Chapter Eight
Can I forget that it was in the very lap of Greece that was seen to arise the City equally famed for its happy ignorance and for the wisdom of its Laws, that Republic of demi-Gods rather than of men, so much superior to humanity did their virtues appear?
O Sparta! eternal shame to vain teaching!
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, First Discourse
IN THE SEVENTEENTH and early eighteenth centuries Athens provided a heartening model to many English republicans seeking instructive analogues for increasing the accountability and moral tone of government in their own day. Writers who did not share these concerns, however, generally found Athenian democracy distasteful. Though the study of antiquity was frequently dragged down by insipid moralizing, interest in classical politics and history intensified during the Enlightenment era. At the same time, however, the appearance for the first time of narrative histories of Greece nurtured a view of Athens that conceived its history as an unbroken line leading to the defeat at Chaeronea. In both Europe and America, eighteenth-century writing about the ancient world was frequently motivated by the desire to isolate the cause of classical civilization’s collapse so as to protect modern civilization from a similar fate, and the tone of this inquiry was generally more anxious than analytical.
The bulk of what was written about Athens in the eighteenth century was produced in England and France. Whereas the work of English writers working after 1735 rarely rose from the level of cliché, French thinkers were significantly more imaginative.1 Though the French must be credited with some of the most tedious examples of sententious anti-Athenian moralizing, during the second half of the century the work of French social scientists offered a variety of new perspectives on Greek history. French views of Athens during the later eighteenth century varied considerably from one author to the next, and this diversity points to a level of ferment that was productive and promising of more serious intellectual work yet to come.
Although to some degree the history of Greece continued to serve as a field to be mined for convenient object lessons easily transplantable from one culture to another, now in the eighteenth century it began if not to be valued in its own right then at least to be examined more closely than had been the case in earlier eras. To be sure, Rome continued to claim the lion’s share of attention. Arnaldo Momigliano in his essay “Ancient History and the Antiquarian” has assembled a bibliography of over thirty eighteenth-century studies of Italy during the pre-Roman period alone.2 Though Roman beginnings excited a certain antiquarian interest, however, it was ultimately the fall of Rome that gripped the eighteenth-century imagination. In 1734 Montesquieu brought out his Considerations on the Greatness and the Decadence of the Romans, and it was on 15 October 1764 that it first entered the head of Edward Gibbon, as he sat musing among the ruins of the Capitol, to write the work that would immortalize his name.
Greek history was never to unseat Roman as the predominant field of ancient historical study, either in the eighteenth century or in any other. Still, the study of Greece began nosing forward shortly after 1700 as at least a respectable contender for scholars’ attention. Already in 1697 as Échard was bringing his Roman History down to the time of Augustus, Potter was compiling his ponderous Greek Antiquities, which were to serve as a common source for Greek history on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time Bayle was wrangling zestfully with ancient and modern sources in the production of the impressive Greek entries in his Dictionnaire. Shortly afterward, Temple Stanyan produced his Grecian History, and by the time he completed the work in the 1740s he was able to draw on the detailed Ancient History composed by the schoolmaster Charles Rollin in France. Undertaken when Rollin was himself fairly ancient, his history appeared in 1729 with an imprimatur advertising its utility in the “improvement of young minds.” How effectively it served this end is uncertain; there was wisdom in Stanyan’s observation that Rollin’s reflections, “tho they are generally just, are too frequent and too tedious, too trite and obvious, and too juvenile.”3
In 1774, Oliver Goldsmith brought out his own history of Greece. It would be an understatement to say that Goldsmith drew deeply on the writings of Rollin and Stanyan; had the three authors published during the twentieth century, Goldsmith and his publishers would have been haled into court in short order. Still, the appearance of the work betokened a continuing interest in Greek antiquity. Meanwhile in France, the quasi-socialist Gabriel Bonnot de Mably published his Observations on the Greeks in 1749, two years before his Observations on the Romans, and his sententious Conversations of Phocion, Concerning the Connection between Government and Morality appeared in 1763. Mably’s writings were to have considerable influence on the French revolutionaries and on the American colonists, about whom he would later write his Observations on the Government and Laws of the United States of America. On the very eve of the revolution appeared Barthélemy’s Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, a historical novel in many volumes that served as a vehicle for extended commentary on Greek civilization, and De Pauw’s Philosophical Researches on the Greeks. Greek history also claimed the attention of eighteenth-century luminaries such as Condillac and Rousseau in France, Burke and Montagu in England, and Hume and Ferguson in Scotland, as well as a host of less familiar figures.
DEMOCRACY AND DECADENCE
The anti-Athenian tradition that characterized the first half of the eighteenth century was tiresome and monotonous. Allegations of the natural giddiness of the Athenians and their relentless fickleness and ingratitude continued to tumble pell-mell off the pen as one writer after another offered loose paraphrases of the strictures of classical thinkers, most particularly Plutarch, who enjoyed a popularity matched by no other author.4 (In eighteenth-century America the only volume in more homes than Plutarch was the Bible.) Decade after decade, eager moralists rung minor variations on a handful of favorite themes. Some of these topoi, such as the superiority of Lycurgus to Solon, were concerned with early Athenian history and the origins of the democracy, but most focused on the decline of the city throughout the course of the fifth and fourth centuries—the evils of Athenian imperialism; the disgraceful undermining of the Council of the Areopagus; the corruption of the Athenian demos by Pericles’ bribery of the masses with jobs, spectacles, and pay for state service; the shamelessness of the demagogues who succeeded Pericles and the licentiousness of the people; the sorry state of fourth-century Athens (as of fourth-century Greece as a whole, where even Sparta had begun to decline from its pristine valor); and, uniting all these separate strands, the ill effects of luxury and its attendant vice, effeminacy. At times the virtues of Sparta are cited to set off the vices of the Athenians; on other occasions Athens is accused of having dragged down even noble Sparta in her train.5
Crusading journalists aside, eighteenth-century writers generally took a dim view of the evolution of the Athenian constitution and the attendant march of democracy. According to Stanyan, though Solon in his wisdom had created the Council of Four Hundred as a check on the “giddy unthinking multitude,” still the difference between the laws of Lycurgus and those of Solon was “easily accounted for, from the Temper of the Athenians, which was too delicate, and capricious to be brought to those grave and regular Austerities.”6 Stanyan would not be the only writer of his day to associate the weaknesses of Athenian government with those of the national character. Goldsmith found Solon’s laws “neither so striking nor yet so well authorized as those of Lycurgus.”7 The real villain of Athenian democracy, however, was generally taken by eighteenth-century writers to be Pericles, and those who were not English crusaders for accountability found him to be not only the perverter of the democratic system but its creature as well. The fiery Josiah Tucker, whose 1781 Treatise Concerning Civil Government was inspired in part by revulsion for the revolution in America, offers an interesting contrast to the views of the earlier republican pamphleteers. Pericles, he maintained, though “the Idol of the Athenians,” nonetheless “laid the foundation of their Ruin, and deserved Banishment an hundred Times”—and he adds in a footnote that the instance of Walpole demonstrates that popularity need not correlate with worth; for Walpole, he writes, though one of the most unpopular statesmen in England, was “the best commercial Minister this country ever had, and the greatest Promoter of its real Interests.”8 Goldsmith, though he has some admiration for Pericles, stresses that the beautification of Athens was founded on Pericles’ misappropriation of league funds, and Stanyan, paraphrasing a passage from Tourreil’s preface to his edition of Demosthenes, asserted that the Athenians “thought, since they had delivered the Grecian cities from the Insults of the Barbarians, they had a right to oppress them in their turn” and “roughly treated the Grecian cities, of which they called themselves the Protectors.”9 David Hume observed that the so-called democracy of Periclean Athens excluded women, slaves, metics, and imperial subjects.10 Mably ranked Pericles’ imperialism high among his sins, while the philosopher Condillac labeled him “eloquent, scheming and deceitful,” claiming that Pericles’ zeal for the public good was only a mask that he removed when his position was secure.11 When Pericles sought to rival Cimon by squandering public moneys to pay citizens to attend shows and trials, Condillac argues, the Athenians became preoccupied with these spectacles and left all authority in his hands.12 A still more impassioned attack on Pericles was mounted by Rousseau, who proclaimed, plumbing the depths of praeterition: “I will not waste my time reviewing the secret causes of the Peloponnesian war which ruined the Republic; I will not inquire whether Alcibiades’ advice was well- or ill-founded; whether Pericles was justly or unjustly accused of embezzlement.” No, Rousseau will simply ask, like Socrates in the Gorgias, whether there was any single individual at Athens, slave or free, even among Pericles’ own children, who was ennobled by Pericles’ ascendancy.13 Stanyan for his part saw Pericles as initiating not only the demotion of the Areopagite Council but its decadence as well, maintaining that “his Contempt of them serv’d to lessen their Dignity; and from that time the same Excesses and Vices, which were practis’d in the City, crept in among the Areopagites themselves.”14 Even Pericles’ supporters Rollin and Goldsmith stressed his ambition and manipulativeness.15
In 424 Aristophanes’ Knights had pilloried Cleon without mercy, and it was in this play that the word demagogos made its first appearance in extant literature. The demagogoi who succeeded Pericles were uniformly censured in the eighteenth century—so uniformly indeed that Goldsmith in writing that Cleon was “rash, arrogant and obstinate, contentious, envious and malicious, covetous and corrupt” was reproducing Stanyan’s text word for word.16 Thomas Hearne, in his 1714 Ductor Historicus: or, A Short System of Universal History, had attributed the Athenians’ unwillingness to make peace with Sparta after their successes in the Hellespont to “the Demagogues of the City … a sort of Men, who were very fierce, given to Change, and factious to the utmost of their Power.”17 Cleophon he named as “the most pestilent of these Demagogues,” while Rollin pegs Hyperbolus as a “very wicked man” who was “hardened in evil” and “insensible to infamy.”18 Mably is particularly ruthless, labeling Pericles’ successors a “petty and untalented swarm, morally and spiritually bankrupt.”19
For Stanyan, it was the pernicious antagonism between demagogues and generals in the fourth century that spelled the ruin of Athens, whereas Rollin traced the decline of Demosthenes’ Athens back to the self-serving policies of Pericles.20 Citing Tourreil’s discussion of Athens’s decline, Rollin maintains that in the age of Demosthenes the “manly and vigorous policy” of earlier times had given way to the love of ease and pleasure, a degeneracy of which Pericles was the first author.21 Rollin, Stanyan, and Goldsmith each offer a stock passage taken from the grafting of Justin onto Plutarch in which they lament the decadence of Athens after the death of Epaminondas. At that juncture, so the story goes, the Athenians gave themselves over to an endless succession of amusements, spending more on producing the plays of Sophocles and Euripides than had been expended on the entire war with Persia.22 Rousseau made a parallel claim.23 The degradation of fourth-century Athens was regularly compared to the heroism she had shown during the Persian Wars. Stanyan pointedly extended the contrast to the Greeks as a whole, opposing “the plain, hardy and untainted age” to the era that sought foreign conquests—conquests that in turn led to an increasingly cosmopolitan society in which “quicker degrees of Knowledge and Politeness” made the Greeks “more luxurious and effeminate.”24 Goldsmith at times seems to extend the decadence back into the fifth century, alleging that their successes against the Persians were “not more flattering to the Greeks, than in the end prejudicial to them,” since the resulting influx of wealth produced a corruption in manners at all levels of society.25 Rousseau had devoted his prizewinning essay to demonstrating the corruption attendant on the development of the arts and sciences, and Condillac admonished his reader that “the administration of Pericles is the epoch of the decadence of Athens; and, the more you study history, the more you will have occasion to remark that the excesses to which luxury conduces are always the forerunner of the fall of empires.”26
The movement from manly vigor to effeminate luxury forms the theme of a rather strange essay published in 1759 and generally ascribed to the eccentric Edward Wortley Montagu, whose renowned mother Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (the celebrated letter-writer) thought so well of him that she left him in her will the sum of one guinea. Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Antient Republics, Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain smacks of a schoolboy rhetorical exercise, though it appeared when its supposed author was forty-six. In it Montagu fulminates on the impending collapse of civilization should Britain not change its course. In ancient Athens and Rome he saw ominous warnings for eighteenth-century England, for, he complains, the resemblance in manners between contemporary Britain and the ancient states in their periods of degeneracy is so great that “any well-meaning reader … would be apt to treat the descriptions of these periods, which he may frequently meet with, as licentious, undistinguishing satire upon the present age.”27
Nothing in Montagu’s research, he reports, gave him so much pleasure as the study of ancient history, because it made him so keenly sensible of the superiority of the British constitution. Nonetheless, he warns, it is necessary for Britons to be on guard against decadence, lest what happened to the free states of antiquity prove their ruin as well—a serious danger “when we reflect, that the same causes, which contributed to their ruin, operate at this time so very strongly amongst us.”28 These causes appear to be luxury and faction, in both of which regards Montagu sees Britain perilously mimicking the example of classical Athens, where virtue-engendering athletic contests gave way to virtue-eroding literary competitions and eventually to complete decadence. He includes in his diatribe the stock passages in which Plutarch pilloried fourth-century Athenians for spending more on dramatic productions than on the entire Persian wars, and he inquires whether if Plutarch was shocked by the Athenians’ wasting so much time on the “chaste and manly” scenes of Sophocles and Euripides, “what must he have thought of the strange Shakespearomania … which prevailed so lately, and so universally among all ranks and all ages?” There follows a vehement attack on Romeo and Juliet, and Montagu goes on to speculate about how Plutarch would respond to seeing the upper classes who should be the bulwark of the nation “attentive only to the unmanning trills of an Opera; a degree of effeminacy which would have disgraced even the women of Greece, in times of greatest degeneracy.” A preoccupation with manliness and its dread opposite, effeminacy, operates as an unrelenting leitmotiv throughout Montagu’s essay. By her fall, Montagu warns, Athens “has left us some instructions highly useful for our present conduct,” for her fate demonstrates that the best way for a minister to tame the spirit of a free people and melt them down to slavery is “to promote luxury, and encourage and diffuse a taste for public diversions … the never-failing forerunners of universal idleness, effeminacy and corruption.”29
Montagu’s shrill tirade is not carefully developed, and the connection between Athenian democracy and Athenian decadence is left unclear. The genesis and workings of faction remain fuzzier still. While Montagu was fulminating in England, more coherent arguments concerning the parallels between ancient and modern civilization were being shaped across the channel that were to have a great impact on historical thinking in Europe and America. In 1749 Mably published his Observations on the Greeks, and at the same time Jean-Jacques Rousseau submitted his prizewinning essay to the Academy of Dijon concerning the effect of the arts and sciences on contemporary civilization.
In his general treatises on political theory, Mably advocated a state similar in many ways to classical republics—more oligarchic than Athens, less exclusive than Rome, and democratic in a way that Sparta only pretended to be. Less charmed by the ineffable virtues of the mixed state than Montesquieu or the English republicans, Mably wished a weak executive and a strong legislative branch. Those who wished to participate in the state, however, would be required to submit certain credentials, including the possession of property and proof of a secure income. In Mably’s ideal state, acquisitiveness was unknown, principles of sharing were promulgated, simplicity and frugality would reign, and the state would be responsible for the poor. Poor and property there would be, however; Mably saw the prelapsarian world of shared goods, the world before private property, as gone forever. Mably’s dislike of the concentration of power in the hands of a wealthy elite did not lead him to support a government in which the poor participated on an equal footing. Rather, he wished to minimize both poverty and wealth.
Predictably Mably preferred Sparta to Athens by a good bit. For other detractors of Athens, Solon had gone too far, but for Mably Solon’s reforms had been altogether too timid. Prudent, xenophobic, nonacquisitive, hostile to the arts, egalitarian within their elite, the Spartans were everything the Athenians were not, and if the helots were cast as frugal rustics and the Peloponnesian League deemed nonimperialistic, the system could be seen as perfect. In Athens, by contrast, lust for power and riches promoted unacceptable inequalities and, in time, inevitably, decadence. For Mably, harmony meant uniformity, and though by the standards of today’s multiethnic nations classical Athens was eminently homogeneous, until recently neither her admirers nor her detractors viewed her population in this way: it was the Athenian tolerance for diversity that Pericles had exalted in his funeral oration.30
Mably’s Observations lambasted popular government in general and Athenian democracy in particular. Like all multitudes, Mably maintained, the Athenian people was blind, moved by passion, vice, and caprice. In Mably’s view, the Athenians offered only the most dramatic instance of the failings of the ancient Greeks in general, who were as a lot divisive and prone to faction. In stark contrast to Trenchard and Gordon, who had stressed the gratefulness of citizens in a republic, Mably argued that monarchies are better at forgetting injuries than republics because a prince can impress his character on people, whereas magistrates are powerless to resist the force of public opinion. If one republic is incapable of reform, he reflects, imagine how dreadful things must have been in Greece, where there were as many republics as there were cities.
Mably also offers invidious comparisons between Athens’s polity and that of Sparta. Though Mably’s avowed belief in the abolition of property and in money as the root of all evil had not moved him to oppose monarchy in his own day, it fostered a predictable preference for Lycurgan “equality” over Solonic timocracy. The pseudoegalitarian Spartans, moreover, stayed strictly away from real democracy, which was, in Mably’s view, to their credit. Though Mably ascribes Sparta’s preference for aristocracy in her allies to the fact that experience had shown the Spartans the unreliability of popular sovereignty, he suggests two possible explanations for Athens’s preference for democracies in the Delian league: Athens preferred democracies either because she herself had one, or, alternatively, out of sheer perversity.31 Though in the end, Mably maintains, the rivalry between Athens and Sparta led the two hegemons to support various factions in allied cities, at first factional disputes did little harm to Greece since Sparta, occupied with her “obligations,” intervened only to reconcile hostile parties and to foster equity—and Athens, for her part, was so occupied with her own revolution that she neglected the affairs of her allies.32 Whereas the Athenians were remiss, in other words, the Spartans were merely busy—and, in a pinch, not even too busy to serve justice.
Just after Mably published his Observations, the most famous of Sparta’s admirers was awarded the prize of the Academy of Dijon for his essay “Whether the Restoration of the Sciences and Arts has contributed to the purification of morals.” In his award-winning entry Rousseau maintained that “the progress of the Arts, the disintegration of morals, and the Macedonian’s yoke closely followed one another.”33 To the degeneracy of refined Athens he pointedly contrasted Sparta, a “City equally famed for its happy ignorance and for the wisdom of its laws, that Republic of demi-Gods rather than of men.”34 Rousseau gives free rein to his theatrical bent in this passage, crying out, “O Sparta! eternal shame to vain teaching!” At the same time, he writes, that “the vices, led by the fine Arts, together insinuated themselves into Athens, while a Tyrant was there so carefully assembling the works of the Prince of Poets, you expelled the Arts and Artists, the Sciences and Scientists from your walls.”35 Rousseau must date the corruption of Athens by its arts very early, as the Tyrant who was “so carefully assembling the works of the Prince of Poets” can only be Peisistratus, busy with his recension of Homer.
For all Rousseau’s passion, however, the precise ways in which the arts and sciences undid the Athenians are poorly articulated in this essay. Rousseau clarifies his position in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, submitted as an unsuccessful entry in the Dijon contest of 1754. In this anthropological piece he ascribes the decline of Athens in part to the Athenians’ system of allowing new laws to be proposed promiscuously at any time and by any citizen.36 He condemns a government in which the people retained the execution of the law in their own hands, maintaining that this was one of the vices that ruined Athens. Such, he claims, “must have been the rude constitution of the first governments arising immediately from the state of Nature.”37 But if this primitive democracy was a short step from the state of nature, it cannot have been the product of an advanced society corrupted by arts and sciences, and so Rousseau’s contention that Athens fell by her very cultivation remains unconvincing. Altogether Athens seems to function for Rousseau more as a foil to virtuous Sparta than as a subject for sincere inquiry, for a serious examination of the Athenian state would inevitably lead to dissonance between the decadence he despises and the egalitarianism he admires.
It remained for Mably to take another stab at diagnosing the corruption of Athens in his Conversations of Phocion, concerning the Connection between Morality and Government, published in 1763. These conversations, which Mably purported to have been preserved for posterity by Phocion’s friend Nicocles, served as a vehicle for Mably to exhort his contemporaries to stem the tide of decay in eighteenth-century France. Phocion’s conversations amount to a searing attack on the moral decline of Athens during his day and offer stern admonitions about the consequences of laxity in morals at any time. The past, Phocion warns his friend Aristias, “is an image, or rather a forecast, of the future,” and experience alone will not prove a sufficient guide to action; rather, it is in the study of the happy and unhappy events of history that one can acquire certain knowledge.38 Mably promises that these conversations will demonstrate that la politique can work effectively for the good of society only when attached to rules of strictest morality—for Phocion had shown that it was a lack of virtue that caused the weakness of his Athenian contemporaries.
It is to a decline in morality, indeed, that Phocion traces the sorry state of fourth-century Greece as a whole. In his lifetime, Phocion complains, Philip has given asylum to the fugitive virtues that were abandoning the Greeks, while Greek orators were selling themselves to Macedon.39 (Just how the noble Philip could retain his virtue while making these purchases is left unclear.) The decay, Phocion laments, has already spread beyond Attica, for Sparta has renounced the ancient virtues of Lycurgus and taken up Athenian ways.40 Mably is inconsistent, however, about just when it was that Sparta began to stray from the paths laid out by Lycurgus, attributing this departure at times to the aftermath of the Persian Wars and on another occasion to the luxuries introduced at the end of the Peloponnesian War by Lysander.41 A similar inconsistency marks his treatment of Athens, as he assigns the decline variously to the period right after the Persian Wars, the ascendancy of Pericles, or the restoration of the democracy in 403—though on one occasion he isolates a brief era in the fifth century when the tribute from the Delian League had strengthened Athens and rot had not yet set in.42 Foreign conquests, Mably maintains, can lead to wealth and luxury, which soften a nation and make it vulnerable to attack, and a moral tone underlies Phocion’s contention that Athens was destroyed by her imperialism.43 To Mably, the quasi-Socialist economy of Sparta offered a far more promising field for the production of virtuous citizens than the acquisitive environment of commercial Athens, which fostered selfishness. In a footnote he cites Plato (in Latin) on the evils of the luxurious state.44
It is in the third of the Conversations that Mably makes clear just how it is that luxury corrupts the state: where there is luxury, there is need of artisans, and where artisans—that is, men who hold no land—determine what happens in the assembly, then power passes into the hands of people who have no heritage, and out of the hands of men who “alone truly have a fatherland.”45 Is it any wonder, Phocion asks, that Athens’s fortunes have fallen while her government is in the hands of workmen? What sort of miracle could impart justice, prudence, and magnanimity to an assembly of artisans?46 Such men—as even the republican Harrington had stressed—know only their particular interests and not those of the republic.47 All Athens’s greatest statesmen, Mably maintained, favored aristocracy with the exception of Aristides, whose opening up of the franchise to men who did not meet a minimum income requirement “was without doubt one of the principal causes of the enormous mistakes made by the republic and of the misfortunes she experienced after the death of Pericles, for the inquietude and insolence of the people knew no bounds.”48 (Similar observations were made in 1767 by the Scot Adam Ferguson, who expressed alarm about popular assemblies “composed of men whose dispositions are sordid, and whose ordinary applications are illiberal,” as was the case in Athens, where the indigent brought to politics jealous minds intent upon profit and eager “to banish from the state whomsoever was respectable and eminent in the superior order of citizens.”49)
Mably’s admiration for Sparta was tempered by his preoccupation with luxury and the decline that followed in its wake—at Sparta as elsewhere. His friend Rousseau was less temperate in his laconophilia, and in his attack on the arts and sciences he cites Sparta as the triumphant refutation of the proponents of cultivation and refinement. “My adversaries’ discomfiture is evident,” he writes, “whenever they have to speak about Sparta. What would they not give for this fatal Sparta never to have existed; and how dearly would those who contend that great deeds are good for nothing but to be celebrated, wish that Sparta’s great deeds had never been celebrated?”50 Imagine, he writes, the speech a Spartan might have delivered to his compatriots had he been swayed by the force of such arguments. “Citizens,” he would say,
open your eyes and behold what you have been blind to. I am pained to see you laboring solely in order to acquire virtue, to exercise your courage, and to preserve your liberty; yet you forget the more important duty of providing amusement for the idle of future generations. Tell me; what good is virtue if it does not cause a stir in the world? What will it have profited you to have been good men if no one will talk about you? What will it matter to later centuries that at Thermopylae you sacrificed your lives to save the Athenians, if you do not, like they, [sic] leave [behind] systems of Philosophy, or poems, or comedies, or statues? Hasten to give up, then, laws that are good for nothing but to make you happy; think only of being much talked about when you will be no longer; and never forget that if great men were not celebrated it would be useless to be one”51
In exalting Sparta at the expense of Athens, Rousseau was only going where hundreds of gentler men had gone before. Who, then, were these putative critics who had censured him for his stance?
THE REPUBLIC OF DEMI-GODS
The truth is that Rousseau was only the most flamboyant of a long line of laconophiles. As is well known, Athenian aristocrats from Cimon to Critias admired Sparta enormously. Xenophon’s enthusiasm for Sparta knew few bounds; Plato and Aristotle both esteemed the city on the Eurotas highly, though neither was blind to its weaknesses. Affection for Sparta was more subdued among the Romans, whose chauvinism made it difficult for them to develop much enthusiasm for any civilization that had gone before—though Valerius Maximus judged that the Spartans, of all ancient peoples, approached most closely to Roman gravitas.52 During the Italian Renaissance, however, Sparta was idolized by political theorists in search of stability at any price. In Florence, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti contrasted Spartan solidity with Athenian anarchy and chaos, and Venetians like Paolo Paruta agreed that Sparta realized in a singular way the much-touted ideal of the governo misto. In this regard Renaissance writers regularly paired Sparta with Venice. The same coupling is apparent in English thought, and the British enthusiasm for mixed government reached obsessive proportions among the classical republicans of the seventeenth century. Harrington denied that a commonwealth of artisans like the Athenian could compare with Rome, Sparta, and Venice, “plumed with their Aristocracies.”53 Like Mably he saw great merit in the equal distribution of land at Sparta, believing as he did that it was politically disastrous for too much property to be in the hands of too few citizens. Sidney liked Sparta, and it attests to the vigor of the pro-Spartan tradition that even the author of Areopagitica could in another work have described Sparta as an excellently ordered state.54 Walter Moyle observed in 1698 that he found it agreeable to contemplate how many millions of people “lived happily and died quietly” throughout seven centuries of Spartan history, and he judged the separation of powers to have worked more effectively in Sparta than in England.55
In France, some discordant notes were struck. Bayle in his 1697 Dictionnaire had passed severe judgment not only on the Spartan king Agesilaus, whose dishonesty and appetite for warfare had earned him the criticism even of Xenophon, but also on the reformers Lycurgus and Agis IV, and the prelate Fénelon in the Dialogue des morts he composed early in the eighteenth century found the Spartans cruel, idle, and excessively warlike.56 By Rousseau’s time, however, these squalls had passed, and the prevailing tone about Sparta was admiring. The Genevan legist Burlamaqui carried forward the notion of Sparta as a mixed state to be linked with England, and, most dramatically, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws brought a somewhat idealized Sparta before the public eye.57 Montesquieu’s belief that republics were founded on the virtue of their citizens led him to esteem greatly the ordinances of Lycurgus. In his appetite for the Lycurgan system, Montesquieu followed in the train of earlier civic humanists—in Italy, for example—whose concern for public virtue drew them to Spartan agoge, and Montesquieu writes approvingly of the Spartans’ respect for age and for authority as well as of their self-discipline and frugality.58
Though Rousseau’s fascination with Sparta exceeded that of his contemporaries, then, his portrait of himself crying out the laconic virtues alone in the wilderness arose more from rhetoric than from reality. The attack on Sparta’s champions in Chastellux’s tract On Public Happiness is probably a more reliable guide to traditional eighteenth-century attitudes to Sparta. In the introduction to this moving and elaborate plea for serious social engineering to relieve public miseries of many kinds, Chastellux raises his voice against the use of stock examples from antiquity to support simplistic solutions to modern problems, complaining of those who adduce the Scythians and Spartans as models by which the opulent commercial nations of his day should reform themselves.59 Chastellux is aware that in his criticism of Sparta he is voicing a minority opinion: “Already,” he reports, “I seem to hear many voices raised against me, and opposing to my observations the power, and the duration of this republic.”60 Chastellux denies the merits of the Lycurgan system, and in a burst of anticlericalism he compares the Spartans to “bold, intriguing monks, who, having overthrown provinces, and even whole states, perceive themselves compelled to retire again within their cloisters, where, in silent indignation, they bend beneath the laws of obedience and austerity.”61 Chastellux’s writing conveys a powerful sense of outrage. In describing the Spartans’ secret police, he reports that revulsion leads him to drop the pen from his hand; but his indignation, he continues, is directed less against the Spartans themselves than against the authors “who have, coldly, transmitted to us, the details of these execrable facts, and complaisantly, expatiated on the praises of the barbarous people who committed them.”62
The Spartans’ (wavering) popularity is also attested by the horror the Abbé Goguet expressed at the traditional view of them in his treatise on The Origin of Laws, Arts, and Sciences, and their Progress among the Most Ancient Nations. It was Goguet’s belief that Lycurgus’s strictures against virtually any form of activity had pretty well legislated life out of existence at Sparta and that the Spartans, though brave, were also imperious, deceitful, and perfidious. Like Chastellux, Goguet chastised other writers for holding up Sparta as a model of wisdom and virtue.63 A similar frustration with rampant laconomania is evident in Voltaire. Distrustful generally of the adulation of antiquity fashionable in his day, Voltaire in his Notebooks cried out against people who acted as if one should conduct oneself at Paris as if it were Sparta, and in his article on luxury in the Dictionnaire philosophique, he asks what good Sparta ever did for Greece. Did she ever produce “any Demostheneses, any Sophocleses, any Appelleses, or any Phidiases?” (The plurals, of course, are more euphonious in French.) “The luxury of Athens,” he argues, “made great men in all areas,” while Sparta had only a handful of captains.64
Not all who rejected Sparta embraced Athens. Chastellux, in fact, pointedly rejected the Athenian model as equally unsuitable. He urges his readers to put aside not only romantic ideas about the Spartans but any similar notions they may have harbored about Athens as well. On close examination, he warns, the Athenians were frivolous, jealous, and ambitious, incapable of forming policy and plagued by an idle eloquence that led them to abandon the substance of argument for the form of rhetoric; in the last analysis they were “unjust to their allies, ungrateful to their chiefs and cruel to their enemies.”65 In vain, Chastellux laments, did learning and the arts settle in Athens, for the harshness of the Athenians toward the people of Mytilene and Sicyon “are such monuments of cruelty, as sufficiently prove the superiority of our modern philosophy, over that which could accommodate itself to such abominations.”66 (He plainly means here not Sicyon but Scione; the Athenians were believed to have maltreated not the Sicyonians in the Peloponnese but rather the people of Scione in northern Greece, who defected to the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War.) Like Rousseau, Chastellux sees Athens as raising unsettling questions about what relation the progress of the mind bears to the increase of public happiness. What has been termed the glorious age of Greece, he concludes, was in reality “a scene of torture, and punishment, inflicted on humanity.”67 It is a melancholy truth, he maintains, that intellectual progress in Athens did not benefit the people.68
THE RISE OF THE LIBERAL TRADITION
Though Chastellux followed tradition in condemning the Athenian state, his work is notable for its iconoclastic approach to Greek civilization, and he concedes some anxieties about “the displeasure of some eminent literati, whose respect for antiquity may be unlimited.”69 Although he is savage toward the Athenians, what he said about the Spartans would play an important role in the eventual debunking of the Spartan myth, a phenomenon that would lead in some instances to a reevaluation of Athenian government and society.
That some thinkers were beginning to reconsider the eighteenth-century condemnation of Athens is demonstrated by Goguet’s caveat that “we commonly view the Athenians on their favorable and advantageous side.”70 To be sure, he goes on to undermine this enthusiasm, arguing that to explain the Athenian constitution is to make known its defects, since every state in which decision-making is in the hands of the people is “essentially vitious.”71 The Athenians’ habits of “inconstancy, impatience and precipitation,” he argues, were “defects, inseparable from the constitution of their government,” and he summons Aristophanes, Cicero, Plato, and Valerius Maximus as witnesses to the depravity of Athenian democracy.72
At the same time, however, he has much good to say about Athens. No easy dichotomy can be posited to explain his position as one favoring Athenian “culture” while condemning Athenian “government,” for as his ascription of flaws in the Athenian character to their form of government suggests, Goguet considers the two inseparable, and in fact he acknowledges that the Athenians’ virtues were often reflected in their laws. A thousand proofs, he says, might be cited that generosity and greatness of soul “formed the general and predominant character of the Athenians,” but he will content himself with mentioning only one, the law that ordained that anyone who had lost his way should be conducted to the right road; later on he supports his contention that humanity was the cardinal principle of the Athenians by reference to the law providing that those who had been maimed in wars should be maintained at the expense of the state.73 Comparing Spartan and Athenian mores, he contends that mildness was the ruling propensity of the Athenians just as cruelty was of the Spartans, and he illustrates the contrast by the greater lenity with which he supposes the Athenians treated their slaves, whose condition, he maintains, “was infinitely more gentle at Athens than in any other city of Greece.”74 Most striking of all Goguet’s departures from customary thinking about antiquity is his praise of Solon over Lycurgus. Lycurgus, he had argued, condemned the Spartans to lives of idleness, while Solon, a more enlightened man, had, on the contrary, “been sensible, that sloth and too much leisure are more to be feared than all the vices that can reign in a state.”75
The ambivalence of Goguet was shared by the Encyclopedists, but on the whole the liberal tradition about Athens prevailed in the Encyclopédie— though nowhere are the inconsistencies of the Encyclopédie plainer than in the treatment accorded there to Athens by Jaucourt. In the article on Athens under the rubric “République,” he portrays Athens as declining almost immediately after the Persian Wars, her citizens the helpless pawns of manipulative orators, and he cites with approval the famous passage of Justin regarding the complete disintegration of Athens following Epaminondas’s death.76 In his essay on Sparta, he had written: “I feel myself in every way a Lacedaemonian. Lycurgus satisfies me in everything; I need neither Solon nor Athens.”77 As Jaucourt’s American editors point out, already here he has forgotten the condemnation of war in his article “Guerre” and the attack on helotry in his “Esclavage.”78 In Jaucourt’s “Démocratie,” however, probably written a good bit later than the entry for Sparta, Athens shines brightly. Here the Solon for whom he had no use in his article on Sparta is a hero. Jaucourt even manages to cite Plato as a source for the masterful way in which Athenian government succeeded in combining natural equality with proper deference to the wise and capable. He sees it as significant that democracies boast of being nurses to great men, and as evidence for the way democracy lifts the spirits he cites the manner in which Athens and Rome were elevated to empire “by virtue of their constitution.” Does his reader question that the people are capable of choosing leaders? The continually excellent choices of leaders made by the Greeks and Romans should dispel these doubts.
Although he had little opportunity to discuss Greek government in his contributions to the Encyclopédie itself, Voltaire’s other writings make clear his preference for Athens over Sparta. As we have seen, his essay on “Luxe” in the Dictionnaire Philosophique attacked the austere Spartans for having produced no notable artists, statesmen, or intellectuals and contrasted Sparta with the thriving commercial state of Athens, which fostered all manner of greatness. Following the lead of J. F. Melon, whose 1734 Essai politique sur le commerce had attempted to divorce the questions of affluence and decadence, Voltaire in his 1736 poem Le Mondain and his subsequent Défense du Mondain had sought to debunk myths of ancient modesty and sobriety, and his entry for “Democracy” in the Philosophical Dictionary afforded a further opportunity to refute contemporary views of the ancient world.79 Taking as his point of departure the attack on democracy in general and Athenian democracy in particular that Bayle had mounted in his dictionary in the entry for “Pericles,” Voltaire was quick to insist that Athenian justice was no worse than that dispensed by the supposedly enlightened countries of modern Europe, and he suggests that Bayle may have been unduly influenced by discontent with contemporary Holland when he judged Athens so harshly. Over a period of two centuries, Voltaire maintains, Athens’s popular government was “stained only by five or six acts of judicial iniquity,” and he is favorably impressed by reports that the Athenians had requested posthumous pardon of Socrates, Phocion, and the victors of Arginusae—a habit most writers before and after him have viewed as the product of a singularly repellent fickleness. Paralleling the anticlerical analogies of Chastellux, Voltaire finds democratic communities measuring up very well indeed against modern religious organizations: a democracy, he concedes, will make many mistakes, but only because it will be composed of men; though discord will prevail as in a convent of monks, still “there will be no St. Bartholemews there, no Irish massacre, no Sicilian vespers, no Inquisition, no condemnation to the galleys for having taken water from the ocean without paying for it.” Voltaire’s final judgment about Athens in this essay is unequivocal, as he proclaims
That the Athenians were warriors like the Swiss, and as polite as the Parisians were under Louis XIV; that they excelled in every art requiring genius or execution, like the Florentine in time of the Medici; that they were the masters of the Romans in eloquence, even in the days of Cicero; that this same people, insignificant in number, who scarcely possessed anything of territory, and who, at the present day, consist only of a band of ignorant slaves … yet bear away the palm from Roman power, by their ancient reputation, which triumphs at once over time and degradation.80
The most dramatic praise of Athens in eighteenth-century France, however, was reserved for the very eve of the Revolution. In 1788 two important French works on Greece appeared, one noteworthy for its immense popularity and the other for its startling originality. Published in the same year, Jean Jacques Barthélemy’s interminable historical novel The Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece and Cornelius De Pauw’s Philosophical Researches on the Greeks are diametrically opposed in their perspectives and their conclusions. The work of Barthélemy reproduces the familiar clichés of the anti-Athenian tradition, while a striking open-mindedness and independence of thought is evident in that of De Pauw (who also published his researches on the Germans, the American Indians, the Egyptians and the Chinese).
Like the “docu-dramas” of our own age, Anacharsis offered its audience a view of ancient Greece that, while rich and detailed, was nonetheless palatable and entertaining, and it was repeatedly cited as a principal source in works of nineteenth-century scholarship.81 It appeared in literally dozens of editions, including abridgments for schools and translations into Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, and English. An atlas to the voyages was also published, along with a companion volume of maps, plans, and coins. Barthélemy was a child of his age down to his adulation of Xenophon over Plato, complaining in a footnote that the Platonic Socrates lacked the “gravity” of Xenophon’s.82 The nature of Barthélemy’s interests is indicated by another footnote that treats the topic of melons, as Barthélemy wrestles with tricky horticultural niceties, ultimately finding himself constrained to refer readers to various modern critics in view of his inability to determine whether the Greeks were acquainted with melons and considered them a species of cucumber.83 When not concerned over the details of Hellenic flora or fauna, Barthélemy rehearses all the customary complaints about the Athenian multitude’s “natural licentiousness of manners,” the primacy of demagogues, and the obsession with games and festivals that led ultimately to the Macedonian conquest.84
De Pauw’s line of thinking was entirely different. A Protestant polymath whose curiosity knew no bounds, De Pauw was originally a German and served as the ambassador to the city of Liège. His nephew was Anacharsis Cloots, who would be executed under the Terror.85 De Pauw combined strong passions with bold iconoclasm, and he comes magnificently alive in the pages of his several anthropological treatises. Though he is little read today, he helped shape the thinking of Joseph de Maistre, Benjamin Constant, and Pierre-Charles Lévesque, the historian of Russia and China who also translated Thucydides.
De Pauw’s treatment of Athens was as innovative as Barthélemy’s was traditional. His intense frustration with modern writing about Greece is splashed liberally across his two-volume Researches. De Pauw sharply censures both his contemporaries and their predecessors for their mindless parroting of received wisdom in general and their repeated exaltation of Sparta over Athens in particular.86 Montesquieu, De Pauw claims, was never more wretched than when he undertook to speak of the Greeks, whose language he did not know; and most particularly he had no understanding of the republic of Athens, about which he made appalling factual errors.87 Rousseau he dismisses as “the most inconsequent thinker who has ever appeared.”88 De Pauw is savage toward the Spartans, who, he claims, contributed nothing to the progress of art or knowledge and were the professed enemies of repose, counting peace among public calamities, and he expresses the hope that his observations will produce a revolution in the thinking of those “who have admired this people with enthusiasm bordering on blindness.”89
The degree to which De Pauw departs from tradition in his treatment of Athenian government is astonishing. Just as some peoples were naturally disposed to trouble and anarchy, he writes—like the Poles and the Slavs—so the Athenians had “an inner penchant for order and legislation,” and everything in Athens was done with reflection and measure. De Pauw sees the Athenians’ changeability not as a vice but as a virtue. For De Pauw, the frequency with which the Athenians overturned one law and replaced it with another pointed to assiduousness in the pursuit of equity rather than fickleness or volatility.90 It is Athens, De Pauw writes, to which one looks for laws to build a new state just as one looks to Sweden for wood to build a ship; even ostracism is agreeable to De Pauw for its effectiveness in preventing political convulsions.91 Athens, he claims, is wrongly censured for being bellicose, for had she not been, she would have fallen to Persia or Sparta, both developments that would have marked the end of learning and culture.92 He is also quick to point out that many of the shortcomings of the Athenians were universal and not particular to them alone: why, he asks bitingly, should Pericles and Socrates be censured in Europe for the inadequacy of their offspring when the European nobility regularly produced such discreditable heirs?93
De Pauw’s judgments about Athens and Sparta were intertwined, for one of the most unusual and dramatic of his departures from tradition is his decision to blame Sparta rather than Athens for the Macedonian conquest of Greece. Demosthenes, he maintains, exaggerated greatly the Athenians’ slowness to furnish money for a campaign; for Philip himself was astonished at the promptness with which the Athenians sent out so many infantry, and they could hardly have done it without money. The real causes of the defeat at Chaeronea, De Pauw argues, were two. First, the Athenians were in too much of a hurry; second, and most decisively, the Spartans did not help. No people on earth, De Pauw writes, ever committed a fault so great or more irreparable than the Spartans who sat still while Philip conquered the Athenians. Furthermore, he adds, if the collapse of Greece is traceable to the failure of the confederative principle, to what is this very failure traceable if not to the uncooperativeness of the Spartans?94
Withal De Pauw finds Athens a grand state, superior in many respects to those of modern Europe.95 His remarks look ahead to the despair Victorian essayists were to express so amusingly over the habit of attacking Athens by particularizing the universal, and they look back as well to the Philosophical Dictionary and Voltaire’s insistence that the Athenians’ inequities were no worse, and in some cases less bad, than those of modern Europeans. Altogether De Pauw and Voltaire were probably the most pointed exponents of the liberal view of Athens.
. . . . .
The appearance of the narrative histories of Rollin, Stanyan, and Goldsmith drew considerable attention to the history of ancient Greece, though the chronological format inevitably focused interest on the ultimate collapse of Athenian power, especially in the minds of readers worried about decadence—laxity in morals and luxury in commerce. In both France and Britain, Pericles was viewed harshly and frequently castigated for setting the Athenians on the road to decline. In a somewhat earlier period British crusaders for accountability had conceived an opposition between Pericles, the self-seeking minister, and the vigilant Athenian people alert to his transgressions. As the century wore on, however, the conduct of Pericles came to be portrayed as emblematic of everything that was wrong at Athens, the creature of the democracy rather than its traducer. On the whole, English thinkers took a dim view of Athens, and the strictures of Stanyan and Goldsmith would be echoed in the Greek histories penned later in the century during the revolutions in France and America by John Gillies, William Young, and William Mitford.
French thinking about Athens was less uniform. In France during the latter half of the eighteenth century there existed fundamentally three traditions about the Greek city-states. The austere virtues of the Spartans were applauded and Athenian decadence decried by those who although eccentric in some respects (Mably in his socialist leanings, Rousseau in pretty much everything) were nonetheless traditionalists where things Greek were concerned. Rousseau’s association of cultivation and decadence ultimately trumped his preoccupation with equality and the involvement of citizens in government and led him to reject Athens for its refinements rather than embrace it for its egalitarianism. Iconoclastic liberals like Goguet and Chastellux deplored the inhumanity of Athens and Sparta alike. Eager proponents of the modern commercial state like De Pauw and Voltaire rejected Sparta and celebrated Athens. Whereas in England dissidents who opposed the government’s involvement in finance and agonized over conspicuous consumption had lauded Athens for the strict accountability to which she held her officials and called for a return to the ancient virtues of simplicity, in France Athens was more likely to be popular with those who defended modern economic development and mocked the call for a return to the modesty and sobriety of the ancients. On the whole the approach of French eighteenth-century thinkers to Greek government was oblique, as Athens and Sparta got caught up in the acrimonious debate over “le luxe,” and the quality of life and the formation of character came to replace constitutional questions as the focus of concern. The structure of government attracted interest primarily in its connection with social and economic institutions, as French writers employed antiquity to debate the prospects for public and private morality in a complex commercial state. A return to Athenian or Spartan government was not on the whole advocated, and in fact Voltaire stated openly that he would not endorse the resurrection of Athenian democracy.96 Like the civil wars of seventeenth-century England, however, the revolutions soon to come in France and America would focus closer attention on actual questions of classical government.