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AUDIENCES— POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
It is true that three hundred years lie between Tacitus, Juvenal, and Augustine. The Christian father's unforgettable sentences must be read as final verdict upon falling and fallen Rome.
It is not easy to arrive at general sociological conclusions with regard to the 'laws' which determine the decay of a civilisation. But it would appear that Professor Ehrenberg in his brilliant study on The People of Aristophanes1 gives us the key to an understanding of this complex historic process when he writes: 'The people of Aristophanes had once been the people of Demosthenes. The same development which led an upper class, distinguished partly by tradition and partly by education and wealth, to the sophists, to Socrates, to philosophy and political theorising, and finally to the ethical or endaemonistic individualism of the Stoics and Epicureans, made the bulk of the citizens a people without political direction, and gradually a body of unpolitical beings. This type was nothing but 'a private person', no matter whether the individual was concerned with business or intellectual enjoyments of a general laissez-aller.' All the same, the people of Athens continued to exist. And it was the Greeks who never shared the delight exhibited in the Roman amphitheatre of their masters in Rome. An apparent economic freedom is compatible with moral or spiritual enslavement, but it is a dangerous state of affairs which may ultimately sap the strength of 'the people'. They may become obedient spectators, satisfied solely with panem et circenses — then as now.
What, then, are the lessons which the decline of Athens and Rome teaches us? Theatrical art, drama, declined when Athens and Rome became Imperial States instead of City-States. In Athens this process lasted some three hundred years; in Rome the same process began in the age of Cicero; he was, as Fowler says, 'the last-born legitimate son of the Roman City-State.'2 A new political loyalty had to be created. Thus the principle of Empire made its appearance. Alexander the Great and Caesar became the symbols of this new loyalty which, 'from Julius Caesar onwards, deliberately extended the citizenship to destroy its association with selfgovernment, and to empty Rome itself of the tradition of authority.'3
This lesson is of paramount importance for our own historic
1 Gf. Ehrenberg, The People of Aristophanes. A Sociology of the Old Attic Comedy, Oxford 1943, p. 264.
2 W. W. Fowler, The City-State of the Greeks and Romans, p. 315. Cf. also Fustel de Coulanges, La Cite" Antique, p. 432 sq.
3 Maclver, The Modern State, p. 99.
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