In the Beginning … as the good book says, man and his mate lived in Utopia, Eden. God had given man free will to do as he would, but had also commanded him not to partake of the tree of knowledge. When he, on the advice of his mate, being man, broke the commandment they were both cast out of the Garden into an eternal search for a way to return. According to Christian doctrine, the path back is through Jesus Christ. Others, who do not necessarily agree with the Christian solution, have their own means of salvation, but almost all solutions involve the idea of an ultimate Utopia. Even secularists, like Marxists, envision a “withering away of the State” into a secular ungoverned Earthly commune. Most men would agree that the mission of man on Earth is to live in such a manner so as to gain immortality in a Paradise in the afterlife.
Many people, even religious doubters, see the hand of divinity in certain undeniable logical, ethical and moral truths known to humanity worldwide. Our forefathers, men of the Enlightenment, certainly recognized them. The Ten Commandments are the basis for ancient as well as all modern law. The ancient Egyptians required adherence to these same tenets as a prerequisite to immortality. Hammurabi prescribed punishments for their breach. The Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” may well be greatest admonition of the Christian New Testament and regardless of one’s feelings about its importance; it is a breath-taking truism. Taken together, these are the basic moral and ethical truths that make civilized society possible. There is also some divinity in known scientific truths that are considered laws of the Universe. Among these are the Pythagorean Theorem, Newton’s Laws of motion and … unknown to our ancestors, Einstein’s incomparable E = MC^2. Our forefathers, reflecting on these truths, deduced that a certain measure of Divinity must also accrue to the benefit of the common Man. These learned men of the Enlightenment reasoned that man, as Jefferson so eloquently averred in the Declaration of Independence, was “endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” to which should be added “Property.” It was clearly understood that those rights could be denied to man by usurpers or tyrants or even by force of law, but equally understood was that even denied, the divine Rights remained, for it was and is beyond the ability of any man, prince, potentate or political system to abolish them. They are immutable; they were always “There” and would always “Be.”
However, when man was cast out, be it by God or by evolution, he was on his own. He certainly understood that he had “free will,” because if he didn’t take his own fate in tow, surely he would have perished. Early man, being self sufficient, undoubtedly had to model his life to the tenets of the poem, “Invictus.” Certainly it took eons, but slowly man began to control his environment; he gave up hunting for husbandry, gathering for agriculture. Husbandry and agriculture spawned villages, then towns and then cities. The villages invited raiding by those with lesser culture. The power of cities denied that tactic, but, in turn, begged for greater strife, war and conquest. Soon armies appeared and conflict became ubiquitous. Conquering armies led to nations. Nations inevitably led to diplomacy. Obviously, as all this was happening, governments were instituted, invariably by strong men, usurpers, monarchs or tyrants who appointed surrogates, the forever pervasive bureaucrats, to enforce their will on the populace. All the while, as civilization rose, the freedom of the individual diminished.
After scores of centuries, a few thinking men perceived that the welfare of the many was not being well served by autocrats. For our purpose here, we will focus on the solutions proposed by the republic of Lycurgus in Sparta and the democracy of Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes in Athens.
In the Spartan republic, the electors, all veteran soldiers over 30 years of age, voted for a 28 member Senate that was augmented by the inclusion of 2 hereditary kings. The Senate was made up of men older than 60 years who were elected for life. This body was called the “Gerousia ” whose duty was to make and oversee the laws. The Senate (and the kings) was, in turn, overseen, with plenary powers, by 5 exemplars that were called “Ephors.” These being elected once in a lifetime for a one-year term. This system was, to a great degree, a democratic republic, serving an elite electorate.
The Athenian democracy was the classical majority rule. There was a large city center in Athens around which the commercial, intellectual, and political life of the city revolved. This area was called the “agora,” and still exists in the modern city. The city had a schedule of regular political meetings, which were held to consider matters of law and order; war and peace. If you were a natural born Athenian, you could attend, could speak and could vote, sometimes by raising your hand or in special circumstances by putting a white “yes” rock or a black “no” rock into a large earthen jar, which was later broken open to count the vote. Of course, the majority ruled and the decisions of the vote were final and often harsh.
It is apparent that the above descriptions gloss over the finer points and peculiarities of the two diverse systems, but describe their essence. The operation of these very different governments in two adversarial cities that struggled for ascendancy over each other for centuries, with the final triumph of Sparta at the end of the second Peloponnesian war and their subsequent demise has been the study of those interested in comparative government ever since. The Roman Senate was probably modeled on that of Sparta. Cicero, the great Roman politician, was a student of the consequences. But most importantly, the founders of the American republic were intimately acquainted and influenced with this history as well as all the subsequent experiments of other peoples up to the those fateful years of the American revolution and the beginning of the American republic.
It is abundantly clear that these early experiments in government did very little to return humanity to its rightful freedom. However the governments of these two tiny city-states lit a light for subsequent students to see how to wrest humanity from the clutches of autocracy and tyranny. The Romans tried the republic successfully for about 300 hundred years, before demagoguery devolved it into the declining empire. Democracies and republics in the years between the failure of the Roman republic and the beginning of the American one were largely unsuccessful. Some exceptions of varying success were republics in Venice, Holland, Iceland and Switzerland. The uprising of the barons against King John at Runnymede, in 1215, resulted in the “Magna Carta” and ultimately in the magnificent English Parliament. All told though, the greater part of mankind wallowed in grip of political darkness for about 2 millennia after the disappearance of these enlightened city-states. It is axiomatic, however, for us to understand that these two experiments in popular government provided the seeds of hope for humanity that were finally manifested in the fruit of the American republic.
The alternatives in governance made available by the existence of these ancient states to our forefathers are the subject of another essay. Get ready!