Nationalism and Culture (65 page)

" Volkstum und Weltmacht in der Gesckichte. Leipzig, p. 18.

unrecorded time. Most of these invasions occurred in a prehistoric epoch and kept large sections of the country in constant ferment, as we learn from the traditions of the Greeks themselves. By these migrations and continual conflicts whole populations were driven out of their homeland and fled to the islands in the Aegaean or to the coast of Asia Minor. The greatest of these migrations was that of the Dorians, which is believed to have occurred about eleven hundred years before our era, and which gave rise to great changes in the social life of the country.

But these migrations from the north were certainly not the only onesj and there is much ground for believing that long before these invasions Asiatic tribes had already forced their way into the future home of the Hellenes. Numerous traces of Asiatic influence in the mythology of the Greeks and, very emphatically, the names of many cities and localities, bear witness to this. How far the influence of the Semitic Phoenicians extended on the Grecian mainland has not yet been incontestably established; that this influence could have been no small one is shown by the fact that a great number of the islands that were feter Grecian, such as the Cyclades, the Sporades, Rhodes, Cyprus and Crete, were colonized by the Phoenicians long before the existence of Greek society. The Carian people of Asia Minor also left distinct traces in Greece. Only from them can we derive the names of the citadel of Karia in Megara and of the legendary King Kar.

Of the Dorians, Aeolians and lonians, which are usually regarded as the three principal lines of the Greeks, the lonians, the most highly endowed and culturally most advanced of them all, seem to have the smallest infusion of Hellenic blood. A large number of famous historians have made mention of the extensive intermixture of the lonians with Semitic and other Oriental peoples. Ernst Curtius—and others with him—have even placed the original home of the lonians in Asia Minor. In support of this view Curtius urges, chiefly, that only in Asia Minor can the existence of an Ionian country be historically established. Of course, this does not prove that the lonians really stem from there. They might merely have migrated into Asia Minor and established a settlement there.^ Herodotus, too, referred in diff^erent places to the non-Hellenic origin of the lonians, especially of the Athenians, and designated them as descendants of the Pelasgians, who only later adopted the Greek language.

From all this one fact emerges clearly, that the Greeks present no particular national-political unity, nor one of race and descent, and that all assertions to the contrary rest merely on vague surmises and indefinite wish-concepts. Quite in accord with our earlier conclusions, unity was found only in the Greek culture, which spread from the west coast of Asia

* Ernst Curtius, Geschichte Griechenlands and Die Jonier vor ier jonischen Wanderung.

Minor and the islands of the Aegean to Sicily and southern Italy. To this must be added separate settlements in the Crimea, on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, and at the mouth of the Rhone.

It must, therefore, have been other causes which furthered the growth of such an outstandingly rich and splendid culture as the Hellenic j and we do not feel that we go astray when we see by far the most important and decisive of these causes in the political separateness and national diversity of the country. It was this healthy decentralization, this internal separation of Greece into hundreds of little communities, tolerating no uniformity, which constantly roused the mind to consideration of new matters. Every larger political structure leads inevitably to a certain rigidity of the cultural life and destroys that fruitful rivalry between separate communities which is so characteristic of the whole life of the Grecian cities. Taine depicts very clearly this political status in ancient Hellas:

To modern eyes the Greek state seems like a miniature painting. Argolis had a length of forty to fifty and a breadth of twenty to twenty-five miles; Laconia was of about the same size; Achaia is a narrow strip of land on the flank of a mountain range that slopes down to the sea. All Attica does not equal the half of one of our smallest [French] departments; the territory of Corinth, Sicyon and Megara extends for only an hour's journey; in general, and above all in the islands and the settlements, a state was merely a city on the coast with a circle of farms about it. From one acropolis one looked across to the acropolis or the mountains of a neighbor city. In such a narrow enclosure everything is clear and easily understood; the intellectual fatherland has about it nothing of the gigantic, the abstract and the indefinite, as with us; the mind can embrace it, it is identified with the physical fatherland; both are outlined in the mind of the citizen by distinct boundaries. To conceive of Athens, Corinth, Argos or Sparta, he thinks of the recesses of its valley or of the outline of its city. He is acquainted with all of its citizens, just as he can picture all its boundaries, and the narrowness of his political enclosure, like the form of his corporeal enclosure, supplies him in advance with that middling, limited type in which all his intellectual conceptions will be shaped."^

These words reveal to us the whole nature of the Grecian city. In such a miniature state man's love of the homeland identifies itself completely with his love of the community. Homeland and fatherland are still one and the same and have nothing in common with the abstract modern idea of the fatherland. Therefore, the so-called "national idea" was always entirely alien to the Greeks, and even in times of most pressing danger could not strike root among them. In Homer one finds not the slightest trace of national fellowship, and there is nothing to show that the national idea was any more appealing to the Greeks in the bloom of their culture.

^ Philosophy of Art, p. 319.

It was merely the consciousness of belonging to a common culture that held the Greek cities together. That is the reason why the colonizings of the Greeks had quite another character than those of all the other peoples of antiquity. The Phoenicians thought of their colonies primarily as associates in trade. For the Romans they played the part of subject territories, which were economically drained by the mother country and were entirely dependent on the Roman state. Not so with the Greeks. They founded their colonies with the same notion as their cities in the closer homeland —as independent organizations, which were, indeed, linked to the mother country by the same culture, but which otherwise felt in themselves the pulse beat of their own separate lives. A colony had, moreover, its own constitution, was a foUs in itself, and competed with the cities of the homeland in the independent development of its own cultural life.

Since the area of the Greek municipality extended to only a few square miles every citizen was easily able to keep track of the entire public life and to form his own judgment about everything—a circumstance of great importance, which is utterly inconceivable in our modern state organization with the wide ramifications of its governmental machinery and the complicated gearing of its bureaucratic institutions. Hence the perplexed helplessness of the citizen of the modern state, his exaggerated overvaluation of governmental proclamations and of political leadership, which deprive him of all personal initiative. Since he is, of course, not in a position to keep track of all the fields of activity of the modern state and its internal and external policy, and is, on the other hand, so firmly convinced of the unalterable fixedness of all these functions that he believes he would sink into a bottomless quicksand if the political equilibrium were at all disturbed, his feeling of his own personal unimportance and dependence upon the state becomes strengthened, and his belief in the absolute necessity of political authority—which today is deper seated in man than his belief in the authority of God—becomes deeper still. So, at best, he dreams only of a change of the persons at the head of the state and does not comprehend that all the inadequacies and evils of the political machine which constantly oppress him depend on the very existence of the state itself and hence always recur in any of the various forms it may assume.

Not so with the Greek. Since he could more easily get a view of the inner workings of the polis he was in a better position to pass judgment on the conduct of his leading men. He had their earthbound humanity always before his eyes and was the more Interested in his own affairs because his intellectual agility was not crippled by blind faith in authority. In no country were the great men so exposed to the judgment of public opinion as in Greece at the time of its highest cultural development. Even the greatest and most undeniable merit afforded no protection in this regard. Men of the stature of a Miltiades, a Themistodes, had to experience this

in their own persons. In this way public life in Greece was kept always in flux, and no one fixed ordering of affairs could persist for long. Thus were the personal freedom and possibilities of development of the individual best safeguarded i his initiative did not exhaust itself on the dead forms of a central state authority. In this condition of intellectual freedom lay the sources of that magnificent culture the powerful development of which cannot otherwise be explained. Sir Francis Galton mentions, correctly, that Athens alone, most important of the Greek city-republics, and the one where spiritual freedom was most at home, in the course of a single century, from 530 to 430 B.C., produced not fewer than ten of the most outstanding men of Grecian history, namely, Miltiades, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles, Thucydides, Socrates, Xenophon, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Phidias. The English scholar adds that only Florence, where under similar conditions a culture as rich, even if of altogether different type, developed, can be compared with Athens in this respect.®

This spirit of creative activity reached its high state of perfection in every city of Greece with the exception of Sparta, which never freed itself from the domination of the aristocracy, while all the other cities were finding' tTie way to democracy. In Spaita, therefore, the idea of political sovereignty played the decisive role, to which everything else was subordinated. True, it is undeniable that in Athens, Thebes and Corinth forces were always present that worked for a political sovereignty in the country'j but that merely proves that every form of the state stands as a hindrance in the way of culture, even when its power is ever so limited. But the complete political and national separateness of Greece took the strength out of these efforts toward an extension of power j even where they had a passing success it was only momentary, and never attained the status of an established political order such as is proper to all great states. Nietzsche, years ago, recognized the internal opposition between foils and culture and characterized the allegedly necessary connection between them as a delusion.®

Not only did Greece know no unified national state j it had never learned to recognize a priestly hierarchy like that of the Babylonians, the Egyptians or the Persians, after which as prototype the Papacy was later formed. And since there was no church, there was also no theology and no catechism. The religion of the Hellenes was an airy structure, in the development of which the poets had a much greater share than the priests. The religious concepts did not support the dogmatism of a theological caste and were scarcely any hindrance to freedom of thought. The Greek thought of his gods differently from most other Oriental peoples.

^Hereditary Genius, Its Laws and Consequences, 1869. ^ Menschliches Allzumenschliches, Chap. 8.

He clothed them with all the qualities of human greatness and human weakness, and faced them, therefore, with that rare simplicity which gives to his religious concepts a peculiar tone to be found among no other people of antiquity. This is also the reason why the idea of hereditary sin remained always alien to the Hellenes. Schiller was quite right when he said that while in Greece the gods were regarded as human, man had to feel himself divine. All Olympus was, so to speak, a faithful copy of the rich Hellenic cultural life with its internal political separateness, its colorful manifoldness and constructive power, its constant rivalry and its utter humanness and all-too-humanness. In Hellas, too, man rhirrored himself in his gods. Only when one sees clearly what a crippling influence the Christian church exerted for centuries on the intellectual life of Europe, how it has supported every despotism and remains today the unconquered stronghold of every intellectual and social reaction, does one comprehend what a chasm yawns between the religious experiences of the Greek and the dead, soul-shackling^ dogmas of the Christian church.

There are few perioSs'in history when the necessary conditions for the unfolding of a great culture were so prodigally provided as in ancient Hellas. What might seem to the modern statesman the great defect in the Hellenic world, the extreme political dividedness of the country, was the greatest blessing for the rich and unrestricted development of its cultural strength. How little of the feeling for national unity there was among the Greeks was shown most conspicuously at the time of the Persian wars. If there ever was a time calculated to awaken a national consciousness among the Greek tribes, this was the time, when Persian despotism had set itself to put an end to the freedom and independence of the Greek cities. The danger which threatened the Hellenes then was equally great for all. No one could have had the faintest illusion about thisj everyone knew what a Persian victory meant for the Greek community. But it was just at that time of greatest danger that the political disunion of the Hellenes became most noticeable.

Already at the time of the victorious expedition of Harpagon who, under orders from the Persian King Cyrus, brought most of the Greek cities in Asia Minor under Persian domination (546-545 B.C.), and later at the time of the Ionic revolt^499-494 b.c), there were two occurrences of far-reaching imporTarice, which might be regarded as a foretaste of the later Persian wars, and which showed so unmistakably the complete lack of any unified national eflFort among the Greeks that a unified resistance against the Persians never came to pass. Miletus, which was so cruelly punished at the suppression of the Ionic revolt, on the occasion of the military expedition of Harpagon, left the other cities altogether in the lurch in order to negotiate a favorable peace with the Persians. Only a few cities carried on the war to the bitter end. Most of them when they saw