Read Ebook: The Origin of Tyranny by Ure P N Percy Neville

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Ebook has 3973 lines and 173929 words, and 80 pages

CHAP. PAGE I INTRODUCTION 1

II ATHENS 33

V LYDIA 127

VI ARGOS 154

X CAPITALIST DESPOTS OF THE AGE OF ARISTOTLE, THE MONEY POWER OF THE RULERS OF PERGAMUM, PROTOGENES OF OLBIA 280

APPENDICES 307

INDEX 339

FIG. PAGE 1 Lophos Loutrou from Daskalio station 42

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The seventh and sixth centuries B.C. constitute from many points of view one of the most momentous periods in the whole of the world's history. No doubt the greatest final achievements of the Greek race belong to the two centuries that followed. But practically all that is meant by the Greek spirit and the Greek genius had its birth in the earlier period. Literature and art, philosophy and science are at this present day largely following the lines that were then laid down for them, and this is equally the case with commerce. It was at the opening of this epoch that the Greeks or their half hellenized neighbours the Lydians brought about perhaps the most epoch-making revolution in the whole history of commerce by the invention of a metal coinage like those that are still in circulation throughout the civilized world.

It was no accident that the invention was made precisely at this time. Industry and commerce were simultaneously making enormous strides. About the beginning of the seventh century the new Lydian Dynasty of the Mermnadae made Sardis one of the most important trading centres that have arisen in the world's history. The Lydian merchants became middlemen between Greece and the Far East. Egypt recovered its prosperity and began rapidly to develop commercial and other relations with its neighbours, including the Greeks. Greek traders were pushing their goods by sea in all directions from Spain to the Crimea. Concrete evidence of this activity is still to be seen in the Corinthian and Milesian pottery of the period that has been so abundantly unearthed as far afield as Northern Italy and Southern Russia. It was a time of extraordinary intellectual alertness. Thales and the numerous other philosophers of the Ionian School were in close touch with the merchants and manufacturers of their age. They were in fact men of science rather than philosophers in the narrow modern sense of the latter word, and most of them were ready to apply their science to practical and commercial ends, as for example Thales, who is said to have made a fortune by buying up all the oil presses in advance when his agricultural observations had led him to expect a particularly plentiful harvest. A corner in oil sounds very modern, and in fact the whole of the evidence shows that in many ways this ancient epoch curiously anticipated the present age.

Politically these two centuries are generally known as the age of tyrants. The view that the prevalence of tyranny was in some way connected with the invention of coinage has been occasionally expressed. Radet has even gone so far as to suggest that the first tyrant was also the first coiner. He does not however go further than to suggest that the tyrant started a mint and coinage when already on the throne.

The evidence appears to me to point to conclusions of a more wide-reaching character. Briefly stated they are these: that the seventh and sixth century Greek tyrants were the first men in their various cities to realize the political possibilities of the new conditions created by the introduction of the new coinage, and that to a large extent they owed their position as tyrants to a financial or commercial supremacy which they had already established before they attained to supreme political power in their several states.

In other words their position as I understand it has considerable resemblances to that built up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D. by the rich bankers and merchants who made themselves despots in so many of the city states of Italy. The most famous of these are the Medici, the family who gave a new power to the currency by their development of the banking business, and mainly as a result of this became tyrants of Florence. Santo Bentivoglio of Bologna passed from a wool factory to the throne. Another despot of Bologna was the rich usurer Rom?o Pepoli. At Pisa the supreme power was grasped by the Gambacorti with an old merchant named Pietro at their head. At Lodi it was seized by the millionaire Giovanni Vignate. The above instances are taken from Symonds' sixth class of despots of whom he says that "in most cases great wealth was the original source of despotic ascendancy."

It is not necessary here to examine in detail the various forms taken by this new paper currency. It is enough to point out that it enables property to be transferred and manipulated far more rapidly and on far larger a scale than was previously possible. Only one other point in the history of the new currency needs to be here mentioned. It cannot be better expressed than in the words used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the House of Commons on November 28th, 1914:

I have been much struck since I have been dealing with these transactions with how little even traders who form a part of this great machinery know about the mechanism of which they form an essential part.... I do not think that the general public--and I am putting myself among them--ever realized the extent to which the business not merely of this country, but of the whole world, depended upon this very delicate and complicated paper machinery.

Apparently it needed a European war to bring home to the modern world of commerce the nature of its currency. This fact should warn us against expecting to find in early Greece any very clear recognition of the revolution in the currency that then took place. When gold and silver coins were first circulated they had a corresponding effect to the modern issues of paper. They enabled property to be transferred with greater ease and rapidity. We may be sure however that the character and possibilities of the new currency did not at once receive universal recognition. The merchants in the bazaars of Lydia and Ionia who best understood how to make use of it must have profited enormously.

The experts in the new finance of the last two generations have been exercising a profound influence upon politics and government. There are many people, particularly in America, who believe that there is a possibility of this influence becoming supreme. It is worth while quoting a few of these opinions:

This era is but a passing phase in the evolution of industrial Caesars, and these Caesars will be of a new type--corporate Caesars.

The flames of a new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the state and have bred individuals greater than themselves, and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master instead of servant.

For some months past the sugar trust has been the Government of the United States.

In 1884 there seems even to have been an idea of running a Standard Oil senator for the United States presidency. "Henry B. Payne is looming up grandly in the character of a possible and not altogether improbable successor to Mr Tilden as the Democratic candidate for the presidency."

The danger of supreme power in America passing into the hands of a few capitalists has even been publicly acknowledged by a President of the United States during his period of office. "Mr Wilson also discussed the division between capital and labour. He dwelt for the greater part of the speech on the effort of 'small bodies of privileged men to resume control of the Government,' and added: 'We must again convince these gentlemen that the government of this country belongs to us, not to them.'"

It should however be said at once that my view appears to have been held by no one who has published opinions on the subject from the fourth century B.C. onwards. This however is not fatal. Later in this chapter reasons will be suggested for holding that the true character of the early tyranny was lost sight of in the days of Plato and Aristotle. Why truer views on this particular subject should be recovered precisely at the present period may be sufficiently explained by the modern financial revolution, which makes it possible to approach the question from a point which has scarcely been accessible during the last two thousand years. With this warning we may proceed to state the nature of the evidence in favour of this view that the earliest tyrannies were founded and based on wealth.

The greater part of it is drawn from anecdotes and incidental statements of fact about particular seventh or sixth century tyrants preserved in Herodotus and later Greek and Latin writers. The various tyrants are dealt with individually in the remaining chapters of the book.

Glimpses into the economic and political life of the seventh and sixth centuries are occasionally to be got from the scanty remains of the poets of the period, supplemented by cautious references to later writers. It will be convenient to examine at once this more general evidence.

The only two writers of the age of the tyrants of whom more than the merest scraps have come down to us are Solon and Theognis. Both deal professedly with the social and political problems of their day. But both address audiences who are familiar with those problems. Even if their whole works had been preserved instead of a few hundred lines in either case, we should not expect to have the fundamental problems explicitly stated. It would be possible to read a large selection of articles and speeches by quite the best journalists and politicians on many recent political measures and at the end of it to be left in uncertainty as to the content and purport of the measure in question. We must expect the same difficulty in reading Solon and Theognis. And it must be confessed that we find it. But there is nothing in the extant fragments of either writer which discredits the theory. More than that there are passages in both of them that become of the utmost significance if the early tyrants owed their power to their previous wealth but are rather pointless on any other hypothesis.

Solon's position in relation to the tyranny is explained in the chapter dealing with Athens. But a few lines may be quoted here:

But of themselves in their folly the men of the city are willing Our great city to wreck, being won over by wealth. False are the hearts of the people's leaders.

Great men ruin a city: for lack of understanding Under a despot's yoke lieth the people enslaved.

These last two lines were presumably written after Peisistratus had made himself tyrant of Athens. Solon's fears had been realized. The citizens had been "won over by wealth" to "wreck their great city." Is not the best sense made out of these lines by assuming that what Solon feared and what actually happened was that the popular leader had made use of his wealth to establish himself as tyrant? Neither the "people's leaders" of the first quotation nor the "great men" of the second are specifically stated to have been extremely rich, but to quote again the words of Solon, both may be plausibly identified with the foremost of

Those who had power and made men to marvel because of their riches.

The political aim of Theognis was to prevent a recurrence of tyranny in Megara. What does the poet bid his townsmen beware of? Not of eloquence, not of violence, not of rashly appointing a lawgiver or ??????????. All his warnings are directed against wealth. The whole town of Megara had become commercial. Birth had lost its prestige, and wealth acquired unprecedented power. He complains how

Tradesmen reign supreme: the bad lord it over their betters.

This is the lesson that each and all must thoroughly master: How that in all the world wealth has the might and the power.

Many a bad man is rich, and many a good man needy.

Not without cause, O wealth, do men honour thee above all things.

Most men reckon the only virtue the making of money.

Everyone honours those that are rich, and despises the needy.

When he explicitly alludes to the dangers of the establishment of a tyranny, his references to wealth are no less prominent:

Cyrnus, this city is pregnant. I fear lest a man it may bear us Swollen with insolent pride, leader in stern civil strife.

The couplet last quoted almost certainly refers to a possible tyrant. Insolent pride is one of the tyrant's stock characteristics. There is no reference to wealth in this particular context. But there can be little doubt that this same character is also referred to earlier in the poem. Who, the poet asks, can preserve his reverence for the Gods:

In this last passage the pride and insolence are directly attributed to enormous wealth.

Or again:

Be thou sure that not long will that city remain unshaken, Even though now it may lie wrapped in the deepest repose, Soon as soever to those that are bad these things become pleasing-- Gains that, whenever they come, bring with them ill for the state. For from these arise factions, murders of men by their kindred, Despots withal.

What are the gains that lead up to tyranny? Is it not most probable that they are some form of payment received by the commons from the would-be tyrant?

Solon and Theognis wrote with the examples of Gyges, Pheidon, Orthagoras, Cypselus, Theagenes and the rest of the seventh century tyrants before them. If they constantly feared that some wealthy tradesman would make himself tyrant, it must surely have been because the tyrants had sprung from or been allied with this new class of wealthy traders and financiers.

Wealth adorned with virtues Brings opportunity for this and that.

Ever in the quest of noble achievements Toil and outlay strive after the issue.

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