THREE:Rhetoric conferred even greater power in old Athens than in modern England. Not only did mastery of expression lead to public employment; but also, as every citizen was permitted by law to address his assembled fellow-countrymen and propose measures for their acceptance, it became a direct passport to supreme political authority. Nor was this all. At Athens the employment of professional advocates was not98 allowed, and it was easy to prosecute an enemy on the most frivolous pretexts. If the defendant happened to be wealthy, and if condemnation involved a loss of property, there was a prejudice against him in the minds of the jury, confiscation being regarded as a convenient resource for replenishing the national exchequer. Thus the possession of rhetorical ability became a formidable weapon in the hands of unscrupulous citizens, who were enabled to extort large sums by the mere threat of putting rich men on their trial for some real or pretended offence. This systematic employment of rhetoric for purposes of self-aggrandisement bore much the same relation to the teaching of Protagoras and Gorgias as the open and violent seizure of supreme power on the plea of natural superiority bore to the theories of their rivals, being the way in which practical men applied the principle that truth is determined by persuasion. It was also attended by considerably less danger than a frank appeal to the right of the stronger, so far at least as the aristocratic party were concerned. For they had been taught a lesson not easily forgotten by the downfall of the oligarchies established in 411 and 404; and the second catastrophe especially proved that nothing but a popular government was possible in Athens. Accordingly, the nobles set themselves to study new methods for obtaining their ultimate end, which was always the possession of uncontrolled power over the lives and fortunes of their fellow-citizens. With wealth to purchase instruction from the Sophists, with leisure to practise oratory, and with the ability often accompanying high birth, there was no reason why the successors of Charmides and Critias should not enjoy all the pleasures of tyranny unaccompanied by any of its drawbacks. Here, again, a parallel suggests itself between ancient Greece and modern Europe. On the Continent, where theories of natural law are far more prevalent than with us, it is by brute force that justice is trampled down: the one great object of every ambitious99 intriguer is to possess himself of the military machine, his one great terror, that a stronger man may succeed in wresting it from him; in England the political adventurer looks to rhetoric as his only resource, and at the pinnacle of power has to dread the hailstorm of epigrammatic invective directed against him by abler or younger rivals.74It would seem from this singular and touching expression of gratitude that the deathless idealism of Hellas found in Neros gift of a nominal liberty ample compensation for the very real and precious works of art of which she was despoiled on the occasion of his visit to her shores. At first sight, that visit looks like nothing better than a display of triumphant buffoonery on the one side and of servile adulation on the other. But, in reality, it was a turning-point in the history of civilisation, the awakening to new glories of a race in whom life had become, to all outward appearance, extinct. For more than a whole century the seat of intellectual supremacy had been established in Rome; and during the same period Rome herself had turned to the West rather than to the East for renovation and support. Caesars conquests were like the revelation of a new world; and three times over, when the two halves of the divided empire came into collision, the champion who commanded the resources of that world had won. Henceforth it was to her western provinces and to her western frontiers that Rome looked for danger, for aggrandisement, or for renown. In Horaces time, men asked each other what the warlike Cantabrians were planning; and the personal presence of Augustus himself was needed before those unruly Iberians could be subdued. His adopted sons earned their first laurels at the expense of Alpine mountaineers. His later years are filled with German campaigns; and the great disaster of Varus must have riveted attention more closely than any victory to what was passing between the Rhine and the Elbe. Under Claudius, the conquest of Britain opened a new source of interest in the West, and, like Germany before, supplied a new title of triumph to the imperial family. Half the literary talent in Rome, the two Senecas, Lucan, and at a269 later period Martial and Quintilian, came from Spain, as also did Trajan, whose youth fall in this period.
