise of political rights. Where slavery exists, the taint of it will inevitably cling to all labour that can be performed by the slave. In ancient Athens (which may be taken as typical of the Greek democracies) unskilled labour was almost entirely slave‑labour, and skilled labour was largely so. The arts and crafts were, to some extent, exercised by citizens, but to a lesser extent in the 4th than in the 6th century. They were, however, chiefly left to aliens or slaves. The citizen-body of Athens in the age of Demosthenes has been stigmatized as consisting in great measure of salaried paupers. There is, doubtless, an exaggeration in this. It is, however, true, both that the system of state-pay went a long way towards supplying the simple wants of a southern population, and that a large proportion of the citizens had time to spare for the service of the state. Had the life of the lower class of citizens been absorbed in a round of mechanical labours, as fully as is the life of our industrial classes, the working of an ancient democracy would have been impossible. In justice to the ancient democracies it must be conceded that, while popular government carried with it neither the enfranchisement of the alien nor the emancipation of the slaves, the rights secured to both classes were more considerable in the democratic states than elsewhere. The lot of the slave, as well as that of the alien, was a peculiarly favourable one at Athens. The pseudo-­Xenophon in the 5th century (De rep. Ath. I. 10–12) and Plato in the 4th (Republic, p. 563 b), prove that the spirit of liberty with which Athenian life was permeated, was not without its influence upon the position of these classes. When we read that critics complained of the opulence of slaves, and of the liberties they took, and when we are told that the slave could not be distinguished from the poorer class of citizens either by his dress or his look, we begin to realize the difference between the slavery of ancient Athens and the system as it was worked on the Roman latifundia or the plantations of the New World.

It had been anticipated that the fall of Athens would mean the triumph of the principle of autonomy. If Athens had surrendered within a year or so of the Sicilian catastrophe, this anticipation would probably have been fulfilled. It was the last phase of the struggle (412–404 bc) that rendered a Spartan empire inevitable. The oligarchical governments established by Lysander recognized that their tenure of power was dependent upon Spartan support, while Lysander himself, to whose genius, as a political organizer not less than as a commander, the triumph of Sparta was due, was unwilling to see his work undone. The Athenian empire had never included the greater part of Greece proper; since the Thirty Years’ Peace its possessions on the mainland, outside the boundaries of Attica, were limited to Naupactus and Plataea. Sparta, on the other hand, attempted the control of the entire Greek world east of the Adriatic. Athens had been compelled to acknowledge a dual system; Sparta sought to establish uniformity. The attempt failed from the first. Within a year of the surrender of Athens, Thebes and Corinth had drifted into an attitude of opposition, while Argos remained hostile. It was not long before the policy of Lysander succeeded in uniting against Sparta the very forces upon which she had relied when she entered on the Peloponnesian War. The Corinthian War (394–387 bc) was brought about by the alliance of all the second-class powers—Thebes, Athens, Corinth, Argos—against the one first-class power, Sparta. Though Sparta emerged successful from the war, it was with the loss of her maritime empire, and at the cost of recognizing the principle of autonomy as the basis of the Greek political system. It was already evident, thus early in the century, that the centrifugal forces were to prove stronger than the centripetal. Two further causes may be indicated which help to explain the failure of the Spartan empire. In the first place Spartan sea-power was an artificial creation. History seems to show that it is idle for a state to aspire to naval supremacy unless it possesses a great commercial marine. Athens had possessed such a marine; her naval supremacy was due not to the mere size of her fleet, but to the numbers and skill of her seafaring population. Sparta had no commerce. She could build fleets more easily than she could man them. A single defeat (at Cnidus, 391 bc) sufficed for the ruin of her sea-power. The second cause is to be found in the financial weakness of the Spartan state. The Spartan treasury had been temporarily enriched by the spoils of the Peloponnesian War, but neither during that war, nor afterwards, did Sparta succeed in developing any scientific financial system, Athens was the only state which either possessed a large annual revenue or accumulated a considerable reserve. Under the conditions of Greek warfare, fleets were more expensive than armies. Not only was money needed for the building and maintenance of the ships, but the sailor must be paid, while the soldier served for nothing. Hence the power with the longest purse could both build the largest fleet and attract the most skillful seamen.

The battle of Leuctra transferred the hegemony from Sparta to Thebes, but the attempt to unite Greece under the leadership of Thebes was from the first doomed to failure. The conditions were less favourable to Thebes than they had been to Athens or Sparta. Thebes was even more exclusively a land-power than Sparta. She had no revenue comparable to that of Athens in the preceding century. Unlike Athens and Sparta, she had not the advantage of being identified with a political cause. As the enemy of Athens in the 5th century, she was on the side of oligarchy; as the rival of Sparta in the 4th, she was on the side of democracy; but in her bid for primacy she could not appeal, as Athens and Sparta could, to a great political tradition, nor had she behind her, as they had, the moral force of a great political principle. Her position, too, in Boeotia itself was insecure. The rise of Athens was in great measure the result of the synoecism . . . of Attica. All inhabitants of Attica were Athenians. But “Boeotian” and “Theban” were not synonymous terms. The Boeotian league was an imperfect form of union, as compared with the Athenian state, and the claim of Thebes to the presi­dency of the league was, at best, sullenly acquiesced in by the other towns. The destruction of some of the most famous of the Boeotian cities, however necessary it may have been in order to unite the country, was a measure which at once impaired the resources of Thebes and outraged Greek sentiment. It has been often held that the failure of Theban policy was due to the death of Epaminondas (at the battle of Mantinea, 362 bc). For this view there is no justification. His policy had proved a failure before his death. Where it harmonized with the spirit of the age, the spirit of dissidence, it succeeded; where it attempted to run counter to it, it failed. It succeeded in destroying the supremacy of Sparta in the Peloponnese; it failed to unite the Peloponnese on a new basis. It failed still more signally to unite Greece north of the Isthmus. It left Greece weaker and more divided than it found it (see the concluding words of Xenophon’s Hellenics). It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of his policy as a destructive force; as a constructive force it effected nothing. The Peloponnesian system which Epaminondas overthrew had lasted two hundred years. Under Spartan leadership the Peloponnese had enjoyed almost complete immunity from invasion and comparative immunity from stasis (faction). The claim that Isocrates makes for Sparta is probably well‑founded (Archidamus, 64–69; during the period of Spartan ascendency the Peloponnesians were omalismenoi ton Ellhnon). Peloponnesian sentiment had been one of the chief factors in Greek politics; to it, indeed, in no small degree was due the victory over Persia. The Theban victory at Leuctra destroyed the unity, and with it the peace and the prosperity, of the Peloponnese. It inaugurated a period of misery, the natural result of stasis and invasion, to which no parallel can be found in the earlier history (See Isocrates, Archidamus, 65, 66; the Peloponnesians were omalismenoi sumtorais). It destroyed, too, the Peloponnesian sentiment of hostility to the invader. The bulk of the army that defeated Mardonius at Plataea came from the Peloponnese; at Chaeronea no Pelopon­nesian state was represented.

The question remains, Why did the city-state fail to save Greece from conquest by Macedon? Was this result due to the inherent weakness either of the city-state itself, or of one particular form of it, democracy? It is clear, in any case, that the triumph of Macedon was the effect of causes which had long been at work. If neither Philip nor Alexander had appeared on the scene, Greece might have maintained her independence for another generation or two; but, when invasion came, it would have found her weaker and more distracted, and the conquerors might easily have been less imbued with the Greek spirit, and less sympathetic towards Greek ideals, than the great Macedonian and his son. These causes are to be found in the tendencies of the age, political, economic and moral. Of the two movements which characterized the Great Age in its political aspect, the imperial and the democratic, the one failed and the other succeeded. The failure and the success were equally fatal to the chances of Greece in the conflict with Macedon. By the middle of the 4th century Greek politics had come to be dominated by the theory of the balance of power. This theory, enunciated in its coarsest form by Demosthenes (Pro Megalopolit. 4 . . .; cf. in Aristocrat. 102, 103), had shaped the foreign policy of Athens since the end of the Peloponnesian War. As long as Sparta was the stronger, Athens inclined to a Theban alliance; after Leuctra she tended in the direction of a Spartan one. At the epoch of Philip’s accession the forces were everywhere nicely balanced. The Peloponnese was fairly equally divided between the Theban and the Spartan interests, and‑central Greece was similarly divided between the Theban and the Athenian. Farther north we get an Athenian party opposed to an Olynthian in Chalcidice, and a republican party, dependent upon the support of Thebes, opposed to that of the tyrants in Thessaly. It is easy to see that the political conditions of Greece, both in the north and in the south, invited interference from without. And the triumph of democracy in its extreme form was ruinous to the military efficiency of Greece. On the one side there was a monarchical state, in which all powers, civil as well as military, were concentrated in the hands of a single ruler; on the other, a constitutional system, in which a complete separation had been effected between the responsibility of the statesman and that of the commander.

It could not be doubtful with which side victory would rest. Meanwhile, the economic conditions were steadily growing worse. The cause which Aristotle assigns for the decay of the Spartan state—a declining population (see Politics, p. 1270. . .)—might be extended to the Greek world generally. The loss of population was partly the result of war and stasis—Isocrates speaks of the number of political exiles from the various states as enormous—but it was also due to a declining birth‑rate, and to the exposure of infants. Aristotle, while condemning exposure, sanctions the procuring of abortion (Politics, 1335 b). It is probable that both ante‑natal and post‑natal infanticide were rife everywhere, except among the more backward communities. A people which has condemned itself to racial suicide can have little chance when pitted against a nation in which healthier instincts prevail. The materials for forming a trustworthy estimate of the population of Greece at any given epoch are not available; there is enough evidence, however, to prove that the military population of the leading Greek states at the era of the battle of Chaeronea (338 bc) fell far short of what it had been at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. The decline in population had been accompanied by a decline in wealth, both public and private; and while revenues had shrunk, expenditure had grown. It was a century of warfare; and warfare had become enormously more expensive, partly through the increased employment of mercenaries, partly through the enhanced cost of material. The power of the purse had made itself felt even in the 5th century; Persian gold had helped to decide the issue of the great war. In the politics of the 4th century the power of the purse becomes the determining factor. The public finance of the ancient world was singularly simple in character, and the expedients for raising a revenue were comparatively few. The distinction between direct and indirect taxation was recognized in practice, but states as a rule were reluctant to submit to the former system. The revenue of Athens in the 5th century was mainly derived from the tribute paid by her subjects; it was only in time of war that a direct tax was levied upon the citizen-body. In the age of Demosthenes the revenue derived from the Athenian Confederacy was insignificant. The whole burden of the expenses of a war fell upon the 1200 richest citizens, who were subject to direct taxation in the dual form of the Trieratchy and the Eisphora (property-tax). The revenue thus raised was wholly insufficient for an effort on a great scale; yet the revenues of Athens at this period must have exceeded those of any other state. It is to moral causes, however, rather than to political or economic ones, that the failure of Greece in the conflict with Macedon is attributed by the most famous Greek statesmen of that age. Demosthenes is never weary of insisting upon the decay of patriotism among the citizens and upon the decay of probity among their leaders. Venality had always been the besetting sin of Greek statesmen. Pericles’ boast as to his own incorruptibility (Thuc. ii. 60) is significant as to the reputation of his contemporaries. In the age of Demosthenes the level of public life in this respect had sunk at least as low as that which prevails in many states of the modern world (see Demosthenes. On the Crown, 61 . . .). Corruption was certainly not confined to the Macedonian party. The best that can be said in defence of the patriots, as well as of their opponents, is that they honestly believed that the policy which they were bribed to advocate was the best for their country’s interests. The evidence for the general decay of patriotism among the mass, of the citizens is less conclusive. The battle of Megalopolis (331 bc), in which the Spartan soldiery “went down in a blaze of glory,” proves that the spirit of the Lacedemonian state remained unchanged. But at Athens it seemed to contemporary observers—to Isocrates equally with Demosthenes—that the spirit of the great days was extinct (see Isocr. On the Peace, 47, 48). It cannot, of course, be denied that public opinion was obstinately opposed to the diversion of the Theoric Fund to the purposes of the war with Philip. It was not till the year before Chaeronea that Demosthenes succeeded in persuading the assembly to devote the entire surplus to the expenses of the war. Nor can it be denied that mercenaries were far more largely employed in the 4th century than in the 5th. In justice, however, to the Athenians of the Demosthenic era, it should be remembered that the burden of direct taxation was rarely imposed, and was reluctantly endured, in the previous century. It must also be remembered that, even in the 4h century, the Athenian citizen was ready to take the field, provided that it was not a question of a distant expedition or of prolonged service. For distant expeditions, or for prolonged service, a citizen-militia is unsuited. The substitution of a professional force for an unprofessional one is to be explained, partly by the change in the character of Greek warfare, and partly by the operation of the laws of supply and demand. There had been a time when warfare meant a brief campaign in the summer months against a neighbouring state. It had come to mean prolonged operations against a distant enemy. Athens was at war, e.g. with Philip, for eleven years continuously (357-346 bc). If winter campaigns in Thrace were unpopular at this epoch, they had been hardly less unpopular in the epoch of the Peloponnesian War. In the days of her greatness, too, Athens had freely employed mer­cenaries, but it was in the navy rather than the army. In the age of Pericles the supply of mercenary rowers was abundant, the supply of mercenary troops inconsiderable. In the age of Demosthenes incessant warfare and ceaseless revolution had filled Greece with crowds of homeless adventurers. The supply helped to create the demand. The mercenary was as cheap as the citizen‑soldier, and much more effective. On the whole, then, it may be inferred that it is a mistake to regard the preval­ence of the mercenary system as the expression of a declining patriotism. It would be nearer the mark to treat the transition from the voluntary to the professional system as cause rather than effect: as one among the causes which contributed to the decay of public spirit in the Greek world.