ties to his adherents, and in the lower by raising masses of slaves to the citizenship and distributing amongst them (as was not uncommon) the wives and daughters of the victims.[1]
After the characteristically Classical fashion, the type of these revolutions was such as to produce always an increase of number, never of extent. Multitudes of them happened, but each proceeded purely for itself and at one point of its own, and it is only the fact that they were contemporary with one another that gives them the character of a collective phenomenon, which marks an epoch. Similarly with Napoleonism; here again, a formless regimen for the first time raised itself above the framework of the State, yet without being able to attain to complete inward detachment therefrom. It supported itself on the Army, which, vis-à-vis the nation that had lost its "form," began to feel itself as an independent power. That is the brief road from Robespierre to Bonaparte — with the fall of the Jacobins the centre of gravity passed from the administration to the ambitious generals. How deeply this new tendency implanted itself in the West may be seen from the example of Bernadotte and Wellington, and even more from the story of Frederick William III's "call to my People" in 1813 — in this case the continuance of the dynasty would have been challenged by the military had not the King stiffened himself to break with Napoleon.[2]
This anti-constitutionality of the Second Tyrannis declared itself also in the position taken by Alcibiades and Lysander in the armed forces of their respective cities during the latter stages of the Peloponnesian War, a position incompatible with the basic form of the Polis. The first-named, destitute as an exile of official position, and against the will of the home authorities, exercised from 411 the de facto command of the Athenian Navy; the second, though not even a Spartiate, felt himself entirely independent at the head of an army devoted to his person. In the year 408 the contest of the two powers for the supremacy over the Ægean world took the form of a contest between these two individuals.[3] Shortly after this, Dionysius of Syracuse built up the first large-scale professional army and introduced engines of war (artillery)[4] — a new form which served as a model for the Diadochi and Rome also. Thereafter the spirit of the army was a political power on its own account, and it became a serious question how far the State was master, and how far tool, of its army.
- ↑ Diodorus XIV, 7. The drama was repeated in 317, when Agathocles the ex-potter let loose his mercenary bands and the mob upon the new upper classes. After the massacre the "people" of the "purified city" assembled and conferred the dictature upon the "saviour of true and genuine freedom" (Deodorus XIX, 6, et seq.). On the whole movement see Busolt, Griech. Staatskunde, pp. 396, et seq., and Pöhlmann, Gesch. d. soz. Frage, I, pp. 416, et seq.
- ↑ Already that part of the Prussian army which had been in Russia had declared against Napoleon — and that, though its general, Yorck, was no liberal, but the old strict type of the Frederician officer. — Tr.
- ↑ Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., IV, §§ 626, 630.
- ↑ H. Delbrück, Gesch. d. Kriegskunst (1908), I, p. 142.
