The Historians' History of the World 04

There are two quite different points of view from which the history of a foreign nation may be regarded. One of these may be called the “sympathetic,” the other the “antipathetic” view. It was the latter of these which Mitford chose, or rather to which he was impelled by temperament, in dealing with those phases of Athenian life which are the central facts in the political history of Greece. It may be laid down almost as an axiom that it is impossible to write a truly great history of a great people from the antipathetic standpoint. At best, one can obtain only a surface knowledge of a foreign people—it is hard enough to gain a correct knowledge of one’s own race. Every people, like every individual, is a strangely inconsistent organism. The deeds of its diverse moods never seem to harmonise; they are as different as the two sides of a shield or medal, and in proportion as we seize on one phase or another of the inconsistencies, we change utterly the type of the picture. Of course the great historian must see all sides and properly adjust them; but the difficulty is this: it is much easier to detect the inconsistencies than the underlying consistencies, which, after all, are necessary to national life. Hence the antipathetic historian makes out a strong case against the nation with relative ease, while quite overlooking the better side; whereas the sympathetic historian, while searching for the better side, cannot by any possibility overlook the obvious inconsistencies.

To illustrate from the case in hand: Mitford was an ardent tory, and he insisted on weighing Greek conduct in his own balance. He never failed to sneer at the democratic tendency of Athens, and to point out the inconsistencies in Athenian life. And he found ample material. Nothing is more startling to the student who undertakes a careful survey of the history of Greece than the glaring defects of this people. Take two or three illustrations: The Athenians contended all along for equality of rights, yet (1) the majority of their co-residents were slaves; (2) they frequently denied to their best citizens the privilege of living in Athens, banishing them, without even the charge of crime, by ostracism; and (3) they strove all along to establish imperial power for Athens over other cities—strove so fiercely for it that the final result was the utter overthrow of Greece itself.

Again, the Athenian is said to have worshipped the æsthetic and the beautiful. His poetry and art attest the truth of the claim. Yet at table he ate with his fingers; in the streets he committed indescribable vulgarities without concealment; and in his relations with his fellows he indulged in practices of the most revolting kind so commonly that to “love after the manner of the Greeks” became an opprobrious by-word among nations. Herodotus himself records that the Greeks taught these practices to the Persians, who to this day are reproached with them.

To go no further, here is plenty of material for the antipathetic historian. Yet even a very brief analysis might serve to modify the first judgment which would tend to denounce the Greeks as the most inconsistent and disreputable of mortals.

Thus, as to the slaves, a sympathetic historian would not forget that slavery had existed almost everywhere in antiquity, among Hamitic, Semitic, and Aryan races alike; and that modern nations did not throw it off for more than two thousand years after the downfall of Greece. Nor will he forget that the last great nation to discard it was the United States, the most advanced of democracies; and that, when the great struggle came through which it was at last rooted out there, practically all Europe sympathised in spirit with the slave-holder, and not with the party that strove to free their fellow-men. These are grotesque inconsistencies; but with the later history in mind we can scarcely hold up the matter of slavery as an essentially Greek inconsistency.

Then consider the question of ostracism. At first sight it surely seems difficult to bring within the pale of reason this fact of the banishment from Athens of one great citizen after another—of Themistocles, the hero of Salamis, of Aristides the Just, of the brilliant Alcibiades, of Xenophon, and of Thucydides. But consider the matter a little further. Here was a little people, numerically insignificant, who had got hold of a unique principle. They had experienced the pleasures of personal liberty, of free “government of, for, and by the people,” and all the world about them looked jealously on their experiment. Always the gold of Persia was at hand to help on an aristocratic party at home in the effort to overthrow the democratic party by whatever means, fair or foul.