The Historians' History of the World 04 [Greece to the Roman Conquest]

By its situation, and the close ties of consanguinity between its population and the Ionians, Athens was destined to unite the civilisations of East and West. The comparatively large peninsula of Attica, so shut off that it is almost insular, had already developed into a political unit at an earlier stage. Aristocratic rule had, it is true, reduced the less wealthy of the peasant population to a condition of servitude, but by introducing the olive it had made agriculture profitable; and, like the Dorians in Corinth, it had recognised trade as an occupation not derogatory to men of rank. Material conditions for amelioration were far more favourable than in the neighbouring island of Ægina, where commerce concerned only the ruling class, who farmed their lands with purchased slaves. But the rapid rise of Athens from obscurity to the first rank is due to one man, in whom the union of East and West was first consummated—the wise Solon. Of noble birth and in sympathy with Dorian modes of life, he had, for all that, travelled to distant shores as a merchant, had laid aside among the Ionians all prejudice, superstition, and mysticism; above all, had acquired the power of using poetry not only for political but also for moral exhortation. He was inspired by the fullest confidence in the might, wisdom, and justice of God, and in the goodness of human nature; all it needed was liberty to exercise itself without let or hindrance,—a need which found its complement in the social order,—that other men might likewise obtain the liberty that was their right. His people had faith in him, and placed the organisation of the state in his hands. He gave the power to the whole people, i.e., to the changing majority of free and upright Athenians, and he gave them all access to the national assembly, to the executive committee, the deliberative council, and the national court of justice. In principle, democracy was established. And the principle of freedom and of equality can be obscured neither by abuse nor by inadequate use; the only limitation to which it is subject is due to the higher principle which Solon himself placed above it, and which never disappears, at least, in theory, from the politics of the Greeks—the principle of justice. Whatever modification it underwent, with Solon there came into existence the municipal constitution, not of Athens alone, but of Greece, which endures as long as the Greek spirit can be traced in historical continuity—the free state of free men. At the time, as a matter of fact, freedom could not be maintained in Athens. But the struggles of the great families, which for another hundred years wrestled together for supremacy, only gave the city time to absorb the Ionian spirit more fully, to develop industry and trade side by side with agriculture, to exploit that economic freedom which was never again encroached upon, and so to accumulate strength in every direction for the decisive moment. This came with the question whether Europe was to be swallowed up in the despotic world-empire of Asia, to which Homeric Greece had already ingloriously succumbed. The issue was not a question of national differences, but simply one of freedom or servitude; a servitude, too, such as the wise man often accepts, because it does not seem to threaten individual liberty. But the free state or class, the democracy of Athens, no less than the Peloponnesian aristocracy, refused to brook it. The Athenian line of battle won the victory at Marathon—it was the triumph of the Doric element. The weapon for the maritime victory of Salamis had been rapidly forged by the genius of Themistocles, a modern Ionian in every sense of the word. In defiance of all human calculations, Xerxes was defeated and compelled to renounce his pretensions to the whole of Europe.

The spirit of Greece now became a national idea; the kinsmen of the Greeks in Asia not only came over, but they made Athens,—Sparta being so tardy,—the presidial centre of a confederation unprecedented in power and extent by anything Greek; the conception of a vast Greek empire in the future, a national confederation, seemed capable of realisation at that moment, since it was possible for the first thought of it to take shape. Politically, too, Athens seemed destined to unite the Greeks of the East and of the West; and if she did so, the Greeks were bound to possess the world.

Under the auspices of these great times Attic tragedy arose as the most perfect expression of the union of Western with Eastern Hellenism, stamped with the features of the great period of its birth; for not until Æschylus, the warrior of Marathon, took the Homeric Heroic legend for the groundwork of the ancient ecstatic Dionysian festivals; not until he substituted the solemn Doric chorus for the satyrs, and reduplicated the Ionian reciter, was the drama discovered which, sublime beyond the scope of mere humanity, and still remaining a part of the worship of the god, yet bore within it the germ of development into a picture of human life, making an appeal more direct and more effective than the narrative of the rhapsodist or the song of the bard. An abundance of talent turned to this new form, which remained Athenian even when the poets came from abroad, and became more and more Athenian, human, and modern. Yet no one ventured to abandon the Homeric subject-matter and go direct to contemporary life for material. And so it continued to be, although with the decay of the Attic empire and its great poets, tragedy (whether as Attic drama or as a part of worship), no longer had any intrinsic claim to the subject-matter of the Heroic legend. Here again the authority of a great achievement condemned posterity to the depths of imitation. The form of drama known at Athens as comedy was regarded as quite another thing; and it had certainly gone far from its source in the same masquerade and the same Dionysian ecstasy by the time it was cast into shape by witty Athenian poets, and promoted to be species of literature. Comedy became drama, and followed the lines of tragedy by centring about a definite action; it was no less wonderful than the latter so long as it served the purpose of the moment and of the necessarily circumscribed circle of Athenian society; but for this very reason it exercised no universal influence, and was destined to fall to pieces with the collapse of the political and social fabric. The last literary achievement of Athens was to transform it, about the time of Alexander, into a refined, purely recitative play which occupied exactly the same relation to contemporary life as later tragedy occupied to the Heroic legends. This new comedy deserved and received the same classic imprimatur as tragedy; but the same slavish subjection to a model ensued; the figures of Menander, so infinitely commonplace and provincial, alas! were doomed to make their appearance on the comic stage, like Medea and Orestes on the tragic, whether the play were written and acted in Rome or Alexandria. In this petrified and haphazard form the theory rather than the poetry of the drama was conveyed to the West. Aristotle, in particular, failed to advance from the chance illustration of actual performances to a formulated statement of the truth, and modern writers have still an unwholesome habit of tossing about the terms “tragedy” and “comedy,” at all events in theory. We have the will to admire and the capacity to understand both what has been achieved by the Athenians and the causes that led inevitably to that achievement: but the foundation of modern dramatic art is Shakespeare—or Plato, who recognised in theory that tragedians and comedians are anything but contradictory terms, and who, like Shakespeare, combined both in himself.