Nationalism and Culture (66 page)

that any resistance to the Persians was vain, preferred to abandon the old soil and to found for themselves a new home at a distance. The Spartans refused any help whatever to the revolting Greek cities in Asia Minor— which simply cannot be reconciled with a strongly developed national feeling. The Athenians supported the Ionic revolt, chiefly because the tyrant Hippias, whom they had exiled, had found asylum at the Persian court and from there had instigated continuous cabals against his native city. These petty potentates, who before the introduction of the republican form of the state had established themselves in almost every Grecian city, allowed themselves to be controlled by no national considerations and were always ready to perform the most menial services for the Persian despots in exchange for assistance in suppressing the struggles for freedom put up by their own people. The machinations of men like Pisistratus in Athens, Aleutos in Thessaly and the Spartan king, Demaratus, prove this.

When at last the Persian king, Darius, got his hands free he sent a great army against Eretria and Athens, which cities he especially hated because of their support of the Ionic revolt 5 still it was clear that his attack was directed at all Greece, for Persian power was not safe in Asia Minor until the Hellenes there were deprived of the possibility of receiving aid from the cities of the mother country. The danger was great, the more so because the tyrant, Hippias, was with the Persian army and, as a Greek, could render them many a useful service. Despite this there is no trace of a kindling of national consciousness among the Hellenes. Sparta's attitude was ambiguous, as always—this, despite the fact that the Persian emissaries who were sent to demand earth and water as tokens of submission were thrown into a well with the suggestion that they would there be able to collect for themselves what they wanted. Many cities on the islands and also on the mainland had submitted almost without resistance, among them the greater part of the Boeotians. Even the closest neighbors of the Athenians, the inhabitants of the island of Aegina, would risk no resistance to the Persian army and preferred surrender to probable capture.

When at last at Marathon it came to a decisive combat between the land forces of the Persians and the Greeks, in which the latter faced an overwhelmingly superior force, the Athenians took the field almost alone, for, except for a thousand hoplites whom the Plataeans had sent, no other aid was at hand. Even the Spartans, who had entered the war against the Persians, appeared on the field only after the battle and contributed nothing to the tremendous victory of Miltiades and his troops. By the victory at Marathon the danger which had threatened Hellas was for the time being averted and the Persian generals were compelled to lead their troops back to Asia. Nevertheless, it must certainly have been clear to everyone that, though the danger was certainly postponed for a while,

it was by no means ended. There was no vestige of a doubt that the Persian despotism would set all its forces at work to get even for the defeat it had suffered. The whole situation was so unequivocal that no one in Hellas could have misunderstood it. One might, therefore, have expected that the Greeks would have availed themselves of the short breathing spell to prepare better to face the approaching danger. If there had existed in Greece the slightest trace of that "national spirit" of which uncritical historians have so much to say, it would by all means surely have revealed itself in such a perilous situation. But there occurred nothing which one could point to as revealing a strengthening of the national consciousness. Internal conditions in Greece remained the same. Sparta, whose military and political prestige had been greatly impaired by the Athenian victory at Marathon, from then on directed its whole political activity to obstructing in every way the rapid development of Athens. This presented to the Spartan aristocracy a much more important problem than the Persian danger.

When, then, in 480 b.c, ten years after the battle of Marathon, the Persian king, Xerxes, threatened Greece with an enormous army on land and a mighty fleet along its coast, the general situation of the Greeks was not better by a single hair than on the occasion of the first Persian attack. Even then there appeared no trace of national unanimity in the face of the frightful danger which threatened all alike. At first there was universal panic. Still no one thought of a common defense of "national interests." Thebes, within whose walls the so-called "Median party" had achieved a strong influence (fostered, beyond a doubt, by the Persian despot) submitted to the enemy without resistance} several tribes in the more central parts of the country followed suit. Boeotians, Thessalians and Achaeans tried by submission to escape the danger which threatened them.

But even the famous assembly on the Isthmus, to which the few cities that had resolved on resistance sent representatives, presented anything but a picture of national resolution. First of all, the Spartans could not be induced to throw their entire military power into the northern part of the country to confront the advancing hostile army. They were clearly quite willing to allow Central Greece to be laid waste, and there is hardly a doubt that the ruling caste in Sparta would gladly have seen Athens destroyed by the Persians and themselves thus freed from an embarrassing rival. The whole role of the Spartans at this time was just as ambiguous as it had been ten years before in the war against Darius. When at last, in order to avoid making their secret purposes all too manifest, they were compelled to consent to putting up a resistance to the Persians at Thermopylae, they sent Leonidas with only three hundred Spartan citizens and about a thousand Perioecae, with whom a few other tribes joined.

Altogether, the number of heavy-armed soldiers was less than four thousand, a ridiculously small number compared to the gigantic horde of the Persians. When Grote and other celebrated narrators of Grecian history express doubts of the sincerity of the Spartans, their reason is only too evident in the light of the historical facts.

Even later when, after the disastrous defeat of his fleet at Salamis, Xerxes was compelled to retreat across the Hellespont with the greater part of his army, Sparta continued to pursue the same equivocal tactics. Xerxes, it was true, had withdrawn into Asia, but he had left behind in Thessaly a strong army under his general, Mardonius, who was to winter there in order to renew the war in the spring. But just at this final decisive battle, the Spartan king, Pausanias, who had the supreme command of the fighting forces of the Hellenes, displayed such an appalling lack of decision that it seemed to hint at treachery. The end of Pausanias, who on a later occasion was led into open betrayal of the interests of the Greeks, justifies the suspicion that even at that time he had struck a secret bargain with Mardonius. This supposition gains probability if we take into consideration that before the opening of hostilities Mardonius had made a secret proposal to the Athenians that they should enter into an alliance with him, promising that their independence should be in no way impaired. The Athenians proudly rejected the proposal, and it is easy to conjecture that Mardonius at once tried it on Pausanias and from him met with a better response. At any rate, the whole behavior of Pausanias before the battle of Plataea lends itself to such an interpretation.

If in spite of their superiority and in spite of their secret machinations the Persians were still decisively defeated, it was because the troops of the Hellenes, who fought for their independence and their freedom, and who had to lose nothing less than their all, were animated by a very different spirit than the gigantic army of the Persians, welded together by the will of a despot, and in large part merely impressed for the war from foreign populations. For this reason the Greeks won despite their national divisions and their political disunion, without their having been aware of these as weaknesses.

The attempt of many historians to interpret the later Peloponnesian war as a struggle over the national unity of Greece is without any secure foundation. Mauthner has strikingly commented on the unreasonableness of this assertion:

Let one only think, for example, that during the nearly thirty-years-long Peloponnesian war the idea of a Hellenic nationality practically did not make its appearance; of course, a man like Alcibiades, who under the stress of wrath and need put his inventive talent at the disposal, now of his fellow Athenians, now of the hostile Spartans, now of the hereditary enemy in Persia, was even at that time an exception; but even among the simple

Greeks those were rare who had formed any conception of their nationality, who as conscious Pan-Hellenes or All-Grecians desired the end of the war. The idea of nationality was not yet effective, despite their love for their homeland, for their city.^*'

In that long and bloody conflict in which Greece slashed at its own flesh and gnawed at its own vitals, the struggle was not over the national-political unity of the Grecian tribes, but over the question: autonomy or hegemony? What was to be decided was which of the larger cities should hold the leadership: Athens, Sparta, Thebes or Corinth. After the Persian wars culture, especially in Athens, had expanded into fullest bloom j but the victory over the Persians had contributed strongly to the extension of the consciousness of political power. The Athenians, who, with their allies, continued the war against the Persians and wished to secure for the Grecian cities in Asia Minor liberation from the Persian yoke, was not actuated by purely economic motives. The principal ground of their behavior was undoubtedly the conviction that an alliance of free cities in Asia Minor would constitute a strong bulwark against further attacks by the Persian despotism. While the Spartans and the other Peloponnesian cities had withdrawn from the war, Athens, and the cities which had identified themselves with her undertakings, founded the Delian-Attic League, which was at first a free federation of independent communities j within its framework every city enjoyed the same rights. But this was ended with the development of the hegemony, which gradually conceded to Athens greater and greater privileges which she could hold only at the expense of her allies. This brought the political motive ever more sharply into the foreground of social life.

This is precisely the curse of every power of whatever sort: that its holders misuse it. Against this manifestation no reform helps, no safety valve in the constitution, however farsightedly devised ; for it springs from the innermost nature of power itself and is therefore inevitable. It is not the external form, but power as suck, that leads to misuse j the striving after power opens gate and door to all the foul and fateful passions of man. When Goethe once spoke of the ruin that politics works on character, he may well have been thinking of that obsession with power which lies at the foundation of all politics. Everything which seems to us base and contemptible in private life becomes—when statesmen use it—patriotic virtue, provided that success treads on its heels. And since with the extension of power more and more economic wealth falls into the laps of its possessors, there develops a system of venality and corruption that gradually undermines all social morale, without which no community can long endure. So power becomes a terrible scourge to social life and its

^° Fritz Mauthner, Der Atheismus. Band I, p. 102.

creative cultural forces. Even the Grecian polls proved no exception to this rule, and fell into inner dissolution just in the proportion that political ambition got the upper hand in it.

Moreover, it was shown then, and has ever since been constantly confirmed, that war, which hopeless fools celebrate as the rejuvenation of social life, usually affects the victor more injuriously than the vanquished. Because as one of its consequences it enriches immoderately certain sections in the community, displaces the earlier limits of well-being and thus disturbs the social equilibrium to such a degree that it becomes constantly more difficult to speak of a community of social interests j and the class contrasts in society manifest themselves more strongly and more undisguisedly. It happened thus in Athens also. Hand in hand with the luxuriant growth of a money oligarchy went the impoverishment of the lower sections of the people J the destruction of the ancient foundations of their society. On this and on her slave economy Greece was at last to wreck herself.

The struggle for the hegemony, which found such overpowering expression in the Peloponnesian war, at the same time initiated the decline of Greek culture and prepared the way for the subjugation of Greece by the Macedonian monarchy, for it led everywhere—in Athens, in Sparta, in Thebes—to the same inevitable results. The one pleasing phenomenon in the struggle for leadership is the fact that none of the larger cities was able to maintain its predominance for any length of time, because the sense of freedom of the Hellenes always impelled the individual cities to revolt and to shake off the yoke that had been imposed on them. But the war lasted too long and undermined completely the foundations of social life. After the termination of hostilities all the cities were so exhausted that they were no match for the approaching Macedonian peril. The less so because, owing to the upsetting of customs and the decay of all moral principles which resulted from the war and the struggle for power, the Macedonian king was able to keep agents in almost every city who worked actively in furtherance of his plans. In fact, the moral depravity was most complete exactly at the time when Demosthenes was vainly striving to arouse Hellas to a united defense against the Macedonian peril.

Alexander of Macedon at last established the national political unity of Greece with the sword, by bringing the whole country under his own overlordship. He was the real founder of that so-called "Hellenism" which servile historians have acclaimed as the zenith of Greek culture. In reality, it was an intellectual decline, incapable of any renewal of its life. Alexander laid the foundation for a unified Grecian kingdom, and in doing this he destroyed the inexhaustible diversity of that rich cultural life which was so characteristic of the Greek communities at the time of their bloom. The former citizens of free cities became subjects of the