There is an interesting section on tyranny. A tyrant desires riches, whereas a king desires honour. The tyrant has guards who are mercenaries, whereas the king has guards who are citizens. Tyrants are mostly demagogues, who acquire power by promising to protect the people against the notables. In an ironically Machiavellian tone, Aristotle explains what a tyrant must do to retain power. He must prevent the rise of any person of exceptional merit, by execution or assassination if necessary. He must prohibit common meals, clubs, and any education likely to produce hostile sentiment. There must be no literary assemblies or discussions. He must prevent people from knowing each other well, and compel them to live in public at his gates. He should employ spies, like the female detectives at Syracuse.
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He must sow quarrels, and impoverish his subjects. He should keep them occupied in great works, as the king of Egypt did in getting the pyramids built. He should give power to women and slaves, to make them informers. He should make war, in order that his subjects may have something to do and be always in want of a leader (1313a and b).
It is a melancholy reflection that this passage is, of the whole book, the one most appropriate to the present day. Aristotle concludes that there is no wickedness too great for a tyrant. There is, however, he says, another method of preserving a tyranny, namely by moderation and by seeming religious. There is no decision as to which method is likely to prove the more successful.
There is a long argument to prove that foreign conquest is not the end of the State, showing that many people took the imperialist view. There is, it is true, an exception: conquest of «natural slaves» is right and just. This would, in Aristotle’s view, justify wars against barbarians, but not against Greeks, for no Greeks are «natural slaves.» In general, war is only a means, not an end; a city in an isolated situation, where conquest is not possible, may be happy; States that live in isolation need not be inactive. God and the universe are active, though foreign conquest is impossible for them. The happiness that a State should seek, therefore, though war may sometimes be a necessary means to it, should not be war, but the activities of peace.
This leads to the question: how large should a State be? Large cities, we are told, are never well governed, because a great multitude cannot be orderly. A State ought to be large enough to be more or less self-sufficing, but not too large for constitutional government. It ought to be small enough for the citizens to know each other’s characters, otherwise right will not be done in elections and lawsuits. The territory should be small enough to be surveyed in its entirety from a hill-top. We are told both that it should be selfsufficient (1326b) and that it should have an export and import trade (1327a), which seems an inconsistency.
Men who work for their living should not be admitted to citizenship. «Citizens should not lead the life of mechanics or tradesmen, for such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue.» Nor should they be husbandmen, because they need leisure. The citizens should own the property, but the husbandmen should be slaves of a different race
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(1330a). Northern races, we are told, are spirited; southern races, intelligent; therefore slaves should be of southern races, since it is inconvenient if they are spirited. The Greeks alone are both spirited and intelligent; they are better governed than barbarians, and if united could rule the world (1327b). One might have expected at this point some allusion to Alexander, but there is none.
With regard to the size of States, Aristotle makes, on a different scale, the same mistake that is made by many modern liberals. A State must be able to defend itself in war, and even, if any liberal culture is to survive, to defend itself without very great difficulty. How large this requires a State to be, depends upon the technique of war and industry. In Aristotle’s day, the City State was obsolete because it could not defend itself against Macedonia. In our day, Greece as a whole, including Macedonia, is obsolete in this sense, as has been recently proved. * To advocate complete independence for Greece, or any other small country, is now as futile as to advocate complete independence for a single city, whose territory can be seen entire from an eminence. There can be no true independence except for a State or alliance strong enough, by its own efforts, to repel all attempts at foreign conquest. Nothing smaller than America and the British Empire combined will satisfy this requirement; and perhaps even this would be too small a unit.
The book, which, in the form in which we have it, appears to be unfinished, ends with a discussion of education. Education, of course, is only for children who are going to be citizens; slaves may be taught useful arts, such as cooking, but these are no part of education. The citizen should be moulded to the form of government under which he lives, and there should therefore be differences according as the city in question is oligarchic or democratic. In the discussion, however, Aristotle assumes that the citizens will all have a share of political power. Children should learn what is useful to them, but not vulgarizing; for instance, they should not be taught any skill that deforms the body, or that would enable them to earn money. They should practice athletics in moderation, but not to the point of acquiring professional skill; the boys who train for the Olympic games suffer in health, as is shown by the fact that those who have been
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* This was written in May, 1941.
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victors as boys are hardly ever victors as men. Children should learn drawing, in order to appreciate the beauty of the human form; and they should be taught to appreciate such painting and sculpture as expresses moral ideas. They may learn to sing and to play musical instruments enough to be able to enjoy music critically, but not enough to be skilled performers; for no freeman would play or sing unless drunk. They must of course learn to read and write, in spite of the usefulness of these arts. But the purpose of education is virtue,» not usefulness. What Aristotle means by «virtue» he has told us in the Ethics, to which this book frequently refers.
Aristotle’s fundamental assumptions, in his Politics, are very different from those of any modern writer. The aim of the State, in his view, is to produce cultured gentlemen-men who combine the aristocratic mentality with love of learning and the arts. This combination existed, in its highest perfection, in the Athens of Pericles, not in the population at large, but among the well-to-do. It began to break down in the last years of Pericles. The populace, who had no culture, turned against the friends of Pericles, who were driven to defend the privileges of the rich, by treachery, assassination, illegal despotism, and other such not very gentlemanly methods. After the death of Socrates, the bigotry of the Athenian democracy diminished, and Athens remained the centre of ancient culture, but political power went elsewhere. Throughout later antiquity, power and culture were usually separate: power was in the hands of rough soldiers, culture belonged to powerless Greeks, often slaves. This is only partially true of Rome in its great days, but it is emphatically true before Cicero and after Marcus Aurelius. After the barbarian invasion, the «gentlemen» were northern barbarians, the men of culture subtle southern ecclesiastics. This state of affairs continued, more or less, until the Renaissance, when the laity began to acquire culture. From the Renaissance onwards, the Greek conception of government by cultured gentlemen gradually prevailed more and more, reaching its acme in the eighteenth century.
Various forces have put an end to this state of affairs. First, democracy, as embodied in the French Revolution and its aftermath. The cultured gentlemen, as after the age of Pericles, had to defend their privileges against the populace, and in the process ceased to be either gentlemen or cultured. A second cause was the rise of indus-
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trialism, with a scientific technique very different from traditional culture. A third cause was popular education, which conferred the power to read and write, but did not confer culture; this enabled a new type of demagogue to practise a new type of propaganda, as seen in the
