Duke of Athens

“ Athenian empire, incorporating so many states into one system, is to be regarded as a most extraordinary accident. Nothing but the genius, energy, discipline, and democracy of Athens, could have brought it about; nor even she, unless favoured and pushed on by a very peculiar train of antecedent events. But having once got it, she might perfectly well have kept it; and had she done so, the Hellenic world would have remained so organised as to be able to repel foreign intervention, either from Susa or from Pella. ”

“ The Persian wars bound all the States together by a powerful Hellenic sentiment of patriotism. The Peloponnesian war dissevered this Panhellenic tie. The disaster at Syracuse was fatal to Athenian supremacy, and even independence. But for this Athens might have remained the great power of Greece. The democratic organization of the government gave great vigor and enterprise to all the ambitious projects of Athens. If Alcibiades had lent his vast talents to the building up of his native State, even then the fortunes of Athens might have been different. ”

“ After such years of misery, it was an unspeakable relief to the Athenian population to regain possession of Athens and Attica; to exchange their domestic tyrants for a renovated democratical government; and to see their foreign enemies not merely evacuate the country, but even bind themselves by treaty to future friendly dealing. In respect of power, indeed, Athens was but the shadow of her former self. She had no empire, no tribute, no fleet, no fortifications at Piræus, no long walls, not a single fortified place in Attica except the city itself. ”

“ Every Athenian is born into accepting the fact that Athena Polias is the divine warder of the city, as much as he is born into accepting the fact that it is his duty to obey the strategi in battle. To repudiate the gods of Athens, e.g. in favor of those of Egypt, is as much iniquity as to join forces against the Athenians if they are at war with Egypt;—the thing is sheer treason, and almost unthinkable. For countless generations the Athenians have worshipped the “Ancestral Gods.” They are proud of them, familiar with them; the gods have participated in all the prosperity of the city. ”

“ We are fully persuaded that the most thorough English Conservative may admire the Athenian republic; so far at least admire as to admit that it is impossible to conceive how, under any other form of government, the peculiar glories of Athens could have shone forth. And, indeed, an Athenian democracy differs so entirely from any political institution which the world sees at present, or will ever see again, that to carry the strife of our politics back into those times, in other than a quite general manner, is as futile as it is tasteless and vexatious. ”

“ But honour and wealth alone would not have sufficed for the universal emulation, the universal devotion to all that could adorn or exalt the nation. It was the innovations of Aristides and Ephialtes that breathed into that abstract and cold formality, THE STATE, the breath and vigour of a pervading people, and made the meanest citizen struggle for Athens with that zeal with which an ambitious statesman struggles for himself [290] . These two causes united reveal to us the true secret why Athens obtained a pre-eminence in intellectual grandeur over the rest of Greece. ”

“ Were we so inclined, many and mighty are our prohibitions; first and chiefly, our temples burnt and overthrown, urging us not to alliance, but to revenge. Next, the whole race of Greece has one consanguinity and one tongue, and common are its manners, its altars, and its gods base indeed, if Athenians were of these the betrayers. Lastly, learn now, if ye knew it not before, that, while one Athenian shall survive, Athens allies herself not with Xerxes. ”

“ Making prompt use of the ascendancy she had won in the Persian War, Athens rose rapidly in power and wealth. Under the guise of a federation of the Ionian cities of the islands and of Asia Minor, she created an empire subject to her rule. She commanded the sea with superior fleets, and became first in commerce, as she was first in knowledge, in politics and in arts. Her coffers overran with the riches poured into them by her tribute-gatherers and her men of trade, and she employed them with a noble prodigality upon her temples and the buildings of the state. ”

“ Athens, become, within a very few years, from the capital of a small province, in fact though not yet in avowed pretension, the head of an empire, exhibited a new and singular phenomenon in politics, a sovereign people; a people, not, as in many other Grecian democracies, sovereign merely of that state which themselves, maintained by slaves, composed, but supreme over other people in subordinate republics, acknowledging a degree of subjection, yet claiming to be free. Under this extraordinary political constitution philosophy and the arts were beginning to make Athens their principal resort. ”

“ Rampant individualism, seeking personal pleasure, clamorous for the admiration of its fellows, but not restrained from secret falsity by any strong moral sense—that was what the Greeks developed in the end.
Neither must Athens be regarded as a democracy in the modern sense. She was only so by contrast with Persia or with Sparta. Not every man in the beautiful city voted, or enjoyed the riches that flowed into her coffers, and could thus afford, free from pecuniary care, to devote himself to art. ”

“ Athens built her glory on other foundations. She could not, indeed, lead countless armies into the field, but she knew how, with a little band, to defeat those who could. In the days of her freedom no human force could subdue her. To effect this, every man within the borders of Attica must have been exterminated; for so long as an Athenian was left, the indomitable spirit of democracy would have survived in him and sufficed to kindle up fresh contests. ”

“ That Athens should be great, splendid, and powerful, was not only a reward due to her public spirit and devotion to the common cause, but also a guarantee for the general dignity and liberty of Greeks. And we, who have still before us the remnants of her temples and statues, and learn from them what man can accomplish under the inspiration of great ideals, need not scan too closely her claim to appropriate the funds which she employed for so noble a purpose. ”

“ There is a little army, chiefly composed of officers, and a miniature cabinet, and a beautiful miniature university, and everybody knows everybody else; and when the King or Queen drives forth, the guard turns out and blows a bugle, and so all Athens, which is always sitting at the cafés around the square of the palace, nods its head and says, "The Queen is going for a drive," or, "Her Majesty has returned early to-day," and then continues to clank its sword and to twirl its mustache and to sip its coffee. Modern Athens tends towards the Frank in dress and habit of thought. ”

“ The Athenian empire, properly so called, which began by the confederacy of Delos after the Persian invasion, was completely destroyed at the close of the Peloponnesian war, when Athens was conquered and taken. But after some years had elapsed, towards the year 377 B.C., Athens again began to make maritime conquests, to acquire allies, to receive tribute, to assemble a synod, and to resume her footing of something like an imperial city. ”

“ It is easy to imagine the dismay of the Athenians when they heard that Eretria had been destroyed, and that the Persians, the conquerors of the world, were even then on their way to Athens. How could they hope, with their small army, to stand against the great empire? Help must be had, and that quickly. To whom should they turn, if not to {129} Sparta, the foremost military state in Greece, and which, should Athens fall, would be the next state attacked? Self-defence, if no other reason, would surely bring them with speed to Athens. ”

“ Possessing complete mastery of the sea, and every sort of superiority requisite for holding empire over islands, Athens had yet no sentiment to appeal to in her subjects, calculated to render her empire popular, except that of common democracy, which seems at first to have acted without any care on her part to encourage it, until the progress of the Peloponnesian war made such encouragement a part of her policy. ”

“ Finally, the boundaries of the kingdom having been more satisfactorily determined by a treaty between Turkey and the powers in 1832, the crown was conferred on Otho, a Bavarian prince, who arrived at Nauplia, the then capital of Greece, in 1833. Athens became the seat of government in 1835. Says a writer in the British Quarterly, "The Greeks neither elected their own sovereign nor chose their national polity. In a spirit of generous confidence they allowed the three protecting powers to name a king for them, and the powers rewarded them by making the worst selection they could. ”

“ The empire delegated to the Athenians they must naturally desire to retain and to increase; and there was every reason to forbode that their ambition would soon exceed their capacities to sustain it. As the state became accustomed to its power, it would learn to abuse it. Increasing civilization, luxury, and art, brought with them new expenses, and Athens had already been permitted to indulge with impunity the dangerous passion of exacting tribute from her neighbours. ”

“ Dionysius of Syracuse, has sent an embassy, and the democracy, which once would have treated with scant courtesy the representatives of a tyrant, is fain to flatter so powerful a prince. There are some Persian Envoys too, for the Persians are still following their old game of playing off one great state against another. A few Greeks from Sinope and from one of the Italian cities, persons of no importance, who would hardly have found a place in the gallery during the palmy times of Athens, make up the company of visitors. ”

“ But the mere establishment and confirmation of a powerful aristocracy, and the mere collection of the population into a capital, were sufficient to prepare the way for far more democratic institutions than Theseus himself contemplated or designed. For centuries afterward an oligarchy ruled in Athens; but, free itself, that oligarchy preserved in its monopoly the principles of liberty, expanding in their influence with the progress of society. The democracy of Athens was not an ancient, yet not a sudden, constitution. ”

“ And altogether the exercise of empire abroad became a prominent feature in Athenian life, and a necessity to Athenian sentiment, not less than democracy at home. Athens was no longer, as she had been once, a single city, with Attica for her territory: she was a capital or imperial city,—a despot city, was the expression used by her enemies, and even sometimes by her own citizens, [14] —with many dependencies attached to her, and bound to follow her orders. ”

“ Athens must never again seek “empire” in the sense which became odious under the influence of Cleon and Hyperbolus,—when, to use the image of Aristophanes, the allies were as Babylonian slaves grinding in the Athenian mill. Athens must never permit, if she could help it, the re-establishment of such a domination as Sparta exercised in Greece from the battle of Aegospotami to the battle of Leuctra. Athens must aim at leading a free confederacy, of which the members should be bound to her by their own truest interests. Athens must seek to deserve the confidence of all Greeks alike. ”

“ They shared the universal Grecian desire for separate autonomy, [73] felt the Athenian empire as an extraneous pressure which they would have been glad to shake off, whenever the change could be made with safety: but their condition was not one of positive hardship, nor did they overlook the hazardous side of such a change,—partly from the coercive hand of Athens, partly from new enemies against whom Athens had hitherto protected them, and not least, from their own oligarchy. ”

“ The successes of Athens during the ensuing ten years were more brilliant than ever, and she attained the maximum of her power: which doubtless had a material effect in imparting stability to the democracy as well as to the administration of Pericles—and enabled both the one and the other to stand the shock of those great public reverses, which deprived the Athenians of their dependent landed alliances, in the interval between the defeat of Coronea and the Thirty Years’ Truce. ”

“ This is the gift of Athens to man. Her freedom and her power have for more than twenty centuries been annihilated; her people have degenerated into timid slaves; her language into a barbarous jargon; her temples have been given up to the successive depredations of Romans, Turks, and Scotchmen; but her intellectual empire is imperishable. And when those who have rivalled her greatness shall have shared her fate; when civilisation and knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant continents ”

“ There is, on the one hand, no easy way of bringing to bear the ascendency of an energetic chief to improve the military organization,—as Athens found to her cost, when she was afterwards assailed by Philip, the successor after some interval, and in many respects the parallel, of Archelaus. But on the other hand, neither the personal tastes nor the appetites, of any individual Athenian, count as active causes in the march of public affairs, which is determined by the established law and by the pronounced sentiments of the body of citizens. ”