This week’s archival blog is again from the first volume of Studies, however this time it hails from the very first issue. While archival – first printed in 1912 – it has direct links to Studies current Summer 2025 edition, and the article “MAGA: On Making Athens Great Again, Then and Now”; wherein Dr Fiachra Long finds parallels between the rise of oligarchy in 5th BCE Athens and present-day America – in particular the foundation of their politics on power, verbal manipulation, and a culture of ‘might is right’.
J. M. Murphy, SJ (1883 – 1955), author of the article extracted below, was born in Kilkenny and was both educated in and taught classics. For more information on his life, please visit his entry in the Jesuit Archives.
J.M. Murphy, ‘Athenian Imperialism’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Mar., 1912), 97 – 113. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30092423
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Why at Ambition, worst of deities,
Son, graspest thou? Do not: she is Queen of Wrong.
Homes many and happy cities enters she,
And leaves for ruin of her votaries.
Thou art mad for her! – better to honour, son,
Equality which knitteth friends to friends,
Cities to cities, allies unto allies.
Man’s law of nature is equality,
And the less, ever marshalled foe against
The greater, ushers in the dawn of hate.(Euripedes. Way.)
In approaching any system of imperialism, it must ever be borne in mind that government has, in the last resort, to do with human beings. Where nations are called upon, or imagine themselves called upon, to undertake the political charge of other peoples, this fact cannot receive too much prominence. In so far as they show themselves heedless of the element of human nature in government, entire or partial failure will follow. Religious feeling, social and political traditions, national characteristics are factors in imperial government of which it is dangerous to be ignorant…Imperialism, after all, admitting the existence of the system, must always be a compromise successful in proportion to its delicacy, an endeavour to reconcile power and liberty, authority and self-government.
How to safeguard the strength of the one, without impairing the sacredness of the other, is the problem that all imperialists are called upon to solve. On the conciliation of this seeming antagonism will depend the stability and popularity of the dominant nation. True, such refinements in political theory were less valued, because less thought upon, in the empire which now concerns us. They are truisms, indeed, of which imperial nations do not like to be reminded, and with which it is not always convenient to sympathize. Yet, there was quite enough in Athenian history to point out to this ambitious nation the dangers that lay ahead; quite enough in her national temperament to cause prudence. Athenian imperialism, however, is another of history’s great paradoxes.
Apart from its merits or defects, the Athenian empire occupies a singular position, in history. The system of government which it evolved is not in any way distinctive; neither has it the finish or coherence which distinguish the work of Rome. But it was the merit of Athens to create a new type of empire familiar to the modern world, but wholly unknown before the fifth century B.C. The change-loving and progressive Athenians were a little impatient of the past. Pioneers in so much else, in politics, too, they were creative, and imperial democracy was the outcome of their devisings. A difficult task certainly to blend and harmonize principles seemingly so contradictory. Less youthful nations would have recoiled before an attempt of which earlier generations had not dreamt. Athens was not daunted. With boundless confidence in her own resources, she was more than sanguine of the future. She had no misgivings about entrusting the administration of an empire to the extremest form of democracy which history knows. Perhaps it might have been better for the empire and herself if she had.
The world of Hellas looked on with mingled interest and anxiety; interest in the movement, anxiety for the future. The political innovation, typified by imperial democracy, was gigantic, and its success it would be difficult to define. “Of course, all sensible men,” said the renegade Alcibiades, “know what democracy is, and I better than most, having suffered; but there is nothing new to be said about acknowledged insanity!” He was only voicing the prejudices of oligarchs and aristocrats so eloquently set forth by Plato. The “good men and true” looked with contempt on an experiment which Athens, they trusted, would not be suffered to survive. For them it opened a new and darker era, and spelt the destruction of privilege and autocracy. Hellas at large was less bitter, though not sanguine. “A people ruling – the very name of it is so beautiful, Isonomia” exclaims Herodotus.
…At long last, men might hope, empire and liberty would lay aside their rivalry, and work together for the good of humanity…Athens, unhappily, neither realized the sacredness or her trust nor admitted its obligations. Her supremacy, due to the concurrence of accuracy and design, dazzled her by its novelty, while her citizens at large looked upon the empire as a heaven sent windfall. Her conception of imperialism, indeed, was radically unsound, and her spirit more imperious than imperial…Pericles…had been trained in another school; the empire he ruled fell on times when men implicitly believed, if they did not openly profess, that might was right.
…Laxness in political morality was thus leagued with a false conception of government. This unhappy combination was not conducive to large-minded or enlightened statesmanship. “Democracies in ancient Greece,” a modern historian rightly reminds us, “were as illiberal in policy as oligarchies”. We need the reminder – for even Democratic Athens is hardly an exception. At all times it was exclusive; its citizenship a sacred privilege. Now, as mistress of a large and scattered empire, Athens was faced with the problem of the franchise. The unification and consolidation of her dependencies seemed to call for prompt and vigorous action, above all for a more politic and less rigid treatment of this question. In her earliest essays in government, Rome was wise enough to share her civic rights with the cities of the Latin League. Athens, a city, as Pericles claimed, open to all the world, where those who willed might learn or enjoy what there was to amuse or instruct, whose whole career was a struggle for equality, could hardly be less wise…The inner circle she would not suffer the empire to invade. Its privileges were for Athenians, and her subjects were not to be the equals of the imperial demos.
…With her inheritance of conservatism she was unable to part, and, with singular imprudence, handed it on enlarged to her children. In a memorable session, the Imperial Assembly gave its sanction to a law denying citizen rights to all whose parents were not both Athenian citizens. It was one of the ironies of history that the measure was proposed by that same Pericles who has immortalized the Liberality and Generosity of Athens…This Act of 451, Mr. Walker says, sealed the fate of the empire. In view of it’s momentous results, the statement is scarcely an exaggeration. Previously, the city seems to have connived at occasional usurpations of her citizenship; this “salutary neglect” – to borrow a phrase from Burke – was politic. Empire blurred her vision, narrowed her sympathies, aggravated her haughtiness. The novel, if perilous, State Socialism, fostered by Pericles, made Athenians jealously tenacious of imperial doles. Whatever the immediate advantages for the metropolis, however great the increase of Egyptian corn to which it entitled its citizens, for the empire at large the new measure was disastrous. With open eyes, Athens stunted and thwarted the natural development of her empire, and inaugurated her rule by irritating her subjects.
…Property qualification or residence at Athens were alike unavailing, and citizenship was put beyond the reach of the subjects. The process of amalgamation which empire is wont to encourage was summarily arrested, a ban placed on intermarriage, and general equality sternly discountenanced. Athens would not adapt herself to her Empire, nor suffer it to adapt itself to her. Expediency triumphed over statesmanship; the panem et circenses cry of the populace prevailed; and the demos was immune against unwelcome intruders.
Free-born Hellenes, as most of them were, proud of their superiority to all the world besides, they felt, very naturally, slighted and insulted. They were already embittered by the arbitrary appropriation of the Confederate Treasury – some three thousand Talents, according to Dr. Cavaignac. Most of them had suffered from Athenian supremacy, and looked to her for some form of compensation. Now she cut them adrift; denied them all voice in imperial legislation, debarred them from sitting on imperial juries, and branded them with the stigma of inferiority. The enemies of Athens must have blessed her for this inauspicious estrangement. The conservative reactionaries can hardly have approved of a measure so likely to provoke dissension. Within a few years, indeed, the progressive party, of which Pericles was the leader, stifled opposition. But Thucydides – son of Melesias – had no reason to be ashamed of his ostracism, with which (we should be glad to think) his protests for Repeal were somehow connected.
(…)
The imperial city realized the value of her citizenship – strangely described as a “useless gift” by a modern authority. She soon learned its worth as a political weapon, and wielded it with politic dexterity. To her fellow-Greeks, however, she was shy in extending it. The favourites of her choice were princelings of Northern Greece, whose services she needed. Greek religion was here no barrier, and its scruples were readily brushed aside to meet the demands of political security. Athens, we believe, would have given stability to the empire, confidence to her subjects by a like attempt to win the affections of her dependencies, and by taking into her confidence prominent and influential men in every portion of her dominion. It was this policy, as all the world knows, that the more practical Romans wisely adopted. Unpopular at first, as such innovations are likely to be, it ultimately triumphed. To it, in a large measure, the Roman Empire owed its endurance, and among the causes of its greatness Mr. Henderson rightly includes “the increasing spread of Roman citizenship among the provincials.”
(…)
Power led her to play with the weakness of her subjects, whose strength she seemed anxious to exhaust. Long before she had shown a fatal passion for interference – that curse of restless and unstable minds from which Burke prayed to be delivered. The spirit of arbitrary government entered into the forms of a free, and led to incessant encroachments on the liberty of the subjects. We are not wont to think of Athens – Periclean Athens – as swarming with pretty despots. Yet, this statesman himself is not ashamed to speak of her as “a tyrant city” – with all the unpleasant associations of that word. “Tyranny,” Mr. Cornford says, “meant, in Pericles’ original ideal, the supremacy of art and civilization.” It meant surely, above all, the supremacy of Athens. Her policy was carefully devised, and frankly selfish. It touched every branch of the life of the dependencies, and tarnished what it touched. Her imperialism, in a word, was markedly destructive; smiting the dependencies to strengthen the metropolis; robbing the empire to enrich its mistress. This was the price exacted by Imperialism.
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Centralization was the dominant principle on the new regime. Early in her imperial career, Athens began to meddle with the courts of justice in the dependencies. The strength of her navy, she felt, could silence protest, and caprice might be freely indulged. Encroachments gradual but constant ended where they were intended to end. At last, Athens reserved to her own courts almost all criminal cases, together with the more important civil offences. Such trials were to take place at Athens, before juries composed exclusively of Athenians, and presided over by Athenian judges. The step was characteristic, and illustrates the trend of her policy. It was a well-aimed blow at the autonomy of her subjects.
…An empire composed of Greeks was a difficult structure to erect. If the Greek was not a born ruler, neither was he a born subject. His cult and curse was Individualism. To political and civic autonomy he clung with murderous tenacity, and jealously resented intrusion on the sacredness of either. The city-state was for him the highest sphere of political activity, the only one where his passion for personal government could be adequately satisfied…Theorists as enlightened and practical as Aristotle, as idealistic as Plato, could rise to no higher conception; in their worship of the Polis, master and pupil are thoroughly Greek…It is not strange, then, that the Greeks disliked the empire. Much more did they detest the new-fangled methods which Athens was introducing. The centralization of justice was maiming and disfiguring that civic life they dearly loved, while Athens had little to give in return. Individualism and Centralization were bitter antagonists.
…From the Athenian point of view, the measure was immensely important. It brought large numbers of visitors to the imperial city, added to the resources of the treasury by duties and fees exacted from litigants and strangers, helped on many of the city traders – inn-keepers, cabmen, heralds, and the like. More than this, it provided salaried employment for large bodies of jurors; but as Mr. Cornford puts it, “it was the allies who paid the bill.” Above all, it strengthened the position of Athens in the empire and before the world. It made her, in a very real manner, the mistress of the dependencies, and converted her dikasteries into imperial high courts. The decisions of her jurors were final, and the empire depended for fair play on their ideas of justice. The demos might congratulate itself – or perhaps Pericles – on this happy stroke of policy. Individual Athenians, too, were being trained – as they were taught to believe – in the art of government and the intricacies of law. More truly were they acquiring a false idea of their own superiority, and of the dependence of their subjects.
(…)
For ourselves we feel that Athens lived more in the present than in the future, and was mainly concerned about the exploitation of the empire. The innovation would have been more tolerable had it been less thorough. Conscious of her strength, she chose to cut the Gordian knot, where it would have been wiser to untie it. She was well aware of the intense reluctance with which her Ionian kinsmen had submitted to a similar step not many years before. The traditions of the unpopular synoikism of Theseus at home were still vivid. Her own citizens bitterly resented Periclean centralisation at the beginning of the war with Sparta; while she herself proclaimed war against Mytilene for centralization in Lesbos! Consistency, however, is not a virtue of Imperialists. It was more essential to secure her hold over her subjects, and to gratify the Athenian hankering after obols.
(…)
The Athenian democrat was not scrupulous about political morality. Oligarchs he banished or carried off as hostages, with astonishing complacency. That he was likely to give them fair play at his tribunals, is far from probable. In the eyes of the populace, the oligarch was no mere political opponent: he was the spy in league with the enemy. “An understanding,” writes Mr. E. M. Walker, “existed between the democratic leaders in the subject states and the democratic party at Athens. Charges were easily trumped up against obnoxious oligarchs, and conviction as easily obtained in the Athenian courts of law”. This is a severe indictment against Athens from one peculiarly competent to judge. In our opinion, it is entirely just. This perversion of justice is, indeed, the burden of Aristophanes’complaints, the bitter insinuation of the Old Oligarchs, and certainly hinted at more than once in Thucydides. History, at all events, abounds in analogies.
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Athens’ single ambition was a monopoly of empire. She claimed supremacy in every department. As she appropriated the administration of justice, seized imperial territory, or sent out governors at will, so she presumed to interfere in matters affecting local prosperity and commerce. We know from the Chalcis decree how arbitrarily she withheld from the local exchequer metic taxes to which it was entitled – an instance…we likewise know something from the Methone decree of her absolutism on the sea – her entire disposal of the corn supplies of her subjects. We can not forget all that the celebrated Megarian decrees reveal to us of the imperial spirit – the heartless cruelty with which Athens closed on Megara, the markets, first of Attica, then of the Empire; and the stern measures she took to secure its complete isolation. This, too, be it remembered, while Pericles still guided the destinies of his native city.
But there is a further instance of Athenian intolerance, to which it may be useful to draw attention. It may have surprised those interested in the coinage of the period that the mints of the dependencies -their name was legion – seem so paralysed during this period…The “Decree of Clearchus” carefully studied by M. Weil, has shed a flood of light on this interesting subject. From its clauses, we see that Athens deliberately forbade the dependencies to mint, imposed penalties for violation of the Decree, and subsequently withdrew from circulation all money other than Athenian…Athens…suppressed almost completely the money of the Islands, and, in a great measure, that of the cities of Asia.
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We sometimes ask ourselves whether Pericles realised the flimsiness of the imperial structure he so carefully erected. Was his optimistic trust in humanity ever saddened by the thought that his work might disappear from the face of the earth? Thucydides shows him to us in at least one such despondent mood. That the great work of his life – the ennobling, almost sanctifying of the imperial city – could be obliterated, he never for a moment believed; and history has more than justified his confidence. He felt that the world could never be quite the same again, however soon the empire collapsed, that it would leave it richer than it found it. But with what degree of confidence he looked forward to the perpetuation of that (Athenian) supremacy for whose consolidation he had done so much, is quite another and more difficult question. He can have been under no delusion as to the insecurity of the empire. When he enunciated his imperial policy in the celebrated words “keep the allies well in hand,” he was appealing to the domineering instincts of his countrymen, and pointing out the way that the empire must go – or fall.
…If we are to identify Periclean statesmanship with the long and harassing code of penal restrictions already considered, justice counsels us to moderate the extravagance of our eulogiums on the great Athenian.Freedom, Trust, Equality – these were to make Athens great, and by these principles Pericles ruled at home. Dependence, Fear, Oppression were reserved for the imperial subjects – and they sum up the Imperial Policy. That this array of imperial devices, converging one and all on the unification of the empire, should have failed, is neither strange nor unnatural. Strange, perhaps, to those who forget that states are made up of human beings, with whose feelings and aspirations no form of government can recklessly trifle. Natural to those who are for ever mindful that government ultimately rests on the goodwill of the governed.
…Despite ruthless centralization, the empire was sadly lacking in true unification. Its specious uniformity was of that kind which Burke has forcibly described as “the dismal, cold, dead uniformity of servitude.” External conformity was wrung from the subjects by force. But an empire held together by nothing but force cannot win its way into the affections of its subjects. For all the glamour of her culture, Athens was cordially detested throughout the Greek world. When the great struggle with Sparta came, she found, as her own historian tells us, that public opinion had set strongly against her; that “every city, aye, every individual, was eager to do what he could by word or deed to help the Lacedemonians.” Athens, in fact, had taught her dependencies “that the government against which a claim of liberty is tantamount to high treason, is a government to which submission is equivalent to slavery”.
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Yet Athens will never die. But she does not live in human thought owing to imperial conquests. Her true empire is the empire of the spirit. Morientes vivimus, writes Professor Butcher, is the epitome of Greek History. It is no less true of Athens. She has done too much for the world, been too munificent a benefactor of civilization ever to be forgotten. In art, literature, science, she has left us priceless “possessions for all time”. To these we must look for her true and imperishable greatness; in these we find that “pleasure that banishes gloom”. These, and not her fleeting empire, have won for her, and ever will win for her, the undying gratitude of mankind.
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