The Growth of the City State
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!" Rathbone Professor of Ancient History in the University of Liverpool 1923. Athenian Stranger. Enough of this. And what, then is to be regarded as the origin of government? Will not a man be able to judge best from a point of view in which he may behold the progress of states and their transitions to good or evil? Cleinias... What do you mean? Athenian Stranger. I mean that he might watch them from the point of view of time, and observe the changes which take place in them during infinite ages. Plato, Laws, III, 676. Kitchener 2001 Batoche Books Kitchener, Ontario Canada email: [email protected] Table of Contents Preface. ................................................................................................................... 4 Lecture I. Geographical Influences. The Migrations of Peoples. ........................... 7 Lecture II. Geographical Influences: The Greeks and the Sea. ............................ 17 Lecture III. Geographical Influences: The Western Mediterranean. .................... 33 Lecture IV. The Growth of the City State. ........................................................... 49 Lecture V. The Early Constitutional Development of Athens. ............................ 80 Lecture VI. The Early Constitutional Development of Rome. .......................... 101 Lecture VII. The Land Question. ....................................................................... 129 Lecture VIII. Pheidippides. Social Conditions in Athens in the Fifth Century. ................................................................................................................ 154 Preface. Perhaps overconfidently I have labelled these lectures First Series, but the menace of a further instalment will not materialise unless the book proves in fact to be of practical use. It may be that it falls between two stools and while too elementary for advanced students it may be too difficult for beginners. After the war, when the necessity for rubbing up my recollections of elementary facts was urgent and I was re-reading the main classical authorities, I planned a session's course of lectures which should not follow the chronological sequence of events but should aim rather at discussing the history of Greece and Rome under the heading of subjects. The lectures of the first term, which this book roughly represents, I intended to cover the earlier history of the city state; the second term I had meant to devote to the struggle between East and West (i.e., the relations of Greece with Persia and Carthage and those of Rome with Carthage and the Eastern powers) and to the consideration of the classical experiments in government upon a larger scale than the city state. In the last term I intended to discuss the classical states from within, i.e., to examine how Athenian democracy worked, and to consider the reasons for the critical view of democracy with which experience inspired almost all thoughtful Greek writers, and then to discuss the breakdown of the Roman Republic after the Great Wars and the merits of the respective preferences of Cato and the gods. The plan was a complete failure. My first year pupils, for whom the course was intended, proved to be too ill-prepared to profit by so allusive a treatment. But it is possible that in book form the lectures may be more fortunate. At least there is no harm in putting it to the test. Two points I should like to emphasise. Firstly that these lectures are intended to be read with or after not instead of the textbook. There is no short cut to learning history, or indeed anything else, and of the two unintelligent processes, which sometimes pass for acquiring knowledge, W. R. Halliday, The Growth of the City State, 5 it is a far greater waste of time to memorise second-hand opinions than to memorise dates. Secondly the opinions which are expressed in this little book are suggestions for consideration. They are there not to be accepted and committed to memory but to be tested and criticised by the student. I have not, of course, stated anything which I believe to be untrue, but a reader who fails to find something with which to disagree will probably have wasted his time. The number of notes I fear is tiresome, but I could think of no other way of doing what I wanted to do. Their nature is, of course, explanatory and illustrative, not exhaustive, and their object is to tempt students to look up some of the references, if only in translation. If my readers contract the habit of looking up references and trouble, as they should, to read the context, they are likely to learn more about Greece and Rome than they can hope to do from any secondhand historian. With regard to references, other than those to classical authors, I have tried to use books which for the greater part are, or should be, in any decently equipped school classical library. To one serious inconsistency I must plead guilty viz., the references to Wilamowitz, Aristoteles und Athen, a German book and a difficult German book at that. The tempta- tion was too strong and my debt too great. I should be very unwilling to subscribe to all the views of the great scholar who wrote it, but I do not know a book from which I have learned more about Athens. I have pilfered freely from well-known translations of classical authors and my equally unacknowledged debt to my Oxford teachers is great. In particular those who have sat at the feet of Mr. E. M. Walker are likely to recognise that his lectures on the Athenaion Politeia have coloured my view of Athenian constitutional history and more, I expect, than I realise myself is ultimately derived from them. I regret that Lecture VII was, in fact, written before I had the opportu- nity of reading Mr. Heitland's extremely careful and judicial study of ancient agriculture, and has therefore benefited only by certain additions, corrections, and references. The last lecture, which was originally delivered to the Liverpool Branch of the Classical Association, is reprinted from Annals of Archaeology and W. R. Halliday, The Growth of the City State, 6 Anthropology VIII. It aims at presenting a picture of social conditions in Athens at a period slightly earlier than that of Becker's Charikles and whereas the text of Becker is provided by the Orators, mine is Aristophanic. In knowledge and in the amount of information, which it conveys, it does not attempt, of course, to challenge comparison but I hope that it may prove a little more readable. For though at one time or another I have read all of Charikles I am bound to confess that I have never succeeded in reading it through at a sitting. An obvious criticism will be raised by the absence of maps, which was decided upon only after careful thought. It seemed to me, however, that the addition of line blocks would add little of value for readers who possess atlases or textbooks containing maps. On the other hand to add maps more elaborate than those which are thus easily accessible, would inevitably add to the cost of production and consequently to the price of the book. Rightly or wrongly I decided that this was the more important consideration. W. R. HALLIDAY. The University, Liverpool. Lecture I. Geographical Influences. The Migrations of Peoples. The science of geography is of the first importance in the study of the history of man, nor does its contribution to the understanding of history end when it has provided charts by which the student may trace the movements of invading armies, or criticise the strategy of opposing generals. For geography is a study not only of the complicated board, upon which the drama of human life is played out, but also of the rules which condition the game. Man like other living things, must adapt himself to his environment or perish. Here he differs only from the beasts in that his adaptation is not merely passive. Increasingly he becomes the master of nature and is able to modify the conditions which she imposes. Tropical medicine, to take a very recent example, has rendered areas suitable for colonisation in which previously the white man could not live and work. Science indeed has armed man with powerful weapons for the struggle for existence and has to some extent made him the master of his environment, but the further back you trace his history, the more dependent he will be found to be upon conditions which nature imposes. Consider for a moment the lower races. Their arrested development is due ultimately to restricted opportunity and conditions of existence which have stunted development, rather than to any original moral or mental difference between their forefathers and the rest of our human ancestors, which has branded them with the curse of Ham. The struggle for mere survival has been too hard for the Esquimo, living precariously on the spoils of his hunting in a country where the development of agriculture is impossible, and dependent for the material of his arts and crafts upon walrus tusks and whale-bone or the rare fortune of a find of drift-wood. Similarly the Australian black-fellow was isolated in an area where the natural conditions of existence were too hard for a start to be made. Man, in fact, cannot develop a civilised existence unless nature helps him by providing the opportunity and the means. Ancient civilisation centres on the land-locked and almost tideless sea W. R. Halliday, The Growth of the City State, 8 round the shores of which the three great continents of the Old World meet. Man, it is true, has developed civilisations of a high order beyond the Mediterranean area but it would seem as though the civilisation, which has its roots in Greek conceptions of independence in life and thought and in Roman ideals of law and government, is destined ultimately to embrace the world.