by Will Durant
The basic principle of democracy is freedom inviting chaos; the basic principle of monarchy is power inviting tyranny, revolution, and war. From Philip to Perseus, from Chaeronea to Pydna (338-168), the foreign and civil wars of the city-states were supplemented by the external and internal wars of the kingdoms, for the perquisites of government tempted a hundred generals to contests for thrones. Violence was as popular, condottieri as numerous and brilliant, in Hellenistic Greece as in Renaissance Italy. When Antipater died Athens revolted again, and put to death old Phocion, who had ruled it as justly as possible in Antipater’s name. Cassander, Antipater’s son, recaptured the city for Macedon (318), widened the franchise to holders of a thousand drachmas, and left as his regent the philosopher, scholar, and dilettante Demetrius of Phalerum, who gave the city ten years of prosperity and peace. Meanwhile Antigonus I (“Cyclops”) dreamed of uniting all of Alexander’s empire under his one eye; he was defeated at Ipsus (301) by a coalition, and lost Asia Minor to Seleucus I. His son Demetrius Poliorcetes (“Taker of Cities”) liberated Greece from Macedonian rule, gave Athens twelve years more of democracy, was lodged as the grateful city’s guest in the Parthenon, brought courtesans to live with him there,2 drove some young men to desperation by his amorous attentions,* won a brilliant naval victory over Ptolemy I at Cyprus (308), besieged Rhodes for six years with new siege instruments but without success, made himself king of Macedon (294), ended Athenian liberty with a garrison, fell into ever new wars, was defeated and captured by Seleucus, and drank himself to death.
Four years later (279), taking advantage of the disorder brought on by the struggle for power in the eastern Mediterranean, a horde of Celts, or “Gauls,” under Brennus* marched down through Macedonia into Greece. Brennus, says Pausanias, “pointed out the weak state of Greece, the immense wealth of her cities, the votive offerings in the temples, the great quantities of silver and gold.”4 At the same time a revolution broke out in Macedonia under the leadership of Apollodorus; part of the army joined in, and helped the angry poor in their periodical revenge of despoiling the rich. The Gauls, doubtless guided by a Greek, found their way through secret passes around Thermopylae, killed and plundered indiscriminately, and advanced upon the rich temple at Delphi. Repulsed there by a Greek force and a storm that in Greek belief was Apollo’s defense of his shrine, Brennus retreated and killed himself in shame. The surviving Gauls crossed over into Asia Minor. “They butchered all the males,” writes Pausanias,
and likewise old women, and babes at their mothers’ breasts; they drank the blood, and feasted on the flesh of infants that were fat. High-spirited women, and maidens in their flower, committed suicide . . . those that survived were subjected to every kind of outrage. . . . Some of the women rushed upon the swords of the Gauls, and voluntarily courted death; to others death came from absence of food or sleep, as these merciless barbarians ravished them in turn, and wreaked their lusts upon them whether dying or dead.†5
After suffering years of such devastation, the Greeks of Asia bought off the invaders, and persuaded them to retire into northern Phrygia (where their settlements become known as Galatia), Thrace, and the Balkans. For two generations the Gauls levied fear tribute from Seleucus I and the Greek cities of the Asiatic coasts and the Black Sea; Byzantium alone paid them $240,000 a year.‡6 As the emperors and generals of Rome were to be occupied, in the third century after Christ, in repelling barbarian inroads, so the kings and generals of Pergamum, Seleucia, and Macedonia gave much of their resources and energies, in the third century before Christ, to driving back the recurring waves of Celtic invasion. Throughout its history ancient civilization lived on the edge of a sea of barbarism that repeatedly threatened to inundate it. The stoic courage of citizens perpetually prepared had once kept back the peril; but stoicism was dying in Greece precisely at the time that devised its classic formulation and its name.
Antigonus II, son of Demetrius Poliorcetes and called “Gonatas” for reasons now unknown, drove the Gauls out of Macedonia, put down the revolt of Apollodorus, and ruled Macedonia with ability and moderation for thirty-eight years (277-39). He gave generously to literature, science, and philosophy, brought poets like Aratus of Soli to his court, and formed a lifelong friendship with Zeno the Stoic; he was the first of that very discontinuous line of philosopher-kings which ended in Marcus Aurelius. Nevertheless it was during his reign that Athens made a last bid for freedom. In 267 the nationalist party came into power under the leadership of a young pupil of Zeno’s, Chremonides. It secured the aid of Egypt, ousted the Macedonian troops, and announced the liberation of Athens. Antigonus came down at his leisure and recaptured the city (262), but dealt with it as became one who respected philosophy and old age. He established garrisons in the Piraeus, on Salamis, and at Sunium, and enjoined Athens from engaging in alliances or wars; for the rest he left the city completely free.
Other Greek states were solving in other ways the problem of reconciling liberty with order. About 279 little Aetolia, peopled like Macedon with half-barbarous and never-conquered mountaineers, began to organize the cities of northern Greece—chiefly those of the Delphic Amphictyony—into the Aetolian League; and about the same time the Achaean League of Patrae, Dyme, Pellene, and other towns attracted to its membership many cities of the Peloponnese. In either league the constituent municipalities kept control of all local government, but surrendered their armed forces and foreign relations to a federal council, and a strategos, elected by such of the citizens as could attend the annual assembly at Aegium in Achaea, or at Thermus in Aetolia. Each league maintained peace, and established common-measures, weights, and coinages throughout its area—an achievement in co-operation that makes the third century in some ways politically superior to the age of Pericles.
The Achaean League was transformed into a first-class power by Aratus of Sicyon. At the age of twenty this new Themistocles freed Sicyon from its dictator by a night attack with a handful of men. By eloquence and subtle negotiation he persuaded all the Peloponnesus except Sparta and Elis to join the League, which chose him as its strategos annually for ten years (245-35). With a few hundred men he secretly entered Corinth, scaled the almost inaccessible Acrocorinthus, routed the Macedonian troops, and restored the city to freedom. Passing on to the Piraeus, he bribed the Macedonian garrison to surrender, and announced the liberation of Athens. From that moment to the Roman conquest Athens enjoyed a unique self-government—militarily powerless, but left inviolate by the Hellenistic states because her universities had made her the intellectual capital of the Greek world. Athens turned to philosophy, and contentedly disappeared from political history.
Now at the height of their power, the two leagues began to weaken themselves by war with each other and class war within. In 220 the Aetolian League, with Sparta and Elis, fought the bitter “Social” War against the Achaean League and Macedon. Aratus, the defender of freedom, was also the protector of wealth; in each city the League supported the party of property. The poorer citizens complained that they could not afford to attend the distant assemblies of the League, and were thereby in effect disfranchised; they were skeptical of a liberty that meant the full privilege of the clever and the strong to exploit the simple and the weak; more and more they gave their applause to demagogues who called for a redistribution of the land. Like the rich of a century before, the poor began to favor Macedonia against their own governments.
Macedonia, however, was ruined by the honesty of Antigonus III. He had assumed power as regent for his stepson, Philip, and had promised to surrender the throne upon Philip’s coming of age. The cynics of the time called him “Doson”—the Promiser—apparently because they took it for granted that he was lying. But he kept his word, and in 221 Philip V, aged seventeen, began a long reign of intrigue and war. He was a man of courage and capacity, but of unscrupulous subtlety. He seduced the wife of Aratus’ son, poisoned Aratus, killed his own son on suspicion of conspiracy, and arranged banquets of poisoned wine for those who st
ood in the way of his plans.7 He enlarged and enriched Macedonia, and left it more populous and prosperous than for one hundred and fifty years past. But in 215, fearful of the growing power of Rome, he made the historic mistake of allying himself with Hannibal and Carthage. A year later Rome declared war upon Macedonia, and began the conquest of Greece.
II. THE STRUGGLE FOR WEALTH
Athenaeus, who is as reliable as any gossip, tells us that Demetrius of Phalerum, about 310, took a census of Athens, and reported 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics or aliens, and 400,000 slaves.8 The last figure is incredible, but we know nothing that contradicts it. Very probably the number of rural slaves had grown; estates were becoming larger, and were being worked more and more by slaves under a slave overseer managing for an absentee landlord.9 Under this system a more scientific agriculture developed; Varro knew fifty Greek manuals of the art. But the processes of erosion and deforestation had already gutted much of the land. Even in the fourth century Plato had expressed the belief that rain and flood, in the flow of time, had carried away much of the arable surface of Attica; the surviving hills, in his metaphor, were a skeleton from which the flesh had been washed away.10 Many areas of Attica were in the third century so denuded of topsoil that their ancient farms were abandoned. The forests of Greece were vanishing, and timber, like food, had to be brought in from abroad.11 The mines at Laurium were worn out and almost deserted; silver could be gotten more cheaply from Spain; and the gold mines of Thrace, which had once poured their wealth into Athens, now enriched the treasury and beautified the coinage of Macedon.
While the source of a virile and independent citizenry was drying up in the villages, industry and the class war were progressing in the towns. Small factories, and the slaves in them, were growing in number at Athens, as in all the larger cities of the Hellenistic world. Slave dealers accompanied the armies, bought unransomed captives, and sold them at three or four minas ($ 150 or $200) a head in the great slave markets of Delos and Rhodes. Some scruples, moral or economic, were felt about this ancient institution. A humanitarian sentiment arose as a by-product of philosophy; the cosmopolitan spirit of the age was negligent of racial distinctions; and casual hired labor, which could be thrown upon public relief whenever it ceased to be privately profitable, was in many circumstances cheaper than slave labor that had to be continuously maintained.12 Towards the close of this period there was a substantial rise in manumissions.
Commerce languished in the older cities, but flourished in the new. The Greek ports of Asia and Egypt grew at the expense of the Piraeus; and even on the mainland it was Chalcis and Corinth that caught the swelling currents of Hellenistic trade. Through these strategically situated and wellequipped centers, as through Antioch, Seleucia, Rhodes, Alexandria, and Syracuse, a busy stream of merchants flowed, spreading a cosmopolitan and skeptical point of view. Bankers multiplied, and lent not only to traders and proprietors but to cities and governments.13 Some cities, like Delos and Byzantium, had public or national banks holding government funds and managed by state officials.14 In 324 Antimenes of Rhodes organized the first known system of insurance by guaranteeing owners, for a premium of eight per cent, against loss from the flight of their slaves.15 The release of Persian accumulations and the quickened circulation of capital reduced the rate of interest to ten per cent in the third century and seven per cent in the second. Speculation was widespread, but not organized. Some manipulators sought to raise prices by limiting production; there were advocates of restricting crops to keep up the purchasing power of the farming community.16 Prices in general were high, again because of the Achaemenid treasuries that Alexander had poured into the currency of the world; but at the same time, and partly by the same cause, trade was facilitated, production was stimulated, and prices gradually fell back to a normal range. The wealth of the wealthy grew beyond any precedent in Greek history. Homes became palaces, furniture and carriages more sumptuous, servants more numerous; dinners became orgies, and women became show windows of their husbands’ prosperity.17
Wages lagged behind rising prices, and rapidly followed their fall. They could support a single man only, and made for celibacy, pauperism, and depopulation; they left a diminishing economic distance between free worker and slave. Employment was irregular, and thousands of men abandoned the mainland cities for mercenary soldiering abroad, or to hide their poverty in rural isolation.18 The Athenian government relieved the destitute with grants of corn; the rich amused them with free tickets to celebrations and games. The wealthy stinted in wages but were generous in charity; often they lent money to their cities without interest, or rescued them from bankruptcy with large gifts, or built public works out of their private funds, or endowed temples or universities, or paid handsomely for the statues or the poems that published their features or their largess. The poor organized themselves into unions for mutual aid, but they could do little against the power and cleverness of the rich, the conservatism of the peasants, and the readiness of otherwise rival governments and leagues to exchange armed assistance in suppressing revolts.19 The freedom of unequal ability to accumulate or starve brought on again, as in Solon’s days, an extreme concentration of wealth. The poor lent readier ear to socialistic gospels; their spokesmen called for the cancellation of debts, the redivision of the land, and the confiscation of large fortunes; the boldest now and then proposed the liberation of the slaves.20
The decay of religious belief promoted the growth of compensatory utopias: Zeno the Stoic described an ideal communism in his Republic (ca. 300), and his follower Iambulus (ca. 250) inspired Greek rebels with a romance in which he described a Blessed Isle in the Indian Ocean (perhaps Ceylon); there, he reported, all men were equal, not only in rights but in ability and intelligence; all worked equally, and shared equally in the product; all took equal part, turn by turn, in administering the government; neither wealth nor poverty existed there, nor any war of the classes; nature produced fruit abundantly of her own accord, and men lived in harmony and universal love.20a
Some governments nationalized certain industries: Priene took over the saltworks, Miletus the textile factories, Rhodes and Cnidus the potteries; but the governments paid as low wages as the private employer, and squeezed all possible profit from the labor of their slaves. The gulf between rich and poor widened;21 the class war became bitterer than before. Every city, young or old, echoed with the hatred of class for class, with uprisings, massacres, suppressions, banishments, and the destruction of property and life. When one faction won it exiled the other and confiscated its goods; when the exiles returned to power they revenged themselves in kind, and slaughtered their enemies; imagine the stability of an economic system subject to such decerebrations and disturbances. Some ancient Greek cities were so devastated by class strife that industry and men fled from them, grass grew in the streets, cattle came there to graze.22 Polybius, writing about 150 B.C., describes certain timeless phases of the war from the viewpoint of a rich conservative:
When they (the radical leaders) have made the populace ready and greedy to receive bribes, the virtue of democracy is destroyed, and it is transformed into a government of violence and the strong hand. For the mob, habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has found a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, . . . produces a reign of violence. Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land.23
It was war and class war that weakened mainland Greece to the point of being easily overcome by Rome. The bitter ruthlessness of the victors—the destruction of crops, vineyards, and orchards, the razing of farmhouses, the selling of captives into slavery—ruined one locality after another, and left an empty shell for the ultimate enemy. A land so wasted by strife, by erosion, deforestation, and the listless tillage of impoverished tenants or slaves, could not compete with the alluvial plains of the Orontes, the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Nile. The northern cities were no longer on the
great routes of trade; they had lost their navies, and could not control the sources and avenues of the grain supply that Athens and Sparta had mastered in their imperial days. The centers of power, even of literary and artistic creation, passed back again to Asia and Egypt, from which, a thousand years before, Greece had humbly learned her letters and her arts.
III. THE MORALS OF DECAY
The failure of the city-state accelerated the decay of the orthodox religion; the gods of the city had proved helpless to defend it, and had forfeited belief. The population was intermingled with foreign merchants who had no share in the city’s civic or religious life, and whose amused skepticism spread among the citizens. The mythology of the ancient local gods survived among the peasantry and the simple townsfolk, and in the official rites; the educated used it for poetry and art, the half-liberated attacked it bitterly, the upper classes supported it as an aid to order, and discountenanced open atheism as bad taste. The growth of large states brought on a sympolity of the gods and made for a vague monotheism, while philosophers strove to formulate pantheism for the literate in a manner not too obviously incompatible with orthodox belief. About 300 Euhemerus of Messana in Sicily published his Hiera Anagrapha (literally Holy Scriptures, or Records), in which he argued that the gods were either personified powers of nature, or, more often, human heroes deified by popular imagination or gratitude for their benefits to mankind; that myths were allegories, and that religious ceremonies were originally exercises in commemoration of the dead. So Zeus was a conqueror who had died in Crete, Aphrodite was the founder and patroness of prostitution, and the story of Cronus eating his children was only a way of saying that cannibalism had once existed on the earth. The book had a sharply atheistic effect in third-century Greece.*23a
