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The Historians' History of the World 04 [Greece to the Roman Conquest]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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The imperial government, like the imperial army, was centred, head and heart, in the king. On his person everything depended. Absolute monarchy was the only possible form for the empire. The founder of this empire, who bore as many wounds on his body as anyone among his veterans, who commanded in all battles in person, who himself, by ceaseless toil, carried on the business of administration, might well regard himself as the true king whose right to rule, even his master, Aristotle, did not dispute, though he questioned the possibility of such a man’s existence. But Alexander in no way regarded himself as a sovereign because he had the power. He regarded himself as a king by the grace of God, not in the sense of a more or less dubious legitimacy, which many great and petty sovereigns are apt to advance as sole proof of their title, but in the sense in which the genuine artist and the prophet may claim to be the depositaries of the divine spirit. It was the reverse of presumption when Alexander set the divine element in himself in the foreground. During his lifetime he exhibited the most scrupulous piety, and it is contemptible to tax him with hypocrisy; he had far more faith in miracles and oracles than we are willing to ascribe to the pupil of Aristotle, though we can readily understand it in the Macedonian and the soldier. To him it was a revelation from heaven when the Libyan god greeted him as his son. Had not his ancestor, Heracles, been the son of Zeus and of Amphitryon? For him personally it was the confirmation of his faith in his own mission, and the divinity of its ruler gave his empire a religious consecration. It was consistent with this idea that the worship of Alexander took its place above the innumerable special cults of tribes and towns, of families and communities, as the religion of the empire as a whole. There are many instances of the worship of the sovereign being assigned a place in the pantheon, side by side with that of the godhead figured under a thousand different names and shapes; for the worship of defunct monarchs, the ancient and hallowed practice of ancestor-worship offers a precedent. The adoration paid to Plato and Epicurus was of a precisely similar character. Thus, the abuses of which weaklings and miscreants on the throne, and flatterers and sycophants among subjects, have been guilty, must not be allowed to neutralise the historical and spiritual authority of the institution of the worship of the sovereign, which is inseparably bound up with the institution of the monarchy of Alexander. This monarchy is the highest phase of political and social organisation attained by antiquity. For the much-lauded Roman Empire is nothing else than this kind of monarchy, imperium et libertas. Cæsar actually grasped at the crown of the Greek king. So far as Italy and the West were concerned, Augustus certainly wished to be the first citizen and no more—the confidential agent of the sovereign people. But to the Greek half of his empire he was from the first both king and god, and he owed his victory not least to his own belief and that of others in the divinity of his adoptive father. From the time of Hadrian the Augustan theory was in the main exploded even in the West.
This Hellenistic state allowed Alexander’s scheme to drop; he would have granted the Persians full rights of citizenship. From henceforth these rights pertain only to the man who has been Hellenised—the legal stamp of such a condition being membership of an Hellenic community. This is clearly manifest in Egypt, where even the Roman emperor bestows Roman citizenship on no Egyptian who has not been adopted into one of the Greek cities of the country. (In this connection we may leave institutions specifically Roman out of account.) For the rest, the king strives to preserve the ideals of the elder age of Greece, the free man and the free state. Personal and economic liberty, legal redress, and liberty of emigration are for the most part secured, not only to the subjects of a single kingdom, but to all Greeks. In like manner the cities enjoy a very considerable liberty of action, in degrees ranging from nominal sovereignty down to the government by royal officials which is presently established in Alexandria. The ancient Greek municipalities of Asia, in particular, enjoyed as subjects much greater privileges than, for example, the cities of Latin countries at the present day. The country, on the contrary, was almost everywhere allotted to some municipal community; that tendency with which we are familiar in the Roman Empire, to convert nations which did not take kindly to town settlements (like the Celts, for instance) from tribes into towns, if only on paper, is equally perceptible in Syria. Egypt remained “the country,” Chora, but likewise remained barbarous and enslaved. One of the rocks on which the civilisation of antiquity made shipwreck was the fact that the farmer was kept in tutelage or even in bondage by the city, and that he lagged behind it in education. Slavery, as an institution, has to be reckoned with only in the western half of the empire; not in Egypt, Palestine, and large districts of Asia. A community which holds property of its own, imposes its own taxes, which has its own laws and law courts, its own constitution and elective magistrates, is free to all intents and purposes; the fact that it pays a fixed tribute to the king, and leaves to his decision or award all questions of peace and war, intercourse with foreign states, or even with communities of its own political status, and is in many respects practically subject to his control, does not materially detract from its liberty. The danger of such a situation lurks in the circumstance that it minimises interest in their own city among the most capable of its citizens. It offers no career for effective political action. Worse still, the citizen ceases to bear arms. The army consists of the royal troops, official rank goes by royal appointment, and the monarchy alone has great resources at its command. To this centre, and to courts and capitals, the stir of life and every kind of talent is drawn. Very few of the free cities, mainly those which still retained their sovereign rights, like Rhodes, remained centres of civilisation. Not one of the new settlements became such, unless it was a royal capital. Doubtless there can be no genuine patriotism when the citizen takes no part in public life either by counsel or act. Doubtless a government which rests entirely upon the capacity of the sovereign can neither he stable, nor in the long run endure. But, on the whole, we must confess that the Hellenes lived at ease under this kind of government. The ancient petty states alone chose rather to bleed to death than to forego the empty name of liberty. We may regard with sympathy the attempts at confederacies made by Crete, the Peloponnesus and Ætolia; but we cannot deny that politically they are of little importance; they are matters of no moment in the history of civilisation.