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 The Spartan empire. B.C.) 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 B.C.) 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 B.C.) 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 skilful 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 Theban hegemony. 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 (συνοικισμός) 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 B.C.). 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.[1] 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 εὐδαιμονέστατοι τῶν Ἑλλήνων). 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 ὡμαλισμένοι ταῖς συμφοραῖς). 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 The rise of Macedon. 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 συμφέρει τῇ πόλει καὶ Λακεδαιμονίους ἀσθενεῖς εἶναι καὶ Θηβαίους; 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
- ↑ It failed even to create a united Arcadia or a strong Messenia.
