Comparative Literature/Book 3/Chapter 1

by Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett

CHAPTER I.

THE CITY COMMONWEALTH GROUP.

§ 45. It has been said with truth that the "brief blossom-time" of the Periclean age has so far dazzled modern critics that they have come to identify the short-lived spirit of that age with the spirit of the Greek race in general. The error cannot, however, with fairness be laid at the door of the modern critic alone. The Athenian spirit in its full life and vigour could not brook the thought of a time when it was not, threw a kind of glamour over the past history of Hellas, and universalised its own ideas at the expense alike of contemporary states of Greek society less developed than its own, and of the early life of chief and clan. Thus, to select a literary example, the dramatic spectacles and forensic pleading of Athens underlie the general canons of Aristotle's poetic and rhetorical criticism, and supply the living particulars which his philosophy expands into ideal forms. Athens herself is, in fact, the type of a city commonwealth, her literature the ideal of such a city's literature. The custom of speaking of "Greek" literature or the Greek "nation"—the latter an abuse of language to be peculiarly condemned—obscures the real nature of that social and political development which has given us the masterpieces of Athenian thought and art. Inheriting the poetic treasures of the tyrannies and the Homeric king-ships, songs of lyrists dependent on the tyrant's palace or the chieftain's hall, Athenian literature strikes its roots deep into the local life of prehistoric Hellas. The flowers and fruits of Athenian imagination and reason spring from a soil to which every part of Greece in its different degree of culture contributed somewhat; and under these external influences the mind of Athens may be observed progressing in the two directions so profoundly affecting literary growth—the evolution of individual character and the expansion of social life. Athens, gathering up into herself all the past and contemporary Greek life of lower evolution, develops within herself an individualism deeper than the Greeks had ever known before, and a width of social sympathy impossible in days of early Greek isolation. In the synoikism of the Attic demes described by Thucydides^[1] we have Athens springing out of isolated village communities; in the days of Macedonian supremacy we have her old political hegemony exchanged for that intellectual centralism of Western civilisation which, from the time of Isokrates to the present, she has never lost. From the isolation and exclusiveness of clan life to world-empire of intellect—such is the brief epitome of Athenian progress; and it is this twofold relation to a narrowly isolated past and a world-wide future that makes Athens the type of the city commonwealth in social and individual development.

To illustrate this typical character we have only to contrast Athens with Rome and the Italian republics. Rome, like Athens, finds the roots of her social life deep down in the clan age. That age, in fact, left upon Roman character marks far more lasting than can be observed in Athenian. From the time of the XII. Tables down to the utmost relaxation of the Patria Potestas the spirit of Roman life was more or less that of the clan narrowed for the most part into the dimensions of the familia. But it is just this conservatism that prevents Rome from competing with Athens as the proper type of the city commonwealth in literary development. The reconciliation of the clanned with the unclanned Romans is reached too late to allow a Roman literature, common property of plebeian and patrician, to spring up. The struggles of Plebs and Patres—essentially one of the clanless against the clansmen for equal rights of marriage, landed property, and political capacity—prevent the rise of Roman unity until the city commonwealth has become the metropolis of a municipal empire of force which must borrow its intellectual refinement from abroad. Not so with Athens. Here the commonwealth is neither parted asunder into gentiles and those who can boast no gens (plebs gentem non habet), nor widened, while thus internally divided, into the metropolis of a municipal empire. Nor like Florence, split into factions almost as permanently hostile as those of Rome, is Athens oppressed by membership of any world-empire; the freedom of her thought knows not the restrictions of a world-religion, and that of her art is unoppressed by models whose imitation cannot but disappoint and whose existence often damps the ardour of young genius. The burning of the Alexandrian Library by the Khalif Omar, it has been said, may not have inflicted so severe a loss on civilisation as some have supposed, "inasmuch as the inheritance of so vast a collection of writings from antiquity would, by engrossing all the leisure and attention of the moderns, have diminished their zeal and their opportunities for original productions." It would be interesting to estimate how far the genius of the Italian republics was diverted from literature to painting and sculpture by the presence of literary models which it must have seemed alike hopeless to surpass by creation and to equal by imitation.

§ 46. Athens, then, is the type of the city commonwealth as an organism internally united, free to pursue its own development, unshackled by inheritances from the past, uncurbed by relations with any larger social union, political or religious. But it may be questioned whether the city commonwealth is a phase of social life found with sufficient frequency to admit of its being taken as a stage of social evolution. It may be said that Athens, Rome, Florence, not only represent, as we have admitted, very different types of the city commonwealth, but that these are isolated cases possessing no widely found characteristics which would justify us in setting them apart as specimens of a defined social organism.

When we look at the East in general and the civilisation of India in particular, we must candidly admit that there are large districts of the world's surface in which city life has exerted no influence compared with the municipal systems of Greece and Rome and the nations which have risen among their ruins. If Rome passed at a single stride from a city commonwealth to a world-empire without waiting to grow into a nation, the social evolution of the East seems to have passed from the village community to world-empire without experiencing the stage of isolated city commonwealths. But the vast influence of municipal life and thought on Western progress abundantly demonstrates the claim of the city commonwealth to be regarded as a leading stage in social development. Objectors, accordingly, will probably shift their ground to the difficulty of defining the nature of the city commonwealth. But a little examination will show that this difficulty is exaggerated, and that the objection founded upon it is one on which all attempts at definition in social science would suffer shipwreck. No doubt, if we were simply to put forward "the city" as a social classification, we should expose ourselves to the very serious objection that so vague a term confuses clan-cities like the Hebrew, in which the inhabitants are regarded as "sons" and "daughters" of the place—a curious combination of kinship and local contiguity as social ties—with municipal life, like that of Athens and Rome, in which kinship of communal nature is gradually forgotten, and with royally or imperially chartered towns, like those of England, France, Spain, Germany, in which kinship ties are altogether lost and the connection between local and central government alone regarded. The term "city commonwealth" has been used to prevent any such ambiguity. It is intended to call attention to the fact that the "city" which occupies so conspicuous a place in social history is neither a village commune nor a chartered town, but a self-dependent unit, rising indeed out of clans and villages, and expanding, it may be, into an empire, but clearly distinguishable alike from communal and imperial systems. But the objection is really based on a mistaken view of social science which would destroy all its definitions. According to this view, our social classes must possess a clear-cut regularity of outline such as the insensible gradation of forms of social life renders impossible. We have previously referred to this irrational requirement, and can only repeat that the fallacy proceeds from the assumption that a class can ever possess the defined unity of individual being.

So far as the social classification under discussion is concerned, it may be added that the range of the city commonwealth, like that of the clan itself, has been concealed by the fact that rarely have physical and social conditions so combined as to allow the development of language and literature bearing distinct marks of a community so limited in extent. None the less clear is it that in passing from the localism of tribes and clans to the centralism of national life the city commonwealth is an intermediate stage which cannot be ignored, because some social groups have made it but a temporary halting-place, while others, from a variety of causes, have accepted it as their social ideal.

Footnotes

1. Bk. ii. ch. 15 (vol. i. p. 203, Arnold's edition, 1868).