Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/770

760 the capital made direct control less practicable, notwithstanding the fact that to the postal service, which had been in use since the first Semites ruled in Babylonia, Sargon and Sennacherib had added paved roads and mile-stones.

The satrap was thus not far inferior to the Assyrian king in actual power. Two systems of check were invented. One was the use of the two subordinates, reporting directly to the king and aided by the espionage so characteristic of an Oriental despotism. The other was the new principle, that subject peoples might be a formal part of the provincial organization and yet have so much local autonomy that they would prefer their chains. The best illustration we may find in the Old Testament, where Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah are virtually local dynasts and enforce their own schemes of reform. The system had its dangers, for it kept alive nationalist feelings, and a change of dynasty might allow revolt or a weak rule result in civil war, but this is only to express in other words the truism that, in an hereditary monarchy, all depends on the character of the monarch. Thanks to this toleration, Judaism, for instance, with all that it has meant to the world, was preserved, with Persian coloring, it is true, but with natural growth permitted.

To those who have thought of the empire as a despotism, there comes a shock of surprise when they find the Persians, after the Ionic revolt, actually introducing democracies into the cities of Asia Minor; still more strange does it seem that the democracies of Athens and of the other Greek city-states were pro-Persian up to the very outbreak of the Great War. This attitude cannot be explained as simply another example of the stupidity of the proletariate. Persian rule permitted the Carian kingship, the Carduchi tribal organization, the Judaean theocracy, the Phoenician aristocracy, the Ionic democracy, and this rule of the foreigner was less repellent to the democrat at Athens than was the close oligarchy of his oppressors at home. The newly risen merchant class likewise desired those commercial advantages now so largely monopolized by Phoenician and Aramaean. At the very end of Greek freedom, revived and sobered Athens was pro-Persian.

Once more we may conjecture what might have been. Would Greece as a whole have had a less full life if the city-states had become municipalities with local autonomy within the empire? The Acropolis would not have been decked with the spoils of subject city-states, but neither would the Peloponnesian War have brought Greek civilization close to ruin. The extreme democracy of Cleon probably never would have been reached but stasis would have been