[Sidenote: and led many people to fear a new tyranny of wealth.]

The experts in the new finance of the last two generations have been exercising a profound influence upon politics and government. There are many people, particularly in America, who believe that there is a possibility of this influence becoming supreme. It is worth while quoting a few of these opinions:

This era is but a passing phase in the evolution of industrial Caesars, and these Caesars will be of a new type—corporate Caesars[12].

The flames of a new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the state and have bred individuals greater than themselves, and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master instead of servant[13].

For some months past the sugar trust has been the Government of the United States[14].

In 1884 there seems even to have been an idea of running a Standard Oil senator for the United States presidency. “Henry B. Payne is looming up grandly in the character of a possible and not altogether improbable successor to Mr Tilden as the Democratic candidate for the presidency[15].”

The danger of supreme power in America passing into the hands of a few capitalists has even been publicly acknowledged by a President of the United States during his period of office. “Mr Wilson also discussed the division between capital and labour. He dwelt for the greater part of the speech on the effort of ‘small bodies of privileged men to resume control of the Government,’ and added: ‘We must again convince these gentlemen that the government of this country belongs to us, not to them[16].’”

Similar views are expressed by French, German and Italian writers. According to the most brilliant of modern Frenchmen the government of France has in some recent periods been in the hands of three or four groups of financiers[17]. Salvioli in his Capitalism in the Ancient World speaks of the “kings of finance who exercise in our states a secret but pervading sway[18].” Even the warlike von Bernhardi fears an impending “tyranny of capital[19].”

These quotations might be multiplied[20], but enough have been given to show that the opinion which they express is widely held. There is no need to discuss the honesty of particular expressions of it. If any of them could be shown to have been insincere, it would be only additional evidence of the plausibility of the opinion. Nor is this the place to discuss from a more general point of view the extent to which that opinion has been or seems likely to be verified. To have indicated how widely prevalent is the fear of an impending “new tyranny of wealth[21]” or “tyranny of capital[22]” is by itself enough to show that the relation between the tyranny and the new form of wealth that arose in the seventh and sixth centuries before our era is a subject that deserves investigation, and to show also that the particular view as to those relations that is maintained in these pages has a priori plausibility[23].

[Sidenote: The evidence:]

It should however be said at once that my view appears to have been held by no one who has published opinions on the subject from the fourth century B.C. onwards. This however is not fatal. Later in this chapter reasons will be suggested for holding that the true character of the early tyranny was lost sight of in the days of Plato and Aristotle. Why truer views on this particular subject should be recovered precisely at the present period may be sufficiently explained by the modern financial revolution, which makes it possible to approach the question from a point which has scarcely been accessible during the last two thousand years. With this warning we may proceed to state the nature of the evidence in favour of this view that the earliest tyrannies were founded and based on wealth.

(1) The greater part of it is drawn from anecdotes and incidental statements of fact about particular seventh or sixth century tyrants preserved in Herodotus and later Greek and Latin writers. The various tyrants are dealt with individually in the remaining chapters of the book.

(2) Glimpses into the economic and political life of the seventh and sixth centuries are occasionally to be got from the scanty remains of the poets of the period, supplemented by cautious references to later writers. It will be convenient to examine at once this more general evidence.

[Sidenote: (a) statements from the extant writings of the sixth century (Solon and Theognis),]

The only two writers of the age of the tyrants of whom more than the merest scraps have come down to us are Solon[24] and Theognis[25]. Both deal professedly with the social and political problems of their day. But both address audiences who are familiar with those problems. Even if their whole works had been preserved instead of a few hundred lines in either case, we should not expect to have the fundamental problems explicitly stated. It would be possible to read a large selection of articles and speeches by quite the best journalists and politicians on many recent political measures and at the end of it to be left in uncertainty as to the content and purport of the measure in question. We must expect the same difficulty in reading Solon and Theognis. And it must be confessed that we find it. But there is nothing in the extant fragments of either writer which discredits the theory. More than that there are passages in both of them that become of the utmost significance if the early tyrants owed their power to their previous wealth but are rather pointless on any other hypothesis.

Solon’s position in relation to the tyranny is explained in the chapter dealing with Athens. But a few lines may be quoted here:

But of themselves in their folly the men of the city are willing Our great city to wreck, being won over by wealth. False are the hearts of the people’s leaders[26].

By the wreck of the city the poet means the establishment of a tyranny, as is indicated by another couplet:

Great men ruin a city: for lack of understanding Under a despot’s[27] yoke lieth the people enslaved[28].

These last two lines were presumably written after Peisistratus had made himself tyrant of Athens. Solon’s fears had been realized. The citizens had been “won over by wealth” to “wreck their great city.” Is not the best sense made out of these lines by assuming that what Solon feared and what actually happened was that the popular leader had made use of his wealth to establish himself as tyrant? Neither the “people’s leaders” of the first quotation nor the “great men” of the second are specifically stated to have been extremely rich, but to quote again the words of Solon, both may be plausibly identified with the foremost of

Those who had power and made men to marvel because of their riches[29].

The political aim of Theognis was to prevent a recurrence of tyranny in Megara[30]. What does the poet bid his townsmen beware of? Not of eloquence, not of violence, not of rashly appointing a lawgiver or αἰσυμνήτης. All his warnings are directed against wealth. The whole town of Megara had become commercial[31]. Birth had lost its prestige, and wealth acquired unprecedented power. He complains how

Tradesmen reign supreme: the bad lord it over their betters[32].

This is the lesson that each and all must thoroughly master: How that in all the world wealth has the might and the power[33].

Many a bad man is rich, and many a good man needy[34].

Not without cause, O wealth, do men honour thee above all things[35].

Most men reckon the only virtue the making of money[36].

Everyone honours those that are rich, and despises the needy[37].

When he explicitly alludes to the dangers of the establishment of a tyranny, his references to wealth are no less prominent:

Neither exalt thou in hope, by yielding to gain, any tyrant[38].

Cyrnus, this city is pregnant. I fear lest a man it may bear us Swollen with insolent pride[39], leader in stern civil strife[40].

The couplet last quoted almost certainly refers to a possible tyrant. Insolent pride (ὕβρις) is one of the tyrant’s stock characteristics[41]. There is no reference to wealth in this particular context. But there can be little doubt that this same character is also referred to earlier in the poem. Who, the poet asks, can preserve his reverence for the Gods:

When that a man unjust and presumptuous, one that regardeth Neither the wrath of a man, no, nor the wrath of a God, Glutted with wealth waxes proud and insolent[42]?

In this last passage the pride and insolence are directly attributed to enormous wealth.

Or again:

Be thou sure that not long will that city remain unshaken, Even though now it may lie wrapped in the deepest repose, Soon as soever to those that are bad these things become pleasing— Gains that, whenever they come, bring with them ill for the state. For from these arise factions, murders of men by their kindred, Despots withal[43].

What are the gains that lead up to tyranny? Is it not most probable that they are some form of payment received by the commons (“those that are bad”) from the would-be tyrant[44]?