But for us, an imperial people, who have inherited a vast and scattered dominion which somehow or other has got to be managed and governed, the chief interest will centre in the question of how these city-states acquired and administered their empires. Above all it is to Athens and perhaps Rome alone that we can look for historical answers to the great riddle for which we cannot yet boast of having discovered a solution--whether democracy can govern an empire.
In Greek history alone we have at least three examples of empires. Athens and Sparta both proceeded to acquire empire by the road of alliance and hegemony, Athens being naval and democratic, Sparta aristocratic and military. Both were despotic, and both failed disastrously for different reasons. Then we have the career of Alexander the Great and his short-lived but important empire, a career providing a type for Cæsar and Napoleon, an empire founded on mere conquest.
Lastly, on the same small canvas we have a momentous phase of the eternal and still-continuing conflict between East and West and their respective habits of civilisation. These pages will describe the aggression and repulse of the East.
It is the misfortune of historians to be liable to attacks at both extremities. On the one hand time is continually adding postscripts to their “Finis,” and on the other hand the archæologist is constantly making them tear up and rewrite their first chapters. In Greek history especially the spade has proved mightier than the pen. We are now only certain that the first page of any Greek history written ten years ago must be defective; we are not yet quite sure what to put in its place. Any moment, it seems, the explorer may turn up something which will make a difference of a thousand years or so in our earliest chronology. There are in the Cretan museum scores of clay tablets inscribed with an unknown writing which only await an interpreter to confound and illuminate us all. Forty years ago eminent writers like Gladstone and Freeman were still looking to Homer for their ideas of the primitive European and his civilisation. Strange indeed were the results that followed. In politics we were to believe that the earliest Greeks settled their affairs at a public meeting where elders and princes made persuasive speeches, and radicalism, though not unknown, was sternly discouraged. A benevolent monarchy, hereditary in the male line, was supposed by Sir Henry Maine to be the form of government common to primitive Europe and modern England. Literature was believed to have begun with elaborate epic poems written in hexameters of exquisite variety and extreme subtlety. The primitive woman was believed to have been the object of chivalrous and romantic esteem. Strangest of all, religion in this primitive world was held to have included the cheerful bantering of anthropomorphic gods and goddesses. We were to suppose that the European began by laughing at his gods and ended by worshipping them.