The Evening Post. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1937. A PARALLELS TODAY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 111, 6 November 1937, Page 8

The Evening Post. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1937. A PARALLELS TODAY

If it be true that history is philosophy teaching by example— and unless it can be so interpreted, history is merely a meaningless chronicle—what lesson, if any, is there to be found in the past that will help us to understand the present, and, perhaps, to mould the future? Is there in history any parallel to the condition of the world today when existing institutions are threatened by forces which seem new? Has democracy ever had to fight for its life before? To answer such questions thoughtful observers are now turning away from modern history more and more to records of; the life of ancient Greece where, in their essential characteristics, the i problems were extraordinarily like our own. Some of these points of similarity we have stressed from time to time, but it is in the struggle of Greek democracies to survive the attack of destructive forces within and without that, we find the closest parallel to the situation today. Terrestrially, this.ancient Greek world was tiny compared with ours—the whole drama of Hellenic hegemony was played on a stage no bigger than New Zealand—yet its significance has been out of all proportion to its size. In his "Plato Today" Mr. R. H. Grossman justly declares: ~ The experiments which the Greeks tried out on themselves in the laboratory of the citx-state are still, hundreds of years after those city-states, perished, ths basis on which we .try to build our States in modern Europe.

. . . They left their rivers unbridged, their towns undrained, but they tried to make the life of man in society as clear and reasonable as the sculptures iti which they portrayed him The wild disarray of our world-society is in strange contrast to the meticulous neatness of the discoveries of science. In the latter there is co-operation and a systematic advance in all fields: in the former there are wars, conflicts, and. rumours of final catastrophe.

It is because the ancient Greek world did, for all that mattered to the patriotic citizen, meet its final catastrophe that the process byxwhich the disaster to democracy came about has its lessons to teach us«in the situation confronting us today. In the middle of the Fourth Century B.C. the city-states of Greece were still suffering from the effects of their "Great War" of fifty years before and the succession of minor conflicts that followed. Of this war Thucydides, the contemporary historian, says:

The Peloponnesian War was * protracted struggle, and attended by calamities such as Hellas had never known within a like period of time. Never were so many cities captured and depopulated, and several of them after their capture were repeopled by strangers. Never were exile and slaughter more frequent whether, in the war or brought about by civil strife. . . .

Thus it was a weakened world of democratic city-states, weaker in' man-power and wealth, that Demosthenes, the great Athenian orator, strove by hi* eloquence ta waken to the danger to their liberties looming in the far north. There could be no greater tribute to the political acumen and foresight of Demosthenes than that he/sensed so soon in Philip, of Macedon, the "Public Enemy No. 1" of democratic Greece. To most Greeks at that time —351 B.C.—Philip was an adventurer who" had fought his way to the control of a barbarian country, Macedonia, in the north, and was harassing in a desultory sort of way the Greek colonies on his coasts. Athens, with whom they were allied, had been waging an even more desultory- war against Philip in their defence for six years, when Demosthenes, in the first of his famous orations against Philip, stripped the, veil of mystery over the operations and exposed not only Philip as the arch-plotter against Greek freedom, but the feeble spasmodic efforts of the Athenians themselves to check him, like "boxers without brains, their hands going wherever they are struck, and not, by watching their opponent, anticipating the blow." And so for thirteen more years the struggle went on between the champion of Greek freedom and its craftiest enemy. In Philip will be recognised many of the characteristics of a modern dictator. His first step was to create a fighting force, and it was he who, borrowing, from Epaminondas of Thebes, -where he had been exiled in His youth, created the Macedonian "phalanx," for two centuries the most formidable weapon, of attack in the ancient world. Politically, his policy was to divide and destroy piecemeal. While1 Demosthenes endeavoured in every possible way to unite Greece against the common enemy, as Greece in its most heroic days had been united, for a brief space, against the Persian' invader at Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea, Philip, skilfully intervening, keptajive old feuds, fomented new ones, and had his own party in every city-state, .even including Athens. The modefn parallel is only too clear. Demosthenes was never daunted, but he had not to deal with the democracy of its golden days of Pericles. His policy, reiterated through all his speeches, was simple ' enough. If the citizen cared for his liberty, for his, glorious traditions, for the city in which1: lie/lived,. he. must be prepared to serve personally? in the armies and navies of freedom, if rich, to contribute freely of his wealth to the cause, if poor, to forgo part of the public display the State lavished on its citizens at festivals. Demosthenes laboured in vain. Philip gradually worked down'into Greece. In 338 B.C. Demosthenes made one final gallant effort and met Philip in the field at Chaeronea. It was a forlorn hope. , The phalanx triumphed and the great age of Greece was over. And so on this most moving tragedy iri history the.

Curtain falls on the death of Greek liberty that has given so much to the world. The Greeks, indeed, says Niebuhr, "continued to live, but in spirit and politically they were dead." Philip did not live long to erijoy his triumph. He was assassinated. - Demosthenes outlived both his great and that enemy's greater son, Alexander, who conquered the world of his time and spread Hellenism throughout the East. Was this worth the destruction of Greek liberty? Some historians think so. Could Greek liberty have been saved? Demosthenes himself, years after Chaeronea, in the greatest oration of all time, "On the Crown," his apologia for. his life, said this:

If there had been found in any Gredk State one man such as I have. been in my sphere among you, rather if Thessaly had only possessed a single man, and if Arcadia had possessed any one of the same principles with me, none of all the Greeks, whether within Thermopylae or without, would have been suffering their present miseries.

And he added this which all true lovers of liberty will applaud as a fitting epitaph on one who had fought the good fight:

I say that if the event had been manifest to the whole world beforehand, not even then ought Athens to have forsaken this course, if Athens had any regard for her glory, or for her past, or for the ages to. come. „

Abyssinia, Spain, China—are we I seeing today a modern counterpart of the opening scenes of the tragedy j I which began on the frontiers of ancient Greek civilisation and ended in' the destruction of Greek liberty? If we are—and there are i ominous signs—-then the lessons that Demosthenes strove so manfully, if in vain, to teach his fellow-country-men hold today. The forces on the I side of democracy may be stronger individually today than-were the i Greek city-states in their struggle, but so are the forces ranged against I democracy, now collectively. As i Demosthenes ever urged, the . only answer is a united front. If the Greek city-states could have made common cause, Philip could not have succeeded. As Grossman points out in his "Plato Today," if democracy is to survive, it must be dynamic and not merely passive and pacifist. It must learn to do voluntarily what its enemies do by compulsion at the behest of their leaders. All this may be read in the speeches of Demosthenes, which might well serve as a guide in the. perplexities of our modern world to the statesmen of today. ,