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GREEK IMPERIALISM
BY
WILLIAM SCOTT FERGUSON
PROFESSOR OF ANCIENT HISTORY
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY WILLIAM SCOTT FERGUSON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published September 1913_
TO MY MOTHER
PREFACE
This book contains seven lectures, six of which were delivered at theLowell Institute in Boston during February, 1913. In the first of themthe main lines of imperial development in Greece are sketched. In theothers I have tried to characterize, having regard rather to clearnessthan to novelty or completeness, the chief imperial growths whicharose in Greece during the transformance of city-states from ultimateto constituent political units. I hope that these discussions of thetheory and practice of government in the empires of Athens, Sparta,Alexander, the Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Antigonids will be founduseful by the general reader, and especially by the student of politicsand history. The idea I wish particularly to convey, however, is thatthere was continuity of constitutional development within the wholeperiod. The city-state, indeed, reached its greatest efficiency in thetime of Pericles, but the federation of city-states was being stillperfected two hundred years afterwards. In government, as in science,the classic period was but the youthful bloom of Greece, whereas itsvigorous maturity—in which it was cut down by Rome—came in theMacedonian time.
Briefly stated, my thesis is this: The city-states of Greece wereunicellular organisms with remarkable insides, and they were incapableof growth except by subdivision. They might reproduce their kindindefinitely, but the cells, new and old, could not combine to forma strong nation. Thus it happened that after Athens and Sparta hadtried in vain to convert their hegemonies over Greece into empires, acancerous condition arose in Hellas, for which the proper remedy wasnot to change the internal constitutions of city-states, as Plato andAristotle taught, but to change the texture of their cell walls so asto enable them to adhere firmly to one another. With a conservatismthoroughly in harmony with the later character of the Greek people, theGreeks struggled against this inevitable and salutary change. But inthe end they had to yield, saving, however, what they could of theirurban separateness, while creating quasi-t