II. The Decomposition of the Heroic Ideal

Economic phenomena and the political events which they engendered took it upon themselves to ruin the heroic ideal and to dissolve the primitive union of moral virtues and material goods, which language records in so artless a manner.

The division of the arable lands, possessed in common by all the members of the clan began to introduce inequality among them. The lands under the action of multiple causes became concentrated into the hands of a few families of the clan and ended by falling into the possession of strangers, to such an extent that increasing numbers of patricians found themselves dispossessed of their goods. They took refuge in the cities, where they lived as parasites, hornets, Socrates calls them. It could not be otherwise; for in ancient societies, and in fact every society based on slavery, manual and even intellectual labor, being performed only by slaves and foreigners, is poorly paid and is considered as degrading, except indeed for agriculture and the care of flocks.

The political situation created by the economic phenomena is explained by Plato in the Eighth Book of the Republic, with a strength and clearness of vision which cannot be too much admired. A violent class struggle was troubling the cities of Greece. The oligarchical state, that is to say the one based on the census, says Socrates, “is not one in its nature, it necessarily contains two states; one composed of the rich, the other of the poor, who inhabit the same ground, and conspire one against the other.” Socrates does not include among the poor the artisans and still less the slaves, but simply the ruined patricians.

”The greatest vice of the oligarchical state is that under it a man may sell all that he has, and another may acquire it, yet after the sale he may dwell in the city of which he is no longer a part, being neither trader, nor artisan, nor horseman nor hoplite, but only a poor, helpless creature. It is impossible to prevent this disorder, for if it were prevented, a part would not possess excessive wealth, while others are reduced to extreme misery. The members of the ruling class, owing their authority only to the great property they possess, refrain from repressing by severe laws the libertinism of the dissipated young men and preventing them from ruining themselves by excessive expenditures, for they have the intention of buying their goods and appropriating them through usury, to increase their own wealth and power.”

The concentration of property creates in the state a class of

“people – armed with stings like hornets, some overwhelmed with debt, others marked with infamy, others who have at the same time lost their property and their honors in a state of hostility and constant conspiracy against those who have enriched themselves with the wreck of their fortunes and against the rest of the citizens; and loving but one thing, revolution. Nevertheless, the greedy usurers, with their heads down and without seeming to perceive those whom they had ruined, since others keep coming, inflict large wounds upon them by means of the money which they loaned them at high interest; and while multiplying their own revenues, they multiply in the state the breed of hornets and mendicants.”

When the hornets became by their number and their turbulence a menace to the security of the governing class, they were sent out to found colonies, and when this resource failed, the wealthy citizens and the state tried to calm them by distributions of food and money. Pericles could maintain himself in power only by exporting and feeding the hornets. He sent one thousand citizens of Athens to colonize the Chersonesus, five hundred to Naxos, two hundred fifty to Andros, one thousand to Thrace, as many to Sicily and to Thurium. He distributed to them by lot the lands of the Island of Aegina, whose inhabitants had been massacred or banished. He paid the hornets, of whom he could not relieve Athens. He gave them money, even for going to the theatre. It was he who introduced the custom of paying six thousand citizens, that is to say nearly half the population enjoying political rights, for exercising the function of judges (dikasts). The pay of the judges, which at first was one obol per day was raised to three by the demagogue Cleon. The annual sum amounted to 5,560 talents, or $180,000, which was a considerable sum even for a city like Athens. So when Peisander abolished the democratic government, he decreed that the judges should no longer be paid, that the soldiers alone should receive wages, and that the management of the public affairs should be entrusted to but five thousand citizens, capable of serving the state with their fortune and their person. Pericles, to restrain and satisfy the artisans, who made common cause with the hornets, had been obliged to undertake great public works.

The economic phenomena, which, by dispossessing a part of the patrician class, created a class of unclassed, ruined revolutionaries, developed more rapidly in the cities, which by their maritime position became centers of commercial and industrial activity. The class of plebeians enriched by commerce, industry and usury, increased in proportion as the number of ruined patricians and parasites increased. These enriched plebeians, to snatch political rights from the rulers, leagued themselves with the dispossessed nobles and when they had obtained political rights, they united with the rulers to combat the impoverished patricians and the plebeians with little or no fortune; and these latter, when they became masters of the city, abolished debts, banished the wealthy and divided up their property. The banished rich implored the assistance of foreigners to return to their city, and in their turn massacred their conquerors. These class struggles ensanguined all the cities of Greece and prepared them for the dominance of Macedonia and Rome.

The economic phenomena and the class struggles which they engendered had overthrown the conditions of life, in the midst of which the heroic ideal had been elaborated.

The manner of making war had been profoundly transformed by the economic phenomena. Piracy and brigandage, these favorite industries of barbaric heroes, had been rendered difficult, since the improved fortifications of the cities sheltered them from surprises. Solon, although at the head of a commercial city and him self a merchant, had been obliged out of complaisance for inveterate habits, to found at Athens a college of pirates, but the establishment of numerous colonies along the shores of the Mediterranean, and the commercial development resulting from this, had forced the maritime cities to police the seas and give chase to the pirates, whose industry lost prestige in proportion as its profits diminished.

Changes of great importance had been made in the military organization on sea and land. The Homeric heroes, like the Scandinavians who later on were to ravage the European shores of the Atlantic, when they started on a maritime expedition took no rowers and sailors with them. Their flat-bottomed ships, which they built themselves and which according to Homer could not have carried more than from fifty to one hundred and twenty men, were manned only by warriors who rowed and fought. The battles were on land only. The Iliad mentions no engagement on the sea. The improvements which the Corinthians introduced into shipbuilding and the increase of naval strength made necessary the use of mercenary rowers and sailors, who took no part in the battles in which the hoplites and other less heavily armed warriors engaged on sea and land. The mercenary once acclimated in the fleet, pushed himself into the land armies. These were at first composed only of citizens taking the field with three or four days rations, which they furnished themselves, as well as their horses and arms. They foraged on the enemy when their provisions gave out and returned to their firesides when the expedition, always of short duration, was ended. But when the war, carried on at a distance, required a long attendance of the army, the state was obliged to provide for the support of the warrior. Pericles at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War gave for the first time at Athens pay to the warriors, who then became soldiers – that is to say, wage-workers, mercenaries. The pay amounted to two drachmas (about forty cents) a day, for the hoplites. Diodorus Siculus says that it was at the siege of Veii that the Romans introduced pay into their armies. From the moment when pay was given for fighting, war became a lucrative profession, as in the Homeric times; corps of soldiers were formed in which the poor citizens and the unclassed and ruined patricians enrolled themselves, just as there existed already bands of mercenary rowers and sailors, selling their services to the highest bidder.

Socrates said that an oligarchical state – that is to say, one governed by the rich, – “is powerless to make war, because it is obliged to arm the multitude and consequently to have more to fear from it than from the enemy; or else not to use it and go into battle with an army truly oligarchical;” – that is to say reduced to the rich citizens. But the new necessities of war forced the rich to repress their fears and to violate the ancient customs. They were obliged to arm the poor and even the slaves. The Athenians enrolled slaves in their fleet, promising them liberty, and they liberated those who had fought valiantly at Arginousae (B.C. 406). The Spartans, themselves, were obliged to arm and liberate Helots. They sent to the relief of the Syracusans, besieged by the Athenians, a corps of 600 hoplites composed of Helots and Neodamodes (newly admitted to citizenship); while the government of the Spartan Republic branded with infamy the Spartans who had laid down their arms at Sphacteria, although several of them had occupied high political positions, it granted liberty to the Helots who had smuggled provisions through to them while they were besieged by the Athenians. The wage which transformed the warrior into a mercenary, into a soldier , becomes in a short time an instrument of social dissolution. The Greeks had sworn at Platea that “they would bequeath to their children’s children hatred against the Persians, that this hatred might last as long as the rivers should flow to the sea,” nevertheless half a century after this proud oath Athenians, Spartans and Peloponnesians paid eager court to the king of Persia in order to obtain subsidies to pay their sailors and their soldiers. The Peloponnesian War hastened the fall of the aristocratic parties and brought out into broad daylight the ruin of heroic customs, which the economic phenomena had silently prepared.

The rich who had reserved to themselves as the first of their privileges the right to bear arms and to defend their country rapidly acquired the custom of replacing themselves in the army by mercenaries. A century after the innovation of Pericles the bulk of the Athenian armies was composed of paid soldiers. Demosthenes says in one of his Olynthiacs that in the army sent against Olynthus there were 4,000 citizens and 10,000 mercenaries; that in that which Phillip defeated at Chaeronea there were 2,000 Athenians and Thebans and 15,000 mercenaries. The rich, although not fighting, reaped the benefits of war. “The rich are excellent for keeping riches,” said Athenagoras, the Syracusan demagogue, “they leave dangers to the multitude, and not content with seizing the greater part of the advantages of war, they usurped them all.”

The barbarian patricians, trained from childhood to all the labors of war, were warriors who defied all comparison. The newly rich, on the contrary, could endure war with difficulty, as Socrates states:

”When the rich and the poor find themselves together in the army on land or sea and observe each other mutually in circumstances of danger, the rich then have no reason to despise the poor; on the contrary, when the poor man, wiry and sunburned, posted on the battlefield by the side of a rich man, brought up in the shade and weighed down with superfluous flesh, sees him all out of breath and troubled with his body, – what thought do you think comes to him at that moment? Does he not say to himself that these people owe their riches only to the cowardice of the poor, and when they are by themselves, do they not say to each other, ‘Of a truth, these rich are not good for much.’”

The rich, deserting the military service and putting mercenaries in their place to defend their country, lost the physical and moral qualities of the heroic ideal while preserving the material property which justified their existence. It happened then, as Aristotle observes, that wealth, far from being the reward of virtue, excused men from being virtuous.

But the heroic virtues, no longer cultivated by the rich, became the appanage of mercenaries, freedmen and slaves, who possessed no material goods; and these virtues, which led the barbaric heroes to property, sufficed only to enable the soldiers to live miserably on their pay. Economic phenomena had thus decreed the divorce of the material goods and the moral qualities, formerly so intimately united.

Among these mercenaries with heroic virtues were found a considerable number of patricians who had lost their property through usury and civil wars, while the rich included in their ranks many people enriched by commerce, usury, and even by war, carried on by others. Thus at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, when Corinth prepared its expedition against Corcyra, Thucydides relates that the state promised its citizens, who should enroll themselves a share in the conquered lands and offered the same advantages to those who, without taking part in the campaign, should give 50 drachmas.

The heroic ideal had fallen to pieces, sowing disorder and confusion in moral ideas, and this confusion was reflected in the religious ideas The grossest superstition continued to flourish even at Athens: which condemned to death Anaxagoras, Diagoras and Socrates; which burned the works of Protagoras for impiety against the gods. Nevertheless the comic authors launched against the gods and the priests, which was still bolder, the most audacious and the most cynical attacks. The demagogues and tyrants profaned their temples and pillaged their sacred treasures and debauchees defiled and overturned by night the statues of the gods placed in the streets. The religious legends, handed down from the most remote antiquity and accepted naively as long as they agreed with current customs, had become shocking by their grossness. Pythagoras and Socrates demanded their suppression, even though it were necessary to mutilate Homer and Hesiod, or to forbid the reading of their poems. Epicurus declared that to believe in the legends about the gods and to repeat them were the acts of atheism. The Christians of the first centuries did nothing but generalize and systematize the criticisms which the pagans had made in the midst of paganism.

The hour had sounded for the bourgeois society – then springing up for the society based on individual property and commercial production – to formulate a moral ideal and a religion corresponding to the new social conditions fashioned by economic phenomena; and it is the eternal honor of the sophistical philosophy of Greece to have traced the principal lines of the new religion and the new moral ideal. The ethical work of Socrates and Plato has not yet been surpassed.