PART THREE
Chapter Eleven
The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history,
is more important than the battle of Hastings.
—John Stuart Mill, “Grote’s History of Greece [I]”
MANY ASPECTS of classical Athenian culture persuaded Victorians of either its timelessness or its modernity or both. Thomas Arnold was convinced that, far from being mired in a remote past, in truth writers like Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides, and Cicero were “virtually our own countrymen and contemporaries,” and in his edition of Thucydides he declared that fifth-century Athens belonged more properly to modern than to ancient history; his son Matthew in his 1857 address “On the Modern Element in Literature” praised the modernity of the Athenians in invidious contrast to the antiquated customs of the Elizabethans.1 (Citizens of the late twentieth century will be amused to note Arnold’s contention that the absence of crime is a basic requirement for modernity.) Arguing along similar lines, the Irish Hellenist John Pentland Mahaffy claimed in 1874 that an educated man of his own culture transported to Periclean Athens “would find life and manners strangely like our own, strangely modern, as he might term it,” for, he maintained, the classical Greeks were “men of like culture with ourselves, who argue with the same logic, who reflect with kindred feelings,” and are, in a word, “thoroughly modern, more modern than the epochs quite proximate to our own.”2
The work that went into Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and the enthusiasm with which it was received reflected the primacy of Roman studies over Greek in the eighteenth century, but in the Victorian era Greece at last came to contend with Rome for the attention of the British reading public. Travel to Greece had begun in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and by the middle of the nineteenth a variety of Englishmen had seen Byron’s “land of lost gods” with their own eyes. At the same time—as Frank Turner has pointed out in his valuable study The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain—the humanistic tradition that had begun as early as the sixteenth century with humanists like Colet and More came to serve as an essential conduit not only for the transmission of Greek culture but also for the transformation of Hellenic traditions into recognizably Victorian ideals.3 For at least the first half-century of the Victorian era, the conviction that the lessons of Greek antiquity could be applied more or less directly to modern Britain ran both wide and deep.
Charmed by what they perceived as the happy cohesiveness of the Greek state and alarmed by the rise of particularist concerns in their own, many Victorians turned with special interest to Greek art and literature, for the notion that unifying civic values prevailed in the Hellenic state in general and the Athenian in particular drew great strength from Greek aesthetics—in part from the unities of time, place, and action associated with Aristotle’s Poetics, but in part too from the role Greek art and architecture was believed to have played in the life of the polis. Grounded in shared civic values, Greek sculpture, it was thought, not only achieved a pleasing blend of sensuality and restraint and a paradoxical resolution of motion and rest; it also reflected the communal interests of society—interests in whose triumph over individual and particularist impulses many reflective Victorians saw the hope of the future. (Then as now, belief in the delightfully stark simplicity of Greek sculpture was enhanced by the fact that the gaudy paint that once adorned statues in classical Greece had long since eroded, leaving the sparkling marble that all moderns associate with classical antiquity.4) Throughout the century men and women were drawn to the idealism of Greek art that exalted the general over the specific. Already in his Discourses presented to the Royal Academy of Art in the 1770s and 1780s, Sir Joshua Reynolds combined an appeal to represent the general rather than the particular with the hope that the effects of such art “may extend themselves imperceptibly into public benefits,” and a century later Jane Ellen Harrison in her Introductory Studies in Greek Art claimed that Greek sculpture manifested “that instinct for generalization, that rising from the particular to the universal, which for the Greek issued ultimately in the highest idealism” and attributed this phenomenon in part to the “democratic instinct” among the Greeks that resented the preeminence of individuals.5 Shortly afterward Percy Gardner’s Grammar of Greek Art proclaimed that Hellenic idealism was “not individual, but social,” belonging “to the nation, the city, or the school, rather than to this or that artist.”6 Travel abroad had encouraged such notions; already during the previous century James Stuart and Nicholas Revett had fostered the British enthusiasm for Greek architecture after their return from Greece with the publication in 1762 of their Antiquities of Athens and the construction of Greek-style buildings: the Doric temple James Stuart designed at Hagley Park in 1758 was the first piece of Greek revival architecture in modern Europe. Stuart and Revett had seen a gratifying affinity between modern and classical Athenians and had suggested a bustling republicanism at its core, writing that their Athenian contemporaries “want not for artful speakers and busy Politicians,” and observing that “the coffee house where such men gathered stood within the ancient Poikile.”7 Though for some Victorians Athens appeared as a hotbed of precisely the sort of faction and divisiveness that the idealism of their beloved Plato sought to combat, many preferred to downplay the conflict between Plato and his fellow Athenians and focus instead on what the ideology of the polis shared with that of its sternest critic. Unity of a pan-Hellenic nature, moreover—a rare departure from the ancient norm—was highlighted by the modern Greek efforts to throw off the dominion of the Turkish despots who so readily evoked the Persian autocrats of yore.
THE WAR IN THE JOURNALS
A good bit of the earliest Victorian debate over the merits of Athenian democracy found a forum in the ferocious combat that broke out over Mitford’s History in the newly founded review journals of the nineteenth century. While liberal French thinkers were suggesting that cosmopolitan Athens replace xenophobic Sparta as a model of the best Greece had to offer and German writers were putting Athens forward as the embodiment of the Hellenic aesthetic ideal, Englishmen, in the witty formulation of Richard Jenkyns, fought over Mitford and the Athenians in the reviews “like Greeks and Trojans over the body of Patroclus.”8 The debate was not entirely academic. The political orientations of the two journals in which the debate was principally conducted were well known, and when a new Greek history was finally written to supplant Mitford, it was the product not only of prodigious scholarship but of profound political commitment as well.
The publication of Mitford’s later volumes coincided with the foundation of several lively review journals. The last chapters of Mitford’s History appeared in 1810. The Edinburgh Review began publishing in 1802, the Quarterly Review in 1809, and the Westminster Review, Bentham’s journal, somewhat later, in 1824. It was primarily in the Quarterly and the Westminster that the debate about Mitford and Athens was aired, although a long review of Mitford appeared in the Edinburgh in 1808, and it was Knight’s Quarterly that published Macaulay’s review of Mitford in 1824. At the same time a sharp controversy broke out in the journals over Greek rhetoric, touching on many of the same issues as the Mitford debate. The essay on “Panegyrical Oratory of Greece” published by the Quarterly Review in 1822 initiated a memorable repartee on the subject of Athens between the Quarterly and the Westminster. Though conducted with genuine acrimony—Charles Austin labeling one article in the opposing journal “monstrous in stupid malignity”—portions of these debates are liable to dissolve twentieth-century readers in paroxysms of laughter, at least some of which was plainly intended.9
High seriousness characterized the Quarterly Review essay, which took as its point of departure a Greek and French edition of Demosthenes and Aeschines.10 The reviewer found Greek praises of democracy composed “in such a transcendant style of excellence, that to translate them with spirit might cost half the sovereigns of Europe their crowns,” a catastrophe the reviewer was eager to avert by laying bare the moral bankruptcy and shameless mendacity of Athenian thinkers, voters, and statesmen.11 Panegyrical oratory in Athens, the reviewer maintained, consisted of conscious, calculating prodemocratic fictions. Many of these concerned the Athenian empire, an autocratic venture that orators sought to cloak in fair-sounding words. The sophists are the particular object of the reviewer’s spleen, a “pestilent” lot whose exercises he took quite literally, expressing pained concern for the undermining of female morals in Gorgias’s speech in praise of Helen. The reviewer clinches his case against the sophists by citing Bishop Burnet’s observations on “the learning of the Popish doctors,” which he considered parallel in its speciousness.12
Athenian rhetoricians, then—both native and adoptive—were branded as “Popish” liars and corruptors of women. Thus far the Quarterly reviewer. The attacks on the Athenian ethos in this earnest essay were answered blow for blow in two hilarious articles in the new Westminster Review. The January issue placed the debate about Athens squarely within the context of the contemporary conflicts between conservatives and liberals, monarchists and republicans, Catholics and Protestants, and mocked the anxious concerns of the contemporary enemies of Athens—men, as the author saw them, who subscribed to “the great article of orthodoxy, viz., that whatever is in the nineteenth century is good, and could only be made better by being brought back to the standards of the twelfth.” Every second issue of the Quarterly, the writer maintains, has attacked the Athenians by a “predatory system of warfare,” because “even the charity of the Quarterly Review, which can pardon much, cannot pardon free discussion.” The citizen of a republic, the reviewer claims, whether an Athenian or an American, is a miscreant placed by the Quarterly “out of the pale of social intercourse.”13 There exists an unexpected similarity, he contends, between “the stoutly orthodox and the fine lady”; in the same way as the latter is bound to quiver at the mention of blood or the death of a fly, so the former must necessarily become agitated at the notion of liberty or the idea of free discussion. Just as it is frequently difficult to get an overwrought child to calm down sufficiently to explain the cause of his terror, the reviewer goes on, so it is with the Quarterly reviewer: in response to his mother’s inquiry as to what is causing his alarm,
He runs to tell Mamma of Lysias, and tells his tale in these words;
“Lysias, a man who, with all the graces of language upon his tongue, had all the fury of a republican in his heart, and in whose writings may be traced all the wishes, feelings, and politics of the mob, from the inmost workings of the thoughts, to the desperate and atrocious deeds, which gave to those thoughts vitality and effect”—
In the midst of all this blubbering, being asked, “What has he done to you, what has he done to Mamma’s Pet?”—After much sobbing, and much rubbing his eyes with his dirty knuckles, it turns out, that the chubby simpleton has been terrified out of his wits, by a phrase, used to denote “the majority of you,” or some such notion equally innocent…. —“To the sovereign multitude.” This favourite expression of Lysias, signifies your Manyship, or your Mobship. He might as well have said, it means, “Down with Reviews! Reviewers à la Lanterne! Christianos ad Leonem! A certain field is not as noble as that of Marathon itself!” or any thing else likely to inspire terror.14
Not even the Church escaped the Westminster writer’s tongue as he took the occasion of the Quarterly’s concern about Gorgias’s praise of Helen to attack the interference of the various Christian establishments in marriage.15 The essay ends, in fact, with a long passage translated from an anticlerical dialogue of Erasmus. But the principal concern of the Westminster writer is the faulty logic of the Quarterly reviewer who sought to blacken the Athenian character by treating the common frailties of human nature as peculiar to Athenians alone. In this he echoes the concerns voiced by De Pauw in his Philosophical Researches.16 It may be true, the Westminster reviewer concedes, that the Greek litigant sought to “strain the laws to his own feelings,” but surely other litigants have behaved similarly:
We might as well blame the men of Athens for permitting the tooth-ache to torture their argumentative mouths, and allege in accusation, that when any of these detestable democrats, who was not accustomed to the sea, went on board ship, he basely suffered himself to be afflicted with a most distressing sickness; the countryman of Pericles turned pale and lost his appetite, and the hateful slave of the worst of tyrannies, a mobocrasy, … was thoroughly uncomfortable.17
It is by a parallel line of argument that the Westminster reviewer portrays the Athenian empire as no better or worse than the next imperialistic venture; for violence, he contends, has always been the arbiter of power, and where the empire was concerned, Britain herself did not disdain to vie with other colonial powers in misgovernment and oppression.18
The July review that appeared in the same year in the Westminster followed an identical line of approach, once more accusing the Quarterly of particularizing the general in its attack on Athens and citing examples from contemporary sectarian acrimony.19 The Quarterly struck back the following year with “Greek Courts of Justice,” a review of several works—vol. 10 of the Greek and French edition of the orators, vol. 2 of Mitchell’s Aristophanes, and Rev. H. F. Cary’s edition of The Birds. Taking the accusations Greek orators hurled at one another in deadly earnest and showing little sensitivity to the ironies of the genre, the reviewer took these slurs as solemn indictments of the entire Greek legal profession. He cites with approval Mitford’s contempt for the Athenian legal system and, judging Greek courts to have been disgraceful affairs that made a pitiful contrast with their English counterparts, concludes that “we should consider it a proof of a very indifferent taste to bring the pure ermine of a British judge into any close contact with the dirty cloak of an Athenian dicast.”20 Not surprisingly, the French revolution and the papacy were also dragged in to fortify the reviewer’s case. Quoting Edmund Burke’s complaint that the French National Assembly had sat too uninterruptedly to avoid exhaustion, he complains that the Greek courts sat even more unremittingly, giving rise to the “carelessness, and indifference which sometimes crept into their proceedings.” He stresses, moreover, the papal deference the democracy demanded: scarcely, he writes, “did the Pope in his utmost plenitude of power exact for the crosier staff a deference more profound, than Democracy did for the staff or sceptre which the Athenian dicast bore as the emblem of his office.”21 Plainly the papal analogy was designed to spark revulsion and terror in readers.
It was in this climate that the battle was engaged over Mitford. Because Mitford’s scholarship so plainly surpassed that of his predecessors in its thoroughness, his work represented in many ways a dramatic step forward in the study of Greek history; it was richer (though in some respects less thoughtful) than the briefer history of Gillies, and a fortiori it was an improvement over the shallow moralizing of Goldsmith and Stanyan. On the whole, it was eagerly received by the reading public—a development that men like Macaulay and Grote took as a sorry commentary on the state of classical scholarship in Britain.
Still, there was plainly enough revulsion from Mitford’s unrelenting snipes at republicanism for the Edinburgh writer of 1808 to have published a review that sought to mediate between Mitford’s admirers and his enemies. At first glance the review appears to be enthusiastic, and at the outset the author handles Mitford tenderly, taking pains to identify the improvements he had made on the work of those who had gone before and admiring his superior discrimination in his use of sources. The praise begins to ring a little hollow, however, when the reviewer proceeds to the core of his essay, an exposition of the weaknesses in Mitford’s treatment of the contest between Athens and Macedon—weaknesses that arose because “Mr. Mitford hates democracy.”22 Mitford, it is suggested, cannot have read the sources dealing with the rise of Macedonia “with his accustomed care.”23 In the end, Mitford walks away with a mixed review: upon the whole, the reviewer concludes, though Mitford’s work was undermined by hostility to republicanism, still it represented an improvement on what had gone before, and even those who do not share his politics “must still acknowledge their obligations to the clearness and fullness of his narrative.”24
Thomas Babington Macaulay felt no such obligation. Macaulay’s review of Mitford appeared in Knight’s Quarterly in November of 1824, but three months earlier he had published a bold essay on the Athenian orators that in many respects set the stage for his attack on Mitford. The essay is an example of cultural relativism in the mode of Herder, as Macaulay insisted that the fundamentally oral civilization of the Athenians needed to be understood on principles very different from those of modern European culture, which depended on printing. Taking as a point of departure Samuel Johnson’s insistence that the audience of Demosthenes must have been a mass of brutes, as they did not read, Macaulay isolated a serious flaw in Johnson’s reasoning. Johnson, he conceded, was an astute but narrow-minded observer of mankind who confused people’s general nature with their particular circumstances. The truth about the Athenians, Macaulay imagined, was very different. There was, he argued, “every reason to believe that, in general intelligence, the Athenian populace far surpassed the lower orders of any community that has ever existed. Books were, indeed, few; but they were excellent; and they were accurately known.” But it was not, in the end, books that educated an Athenian citizen, but rather the energizing nature of public life in the city itself: “We enter the public space; there is a ring of youths, all leaning forward, with sparkling eyes, and gestures of expectation. Socrates is pitted against the famous atheist of Ionia, and has just brought him to a contradiction in terms…. Pericles is mounting the stand. Then for a play of Sophocles; and away to sup with Aspasia. I know of no modern university which has so excellent a system of education.”25 How Macaulay imagined impoverished farmers and potters dropping in on Aspasia at dinnertime is rather mysterious.
The notion that Athens must be understood and judged (if at all) on its own terms also underlies Macaulay’s review of Mitford published three months later. Macaulay acknowledges grudgingly that the work of Mitford might serve as a corrective to the undue romanticizing of Greece in earlier authors; French and English writers, he complains, have been too eager to inhale the sentimental paeans to ancient liberty in the writings of men who, like Plutarch and Diodorus, misapplied to the little republics of Greece lessons they had learned through studying the sprawling empire of Rome. Such people, he argues, knowing nothing of liberty, nonetheless ranted about it “from the same cause which leads monks to talk more ardently than other men about love and women.” The wise man, Macaulay maintains, values liberty because of the benefits it confers—because it functions as a check on ministers, because it fosters arts and sciences and industry and conduces to the comforts of all classes. But the writers of whom he complains considered it not as a means but as an end and canonized those who for the mere name of freedom sacrificed the prosperity, the security, and the justice from which liberty derived its value. Like Constant, in other words, Macaulay inveighed against the romanticizing of ancient liberty, and for this sentimentality he concedes that even the most dismal portions of Mitford’s work may serve as a useful corrective. Ultimately, however, he sees the problem with Mitford’s view of Greece as its ahistorical approach to both education and politics. A good government, Macaulay argues,
like a good coat, is that which fits the body for which it is designed. A man who, upon abstract principles, pronounces a constitution to be good, without an exact knowledge of the people who are to be governed by it, judges as absurdly as a tailor who should measure the Belvidere Apollo for the clothes of all his customers. The demagogues who wished to see Portugal a republic, and the wise critics who revile the Virginians for not having instituted a peerage, appear equally ridiculous to all men of sense and candor.26
Despite these impassioned caveats, Macaulay is comfortable pronouncing a few pages later that “the happiest state of society is that in which supreme power resides in the whole body of a well-informed people,” and he proclaims cheerfully that “he alone deserves the name of a great statesman whose principle it is to extend the power of the people in proportion to the extent of their knowledge, and to give them every facility for obtaining such a degree of knowledge as may render it safe to trust them with absolute power.” Because Mitford’s preference for oligarchy has made popular a preference for Sparta over Athens, Macaulay writes, and because this preference is so misguided, he feels called upon to compare the two at some length. Macaulay misreads Mitford here. In reality Mitford had been highly critical of Sparta and emphatic in his condemnation of helotry; besides, the British preference for Athens over Sparta was evident well before the appearance of Mitford’s volumes. Macaulay’s misperception, however, was felicitous in giving rise to a memorable commentary on Sparta in particular and oligarchy in general. In Sparta, Macaulay observes, there was “little to admire and less to approve,” because oligarchy owes its very stability to its weakness: “It has a sort of valetudinarian longevity; … it takes no exercise, it exposes itself to no accident; it is seized with an hypochondriac alarm at every new sensation; it trembles at every breath; it lets blood for every inflammation: and thus, without ever enjoying a day of health or pleasure, drags on its existence to a doting and debilitated old age.”27 Macaulay is quick to contrast the perpetual senescence of Sparta with the eternal youth of Athens, where children were not snatched from their mothers, adults were not starved into thievery, no government told people what to think or to say, and altogether “freedom produced excellence.”28 Where Mitford went wrong, Macaulay argues, was not simply in imparting his political biases to his historical work—“Is this a history, or a party pamphlet?” he asks (as others would soon ask about Grote’s project)—but also in neglecting literature and the arts so thoroughly as to fail to see what democracy had accomplished in Athens.29 Wherever a few outstanding minds have taken a stand for freedom and rationality against violence and fraud, he proclaims, “the spirit of Athens has been in the midst of them; inspiring, encouraging, consoling;—by the lonely lamp of Erasmus; by the restless bed of Pascal; in the tribune of Mirabeau; in the cell of Galileo; on the scaffold of Sidney…. Wherever literature consoles sorrow or assuages pain, wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep, there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens.”30
In Macaulay’s view, Mitford had erred in trying to set up a single political standard for all times and places. Democracy, Macaulay suggested, simply happened to be best for Athens because of the singularly high level of education of the Athenian demos. But of course he also ascribed that high level of education—education both in information and in sensibility—to the democracy itself. Though it was Macaulay’s ostensible wish to withdraw Athens from the debate over government raging in contemporary Britain, his true goal appears to have been to purloin the Athenian example for the reformers. In view of the terror of the Athenian state reinforced in English hearts not only by Mitford but by Gillies, Young, and Bisset as well, Macaulay could not afford to advertise this appropriation too blatantly—hence the pious disclaimers; subsequently during the debate in the House of Commons over the Reform Bill Macaulay insisted that the bill would not establish an Athenian-style democracy.31 But the sonorous conclusion of his essay is plainly at odds with his insistence that ancient Athens carried no implications whatsoever for modern Britain.
The banker and utilitarian essayist George Grote published his review of Mitford in the Westminster Review a year and a half later. Finding Mitford bigoted, illogical, inconsistent and devoid of analytical capacity, Grote, who had been at work on his history of Greece since 1823, made no bones about his own view of Greek government, proclaiming at the outset that “democracies were by far the best among all the Grecian governments” and arguing that “it is to democracy alone (and to that sort of open aristocracy which is, practically, very similar to it), that we owe that unparalleled brilliancy and diversity of individual talent which constitutes the charm and glory of Grecian history.”32 Mitford, he maintains, was fundamentally a misanthrope who had no respect for the bulk of mankind and partook of the strong tendency in the human mind to worship power—a tendency that, Grote complains, “everything in English education tends to nourish, to strengthen, to perpetuate.” In Mitford’s mind, Grote argues—“a mind priding itself on adherence to everything English”—this bent shaded into idolatry, with the result that Mitford was devoted to monarchy “not only with preference, but even with passion and bigotry.”33 In his inconsistency, Grote asserts, Mitford cannot seem to decide whether the Athenians are to be dismissed as poor working folk or condemned as idle; whether they are restless or lazy; all-powerful or impotent. When Athenian commanders are active in the Aegean, they are pirates, but when they are put on trial for the very conduct Mitford has portrayed as habitual, then the historian’s tone changes, and he depicts them as innocent victims of popular ingratitude and democratic jealousy. There is no way, Grote writes, to count up the innumerable disparaging epithets with which Mitford refers to the Athenian people. Mitford is particularly fond of “sovereign beggars,” and Grote takes the occasion of this oxymoron to observe that “had this phrase proceeded from any other writer, we should have regarded it as a disguised compliment to the Athenian many; for we believe they would be the first sovereigns on earth who ever consented to remain beggars while they had rich men for their subjects.”34 Mitford, moreover, is illogical in arguing that “the sovereignty passes into the hands of the poor, when no political privileges are allowed to the rich.” This, Grote maintains, “is as absurd as to say, that if the tall men in the community are not permitted to possess peculiar privileges, the government must necessarily be in the hands of the short men.”35 (Mitford’s argument here, of course, reproduces that of the Old Oligarch.)
The antidemocratic bias of Mitford, Grote maintains, is evident throughout the whole of his History but particularly in the portions written subsequent to the French revolution. Grote denies that the political concerns of modern Europe are comparable to those of ancient Greece. Withal, Grote judges Mitford’s work a disaster, and he takes its popularity as evidence of the superficiality of interest in Greece in contemporary Britain. Should Greek history ever be rewritten, he concluded, “with care and fidelity, we venture to predict that Mr. Mitford’s reputation, for these as for other desirable qualities, will be prodigiously lowered.”36
GROTE’S HISTORY OF GREECE
In his strictures on Mitford Grote was beating a distinctly moribund horse, and rather hard at that. The stock of Mitford had already fallen considerably; Thomas Keightley in his (fundamentally anti-Athenian) History of Greece published in 1839 maintained that Mitford’s prejudices were well known and that he had not a single follower on the continent, while in Britain it fell still further when Grote’s friend Connop Thirlwall began publishing his careful if unexciting Greek history in 1835.37 What gave Grote’s own volumes their place in the history of historiography was not their “care and fidelity,” for Thirlwall had certainly shown these, but rather a deeply seated commitment to liberal ideals that spurred him to question received wisdom in a way that transformed the way Greek history would be approached by future historians even when the ideals those historians cherished were dramatically different from the ones that informed Grote’s work. A contemporary nineteenth-century observer might have predicted that the language of the first great nineteenth-century history of Greece would be German. Particularly in philology, by the middle of the nineteenth century the Germans’ primacy in classical studies was undisputed; aspiring American classicists dreamed of studying at Göttingen, and the Quarterly Review maintained rather extravagantly that in the study of Greek and Latin the Germans had “gained such a decided ascendancy, that their neighbours appear to have given up all hope of rivalling them, and are satisfied to follow as mere servile imitators of their triumphant career.”38 Grote himself observed in his review of Mitford that a comparison of Mitford’s so-called scholarship and that of Niebuhr had made him “painfully sensible of the difference between the real knowledge of the ancient world possessed or inquired for by a German public, and the appearance of knowledge which suffices here.”39 Certainly Britain had not produced works as meticulous as Böckh’s Public Economy of the Athenians (1817) or Meier and Schömann’s Attische Prozess (1824), and no English author writing on Greece had rivaled Niebuhr in intellectual energy. But most German scholars found Mitford’s orientation to antiquity fundamentally congenial. Very late indeed leaving the gate, German scholarship on Greece had advanced rapidly and overtaken both the English and the French. Whereas on the whole Germans who were not professional Greek historians expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for Athens and did not hesitate to prefer her to Sparta, hard-nosed academic specialists saw things differently. Böckh in his Public Economy, Wachsmuth in his Historical Antiquities of the Greeks, and Hermann in his Manual of the Political Antiquities of the Greeks all delivered stinging indictments of the Athenian state.40 But it was not in Germany that the seminal nineteenth-century history of Greece was to be produced but in Britain, and when the epoch-making volumes appeared, they came not from the pen of a German professor but from that of an English banker. They were written by George Grote, who had a solid grounding in German scholarship but was deeply dyed in Benthamite utilitarian ideals. Following the lead not of the uncritical Wachsmuth but of the reflective Niebuhr—whose exasperated strictures on those who took Xenophon and Plutarch seriously as historians looked ahead to Grote’s own outbursts—Grote turned out, volume by volume, the earliest history of Greece that is still consulted by modern scholars.41 Throughout, Grote’s History reveals a simmering frustration that evokes that of his liberal predecessors De Pauw and Constant, and the advancement of scholarship—and of history—made it possible for him to detail the inadequacy of traditional views with more elaborate documentation than earlier writers and to marshal more effective ammunition against them.
In an interesting passage in his otherwise rather plodding biography of Grote, M. L. Clarke speculates on the turn Grote’s life might have taken had his father valued education more highly. Had the elder Grote been of a more intellectual bent and less determined to have his son’s assistance in the family business, Clarke suggests sensibly, the bright young man would probably have wound up in Trinity College, Cambridge; his headmaster at Charterhouse, Matthew Raine, had graduated from Trinity and had blessed (or burdened) it with a number of Grote’s classmates. There Grote would have distinguished himself and quite possibly taken holy orders, ending up as a liberal clergyman like his brother John. Most important, he would never have met James Mill.42
But Grote did meet Mill. Whether or not Grote would have slid comfortably into a clerical existence had the circumstances of his life been different is uncertain, but it is clear that his development was affected profoundly by his relationship with James Mill, whom he met in 1819 when he was twenty-five. Mill filled the void left in Grote’s life by his own father’s lack of imagination. A further wedge had been driven between Grote and his father by the elder Grote’s opposition to his son’s marriage to the intellectual Harriet Lewin, and Henry Reeve was probably quite correct when he wrote in the Edinburgh Review that Grote’s lifelong opposition to authority and authoritarianism derived some of its force from the suffering he had experienced at his father’s hands.43 (The austere evangelism of his mother may have fostered this bent as well.) Mill soon became Grote’s mentor, and Grote found Mill’s ideas immensely congenial, at least as regarded utilitarianism and attendant political reform; the idea of abandoning his religious faith sat less comfortably, but after a short struggle he submitted to the skepticism of the Benthamites. Through Mill he met Bentham, but it was Mill himself whose ideas guided him, and he once observed that Mill’s Logic was “the best book in my library.”44
Grote’s earliest publications attacked religion and advocated political reform. His 1822 Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind, written at Bentham’s request from four volumes of notes Bentham himself had compiled, was so provocative that it was published under a pseudonym and printed by a man who was already in jail. By 1823 Grote was hard at work on his history of Greece, and it occupied much of the time left over from the family bank until liberation came in the form of his father’s death in 1830. That same year the success of the July revolution in Paris that replaced the Bourbon Charles X with the more liberal regime of Louis Philippe lent additional force to the reform movement that had been gathering strength among the English, and Mill urged Grote to focus his energy on his Essentials of Parliamentary Reform. (Grote himself had dedicated £500 to the cause of the French reformers.) Not daring to propose universal suffrage, in the Essentials Grote nonetheless recommended extending the franchise to create an electorate of one million; he also argued for an attendant extension of the British educational system.45 In May of 1832 the First Reform Bill passed; in June Grote announced his candidacy for Parliament. At the election the following December he won his seat by a wide margin, and for the next nine years he devoted himself to the cause of reform. He then returned to the Greek history, publishing the article on Mitford in the Westminster in 1843. The first volume of Grote’s History appeared in 1846, the last in 1856. He then turned his attention to Plato. Like his History of Greece, Grote’s work on the Platonic dialogues is still being consulted over a hundred years later.
The passionate nature of Grote’s commitment to utilitarian ideals underlay all that he said and did, whether as a political activist or as a student of Greek texts. In the 1830s John Stuart Mill wrote that Grote’s utilitarian conviction amounted to “a belief … most deep and conscientious, for which he chiefly lives, and for which he would die.”46 Some of Grote’s fellow Philosophical Radicals were in truth neither quite so philosophical as he nor quite so radical, and his uncompromising idealism cost him some friends and some votes. Because of Grote’s profound commitment to liberal ideals, the regeneration of the much-maligned Athenian democracy formed an important part of his agenda. Greek democracy, Grote maintained, sparked a rare energy and eager patriotism in citizens, a vital force dramatically different from the passivity inevitably fostered by oligarchy. Among the Athenians, he argued, “it produced a strength and unanimity of positive political sentiment, such as has rarely been seen in the history of mankind.”47 Most previous scholars had seen the sophists as a singularly pestilent crew whose vices were precisely those that Plato in the Gorgias had ascribed to the Athenian democracy; Grote defended the sophists against time-honored allegations of shallowness, superficiality, and self-interested charlatanry, viewing the bad press they had customarily received as the product of the same uncritical reading of sources responsible for the hostility to the democracy. Where other historians had largely ignored Cleisthenes, Grote saw his determination to break down the particularist interests of the aristocrats and to dismantle geographically based coalitions as pivotal in the history of the democracy.48 So far from viewing the coup of the Four Hundred as promising some kind of relief from the chaotic pseudopolicy of the democracy, Grote construes the episode as clear evidence that the enemies against which the likes of Cleon and Hyperbolus inveighed “were not fictitious but dangerously real” and proof that in reality the demagogues “formed the vital movement of all that was tutelary and public-spirited in democracy.”49
Arguing along the same lines, Grote defends ostracism as a necessary check on politicians, and he is resolute in refuting the charges leveled for centuries against the Athenians for their treatment of their leaders, arguing that it was crucial in a Greek state to watch over the conduct of military officers since the real danger in Greece lay not in insufficient gratitude to victorious soldiers but rather in excessive adulation. Predictably, Grote defends the impeachments of Miltiades, of Alcibiades—who he claims was plainly guilty of profaning the mysteries—and of Thucydides.50 He is singularly exasperated at attempts to exculpate Thucydides (and his colleague Eucles) for the loss of Amphipolis. “Had they,” he asks, “a difficult position to defend? Were they overwhelmed by a superior force? Were they distracted by simultaneous revolts in different places, or assailed by enemies unknown or unforeseen? Not one of these grounds for acquittal can be pleaded.”51 Grote blames Sparta and Corinth for the Peloponnesian War and contends that the loss of the war is not to be assigned to lower-class upstarts like Cleon and Cleophon (who were actually members of the middle class) but rather must be laid at the door of the supremely respectable Nicias.52 What Grote finds noteworthy in past historians’ treatment of Nicias is not simply their refusal to hold him accountable for the Sicilian debacle but rather their failure to see that what really destroyed Athens was not the fickleness of the demos but in truth its fanatical loyalty to a patent incompetent. From the case of Nicias, Grote writes, we can learn
that the habitual defects of the Athenian character were very different from what historians commonly impute to them. Instead of being fickle, we find them tenacious in the extreme of confidence once bestowed and of schemes once embarked upon: instead of ingratitude for services actually rendered, we find credit given for services which an officer ought to have rendered, but has not: instead of angry captiousness, we discover an indulgence not merely generous, but even culpable.53
Grote expatiates at great length on the inadequacy of Nicias, and he does so because the dangers posed to Athens by the demos’s adulation of great men justified in his eyes the so-called demagogy of Cleon and his ilk. Performing in essence the functions of a constitutional opposition, the demagogues’ “accusatory eloquence” had the potential to serve as a corrective to the damage that could be done by “decorous and pious incompetence, when aided by wealth and family advantages.” In Grote’s view, Athens lost the war not because of rampant demagogy but because of insufficient leadership, and in the last analysis the man who ended by destroying the Athenian endeavor abroad was “not a leather-seller of impudent and abusive eloquence, but a man of ancient family and hereditary wealth—munificent and affable, having credit not merely for the largesses which he bestowed, but also for all the insolences which as a rich man he might have committed but did not commit.”54 The message for his own time is unmistakable; Grote’s Benthamite radicalism left no room in Britain for the deference traditionally paid to birth and wealth. In Grote’s view a straight and dangerous line had led from Athenian class prejudice and the overvaluation of the elite to the bloody slaughter of the Athenian forces as they drank from the Assinarus River in Sicily. It had not been good for Athens, and it had not been good for England.
Athens’s reputation has suffered, Grote stated baldly, because “democracy happens to be unpalatable to most modern readers.”55 In his attempt to redeem that reputation, Grote enlisted elaborate critical apparatus, but though his notes referred readers to appropriate passages in classical authors, these on the whole could not be counted on to help his case, since classical writers were generally antidemocratic. Nor was his argument going to be appreciably strengthened by his frequent citations of other authors, since he so often cited them (Mitford, for example, and Wachsmuth) in order to disagree. What fortified Grote’s case was a steady stream of modern analogies generally designed to demonstrate that the Athenian democracy, so far from being the most irrational and inhumane of governments, had in fact conducted itself as well as any government in modern Europe—and in many cases better. (In the deployment of modern analogies, Grote plainly had one set of rules for himself and another for Mitford.)
Much of the comparative material Grote introduces is used casually and in passing, and the weight of these examples is more cumulative in total than it is decisive in any one case. Some of Grote’s modern exempla are concrete, others hypothetical. (“What do you suppose would happen today if … ?”) Grote points out, for example, that the critics of ostracism do not consider it any extravagant injustice that pretenders to the throne are excluded from modern countries—in his own day the Duke of Bordeaux, after 1815 Napoleon, and Charles Edward in the eighteenth century—even though the overthrowing of the Athenian government would have involved much more pervasive transformation than a mere change in dynasties.56 He notes that the terrible strains of the plague did not prompt the Athenians either to offer up human sacrifice such as those performed at Carthage during parallel times of pestilence or to undertake persecutions against imaginary authors of the disease, such as happened in Milan in 1630.57 Were Cleon’s invectives against Pericles, he asks, necessarily any fiercer than those against Walpole with which Chatham initiated his career?58 Were the mistakes of the overconfident Athenians in sending away the envoys who came to them after the victory at Sphacteria really singular to democracy—or are they the same mistakes made by Napoleon or by the British aristocracy? Grote quotes Burke himself on the similar effect early victories against the American rebels had on Englishmen.59 Again, Napoleon and the British are invoked in a hypothetical example to question whether the Athenians’ harshness to Thucydides after the loss of Amphipolis had the slightest connection with the democratic form of their government. If, he asks, Napoleon or the Duke of Wellington had lost a crucial post to a tiny enemy force, would either man be content to hear from the officer in command, “Having no idea that the enemy would attempt any surprise, I thought that I might keep my force half a day’s journey off from the post exposed, at another post which it was physically impossible for the enemy to reach …?”60
Grote takes the occasion of Mitford’s attack on Athenian courts to deliver an encomium on the jury system in general and Athenian juries in particular (though he certainly sees particular defects in the system at Athens, as in the system in England). Athenian dicasteries, he finds, compare favorably to the best juries in the world—those in the United States, and those in England after 1688. Although Grote is aware of certain disadvantages that attend on the absence of judges in Athenian courts, he sees the presence of such individuals as potentially pernicious. In England prior to 1688, he points out, jurors who found a verdict contrary to the dictation of the judge were liable to a fine, and even in modern times the influence of the judge “has always been such as to overrule the natural play of [the jurors’] feelings and judgment as men and citizens,” whereas in Athens jurors were “free, self-judging persons—unassisted by the schooling, but at the same time untrammeled by the awe-striking ascendancy, of a professional judge.” It is probable, he ultimately concludes, that an Athenian defendant would have had greater hopes of a fair trial in Athens than he could have expected anywhere in the modern world except England or the United States, and better than he would have had in England down to the seventeenth century. Grote’s enthusiasm for the jury system was so great that he allowed himself page after page of footnotes to modern sources on the topic—including one note that went onto a third page and incorporated a long panegyric on jury trials cited from the American author of the penal code for the state of Louisiana.61 Grote musters a formidable arsenal of comparative material in his defense of the Athenians against the many accusations that had been leveled against them concerning the crisis of 415 (the profanation of the mysteries and the mutilation of the Hermae)—so formidable, indeed, that had he been at work today, he would surely have been urged by his friends to publish his discussion of the crisis as an article, or at least to inflict it on a scholarly audience at an appropriate conference, without requiring the world to wait for the appearance of the opus to read it. (Once the opus was accepted for publication, however, an editor would probably have suggested that he excise the entire business as extraneous popularizing.) Grote argues that the depth and sincerity of the Athenians’ conviction that the well-being of the state hung on the protection of the gods easily explains the panic that attended the discovery of the impieties of 415 and the attendant conviction that the state was in the gravest danger.62 (Grote is very close to his material here; his response contrasts dramatically with that of Niebuhr, who had confessed candidly in his lectures on Greek history that he had difficulty imagining how the mutilation of the herms could have persuaded people there was a conspiracy to overthrow the government. There are questions, Niebuhr concluded rather endearingly, “which I cannot explain to myself.”63) Grote’s friend Thirlwall had drawn a parallel between the crisis of 415 and the so-called Popish Plot in England in 1678–79, and Grote reiterates the analogy in a footnote of about a thousand words, arguing that in a comparison with the English—a comparison Grote was as fond of making as was Mitford—the Athenians come out ahead in all respects, since the Athenians were far more scrupulous in their methods of gathering evidence, and since the profanation of the mysteries and the mutilation of the herms, whatever its political significance or lack thereof, had in fact taken place, whereas the Popish Plot was a mendacious lie.64
Other parallels are adduced as well. Those baffled by the Athenians’ strong response in the affair of the herms, Grote writes, may be reminded of an analogous event of modern times, to wit, the condemnation in France in 1766 of two young men for having injured a wooden crucifix that stood on the bridge in the town of Abbeville and sung indecent songs to boot. Despite “exceedingly doubtful” evidence, the youths were condemned to have their tongues cut out by the roots, to have their right hands severed, and then to be tied to a post and burnt by a slow fire. One youth escaped; the other was actually executed according to the procedure specified, though it was decided he might be decapitated before he was burnt—but not before he was put to torture to disclose his accomplices. This sentence, Grote observes pointedly, was passed “not by the people, nor by any popular judicature, but by a limited court of professional judges, sitting at Abbeville, and afterwards confirmed by the Parlement de Paris, the first tribunal of professional judges in France.”65 Grote also recurs to the analog of the Untori of Milan already raised for the first time in the discussion of the plague. In Milan in 1630 the strains of plague had sparked accusations against suspects named Untori, the “anointers,” who were commonly believed to be spreading the pestilence by ointments they applied to the doors of houses. Manzoni in his Storia della Colonna Infame recounts how the government of Milan tortured and executed the supposed perpetrators, tearing down the house of one of them and setting up the “infamous column” of Manzoni’s title to commemorate the deed. The lesson in this? That the Athenians, despite their acute and understandable alarm in their hour of crisis, should be commended for resisting the temptation to apply torture—something that, Grote points out, would not have been totally alien to them, since they did torture slaves to obtain testimony. (Throughout his History, Grote the great liberal manifested no distress at the Athenians’ slaveholding. He also sympathized with the southern states in the American civil war.) From Manzoni’s narrative, Grote argues, readers “will understand … the degree to which public excitement and alarm can operate to poison and barbarise the course of justice in a Christian city, without a taint of democracy, and with professional lawyers and judges to guide the whole procedure secretly—as compared with a pagan city, ultra-democratical, where judicial procedure as well as decision was all oral, public and multitudinous.”66
It is no coincidence that Grote saw the hand of religion not only in the hysteria that attended on the mutilation of the herms but also in the trial of Socrates and in that of the victors of Arginusae. His Benthamite skepticism, in other words, enabled him to blame the conduct for which the Athenians were customarily excoriated not on excessive differences between Athenian and modern society but in fact on excessive similarities; the Athenians, he suggests, would have done better had they been less pious, not more so. Better than modern Christians, they could have been more excellent still had they cast aside superstitions left over from the more primitive period of their history and adopted an even more rational outlook than they did. Grote plainly had a deep personal investment in his Athenians; Momigliano has contrasted Grote’s orientation with that of his friend Thirlwall by sagely observing that while Thirlwall really loved Germany, Grote loved Athens, but he goes on to maintain that Grote in fact “loved Athens without any romantic nostalgia as a state which was formed for the sake of the good life.”67 It is probably going too far to deny that Grote had any romantic attachment to the Athenians, but it is certainly true that he laid the blame for the final debacle squarely at the Athenians’ door.
The conquest of Greece by Philip in 338 has traditionally assured Athens’s detractors of the fundamental rottenness of the Athenian system, but it has always presented a problem for her admirers. De Pauw had taken a distinctly maverick position in blaming Chaeronea on the inactivity of the Spartans; in his 1877 Democracy in Europe Sir Thomas Erskine May would ascribe it to the overwhelming military superiority of Macedon.68 Grote does not offer a very cogent explanation of Chaeronea at all, reverting, as Frank Turner has pointed out, to “an extended organic metaphor” that conceived the Athenian of Demosthenes’ era as having grown old; quiet and “home-keeping,” the Athenians of the mid-fourth century had, in Grote’s view, redefined civic life in terms of bureaucratic obligations and religious festivals rather than war and peace.69 This construct in fact explains very little, for, like others concerned with the question of decline at Athens, Grote gives no fully adequate account of how this erosion of public spirit came about. But he does connect it with the undercurrent that had always existed in Athens of private interests and religious piety, two phenomena that the democracy had been only partially successful in eradicating.
REPLIES AND ECHOES
Grote’s work was well received by two contributors to the Edinburgh Review. The liberal cabinet minister George Cornewall Lewis published his review of Grote’s fifth and sixth volumes—ending with the Peace of Nicias—in January of 1850.70 Like Grote, Lewis was steeped in German scholarship on Greece. He had translated Böckh’s Public Economy in 1828 and Karl Ottfried Müller’s Historical Antiquities of the Doric Race in 1830; early in the 1840s his translations of the first volumes of Müller’s History of the Literature of Ancient Greece appeared. Lewis’s estimate of Grote’s work was enthusiastic, although while forcefully concurring with Grote’s positive assessment of the Delian League he did question Grote’s assertion that Athens’s governance of it could match the excellences of Britain’s administration of her own empire. But though Lewis regarded Grote’s work favorably, it is unlikely that any man alive was more relieved to see Mitford superseded by Grote than John Stuart Mill, whose father had placed Mitford’s work in his son’s hands faute de mieux accompanied by warnings against Mitford’s “Tory prejudices,” “perversions of facts for the whitewashing of despots,” and “blackening of popular institutions.” In reading Mitford, Mill reported, his “sympathies were always on the contrary side to those of the author.”71 It was with great satisfaction that Mill in his adult life found himself reviewing Grote’s work for the Edinburgh. (The Edinburgh reviews of Grote’s History smack of clubbiness among the eager liberals; both Mill and Lewis were good friends of the author.) In his 1846 review of Grote’s first two volumes, Mill had affirmed the relevance of Greek history to his countrymen in the strongest possible terms, proclaiming that because the true ancestors of the European nations were those from whom they derived the most valuable portion of their heritage, consequently “the battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings”; for had the issue of that day been different, “the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods.”72 Like Grote, Mill saw Athens as having approached more closely than most states to the Benthamite ideal of a state unified in defense of the common good, overriding the divisive selfishness of particularist interests more than the governments of modern Europe had been able to do. In his autobiography Mill suggested that this had been easier to do in antiquity: the whole course of the institutions of his own day, he wrote, fostered the “deep-rooted selfishness which forms the general character of the existing state of society”—in modern society in some respects more than in ancient, since the occasions on which individuals were called upon for unpaid public service were far less frequent in the modern world than they had been in the classical republics.73 Mill was an enthusiastic champion of the Grotean view of Athens. In his review of Grote’s later volumes he was vehement and determined in his defense of the Athenian empire, and he followed Grote in choosing the Athenians over the Spartans—“those hereditary Tories and Conservatives of Greece,” he labeled them, peculiarly petty and selfish, “objects of exaggerated admiration to the moralists and philosophers of the far nobler as well as greater and wiser Athens.”74 The Spartan ethos, Mill alleged, was capable of providing stability but not of fostering progress. To this the Athenian system provided a dramatic contrast: of other Greek democracies, Mill writes, “not one enjoyed the Eunomia, the unimpeded authority of law, and freedom from factious violence, which were quite as characteristic of Athens as either her liberty or her genius; and which, making life and property more secure than in any other part of the Grecian world, afforded the mental tranquillity which is also one of the conditions of high intellectual or imaginative achievement.”75 Implicit here is a slap in the face to the Mitfordian tradition that had harped on the very insecurity of life and property under a democracy, and that had been indifferent to the connection between the Athenian system of government and the unique cultural explosion that had marked classical Athens.
A third English liberal, Edward Freeman, gave Grote an equally favorable review. Like that of George Cornewall Lewis, his enthusiasm was tempered by some minor reservations about Grote’s historical parallels, and he was inclined to suspect that Grote’s own experience in modern politics had skewed his vision of Athens somewhat. Despite these concerns, however, Freeman eagerly embraces Grote’s view of Athens as a whole. The Athenian democracy, Freeman maintains, “was the first great instance which the world ever saw of the substitution of law for force.” Citing Macaulay’s contention in his History of England that an assembly tends by its very size to become a mob, Freeman gladly concedes that the supreme executive council of Athens was indeed a mob—not the mob of five or six hundred Macaulay feared in England, but a mob of many thousands; and, he goes on in a passage that has since become famous,
a fair examination of Grecian history will assuredly lead us to the conclusion that this mob clothed with executive functions made one of the best governments which the world ever saw. It did not work impossibilities; it did not change earth into paradise nor men into angels; it did not forestall every improvement which has since appeared in the world; still less did it forestall all the improvements which we may trust are yet in store for mankind. But that government cannot be called a bad one which is better than any other government of its own time. And surely that government must be called a good one which is a marked improvement upon every government which has gone before it.76
Ironically, in censuring Grote for failing to distinguish between the political structures of his own age and those of classical Athens, Freeman criticizes him for an error similar to those of Mitford, who, he claims, made undue extrapolations to the society of Athens from the world in which he himself lived. Mitford, Freeman argues, had been right in his low opinion of the political capacities of groups of Englishmen with no formal education; but he had been wrong in extending this opinion to the Athenian assembly. “Certainly,” Freeman concedes, “squires and farmers alike, gathered together at times few and far between under some political excitement, are utterly incapable of really entertaining a political question.” But, he insists, “we must not thence infer that the Ekklesia of Athens presented a scene equally deplorable.” He goes on to cite with approval Macaulay’s contention that the daily life of an Athenian was itself the best possible political education, comparing Athens favorably with Florence and reporting that “we suspect that the average Athenian citizen was, in political intelligence, above the average English Member of Parliament.”77
Grote’s volumes had a forceful impact in America, where John Adams’s grandson Charles Francis Adams brought out an edition of his grandfather’s works amending a number of his conclusions in the light of Grote’s History.78 They were also well received across the Channel. In a series of reviews in the Revue des Deux Mondes that appeared in several installments as Grote’s own volumes were turned out, the politician and man of letters Prosper Mérimée gave Grote’s History his enthusiastic approval, offering his congratulations not only to Grote himself but to “his fortunate fatherland, which possesses so many readers for such a sober and substantial work.”79 Although Mérimée considers Grote too lenient in his judgment on the empire, he finds this regrettable lapse easy to understand in view of what he identifies as the perilous seductiveness of the Athenians, those great respecters of individual liberty.80 The impact of Grote’s history in France can be gauged by the footnote Victor Duruy attached to the second edition of his Histoire Grecque, published at Paris in 1856. Duruy—a professor who went on to serve as minister of education in the 1860s—reported in this note that his preference for Athens over Sparta in his first edition of 1851 had called forth a severe dressing-down from the administration of his university on the topic of his “temerities”; but since the publication a year later of Grote’s assessment, he writes, his outlook has achieved respectability.81
Grote’s work was not fused in a vacuum. The outbursts of Macaulay revealed a very similar orientation, and Grote’s friends Mill and Thirlwall had been thinking along analogous lines. All were influenced by German schools of thought. Mill, an admirer of Herder, was impatient with the traditional view of Athens, and many of Grote’s central themes were adumbrated in Thirlwall’s History of Greece—so much so that Grote reported in his preface that, had he not progressed so far in his own project, he would have abandoned his own History when Thirlwall’s work appeared. Duruy’s first edition was filled with references to Thirlwall. But Thirlwall lacked Grote’s spark, and so it was ultimately the name of Grote that came to be attached to the new valuation of Athenian government and society. John Pentland Mahaffy, for example, in his introduction to the 1889–90 English translation of Duruy’s History by M. M. Ripley, devoted considerable attention to Grote, while the page on Thirlwall bore the marginal rubrics, “his merits; his coldness; his fairness and accuracy; but without enthusiasm.”82 Thirlwall’s work did not provoke loss of temper; Grote’s did. Grote’s critical reading of Thucydides in general and his attempt to rehabilitate Cleon in particular sparked Richard Shilleto’s pamphlet “Thucydides or Grote?”—a squawky piece that in turn spawned a still wordier and equally carping pamphlet by Grote’s brother John, a professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge.83 Much can be learned about the intense engagement of Victorian males with classical Athens from this ponderous philological equivalent of a schoolyard brawl in which John pulls no punches in avenging himself upon the bully who has dared impugn his brother’s honor.
Grote’s History also served as a point of departure for numerous English histories. One of the most dramatic examples of Grotean influence is afforded by George William Cox in his 1874 History of Greece, which showed embarrassingly heavy dependence on Grote and referred to him every few pages. Though he is careful to disagree with Grote from time to time, Cox’s departures from Grotean wisdom often appear forced and sometimes seem designed to justify the originality of his own work. Despite his own caveat that “comparisons are often dangerous,” Cox, like Grote, fleshed out his History with numerous modern parallels, parallels designed on the whole to place the conduct of the Athenian democracy in a flattering light.84 The Renaissance is now long past; it is an index of a shift in the temper of the times that when Cox compares the Spartan ephors to the Venetian Council of Ten, the comparison is meant to be unflattering, even sinister.85 Whereas Grote had seen in Athens what Britain could be, moreover, Cox saw in her what Britain actually was: if the picture painted by Pericles was substantially accurate, Cox writes,
we shall find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that distinctions of time and place go for little indeed. All the special characteristics of the English polity—its freedom of speech, the right of the people to govern themselves, the supremacy of the ordinary courts of law over all functionaries without exception, the practical restriction of state interference to the protection of person and property, the free play given to the tastes, fancies, prejudices, and caprices of individual citizens—may be seen in equal development in the polity of Athens.86
The force of the new liberal tradition was equally evident in both the text and the annotations of Sir Thomas Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe, which appeared in 1877; Grote and Cox often appear in the notes, and one long footnote on the glories of Athens includes quotations from Macaulay, Mill, and Freeman. Though he censured the Athenians for what he considered a fundamental ethic of selfishness—one that expressed itself in the phenomenon of slavery—and voiced some concern about the godless and “turbulent leaders of democracy and communism” in his own day, on the whole May fairly glowed on the topic of Athenian government and society.87 Citing Grote on Sparta, he condemns the Spartans in the harshest terms he knows, comparing them in their xenophobia and immobility to Asians, always with May a term of the severest disapprobation.88 Athens’s fall, he claims, was due neither to internal dissent nor to the failure of its democratic institutions but rather to the overpowering strength of Macedonia.89 He defends Athens in the matter of Socrates, inquiring where else Socrates would have been able to ply his pesky trade as long as he did and concluding that “there was far more toleration in Pagan Athens, than in Christian Spain.”90
The impact of Grote’s work was also felt in Germany, where a translation was published at Leipzig beginning already in 1850. Although Athens had benefited enormously from the German enthusiasm for the Greek aesthetic ideal, the attitude toward Athens evident in the German scholarly community had been more skeptical. The first half of the nineteenth century had witnessed the rise of serious classical philology in German universities. There was some truth, however, in George Cornewall Lewis’s contention that German thinking about ancient government suffered from the closeted, academic nature of scholarship conducted by ivory tower academic specialists disengaged from the political life of their own day.91 The most prominent students of Athenian government, Augustus Böckh and Wilhelm Wachsmuth, had taken a dim view of Athenian democracy. Böckh had set out his opinions at considerable length in his 1817 treatise The Public Economy of Athens, which was translated into English by George Cornewall Lewis himself. For Böckh, all Greek states carried within them the seeds of destruction, since the polis system itself was doomed to be replaced—and blessedly so—by large monarchies; besides, the Greeks suffered morally as a result of having lived before the advent of Christianity.92 Athens in particular was doomed by her decision to pay citizens for state service, for, Böckh had argued, “it is a condition requisite for good government, that all who wish to partake in the ruling power should support themselves upon their own property.”93 Wachsmuth stressed the role of bad character in the failure of the Athenian democracy, identifying credulity and irascibility as the most prominent features of the Athenian character.94 These defects, he contended, were predictable in republican governments, of which backbiting and slander “have ever been the mainstay.”95
The orientation of Böckh and Wachsmuth never died out in Germany. Just a few years after the publication of Grote’s volumes on Athens, Ludwig Herbst in his 1855 monograph on the battle of Arginusae reiterated the traditional view in the face of Grote’s revisionism; the picture of Athenian government and society set forth in Burckhardt’s cultural history of Greece was nothing less than devastating; and Eduard Meyer continued the tradition into the twentieth century, where it continued to thrive.96 The work of the English liberals, however, sparked a competing school of thought among German scholars, and the multivolume Greek histories of both Ernst Curtius (1857–67) and Adolph Holm (1886–94) were both indebted in some degree to the British revisionists—Holm more than Curtius. Curtius, who often cited Grote, frequently used “demagogue” in a nonpejorative sense, preferred the Athenians to the languid, unimaginative Spartans, defended Athenian imperialism, considered the democrats less dangerous than the oligarchic conspirators, admired leaders like Pericles and Demosthenes, and expressed a vague and general enthusiasm for Athenian civilization.97 His warmth for Athens, however, faded sometime after Pericles’ death; he supported Herbst’s refutation of Grote in the matter of the victors of Arginusae, saw nothing worthwhile in the fourth century, and opposed the sophists unrelentingly. The spirit of Holm’s work was very different. Holm not only defended fifth-century Athens—Cleon, empire and all—but devoted considerable energy to debunking the “alleged degeneracy of the Athenians” after the death of Pericles, arguing in his text that “the decline of Athens, of which we hear so much, is little better than a fable” and taking on Curtius by name in a number of footnotes, one of them over two pages long.98 What the history of Athens during the century before Chaeronea demonstrates, Holm argues, is that “whenever a distinctly perceptible elevation of moral tone appears, it is due to the democrats.”99 In Athens, he insists, democracy, so far from fostering decay, was in reality “a factor in the moral preservation of the city.”100 Finally, Holm denies that the defeat at Chaeronea should be ascribed to anything resembling moral decline at Athens, stressing the peaceability of life in the city once the fifth-century tensions between democrats and oligarchs had eased.101 In fourth-century Athens, he contends, “violence has disappeared. The democracy is thoroughly disciplined; it commits no excesses; riots never occur; the people remain collected, cool and dignified in the most difficult situations; there is no trace of mob-rule.”102 Times have indeed changed; Holm compares the excesses of the French revolutionaries not with those of the Athenian democrats but rather with those of the Thirty, likening Critias specifically to Robespierre and casting Theramenes as a victim parallel to Danton.103
. . . . .
The liberal students of Greece were for a long time convinced that the sun would never set on the new day that had dawned. Happy at last, they merrily reviewed one another’s works in the journals and rejoiced to think the reputation of Athens had been saved. The long night was over. Athens was redeemed; but not only that. Many continued unshaken in their faith in the essential modernity and profound relevance of classical Athens. The collection of Edward Freeman’s Historical Essays that appeared in 1873 carried as its epigram Thomas Arnold’s contention (set forth in his edition of Thucydides) that “the history of Greece and Rome is not an idle inquiry about remote ages and forgotten institutions, but a living picture of things present, fitted not so much for the curiosity of the scholar, as the instruction of the statesman and the citizen”; Sir Thomas Erskine May in his 1877 Democracy in Europe cited the identical passage.104
Other ways of reading history, however, survived, as they always do. The march of democracy was not greeted with enthusiasm in all quarters; and belief in the identification of Victorian Britain with Periclean Athens did not necessarily imply enthusiasm for either. Just as eighteenth-century thinkers like Montagu had viewed the slide to Chaeronea as the clear harbinger of the collapse of their own civilization, so some writers of the nineteenth saw in the sins of the Athenian democrats the precursor of the problems of their own age, expressing the fear that Britain would be done in by the “dagger of democracy”; the essay on the Outlines of History published in the Quarterly in 1831 identified the two cultures precisely in respect to the danger democratic tendencies posed in both. In every human community, the reviewer argues, the majority are “at all times hostile to Law.” The only means to stability, he maintains, is an unremitting effort on the part of the governing party acting in concert with “the wise and good of every class” to uphold “the sanctity of law, and the inviolability of right”; for the history of both Rome and Athens demonstrated that it is “the violated rights of the privileged orders” that brings republics down. The lesson of classical antiquity, he contends,
is neither local nor temporary; the facts are only exemplifications of the great principle which governs human affairs, that in every state there must exist a conservative and [an] innovating party; a party in possession of power, and a party bent on attaining it…. If then the party which should naturally be conservative, yields on principle at every summons, an endless series of precipitate changes, with all their attendant horrors, must be the inevitable result; if they relax their efforts for an instant, they must be swept away by the resistless torrent of innovation.
Like numerous eighteenth-century Britons, the reviewer concludes that the greatest safeguard to liberty lies in an aristocratic government such as exists in England. The author’s distaste for democracy is not surprising in view of the journal in which his essay appeared, but what is striking is the unwavering conviction he shared with Grote and his liberal ilk that antiquity provided a living lesson for the present. The conviction that classical Athens was a useful laboratory in which to study the problems that beset Victorian Britain is reflected in the author’s term for the members of the Delian League: for him they are Athens’s “colonies.”105
Concerns about the dangers of democracy remained vigorous throughout the century. Although the ability of the Americans to preserve a stable polity without the ministrations of a monarch served at first to defuse some of the apprehension Europeans felt about republicanism in general and even in some instances democracy in particular, as time passed many Europeans found themselves disturbed by the gap in refinement they saw dividing them from Americans, and some were inclined to associate American democratization with what Matthew Arnold termed “low ideals and want of culture.” This concern made it necessary to explain away the indisputable cultural achievements of the seeming democracy of the Athenians. Though Arnold conceded that Athens was “not an aristocracy, leavening with its own high spirit the multitude which it wields, but leaving it the unformed multitude still,” he also denied that it was “a democracy, acute and energetic, but tasteless, narrow-minded, and ignoble.” Rather it was an extraordinary universe in which the middle and lower classes, having attained the highest development of humanity to which such classes had been able to aspire, found themselves satisfied with nothing less than the highest monuments of intellectual and artistic achievement. Sharing the concerns of many other Victorians that individualistic and particularist impulses would destroy the fabric of society, Arnold appealed to the pronounced friends of progress to turn an eye to the past and emulate the Athenians. For, he maintains, the course taken over the next half-century by the British middle classes would be decisive in its history; and, he argues, if these classes continue “exaggerating their spirit of individualism” and remain resentful of government action, “they may succeed in a brief ascendancy in government, but they will, alas, Americanise it” by bringing culture down to their own dismal level.106 Far better the Athenian example, then, than the American. The arguments of the jurist and historian Sir Henry Maine were similar. Concerned about the debasement of society under a democratic regime, he concluded that the achievements of the Athenians precluded the possibility that Athenian government could actually have been democratic. Athens, he contended, had in reality been an aristocracy. Claiming that it is in fact aristocracy alone that preserves and advances civilization, he cites the example of Athens, whose supposed democracy was in reality “only an aristocracy which rose on the ruins of one much narrower,” as the glories of Athenian culture were dependent on the harsh taxation of subject cities and the widespread use of slaves.107
The philhellenism sparked by the revolt against Turkey in the 1820s and the apparent success of the bold American endeavor in republicanism both contributed to the rise in Athens’s fortunes during the nineteenth century, as did the resurrection of Greek aesthetic ideals in Germany. It is curious that the period during which this dramatic shift in thinking about Athenian democracy took shape coincides precisely with the years Martin Bernal identifies as those that witnessed another important transformation in thinking about antiquity. Bernal contends that these very decades saw the replacement of what he calls the “Ancient Model” of Greek civilization with a romantic and racist approach that denied the African and Asian roots that had previously been accepted as important elements in what became Hellenic civilization.108 Broad trends may have been at work here, and if Bernal is right, the two developments may be linked by the growing idealism that affected thinking about ancient Greece. The chief catalyst responsible for rehabilitating the Athenians, however, was the reaction provoked by the long-standing British concern with property and hierarchy, what Matthew Arnold was to call the characteristically English “religion of inequality.”109 When men like Mill and Bentham decided they had had enough, and when traditional snobbery was reiterated in a multivolume history of the Greek world by a man of idiosyncratic spelling and equally eccentric notions about the civil rights of the Macedonian people, the response of men like Macaulay and Grote was foreseeable. Historians could have predicted that a Mitford would spawn a Grote; what they could not have predicted was that a Mitford would arise in the first place. Had Greek history of the eighteenth century stopped with Gillies’s comparatively innocuous antidemocratic volumes, it is unclear whether it would have drawn the interest of Macaulay and Grote. In some ways the modern view of Athens owes more to Mitford’s squeakiness than to Grote’s eloquence.
Even more than Athens’s Florentine critics and the crusaders for accountability in early eighteenth-century Britain, the English liberals of Grote’s generation manifested the “group prejudice” W. H. Walsh discussed in his Introduction to Philosophy of History. Convinced that the society they envisioned for Britain had to a substantial degree been realized in the past, they delighted in uncovering a model that could function as what Dewey would soon praise as a lever for moving the present into a particular kind of future.110 Education, they were confident, would make a broadened franchise workable, and in the energized civic life of classical Athens they believed that the education of the average working person had been accomplished. Macaulay let himself imagine that ordinary Athenian voters had more leisure for lingering in the agora than is realistically possible in any society, while Grote chose not to know that many, many working people in Athens were slaves. Where America’s founders had focused on constitutional issues and questions of stability, asking where Athens had failed, the liberals of Victorian Britain focused on education and civic life, asking how Athens had succeeded. Using precisely the same texts as the founders—to which must be added Mitford’s several volumes—Macaulay and his successors came to radically different conclusions because they asked radically different questions. Whereas the founders had considered it useful to distance themselves from the unpopular Athenian example and were genuinely afraid of the instability that they associated with popular government (in Renaissance Florence, for example), the English liberals found it profitable to reconstruct an idyllic cohesive Athens that could serve as an inspiration for modern Britain.