A Study of History: Abridgement of Volumes I-VI (Royal Institute of International Affairs) by Toynbee Arnold J. & D.C. Somervell

Author:Toynbee, Arnold J. & D.C. Somervell [Toynbee, Arnold J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1947-12-30T16:00:00+00:00

(4) THE NEMESIS OF CREATIVITY: IDOLIZATION OF AN EPHEMERAL INSTITUTION

The Hellenic City-State

In examining the part played in the breakdown and disintegration of the Hellenic Society by the idolization of this institution— so brilliantly successful within its proper limits but at the same time, like all human creations, ephemeral—we shall have to distinguish between two different situations in which the idol stood as a stumbling-block in the way of the solution of a social problem.

The earlier, and graver, of the two problems is one which we have examined already in another context and can now, therefore, briefly dismiss. What we have called the Solonian economic revolution required, as one of its corollaries, some kind of political federation of the Hellenic World. The Athenian attempt to achieve this failed, and resulted in what we have diagnosed as the breakdown of the Hellenic Society. It is obvious that the cause of this failure was an inability on the part of all concerned to get over the stumbling-block of city-state sovereignty. But while this inescapable and central problem was left unsolved a secondary problem, which was of the Hellenic dominant minority’s own seeking, came treading upon its heels when Hellenic history passed over from its second to its third chapter at the turn of the fourth and third centuries B.C.

The chief outward sign of this transition was a sudden increase in the material scale of Hellenic life. A hitherto maritime world, confined to the coasts of the Mediterranean Basin, expanded overland from the Dardanelles to India and from Olympus and the Apennines to the Danube and the Rhine. In a society which had swollen to these dimensions without having solved the spiritual problem of creating law and order between the states into which it was articulated, the sovereign city-state was so utterly dwarfed that it was no longer a practicable unit of political life. This was in itself by no means a misfortune; indeed, the passing of this traditional Hellenic form of parochial sovereignty might have been taken as a heaven-sent opportunity for shaking off the incubus of parochial sovereignty altogether. If Alexander had lived to ally himself with Zeno and Epicurus, it is conceivable that the Hellenes might have succeeded in stepping straight out of the city-state into the Cosmopolis; and in that event the Hellenic Society might have taken on a new lease of creative life. But Alexander’s premature death left the World at the mercy of his successors, and the evenly balanced rivalries of the contending Macedonian warlords kept alive the institution of parochial sovereignty in the new era which Alexander had inaugurated. But on the new material scale of Hellenic life parochial sovereignty could be salvaged only on one condition. The sovereign city-state must make way for new states of higher calibre.

These new states were successfully evolved, but, as the result of a series of knock-out blows which Rome delivered, between 220 and 168 B.C., to all her rivals, the number of these states was abruptly reduced from the plural to the singular.

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