CHAPTER I

THE LEADING IDEAS OF THE NEW PERIOD

I.

SALIENT FEATURES

DURING the period of history covered in this volume the Greeks continued for a long time to occupy the centre of the stage. The role they had to play was graver and more complicated than ever before. In the West they soon lost the initiative to Rome. All the time they were spreading themselves thinly over the East the Italians were being concentrated more and more completely and compactly under a single head. It would have been better for the political fortunes of the Greeks if the forces led by Alexander of Macedon into the East had supported Alexander of Epirus in Italy, and Hellas was destined to pay dearly for misdirecting thus its energy. So favourable a conjuncture for saving their western kinsmen was never to recur; and that not simply because of the marvellous growth of Roman power. For once the way into Persia was opened, thither for several generations streamed the surplus population of the Aegean Archipelago and its environs. The East became the land of opportunity for the Greeks. It was ‘manifest destiny’ that they should seek to possess it. And once they were committed to movement in that direction they could not draw back. No matter what happened in the West they had to hellenize the world in which the Macedonians had made them masters, or themselves go under.

They set about this task with energy and intelligence. It was twofold in character: the forging of instruments—institutions, ideas, devices—by which to make their culture more readily communicable to non-Greeks; and the transmutation of ‘natives.’ They ran great risks of losing their own soul in the process. Probably we should say, from our rich experience of imperialism, that success was excluded from the start. Hellenism failed to master the intractable soul of the Orient; but it acquired a capacity for world-culture in the attempt. What led the proud Roman conqueror captive was not the aristocratic civilization of Attic Greece but the more seductive, accommodating, catholic modification of it that we call Hellenistic. And, after all, the East was moved. It is hard to overrate an effort which, precisely by its partial failure, created the milieu in which heretical Judaism was fused with cosmopolitanized Hellenism to form Christianity.

The leaders of the Hellenes in their eastward expansion were Macedonians, the most forceful, if not the most cultivated, representatives of their race, but the prompters and agents of these leaders were for the most part Greeks of the old stock. The work had to be prosecuted in the midst of political disunion and intestine wars—hence without centralized direction—in Egypt in one way, in Syria and elsewhere in Asia in another; and not by states alone, but by scores of communes, hundreds of private associations, and thousands of individuals, acting ordinarily without set purpose, aggressive propagandists of Hellenism by their mere existence if by nothing else. The problems were so novel, the centres of irradiation, cities new and old, so numerous, the area of statecraft so circumscribed that, in the sense of drift and of the omnipotence of Tyche—Chance—then generally prevalent, conscious effort could seldom be long sustained.

Macedon exerted no such transforming influence on Greece as Rome did on Italy. There was no Hellenic analogue for Latinization. The synedrion of the various Hellenic Leagues, whether a reflex of Macedon or autonomous, proved an ineffective instrument of national consolidation. And, disunited at home, Greece lacked an organ, such as the governing society of Italy possessed, first in the Senate and later in the Princeps, for keeping its influence steadily applied in given directions abroad. Macedonian imperialism differed from Roman imperialism in its works as well as in its methods. Rome gave to the world order, law, roads, administrative centralization. The Greeks had only themselves to give—themselves and their views and ways of life. The only external authority they had recognized hitherto had come to each individual from his city-state, and in the new world this was diminished by the artificiality of the new cities, by monarchical interferences with their conduct of affairs, and, perhaps even more than by either of these sources of weakness, by the contacts in the routine of life between townsman and townsman throughout the length and breadth of a kingdom. The authority of city-states could not control situations and problems adequately when these ceased to be predominantly urban. The Greeks in the East were thus thrown even more than at home upon their own resources. In one sense their pronounced individualism was an asset: it multiplied indefinitely their propensity for contrivance. But the ordinary Greek was not a masterful person like the ordinary Roman. He was too curious, too interested, too sociable to stand aloof among the ‘barbarians’ with whom his lot was cast. He could not forget that he was a Greek, but neither could he leave unsampled the goods of others. In their colonial environment the Hellenes had perforce to deviate from their traditions however much value they set on maintaining them. They were of course the imperial people; and in the gymnasium, which they took with them everywhere, they had an institution for the education of their youth that served to keep them socially apart from ‘the lesser breeds without the Law.’ Theirs was not the role to yield, least of all to subjects. But, this granted, they could not display their superiority in any way more clearly than by adapting themselves flexibly to changed circumstances.

It thus happened that the early Hellenistic age was an age of vast experiment in the most varied spheres of human endeavour. The capabilities of monarchical and federal states were tested simultaneously in many political laboratories. The manifold possibilities of municipal organization were explored more and more thoroughly. The old lines separating nations, classes, families, races, and sexes having faded, a new social cosmos had to be created. Social life, indeed, divorced from political life after two centuries of fusion, had to be re-cast in institutions of its own. Religion, too, had now to face a new problem, that of creating organs peculiar to itself and distinct from states. The whole economic order had to be remodelled. The office of governing natives was inseparable from that of exploiting them, and on this unhappy business much ingenuity was expended—so, too, on the management of state monopolies and of crown-lands. Protective tariffs were invented. Transport, assuming added significance with the increased size of states, perplexed statesmen even more than it did merchants and manufacturers; and with good reason. For without effective communications big states were bound to be weak states. The time was rich in novelties in art and architecture, engineering and town-planning, education and scientific research. As was natural in an age when literature had to be re-shaped to meet the needs of a Hellenic diaspora, of a reading instead of a listening public, of a patronage which, while given mainly by courts and courtiers, was extended also by mobs and masses, often cosmopolitan, old literary types had to be discarded, replaced, re-combined, and new ones added. With the widening of the world the public, with which in the olden time writers and artists had been in marvellously direct and mutually profitable contact, receded farther and farther in the distance or went completely out of sight. Athens did not cease at once to be the cynosure of Greece, but its leadership was contested by new royal capitals; and everywhere the effect was felt of the waning of its dominion in matters of taste. Like the sculptor and the painter, the man of letters, for whom his own city no longer sufficed, was allowed to feel that he had only his own taste to consult, his own moods to chronicle, his own personality to embody in his work.

Individualism thus became a dominant feature of the age. But, once the great Macedonian generals, whose pulses had been quickened by service with Alexander, had passed from the scene, it was not a magnificent individualism, arising, as it did, not so much from the greatness of individuals as from the weakness of society. Craftsmanship was free from control rather than inspired. Asceticism waxed; and it waxed from fear of the entanglements of ambition rather than from satiety. Introspection flourished, numbing the will and killing zest for action, and scepticism, with its arrest of judgment. The world had become too suddenly big, and too formless even for great social criticism. But there was one sphere in which this individualism was indeed magnificent— characterized by splendid achievements—that of pure. Nihil mathematicis inlustrius, says Cicero. The men of science alone rose to the height of the occasion and were the chief glory of their time; but they failed to make their knowledge a common possession because the mass of mankind was too remote and ill-organized to advance abreast of them.

Among the populations released from the old authority of city state law and opinion but uncontrolled by the authority of their scientific leaders, religions grew and spread, especially those which promised to individuals knowledge of their future (astrology), cure of their diseases (Asclepius), salvation and immortality (Mystery cults). To this resurgence of superstition the new monarchies, while doing much for science, were either indifferent or sympathetic. Like other polytheistic peoples the Macedonians had no thought of extending their imperialism to religion. They did not view the gods of subjected peoples as subject to their gods or themselves as having a mission to proselytize. The Hellenes generally took their home gods with them to the East, as they had taken them to their colonies in times past. These, now as then, were the gods primarily recognized by both monarchical and citystate law—those, for example, for which public cults and festivals were commonly instituted; but Greeks abroad readily identified them with local gods that looked like them, and, like their ancestors, they had little or no religious repugnance to adopting new gods found on the spot or new modes of worshipping old gods. ‘In such an environment, as the history of emigration and colonization in modern times teaches us, fidelity to the religion of their ancestors was a matter of individual determination.’1 Cosmopolitanism in heaven was matched by religious individualism on earth.

To bring some semblance of system into the welter of worships that ensued was a challenge to the official no less than to the philosophic and the popular mind. By making the ruler-gods of each dynasty share temples with one another and with other deities, and by grouping under a single priesthood deities like Sarapis, Isis, Harpocrates, and Anubis, governments did something to promote simplification. Rationalizing theology also helped somewhat by substituting for the gods of common thinking abstractions which could be symbolized adequately not by one god-name alone but by two or more combined, as, for example, Apollo-Helios-Hermes. But the general tendency, now as in all periods of polytheistic expansion, was towards a cruder syncretism—putting the name of a Greek god on a cognate deity, addressing him as ‘Thou of many names’ or by all the names strung together by which each worshipper happened to know him, accepting as valid every local mode of divine approach when it was not too repellent. From the fusion of deities—new and old—of a place or region it was a short step, at least for the theologically-minded, to their complete fusion into universal powers. The idea that was their common character was subtracted. Zeus-Ammon-Yahweh-Ahuramazda-Jupiter, for example, became the Highest God or (since the Greek language was the lingua franca) Zeus simply. Once this tendency was established, the differences in religion felt to be important were peculiarities of ritual; and the local cults that had the most potent ritual—the best accredited means of winning the attention of the gods—had an almost infinite capacity of migration. An ebb and flow of cults followed which brought alien elements into both West and East—Dionysiac rites into Egypt and Jerusalem and rites of Isis and Atargatis into Athens—but which did not necessitate much change anywhere of fundamental religious conceptions. Of these the most active transforming agent remained the philosophic (scientific and mystic) speculation of the Greeks; but now, even more than before, this was fed by Oriental materials, by concepts native in Iran, Chaldaea, Egypt; and it was  menaced in its basic assumption—the efficacy of reason—by inner disintegration into dogmatism and scepticism, and, though more remotely, by an attitude of mind prevalent in the Orient and manifested in its most pure form in the fundamental tenet of Judaism, ‘that religion must be revealed.’ For the Jews require a sign and the Greeks seek after wisdom.

Hellenism, like a corrosive fluid, spread round and ate into the foundations of the eastern cultures, rock-ribbed with religion though they were. It dissolved isolated particles, disintegrated detached masses, penetrated all crevices and softened the granite surfaces perceptibly wherever, as in and near the cities, its action was especially direct. The elements thus hellenized conformed to the amenities of cosmopolitan life, obtained access to offices and better openings for international business, entered through intermarriage into the penumbra of ‘society,’ and thus formed a medium through which the acid of the West advanced yet farther, though doubtless with less transforming efficacy. But the great massifs remained impervious. The most resistant Oriental cultures, established, as they were believed to be, by the very presence of God, stood fast amidst the tide. Judaism threw the fence of the Law around its divine inheritance, and was strong enough, when the overt attack came, to assert its right to its own independent life (see further, vol. vm). In Egypt the many local cults, through whose stiff and antiquated rites the ideal life of the people strove helplessly for expression, retained a strong hold on the mass of the peasants, while those cults whose appeal was wider had even greater success in preserving their ancient character through being indissolubly bound up with the crown not only by syndicated priesthoods but also by theology, ritual, festivals, and sacred ceremonies and representations of which the Pharaoh-Ptolemy was the interested object. In Iran, where, too, national life was wrapped up in religion, and in eastern Asia Minor, whither Zoroastrianism had been carried by Persian colonization, Hellenism encountered successful opposition. The Magi had in their arsenal not merely sorcery, with which to combat malevolent demons, but also a creed which did justice to the reality of Evil yet. taught men to hope that, with their help and for their salvation, its god of Goodness and Light, Ahuramazda, would, in the fullness of time, prevail over his great adversary, Ahriman, and the hosts of Darkness. In fact, so strong was the religion of Iran that orthodox Judaism at this time moulded its thinking more in conformance with Zoroastrianism than in conformance with  Hellenism. Here, then, and elsewhere in what had been Persia, notably in Babylonia, national streams of thought and feeling kept flowing steadily on through the sea of Hellenism, now broad now narrow, now mingling with one another and with their common medium or losing themselves in it altogether, now holding resolutely apart each in its own channel.

With the religions of the nations which they could neither ignore nor assimilate the Greeks came to terms, with some of them in our period—for example, the Egyptian cult of Sarapis, Isis, Harpocrates and Anubis and the Syrian cult of Hadad and Atargatis; with others, like that of the Jewish sect of the Nazarenes, not till five hundred years later. But they got terms as well as gave them, and the end of the matter was that these religions ceased to be Oriental and became Hellenistic. The rites may have remained essentially eastern; the plastic representations were mainly Greek. The religious services were quickened by Hellenic speculation into mysteries—Graeco-Oriental ‘fake’ mysteries, as they have been called. Greek thinkers fitted into their own systems ideas for which they were ripe, from Zoroastrianism the concept of Eternity (Zervan-Aion), from Babylon the lore, so seemingly scientific, of the heavenly bodies as Cosmocratores—predeterminers of the fate of men and empires. It was ominous for Greek assimilation of this mass of alien matter that, after a long period of mutually profitable union, Greek philosophy and science parted company in the third century BC—the one to become more ethical, popular, sentimental, the other more mathematical, difficult, remote.

II.

MONARCHY

Of the two expedients with which this age experimented for combining small states into large units—League1 and Monarchy —the former has approved itself in our time as the most apt instrument of republican consolidation. Until the Great War (Switzerland apart) it achieved its real triumphs where,, as in America, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia, it was applied to political entities in which state-distinctiveness and national individuality were blurred by prior membership in a larger political association. This, too, was the condition of its most striking, if not its only, success in Hellas. Behind the Greek Leagues that achieved inner solidarity was almost invariably a Greek tribe (ethnos), of which the federated states were in each instance parts. As an agency of republican consolidation of altogether separate nations the League laboured under the double disadvantage (from which we today are spared) that self-government had come to be applied consistently to foreign relations and that democracy could not be maintained when the population concerned was widely dispersed. Wherever government was organized without a primary assembly, it ceased to be self-government even in city-states. Only where there was a common Assembly could there be a common citizenship that meant anything politically important for the masses. And the greatest significance of a primary Assembly, even' in Leagues of moderate compass like the Achaean, was to preserve the form rather than the reality of democracy. Whether primary assemblies existed or not, states in which the chief powers of national government were vested in representative bodies took on an aristocratic complexion. To the masses the rule of an alien monarch who professed to champion their interests might easily appear preferable to the rule of the representatives of a native class. And if this was true generally, it was especially true when this rule was shared, as in Leagues, with the representatives of similar classes in other states; for then local feeling was apt to be outraged as well as popular feeling. Leagues which, like those of Philip II, Demetrius Poliorcetes, and Antigonus Doson, aspired to include Greeks generally, lacking as they necessarily did the deliberative organ by which alone a collective public opinion could be quickly formed, were bound to be ruled arbitrarily even if they had been ruled by representative synods and not monarchically. Thus hampered, the various Leagues attempted at this time in Greece did not secure enough loyalty from their members, or enough magnitude, or enough freedom of action, to offset the advantages of monarchy.

Monarchy was accordingly the instrument for building up territorial states to which the Macedonian age gave the stamp of its approval. Of its work much was ephemeral, but it itself was singularly long-lived. Made dominant in Greece by the Macedonians, discredited temporarily but not destroyed by the Roman Senate, kings, as the heads of states and not merely of tribes as in the early Greek monarchies, came into the western world at this time, there to stay until in our day it has become possible for big states to be republics. During the two millenniums and i quarter that intervene between the rise of the Macedonians and the downfall of the Romanoffs, Hapsburgs, and Hohenzollerns, monarchy in some form or other has been the normal form of political life.

The monarchy which first approved itself in action and lent its prestige to the whole institution was the national monarchy of Philip and Alexander. This was home-grown in Macedonia. There it had the strong sanction of antiquity. Hereditary in the royal house of the Argeadae it passed, in the event of a disputed succession, to the claimant whom the army favoured. Its basis was the instinctive loyalty of a politically undeveloped people to their legitimate head. Its forms were military; and behind the forms lay the ‘fellowship’ of the nobles and commons with their king, which lent a spirit of camaraderie to discipline; for discipline there was, at least after Philip’s time— the stiff discipline of the phalanx, which yet, for all its rigour, left unimpaired the natural sturdiness of Macedonian character. Custom served for a constitution. It required the king to draw near to his person the chief nobles of his realm (as Bodyguards and Companions), and to assemble at his court their sons (as Royal Pages), but it left him free to select his civil, military, and diplomatic officials according to his own judgment, to promote or dismiss them, but not to put them to death without the consent of the army. The army was the people. The right of decision in matters of policy in peace and war rested with the king, but it was customary for him to exercise it in a council of his Companions1. Large scope was left to kings of strong character. A regency fell to the nearest agnate in the case of minors. There was no remedy for adult rulers of weak character.

This kind of monarchy was mobile but not exportable. It moved with the Macedonian king and army, but wherever it went it had to accommodate itself to local conditions. In Greece, where the prevailing sentiment was hostile, the intrusive office had to be camouflaged. In the surface drift of the age of Isocrates toward larger Hellenic unity there had been a side current that was perceptibly monarchical; but the monarch it portended was an emergency man, a reconciler of factions, a war-lord, the head of a crusade. The main current in this surface drift was toward federalism, not monarchy; and however much statesmen and communities, political theorists and leagues might try to stem it, the deep drift in Greece, then and thereafter, was toward the slow disintegration of the 'polis without re-integration in any political cosmos—toward the making of a world of comparatively isolated individuals, actuated primarily by economic, social, ethical, and religious egoisms, and hence, as the sequel showed, less indisposed to let their government pass into the hands of autocrats. In Greece monarchy stayed as hegemony. The king of Macedon continued the line of paramount -poleis— Athens, Sparta, Thebes. He was a tyrant, or the prop of tyrants, in so far as he was not a constitutional magistrate. His composite office might be regularized by making a god of him, and this was frequently done until Antigonus Gonatas put a check on it. The transition from a hegemon to a king premised more than decay of popular interest in political life. It implied the growth of an active feeling of devotion for the representative of royalty, and of this there is not a trace in third-century Greece. Nor was the decay in urban loyalty an unmixed evil. It reduced particularistic opposition to federalism as well as to autocracy. It betokened despair rather than unwillingness to make personal sacrifices for the commonwealth. On any revival of hope local patriotism flared up anew, whereupon decadence manifested itself in fickleness and indiscipline rather than in lack of courage. For monarchy Greece remained stony ground throughout this period.

It was not Philip’s conquest of Greece but Alexander’s conquest of Persia that stabilized monarchy in the western world. For it was only thereafter that it became a political necessity. In a realm like Alexander’s, as in an empire like Rome’s, the territory was too large for any government but a monarchy to control it. Indeed it proved to be too large for a single monarchy. And even if countries so vast as its divisions had not precluded by their very magnitude organization on republican lines, the confusion of their peoples would have done so. Under the Persian monarchy, the inhabitants of Asia, already torn by violence or tempted by hope of gain far from their homes, had become, as later under the Turk, almost inextricably mixed. Iranians, Jews, Babylonians, and Greeks were thus superimposed in many parts upon the indigenous stocks. The areas without racial or religious intermixture were apt to be remote and inaccessible. Any other kind of state than a monarchy requires some sort of taking counsel together, and where population was so heterogeneous, stratified, and widely dispersed, this was impossible in the state of communications at that time existing. There was thus reason behind the persistence of monarchy in the world conquered by Alexander —reason and, at the time of the conquest, age-long tradition; and reason and tradition taken together would have compelled the conqueror to maintain monarchy there even if he had not been himself a king and the head of a monarchically-minded people; and not only there, but also in the sections into which it became divided.

But what sort of a monarchy should this be? The answer given by Alexander to this question has been described in the previous volume: it should assume, he concluded, a different character in accordance with differences in the ideas and customs of the peoples over which it was exercised. That this was a provisional answer is probable. Certainly it was not a definitive one. The Macedonian reaction which followed his death stressed the Macedonian characteristics of the monarchical institution at the expense of the Persian; and the court which evolved in each section retained the institutions noted above as Macedonian—Royal Pages, Bodyguards, and (in place of Companions) an exclusive body of dignitaries graded (ultimately at least) by titles in ranks expressive of the degree of their intimacy with the monarch. From this body, as from the Companions during the reigns of Philip and Alexander, a Crown Council was constituted. Even though the executive posts under the king were multiplied out of all recognition, and the camaraderie of the king with his fellows was affected by changes in the character of his entourage as well as by a general exaltation of the royal office of which the assumption by the monarch of the diadem was the symbol, these familiar institutions sufficed to create the impression that the national kingship had survived. But resting as it did on a king-made aristocracy and not, as in Macedon and in Persia, on a nobility that sprang from the soil, Hellenistic kingship possessed a strongly marked cosmopolitan character. It was a type of monarchy that could be applied in any empire; and it was thus assured of a great future in the long age which separated the destruction of national states in ancient times from the formation of new ones in the modern age. Augustus compromised with it when he recognized the cult of Roma et Augustus; and it was Hellenistic kingship (gradually assimilated by Rome in the first three Christian centuries), quite as much as its Persian derivative (brusquely copied by Diocletian), that constituted the most important non-Roman element in the autocracy of the late and eastern empires. It thus formed part of the classical heritage of the Middle Ages and of the Byzantine inheritance of the Renascence.

As we have seen, Hellenistic kingship had Macedonian kingship as its core. It was not only by acquiring an officialdom shot with alien elements that it became a distinct type of government. Something essential to Macedonian kingship had also to be abandoned. For monarchy in Macedon presupposed the presence of a Macedonian nation, or at least of a Macedonian army, and what the Successors had to work with, after the revolt in Greece had forced Leonnatus and Craterus to return home with their troops, was not a nation and a national army, but corps of mercenaries and a Macedonian diaspora. And as time passed and Macedon, organized as a separate kingdom, needed all its manpower to maintain its hegemony in Hellas, the Macedonian element in the European stratum of population which the conquest had made dominant in Persia became relatively smaller and smaller. The claim of the garrisons stationed in the new capitals to act as the Macedonian army-nation became a revolutionary manifesto. In these circumstances royal ordinances could not continue to be regarded as affirmations’ of Macedonian custom, and a new sanction for them had to be sought. For the former subjects of the Persian kings it already existed: the wearer of the diadem was the vice-gerent of the gods—of Ahuramazda, Bel, Amon, as the case might be. But with the shift of the courts from the ancient seats of government (Persepolis, Babylon, Memphis, Thebes) to Seleuceia on the Tigris, Antioch, Alexandria, and Pergamum, the ideas of the priesthoods and the populations of the old capitals ceased to be of much practical importance. The preponderance passed to the Greeks, both those resident in the old cities situated on the coast of Asia Minor and those who migrated thence or from the islands and mainland of Greece to form the nuclei of the new cities in the interior, and especially of the new capitals. It came about, too, and not without design, that both the great eastern monarchies into which Alexander’s kingdom was divided had a Greek portion, which, moreover, because of its emigrants, its rulers had imperative reasons to conciliate. In these circumstances the Greeks were bound to have great influence in fixing the form which monarchy was to assume in Asia and Egypt, and especially on points in which, from their political training, they were most deeply interested—its theory and legal basis. Hence in the triune kingship that Alexander had created, with one nature for the Macedonians, one for the Greeks, and one for the Orientals, it was the nature that was formulated in terms of Hellenic thinking which gave character to the whole institution.

III.

DEIFICATION

Living men had been deified in Greece before Alexander crossed over into Asia: Lysander by the Samian aristocrats, Dionysius and Dion by their Syracusan partisans, Philip by some of his subjects, and Plato by his scholars. From one point of view the attribution of divinity to a man was deference; or, when construed unfavourably, flattery; and it harmonized with Greek psychology to translate extraordinary endowment of will, intellect, character, persuasiveness, beauty into the sphere of the supernatural, and thus to acknowledge the mystery of strong human personality. Nor did men who were wont to see Aphrodite present in a picture when Paris was represented abducting Helen (to convey the idea that in Helen resided the damonische aphrodisische power of beauty), or Asclepius present in a relief when a physician was portrayed working with a patient, find it difficult to conceive some god or other present in the triumphant progress of Alexander through Asia. But the deification of rulers was a ;peculiar manifestation of this theopoetic faculty in this (if in nothing else), that it was not a sculptor’s or a painter’s fancy but a solemn act of legislation, and that rulers specifically were its objects.

And indeed there is another approach, likewise in Greek thought, to this, at first seeming, bizarre Hellenistic phenomenon. Looked at from another point of view, that of a legalistic society, the deification of outstanding leaders was simply political justice. The right of men of genius to be above the law was an axiom of Greek political theory. What then was their position to be? The answer was suggested repeatedly by Aristotle. ‘If,’ he argued in a famous passage of the Politics, ‘there exists in a state an individual so preeminent m virtue that neither the virtue nor political capacity of all the other citizens is comparable with his ..., he should not be regarded as a member of the state at all. For he will be wronged if treated as an equal when he is thus unequal in virtue and political capacity. Such a man should be rated as a god among men. For a citizen to be uplifted thus above his fellow-citizens, however great his virtues, did not come within the range of theoretical assumption much less of practical politics; but when a foreign ruler appeared, vested with the authority due theoretically to the man of super-eminent ability, a place was ready made for him, and it was a place in the ranks of the gods. Here, then, in the sphere of politics a special reason existed for the indulgence of what we have called the theopoetic faculty of the Greeks, a reason, moreover, that was operative in epochs of political speculation and advanced constitutionalism like those in which deification of rulers was first established in Greece and first transplanted to Rome.

In the period of enlightenment that followed the age of illumination many men viewed gods simply as symbols. From their point of view a ruler who occupied the place of a god might be recognized as one without scruple should reason of state so dictate; and to this sceptical category belonged most of those influential in city-state politics. Others had to be helped by a miracle; nor was this hard to find in the days of anthropomorphic polytheism. When all men were thought to be sprung from the gods in some way and all nobles in a peculiar way, it was credible that Alexander was sprung directly from Zeus, as three authoritative oracles affirmed or were said to have affirmed; and it was in fact on the score of his sonship of Zeus that he requested and received admission into the circle of deities of the Greek cities in 324 BC. Thus religious objections to the deification of rulers could be overcome among any populace that was content to accept the miracle.

In 323 BC Alexander ‘departed from among men,’ as the official formula ran. In other words, he remained a god according to the theory of the dynasty; and was recognized as such by loyalists, but only in the portions of his realm where his sonship of Zeus had been acknowledged, i.e. in the Greek cities. Elsewhere, except in Egypt (where every Pharaoh was inevitably the incarnation of Amon and became an Osiris at death), if he received divine honours it was in consequence of an act of posthumous canonization (heroization). Even this seems to have been withheld in Macedon, where his claim to divinity seemed to Antipater to be injurious to Philip and blasphemous. In the regions of Asia where a theory of the state had been evolved, Alexander, like the Persian kings whom he had succeeded, was not a god but the chosen of the gods. He was for the Persians a being endowed by the supreme Light-God, Ahuramazda, with his spirit; hence with a peculiar glory, an indwelling light from which issued a radiance so brilliant as to dazzle ordinary men. But he was not the object of an official cult.

In Asia deities either were, or were tending to become, cosmic forces, while their worshippers, unlike the Greeks, remained devoutly religious. Hence a Darius was as incapable, almost, of being approximated to Ahuramazda as a Solomon to Yahweh. In Asia there was little soil for deification of rulers to germinate or take root in. And even if it were better established than it is that Persian proskynesis involved not merely homage to rank, but also, when rendered to the king, an offering to his daimon , the rite would imply simply the existence among the Persians of conceptions of the vital element in man (psyche, genius) which mutatis mutandis were also part and parcel of the Greek heritage of Alexander and the Roman heritage of Augustus. It is not these conceptions but the alteration of them that we have to explain in trying to account for king-worship.

As it was in Greece (Egypt apart) that the deification of rulers originated, so it was there that it was perpetuated. For a whole half-century after Alexander’s death no ruler demanded, so far as we know, recognition for himself as a god from anybody. But during this interval many Greek communities voted of their own accord divine honours (temples, images, altars, priests, processions, games, sacrifices) to their rulers. What led them thus to worship as gods persons who treated themselves as men? Servility? Hardly. If the Greeks of this epoch had become thus abject, their wars, sieges, insurrections, confederacies, would be beyond understanding. The example of Alexander? Perhaps. But those with whom it should have counted for most—the Successors—did not follow it themselves. What lay behind these repeated acts of deification was doubtless the same motive which led the Samians and Alexander to the idea in the first instance— political convenience and political thought. The same political problem presented itself again and again: the need of finding a legal basis in a constitutional state for an extra-constitutional authority. As kings, Antigonus and his rivals had no right to interfere with a free city; as gods, they had the right to make known their wishes and their worshippers the duty to regard them. On purely scientific grounds states experienced no difficulty in the discovery of new gods or in the recognition of old gods under new names; nor was there anyone to dispute the right of the organized community to adopt new gods once it had discovered them. It had been doing this from time immemorial. Since it was the fact that kings had to be obeyed, deification was a way, consonant with Hellenic feeling, of legalizing absolutism.

All the while that monarchy was becoming stabilized in the world, the development of general ideas was making it easier for city-states in deifying rulers to consult their political convenience with less violence to religious orthodoxy. In this half-century (323—273 BC) political thought obliterated more and more completely the distinction between what was human and what was divine. The concept of the ideal wise man, launched on the world by the Cynics, was interpreted pantheistically by Zeno. A ruler after the Stoic model was in fact a living god as well as a godlike mechanism. Here there was an elevation of the human to the divine. On the other hand, rationalistic ideas, long since disseminated in Greek circles, bore fruit in the doctrine of Euhemerus that the gods and goddesses of cities were simply deceased rulers and benefactors, and religious rites simply commemorative exercises for the dead x. Here the divine was degraded to the human. And if gratitude was the essence of worship it seemed ingratitude to withhold it till the recipient was dead.

That rude men like the Macedonian barons who succeeded Alexander were slower in enunciating a right for the power they wielded than the Greek cities that were their subjects is not surprising. As, too, we should expect, they long adhered to what was conventional in matters of religious practice. That a human being, if deserving, might become a hero (i.e. a god) after death was a commonplace of Greek religious thinking; and, since founders of city-states had been regularly accorded this honour, there was no good reason to refuse it to founders of kingdoms. Hence Ptolemy I and his queen Berenice were canonized by their son and successor as the Theoi Soteres, and Seleucus I and Antiochus I by their heirs as Zeus Nicator and Apollo Soter respectively. There was some presumption in the latter identifications, doubtless, but no irreligion, any more than in the worship of Sophocles by the Athenians as the Hero Dexion. The essence of this kind of deification, however, was that it was posthumous. Between it and the deification of the living there was a chasm that could not be crossed, so long as men believed that the gods were supernatural beings, exempt from death. Hence it is an error to assert that the Hellenistic deification of the living was simply an extension of the Hellenic heroization of the dead. In reality it was an irreligious substitute for it; a substitute by which the apotheosis of rulers occurred at or shortly after their accession, and not at their demise. It meant a victory of Greece over Macedon.

Progress from a sporadic urban cult of a living ruler to an official imperial cult was seemingly the work of the Ptolemies; and in it, though much is still uncertain, two steps are clearly recognizable. The first was taken by Ptolemy I, probably on assuming the title of king, in 305 BC, certainly before 289 BC, when he instituted in his capital an official state cult of Alexander. The priest, an eponymous magistrate, was a Macedonian or Greek of high station, appointed annually by the crown, and the ritual used was Hellenic, not native. In centring the official worship of his realm in Alexander, Ptolemy I simply sought, in all probability, to distinguish his claim to kingship in the matter of legitimacy from the claims of his rivals; and what was involved may have been nothing but an amplification of a local Alexandrian cult. But this act served as the point of departure for the second step in the development of the imperial cult of the Ptolemies, one that was decisive for the character of Hellenistic king-worship generally. This advance was made at some time between 273—2 and 271—0 BC when Ptolemy II and Arsinoe, his sister-wife and consort, already lifted above ordinary mortals through being the children of the ‘Saviour Gods,’ shared a temple with Alexander as the ‘Brother-Sister Gods’ in the cult established by Ptolemy I. Thus by his own fiat a living ruler raised himself to a place by the side of the archegetes of empire as the divine object of the homage of his subjects, as the extra-constitutional authority whose will was everywhere law—a symbol of the common fealty to one head of diverse elements in the population of the kingdom. And thenceforth the kings and queens of the royal family succeeded, at an unfixed interval after their accession, to an ever-lengthening line of imperial deities so as to constitute a single sacred household , the source and sanction of the accumulation of laws and ordinances valid in the empire. Then it seemed anomalous that the founders of the dynasty, Ptolemy I and Berenice, should be omitted. Hence they were included at an early date in the circle of divine kings in whose names oaths were sworn, and under Philopator their names were inserted in the dynastic hierarchy in their proper place after Alexander as the ‘Saviour Gods,’ although in their lifetime they had not claimed divinity for themselves.

The role of Egypt in this transformation of Macedonian monarchy into Ptolemaic god-kingship seems to have been comparatively unimportant. The place of Pharaoh in the religious establishment of the Egyptians was fixed from ancient times by an immutable ritual performed by the priestly class and recorded in sacred pictures and writings on the walls of temples. Two acts are depicted in documents ranging in point of time from the Old Kingdom to the age of the Antonines as requisite for deification according to the Egyptian rite: the divine conception and nativity of the king; and his enthronement. The child predestined for kingship was represented as begotten of the queen by the god Amon, as born with divine assistance, and nourished at the breasts of goddesses. He was thus the son of the gods. He was also their heir. He entered upon his heritage by the ceremony of enthronement. His heritage was spiritual as well as temporal. The gods administered to him le fluide magique by which he was endowed with divine ‘life,’ ‘power,’ and ‘permanence’; he was presented by his divine father to the assembly of the gods and accepted by them as legitimate; he was presented by his earthly father to the court as divinely born and endowed; his royal name was proclaimed. Thus identified and once again given le fluide magique he was formally enthroned by being seated on the thrones of the North and South and invested with the insignia of authority—the double crown with its uraeus band, the crook, the sceptre, and the whip; whereupon he symbolically bound Upper and Lower Egypt together and took ritualistic possession of all the lands over which the gods held sway. The ceremony was concluded by the royal ascent to the temple of his divine father, where he was embraced by him and thus reinfused with the fluid of divinity.

By virtue of these rites, which were repeated in all temples daily, and, with more elaboration, on special occasions throughout the year and reign, Pharaoh alone of the gods enjoyed direct association with mankind and alone of mortals enjoyed by anticipation during his lifetime the identification with Amon-Re, Horus, and especially Osiris, which Egyptians generally believed they would themselves attain after death through the magical potency of funerary rites. On his death Pharaoh, his career as an earthly god ended, joined the deified dead as one more Osiris—a great one doubtless—in the realms of Osiris, and a new Pharaoh took his place as the intermediary between mankind and the gods of the upper and lower worlds. Pharaoh was thus king because he was priest, and as priest-king it was in his name that all temples were built and sacrifices offered. Without a Pharaoh the Egyptian religion lacked the essential link between man and the gods; and it is hard to believe that Ptolemy I, on assuming the royal title, did not follow the example of Alexander and become Pharaoh. In any event, Ptolemy II possessed the pharaonic crown-name, as did all his successors, so that, although the pharaonic ceremony of coronation is attested by documents only for the fourth and later Ptolemies, it may also be inferred in some form or other for the second and third, and possibly for the first1. Conceivably, in deification according to the Egyptian rite, no account need have been taken of the fact that Ptolemy was a Greek god, just as in the Hellenic deification no account was taken of his identification with Amon, Horus, and Osiris; but Ptolemy willed it otherwise. He had his Greek cult-name—Theos Adelphos, Theos Euergetes, Theos Philopator, as the case might be—added to the Egyptian cult-names as a new and barbarous element in the hierarchy of titles which had constituted since the end of the Middle Kingdom the crown-name of Pharaoh. Except for this and what it entailed in Egyptian worship, the two cults were distinct. They were different in ritual and priestly personnel. They were different in consequences, in that, whereas Pharaoh dropped out of the ritual when dead, the Theoi Adelphoi did not. And they were also different in idea: Pharaoh was not Law incarnate, like the Hellenistic god-king; he was rather the apotheosis of Life —the Osiris of the living. The one common factor of the two cults was the god Ptolemy, a single symbol for the profound aspirations of two very different people— of the Egyptians for life after death, and of the Greeks for government according to law. The religion of the Egyptians, as it was presented authoritatively to the Greek world by Ptolemy I, centred, not in Pharaoh, but in Serapis; and if Greeks who felt the need sought help at the native shrines, that was their affair.

Though the steps in the development of the imperial cult of the Seleucids cannot be traced, the chances are that the process was completed during the reign of the second Antiochus. The system seems to have arisen, on the one hand, through the normalizing of city cults and, on the other hand, through the creation by the crown of a provincial cult, for the conduct of which the king appointed annually a high priest of himself in each satrapy of the empire. In the urban cults the worship of the living monarch (or monarchs) was combined, under the same or (perhaps later) a separate priest, with that of his predecessors beginning with the founder of the dynasty; and the same was probably the practice in the provincial cults, in which, moreover, first the queen and later other princesses of the royal family participated with a high priestess of their own. The offices of high priest and high priestess were positions of great dignity in the imperial service, appropriate to kinsmen of the king, comparable in this and other respects with that of the priest of the Ptolemies in Alexandria. The indications are chat there was no articulation between them and the priesthoods of the cities, since they emanated from different authorities. Unlike the Ptolemies, the Seleucids did not attach their dynasty to Alexander. They had their own theory of legitimacy, according to which Apollo stood in the same paternal relation to Seleucus as Zeus did to Alexander. With Seleucus himself they accordingly began their dynasty, thus making 312—1 and not 323 BC their epochal year.

The kingdom of Pergamum had no satrapies or hyparchies, or need of any, until it was awarded the territories of the Seleucids in Asia Minor in 18 8 BC. Hence it shows no trace of provincial cults or indeed of the normalizing of its numerous city cults. Otherwise the worship of the Attalids was like that of the Seleucids, with this modification (another consequence, perhaps, of the tardiness of the dynasty in assuming the regal title and state) that apparently the dead monarchs were not combined with one another, or, collectively with the reigning sovereigns, in a single ‘sacred household.’

There is much in this king-worship that seems contradictory and is hard for us to understand. In ordinances the deified monarchs speak as kings simply and not as gods. It was permissible, not to say usual, for courtiers and others to address the Ptolemies as gods, and the Seleucids and Attalids by their cult names, yet to make offerings to other gods on their behalf as if ;they were men. The Seleucids and Attalids had priests and all the regular apparatus of worship during their lifetime, yet became theoi only after their ‘departure from among men.’ The cult-names are traceable at times to the initiative of dependent political bodies, but their adoption by rulers must certainly have been the work of rulers themselves. Official cult-names were apparently reserved to members of the royal family; and among Seleucid cult-names was included, by a curious prolepsis, Theos. A deified king might justify a grant of more elaborate worship to his deified ‘sister-queen’ on the plea that she had been a good wife and a pious woman; and the motive most frequently avowed by cities and leagues for deifying rulers was gratitude for services received. The official cult-names traceable to popular initiative reflected this motive. They were preponderantly either ‘Benefactor’ (Euergetes) or ‘Saviour’ (Soter). The service was regularly a political service such as might be prayed for from a god, rescue from great danger—destruction, oppression, or distress. The ‘saving’ was the saving of communities from their enemies, not of individuals from their transgressions; and the situation ordinarily looked forward to in the future was ‘liberty.’

The truth is that the godhood of these cults was official, not personal. Like a uniform it could be changed by a monarch to suit the occasion. For by the middle of the third century BC deification had a history behind it that enabled it at one and the same time to mean different things to different persons. To a king it meant primarily peaceful access to otherwise autonomous communities; to autonomous communities it meant ‘liberty’—the supplanting of a ‘tyrant’ by a god, the continuance in function (with an occasional impulse from on high) of the complex of civic laws by means of which citizens had ruled, taught, moulded, and expressed themselves: the addition simply of another divine symbol of their corporate life. To them the alternative was ordinarily the concentration in the hands of an unlicensed autocrat, or his deputy, of the vast power (political, social, educational) vested in an all-inclusive state, such as the city-state traditionally was. After Demetrius of Phalerum even Demetrius Poliorcetes seemed a liberator: the one imposed his conception of society on Athens, the other his policy alone. To a dynasty, again, deification meant legitimacy, the regularizing of right acquired by the sword. It meant, further, the elevation of the royal family above the ambition of men who had recently been their peers, the strengthening of the rights of sovereigns by fusing them in a single whole with the prerogatives of their divine predecessors, the presentation to subjects everywhere of a symbol round which they might, perchance, rally through religious sentiment since they could not do so through national sentiment. Those to whom the worship of the living seemed impious had understanding for the worship of the dead with which, as the dynastic cults developed, the worship of the living was craftily conjoined. And if a king was a god as the result of an act based on his being the son of a god, and if on ;death he simply departed from among men, he must have been a god before he came among men. This conclusion the third-century rulers did not draw. To them, as we have said, their divinity was official, not personal; but they could not prevent others, poets and courtiers through fancy, humble folk and orientals through ;mysticism, and theorists through logical inference, from drawing it for them. And by the second century some of the kings became so far complaisant to these multiplied suggestions as officially to designate their appearance on the political stage as an epiphany.

In 290 BC. the Athenians hailed Demetrius as ‘a true god, not one of wood or stone.’ What they and he understood by a true god was one thing; what Egyptians understood by it was something altogether different; and centuries later Christians would have viewed both these understandings as blasphemous. King-worship altered its forms with alterations in the organization of states, its nature with alterations in the conception of God.

IV.

THE LARGE STATE AND THE POLIS

What we call national feeling had attached itself in classical Greece to the city and territory which constituted the city-state. And then, as now, it had helped to strengthen enormously public authority. But even before Chaeronea nationalism was on the wane. It had proved too weak to suppress class aspirations. Already for a long time city-states had had to suffer from the abuse of their aggrandized public authority to the special economic advantage of particular groups; and furthermore, from the formation in their citizen-bodies, notably in small states, of international parties. Yet it was only in comparison with their own past that these national states were ineffective. The ineffectiveness for which Greece paid the supreme penalty in the epoch of Philip sprang from the inveterate defect of nationalism—antipathy of one national state for another, which the existence, already noted, of international parties seems rather to have exacerbated than diminished. The fatal weakness of the Greek city-states as the custodians of civilization was their incapacity in the face of foreign menace to form one all-embracing coalition. A single nation was out of the question without the sacrifice of democracy, and Greece without democracy meant a Greece in which, if it was united in one state, a majority of the inhabitants would have been, as respects self-government, in the condition of Asiatics. National states cannot exceed the areas of national feeling without becoming empires. In Greece national feeling and government by public opinion had grown up together. The limitation of states to territories that were small enough to centre easily and completely in single cities made both possible and inevitable the control of government by public opinion. Any government not so controlled seemed, and was, tyranny, it mattered not whether it consisted of an executive official alone, or of a representative council, synedrion, or of both. Hence the expansion of urban nationality into Hellenic nationality was impossible on republican lines except through the formation of an effective Hellenic public opinion, and not only its formation, but its reformation again and again upon each successive problem of politics. Whatever the chances of attaining this may have been earlier—and they were small indeed—they were utterly destroyed when the. area of Hellenism was enlarged by Alexander to include the whole of the Persian Empire; and they remained negligible when, on the division of Alexander’s empire, the ambition of Macedon to attach Greece firmly to itself was constantly frustrated by hopes inspired by kings of the East.

The city-states that were least ready to compromise their national points of view were, of course, the greatest states, like Athens and Sparta, in which traditions of power, of having had their own way, were strongest; and when the world had been re-cast in such large patterns that their strivings for leadership became visionary, rather than yield they made obstinate efforts to assert themselves. When these failed—that of Athens in 262-1 BC, that of Sparta forty years later—they tried to withdraw altogether from the common life of nations. Thus even where urban nationalism was most vital the tendency existed to substitute cities for city-states, economic organisms for political organisms, an assemblage of class or individual purposes for a national purpose popularly based and organized. The most notable exception was Rhodes.

The chief refuge of republican nationalism in this epoch, when city-states had become too small to promote their interests and defend themselves, was the autonomous federation; and the Aetolian League, and, in lesser degree, the Achaean League, showed that there was a strength in the spirit of nationality, even though it was incorporated in a poor, remote and (despite the geographical elasticity involved in the federal idea) necessarily restricted territory, that made its general decay in the Hellenic world a political catastrophe. Here, too, the concentration of foreign affairs in the federal authority went a certain way to  converting city-states into cities; and even though the federal authority itself was organized on city-state lines, in this super-state two essentials of the polls were lacking—frequent meetings of a primary assembly and laws sufficiently inclusive to form a rule of life for citizens. Much more completely were the poleis shorn of their statehood in the spuriously autonomous federations (League of the Islanders, Ionians, Ilians, etc.) which were called into existence by one or other of the god-kings. Since these lacked federal assemblies altogether, and their federal parliaments (synods) had their executive officers appointed by the kings, the member-cities were practically municipalities.

The new foundations in what had been the Persian Empire may have had the outward appearance of city-states and the status of ‘allies.’ Assemblies, councils, and magistrates may have gone through the motions of governing according to bodies of laws furnished ready-made by the founders; the towns may ordinarily have possessed territories (partly farmed by citizens and partly by villagers) subject to their jurisdiction, so that the frontiers of the state were wider than the limits of the city. The fact remains that in some, if not all of these cities, since it was to the king and not to the city that property escheated, urban sovereignty was defective from their foundation, and regal interference at all times both warranted and imperative. Nor was this the only practical justification for curtailing urban autonomy. The king had to have means of exercising authority in his cities, if for nothing else, for their protection. Hence in some of them (as often in the Seleucid Empire) imperial officials were installed with or without garrisons, and in others (as in the kingdom of Pergamum generally) the highest magistracies were filled from the ranks of citizens, but by royal appointment. In no case was there any escaping from the consequences of the fact that the cities were everywhere embedded in land which was administered directly for or by the crown; or of the theory that the king was one of their gods. Moreover, the urban complex can seldom have formed a single civic corporation. Rather, in addition to a body politic of citizens it must ordinarily have comprised bodies of men of lesser, or at least different rights, of varying number and magnitude; some in process of assimilation, others, like the Jews, obstinately recusant, others strong enough, perhaps, eventually to do the assimilating themselves. And where these paroikoi, to give them their technical name, were disproportionately multitudinous and polyglot, as early in Alexandria and later in Delos the bodies politic themselves were transformed into privileged social organizations, with atrophied demes and phylae and phratries. They formed but one element in something that did service for an assembly, but since this did not possess a council1 it was incompetent of independent activity, and government rested with appointed officers alone. The homogeneity of the old city-states was gone. Gone, too, was the general partnership in community action of large scope, and the training and interest in politics inseparable from it. Such city-states were like modern cities, seats of culture, hives of business, purveyors of refined and unrefined amusements; but lacking two things—safeguarded municipal rights, and a voice in the affairs of the realm of which they formed part.

City-states desired two things which the world situation made it impossible for them to have simultaneously—liberty and protection; and yearning for the former killed gratitude for the latter, so that devotion to a dynasty had great difficulty in gathering strength. Accordingly, cities had usually little preference for one god-king rather than another provided he was philhellene. They yielded readily to every such invader, and when the tide turned they deserted him with equal promptitude. The remedies sought for this oscillation were the fixing of definite frontiers to protectorates and the building up for the territories thus circumscribed of stable administrative services centring in the capitals.

The first of these remedies could not be applied until it was settled that neither should the empire of Alexander remain undivided nor should virtually every satrapy form an independent realm. The logic of events rather than of geography or ethnology excluded both these alternatives; and the outcome of long and disastrous wars was the formation of a continental kingdom based first on Seleuceia and then on Antioch as a capital, of an Egyptian kingdom based on Alexandria, and of a Macedonian kingdom based on Pella, each ruled by a Macedonian dynasty, each with ill-defined land frontiers, all vitally interested in getting and holding against one another, as large a foothold as possible, if not a predominance, in the Aegean Archipelago and its environs, which, already a prey to the conflicting ambitions of its own cities and federations, was thus additionally rent with dissension. The wars which registered attempts to delimit frontiers to protectorates in this debatable region did not produce the desired result. The most that could be achieved was a sort of condominium resting on the possession of strategic posts by each rival power.

The failure of the city-states in classic times to create a concert of the powers that might have saved Greek civilization was matched by an even more complete failure of the monarchical states in the period of their ascendancy.

The struggles of the monarchies were also grounded in mutual fears and commercial rivalries; and they were prolonged by personal and dynastic animosities. In the light of modern experience their long continuance presents no mystery. But it was none the less catastrophic. Not only did it permit the Gauls to occupy the heart of Asia Minor, the Parthians to establish themselves across the highways leading from the Near to the Far East of the Asia then known and the Romans to incorporate in their empire the Greeks of Magna Graecia and Sicily: it also wore down the strength of the three monarchies themselves. The Ptolemies proved unequal to the sustained effort involved in holding the empire in the eastern Mediterranean mapped out by the founder of the dynasty. The Seleucids were forced by the wars which had to be waged on their sea front to denude outlying areas of troops, so that local ‘protectors’ seemed more capable and, if resisted, more dangerous than they. Thus new philhellene kings founded dynasties within the continental empire in Pergamum (the Attalids) and in Bactria and Sogdiana (the Diodotids), the former to assume the role of ‘saviour’ for the ‘cities’ in western Asia Minor against the Gauls, the latter to do the like for the ‘cities’ on the north-eastern frontier against the Scythians and, in the sequel, in North-west India and all that lay between. The interposition of the Parthian kingdom of the Arsacids made reincorporation of these Far Eastern ‘cities’ in the Seleucid empire more difficult, but also, from the cities’ point of view, more desirable, since otherwise they were isolated from the world of Greeks. The autonomy of the Diodotids under Seleucid suzerainty was the way found out of this difficulty. The suzerainty invoked by the Attalids (when Egypt failed them) to save themselves from the Seleucids and Antigonids after they had saved their protectorate from the Gauls was that of Rome.

National states had had their weaknesses; but one knew, at least approximately, where their frontiers ran. There was also a certain natural limit of size to a federal state, though what that was could only be ascertained empirically: the less democratic a federation, the larger it might become. The Hellenistic monarchies were less happily situated. Their fundamental principle was force, and this could be checked and delimited only by encountering an equal and opposite force. An equilibrium of forces might be achieved, and in a certain measure it was achieved in the course of the third century. But it was maintained by no political principle. Given the power, any monarch might aspire to sovereignty as far as the edge of Hellenism or of ‘ the inhabited world.’ And the situation in the East actually encouraged such aspirations, since any narrower frontiers than these dismembered every diaspora, and ethnological lines, long since faint, had been obliterated yet further, as by a new fall of snow, wherever Greeks and Macedonians settled in considerable numbers. Hence the land frontiers between the kingdoms of Alexandria, Antioch, and Pergamum remained vague and shifting. In both Syria and Asia Minor they were at any particular time those laid down in oft-made, oft-broken treaties which merely reflected the situation reached in the fighting in each war.

How the territories of these monarchies were connected up by the web of a governmental system—administrative, economic, fiscal—will be described fully in another place. Egypt was peculiar in that all the land in the valley of the Nile and the Delta was the private property of the Ptolemies. This fact served as the starting point for organizing there a system for making state control effective over all private activities for which history has few parallels. An estate rather than a state and managed accordingly, Egypt had much use for overseers and guards and little use for autonomous cities. The Ptolemies yielded readily to the temptation to extend to their dependencies abroad the proprietary attitude engendered at home; but there they had perforce to use poleis as the agencies of local government and even to add to their number by founding colonies. The Seleucids did not inherit from their predecessors, as did the Ptolemies from the Pharaohs, a divine title giving them ownership of their realm. They recognized the proprietary rights of the ‘kings, dynasts, tribes, and cities,’ of whose territories their kingdom was mainly formed, and deputed to them most of the work of government. In addition to the officials by which these deputies were supervised, they needed permanent administrators only for the central bureaux in Antioch and for the widespread royal demesne. Their administrative web was thus much less intricate than that of the Ptolemies, and it differed further in that it contained subordinate patterns that centred strongly in the provincial capitals. Entire provinces might be disengaged without disrupting the whole. Pergamum had much the character of a Seleucid province that had gained its independence until in 188 BC it became an aggregate of such provinces.

Through being aliens in conquered lands the Macedonian  dynasties were bound to be assimilated by the Orient and lost unless they could surround themselves by large numbers of their fellow-countrymen. For success in this policy they had to make conditions in their kingdoms as attractive as possible to Greeks and Macedonians without driving the natives to desperation. The methods followed in each realm to secure this end will be described elsewhere (chaps, iv and v). The profession of philhellenism was by no means a pose. Each dynasty was the other’s rival. It needed splendour, prestige, and, above all, money and property, with which to fascinate, encourage, and reward Greeks and Macedonians and attach them firmly to the crown. To this necessity of their position, rather than to the love of grandeur or popularity of individual rulers, is to be traced the combination of fiscality and prodigality which seems the cardinal vice of all these states.

Naturally it was the native populations which suffered chiefly from the excessive energy of their masters in raising money; but not exclusively. Even in Alexandria the Greeks had to pay 52 drachmae for the metretes of olive oil, instead of 16—21 as at Delos, because Ptolemy took 34 drachmae in taxes and profit. And enormous though the revenues of Egypt were, from rentals, taxes, monopolies, concessions, customs, tolls, etc., the essential services of the country, like the maintenance of dykes and canals, and the reclamation of marsh and arid lands, transport, the upkeep of warships, were supplied by forced levies of labour, animals, and capital. To take much and give little except by way of favours seems to have been a principle of Ptolemaic finance, and (we may add, though insufficiently informed) of royal finance in general in Hellenistic times.

Unlike the old city-states, or indeed the new cities, the eastern monarchies had to base their administration on professionalism. Republics were able to treat their offices as honours, and it was their aim to train their citizens so highly that they, or at least the well-to-do among them, could take turns in ruling and being ruled. Through love of distinction if not through love of country, citizens were found ready to serve the community in the most varied capacities at large personal expense; but even the richest could do this only intermittently. Kings demanded in their administrative services permanency of tenure. Annual change of his subordinates—indeed, any displacement of them except at his pleasure—could not and did not seem reasonable or wise to a lifelong chief executive. This consideration would have sufficed for the creation under monarchical rule of a permanent officialdom even without the tendency of the times toward specialization of functions. The principle that a man does a thing best when he has to do nothing else was incapable of being elevated into a general law, as Aristotle saw clearly; but it had validity in science as well as in industry, and the Hellenistic age was scientific and materialistic.

The success of professionalism in the conduct and practice of war also helped this tendency to prevail elsewhere. In matters of statecraft the view became ascendant that ‘the cook was a better judge of the dinner than the company to whom it was served.’ The new monarchies had to have a paid service, civil and military, with officials and officers, high and low, with ordinary clerks and labourers, common soldiers and sailors, and even in peace time this service was a heavy charge on every treasury. Recruited as it had to be from subjects (Macedonians and Greeks primarily) irrespective of birthplace and condition, it could be kept faithful only by self-interest. Devotion to the crown and professional pride were apparently the exception rather than the rule. Hence salaries had to be supplemented by gifts; and wages, at least in the army, by gratuities. Indeed, the careers which were thus furnished attracted men primarily because of their perquisites— because of the occasions they offered for receiving benefices and the opportunities they afforded for collateral gains. If the king’s favour or that of someone more highly stationed than oneself endured, men might advance to places of princely opulence and power, when they would themselves furnish careers to others in their employ or clientage, comparable with those in the service of the crown. At the court of the Ptolemies such favourites of fortune were Demetrius of Phalerum, founder of the Museum and benefactor of Athens, Sostratus of Cnidus, to whose munificence Alexandria owed its famous lighthouse, Sosibius the elder, patron of Callimachus, who lauds his ‘public spirit and his loyal remembrance of strugglers,’ Glaucon and Chremonides, to whom with exile from Athens came in Alexandria ‘eminence and responsibility and money-power,’ and, in the days when the kings had lost their grip, Sosibius the younger, Tlepolemus, and Polycrates the Argive—to mention only a few of those who preceded or followed Apollonius, Philadelphus’ all-powerful minister, as the recipients and dispensers of the bounty of Egypt.

Nor were there careers only for statesmen and generals. There were others for engineers and architects, physicians and stewards, business managers of all sorts, and notably scientists, artists, and men of letters. Every king had to be philhellene and every courtier had to ape him. And to be philhellene meant to have, or to show, an interest in the intellectual and aesthetic pursuits which the Greeks had made concomitants of civilization and the Athenians essentials. Without them the new capitals were, and seemed, raw. To make Alexandria and Antioch a new Athens was long an important aim of Ptolemaic and Seleucid ambition—a new Athens and not a new Sparta, for ancient Sparta had been eclipsed in its own specialty by Thebes and Macedon, and the tendency of modern political thinking was no longer socialistic but individualistic. The life desired was a life of diversified culture centring not only in the gymnasium and the stadium but also in the theatre and the college, if we may apply this name to institutes like the Museum at Alexandria, itself a copy of the schools of the philosophers in Athens. Hence kings and courtiers vied with one another and with other kings and courtiers in showering appointments and gifts and invitations upon men of letters and science, commissions and encouragements upon artists of all kinds; and in establishing games and fetes and pageants that should both add éclat to their own society and attract and stimulate talent, as the Great Dionysia and Panathenaea had done, and were still doing.

And they did not lack success. It has been suggested that to take much and give little except by way of favours was a characteristic of royal finance. It is only fair to add that to bestow favours with a bountiful hand was an even more marked characteristic. Soldiers and officials were undoubtedly the chief beneficiaries; but not the only ones. The favour of a king or courtier came to be the hope or mainstay of many a scientist, philosopher, historian; and of many a poet, painter, architect, sculptor, and goldsmith or silversmith. Of Tlepolemus, regent of Egypt at the end of the third century, it is said by Polybius: ‘he spent, nay, to call it by its true name, he squandered, the King’s money on all comers—envoys from Greece, troups of playwrights and musicians, and, notably, officers and soldiers in attendance on the Court. For he did not know how to refuse anybody.’ Here, then, in the lavishness of kings and courtiers, which was politic at base but impolitic because without bounds, was one of the roots of fiscality.

All that money could do for the material equipment of the royal capitals was done. Alexandria, Antioch, and Pergamum came soon to possess sacred buildings that challenged even those of Athens and Olympia, while their palaces and mansions surpassed in magnificence anything that Greece had hitherto seen. But these cities lacked the charm of antiquity and were conscious of it. Their kings might import old manuscripts, paintings, statues, and other objects d'art. That was well so far as it went. But what America has lost through having no share in the Middle Ages and Renaissance the Hellenistic great-cities lost through having come too late for the Classic Age. And they had yet a greater lack: bodies of citizens influential enough, disciplined enough, cultivated enough, homogeneous enough, to preserve the great tradition at once against the vagaries of artists and the caprices of kings and courtiers. It was easier to recreate the city of the Athenians than their society, for this could not be made, it had to grow, as it had grown, after a long period of gestation, in an atmosphere of great freedom and great responsibility. There was no such atmosphere in Alexandria, Antioch, or Pergamum. These cities were poor nurseries of men of eminence. It was not from them but mainly from the old city-states that these sprang. There, in alert and exacting environments, amid memories that challenged and under masters who knew, as often as not with the handicap of straitened circumstances, the minds and hands were trained that did most of the world’s best work in science, literature, and art. And when men left home to seek larger opportunities, it was not solely to courts that they travelled.

Athens was still a magnet for talent, and Rhodes became another; and both had talented men of their own. To measure the attraction of courts and republics respectively is difficult. Perhaps the attraction of opportunities was more important: poets and artists sought patronage, philologists libraries, scientists equipment and philosophers freedom—freedom to launch new theories of state and society, freedom to discuss the nature and power of the gods, freedom to doubt; and this they found most abundantly in Athens . And with all the more prospect of permanency because, when the right of philosophers to teach had been forbidden in the reaction that followed Demetrius of Phalerum’s attempt to make the city an ideal state on the Peripatetic model, the courts had held this prohibition unconstitutional as contravening the general right of free association. There are individual acts of intolerance recorded of this age as of all periods of the world’s history. But it was a favourable circumstance for freedom of thought that within the circle of Hellenism there were still many separate states that were centres of culture, and that it was easier than ever for men who felt oppressed in one to leave it and go to  another. Nor need they, if they had grasped the spirit of the new philosophies, change their place: they might make refuge in their own souls, and leave the worry of the world to ‘fools.’

But there was a pressure being exerted on men’s minds that was more powerful, because more subtle, than downright coercion. Since the conquest of Persia a change of emphasis had come over the values assigned by the Greeks to different kinds of human actions. With greater opportunities for its gratification desire for riches had grown and with the diminution of republicanism desire for civic honour had weakened, as motives for effort. We may trace a less instinctive and steady general sense of beauty. But things of the mind were prized as highly as ever, and not for over two thousand years was so resolute an attempt again made to interpret the universe scientifically. Yet in their dispersion the Greeks had given a multitude of hostages to the Orient, and, with all their pride of race, it is an open question whether they could have withstood the seductive ideals of Asia even if they had been able to repulse the arms of Rome. Be that as it may, the serious malaise from which the Greek world suffered on the intervention of Rome was political and military rather than spiritual. The strength of the eastern monarchies lay in their revenues, their weakness in their scanty supply of men of the dominant stock; whereas old Hellas was, comparatively, strong in men and weak in money. So long as the Aegean world was able to keep pouring emigrants into the East, the Macedonian kings there had little difficulty in enlisting recruits for their armies—for the army was the readiest road to preferment; but when the flood subsided and the colonists had settled down in their nomoi, poleis, and katoikiai, they neither would nor could be mobilized to furnish armies equal in numbers and quality to the exigencies of major wars. The new world had thus to turn again and again to the old world for soldiers—and it got mercenaries, to whom success was more important than the cause for which they were fighting. On the other hand, the free cities and leagues of old Greece, drained constantly of their increase of population by the departure of their youth to seek their fortunes in the East, found their development arrested, like rural New England on the opening of the American West. And since the centres of commerce shifted simultaneously to Alexandria, Rhodes, and the coastal cities of the eastern Mediterranean, the European states were unable any longer to back their policies by adequate material resources. The economic forces of the Hellenistic world had been thrown badly out of gear with its man-power when Rome came.

V.

COSMOPOLITANISM, INDIVIDUALISM, STOICISM

Awareness of the world as a place in which he might anywhere make his home, if he chose—a place with frontiers unexplored to be sure, but as definite as those of most great states—entered into the every-day consciousness of the Greek in the Macedonian age as never before. The question raised by the Sophists as to whether he should live in it according to his own natural bent or according to the rules laid down by his own political society was met by Aristotle with the affirmation that the two things were the same—‘that by nature man was a political animal’; and Aristotle constructed his Politics on the foundation, laid, he thought, by history, analogy, and theory conjointly, that political animal meant city-state animal. The question was met by the Cynics—rebels against the discipline and conventions of city-state civilization—by the counter-affirmation that the two things were indeed the same, but that man could live according to his own bent only when all the world was his city: ‘that by nature man was a cosmopolitan animal.’ Both respondents were reformers. In order to enable men really to live according to their own nature Aristotle would remodel polls. For the same reason the Cynics would eliminate it. The past belonged to the philosopher: was the future to belong to the anarchists ?

There was much in current happenings to suggest to contemporaries that all political order was indeed crumbling. The city-states were fast becoming subordinate cities. With what authority could they claim to determine the life of their citizens— to educate them in their spirit, to teach them the relative values of human activities, to issue general rules for magistrates to apply to their conduct—when they lacked self-determination themselves? The proof that poleis could no longer speak authoritatively to men is that many of them, particularly the new great-cities, did not even make the attempt: they were too disintegrated and their inhabitants were too heterogeneous for that. None the less, the city-state retained so strong a hold on the minds of men even in this the time of its decay as to make it very difficult for anybody, tracing the royal or federal ordinances to their source, to arrive at the idea that by nature man was a monarchical or confederative animal. The utterances of the super-states were too incoherent to constitute a rule of life. In monarchies they formed simply frameworks (diagrammata) in which were set the ‘ laws ’ of cities and ‘nations’; and in true federations, while formally they were laws, they were thought of as international covenants, and even the Achaean League, though at its acme it was dimly visioned as a new state, was understood as a kind of city-state embracing the entire Peloponnese. 

In these circumstances, where rules of life derived from the polls were becoming obsolete and none were derivable from its substitutes, there was at first a stronger tendency for speculative thinking to re-establish social morality by basing it on class, and especially on an idealization of the castes and the hierarchy of castes that existed, or was thought to exist, in Egypt, India, Judaea, and other eastern countries. But on closer acquaintance these exotic social systems lost their prestige, discredited by the political helplessness of the peoples that lived under them. And the happenings incident to the ‘planting of a nation in the new world’ unsettled classes in the dominant race both at home and abroad. Abroad the drafts of colonists made by kings for the founding or re-founding of cities were combined with one another, and with immigrants that came individually, in ways that cannot but have blurred social distinctions as well as distinctions of nationality. Nor was there anything socially sharp and distinct in the imperial bureaucracies. At home the rich tended to become richer and the poor poorer—a development that rendered social revolutions chronic, thus furthering mixture of classes. Social confusion was accordingly as pronounced in the Hellenistic world as political.

The only social unit that throve was the ‘club,’ what the Greeks called generically a koinon, the Romans a collegium. With private associations of this type the Hellenic world became honeycombed. They arose spontaneously—without any form of state compulsion; and both in this particular and in the complete subordination of the hereditary principle to freedom of choice as the basis for their recruitment, they must be distinguished sharply from the guilds of the later Roman Empire. The occasions for their organization were almost infinitely diverse—the promotion of the lyric and dramatic arts, of new religious cults, of conviviality and mutual support among co-nationals when living abroad, among soldiers in garrison and other professional groups, among classmates in the gymnasium, or simply among friends or neighbours. The spread of these societies may be traced ultimately to changes in economic life; but not directly. Trading and transport companies and syndicates for farming taxes are not to be taken as significant of their nature since they belonged to the world of business partnerships rather than of private associations. Among artisans associations that transcended the fellowship of the quarter or street in which the specific art or craft was practised were rare as yet outside Egypt. Clubs of professional athletes were unknown. The conditions under which merchants and shipmasters, warehousemen and traders did business at home and abroad apparently made the formation of guilds, in the common sense of this term, exceptional, so that when men engaged in these occupations in a given centre united at all, it was usually as one body in a quasipolitical assembly or as social groups in the form of ethnic or religious clubs. It may be conceded that at meetings of such clubs more went on than was contained in their records. Since the members had the same vocations, useful information must have been interchanged; and the fact that they occasionally voted honours to external benefactors betrays the existence among them of a sense of corporate interest that may well have been economic at times. But that they issued rules for the conduct of a trade or profession, or used their organization to advance prices or rates or to press claims for special privileges, conforms neither to the evidence nor to the probabilities. The problems peculiar to labour were not open to collective treatment so long as most of the industrial wage-earners were slaves.

Business remained essentially a sphere of individual initiative, and the characteristic thing is rather the number of men that it uprooted from home and city than the growth of co-operative enterprises. Hence the urge to form associations was rarely grounded in strictly economic considerations. Yet it was felt very widely, by women as well as by men, and also, though exceptionally, by slaves. On the evidence available the fact seems to be that private associations were multiplied because they offered the easiest way of escape to a sociable people from loneliness and helplessness in a vast disintegrating world. The super-state was too remote to be real, the polis too subject to external control to reward exclusive devotion. Hence the club flourished. But it in turn was too real to enlist ideals strongly. Class and nationality remain as principles of social organization. But, as we have seen, class was blurred at home, while abroad it was tarnished through having become distinctive of natives; whereas nationality, weakened everywhere by the example and influence of denationalized territorial states, was either supplanted by municipalism in the new world or used, and then misused, to mark off the constituent elements of conglomerate cities and armies. What response was political and ethical theory to make to this complication of affairs? 

For all its instinctive conservatism Greek thought was a living thing, sensitive to changes of environment; and a masterful thing, set on dominating life. And in the Hellenistic age it had not lost its qualities. The political institution of which it had now to determine more explicitly the theoretical properties was monarchy. In considering this men trained in the Greek schools naturally used the method which had been followed in considering the city-state—the elucidation, with a view to betterment, of the actual by the setting up of the ideal. The personal qualities of the ideal king had been already defined by Plato and Aristotle; and their definitions were retained and amplified by their successors. But the institution itself had to be explored anew. For in order to be ideal monarchy had now to be universal. Once the city-state had ceased to be conceived as self-sufficient, the ideal monarch could not be confined to a single city-state without loss of perfection; nor could he tolerate longer, like the philosopher-king of Plato, the coexistence of ideal monarchs in other city-states. He could suffer no territorial limitation whatsoever. For, the self-sufficiency of the city-state gone, it did not occur to anyone as possible to attribute self-sufficiency to any other section of the world. The traditions of monarchy in Persia and Egypt, the example of Alexander and of Antigonus I, and the failure of the Successors to set frontiers to their kingdoms conspired to crush any thought of sectional completeness. Yet without self-sufficiency the government of a section, whatever its form might be, could not be ideal, least of all in an age which, like the Hellenistic, made self-sufficiency the universal test of perfection. Greek theory of monarchy had thus to be one degree further removed from political realities than the theory of the polis. It tended to become merged with the theory of the universe in general.

Greek thought was led in this same direction by yet other considerations. It could not fail to respond to the enormous widening of horizon and enlargement of knowledge and interlocking of business interests that had occurred. The way for a larger synthesis was also blazed by the rise of a standard Greek language— the so-called Hellenistic koine—and its spread beyond the bounds of the Hellenic world. The effects of community of language and of dialect had been of course overborne in classic Greece by divergence among its states in national and political aims; and the use by Greeks and non-Greeks from Rome to Parthia of the koine as the one language of culture meant no more durable interpenetration of aspirations than, for example, the like use of Greek in the Ottoman Empire. But such use did mean that, for the time being at least, men of culture everywhere, irrespective of race, had one further element and agency of exchange in common—a fact which political thinking could not overlook. Nor could it overlook the implications of Alexander’s astounding policy of fusing races. Be his motive what it may, the projected marriage of Europe and Asia emphasized in unforgettable fashion both the artificiality of the distinctions separating men of one race, language, religion, and culture from those of another, and the significance for social life of their common humanity. The fundamental idea did not die with its author. Rejected by his successors as humiliating to their national pride, it lived on in men’s consciousness and fired the imagination of another great dreamer, who, being a Semite by birth and an Athenian by education, was well placed to see in humanity an ideal unity by which to resolve the dualism of his experience.

It thus happened that the political theory of the Greeks leaped at one bound from the reality of the polis to the vision of ‘the universe of men,’ the oecumene without deigning to set foot in passing on the half-reality of the territorial monarchy and the federation. It was, however, a leap of the imagination alone. The framework of the Stoic cosmopolis was filled in, if at all, not by concrete nomoi of its own, but by the patchwork fabric of existing institutions. It was not with this ‘dream or image of a state’ that the mind of Zeno lived. With him, as with his contemporary Epicurus, the real thing about which to theorize was no association of men, but its negation—the solitary self-centred individual. With Zeno individualism all but sufficed; with Epicurus it sufficed altogether, at least theoretically. Both of them had more in common in the premises of their thinking with the Cynics than with the older Academicians or the Peripatetics, in that they grounded their systems in the self-sufficiency of the sage in place of the self-sufficiency of the polis. The gods they wrote off as limiting factors in the individual’s life, Epicurus by a cosmogony which made gods extramundane, Zeno by a cosmogony which made gods and men identical in essence. Death was a release, of the Epicurean from everything, of the Stoic from the corruption of the body: in neither creed was it an end to determine human activity. There remained the ‘domination of things.’ From this the way to freedom led inward—to the refuge of one’s own thoughts. The sage’s peace of mind (ataraxia) came to him, not through existing without pain, disease, hardship, slavery, poverty, humiliations, but through mental capacity to disassociate wellbeing from externals. From such things as formed the evils of the multitude of men no man could escape, but the wise man would make nothing of them; and from the rush and turmoil and confusion of the life of ordinary men he would seek deliverance by reducing his interests to a minimum. ‘Every interest man had in an object,’ writes a modern interpreter of Hellenistic popular philosophy1, ‘was a filament, as it were, going out from his heart and attaching itself to that object, so that if the object was unstable and elusive he was pulled miserably after it. The way of freedom therefore was to cut all these strands going out in all directions and attaching to a multitude of objects’—family, state, property, honours and the like.

Unlike the Cynics, neither the Epicureans nor the Stoics were anarchists, though they had nothing positive to offer in the sphere of ordinary politics. The Epicureans needed the state as a shield for their own life, and traced its origin to a contract, or kind of international treaty, between individuals; but it mattered not at all what the state was, and they put ‘ the saving of the Hellenes ’ among the valueless things. The life they envisaged as ideal was that of a club, a group of congenial friends like the one in the midst of which their Master lived in the Garden in Athens, unmolested because of its obscurity and inactivity, an earthly replica of the society of the extra-mundane gods and goddesses, a stage, rather than a necessity for the life of subdued pleasure which they made their summum bonum.

The Garden thus embodied one of the two concepts of society round which men chiefly rallied in the Hellenistic age. The Stoics laid hold of the other—that of a world-order—and made it their own. From the standpoint of their psychology the ideal wise man could not but jeopardize his self-sufficiency (autarkeia) if he engaged his interest in politics, but from the standpoint of their ethics he could not but display activity of some sort, be it mental or physical, since they made virtue his summum bonum, and virtue meant to all Greeks virtuous action. The solution of this dilemma they found in the sage’s refusal to let himself become wrapped up in any particular state or society while accepting with indifference the form of government or station of life in which he was placed.  ‘The sage will take part in politics,’ they affirmed, not because of the result to be attained thereby— that was preordained—but simply because it was in the line of his duty: like an actor on the stage, he will try to do his part well.

This unenthusiastic acceptance of civic obligations was consonant with Stoic cosmology. Rather—it would, perhaps, be more accurate to say—the Stoics accepted a cosmology from which they could infer that if man lived in harmony with his own higher nature, i.e. virtuously, he at the same time lived in harmony with the nature of the cosmos. Like man the cosmos was, they held, a rational animal. Within them both was diffused the heat of life, due both in man and cosmos to the presence of the divine fire that was reason. Like the cosmos, again, man was an intelligent machine. Both ran their set course and perished; whereupon they released for re-use their portions, of the fire, man to the cosmos after life’s brief span, the cosmos, after its great cycle had been completed, to re-create the imperishable fire from which it had sprung. All men were thus partakers one with another of the divine reason, and the sympathy which existed between man and nature existed necessarily between man and man. From this conception the vertical classification of men into sages and fools (in the matter of wisdom and folly, as they understood it, there was no tertium quid) had as its necessary complement a horizontal grouping of them as kinsmen, it being a matter of no consequence in either case whether they were Greeks or Barbarians, rich or poor, free or slave. As parts of the cosmos, the sun and the moon and the lesser bodies that fretted the magisterial roof of the world with golden fire were, like men, mechanisms and quickened by the same reason. Theirs was the high office to disclose by the unswerving regularity of their movements that this all-pervading reason was law. There was then one law for all men—the law of their own nature, or, simply, natural law. But the correlate alike of one blood and of one law among all mankind was a single universal state, of which naturally the wise and not the fools should have the governance. Since, moreover, wisdom was teachable and the sage could not exist without doing something virtuous, he must needs work for the more complete realization of the state of his vision. But he must work without fervour. The role of the Stoa was thus to launch the idea of a cosmos that was also a polis at a time when the world had been prepared somewhat to accept it, by the conquests and policy of Alexander, by the decay of nations and national loyalties, by the development of an universal  language, and by the groping of mankind after a way of escape from the tyranny of Tyche and the seductiveness of things that did not require the rejection of religion, civilization, and community life. And if, as has been suggested1, ‘the dividing line between the ancient and the modern political theory must be sought, if anywhere, in the period between Aristotle and Cicero,’ for this the Stoics were primarily responsible.

The Greek world which Rome presently entered was a world governed more by these new ideas than by the philosophies which were sprung from the Greek city-states. They were of course meaningless to her until she felt the need for them; and, meanwhile, she learned from the Hellenistic world its less admirable traits—to look upon public service as an opportunity for private enrichment; to covet a life of relaxation, luxury, frivolity; to seek happiness by gratifying desires however extravagant or vicious; to evade, as being the affair of professionals, the inconveniences, hardships, and sacrifices of war. But the need came all the sooner because the vices came first. And Rome’s need for Stoicism was three-fold: to justify theoretically her dominion over the orbis terrarium, to guide her courts in the award of legal rights when political rights did not determine them; and to give her citizens a reason for doing their duty disinterestedly when patriotism proved not enough. The Greek world which the Romans entered was not the world which they idealized; but from it many of the best of them, as well as many of the worst of them, drew their inspiration. Its science they did not understand; its art they did not feel; its mission they frustrated—and then undertook themselves.

CHAPTER II. THE COMING OF THE CELTS By J. M. de Navarro