The Story of Mankind
by Hendrik Willem Van Loon · English · Gutenberg #754 · 762,264 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Story of Mankind
Author: Hendrik Willem Van Loon
Release date: December 1, 1996 [eBook #754]
Most recently updated: November 27, 2009
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/754
Credits: Produced by Charles Keller, and David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF MANKIND ***
Produced by Charles Keller
THE STORY OF MANKIND
By Hendrik Van Loon, Ph.D.
Professor of the Social Sciences in Antioch College. Author of The Fall
of the Dutch Republic, The Rise of the Dutch Kingdom, The Golden Book of
the Dutch Navigators, A Short Story of Discovery, Ancient Man.
Frontispiece caption= THE SCENE OF OUR HISTORY IS LAID UPON A LITTLE
PLANET, LOST IN THE VASTNESS OF THE UNIVERSE.
To JIMMIE "What is the use of a book without pictures?" said Alice.
FOREWORD
For Hansje and Willem:
WHEN I was twelve or thirteen years old, an uncle of mine who gave me
my love for books and pictures promised to take me upon a memorable
expedition. I was to go with him to the top of the tower of Old Saint
Lawrence in Rotterdam.
And so, one fine day, a sexton with a key as large as that of Saint
Peter opened a mysterious door. "Ring the bell," he said, "when you come
back and want to get out," and with a great grinding of rusty old hinges
he separated us from the noise of the busy street and locked us into a
world of new and strange experiences.
For the first time in my life I was confronted by the phenomenon of
audible silence. When we had climbed the first flight of stairs, I added
another discovery to my limited knowledge of natural phenomena--that of
tangible darkness. A match showed us where the upward road continued.
We went to the next floor and then to the next and the next until I had
lost count and then there came still another floor, and suddenly we had
plenty of light. This floor was on an even height with the roof of the
church, and it was used as a storeroom. Covered with many inches of
dust, there lay the abandoned symbols of a venerable faith which had
been discarded by the good people of the city many years ago. That which
had meant life and death to our ancestors was here reduced to junk and
rubbish. The industrious rat had built his nest among the carved images
and the ever watchful spider had opened up shop between the outspread
arms of a kindly saint.
The next floor showed us from where we had derived our light. Enormous
open windows with heavy iron bars made the high and barren room the
roosting place of hundreds of pigeons. The wind blew through the iron
bars and the air was filled with a weird and pleasing music. It was
the noise of the town below us, but a noise which had been purified and
cleansed by the distance. The rumbling of heavy carts and the clinking
of horses' hoofs, the winding of cranes and pulleys, the hissing sound
of the patient steam which had been set to do the work of man in
a thousand different ways--they had all been blended into a softly
rustling whisper which provided a beautiful background for the trembling
cooing of the pigeons.
Here the stairs came to an end and the ladders began. And after the
first ladder (a slippery old thing which made one feel his way with a
cautious foot) there was a new and even greater wonder, the town-clock.
I saw the heart of time. I could hear the heavy pulsebeats of the rapid
seconds--one--two--three--up to sixty. Then a sudden quivering noise
when all the wheels seemed to stop and another minute had been chopped
off eternity. Without pause it began again--one--two--three--until at
last after a warning rumble and the scraping of many wheels a thunderous
voice, high above us, told the world that it was the hour of noon.
On the next floor were the bells. The nice little bells and their
terrible sisters. In the centre the big bell, which made me turn stiff
with fright when I heard it in the middle of the night telling a story
of fire or flood. In solitary grandeur it seemed to reflect upon those
six hundred years during which it had shared the joys and the sorrows of
the good people of Rotterdam. Around it, neatly arranged like the blue
jars in an old-fashioned apothecary shop, hung the little fellows, who
twice each week played a merry tune for the benefit of the country-folk
who had come to market to buy and sell and hear what the big world had
been doing. But in a corner--all alone and shunned by the others--a big
black bell, silent and stern, the bell of death.
Then darkness once more and other ladders, steeper and even more
dangerous than those we had climbed before, and suddenly the fresh air
of the wide heavens. We had reached the highest gallery. Above us the
sky. Below us the city--a little toy-town, where busy ants were hastily
crawling hither and thither, each one intent upon his or her particular
business, and beyond the jumble of stones, the wide greenness of the
open country.
It was my first glimpse of the big world.
Since then, whenever I have had the opportunity, I have gone to the top
of the tower and enjoyed myself. It was hard work, but it repaid in full
the mere physical exertion of climbing a few stairs.
Besides, I knew what my reward would be. I would see the land and the
sky, and I would listen to the stories of my kind friend the watchman,
who lived in a small shack, built in a sheltered corner of the gallery.
He looked after the clock and was a father to the bells, and he warned
of fires, but he enjoyed many free hours and then he smoked a pipe and
thought his own peaceful thoughts. He had gone to school almost fifty
years before and he had rarely read a book, but he had lived on the top
of his tower for so many years that he had absorbed the wisdom of that
wide world which surrounded him on all sides.
History he knew well, for it was a living thing with him. "There," he
would say, pointing to a bend of the river, "there, my boy, do you see
those trees? That is where the Prince of Orange cut the dikes to drown
the land and save Leyden." Or he would tell me the tale of the old
Meuse, until the broad river ceased to be a convenient harbour and
became a wonderful highroad, carrying the ships of De Ruyter and Tromp
upon that famous last voyage, when they gave their lives that the sea
might be free to all.
Then there were the little villages, clustering around the protecting
church which once, many years ago, had been the home of their Patron
Saints. In the distance we could see the leaning tower of Delft. Within
sight of its high arches, William the Silent had been murdered and there
Grotius had learned to construe his first Latin sentences. And still
further away, the long low body of the church of Gouda, the early home
of the man whose wit had proved mightier than the armies of many an
emperor, the charity-boy whom the world came to know as Erasmus.
Finally the silver line of the endless sea and as a contrast,
immediately below us, the patchwork of roofs and chimneys and houses
and gardens and hospitals and schools and railways, which we called our
home. But the tower showed us the old home in a new light. The confused
commotion of the streets and the market-place, of the factories and
the workshop, became the well-ordered expression of human energy
and purpose. Best of all, the wide view of the glorious past, which
surrounded us on all sides, gave us new courage to face the problems of
the future when we had gone back to our daily tasks.
History is the mighty Tower of Experience, which Time has built amidst
the endless fields of bygone ages. It is no easy task to reach the top
of this ancient structure and get the benefit of the full view. There is
no elevator, but young feet are strong and it can be done.
Here I give you the key that will open the door.
When you return, you too will understand the reason for my enthusiasm.
HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON.
CONTENTS
1. THE SETTING OF THE STAGE
2. OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS
3. PREHISTORIC MAX BEGINS TO MAKE THINGS FOR HIMSELF
4. THE EGYPTIANS INVENT THE ART OF WRITING AND THE RECORD
OF HISTORY BEGINS
5. THE BEGINNING OF CIVILISATION IN THE VALLEY OF THE NILE
6. THE RISE AND FALL OF EGYPT
7. MESOPOTAMIA, THE SECOND CENTRE OF EASTERN CIVILISATION
8. THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS, WHOSE CLAY TABLETS TELL US
THE STORY OF ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, THE GREAT SEMITIC
MELTING-POT
9. THE STORY OF MOSES, THE LEADER OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
10. THE PHOENICIANS, WHO GAVE US OUR ALPHABET
11. THE INDO-EUROPEAN PERSIANS CONQUER THE SEMITIC AND THE
EGYPTIAN WORLD
12. THE PEOPLE OF THE AEGEAN SEA CARRIED THE CIVILISATION
OF OLD ASIA INTO THE WILDERNESS OF EUROPE
13. MEANWHILE THE INDO-EUROPEAN TRIBE OF THE HELLENES WAS
TAKING POSSESSION OF GREECE
14. THE GREEK CITIES THAT WERE REALLY STATES
15. THE GREEKS WERE THE FIRST PEOPLE TO TRY THE DIFFICULT
EXPERIMENT OF SELF-GOVERNMENT
16. HOW THE GREEKS LIVED
17. THE ORIGINS OF THE THEATRE, THE FIRST FORM OF PUBLIC
AMUSEMENT
18. HOW THE GREEKS DEFENDED EUROPE AGAINST AN ASIATIC INVASION AND
DROVE THE PERSIANS BACK ACROSS THE AEGEAN SEA
19. HOW ATHENS AND SPARTA FOUGHT A LONG AND DISASTROUS WAR
FOR THE LEADERSHIP OF GREECE
20. ALEXANDER THE MACEDONIAN ESTABLISHES A GREEK WORLD
EMPIRE, AND WHAT BECAME OF THIS HIGH AMBITION
21. A SHORT SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS 1 TO 20
22. THE SEMITIC COLONY OF CARTHAGE ON THE NORTHERN COAST OF
AFRICA AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN CITY OF ROME ON THE WEST
COAST OF ITALY FOUGHT EACH OTHER FOR THE POSSESSION OF
THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN AND CARTHAGE WAS DESTROYED
23. HOW ROME HAPPENED
24. HOW THE REPUBLIC OF ROME, AFTER CENTURIES OF UNREST AND
REVOLUTION, BECAME AN EMPIRE
25. THE STORY OF JOSHUA OF NAZARETH, WHOM THE GREEKS CALLED
JESUS
26. THE TWILIGHT OF ROME
27. HOW ROME BECAME THE CENTRE OF THE CHRISTIAN WORLD
28. AHMED, THE CAMEL DRIVER, WHO BECAME THE PROPHET OF THE
ARABIAN DESERT, AND WHOSE FOLLOWERS ALMOST CONQUERED
THE ENTIRE KNOWN WORLD FOR THE GREATER GLORY OF
ALLAH, THE "ONLY TRUE GOD"
29. HOW CHARLEMAGNE, THE KING OF THE RANKS, CAME TO BEAR
THE TITLE OF EMPEROR AND TRIED TO REVIVE THE OLD IDEAL
OF WORLD-EMPIRE
30. WHY THE PEOPLE OF THE TENTH CENTURY PRAYED THE LORD
TO PROTECT THEM FROM THE FURY OF THE NORSEMEN
31. HOW CENTRAL EUROPE, ATTACKED FROM THREE SIDES, BECAME
AN ARMED CAMP AND WHY EUROPE WOULD HAVE PERISHED
WITHOUT THOSE PROFESSIONAL SOLDIERS AND ADMINISTRATORS
WHO WERE PART OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM
32. CHIVALRY
33. THE STRANGE DOUBLE LOYALTY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE
AGES, AND HOW IT LED TO ENDLESS QUARRELS BETWEEN THE
POPES AND THE HOLY ROMAN EMPERORS
34. BUT ALL THESE DIFFERENT QUARRELS WERE FORGOTTEN WHEN
THE TURKS TOOK THE HOLY LAND, DESECRATED THE HOLY
PLACES AND INTERFERED SERIOUSLY WITH THE TRADE FROM
EAST TO WEST. EUROPE WENT CRUSADING
35. WHY THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES SAID THAT CITY AIR
IS FREE AIR
36. HOW THE PEOPLE OF THE CITIES ASSERTED THEIR RIGHT
TO BE HEARD IN THE ROYAL COUNCILS OF THEIR COUNTRY
37. WHAT THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES THOUGHT OF THE
WORLD IN WHICH THEY HAPPENED TO LIVE
38. HOW THE CRUSADES ONCE MORE MADE THE MEDITERRANEAN A
BUSY CENTRE OF TRADE AND HOW THE CITIES OF THE ITALIAN
PENINSULA BECAME THE GREAT DISTRIBUTING CENTRE FOR THE
COMMERCE WITH ASIA AND AFRICA
39. PEOPLE ONCE MORE DARED TO BE HAPPY JUST BECAUSE THEY
WERE ALIVE. THEY TRIED TO SAVE THE REMAINS OF THE
OLDER AND MORE AGREEABLE CIVILISATION OF ROME AND
GREECE AND THEY WERE 80 PROUD OF THEIR ACHIEVEMENTS
THAT THEY SPOKE OF A RENAISSANCE OR RE-BIRTH OF
CIVILISATION
40. THE PEOPLE BEGAN TO FEEL THE NEED OF GIVING EXPRESSION
TO THEIR NEWLY DISCOVERED JOY OF LIVING. THEY EXPRESSED
THEIR HAPPINESS IN POETRY AND IN SCULPTURE AND
IN ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING, AND IN THE BOOKS THEY
PRINTED
41. BUT NOW THAT PEOPLE HAD BROKEN THROUGH THE BONDS OF
THEIR NARROW MEDIEVAL LIMITATIONS, THEY HAD TO HAVE
MORE ROOM FOR THEIR WANDERINGS. THE EUROPEAN WORLD
HAD GROWN TOO SMALL FOR THEIR AMBITIONS. IT WAS THE
TIME OF THE GREAT VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY
42. CONCERNING BUDDHA AND CONFUCIUS
43. THE PROGRESS OF THE HUMAN RACE IS BEST COMPARED TO A
GIGANTIC PENDULUM WHICH FOREVER SWINGS FORWARD AND
BACKWARD. THE RELIGIOUS INDIFFERENCE AND THE ARTISTIC
AND LITERARY ENTHUSIASM OF THE RENAISSANCE WERE FOLLOWED
BY THE ARTISTIC AND LITERARY INDIFFERENCE AND THE
RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM OF THE REFORMATION
44. THE AGE OF THE GREAT RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES
45. HOW THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS
AND THE LESS DIVINE BUT MORE REASONABLE RIGHT OF
PARLIAMENT ENDED DISASTROUSLY FOR KING CHARLES II
46. IN FRANCE, ON THE OTHER HAND, THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS
CONTINUED WITH GREATER POMP AND SPLENDOR THAN EVER
BEFORE AND THE AMBITION OF THE RULER WAS ONLY TEMPERED
BY THE NEWLY INVENTED LAW OF THE BALANCE OF POWER
47. THE STORY OF THE MYSTERIOUS MUSCOVITE EMPIRE WHICH SUDDENLY
BURST UPON THE GRAND POLITICAL STAGE OF EUROPE
48. RUSSIA AND SWEDEN FOUGHT MANY WARS TO DECIDE WHO
SHALL BE THE LEADING POWER OF NORTHEASTERN EUROPE
49. THE EXTRAORDINARY RISE OF A LITTLE STATE IN A DREARY PART
OF NORTHERN GERMANY, CALLED PRUSSIA
50. HOW THE NEWLY FOUNDED NATIONAL OR DYNASTIC STATES OF
EUROPE TRIED TO MAKE THEMSELVES RICH AND WHAT WAS
MEANT BY THE MERCANTILE SYSTEM
51. AT THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EUROPE HEARD
STRANGE REPORTS OF SOMETHING WHICH HAD HAPPENED IN
THE WILDERNESS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN CONTINENT. THE
DESCENDANTS OF THE MEN WHO HAD PUNISHED KING CHARLES
FOR HIS INSISTENCE UPON HIS DIVINE RIGHTS ADDED A
NEW CHAPTER TO THE OLD STORY OF THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT
62. THE GREAT FRENCH REVOLUTION PROCLAIMS THE PRINCIPLES
OF LIBERTY, FRATERNITY AND EQUALITY UNTO All THE PEOPLE
OF THE EARTH
53. NAPOLEON
54. AS SOON AS NAPOLEON HAD BEEN SENT TO ST. HELENA, THE
RULERS WHO SO OFTEN HAD BEEN DEFEATED BY THE HATED
CORSICAN MET AT VIENNA AND TRIED TO UNDO THE MANY
CHANCES WHICH HAD BEEN BROUGHT ABOUT BY THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION
55. THEY TRIED TO ASSURE THE WORLD AN ERA OF UNDISTURBED
PEACE BY SUPPRESSING ALL NEW IDEAS. THEY MADE THE
POLICE-SPY THE HIGHEST FUNCTIONARY IN THE STATE AND
SOON THE PRISONS OF ALL COUNTRIES WERE FILLED WITH
THOSE WHO CLAIMED THAT PEOPLE HAVE THE RIGHT TO
GOVERN THEMSELVES AS THEY SEE FIT
56. THE LOVE OF NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE, HOWEVER, WAS TOO
STRONG TO BE DESTROYED IN THIS WAY. THE SOUTH AMERICANS
WERE THE FIRST TO REBEL AGAINST THE REACTIONARY
MEASURES OF THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA. GREECE AND BELGIUM
AND SPAIN AND A LARGE NUMBER OF OTHER COUNTRIES
OF THE EUROPEAN CONTINENT FOLLOWED SUIT AND THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS FILLED WITH THE RUMOR OF MANY
WARS OF INDEPENDENCE
57. BUT WHITE THE PEOPLE OF EUROPE WERE FIGHTING FOR THEIR
NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE, THE WORLD IN WHICH THEY LIVED
HAD BEEN ENTIRELY CHANGED BY A SERIES OF INVENTIONS,
WHICH HAD MADE THE CLUMSY OLD STEAM-ENGINE OF THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY THE MOST FAITHFUL AND EFFICIENT
STAVE OF MAN
58. THE NEW ENGINES WERE VERY EXPENSIVE AND ONLY PEOPLE
OF WEALTH COULD AFFORD THEM. THE OLD CARPENTER OR
SHOEMAKER WHO HAD BEEN HIS OWN MASTER IN HIS LITTLE
WORKSHOP WAS OBLIGED TO HIRE HIMSELF OUT TO THE OWNERS
OF THE BIG MECHANICAL TOOLS, AND WHITE HE MADE
MORE MONEY THAN BEFORE, HE LOST HIS FORMER INDEPENDENCE
AND HE DID NOT LIKE THAT
59. THE GENERAL INTRODUCTION OF MACHINERY DID NOT BRING
ABOUT THE ERA OF HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY WHICH HAD
BEEN PREDICTED BY THE GENERATION WHICH SAW THE STAGE
COACH REPLACED BY THE RAILROAD. SEVERAL REMEDIES
WERE SUGGESTED, BUT NONE OF THESE QUITE SOLVED THE
PROBLEM
60. BUT THE WORLD HAD UNDERGONE ANOTHER CHANGE WHICH WAS
OF GREATER IMPORTANCE THAN EITHER THE POLITICAL OR THE
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS. AFTER GENERATIONS OF OPPRESSION
AND PERSECUTION, THE SCIENTIST HAD AT LAST GAINED
LIBERTY OF ACTION AND HE WAS NOW TRYING TO DISCOVER
THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS WHICH GOVERN THE UNIVERSE
61. A CHAPTER OF ART
62. THE LAST FIFTY YEARS, INCLUDING SEVERAL EXPLANATIONS
AND A FEW APOLOGIES
63. THE GREAT WAR, WHICH WAS REALLY THE STRUGGLE FOR A
NEW AND BETTER WORLD
64.ANIMATED CHRONOLOGY
65.CONCERNING THE PICTURES
66.AN HISTORICAL READING LIST FOR CHILDREN
67.INDEX
THE STORY OF MANKIND
HIGH Up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock.
It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand
years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak.
When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity
will have gone by.
THE SETTING OF THE STAGE
WE live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark.
Who are we?
Where do we come from?
Whither are we bound?
Slowly, but with persistent courage, we have been pushing this question
mark further and further towards that distant line, beyond the horizon,
where we hope to find our answer.
We have not gone very far.
We still know very little but we have reached the point where (with a
fair degree of accuracy) we can guess at many things.
In this chapter I shall tell you how (according to our best belief) the
stage was set for the first appearance of man.
If we represent the time during which it has been possible for animal
life to exist upon our planet by a line of this length, then the tiny
line just below indicates the age during which man (or a creature more
or less resembling man) has lived upon this earth.
Man was the last to come but the first to use his brain for the purpose
of conquering the forces of nature. That is the reason why we are going
to study him, rather than cats or dogs or horses or any of the other
animals, who, all in their own way, have a very interesting historical
development behind them.
In the beginning, the planet upon which we live was (as far as we now
know) a large ball of flaming matter, a tiny cloud of smoke in the
endless ocean of space. Gradually, in the course of millions of years,
the surface burned itself out, and was covered with a thin layer of
rocks. Upon these lifeless rocks the rain descended in endless torrents,
wearing out the hard granite and carrying the dust to the valleys that
lay hidden between the high cliffs of the steaming earth.
Finally the hour came when the sun broke through the clouds and saw how
this little planet was covered with a few small puddles which were to
develop into the mighty oceans of the eastern and western hemispheres.
Then one day the great wonder happened. What had been dead, gave birth
to life.
The first living cell floated upon the waters of the sea.
For millions of years it drifted aimlessly with the currents. But during
all that time it was developing certain habits that it might survive
more easily upon the inhospitable earth. Some of these cells were
happiest in the dark depths of the lakes and the pools. They took root
in the slimy sediments which had been carried down from the tops of the
hills and they became plants. Others preferred to move about and they
grew strange jointed legs, like scorpions and began to crawl along
the bottom of the sea amidst the plants and the pale green things that
looked like jelly-fishes. Still others (covered with scales) depended
upon a swimming motion to go from place to place in their search for
food, and gradually they populated the ocean with myriads of fishes.
Meanwhile the plants had increased in number and they had to search for
new dwelling places. There was no more room for them at the bottom of
the sea. Reluctantly they left the water and made a new home in the
marshes and on the mud-banks that lay at the foot of the mountains.
Twice a day the tides of the ocean covered them with their brine. For
the rest of the time, the plants made the best of their uncomfortable
situation and tried to survive in the thin air which surrounded the
surface of the planet. After centuries of training, they learned how
to live as comfortably in the air as they had done in the water. They
increased in size and became shrubs and trees and at last they learned
how to grow lovely flowers which attracted the attention of the busy big
bumble-bees and the birds who carried the seeds far and wide until the
whole earth had become covered with green pastures, or lay dark under
the shadow of the big trees. But some of the fishes too had begun to
leave the sea, and they had learned how to breathe with lungs as well as
with gills. We call such creatures amphibious, which means that they
are able to live with equal ease on the land and in the water. The first
frog who crosses your path can tell you all about the pleasures of the
double existence of the amphibian.
Once outside of the water, these animals gradually adapted themselves
more and more to life on land. Some became reptiles (creatures who
crawl like lizards) and they shared the silence of the forests with
the insects. That they might move faster through the soft soil, they
improved upon their legs and their size increased until the world was
populated with gigantic forms (which the hand-books of biology list
under the names of Ichthyosaurus and Megalosaurus and Brontosaurus)
who grew to be thirty to forty feet long and who could have played with
elephants as a full grown cat plays with her kittens.
Some of the members of this reptilian family began to live in the tops
of the trees, which were then often more than a hundred feet high.
They no longer needed their legs for the purpose of walking, but it was
necessary for them to move quickly from branch to branch. And so they
changed a part of their skin into a sort of parachute, which stretched
between the sides of their bodies and the small toes of their fore-feet,
and gradually they covered this skinny parachute with feathers and
made their tails into a steering gear and flew from tree to tree and
developed into true birds.
Then a strange thing happened. All the gigantic reptiles died within a
short time. We do not know the reason. Perhaps it was due to a sudden
change in climate. Perhaps they had grown so large that they could
neither swim nor walk nor crawl, and they starved to death within sight
but not within reach of the big ferns and trees. Whatever the cause, the
million year old world-empire of the big reptiles was over.
The world now began to be occupied by very different creatures. They
were the descendants of the reptiles but they were quite unlike these
because they fed their young from the "mammae" or the breasts of the
mother. Wherefore modern science calls these animals "mammals." They
had shed the scales of the fish. They did not adopt the feathers of
the bird, but they covered their bodies with hair. The mammals however
developed other habits which gave their race a great advantage over the
other animals. The female of the species carried the eggs of the young
inside her body until they were hatched and while all other living
beings, up to that time, had left their children exposed to the dangers
of cold and heat, and the attacks of wild beasts, the mammals kept their
young with them for a long time and sheltered them while they were still
too weak to fight their enemies. In this way the young mammals were
given a much better chance to survive, because they learned many things
from their mothers, as you will know if you have ever watched a cat
teaching her kittens to take care of themselves and how to wash their
faces and how to catch mice.
But of these mammals I need not tell you much for you know them well.
They surround you on all sides. They are your daily companions in the
streets and in your home, and you can see your less familiar cousins
behind the bars of the zoological garden.
And now we come to the parting of the ways when man suddenly leaves the
endless procession of dumbly living and dying creatures and begins to
use his reason to shape the destiny of his race.
One mammal in particular seemed to surpass all others in its ability
to find food and shelter. It had learned to use its fore-feet for the
purpose of holding its prey, and by dint of practice it had developed a
hand-like claw. After innumerable attempts it had learned how to balance
the whole of the body upon the hind legs. (This is a difficult act,
which every child has to learn anew although the human race has been
doing it for over a million years.)
This creature, half ape and half monkey but superior to both, became
the most successful hunter and could make a living in every clime. For
greater safety, it usually moved about in groups. It learned how to make
strange grunts to warn its young of approaching danger and after many
hundreds of thousands of years it began to use these throaty noises for
the purpose of talking.
This creature, though you may hardly believe it, was your first
"man-like" ancestor.
OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS
WE know very little about the first "true" men. We have never seen
their pictures. In the deepest layer of clay of an ancient soil we
have sometimes found pieces of their bones. These lay buried amidst the
broken skeletons of other animals that have long since disappeared from
the face of the earth. Anthropologists (learned scientists who devote
their lives to the study of man as a member of the animal kingdom) have
taken these bones and they have been able to reconstruct our earliest
ancestors with a fair degree of accuracy.
The great-great-grandfather of the human race was a very ugly and
unattractive mammal. He was quite small, much smaller than the people
of today. The heat of the sun and the biting wind of the cold winter had
coloured his skin a dark brown. His head and most of his body, his arms
and legs too, were covered with long, coarse hair. He had very thin but
strong fingers which made his hands look like those of a monkey. His
forehead was low and his jaw was like the jaw of a wild animal which
uses its teeth both as fork and knife. He wore no clothes. He had seen
no fire except the flames of the rumbling volcanoes which filled the
earth with their smoke and their lava.
He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests, as the pygmies of Africa
do to this very day. When he felt the pangs of hunger he ate raw leaves
and the roots of plants or he took the eggs away from an angry bird and
fed them to his own young. Once in a while, after a long and patient
chase, he would catch a sparrow or a small wild dog or perhaps a rabbit.
These he would eat raw for he had never discovered that food tasted
better when it was cooked.
During the hours of day, this primitive human being prowled about
looking for things to eat.
When night descended upon the earth, he hid his wife and his children
in a hollow tree or behind some heavy boulders, for he was surrounded on
all sides by ferocious animals and when it was dark these animals began
to prowl about, looking for something to eat for their mates and their
own young, and they liked the taste of human beings. It was a world
where you must either eat or be eaten, and life was very unhappy because
it was full of fear and misery.
In summer, man was exposed to the scorching rays of the sun, and during
the winter his children would freeze to death in his arms. When such a
creature hurt itself, (and hunting animals are forever breaking their
bones or spraining their ankles) he had no one to take care of him and
he must die a horrible death.
Like many of the animals who fill the Zoo with their strange noises,
early man liked to jabber. That is to say, he endlessly repeated the
same unintelligible gibberish because it pleased him to hear the sound
of his voice. In due time he learned that he could use this guttural
noise to warn his fellow beings whenever danger threatened and he gave
certain little shrieks which came to mean "there is a tiger!" or "here
come five elephants." Then the others grunted something back at him and
their growl meant, "I see them," or "let us run away and hide." And this
was probably the origin of all language.
But, as I have said before, of these beginnings we know so very little.
Early man had no tools and he built himself no houses. He lived and died
and left no trace of his existence except a few collar-bones and a few
pieces of his skull. These tell us that many thousands of years ago the
world was inhabited by certain mammals who were quite different from
all the other animals--who had probably developed from another unknown
ape-like animal which had learned to walk on its hind-legs and use
its fore-paws as hands--and who were most probably connected with the
creatures who happen to be our own immediate ancestors.
It is little enough we know and the rest is darkness.
PREHISTORIC MAN
PREHISTORIC MAN BEGINS TO MAKE THINGS FOR HIMSELF.
EARLY man did not know what time meant. He kept no records of birthdays
or wedding anniversaries or the hour of death. He had no idea of days or
weeks or even years. But in a general way he kept track of the seasons
for he had noticed that the cold winter was invariably followed by the
mild spring--that spring grew into the hot summer when fruits ripened
and the wild ears of corn were ready to be eaten and that summer ended
when sudden gusts of wind swept the leaves from the trees and a number
of animals were getting ready for the long hibernal sleep.
But now, something unusual and rather frightening had happened.
Something was the matter with the weather. The warm days of summer had
come very late. The fruits had not ripened. The tops of the mountains
which used to be covered with grass now lay deeply hidden underneath a
heavy burden of snow.
Then, one morning, a number of wild people, different from the other
creatures who lived in that neighbourhood, came wandering down from the
region of the high peaks. They looked lean and appeared to be starving.
They uttered sounds which no one could understand. They seemed to
say that they were hungry. There was not food enough for both the old
inhabitants and the newcomers. When they tried to stay more than a few
days there was a terrible battle with claw-like hands and feet and whole
families were killed. The others fled back to their mountain slopes and
died in the next blizzard.
But the people in the forest were greatly frightened. All the time the
days grew shorter and the nights grew colder than they ought to have
been.
Finally, in a gap between two high hills, there appeared a tiny speck
of greenish ice. Rapidly it increased in size. A gigantic glacier came
sliding downhill. Huge stones were being pushed into the valley. With
the noise of a dozen thunderstorms torrents of ice and mud and blocks of
granite suddenly tumbled among the people of the forest and killed them
while they slept. Century old trees were crushed into kindling wood. And
then it began to snow.
It snowed for months and months. All the plants died and the animals
fled in search of the southern sun. Man hoisted his young upon his
back and followed them. But he could not travel as fast as the wilder
creatures and he was forced to choose between quick thinking or quick
dying. He seems to have preferred the former for he has managed to
survive the terrible glacial periods which upon four different occasions
threatened to kill every human being on the face of the earth.
In the first place it was necessary that man clothe himself lest
he freeze to death. He learned how to dig holes and cover them with
branches and leaves and in these traps he caught bears and hyenas, which
he then killed with heavy stones and whose skins he used as coats for
himself and his family.
Next came the housing problem. This was simple. Many animals were in the
habit of sleeping in dark caves. Man now followed their example, drove
the animals out of their warm homes and claimed them for his own.
Even so, the climate was too severe for most people and the old and the
young died at a terrible rate. Then a genius bethought himself of
the use of fire. Once, while out hunting, he had been caught in a
forest-fire. He remembered that he had been almost roasted to death by
the flames. Thus far fire had been an enemy. Now it became a friend. A
dead tree was dragged into the cave and lighted by means of smouldering
branches from a burning wood. This turned the cave into a cozy little
room.
And then one evening a dead chicken fell into the fire. It was not
rescued until it had been well roasted. Man discovered that meat tasted
better when cooked and he then and there discarded one of the old habits
which he had shared with the other animals and began to prepare his
food.
In this way thousands of years passed. Only the people with the
cleverest brains survived. They had to struggle day and night against
cold and hunger. They were forced to invent tools. They learned how to
sharpen stones into axes and how to make hammers. They were obliged to
put up large stores of food for the endless days of the winter and they
found that clay could be made into bowls and jars and hardened in the
rays of the sun. And so the glacial period, which had threatened to
destroy the human race, became its greatest teacher because it forced
man to use his brain.
HIEROGLYPHICS
THE EGYPTIANS INVENT THE ART OF WRITING AND THE RECORD OF HISTORY BEGINS
THESE earliest ancestors of ours who lived in the great European
wilderness were rapidly learning many new things. It is safe to say that
in due course of time they would have given up the ways of savages and
would have developed a civilisation of their own. But suddenly there
came an end to their isolation. They were discovered.
A traveller from an unknown southland who had dared to cross the sea
and the high mountain passes had found his way to the wild people of the
European continent. He came from Africa. His home was in Egypt.
The valley of the Nile had developed a high stage of civilisation
thousands of years before the people of the west had dreamed of the
possibilities of a fork or a wheel or a house. And we shall therefore
leave our great-great-grandfathers in their caves, while we visit
the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, where stood the
earliest school of the human race.
The Egyptians have taught us many things. They were excellent farmers.
They knew all about irrigation. They built temples which were afterwards
copied by the Greeks and which served as the earliest models for the
churches in which we worship nowadays. They had invented a calendar
which proved such a useful instrument for the purpose of measuring time
that it has survived with a few changes until today. But most important
of all, the Egyptians had learned how to preserve speech for the benefit
of future generations. They had invented the art of writing.
We are so accustomed to newspapers and books and magazines that we take
it for granted that the world has always been able to read and write.
As a matter of fact, writing, the most important of all inventions, is
quite new. Without written documents we would be like cats and dogs, who
can only teach their kittens and their puppies a few simple things and
who, because they cannot write, possess no way in which they can make
use of the experience of those generations of cats and dogs that have
gone before.
In the first century before our era, when the Romans came to Egypt, they
found the valley full of strange little pictures which seemed to have
something to do with the history of the country. But the Romans were not
interested in "anything foreign" and did not inquire into the origin of
these queer figures which covered the walls of the temples and the walls
of the palaces and endless reams of flat sheets made out of the papyrus
reed. The last of the Egyptian priests who had understood the holy art
of making such pictures had died several years before. Egypt deprived
of its independence had become a store-house filled with important
historical documents which no one could decipher and which were of no
earthly use to either man or beast.
Seventeen centuries went by and Egypt remained a land of mystery. But
in the year 1798 a French general by the name of Bonaparte happened to
visit eastern Africa to prepare for an attack upon the British Indian
Colonies. He did not get beyond the Nile, and his campaign was a
failure. But, quite accidentally, the famous French expedition solved
the problem of the ancient Egyptian picture-language.
One day a young French officer, much bored by the dreary life of his
little fortress on the Rosetta river (a mouth of the Nile) decided to
spend a few idle hours rummaging among the ruins of the Nile Delta. And
behold! he found a stone which greatly puzzled him. Like everything else
in Egypt it was covered with little figures. But this particular slab of
black basalt was different from anything that had ever been discovered.
It carried three inscriptions. One of these was in Greek. The Greek
language was known. "All that is necessary," so he reasoned, "is to
compare the Greek text with the Egyptian figures, and they will at once
tell their secrets."
The plan sounded simple enough but it took more than twenty years to
solve the riddle. In the year 1802 a French professor by the name of
Champollion began to compare the Greek and the Egyptian texts of
the famous Rosetta stone. In the year 1823 he announced that he had
discovered the meaning of fourteen little figures. A short time later
he died from overwork, but the main principles of Egyptian writing had
become known. Today the story of the valley of the Nile is better known
to us than the story of the Mississippi River. We possess a written
record which covers four thousand years of chronicled history.
As the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (the word means "sacred writing")
have played such a very great role in history, (a few of them in
modified form have even found their way into our own alphabet,) you
ought to know something about the ingenious system which was used fifty
centuries ago to preserve the spoken word for the benefit of the coming
generations.
Of course, you know what a sign language is. Every Indian story of our
western plains has a chapter devoted to strange messages writter{sic}
in the form of little pictures which tell how many buffaloes were killed
and how many hunters there were in a certain party. As a rule it is not
difficult to understand the meaning of such messages.
Ancient Egyptian, however, was not a sign language. The clever people of
the Nile had passed beyond that stage long before. Their pictures meant
a great deal more than the object which they represented, as I shall try
to explain to you now.
Suppose that you were Champollion, and that you were examining a stack
of papyrus sheets, all covered with hieroglyphics. Suddenly you came
across a picture of a man with a saw. "Very well," you would say, "that
means of course that a farmer went out to cut down a tree." Then you
take another papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the
age of eighty-two. In the midst of a sentence appears the picture of the
man with the saw. Queens of eighty-two do not handle saws. The picture
therefore must mean something else. But what?
That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved. He discovered
that the Egyptians were the first to use what we now call "phonetic
writing"--a system of characters which reproduce the "sound" (or phone)
of the spoken word and which make it possible for us to translate all
our spoken words into a written form, with the help of only a few dots
and dashes and pothooks.
Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw. The word
"saw" either means a certain tool which you will find in a carpenter's
shop, or it means the past tense of the verb "to see."
This is what had happened to the word during the course of centuries.
First of all it had meant only the particular tool which it represented.
Then that meaning had been lost and it had become the past participle
of a verb. After several hundred years, the Egyptians lost sight of
both these meanings and the picture {illust.} came to stand for a single
letter, the letter S. A short sentence will show you what I mean.
Here is a modern English sentence as it would have been written in
hieroglyphics. {illust.}
The {illust.} either means one of these two round objects in your head,
which allow you to see or it means "I," the person who is talking.
A {illust.} is either an insect which gathers honey, or it represents
the verb "to be" which means to exist. Again, it may be the first part
of a verb like "be-come" or "be-have." In this particular instance it
is followed by {illust.} which means a "leaf" or "leave" or "lieve" (the
sound of all three words is the same).
The "eye" you know all about.
Finally you get the picture of a {illust.}. It is a giraffe It is part
of the old sign-language out of which the hieroglyphics developed.
You can now read that sentence without much difficulty.
"I believe I saw a giraffe."
Having invented this system the Egyptians developed it during thousands
of years until they could write anything they wanted, and they used
these "canned words" to send messages to friends, to keep business
accounts and to keep a record of the history of their country, that
future generations might benefit by the mistakes of the past.
THE NILE VALLEY
THE BEGINNING OF CIVILISATION IN THE VALLEY OF THE NILE
THE history of man is the record of a hungry creature in search of food.
Wherever food was plentiful, thither man has travelled to make his home.
The fame of the Valley of the Nile must have spread at an early date.
From the interior of Africa and from the desert of Arabia and from the
western part of Asia people had flocked to Egypt to claim their share
of the rich farms. Together these invaders had formed a new race which
called itself "Remi" or "the Men" just as we sometimes call America
"God's own country." They had good reason to be grateful to a Fate which
had carried them to this narrow strip of land. In the summer of each
year the Nile turned the valley into a shallow lake and when the waters
receded all the grainfields and the pastures were covered with several
inches of the most fertile clay.
In Egypt a kindly river did the work of a million men and made it
possible to feed the teeming population of the first large cities of
which we have any record. It is true that all the arable land was not
in the valley. But a complicated system of small canals and well-sweeps
carried water from the river-level to the top of the highest banks
and an even more intricate system of irrigation trenches spread it
throughout the land.
While man of the prehistoric age had been obliged to spend sixteen hours
out of every twenty-four gathering food for himself and the members of
his tribe, the Egyptian peasant or the inhabitant of the Egyptian city
found himself possessed of a certain leisure. He used this spare time
to make himself many things that were merely ornamental and not in the
least bit useful.
More than that. One day he discovered that his brain was capable of
thinking all kinds of thoughts which had nothing to do with the problems
of eating and sleeping and finding a home for the children. The Egyptian
began to speculate upon many strange problems that confronted him.
Where did the stars come from? Who made the noise of the thunder which
frightened him so terribly? Who made the River Nile rise with such
regularity that it was possible to base the calendar upon the appearance
and the disappearance of the annual floods? Who was he, himself, a
strange little creature surrounded on all sides by death and sickness
and yet happy and full of laughter?
He asked these many questions and certain people obligingly stepped
forward to answer these inquiries to the best of their ability. The
Egyptians called them "priests" and they became the guardians of his
thoughts and gained great respect in the community. They were highly
learned men who were entrusted with the sacred task of keeping the
written records. They understood that it is not good for man to
think only of his immediate advantage in this world and they drew his
attention to the days of the future when his soul would dwell beyond the
mountains of the west and must give an account of his deeds to Osiris,
the mighty God who was the Ruler of the Living and the Dead and who
judged the acts of men according to their merits. Indeed, the priests
made so much of that future day in the realm of Isis and Osiris that
the Egyptians began to regard life merely as a short preparation for the
Hereafter and turned the teeming valley of the Nile into a land devoted
to the Dead.
In a strange way, the Egyptians had come to believe that no soul could
enter the realm of Osiris without the possession of the body which had
been its place of residence in this world. Therefore as soon as a man
was dead his relatives took his corpse and had it embalmed. For weeks
it was soaked in a solution of natron and then it was filled with pitch.
The Persian word for pitch was "Mumiai" and the embalmed body was called
a "Mummy." It was wrapped in yards and yards of specially prepared linen
and it was placed in a specially prepared coffin ready to be removed to
its final home. But an Egyptian grave was a real home where the body was
surrounded by pieces of furniture and musical instruments (to while away
the dreary hours of waiting) and by little statues of cooks and bakers
and barbers (that the occupant of this dark home might be decently
provided with food and need not go about unshaven).
Originally these graves had been dug into the rocks of the western
mountains but as the Egyptians moved northward they were obliged to
build their cemeteries in the desert. The desert however is full of
wild animals and equally wild robbers and they broke into the graves and
disturbed the mummy or stole the jewelry that had been buried with the
body. To prevent such unholy desecration the Egyptians used to build
small mounds of stones on top of the graves. These little mounds
gradually grew in size, because the rich people built higher mounds than
the poor and there was a good deal of competition to see who could make
the highest hill of stones. The record was made by King Khufu, whom the
Greeks called Cheops and who lived thirty centuries before our era. His
mound, which the Greeks called a pyramid (because the Egyptian word for
high was pir-em-us) was over five hundred feet high.
It covered more than thirteen acres of desert which is three times as
much space as that occupied by the church of St. Peter, the largest
edifice of the Christian world.
During twenty years, over a hundred thousand men were busy carrying the
necessary stones from the other side of the river--ferrying them across
the Nile (how they ever managed to do this, we do not understand),
dragging them in many instances a long distance across the desert and
finally hoisting them into their correct position. But so well did
the King's architects and engineers perform their task that the narrow
passage-way which leads to the royal tomb in the heart of the stone
monster has never yet been pushed out of shape by the weight of those
thousands of tons of stone which press upon it from all sides.
THE STORY OF EGYPT
THE RISE AND FALL OF EGYPT
THE river Nile was a kind friend but occasionally it was a hard
taskmaster. It taught the people who lived along its banks the noble art
of "team-work." They depended upon each other to build their irrigation
trenches and keep their dikes in repair. In this way they learned how
to get along with their neighbours and their mutual-benefit-association
quite easily developed into an organised state.
Then one man grew more powerful than most of his neighbours and he
became the leader of the community and their commander-in-chief when the
envious neighbours of western Asia invaded the prosperous valley. In
due course of time he became their King and ruled all the land from the
Mediterranean to the mountains of the west.
But these political adventures of the old Pharaohs (the word meant
"the Man who lived in the Big House") rarely interested the patient and
toiling peasant of the grain fields. Provided he was not obliged to pay
more taxes to his King than he thought just, he accepted the rule of
Pharaoh as he accepted the rule of Mighty Osiris.
It was different however when a foreign invader came and robbed him of
his possessions. After twenty centuries of independent life, a savage
Arab tribe of shepherds, called the Hyksos, attacked Egypt and for five
hundred years they were the masters of the valley of the Nile. They were
highly un-popular and great hate was also felt for the Hebrews who
came to the land of Goshen to find a shelter after their long wandering
through the desert and who helped the foreign usurper by acting as his
tax-gatherers and his civil servants.
But shortly after the year 1700 B.C. the people of Thebes began a
revolution and after a long struggle the Hyksos were driven out of the
country and Egypt was free once more.
A thousand years later, when Assyria conquered all of western Asia,
Egypt became part of the empire of Sardanapalus. In the seventh century
B.C. it became once more an independent state which obeyed the rule of a
king who lived in the city of Sais in the Delta of the Nile. But in the
year 525 B.C., Cambyses, the king of the Persians, took possession
of Egypt and in the fourth century B.C., when Persia was conquered by
Alexander the Great, Egypt too became a Macedonian province. It regained
a semblance of independence when one of Alexander's generals set himself
up as king of a new Egyptian state and founded the dynasty of the
Ptolemies, who resided in the newly built city of Alexandria.
Finally, in the year 89 B.C., the Romans came. The last Egyptian queen,
Cleopatra, tried her best to save the country. Her beauty and charm were
more dangerous to the Roman generals than half a dozen Egyptian army
corps. Twice she was successful in her attacks upon the hearts of her
Roman conquerors. But in the year 30 B.C., Augustus, the nephew and
heir of Caesar, landed in Alexandria. He did not share his late uncle's
admiration for the lovely princess. He destroyed her armies, but spared
her life that he might make her march in his triumph as part of the
spoils of war. When Cleopatra heard of this plan, she killed herself by
taking poison. And Egypt became a Roman province.
MESOPOTAMIA
MESOPOTAMIA--THE SECOND CENTRE OF EASTERN CIVILISATION
I AM going to take you to the top of the highest pyramid and I am going
to ask that you imagine yourself possessed of the eyes of a hawk. Way,
way off, in the distance, far beyond the yellow sands of the desert, you
will see something green and shimmering. It is a valley situated between
two rivers. It is the Paradise of the Old Testament. It is the land of
mystery and wonder which the Greeks called Mesopotamia--the "country
between the rivers."
The names of the two rivers are the Euphrates (which the Babylonians
called the Purattu) and the Tigris (which was known as the Diklat). They
begin their course amidst the snows of the mountains of Armenia where
Noah's Ark found a resting place and slowly they flow through the
southern plain until they reach the muddy banks of the Persian gulf.
They perform a very useful service. They turn the arid regions of
western Asia into a fertile garden.
The valley of the Nile had attracted people because it had offered them
food upon fairly easy terms. The "land between the rivers" was popular
for the same reason. It was a country full of promise and both the
inhabitants of the northern mountains and the tribes which roamed
through the southern deserts tried to claim this territory as their
own and most exclusive possession. The constant rivalry between the
mountaineers and the desert-nomads led to endless warfare. Only the
strongest and the bravest could hope to survive and that will explain
why Mesopotamia became the home of a very strong race of men who
were capable of creating a civilisation which was in every respect as
important as that of Egypt.
THE SUMERIANS
THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS, WHOSE CLAY TABLETS TELL US THE STORY OF
ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, THE GREAT SEMITIC MELTING-POT
THE fifteenth century was an age of great discoveries. Columbus tried
to find a way to the island of Kathay and stumbled upon a new and
unsuspected continent. An Austrian bishop equipped an expedition which
was to travel eastward and find the home of the Grand Duke of Muscovy,
a voyage which led to complete failure, for Moscow was not visited by
western men until a generation later. Meanwhile a certain Venetian
by the name of Barbero had explored the ruins of western Asia and had
brought back reports of a most curious language which he had found
carved in the rocks of the temples of Shiraz and engraved upon endless
pieces of baked clay.
But Europe was busy with many other things and it was not until the
end of the eighteenth century that the first "cuneiform inscriptions"
(so-called because the letters were wedge-shaped and wedge is called
"Cuneus" in Latin) were brought to Europe by a Danish surveyor, named
Niebuhr. Then it took thirty years before a patient German school-master
by the name of Grotefend had deciphered the first four letters, the
D, the A, the R and the SH, the name of the Persian King Darius.
And another twenty years had to go by until a British officer, Henry
Rawlinson, who found the famous inscription of Behistun, gave us a
workable key to the nail-writing of western Asia.
Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writings, the job of
Champollion had been an easy one. The Egyptians used pictures. But the
Sumerians, the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon
the idea of scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded
pictures entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which
showed little connection with the pictures out of which they had been
developed. A few examples will show you what I mean. In the beginning a
star, when drawn with a nail into a brick looked as follows: {illust.}
This sign however was too cumbersome and after a short while when the
meaning of "heaven" was added to that of star the picture was simplified
in this way {illust.} which made it even more of a puzzle. In the same
way an ox changed from {illust} into {illust.} and a fish changed from
{illust.} into {illust.} The sun was originally a plain circle {illust.}
and became {illust.} If we were using the Sumerian script today we would
make an {illust.} look like {illust.}. This system of writing down our
ideas looks rather complicated but for more than thirty centuries it
was used by the Sumerians and the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the
Persians and all the different races which forced their way into the
fertile valley.
The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and conquest. First
the Sumerians came from the North. They were a white People who had
lived in the mountains. They had been accustomed to worship their Gods
on the tops of hills. After they had entered the plain they constructed
artificial little hills on top of which they built their altars. They
did not know how to build stairs and they therefore surrounded their
towers with sloping galleries. Our engineers have borrowed this idea, as
you may see in our big railroad stations where ascending galleries lead
from one floor to another. We may have borrowed other ideas from the
Sumerians but we do not know it. The Sumerians were entirely ab-sorbed
by those races that entered the fertile valley at a later date. Their
towers however still stand amidst the ruins of Mesopotamia. The Jews saw
them when they went into exile in the land of Babylon and they called
them towers of Babillli, or towers of Babel.
In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had entered
Mesopotamia. They were soon afterwards over-powered by the Akkadians,
one of the many tribes from the desert of Arabia who speak a common
dialect and who are known as the "Semites," because in the olden days
people believed them to be the direct descendants of Shem, one of the
three sons of Noah. A thousand years later, the Akkadians were forced to
submit to the rule of the Amorites, another Semitic desert tribe whose
great King Hammurabi built himself a magnificent palace in the holy
city of Babylon and who gave his people a set of laws which made the
Babylonian state the best administered empire of the ancient world. Next
the Hittites, whom you will also meet in the Old Testament, over-ran the
Fertile Valley and destroyed whatever they could not carry away. They
in turn were vanquished by the followers of the great desert God, Ashur,
who called themselves Assyrians and who made the city of Nineveh the
center of a vast and terrible empire which conquered all of western Asia
and Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subject races until the end
of the seventh century before the birth of Christ when the Chaldeans,
also a Semitic tribe, re-established Babylon and made that city the most
important capital of that day. Nebuchadnezzar, the best known of their
Kings, encouraged the study of science, and our modern knowledge of
astronomy and mathematics is all based upon certain first principles
which were discovered by the Chaldeans. In the year 538 B.C. a crude
tribe of Persian shepherds invaded this old land and overthrew the
empire of the Chaldeans. Two hundred years later, they in turn were
overthrown by Alexander the Great, who turned the Fertile Valley, the
old melting-pot of so many Semitic races, into a Greek province. Next
came the Romans and after the Romans, the Turks, and Mesopotamia, the
second centre of the world's civilisation, became a vast wilderness
where huge mounds of earth told a story of ancient glory.
MOSES
THE STORY OF MOSES, THE LEADER OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
SOME time during the twentieth century before our era, a small and
unimportant tribe of Semitic shepherds had left its old home, which was
situated in the land of Ur on the mouth of the Euphrates, and had tried
to find new pastures within the domain of the Kings of Babylonia. They
had been driven away by the royal soldiers and they had moved westward
looking for a little piece of unoccupied territory where they might set
up their tents.
This tribe of shepherds was known as the Hebrews or, as we call them,
the Jews. They had wandered far and wide, and after many years of dreary
peregrinations they had been given shelter in Egypt. For more than five
centuries they had dwelt among the Egyptians and when their adopted
country had been overrun by the Hyksos marauders (as I told you in
the story of Egypt) they had managed to make themselves useful to the
foreign invader and had been left in the undisturbed possession of their
grazing fields. But after a long war of independence the Egyptians had
driven the Hyksos out of the valley of the Nile and then the Jews had
come upon evil times for they had been degraded to the rank of common
slaves and they had been forced to work on the royal roads and on the
Pyramids. And as the frontiers were guarded by the Egyptian soldiers it
had been impossible for the Jews to escape.
After many years of suffering they were saved from their miserable
fate by a young Jew, called Moses, who for a long time had dwelt in the
desert and there had learned to appreciate the simple virtues of his
earliest ancestors, who had kept away from cities and city-life and had
refused to let themselves be corrupted by the ease and the luxury of a
foreign civilisation.
Moses decided to bring his people back to a love of the ways of the
patriarchs. He succeeded in evading the Egyptian troops that were sent
after him and led his fellow tribesmen into the heart of the plain at
the foot of Mount Sinai. During his long and lonely life in the desert,
he had learned to revere the strength of the great God of the Thunder
and the Storm, who ruled the high heavens and upon whom the shepherds
depended for life and light and breath. This God, one of the many
divinities who were widely worshipped in western Asia, was called
Jehovah, and through the teaching of Moses, he became the sole Master of
the Hebrew race.
One day, Moses disappeared from the camp of the Jews. It was whispered
that he had gone away carrying two tablets of rough-hewn stone. That
afternoon, the top of the mountain was lost to sight. The darkness of
a terrible storm hid it from the eye of man. But when Moses returned,
behold! there stood engraved upon the tablets the words which Jehovah
had spoken unto the people of Israel amidst the crash of his thunder and
the blinding flashes of his lightning. And from that moment, Jehovah was
recognised by all the Jews as the Highest Master of their Fate, the only
True God, who had taught them how to live holy lives when he bade them
to follow the wise lessons of his Ten Commandments.
They followed Moses when he bade them continue their journey through the
desert. They obeyed him when he told them what to eat and drink and what
to avoid that they might keep well in the hot climate. And finally after
many years of wandering they came to a land which seemed pleasant and
prosperous. It was called Palestine, which means the country of the
"Pilistu" the Philistines, a small tribe of Cretans who had settled
along the coast after they had been driven away from their own island.
Unfortunately, the mainland, Palestine, was already inhabited by another
Semitic race, called the Canaanites. But the Jews forced their way into
the valleys and built themselves cities and constructed a mighty temple
in a town which they named Jerusalem, the Home of Peace. As for Moses,
he was no longer the leader of his people. He had been allowed to see
the mountain ridges of Palestine from afar. Then he had closed his tired
eyes for all time. He had worked faithfully and hard to please Jehovah.
Not only had he guided his brethren out of foreign slavery into the free
and independent life of a new home but he had also made the Jews the
first of all nations to worship a single God.
THE PHOENICIANS
THE PHOENICIANS WHO GAVE US OUR ALPHABET
THE Phoenicians, who were the neighbours of the Jews, were a Semitic
tribe which at a very early age had settled along the shores of the
Mediterranean. They had built themselves two well-fortified towns, Tyre
and Sidon, and within a short time they had gained a monopoly of the
trade of the western seas. Their ships went regularly to Greece and
Italy and Spain and they even ventured beyond the straits of Gibraltar
to visit the Scilly islands where they could buy tin. Wherever they
went, they built themselves small trading stations, which they called
colonies. Many of these were the origin of modern cities, such as Cadiz
and Marseilles.
They bought and sold whatever promised to bring them a good profit.
They were not troubled by a conscience. If we are to believe all their
neighbours they did not know what the words honesty or integrity meant.
They regarded a well-filled treasure chest the highest ideal of all good
citizens. Indeed they were very unpleasant people and did not have a
single friend. Nevertheless they have rendered all coming generations
one service of the greatest possible value. They gave us our alphabet.
The Phoenicians had been familiar with the art of writing, invented by
the Sumerians. But they regarded these pothooks as a clumsy waste
of time. They were practical business men and could not spend hours
engraving two or three letters. They set to work and invented a new
system of writing which was greatly superior to the old one. They
borrowed a few pictures from the Egyptians and they simplified a number
of the wedge-shaped figures of the Sumerians. They sacrificed the pretty
looks of the older system for the advantage of speed and they reduced
the thousands of different images to a short and handy alphabet of
twenty-two letters.
In due course of time, this alphabet travelled across the AEgean Sea and
entered Greece. The Greeks added a few letters of their own and carried
the improved system to Italy. The Romans modified the figures somewhat
and in turn taught them to the wild barbarians of western Europe. Those
wild barbarians were our own ancestors, and that is the reason why this
book is written in characters that are of Phoenician origin and not
in the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or in the nail-script of the
Sumerians.
THE INDO-EUROPEANS
THE INDO-EUROPEAN PERSIANS CONQUER THE SEMITIC AND THE EGYPTIAN WORLD
THE world of Egypt and Babylon and Assyria and Phoenicia had existed
almost thirty centuries and the venerable races of the Fertile Valley
were getting old and tired. Their doom was sealed when a new and
more energetic race appeared upon the horizon. We call this race the
Indo-European race, because it conquered not only Europe but also made
itself the ruling class in the country which is now known as British
India.
These Indo-Europeans were white men like the Semites but they spoke
a different language which is regarded as the common ancestor of all
European tongues with the exception of Hungarian and Finnish and the
Basque dialects of Northern Spain.
When we first hear of them, they had been living along the shores of the
Caspian Sea for many centuries. But one day they had packed their tents
and they had wandered forth in search of a new home. Some of them had
moved into the mountains of Central Asia and for many centuries they had
lived among the peaks which surround the plateau of Iran and that is why
we call them Aryans. Others had followed the setting sun and they had
taken possession of the plains of Europe as I shall tell you when I give
you the story of Greece and Rome.
For the moment we must follow the Aryans. Under the leadership of
Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) who was their great teacher many of them had
left their mountain homes to follow the swiftly flowing Indus river on
its way to the sea.
Others had preferred to stay among the hills of western Asia and there
they had founded the half-independent communities of the Medes and the
Persians, two peoples whose names we have copied from the old Greek
history-books. In the seventh century before the birth of Christ, the
Medes had established a kingdom of their own called Media, but this
perished when Cyrus, the chief of a clan known as the Anshan, made
himself king of all the Persian tribes and started upon a career of
conquest which soon made him and his children the undisputed masters of
the whole of western Asia and of Egypt.
Indeed, with such energy did these Indo-European Persians push their
triumphant campaigns in the west that they soon found themselves in
serious difficulties with certain other Indo-European tribes which
centuries before had moved into Europe and had taken possession of the
Greek peninsula and the islands of the AEgean Sea.
These difficulties led to the three famous wars between Greece and
Persia during which King Darius and King Xerxes of Persia invaded the
northern part of the peninsula. They ravaged the lands of the Greeks and
tried very hard to get a foothold upon the European continent.
But in this they did not succeed. The navy of Athens proved
unconquerable. By cutting off the lines of supplies of the Persian
armies, the Greek sailors invariably forced the Asiatic rulers to return
to their base.
It was the first encounter between Asia, the ancient teacher, and
Europe, the young and eager pupil. A great many of the other chapters
of this book will tell you how the struggle between east and west has
continued until this very day.
THE AEGEAN SEA
THE PEOPLE OF THE AEGEAN SEA CARRIED THE CIVILISATION OF OLD ASIA INTO
THE WILDERNESS OF EUROPE
WHEN Heinrich Schliemann was a little boy his father told him the story
of Troy. He liked that story better than anything else he had ever heard
and he made up his mind, that as soon as he was big enough to leave
home, he would travel to Greece and "find Troy." That he was the son of
a poor country parson in a Mecklenburg village did not bother him. He
knew that he would need money but he decided to gather a fortune first
and do the digging afterwards. As a matter of fact, he managed to get
a large fortune within a very short time, and as soon as he had enough
money to equip an expedition, he went to the northwest corner of Asia
Minor, where he supposed that Troy had been situated.
In that particular nook of old Asia Minor, stood a high mound covered
with grainfields. According to tradition it had been the home of Priamus
the king of Troy. Schliemann, whose enthusiasm was somewhat greater than
his knowledge, wasted no time in preliminary explorations. At once he
began to dig. And he dug with such zeal and such speed that his trench
went straight through the heart of the city for which he was looking
and carried him to the ruins of another buried town which was at least
a thousand years older than the Troy of which Homer had written. Then
something very interesting occurred. If Schliemann had found a few
polished stone hammers and perhaps a few pieces of crude pottery, no one
would have been surprised. Instead of discovering such objects, which
people had generally associated with the prehistoric men who had lived
in these regions before the coming of the Greeks, Schliemann found
beautiful statuettes and very costly jewelry and ornamented vases of a
pattern that was unknown to the Greeks. He ventured the suggestion that
fully ten centuries before the great Trojan war, the coast of the AEgean
had been inhabited by a mysterious race of men who in many ways had been
the superiors of the wild Greek tribes who had invaded their country and
had destroyed their civilisation or absorbed it until it had lost
all trace of originality. And this proved to be the case. In the late
seventies of the last century, Schliemann visited the ruins of Mycenae,
ruins which were so old that Roman guide-books marvelled at their
antiquity. There again, beneath the flat slabs of stone of a small round
enclosure, Schliemann stumbled upon a wonderful treasure-trove, which
had been left behind by those mysterious people who had covered the
Greek coast with their cities and who had built walls, so big and so
heavy and so strong, that the Greeks called them the work of the Titans,
those god-like giants who in very olden days had used to play ball with
mountain peaks.
A very careful study of these many relics has done away with some of the
romantic features of the story. The makers of these early works of
art and the builders of these strong fortresses were no sorcerers, but
simple sailors and traders. They had lived in Crete, and on the many
small islands of the AEgean Sea. They had been hardy mariners and they
had turned the AEgean into a center of commerce for the exchange of
goods between the highly civilised east and the slowly developing
wilderness of the European mainland.
For more than a thousand years they had maintained an island empire
which had developed a very high form of art. Indeed their most important
city, Cnossus, on the northern coast of Crete, had been entirely modern
in its insistence upon hygiene and comfort. The palace had been properly
drained and the houses had been provided with stoves and the Cnossians
had been the first people to make a daily use of the hitherto unknown
bathtub. The palace of their King had been famous for its winding
staircases and its large banqueting hall. The cellars underneath this
palace, where the wine and the grain and the olive-oil were stored, had
been so vast and had so greatly impressed the first Greek visitors, that
they had given rise to the story of the "labyrinth," the name which we
give to a structure with so many complicated passages that it is almost
impossible to find our way out, once the front door has closed upon our
frightened selves.
But what finally became of this great AEgean Empire and what caused its
sudden downfall, that I can not tell.
The Cretans were familiar with the art of writing, but no one has yet
been able to decipher their inscriptions. Their history therefore is
unknown to us. We have to reconstruct the record of their adventures
from the ruins which the AEgeans have left behind. These ruins make it
clear that the AEgean world was suddenly conquered by a less civilised
race which had recently come from the plains of northern Europe. Unless
we are very much mistaken, the savages who were responsible for the
destruction of the Cretan and the AEgean civilisation were none other
than certain tribes of wandering shepherds who had just taken possession
of the rocky peninsula between the Adriatic and the AEgean seas and who
are known to us as Greeks.
THE GREEKS
MEANWHILE THE INDO-EUROPEAN TRIBE OF THE HELLENES WAS TAKING POSSESSION
OF GREECE
THE Pyramids were a thousand years old and were beginning to show the
first signs of decay, and Hammurabi, the wise king of Babylon, had been
dead and buried several centuries, when a small tribe of shepherds left
their homes along the banks of the River Danube and wandered southward
in search of fresh pastures. They called themselves Hellenes, after
Hellen, the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha. According to the old myths
these were the only two human beings who had escaped the great flood,
which countless years before had destroyed all the people of the world,
when they had grown so wicked that they disgusted Zeus, the mighty God,
who lived on Mount Olympus.
Of these early Hellenes we know nothing. Thucydides, the historian of
the fall of Athens, describing his earliest ancestors, said that they
"did not amount to very much," and this was probably true. They were
very ill-mannered. They lived like pigs and threw the bodies of their
enemies to the wild dogs who guarded their sheep. They had very little
respect for other people's rights, and they killed the natives of the
Greek peninsula (who were called the Pelasgians) and stole their farms
and took their cattle and made their wives and daughters slaves and
wrote endless songs praising the courage of the clan of the Achaeans,
who had led the Hellenic advance-guard into the mountains of Thessaly
and the Peloponnesus.
But here and there, on the tops of high rocks, they saw the castles
of the AEgeans and those they did not attack for they feared the metal
swords and the spears of the AEgean soldiers and knew that they could
not hope to defeat them with their clumsy stone axes.
For many centuries they continued to wander from valley to valley and
from mountain side to mountain side Then the whole of the land had been
occupied and the migration had come to an end.
That moment was the beginning of Greek civilisation. The Greek farmer,
living within sight of the AEgean colonies, was finally driven by
curiosity to visit his haughty neighbours. He discovered that he could
learn many useful things from the men who dwelt behind the high stone
walls of Mycenae, and Tiryns.
He was a clever pupil. Within a short time he mastered the art of
handling those strange iron weapons which the AEgeans had brought
from Babylon and from Thebes. He came to understand the mysteries of
navigation. He began to build little boats for his own use.
And when he had learned everything the AEgeans could teach him he turned
upon his teachers and drove them back to their islands. Soon afterwards
he ventured forth upon the sea and conquered all the cities of the
AEgean. Finally in the fifteenth century before our era he plundered and
ravaged Cnossus and ten centuries after their first appearance upon the
scene the Hellenes were the undisputed rulers of Greece, of the
AEgean and of the coastal regions of Asia Minor. Troy, the last great
commercial stronghold of the older civilisation, was destroyed in the
eleventh century B.C. European history was to begin in all seriousness.
THE GREEK CITIES
THE GREEK CITIES THAT WERE REALLY STATES
WE modern people love the sound of the word "big." We pride ourselves
upon the fact that we belong to the "biggest" country in the world and
possess the "biggest" navy and grow the "biggest" oranges and potatoes,
and we love to live in cities of "millions" of inhabitants and when we
are dead we are buried in the "biggest cemetery of the whole state."
A citizen of ancient Greece, could he have heard us talk, would not have
known what we meant. "Moderation in all things" was the ideal of
his life and mere bulk did not impress him at all. And this love of
moderation was not merely a hollow phrase used upon special occasions:
it influenced the life of the Greeks from the day of their birth to the
hour of their death. It was part of their literature and it made them
build small but perfect temples. It found expression in the clothes
which the men wore and in the rings and the bracelets of their wives. It
followed the crowds that went to the theatre and made them hoot down any
playwright who dared to sin against the iron law of good taste or good
sense.
The Greeks even insisted upon this quality in their politicians and in
their most popular athletes. When a powerful runner came to Sparta and
boasted that he could stand longer on one foot than any other man in
Hellas the people drove him from the city because he prided himself
upon an accomplishment at which he could be beaten by any common goose.
"That is all very well," you will say, "and no doubt it is a great
virtue to care so much for moderation and perfection, but why should
the Greeks have been the only people to develop this quality in olden
times?" For an answer I shall point to the way in which the Greeks
lived.
The people of Egypt or Mesopotamia had been the "subjects" of a
mysterious Supreme Ruler who lived miles and miles away in a dark palace
and who was rarely seen by the masses of the population. The Greeks on
the other hand, were "free citizens" of a hundred independent little
"cities" the largest of which counted fewer inhabitants than a large
modern village. When a peasant who lived in Ur said that he was a
Babylonian he meant that he was one of millions of other people who paid
tribute to the king who at that particular moment happened to be master
of western Asia. But when a Greek said proudly that he was an Athenian
or a Theban he spoke of a small town, which was both his home and his
country and which recognised no master but the will of the people in the
market-place.
To the Greek, his fatherland was the place where he was born; where he
had spent his earliest years playing hide and seek amidst the forbidden
rocks of the Acropolis; where he had grown into manhood with a thousand
other boys and girls, whose nicknames were as familiar to him as those
of your own schoolmates. His Fatherland was the holy soil where his
father and mother lay buried. It was the small house within the high
city-walls where his wife and children lived in safety. It was a
complete world which covered no more than four or five acres of rocky
land. Don't you see how these surroundings must have influenced a man
in everything he did and said and thought? The people of Babylon and
Assyria and Egypt had been part of a vast mob. They had been lost in
the multitude. The Greek on the other hand had never lost touch with
his immediate surroundings. He never ceased to be part of a little
town where everybody knew every one else. He felt that his intelligent
neighbours were watching him. Whatever he did, whether he wrote plays
or made statues out of marble or composed songs, he remembered that his
efforts were going to be judged by all the free-born citizens of his
home-town who knew about such things. This knowledge forced him to
strive after perfection, and perfection, as he had been taught from
childhood, was not possible without moderation.
In this hard school, the Greeks learned to excel in many things. They
created new forms of government and new forms of literature and new
ideals in art which we have never been able to surpass. They performed
these miracles in little villages that covered less ground than four or
five modern city blocks.
And look, what finally happened!
In the fourth century before our era, Alexander of Macedonia conquered
the world. As soon as he had done with fighting, Alexander decided that
he must bestow the benefits of the true Greek genius upon all mankind.
He took it away from the little cities and the little villages and tried
to make it blossom and bear fruit amidst the vast royal residences of
his newly acquired Empire. But the Greeks, removed from the familiar
sight of their own temples, removed from the well-known sounds and
smells of their own crooked streets, at once lost the cheerful joy and
the marvellous sense of moderation which had inspired the work of
their hands and brains while they laboured for the glory of their old
city-states. They became cheap artisans, content with second-rate work.
The day the little city-states of old Hellas lost their independence and
were forced to become part of a big nation, the old Greek spirit died.
And it has been dead ever since.
GREEK SELF-GOVERNMENT
THE GREEKS WERE THE FIRST PEOPLE TO TRY THE DIFFICULT EXPERIMENT OF
SELF-GOVERNMENT
IN the beginning, all the Greeks had been equally rich and equally poor.
Every man had owned a certain number of cows and sheep. His mud-hut had
been his castle. He had been free to come and go as he wished. Whenever
it was necessary to discuss matters of public importance, all the
citizens had gathered in the market-place. One of the older men of the
village was elected chairman and it was his duty to see that everybody
had a chance to express his views. In case of war, a particularly
energetic and self-confident villager was chosen commander-in-chief, but
the same people who had voluntarily given this man the right to be
their leader, claimed an equal right to deprive him of his job, once the
danger had been averted.
But gradually the village had grown into a city. Some people had worked
hard and others had been lazy. A few had been unlucky and still others
had been just plain dishonest in dealing with their neighbours and had
gathered wealth. As a result, the city no longer consisted of a number
of men who were equally well-off. On the contrary it was inhabited by a
small class of very rich people and a large class of very poor ones.
There had been another change. The old commander-in-chief who had been
willingly recognised as "headman" or "King" because he knew how to lead
his men to victory, had disappeared from the scene. His place had been
taken by the nobles--a class of rich people who during the course of
time had got hold of an undue share of the farms and estates.
These nobles enjoyed many advantages over the common crowd of freemen.
They were able to buy the best weapons which were to be found on the
market of the eastern Mediterranean. They had much spare time in which
they could practise the art of fighting. They lived in strongly
built houses and they could hire soldiers to fight for them. They were
constantly quarrelling among each other to decide who should rule the
city. The victorious nobleman then assumed a sort of Kingship over all
his neighbours and governed the town until he in turn was killed or
driven away by still another ambitious nobleman.
Such a King, by the grace of his soldiers, was called a "Tyrant" and
during the seventh and sixth centuries before our era every Greek city
was for a time ruled by such Tyrants, many of whom, by the way, happened
to be exceedingly capa-ble men. But in the long run, this state of
affairs became unbearable. Then attempts were made to bring about
reforms and out of these reforms grew the first democratic government of
which the world has a record.
It was early in the seventh century that the people of Athens decided to
do some housecleaning and give the large number of freemen once more a
voice in the government as they were supposed to have had in the days
of their Achaean ancestors. They asked a man by the name of Draco to
provide them with a set of laws that would protect the poor against
the aggressions of the rich. Draco set to work. Unfortunately he was a
professional lawyer and very much out of touch with ordinary life. In
his eyes a crime was a crime and when he had finished his code, the
people of Athens discovered that these Draconian laws were so severe
that they could not possibly be put into effect. There would not have
been rope enough to hang all the criminals under their new system of
jurisprudence which made the stealing of an apple a capital offence.
The Athenians looked about for a more humane reformer. At last they
found some one who could do that sort of thing better than anybody else.
His name was Solon. He belonged to a noble family and he had travelled
all over the world and had studied the forms of government of many other
countries. After a careful study of the subject, Solon gave Athens a set
of laws which bore testimony to that wonderful principle of moderation
which was part of the Greek character. He tried to improve the condition
of the peasant without however destroying the prosperity of the nobles
who were (or rather who could be) of such great service to the state as
soldiers. To protect the poorer classes against abuse on the part of
the judges (who were always elected from the class of the nobles because
they received no salary) Solon made a provision whereby a citizen with a
grievance had the right to state his case before a jury of thirty of his
fellow Athenians.
Most important of all, Solon forced the average freeman to take a direct
and personal interest in the affairs of the city. No longer could he
stay at home and say "oh, I am too busy today" or "it is raining and I
had better stay indoors." He was expected to do his share; to be at the
meeting of the town council; and carry part of the responsibility for
the safety and the prosperity of the state.
This government by the "demos," the people, was often far from
successful. There was too much idle talk. There were too many hateful
and spiteful scenes between rivals for official honor. But it taught
the Greek people to be independent and to rely upon themselves for their
salvation and that was a very good thing.
GREEK LIFE
HOW THE GREEKS LIVED
BUT how, you will ask, did the ancient Greeks have time to look after
their families and their business if they were forever running to the
market-place to discuss affairs of state? In this chapter I shall tell
you.
In all matters of government, the Greek democracy recognised only one
class of citizens--the freemen. Every Greek city was composed of a small
number of free born citizens, a large number of slaves and a sprinkling
of foreigners.
At rare intervals (usually during a war, when men were needed for the
army) the Greeks showed themselves willing to confer the rights of
citizenship upon the "barbarians" as they called the foreigners. But
this was an exception. Citizenship was a matter of birth. You were an
Athenian because your father and your grandfather had been Athenians
before you. But however great your merits as a trader or a soldier, if
you were born of non-Athenian parents, you remained a "foreigner" until
the end of time.
The Greek city, therefore, whenever it was not ruled by a king or a
tyrant, was run by and for the freemen, and this would not have been
possible without a large army of slaves who outnumbered the free
citizens at the rate of six or five to one and who performed those tasks
to which we modern people must devote most of our time and energy if we
wish to provide for our families and pay the rent of our apartments.
The slaves did all the cooking and baking and candlestick making of the
entire city. They were the tailors and the carpenters and the jewelers
and the school-teachers and the bookkeepers and they tended the store
and looked after the factory while the master went to the public meeting
to discuss questions of war and peace or visited the theatre to see the
latest play of AEschylus or hear a discussion of the revolutionary
ideas of Euripides, who had dared to express certain doubts upon the
omnipotence of the great god Zeus.
Indeed, ancient Athens resembled a modern club. All the freeborn citizens
were hereditary members and all the slaves were hereditary servants, and
waited upon the needs of their masters, and it was very pleasant to be a
member of the organisation.
But when we talk about slaves, we do not mean the sort of people about
whom you have read in the pages of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It is true that
the position of those slaves who tilled the fields was a very unpleasant
one, but the average freeman who had come down in the world and who had
been obliged to hire himself out as a farm hand led just as miserable
a life. In the cities, furthermore, many of the slaves were more
prosperous than the poorer classes of the freemen. For the Greeks, who
loved moderation in all things, did not like to treat their slaves after
the fashion which afterward was so common in Rome, where a slave had as
few rights as an engine in a modern factory and could be thrown to the
wild animals upon the smallest pretext.
The Greeks accepted slavery as a necessary institution, without which no
city could possibly become the home of a truly civilised people.
The slaves also took care of those tasks which nowadays are performed by
the business men and the professional men. As for those household duties
which take up so much of the time of your mother and which worry your
father when he comes home from his office, the Greeks, who understood
the value of leisure, had reduced such duties to the smallest possible
minimum by living amidst surroundings of extreme simplicity.
To begin with, their homes were very plain. Even the rich nobles spent
their lives in a sort of adobe barn, which lacked all the comforts which
a modern workman expects as his natural right. A Greek home consisted
of four walls and a roof. There was a door which led into the street but
there were no windows. The kitchen, the living rooms and the sleeping
quarters were built around an open courtyard in which there was a small
fountain, or a statue and a few plants to make it look bright. Within
this courtyard the family lived when it did not rain or when it was not
too cold. In one corner of the yard the cook (who was a slave) prepared
the meal and in another corner, the teacher (who was also a
slave) taught the children the alpha beta gamma and the tables of
multiplication and in still another corner the lady of the house, who
rarely left her domain (since it was not considered good form for a
married woman to be seen on the street too often) was repairing her
husband's coat with her seamstresses (who were slaves,) and in the
little office, right off the door, the master was inspecting the
accounts which the overseer of his farm (who was a slave) had just
brought to him.
When dinner was ready the family came together but the meal was a very
simple one and did not take much time. The Greeks seem to have regarded
eating as an unavoidable evil and not a pastime, which kills many dreary
hours and eventually kills many dreary people. They lived on bread and
on wine, with a little meat and some green vegetables. They drank water
only when nothing else was available because they did not think it very
healthy. They loved to call on each other for dinner, but our idea of a
festive meal, where everybody is supposed to eat much more than is good
for him, would have disgusted them. They came together at the table for
the purpose of a good talk and a good glass of wine and water, but as
they were moderate people they despised those who drank too much.
The same simplicity which prevailed in the dining room also dominated
their choice of clothes. They liked to be clean and well groomed, to
have their hair and beards neatly cut, to feel their bodies strong with
the exercise and the swimming of the gymnasium, but they never followed
the Asiatic fashion which prescribed loud colours and strange patterns.
They wore a long white coat and they managed to look as smart as a
modern Italian officer in his long blue cape.
They loved to see their wives wear ornaments but they thought it very
vulgar to display their wealth (or their wives) in public and whenever
the women left their home they were as inconspicuous as possible.
In short, the story of Greek life is a story not only of moderation but
also of simplicity. "Things," chairs and tables and books and houses and
carriages, are apt to take up a great deal of their owner's time. In the
end they invariably make him their slave and his hours are spent looking
after their wants, keeping them polished and brushed and painted. The
Greeks, before everything else, wanted to be "free," both in mind and
in body. That they might maintain their liberty, and be truly free in
spirit, they reduced their daily needs to the lowest possible point.
THE GREEK THEATRE
THE ORIGINS OF THE THEATRE, THE FIRST FORM OF PUBLIC AMUSEMENT
AT a very early stage of their history the Greeks had begun to collect
the poems, which had been written in honor of their brave ancestors who
had driven the Pelasgians out of Hellas and had destroyed the power of
Troy. These poems were recited in public and everybody came to listen to
them. But the theatre, the form of entertainment which has become almost
a necessary part of our own lives, did not grow out of these recited
heroic tales. It had such a curious origin that I must tell you
something about it in a separate chapter
The Greeks had always been fond of parades. Every year they held solemn
processions in honor of Dionysos the God of the wine. As everybody in
Greece drank wine (the Greeks thought water only useful for the purpose
of swimming and sailing) this particular Divinity was as popular as a
God of the Soda-Fountain would be in our own land.
And because the Wine-God was supposed to live in the vineyards, amidst a
merry mob of Satyrs (strange creatures who were half man and half goat),
the crowd that joined the procession used to wear goat-skins and to
hee-haw like real billy-goats. The Greek word for goat is "tragos" and
the Greek word for singer is "oidos." The singer who meh-mehed like a
goat therefore was called a "tragos-oidos" or goat singer, and it is
this strange name which developed into the modern word "Tragedy," which
means in the theatrical sense a piece with an unhappy ending, just as
Comedy (which really means the singing of something "comos" or gay) is
the name given to a play which ends happily.
But how, you will ask, did this noisy chorus of masqueraders, stamping
around like wild goats, ever develop into the noble tragedies which have
filled the theatres of the world for almost two thousand years?
The connecting link between the goat-singer and Hamlet is really very
simple as I shall show you in a moment.
The singing chorus was very amusing in the beginning and attracted large
crowds of spectators who stood along the side of the road and laughed.
But soon this business of tree-hawing grew tiresome and the Greeks
thought dullness an evil only comparable to ugliness or sickness. They
asked for something more entertaining. Then an inventive young poet
from the village of Icaria in Attica hit upon a new idea which proved a
tremendous success. He made one of the members of the goat-chorus step
forward and engage in conversation with the leader of the musicians who
marched at the head of the parade playing upon their pipes of Pan.
This individual was allowed to step out of line. He waved his arms and
gesticulated while he spoke (that is to say he "acted" while the others
merely stood by and sang) and he asked a lot of questions, which the
bandmaster answered according to the roll of papyrus upon which the poet
had written down these answers before the show began.
This rough and ready conversation--the dialogue--which told the story
of Dionysos or one of the other Gods, became at once popular with the
crowd. Henceforth every Dionysian procession had an "acted scene" and
very soon the "acting" was considered more important than the procession
and the meh-mehing.
AEschylus, the most successful of all "tragedians" who wrote no less
than eighty plays during his long life (from 526 to 455) made a
bold step forward when he introduced two "actors" instead of one. A
generation later Sophocles increased the number of actors to three. When
Euripides began to write his terrible tragedies in the middle of the
fifth century, B.C., he was allowed as many actors as he liked and
when Aristophanes wrote those famous comedies in which he poked fun
at everybody and everything, including the Gods of Mount Olympus, the
chorus had been reduced to the role of mere bystanders who were lined up
behind the principal performers and who sang "this is a terrible world"
while the hero in the foreground committed a crime against the will of
the Gods.
This new form of dramatic entertainment demanded a proper setting, and
soon every Greek city owned a theatre, cut out of the rock of a nearby
hill. The spectators sat upon wooden benches and faced a wide circle
(our present orchestra where you pay three dollars and thirty cents for
a seat). Upon this half-circle, which was the stage, the actors and the
chorus took their stand. Behind them there was a tent where they made
up with large clay masks which hid their faces and which showed the
spectators whether the actors were supposed to be happy and smiling or
unhappy and weeping. The Greek word for tent is "skene" and that is the
reason why we talk of the "scenery" of the stage.
When once the tragedy had become part of Greek life, the people took
it very seriously and never went to the theatre to give their minds a
vacation. A new play became as important an event as an election and
a successful playwright was received with greater honors than those
bestowed upon a general who had just returned from a famous victory.
THE PERSIAN WARS
HOW THE GREEKS DEFENDED EUROPE AGAINST ASIATIC INVASION AND DROVE THE
PERSIANS BACK ACROSS THE AEGEAN SEA
THE Greeks had learned the art of trading from the AEgeans who had
been the pupils of the Phoenicians. They had founded colonies after the
Phoenician pattern. They had even improved upon the Phoenician methods
by a more general use of money in dealing with foreign customers. In
the sixth century before our era they had established themselves firmly
along the coast of Asia Minor and they were taking away trade from the
Phoenicians at a fast rate. This the Phoenicians of course did not
like but they were not strong enough to risk a war with their Greek
competitors. They sat and waited nor did they wait in vain.
In a former chapter, I have told you how a humble tribe of Persian
shepherds had suddenly gone upon the warpath and had conquered the
greater part of western Asia. The Persians were too civilised to plunder
their new subjects. They contented themselves with a yearly tribute.
When they reached the coast of Asia Minor they insisted that the Greek
colonies of Lydia recognize the Persian Kings as their over-Lords and
pay them a stipulated tax. The Greek colonies objected. The Persians
insisted. Then the Greek colonies appealed to the home-country and the
stage was set for a quarrel.
For if the truth be told, the Persian Kings regarded the Greek
city-states as very dangerous political institutions and bad examples
for all other people who were supposed to be the patient slaves of the
mighty Persian Kings.
Of course, the Greeks enjoyed a certain degree of safety because their
country lay hidden beyond the deep waters of the AEgean. But here their
old enemies, the Phoenicians, stepped forward with offers of help and
advice to the Persians. If the Persian King would provide the soldiers,
the Phoenicians would guarantee to deliver the necessary ships to carry
them to Europe. It was the year 492 before the birth of Christ, and Asia
made ready to destroy the rising power of Europe.
As a final warning the King of Persia sent messengers to the Greeks
asking for "earth and water" as a token of their submission. The Greeks
promptly threw the messengers into the nearest well where they would
find both "earth and water" in large abundance and thereafter of course
peace was impossible.
But the Gods of High Olympus watched over their children and when the
Phoenician fleet carrying the Persian troops was near Mount Athos, the
Storm-God blew his cheeks until he almost burst the veins of his brow,
and the fleet was destroyed by a terrible hurricane and the Persians
were all drowned.
Two years later they returned. This time they sailed straight across
the AEgean Sea and landed near the village of Marathon. As soon as the
Athenians heard this they sent their army of ten thousand men to guard
the hills that surrounded the Marathonian plain. At the same time they
despatched a fast runner to Sparta to ask for help. But Sparta was
envious of the fame of Athens and refused to come to her assistance.
The other Greek cities followed her example with the exception of tiny
Plataea which sent a thousand men. On the twelfth of September of the
year 490, Miltiades, the Athenian commander, threw this little army
against the hordes of the Persians. The Greeks broke through the Persian
barrage of arrows and their spears caused terrible havoc among the
disorganised Asiatic troops who had never been called upon to resist
such an enemy.
That night the people of Athens watched the sky grow red with the flames
of burning ships. Anxiously they waited for news. At last a little
cloud of dust appeared upon the road that led to the North. It was
Pheidippides, the runner. He stumbled and gasped for his end was near.
Only a few days before had he returned from his errand to Sparta. He had
hastened to join Miltiades. That morning he had taken part in the attack
and later he had volunteered to carry the news of victory to his beloved
city. The people saw him fall and they rushed forward to support him.
"We have won," he whispered and then he died, a glorious death which
made him envied of all men.
As for the Persians, they tried, after this defeat, to land near Athens
but they found the coast guarded and disappeared, and once more the land
of Hellas was at peace.
Eight years they waited and during this time the Greeks were not idle.
They knew that a final attack was to be expected but they did not agree
upon the best way to avert the danger. Some people wanted to increase
the army. Others said that a strong fleet was necessary for success. The
two parties led by Aristides (for the army) and Themistocles (the leader
of the bigger-navy men) fought each other bitterly and nothing was done
until Aristides was exiled. Then Themistocles had his chance and he
built all the ships he could and turned the Piraeus into a strong naval
base.
In the year 481 B.C. a tremendous Persian army appeared in Thessaly, a
province of northern Greece. In this hour of danger, Sparta, the
great military city of Greece, was elected commander-in-chief. But the
Spartans cared little what happened to northern Greece provided their
own country was not invaded, They neglected to fortify the passes that
led into Greece.
A small detachment of Spartans under Leonidas had been told to guard
the narrow road between the high mountains and the sea which connected
Thessaly with the southern provinces. Leonidas obeyed his orders. He
fought and held the pass with unequalled bravery. But a traitor by the
name of Ephialtes who knew the little byways of Malis guided a regiment
of Persians through the hills and made it possible for them to attack
Leonidas in the rear. Near the Warm Wells--the Thermopylae--a terrible
battle was fought.
When night came Leonidas and his faithful soldiers lay dead under the
corpses of their enemies.
But the pass had been lost and the greater part of Greece fell into the
hands of the Persians. They marched upon Athens, threw the garrison from
the rocks of the Acropolis and burned the city. The people fled to the
Island of Salamis. All seemed lost. But on the 20th of September of the
year 480 Themistocles forced the Persian fleet to give battle within the
narrow straits which separated the Island of Salamis from the mainland
and within a few hours he destroyed three quarters of the Persian ships.
In this way the victory of Thermopylae came to naught. Xerxes was forced
to retire. The next year, so he decreed, would bring a final decision.
He took his troops to Thessaly and there he waited for spring.
But this time the Spartans understood the seriousness of the hour.
They left the safe shelter of the wall which they had built across the
isthmus of Corinth and under the leadership of Pausanias they marched
against Mardonius the Persian general. The united Greeks (some one
hundred thousand men from a dozen different cities) attacked the three
hundred thou-sand men of the enemy near Plataea. Once more the heavy
Greek infantry broke through the Persian barrage of arrows. The Persians
were defeated, as they had been at Marathon, and this time they left for
good. By a strange coincidence, the same day that the Greek armies won
their victory near Plataea, the Athenian ships destroyed the enemy's
fleet near Cape Mycale in Asia Minor.
Thus did the first encounter between Asia and Europe end. Athens had
covered herself with glory and Sparta had fought bravely and well. If
these two cities had been able to come to an agreement, if they had been
willing to forget their little jealousies, they might have become the
leaders of a strong and united Hellas.
But alas, they allowed the hour of victory and enthusiasm to slip by,
and the same opportunity never returned.
ATHENS vs. SPARTA
HOW ATHENS AND SPARTA FOUGHT A LONG AND DISASTROUS WAR FOR THE
LEADERSHIP OF GREECE
ATHENS and Sparta were both Greek cities and their people spoke a common
language. In every other respect they were different. Athens rose high
from the plain. It was a city exposed to the fresh breezes from the sea,
willing to look at the world with the eyes of a happy child. Sparta, on
the other hand, was built at the bottom of a deep valley, and used the
surrounding mountains as a barrier against foreign thought. Athens was a
city of busy trade. Sparta was an armed camp where people were soldiers
for the sake of being soldiers. The people of Athens loved to sit in the
sun and discuss poetry or listen to the wise words of a philosopher.
The Spartans, on the other hand, never wrote a single line that was
considered literature, but they knew how to fight, they liked to fight,
and they sacrificed all human emotions to their ideal of military
preparedness.
No wonder that these sombre Spartans viewed the success of Athens with
malicious hate. The energy which the defence of the common home had
developed in Athens was now used for purposes of a more peaceful nature.
The Acropolis was rebuilt and was made into a marble shrine to the
Goddess Athena. Pericles, the leader of the Athenian democracy, sent far
and wide to find famous sculptors and painters and scientists to make
the city more beautiful and the young Athenians more worthy of their
home. At the same time he kept a watchful eye on Sparta and built high
walls which connected Athens with the sea and made her the strongest
fortress of that day.
An insignificant quarrel between two little Greek cities led to the
final conflict. For thirty years the war between Athens and Sparta
continued. It ended in a terrible disaster for Athens.
During the third year of the war the plague had entered the city. More
than half of the people and Pericles, the great leader, had been killed.
The plague was followed by a period of bad and untrustworthy leadership.
A brilliant young fellow by the name of Alcibiades had gained the favor
of the popular assembly. He suggested a raid upon the Spartan colony of
Syracuse in Sicily. An expedition was equipped and everything was ready.
But Alcibiades got mixed up in a street brawl and was forced to flee.
The general who succeeded him was a bungler. First he lost his ships and
then he lost his army, and the few surviving Athenians were thrown into
the stone-quarries of Syracuse, where they died from hunger and thirst.
The expedition had killed all the young men of Athens. The city was
doomed. After a long siege the town surrendered in April of the year
404. The high walls were demolished. The navy was taken away by the
Spartans. Athens ceased to exist as the center of the great colonial
empire which it had conquered during the days of its prosperity. But
that wonderful desire to learn and to know and to investigate which
had distinguished her free citizens during the days of greatness and
prosperity did not perish with the walls and the ships. It continued to
live. It became even more brilliant.
Athens no longer shaped the destinies of the land of Greece. But now, as
the home of the first great university the city began to influence the
minds of intelligent people far beyond the narrow frontiers of Hellas.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
ALEXANDER THE MACEDONIAN ESTABLISHES A GREEK WORLD-EMPIRE, AND WHAT
BECAME OF THIS HIGH AMBITION
WHEN the Achaeans had left their homes along the banks of the Danube to
look for pastures new, they had spent some time among the mountains of
Macedonia. Ever since, the Greeks had maintained certain more or
less formal relations with the people of this northern country. The
Macedonians from their side had kept themselves well informed about
conditions in Greece.
Now it happened, just when Sparta and Athens had finished their
disastrous war for the leadership of Hellas, that Macedonia was ruled
by an extraordinarily clever man by the name of Philip. He admired
the Greek spirit in letters and art but he despised the Greek lack of
self-control in political affairs. It irritated him to see a perfectly
good people waste its men and money upon fruitless quarrels. So he
settled the difficulty by making himself the master of all Greece and
then he asked his new subjects to join him on a voyage which he meant to
pay to Persia in return for the visit which Xerxes had paid the Greeks
one hundred and fifty years before.
Unfortunately Philip was murdered before he could start upon this
well-prepared expedition. The task of avenging the destruction of Athens
was left to Philip's son Alexander, the beloved pupil of Aristotle,
wisest of all Greek teachers.
Alexander bade farewell to Europe in the spring of the year 334 B.C.
Seven years later he reached India. In the meantime he had destroyed
Phoenicia, the old rival of the Greek merchants. He had conquered Egypt
and had been worshipped by the people of the Nile valley as the son
and heir of the Pharaohs. He had defeated the last Persian king--he had
overthrown the Persian empire he had given orders to rebuild Babylon--he
had led his troops into the heart of the Himalayan mountains and had
made the entire world a Macedonian province and dependency. Then he
stopped and announced even more ambitious plans.
The newly formed Empire must be brought under the influence of the Greek
mind. The people must be taught the Greek language--they must live in
cities built after a Greek model. The Alexandrian soldier now turned
school-master. The military camps of yesterday became the peaceful
centres of the newly imported Greek civilisation. Higher and higher
did the flood of Greek manners and Greek customs rise, when suddenly
Alexander was stricken with a fever and died in the old palace of King
Hammurabi of Babylon in the year 323.
Then the waters receded. But they left behind the fertile clay of a
higher civilisation and Alexander, with all his childish ambitions and
his silly vanities, had performed a most valuable service. His Empire
did not long survive him. A number of ambitious generals divided the
territory among themselves. But they too remained faithful to the dream
of a great world brotherhood of Greek and Asiatic ideas and knowledge.
They maintained their independence until the Romans added western
Asia and Egypt to their other domains. The strange inheritance of this
Hellenistic civilisation (part Greek, part Persian, part Egyptian
and Babylonian) fell to the Roman conquerors. During the following
centuries, it got such a firm hold upon the Roman world, that we feel
its influence in our own lives this very day.
A SUMMARY
A SHORT SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS 1 to 20
THUS far, from the top of our high tower we have been looking eastward.
But from this time on, the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia is going
to grow less interesting and I must take you to study the western
landscape.
Before we do this, let us stop a moment and make clear to ourselves what
we have seen.
First of all I showed you prehistoric man--a creature very simple in his
habits and very unattractive in his manners. I told you how he was
the most defenceless of the many animals that roamed through the early
wilderness of the five continents, but being possessed of a larger and
better brain, he managed to hold his own.
Then came the glaciers and the many centuries of cold weather, and life
on this planet became so difficult that man was obliged to think three
times as hard as ever before if he wished to survive. Since, however,
that "wish to survive" was (and is) the mainspring which keeps every
living being going full tilt to the last gasp of its breath, the brain
of glacial man was set to work in all earnestness. Not only did these
hardy people manage to exist through the long cold spells which killed
many ferocious animals, but when the earth became warm and comfortable
once more, prehistoric man had learned a number of things which gave
him such great advantages over his less intelligent neighbors that the
danger of extinction (a very serious one during the first half million
years of man's residence upon this planet) became a very remote one.
I told you how these earliest ancestors of ours were slowly plodding
along when suddenly (and for reasons that are not well understood) the
people who lived in the valley of the Nile rushed ahead and almost over
night, created the first centre of civilisation.
Then I showed you Mesopotamia, "the land between the rivers," which was
the second great school of the human race. And I made you a map of the
little island bridges of the AEgean Sea, which carried the knowledge and
the science of the old east to the young west, where lived the Greeks.
Next I told you of an Indo-European tribe, called the Hellenes, who
thousands of years before had left the heart of Asia and who had in
the eleventh century before our era pushed their way into the rocky
peninsula of Greece and who, since then, have been known to us as the
Greeks. And I told you the story of the little Greek cities that
were really states, where the civilisation of old Egypt and Asia was
transfigured (that is a big word, but you can "figure out" what it
means) into something quite new, something that was much nobler and
finer than anything that had gone before.
When you look at the map you will see how by this time civilisation has
described a semi-circle. It begins in Egypt, and by way of Mesopotamia
and the AEgean Islands it moves westward until it reaches the European
continent. The first four thousand years, Egyptians and Babylonians and
Phoenicians and a large number of Semitic tribes (please remember that
the Jews were but one of a large number of Semitic peoples) have carried
the torch that was to illuminate the world. They now hand it over to the
Indo-European Greeks, who become the teachers of another Indo-European
tribe, called the Romans. But meanwhile the Semites have pushed westward
along the northern coast of Africa and have made themselves the rulers
of the western half of the Mediterranean just when the eastern half has
become a Greek (or Indo-European) possession.
This, as you shall see in a moment, leads to a terrible conflict between
the two rival races, and out of their struggle arises the victorious
Roman Empire, which is to take this Egyptian-Mesopotamian-Greek
civilisation to the furthermost corners of the European continent, where
it serves as the foundation upon which our modern society is based.
I know all this sounds very complicated, but if you get hold of these
few principles, the rest of our history will become a great deal
simpler. The maps will make clear what the words fail to tell. And after
this short intermission, we go back to our story and give you an account
of the famous war between Carthage and Rome.
ROME AND CARTHAGE
THE SEMITIC COLONY OF CARTHAGE ON THE NORTHERN COAST OF AFRICA AND THE
INDO-EUROPEAN CITY OF ROME ON THE WEST COAST OF ITALY FOUGHT EACH
OTHER FOR THE POSSESSION OF THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN AND CARTHAGE WAS
DESTROYED
THE little Phoenician trading post of Kart-hadshat stood on a low hill
which overlooked the African Sea, a stretch of water ninety miles
wide which separates Africa from Europe. It was an ideal spot for a
commercial centre. Almost too ideal. It grew too fast and became too
rich. When in the sixth century before our era, Nebuchadnezzar of
Babylon destroyed Tyre, Carthage broke off all further relations with
the Mother Country and became an independent state--the great western
advance-post of the Semitic races.
Unfortunately the city had inherited many of the traits which for a
thousand years had been characteristic of the Phoenicians. It was a vast
business-house, protected by a strong navy, indifferent to most of the
finer aspects of life. The city and the surrounding country and the
distant colonies were all ruled by a small but exceedingly powerful
group of rich men, The Greek word for rich is "ploutos" and the Greeks
called such a government by "rich men" a "Plutocracy." Carthage was a
plutocracy and the real power of the state lay in the hands of a dozen
big ship-owners and mine-owners and merchants who met in the back
room of an office and regarded their common Fatherland as a business
enterprise which ought to yield them a decent profit. They were however
wide awake and full of energy and worked very hard.
As the years went by the influence of Carthage upon her neighbours
increased until the greater part of the African coast, Spain and certain
regions of France were Carthaginian possessions, and paid tribute, taxes
and dividends to the mighty city on the African Sea.
Of course, such a "plutocracy" was forever at the mercy of the crowd.
As long as there was plenty of work and wages were high, the majority of
the citizens were quite contented, allowed their "betters" to rule them
and asked no embarrassing questions. But when no ships left the harbor,
when no ore was brought to the smelting-ovens, when dockworkers and
stevedores were thrown out of employment, then there were grumblings and
there was a demand that the popular assembly be called together as in
the olden days when Carthage had been a self-governing republic.
To prevent such an occurrence the plutocracy was obliged to keep the
business of the town going at full speed. They had managed to do this
very successfully for almost five hun-dred years when they were greatly
disturbed by certain rumors which reached them from the western coast of
Italy. It was said that a little village on the banks of the Tiber had
suddenly risen to great power and was making itself the acknowledged
leader of all the Latin tribes who inhabited central Italy. It was also
said that this village, which by the way was called Rome, intended to
build ships and go after the commerce of Sicily and the southern coast
of France.
Carthage could not possibly tolerate such competition. The young rival
must be destroyed lest the Carthaginian rulers lose their prestige as
the absolute rulers of the western Mediterranean. The rumors were duly
investigated and in a general way these were the facts that came to
light.
The west coast of Italy had long been neglected by civilisation. Whereas
in Greece all the good harbours faced eastward and enjoyed a full view
of the busy islands of the AEgean, the west coast of Italy contemplated
nothing more exciting than the desolate waves of the Mediterranean. The
country was poor. It was therefore rarely visited by foreign merchants
and the natives were allowed to live in undisturbed possession of their
hills and their marshy plains.
The first serious invasion of this land came from the north. At an
unknown date certain Indo-European tribes had managed to find their way
through the passes of the Alps and had pushed southward until they
had filled the heel and the toe of the famous Italian boot with their
villages and their flocks. Of these early conquerors we know nothing.
No Homer sang their glory. Their own accounts of the foundation of Rome
(written eight hundred years later when the little city had become the
centre of an Empire) are fairy stories and do not belong in a history.
Romulus and Remus jumping across each other's walls (I always forget who
jumped across whose wall) make entertaining reading, but the foundation
of the City of Rome was a much more prosaic affair. Rome began as a
thousand American cities have done, by being a convenient place for
barter and horse-trading. It lay in the heart of the plains of central
Italy The Tiber provided direct access to the sea. The land-road from
north to south found here a convenient ford which could be used all the
year around. And seven little hills along the banks of the river offered
the inhabitants a safe shelter against their enemies who lived in the
mountains and those who lived beyond the horizon of the nearby sea.
The mountaineers were called the Sabines. They were a rough crowd with
an unholy desire for easy plunder. But they were very backward. They
used stone axes and wooden shields and were no match for the Romans
with their steel swords. The sea-people on the other hand were dangerous
foes. They were called the Etruscans and they were (and still are) one
of the great mysteries of history. Nobody knew (or knows) whence they
came; who they were; what had driven them away from their original
homes. We have found the remains of their cities and their cemeteries
and their waterworks all along the Italian coast. We are familiar with
their inscriptions. But as no one has ever been able to decipher the
Etruscan alphabet, these written messages are, so far, merely annoying
and not at all useful.
Our best guess is that the Etruscans came originally from Asia Minor and
that a great war or a pestilence in that country had forced them to
go away and seek a new home elsewhere. Whatever the reason for their
coming, the Etruscans played a great role in history. They carried the
pollen of the ancient civilisation from the east to the west and they
taught the Romans who, as we know, came from the north, the first
principles of architecture and street-building and fighting and art and
cookery and medicine and astronomy.
But just as the Greeks had not loved their AEgean teachers, in this same
way did the Romans hate their Etruscan masters. They got rid of them
as soon as they could and the opportunity offered itself when Greek
merchants discovered the commercial possibilities of Italy and when the
first Greek vessels reached Rome. The Greeks came to trade, but they
stayed to instruct. They found the tribes who inhabited the Roman
country-side (and who were called the Latins) quite willing to learn
such things as might be of practical use. At once they understood the
great benefit that could be derived from a written alphabet and
they copied that of the Greeks. They also understood the commercial
advantages of a well-regulated system of coins and measures and weights.
Eventually the Romans swallowed Greek civilisation hook, line and
sinker.
They even welcomed the Gods of the Greeks to their country. Zeus was
taken to Rome where he became known as Jupiter and the other divinities
followed him. The Roman Gods however never were quite like their
cheerful cousins who had accompanied the Greeks on their road through
life and through history. The Roman Gods were State Functionaries. Each
one managed his own department with great prudence and a deep sense
of justice, but in turn he was exact in demanding the obedience of his
worshippers. This obedience the Romans rendered with scrupulous care.
But they never established the cordial personal relations and that
charming friendship which had existed between the old Hellenes and the
mighty residents of the high Olympian peak.
The Romans did not imitate the Greek form of government, but being of
the same Indo-European stock as the people of Hellas, the early history
of Rome resembles that of Athens and the other Greek cities. They did
not find it difficult to get rid of their kings, the descendants of the
ancient tribal chieftains. But once the kings had been driven from the
city, the Romans were forced to bridle the power of the nobles, and it
took many centuries before they managed to establish a system which gave
every free citizen of Rome a chance to take a personal interest in the
affairs of his town.
Thereafter the Romans enjoyed one great advantage over the Greeks. They
managed the affairs of their country without making too many speeches.
They were less imaginative than the Greeks and they preferred an ounce
of action to a pound of words. They understood the tendency of the
multitude (the "plebe," as the assemblage of free citizens was called)
only too well to waste valuable time upon mere talk. They therefore
placed the actual business of running the city into the hands of two
"consuls" who were assisted by a council of Elders, called the Senate
(because the word "senex" means an old man). As a matter of custom and
practical advantage the senators were elected from the nobility. But
their power had been strictly defined.
Rome at one time had passed through the same sort of struggle between
the poor and the rich which had forced Athens to adopt the laws of Draco
and Solon. In Rome this conflict had occurred in the fifth century B.
C. As a result the freemen had obtained a written code of laws which
protected them against the despotism of the aristocratic judges by the
institution of the "Tribune." These Tribunes were city-magistrates,
elected by the freemen. They had the right to protect any citizen
against those actions of the government officials which were thought to
be unjust. A consul had the right to condemn a man to death, but if the
case had not been absolutely proved the Tribune could interfere and save
the poor fellow's life.
But when I use the word Rome, I seem to refer to a little city of a few
thousand inhabitants. And the real strength of Rome lay in the country
districts outside her walls. And it was in the government of these
outlying provinces that Rome at an early age showed her wonderful gift
as a colonising power.
In very early times Rome had been the only strongly fortified city in
central Italy, but it had always offered a hospitable refuge to
other Latin tribes who happened to be in danger of attack. The Latin
neighbours had recognised the advantages of a close union with such
a powerful friend and they had tried to find a basis for some sort of
defensive and offensive alliance. Other nations, Egyptians, Babylonians,
Phoenicians, even Greeks, would have insisted upon a treaty of
submission on the part of the "barbarians," The Romans did nothing of
the sort. They gave the "outsider" a chance to become partners in a
common "res publica"--or common-wealth.
"You want to join us," they said. "Very well, go ahead and join. We
shall treat you as if you were full-fledged citizens of Rome. In return
for this privilege we expect you to fight for our city, the mother of us
all, whenever it shall be necessary."
The "outsider" appreciated this generosity and he showed his gratitude
by his unswerving loyalty.
Whenever a Greek city had been attacked, the foreign residents had moved
out as quickly as they could. Why defend something which meant nothing
to them but a temporary boarding house in which they were tolerated as
long as they paid their bills? But when the enemy was before the gates
of Rome, all the Latins rushed to her defence. It was their Mother who
was in danger. It was their true "home" even if they lived a hundred
miles away and had never seen the walls of the sacred Hills.
No defeat and no disaster could change this sentiment. In the beginning
of the fourth century B.C. the wild Gauls forced their way into Italy.
They had defeated the Roman army near the River Allia and had marched
upon the city. They had taken Rome and then they expected that the
people would come and sue for peace. They waited, but nothing happened.
After a short time the Gauls found themselves surrounded by a hostile
population which made it impossible for them to obtain supplies. After
seven months, hunger forced them to withdraw. The policy of Rome to
treat the "foreigner" on equal terms had proved a great success and Rome
stood stronger than ever before.
This short account of the early history of Rome shows you the enormous
difference between the Roman ideal of a healthy state, and that of the
ancient world which was embodied in the town of Carthage. The Romans
counted upon the cheerful and hearty co-operation between a number of
"equal citizens." The Carthaginians, following the example of Egypt and
western Asia, insisted upon the unreasoning (and therefore unwilling)
obedience of "Subjects" and when these failed they hired professional
soldiers to do their fighting for them.
You will now understand why Carthage was bound to fear such a clever and
powerful enemy and why the plutocracy of Carthage was only too willing
to pick a quarrel that they might destroy the dangerous rival before it
was too late.
But the Carthaginians, being good business men, knew that it never
pays to rush matters. They proposed to the Romans that their respective
cities draw two circles on the map and that each town claim one of these
circles as her own "sphere of influence" and promise to keep out of the
other fellow's circle. The agreement was promptly made and was broken
just as promptly when both sides thought it wise to send their armies
to Sicily where a rich soil and a bad government invited foreign
interference.
The war which followed (the so-called first Punic War) lasted
twenty-four years. It was fought out on the high seas and in the
beginning it seemed that the experienced Carthaginian navy would defeat
the newly created Roman fleet. Following their ancient tactics, the
Carthaginian ships would either ram the enemy vessels or by a bold
attack from the side they would break their oars and would then kill the
sailors of the helpless vessel with their arrows and with fire balls.
But Roman engineers invented a new craft which carried a boarding bridge
across which the Roman infantrymen stormed the hostile ship. Then there
was a sudden end to Carthaginian victories. At the battle of Mylae their
fleet was badly defeated. Carthage was obliged to sue for peace, and
Sicily became part of the Roman domains.
Twenty-three years later new trouble arose. Rome (in quest of copper)
had taken the island of Sardinia. Carthage (in quest of silver)
thereupon occupied all of southern Spain. This made Carthage a direct
neighbour of the Romans. The latter did not like this at all and they
ordered their troops to cross the Pyrenees and watch the Carthaginian
army of occupation.
The stage was set for the second outbreak between the two rivals. Once
more a Greek colony was the pretext for a war. The Carthaginians were
besieging Saguntum on the east coast of Spain. The Saguntians appealed
to Rome and Rome, as usual, was willing to help. The Senate promised the
help of the Latin armies, but the preparation for this expedition took
some time, and meanwhile Saguntum had been taken and had been destroyed.
This had been done in direct opposition to the will of Rome. The Senate
decided upon war. One Roman army was to cross the African sea and make
a landing on Carthaginian soil. A second division was to keep the
Carthaginian armies occupied in Spain to prevent them from rushing
to the aid of the home town. It was an excellent plan and everybody
expected a great victory. But the Gods had decided otherwise.
It was the fall of the year 218 before the birth of Christ and the Roman
army which was to attack the Carthaginians in Spain had left Italy.
People were eagerly waiting for news of an easy and complete victory
when a terrible rumour began to spread through the plain of the Po.
Wild mountaineers, their lips trembling with fear, told of hundreds of
thousands of brown men accompanied by strange beasts "each one as big
as a house," who had suddenly emerged from the clouds of snow which
surrounded the old Graian pass through which Hercules, thousands of
years before, had driven the oxen of Geryon on his way from Spain to
Greece. Soon an endless stream of bedraggled refugees appeared before
the gates of Rome, with more complete details. Hannibal, the son of
Hamilcar, with fifty thousand soldiers, nine thousand horsemen and
thirty-seven fighting elephants, had crossed the Pyrenees. He had
defeated the Roman army of Scipio on the banks of the Rhone and he had
guided his army safely across the mountain passes of the Alps although
it was October and the roads were thickly covered with snow and ice.
Then he had joined forces with the Gauls and together they had defeated
a second Roman army just before they crossed the Trebia and laid siege
to Placentia, the northern terminus of the road which connected Rome
with the province of the Alpine districts.
The Senate, surprised but calm and energetic as usual, hushed up
the news of these many defeats and sent two fresh armies to stop the
invader. Hannibal managed to surprise these troops on a narrow road
along the shores of the Trasimene Lake and there he killed all the Roman
officers and most of their men. This time there was a panic among
the people of Rome, but the Senate kept its nerve. A third army was
organised and the command was given to Quintus Fabius Maximus with full
power to act "as was necessary to save the state."
Fabius knew that he must be very careful lest all be lost. His raw and
untrained men, the last available soldiers, were no match for Hannibal's
veterans. He refused to accept battle but forever he followed Hannibal,
destroyed everything eatable, destroyed the roads, attacked small
detachments and generally weakened the morale of the Carthaginian troops
by a most distressing and annoying form of guerilla warfare.
Such methods however did not satisfy the fearsome crowds who had found
safety behind the walls of Rome. They wanted "action." Something must be
done and must be done quickly. A popular hero by the name of Varro, the
sort of man who went about the city telling everybody how much better
he could do things than slow old Fabius, the "Delayer," was made
commander-in-chief by popular acclamation. At the battle of Cannae (216)
he suffered the most terrible defeat of Roman history. More than seventy
thousand men were killed. Hannibal was master of all Italy.
He marched from one end of the peninsula to the other, proclaiming
himself the "deliverer from the yoke of Rome" and asking the different
provinces to join him in warfare upon the mother city. Then once more
the wisdom of Rome bore noble fruit. With the exceptions of Capua and
Syracuse, all Roman cities remained loyal. Hannibal, the deliverer,
found himself opposed by the people whose friend he pretended to be.
He was far away from home and did not like the situation. He sent
messengers to Carthage to ask for fresh supplies and new men. Alas,
Carthage could not send him either.
The Romans with their boarding-bridges, were the masters of the sea.
Hannibal must help himself as best he could. He continued to defeat the
Roman armies that were sent out against him, but his own numbers
were decreasing rapidly and the Italian peasants held aloof from this
self-appointed "deliverer."
After many years of uninterrupted victories, Hannibal found himself
besieged in the country which he had just conquered. For a moment, the
luck seemed to turn. Hasdrubal, his brother, had defeated the Roman
armies in Spain. He had crossed the Alps to come to Hannibal's
assistance. He sent messengers to the south to tell of his arrival and
ask the other army to meet him in the plain of the Tiber. Unfortunately
the messengers fell into the hands of the Romans and Hannibal waited
in vain for further news until his brother's head, neatly packed in a
basket, came rolling into his camp and told him of the fate of the last
of the Carthaginian troops.
With Hasdrubal out of the way, young Publius Scipio easily reconquered
Spain and four years later the Romans were ready for a final attack upon
Carthage. Hannibal was called back. He crossed the African Sea and tried
to organise the defences of his home-city. In the year 202 at the battle
of Zama, the Carthaginians were defeated. Hannibal fled to Tyre. From
there he went to Asia Minor to stir up the Syrians and the Macedonians
against Rome. He accomplished very little but his activities among these
Asiatic powers gave the Romans an excuse to carry their warfare into the
territory of the east and annex the greater part of the AEgean world.
Driven from one city to another, a fugitive without a home, Hannibal at
last knew that the end of his ambitious dream had come. His beloved city
of Carthage had been ruined by the war. She had been forced to sign a
terrible peace. Her navy had been sunk. She had been forbidden to make
war without Roman permission. She had been condemned to pay the Romans
millions of dollars for endless years to come. Life offered no hope of
a better future. In the year 190 B.C. Hannibal took poison and killed
himself.
Forty years later, the Romans forced their last war upon Carthage. Three
long years the inhabitants of the old Phoenician colony held out against
the power of the new republic. Hunger forced them to surrender. The few
men and women who had survived the siege were sold as slaves. The city
was set on fire. For two whole weeks the store-houses and the pal-aces
and the great arsenal burned. Then a terrible curse was pronounced upon
the blackened ruins and the Roman legions returned to Italy to enjoy
their victory.
For the next thousand years, the Mediterranean remained a European sea.
But as soon as the Roman Empire had been destroyed, Asia made another
attempt to dominate this great inland sea, as you will learn when I tell
you about Mohammed.
THE RISE OF ROME
HOW ROME HAPPENED
THE Roman Empire was an accident. No one planned it. It "happened." No
famous general or statesman or cut-throat ever got up and said "Friends,
Romans, Citizens, we must found an Empire. Follow me and together we
shall conquer all the land from the Gates of Hercules to Mount Taurus."
Rome produced famous generals and equally distinguished statesmen and
cut-throats, and Roman armies fought all over the world. But the Roman
empire-making was done without a preconceived plan. The average
Roman was a very matter-of-fact citizen. He disliked theories about
government. When someone began to recite "eastward the course of Roman
Empire, etc., etc.," he hastily left the forum. He just continued to
take more and more land because circumstances forced him to do so. He
was not driven by ambition or by greed. Both by nature and inclination
he was a farmer and wanted to stay at home. But when he was attacked he
was obliged to defend himself and when the enemy happened to cross the
sea to ask for aid in a distant country then the patient Roman marched
many dreary miles to defeat this dangerous foe and when this had been
accomplished, he stayed behind to adminster{sic} his newly conquered
provinces lest they fall into the hands of wandering Barbarians and
become themselves a menace to Roman safety. It sounds rather complicated
and yet to the contemporaries it was so very simple, as you shall see in
a moment.
In the year 203 B.C. Scipio had crossed the African Sea and had carried
the war into Africa. Carthage had called Hannibal back. Badly supported
by his mercenaries, Hannibal had been defeated near Zama. The Romans had
asked for his surrender and Hannibal had fled to get aid from the kings
of Macedonia and Syria, as I told you in my last chapter.
The rulers of these two countries (remnants of the Empire of Alexander
the Great) just then were contemplating an expedition against Egypt.
They hoped to divide the rich Nile valley between themselves. The king
of Egypt had heard of this and he had asked Rome to come to his
support. The stage was set for a number of highly interesting plots and
counter-plots. But the Romans, with their lack of imagination, rang
the curtain down before the play had been fairly started. Their legions
completely defeated the heavy Greek phalanx which was still used by the
Macedonians as their battle formation. That happened in the year 197
B.C. at the battle in the plains of Cynoscephalae, or "Dogs' Heads," in
central Thessaly.
The Romans then marched southward to Attica and informed the Greeks that
they had come to "deliver the Hellenes from the Macedonian yoke." The
Greeks, having learned nothing in their years of semi-slavery, used
their new freedom in a most unfortunate way. All the little city-states
once more began to quarrel with each other as they had done in the good
old days. The Romans, who had little understanding and less love for
these silly bickerings of a race which they rather despised, showed
great forebearance. But tiring of these endless dissensions they lost
patience, invaded Greece, burned down Corinth (to "encourage the other
Greeks") and sent a Roman governor to Athens to rule this turbulent
province. In this way, Macedonia and Greece became buffer states which
protected Rome's eastern frontier.
Meanwhile right across the Hellespont lay the Kingdom of Syria, and
Antiochus III, who ruled that vast land, had shown great eagerness when
his distinguished guest, General Hannibal, explained to him how easy it
would be to invade Italy and sack the city of Rome.
Lucius Scipio, a brother of Scipio the African fighter who had defeated
Hannibal and his Carthaginians at Zama, was sent to Asia Minor. He
destroyed the armies of the Syrian king near Magnesia (in the year 190
B.C.) Shortly afterwards, Antiochus was lynched by his own people. Asia
Minor became a Roman protectorate and the small City-Republic of Rome
was mistress of most of the lands which bordered upon the Mediterranean.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE
HOW THE REPUBLIC OF ROME AFTER CENTURIES OF UNREST AND REVOLUTION BECAME
AN EMPIRE
WHEN the Roman armies returned from these many victorious campaigns,
they were received with great jubilation. Alas and alack! this sudden
glory did not make the country any happier. On the contrary. The endless
campaigns had ruined the farmers who had been obliged to do the hard
work of Empire making. It had placed too much power in the hands of the
successful generals (and their private friends) who had used the war as
an excuse for wholesale robbery.
The old Roman Republic had been proud of the simplicity which had
characterised the lives of her famous men. The new Republic felt ashamed
of the shabby coats and the high principles which had been fashionable
in the days of its grandfathers. It became a land of rich people ruled
by rich people for the benefit of rich people. As such it was doomed to
disastrous failure, as I shall now tell you.
Within less than a century and a half. Rome had become the mistress of
practically all the land around the Mediterranean. In those early days
of history a prisoner of war lost his freedom and became a slave. The
Roman regarded war as a very serious business and he showed no mercy to
a conquered foe. After the fall of Carthage, the Carthaginian women and
children were sold into bondage together with their own slaves. And a
like fate awaited the obstinate inhabitants of Greece and Macedonia and
Spain and Syria when they dared to revolt against the Roman power.
Two thousand years ago a slave was merely a piece of machinery. Nowadays
a rich man invests his money in factories. The rich people of Rome
(senators, generals and war-profiteers) invested theirs in land and in
slaves. The land they bought or took in the newly-acquired provinces.
The slaves they bought in open market wherever they happened to be
cheapest. During most of the third and second centuries before Christ
there was a plentiful supply, and as a result the landowners worked
their slaves until they dropped dead in their tracks, when they bought
new ones at the nearest bargain-counter of Corinthian or Carthaginian
captives.
And now behold the fate of the freeborn farmer!
He had done his duty toward Rome and he had fought her battles without
complaint. But when he came home after ten, fifteen or twenty years, his
lands were covered with weeds and his family had been ruined. But he was
a strong man and willing to begin life anew. He sowed and planted and
waited for the harvest. He carried his grain to the market together with
his cattle and his poultry, to find that the large landowners who worked
their estates with slaves could underbid him all along the line. For a
couple of years he tried to hold his own. Then he gave up in despair. He
left the country and he went to the nearest city. In the city he was as
hungry as he had been before on the land. But he shared his misery with
thousands of other disinherited beings. They crouched together in filthy
hovels in the suburbs of the large cities. They were apt to get sick and
die from terrible epidemics. They were all profoundly discontented. They
had fought for their country and this was their reward. They were always
willing to listen to those plausible spell-binders who gather around a
public grievance like so many hungry vultures, and soon they became a
grave menace to the safety of the state.
But the class of the newly-rich shrugged its shoulders. "We have our
army and our policemen," they argued, "they will keep the mob in order."
And they hid themselves behind the high walls of their pleasant villas
and cultivated their gardens and read the poems of a certain Homer which
a Greek slave had just translated into very pleasing Latin hexameters.
In a few families however the old tradition of unselfish service to the
Commonwealth continued. Cornelia, the daughter of Scipio Africanus,
had been married to a Roman by the name of Gracchus. She had two sons,
Tiberius and Gaius. When the boys grew up they entered politics and
tried to bring about certain much-needed reforms. A census had shown
that most of the land of the Italian peninsula was owned by two thousand
noble families. Tiberius Gracchus, having been elected a Tribune, tried
to help the freemen. He revived two ancient laws which restricted the
number of acres which a single owner might possess. In this way he hoped
to revive the valuable old class of small and independent freeholders.
The newly-rich called him a robber and an enemy of the state. There were
street riots. A party of thugs was hired to kill the popular Tribune.
Tiberius Gracchus was attacked when he entered the assembly and was
beaten to death. Ten years later his brother Gaius tried the experiment
of reforming a nation against the expressed wishes of a strong
privileged class. He passed a "poor law" which was meant to help the
destitute farmers. Eventually it made the greater part of the Roman
citizens into professional beggars.
He established colonies of destitute people in distant parts of the
empire, but these settlements failed to attract the right sort of
people. Before Gaius Gracchus could do more harm he too was murdered and
his followers were either killed or exiled. The first two reformers had
been gentlemen. The two who came after were of a very different stamp.
They were professional soldiers. One was called Marius. The name of the
other was Sulla. Both enjoyed a large personal following.
Sulla was the leader of the landowners. Marius, the victor in a great
battle at the foot of the Alps when the Teutons and the Cimbri had been
annihilated, was the popular hero of the disinherited freemen.
Now it happened in the year 88 B.C. that the Senate of Rome was greatly
disturbed by rumours that came from Asia. Mithridates, king of a country
along the shores of the Black Sea, and a Greek on his mother's side,
had seen the possibility of establishing a second Alexandrian Empire.
He began his campaign for world-domination with the murder of all Roman
citizens who happened to be in Asia Minor, men, women and children.
Such an act, of course, meant war. The Senate equipped an army to march
against the King of Pontus and punish him for his crime. But who was to
be commander-in-chief? "Sulla," said the Senate, "because he is Consul."
"Marius," said the mob, "because he has been Consul five times and
because he is the champion of our rights."
Possession is nine points of the law. Sulla happened to be in actual
command of the army. He went west to defeat Mithridates and Marius fled
to Africa. There he waited until he heard that Sulla had crossed into
Asia. He then returned to Italy, gathered a motley crew of malcontents,
marched on Rome and entered the city with his professional highwaymen,
spent five days and five nights, slaughtering the enemies of the
Senatorial party, got himself elected Consul and promptly died from the
excitement of the last fortnight.
There followed four years of disorder. Then Sulla, having defeated
Mithridates, announced that he was ready to return to Rome and settle
a few old scores of his own. He was as good as his word. For weeks his
soldiers were busy executing those of their fellow citizens who were
suspected of democratic sympathies. One day they got hold of a young
fellow who had been often seen in the company of Marius. They were going
to hang him when some one interfered. "The boy is too young," he said,
and they let him go. His name was Julius Caesar. You shall meet him
again on the next page.
As for Sulla, he became "Dictator," which meant sole and supreme ruler
of all the Roman possessions. He ruled Rome for four years, and he died
quietly in his bed, having spent the last year of his life tenderly
raising his cabbages, as was the custom of so many Romans who had spent
a lifetime killing their fellow-men.
But conditions did not grow better. On the contrary, they grew worse.
Another general, Gnaeus Pompeius, or Pompey, a close friend of Sulla,
went east to renew the war against the ever troublesome Mithridates. He
drove that energetic potentate into the mountains where Mithridates took
poison and killed himself, well knowing what fate awaited him as a
Roman captive. Next he re-established the authority of Rome over Syria,
destroyed Jerusalem, roamed through western Asia, trying to revive the
myth of Alexander the Great, and at last (in the year 62) returned to
Rome with a dozen ship-loads of defeated Kings and Princes and Generals,
all of whom were forced to march in the triumphal procession of this
enormously popular Roman who presented his city with the sum of forty
million dollars in plunder.
It was necessary that the government of Rome be placed in the hands of
a strong man. Only a few months before, the town had almost fallen
into the hands of a good-for-nothing young aristocrat by the name of
Catiline, who had gambled away his money and hoped to reimburse himself
for his losses by a little plundering. Cicero, a public-spirited lawyer,
had discovered the plot, had warned the Senate, and had forced Catiline
to flee. But there were other young men with similar ambitions and it
was no time for idle talk.
Pompey organised a triumvirate which was to take charge of affairs. He
became the leader of this Vigilante Committee. Gaius Julius Caesar, who
had made a reputation for himself as governor of Spain, was the second
in command. The third was an indifferent sort of person by the name of
Crassus. He had been elected because he was incredibly rich, having been
a successful contractor of war supplies. He soon went upon an expedition
against the Parthians and was killed.
As for Caesar, who was by far the ablest of the three, he decided that
he needed a little more military glory to become a popular hero. He
crossed the Alps and conquered that part of the world which is now
called France. Then he hammered a solid wooden bridge across the Rhine
and invaded the land of the wild Teutons. Finally he took ship and
visited England. Heaven knows where he might have ended if he had not
been forced to return to Italy. Pompey, so he was informed, had been
appointed dictator for life. This of course meant that Caesar was to
be placed on the list of the "retired officers," and the idea did not
appeal to him. He remembered that he had begun life as a follower of
Marius. He decided to teach the Senators and their "dictator" another
lesson. He crossed the Rubicon River which separated the province of
Cis-alpine Gaul from Italy. Everywhere he was received as the "friend of
the people." Without difficulty Caesar entered Rome and Pompey fled to
Greece Caesar followed him and defeated his followers near Pharsalus.
Pompey sailed across the Mediterranean and escaped to Egypt. When he
landed he was murdered by order of young king Ptolemy. A few days later
Caesar arrived. He found himself caught in a trap. Both the Egyptians
and the Roman garrison which had remained faithful to Pompey, attacked
his camp.
Fortune was with Caesar. He succeeded in setting fire to the Egyptian
fleet. Incidentally the sparks of the burning vessels fell on the
roof of the famous library of Alexandria (which was just off the water
front,) and destroyed it. Next he attacked the Egyptian army, drove
the soldiers into the Nile, drowned Ptolemy, and established a new
government under Cleopatra, the sister of the late king. Just then word
reached him that Pharnaces, the son and heir of Mithridates, had gone
on the war-path. Caesar marched northward, defeated Pharnaces in a war
which lasted five days, sent word of his victory to Rome in the famous
sentence "veni, vidi, vici," which is Latin for "I came, I saw, I
conquered," and returned to Egypt where he fell desperately in love with
Cleopatra, who followed him to Rome when he returned to take charge of
the government, in the year 46. He marched at the head of not less than
four different victory-parades, having won four different campaigns.
Then Caesar appeared in the Senate to report upon his adventures, and
the grateful Senate made him "dictator" for ten years. It was a fatal
step.
The new dictator made serious attempts to reform the Roman state.
He made it possible for freemen to become members of the Senate. He
conferred the rights of citizenship upon distant communities as had been
done in the early days of Roman history. He permitted "foreigners" to
exercise influence upon the government. He reformed the administration
of the distant provinces which certain aristocratic families had come to
regard as their private possessions. In short he did many things for
the good of the majority of the people but which made him thoroughly
unpopular with the most powerful men in the state. Half a hundred young
aristocrats formed a plot "to save the Republic." On the Ides of March
(the fifteenth of March according to that new calendar which Caesar had
brought with him from Egypt) Caesar was murdered when he entered the
Senate. Once more Rome was without a master.
There were two men who tried to continue the tradition of Caesar's
glory. One was Antony, his former secretary. The other was Octavian,
Caesar's grand-nephew and heir to his estate. Octavian remained in
Rome, but Antony went to Egypt to be near Cleopatra with whom he too had
fallen in love, as seems to have been the habit of Roman generals.
A war broke out between the two. In the battle of Actium, Octavian
defeated Antony. Antony killed himself and Cleopatra was left alone to
face the enemy. She tried very hard to make Octavian her third Roman
conquest. When she saw that she could make no impression upon this very
proud aristocrat, she killed herself, and Egypt became a Roman province.
As for Octavian, he was a very wise young man and he did not repeat the
mistake of his famous uncle. He knew how people will shy at words. He
was very modest in his demands when he returned to Rome. He did not want
to be a "dictator." He would be entirely satisfied with the title of
"the Honourable." But when the Senate, a few years later, addressed him
as Augustus--the Illustrious--he did not object and a few years later
the man in the street called him Caesar, or Kaiser, while the soldiers,
accustomed to regard Octavian as their Commander-in-chief referred to
him as the Chief, the Imperator or Emperor. The Republic had become an
Empire, but the average Roman was hardly aware of the fact.
In 14 A.D. his position as the Absolute Ruler of the Roman people had
become so well established that he was made an object of that divine
worship which hitherto had been reserved for the Gods. And his
successors were true "Emperors"--the absolute rulers of the greatest
empire the world had ever seen.
If the truth be told, the average citizen was sick and tired of anarchy
and disorder. He did not care who ruled him provided the new master gave
him a chance to live quietly and without the noise of eternal street
riots. Octavian assured his subjects forty years of peace. He had no
desire to extend the frontiers of his domains, In the year 9 A.D. he
had contem-plated an invasion of the northwestern wilderness which was
inhabited by the Teutons. But Varrus, his general, had been killed with
all his men in the Teutoburg Woods, and after that the Romans made no
further attempts to civilise these wild people.
They concentrated their efforts upon the gigantic problem of internal
reform. But it was too late to do much good. Two centuries of revolution
and foreign war had repeatedly killed the best men among the younger
generations. It had ruined the class of the free farmers. It had
introduced slave labor, against which no freeman could hope to compete.
It had turned the cities into beehives inhabited by pauperized
and unhealthy mobs of runaway peasants. It had created a large
bureaucracy--petty officials who were underpaid and who were forced to
take graft in order to buy bread and clothing for their families.
Worst of all, it had accustomed people to violence, to blood-shed, to a
barbarous pleasure in the pain and suffering of others.
Outwardly, the Roman state during the first century of our era was a
magnificent political structure, so large that Alexander's empire became
one of its minor provinces. Underneath this glory there lived millions
upon millions of poor and tired human beings, toiling like ants who have
built a nest underneath a heavy stone. They worked for the benefit of
some one else. They shared their food with the animals of the fields.
They lived in stables. They died without hope.
It was the seven hundred and fifty-third year since the founding of
Rome. Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus was living in the palace
of the Palatine Hill, busily engaged upon the task of ruling his empire.
In a little village of distant Syria, Mary, the wife of Joseph the
Carpenter, was tending her little boy, born in a stable of Bethlehem.
This is a strange world.
Before long, the palace and the stable were to meet in open combat.
And the stable was to emerge victorious.
JOSHUA OF NAZARETH
THE STORY OF JOSHUA OF NAZARETH, WHOM THE GREEKS CALLED JESUS
IN the autumn of the year of the city 783 (which would be 62 A.D., in
our way of counting time) AEsculapius Cultellus, a Roman physician,
wrote to his nephew who was with the army in Syria as follows:
My dear Nephew,
A few days ago I was called in to prescribe for a sick man named Paul.
He appeared to be a Roman citizen of Jewish parentage, well educated
and of agreeable manners. I had been told that he was here in connection
with a law-suit, an appeal from one of our provincial courts, Caesarea
or some such place in the eastern Mediterranean. He had been described
to me as a "wild and violent" fellow who had been making speeches
against the People and against the Law. I found him very intelligent and
of great honesty.
A friend of mine who used to be with the army in Asia Minor tells me
that he heard something about him in Ephesus where he was preaching
sermons about a strange new God. I asked my patient if this were true
and whether he had told the people to rebel against the will of our
beloved Emperor. Paul answered me that the Kingdom of which he had
spoken was not of this world and he added many strange utterances which
I did not understand, but which were probably due to his fever.
His personality made a great impression upon me and I was sorry to hear
that he was killed on the Ostian Road a few days ago. Therefore I am
writing this letter to you. When next you visit Jerusalem, I want you to
find out something about my friend Paul and the strange Jewish prophet,
who seems to have been his teacher. Our slaves are getting much excited
about this so-called Messiah, and a few of them, who openly talked of
the new kingdom (whatever that means) have been crucified. I would like
to know the truth about all these rumours and I am
Your devoted Uncle,
AESCULAPIUS CULTELLUS.
Six weeks later, Gladius Ensa, the nephew, a captain of the VII Gallic
Infantry, answered as follows:
My dear Uncle,
I received your letter and I have obeyed your instructions.
Two weeks ago our brigade was sent to Jerusalem. There have been several
revolutions during the last century and there is not much left of the
old city. We have been here now for a month and to-morrow we shall
continue our march to Petra, where there has been trouble with some of
the Arab tribes. I shall use this evening to answer your questions, but
pray do not expect a detailed report.
I have talked with most of the older men in this city but few have been
able to give me any definite information. A few days ago a pedler came
to the camp. I bought some of his olives and I asked him whether he had
ever heard of the famous Messiah who was killed when he was young. He
said that he remembered it very clearly, because his father had taken
him to Golgotha (a hill just outside the city) to see the execution,
and to show him what became of the enemies of the laws of the people of
Judaea. He gave me the address of one Joseph, who had been a personal
friend of the Messiah and told me that I had better go and see him if I
wanted to know more.
This morning I went to call on Joseph. He was quite an old man. He had
been a fisherman on one of the fresh-water lakes. His memory was
clear, and from him at last I got a fairly definite account of what had
happened during the troublesome days before I was born.
Tiberius, our great and glorious emperor, was on the throne, and an
officer of the name of Pontius Pilatus was governor of Judaea and
Samaria. Joseph knew little about this Pilatus. He seemed to have been
an honest enough official who left a decent reputation as procurator of
the province. In the year 755 or 756 (Joseph had forgotten when) Pilatus
was called to Jerusalem on account of a riot. A certain young man (the
son of a carpenter of Nazareth) was said to be planning a revolution
against the Roman government. Strangely enough our own intelligence
officers, who are usually well informed, appear to have heard nothing
about it, and when they investigated the matter they reported that
the carpenter was an excellent citizen and that there was no reason to
proceed against him. But the old-fashioned leaders of the Jewish
faith, according to Joseph, were much upset. They greatly disliked his
popularity with the masses of the poorer Hebrews. The "Nazarene" (so
they told Pilatus) had publicly claimed that a Greek or a Roman or even
a Philistine, who tried to live a decent and honourable life, was quite
as good as a Jew who spent his days studying the ancient laws of Moses.
Pilatus does not seem to have been impressed by this argument, but when
the crowds around the temple threatened to lynch Jesus, and kill all
his followers, he decided to take the carpenter into custody to save his
life.
He does not appear to have understood the real nature of the quarrel.
Whenever he asked the Jewish priests to explain their grievances, they
shouted "heresy" and "treason" and got terribly excited. Finally,
so Joseph told me, Pilatus sent for Joshua (that was the name of the
Nazarene, but the Greeks who live in this part of the world always refer
to him as Jesus) to examine him personally. He talked to him for several
hours. He asked him about the "dangerous doctrines" which he was said
to have preached on the shores of the sea of Galilee. But Jesus answered
that he never referred to politics. He was not so much interested in
the bodies of men as in Man's soul. He wanted all people to regard their
neighbours as their brothers and to love one single God, who was the
father of all living beings.
Pilatus, who seems to have been well versed in the doctrines of the
Stoics and the other Greek philosophers, does not appear to have
discovered anything seditious in the talk of Jesus. According to
my informant he made another attempt to save the life of the kindly
prophet. He kept putting the execution off. Meanwhile the Jewish people,
lashed into fury by their priests, got frantic with rage. There had
been many riots in Jerusalem before this and there were only a few Roman
soldiers within calling distance. Reports were being sent to the
Roman authorities in Caesarea that Pilatus had "fallen a victim to the
teachings of the Nazarene." Petitions were being circulated all through
the city to have Pilatus recalled, because he was an enemy of the
Emperor. You know that our governors have strict instructions to avoid
an open break with their foreign subjects. To save the country from
civil war, Pilatus finally sacrificed his prisoner, Joshua, who behaved
with great dignity and who forgave all those who hated him. He was
crucified amidst the howls and the laughter of the Jerusalem mob.
That is what Joseph told me, with tears running down his old cheeks. I
gave him a gold piece when I left him, but he refused it and asked me
to hand it to one poorer than himself. I also asked him a few questions
about your friend Paul. He had known him slightly. He seems to have been
a tent maker who gave up his profession that he might preach the words
of a loving and forgiving God, who was so very different from that
Jehovah of whom the Jewish priests are telling us all the time.
Afterwards, Paul appears to have travelled much in Asia Minor and in
Greece, telling the slaves that they were all children of one loving
Father and that happiness awaits all, both rich and poor, who have tried
to live honest lives and have done good to those who were suffering and
miserable.
I hope that I have answered your questions to your satisfaction. The
whole story seems very harmless to me as far as the safety of the state
is concerned. But then, we Romans never have been able to understand the
people of this province. I am sorry that they have killed your friend
Paul. I wish that I were at home again, and I am, as ever,
Your dutiful nephew,
GLADIUS ENSA.
THE FALL OF ROME
THE TWILIGHT OF ROME
THE text-books of ancient History give the date 476 as the year in which
Rome fell, because in that year the last emperor was driven off his
throne. But Rome, which was not built in a day, took a long time
falling. The process was so slow and so gradual that most Romans did not
realise how their old world was coming to an end. They complained about
the unrest of the times--they grumbled about the high prices of food and
about the low wages of the workmen--they cursed the profiteers who had a
monopoly of the grain and the wool and the gold coin. Occasionally they
rebelled against an unusually rapacious governor. But the majority of
the people during the first four centuries of our era ate and drank
(whatever their purse allowed them to buy) and hated or loved (according
to their nature) and went to the theatre (whenever there was a free
show of fighting gladiators) or starved in the slums of the big
cities, utterly ignorant of the fact that their empire had outlived its
usefulness and was doomed to perish.
How could they realise the threatened danger? Rome made a fine showing
of outward glory. Well-paved roads connected the different provinces,
the imperial police were active and showed little tenderness for
highwaymen. The frontier was closely guarded against the savage tribes
who seemed to be occupying the waste lands of northern Europe. The whole
world was paying tribute to the mighty city of Rome, and a score of
able men were working day and night to undo the mistakes of the past and
bring about a return to the happier conditions of the early Republic.
But the underlying causes of the decay of the State, of which I have
told you in a former chapter, had not been removed and reform therefore
was impossible.
Rome was, first and last and all the time, a city-state as Athens and
Corinth had been city-states in ancient Hellas. It had been able to
dominate the Italian peninsula. But Rome as the ruler of the entire
civilised world was a political impossibility and could not endure. Her
young men were killed in her endless wars. Her farmers were ruined by
long military service and by taxation. They either became professional
beggars or hired themselves out to rich landowners who gave them board
and lodging in exchange for their services and made them "serfs," those
unfortunate human beings who are neither slaves nor freemen, but who
have become part of the soil upon which they work, like so many cows,
and the trees.
The Empire, the State, had become everything. The common citizen had
dwindled down to less than nothing. As for the slaves, they had heard
the words that were spoken by Paul. They had accepted the message of the
humble carpenter of Nazareth. They did not rebel against their masters.
On the contrary, they had been taught to be meek and they obeyed their
superiors. But they had lost all interest in the affairs of this world
which had proved such a miserable place of abode. They were willing to
fight the good fight that they might enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
But they were not willing to engage in warfare for the benefit of an
ambitious emperor who aspired to glory by way of a foreign campaign in
the land of the Parthians or the Numidians or the Scots.
And so conditions grew worse as the centuries went by. The first
Emperors had continued the tradition of "leadership" which had given the
old tribal chieftains such a hold upon their subjects. But the Emperors
of the second and third centuries were Barrack-Emperors, professional
soldiers, who existed by the grace of their body-guards, the so-called
Praetorians. They succeeded each other with terrifying rapidity,
murdering their way into the palace and being murdered out of it as soon
as their successors had become rich enough to bribe the guards into a
new rebellion.
Meanwhile the barbarians were hammering at the gates of the northern
frontier. As there were no longer any native Roman armies to stop their
progress, foreign mercenaries had to be hired to fight the invader. As
the foreign soldier happened to be of the same blood as his supposed
enemy, he was apt to be quite lenient when he engaged in battle.
Finally, by way of experiment, a few tribes were allowed to settle
within the confines of the Empire. Others followed. Soon these tribes
complained bitterly of the greedy Roman tax-gatherers, who took away
their last penny. When they got no redress they marched to Rome and
loudly demanded that they be heard.
This made Rome very uncomfortable as an Imperial residence. Constantine
(who ruled from 323 to 337) looked for a new capital. He chose
Byzantium, the gate-way for the commerce between Europe and Asia. The
city was renamed Constantinople, and the court moved eastward. When
Constantine died, his two sons, for the sake of a more efficient
administration, divided the Empire between them. The elder lived in
Rome and ruled in the west. The younger stayed in Constantinople and was
master of the east.
Then came the fourth century and the terrible visitation of the Huns,
those mysterious Asiatic horsemen who for more than two centuries
maintained themselves in Northern Europe and continued their career of
bloodshed until they were defeated near Chalons-sur-Marne in France in
the year 451. As soon as the Huns had reached the Danube they had begun
to press hard upon the Goths. The Goths, in order to save themselves,
were thereupon obliged to invade Rome. The Emperor Valens tried to stop
them, but was killed near Adrianople in the year 378. Twenty-two years
later, under their king, Alaric, these same West Goths marched westward
and attacked Rome. They did not plunder, and destroyed only a few
palaces. Next came the Vandals, and showed less respect for the
venerable traditions of the city. Then the Burgundians. Then the East
Goths. Then the Alemanni. Then the Franks. There was no end to the
invasions. Rome at last was at the mercy of every ambitious highway
robber who could gather a few followers.
In the year 402 the Emperor fled to Ravenna, which was a sea-port and
strongly fortified, and there, in the year 475, Odoacer, commander of a
regiment of the German mercenaries, who wanted the farms of Italy to
be divided among themselves, gently but effectively pushed Romulus
Augustulus, the last of the emperors who ruled the western division,
from his throne, and proclaimed himself Patriarch or ruler of Rome. The
eastern Emperor, who was very busy with his own affairs, recognised him,
and for ten years Odoacer ruled what was left of the western provinces.
A few years later, Theodoric, King of the East Goths, invaded the newly
formed Patriciat, took Ravenna, murdered Odoacer at his own dinner
table, and established a Gothic Kingdom amidst the ruins of the western
part of the Empire. This Patriciate state did not last long. In the
sixth century a motley crowd of Longobards and Saxons and Slavs and
Avars invaded Italy, destroyed the Gothic kingdom, and established a new
state of which Pavia became the capital.
Then at last the imperial city sank into a state of utter neglect and
despair. The ancient palaces had been plundered time and again. The
schools had been burned down. The teachers had been starved to death.
The rich people had been thrown out of their villas which were now
inhabited by evil-smelling and hairy barbarians. The roads had fallen
into decay. The old bridges were gone and commerce had come to a
standstill. Civilisation--the product of thousands of years of patient
labor on the part of Egyptians and Babylonians and Greeks and Romans,
which had lifted man high above the most daring dreams of his earliest
ancestors, threatened to perish from the western continent.
It is true that in the far east, Constantinople continued to be the
centre of an Empire for another thousand years. But it hardly counted
as a part of the European continent. Its interests lay in the east. It
began to forget its western origin. Gradually the Roman language was
given up for the Greek. The Roman alphabet was discarded and Roman
law was written in Greek characters and explained by Greek judges. The
Emperor became an Asiatic despot, worshipped as the god-like kings of
Thebes had been worshipped in the valley of the Nile, three thousand
years before. When missionaries of the Byzantine church looked for fresh
fields of activity, they went eastward and carried the civilisation of
Byzantium into the vast wilderness of Russia.
As for the west, it was left to the mercies of the Barbarians. For
twelve generations, murder, war, arson, plundering were the order of
the day. One thing--and one thing alone--saved Europe from complete
destruction, from a return to the days of cave-men and the hyena.
This was the church--the flock of humble men and women who for many
centuries had confessed themselves the followers of Jesus, the carpenter
of Nazareth, who had been killed that the mighty Roman Empire might be
saved the trouble of a street-riot in a little city somewhere along the
Syrian frontier.
RISE OF THE CHURCH
HOW ROME BECAME THE CENTRE OF THE CHRISTIAN WORLD
THE average intelligent Roman who lived under the Empire had taken very
little interest in the gods of his fathers. A few times a year he went
to the temple, but merely as a matter of custom. He looked on
patiently when the people celebrated a religious festival with a solemn
procession. But he regarded the worship of Jupiter and Minerva and
Neptune as something rather childish, a survival from the crude days
of the early republic and not a fit subject of study for a man who had
mastered the works of the Stoics and the Epicureans and the other great
philosophers of Athens.
This attitude made the Roman a very tolerant man. The government
insisted that all people, Romans, foreigners, Greeks, Babylonians, Jews,
should pay a certain outward respect to the image of the Emperor
which was supposed to stand in every temple, just as a picture of
the President of the United States is apt to hang in an American Post
Office. But this was a formality without any deeper meaning. Generally
speaking everybody could honour, revere and adore whatever gods he
pleased, and as a result, Rome was filled with all sorts of queer little
temples and synagogues, dedicated to the worship of Egyptian and African
and Asiatic divinities.
When the first disciples of Jesus reached Rome and began to preach their
new doctrine of a universal brotherhood of man, nobody objected. The man
in the street stopped and listened Rome, the capital of the world,
had always been full of wandering preachers, each proclaiming his
own "mystery." Most of the self-appointed priests appealed to the
senses--promised golden rewards and endless pleasure to the followers of
their own particular god. Soon the crowd in the street noticed that the
so-called Christians (the followers of the Christ or "anointed") spoke
a very different language. They did not appear to be impressed by great
riches or a noble position. They extolled the beauties of poverty and
humility and meekness. These were not exactly the virtues which had made
Rome the mistress of the world. It was rather interesting to listen to
a "mystery" which told people in the hey-day of their glory that their
worldly success could not possibly bring them lasting happiness.
Besides, the preachers of the Christian mystery told dreadful stories
of the fate that awaited those who refused to listen to the words of
the true God. It was never wise to take chances. Of course the old Roman
gods still existed, but were they strong enough to protect their friends
against the powers of this new deity who had been brought to Europe from
distant Asia? People began to have doubts. They returned to listen to
further explanations of the new creed. After a while they began to meet
the men and women who preached the words of Jesus. They found them very
different from the average Roman priests. They were all dreadfully
poor. They were kind to slaves and to animals. They did not try to gain
riches, but gave away whatever they had. The example of their unselfish
lives forced many Romans to forsake the old religion. They joined the
small communities of Christians who met in the back rooms of private
houses or somewhere in an open field, and the temples were deserted.
This went on year after year and the number of Christians continued to
increase. Presbyters or priests (the original Greek meant "elder") were
elected to guard the interests of the small churches. A bishop was made
the head of all the communities within a single province. Peter, who had
fol-lowed Paul to Rome, was the first Bishop of Rome. In due time his
successors (who were addressed as Father or Papa) came to be known as
Popes.
The church became a powerful institution within the Empire. The
Christian doctrines appealed to those who despaired of this world. They
also attracted many strong men who found it impossible to make a career
under the Imperial government, but who could exercise their gifts of
leadership among the humble followers of the Nazarene teacher. At last
the state was obliged to take notice. The Roman Empire (I have said this
before) was tolerant through indifference. It allowed everybody to
seek salvation after his or her own fashion. But it insisted that the
different sects keep the peace among themselves and obey the wise rule
of "live and let live."
The Christian communities however, refused to practice any sort of
tolerance. They publicly declared that their God, and their God alone,
was the true ruler of Heaven and Earth, and that all other gods
were imposters. This seemed unfair to the other sects and the police
discouraged such utterances. The Christians persisted.
Soon there were further difficulties. The Christians refused to go
through the formalities of paying homage to the emperor. They refused
to appear when they were called upon to join the army. The Roman
magistrates threatened to punish them. The Christians answered that this
miserable world was only the ante-room to a very pleasant Heaven and
that they were more than willing to suffer death for their principles.
The Romans, puzzled by such conduct, sometimes killed the offenders, but
more often they did not. There was a certain amount of lynching during
the earliest years of the church, but this was the work of that part
of the mob which accused their meek Christian neighbours of every
conceivable crime, (such as slaughtering and eating babies, bringing
about sickness and pestilence, betraying the country in times of danger)
because it was a harmless sport and devoid of danger, as the Christians
refused to fight back.
Meanwhile, Rome continued to be invaded by the Barbarians and when her
armies failed, Christian missionaries went forth to preach their gospel
of peace to the wild Teutons. They were strong men without fear of
death. They spoke a language which left no doubt as to the future of
unrepentant sinners. The Teutons were deeply impressed. They still had a
deep respect for the wisdom of the ancient city of Rome. Those men were
Romans. They probably spoke the truth. Soon the Christian missionary
became a power in the savage regions of the Teutons and the Franks. Half
a dozen missionaries were as valuable as a whole regiment of soldiers.
The Emperors began to understand that the Christian might be of great
use to them. In some of the provinces they were given equal rights with
those who remained faithful to the old gods. The great change however
came during the last half of the fourth century.
Constantine, sometimes (Heaven knows why) called Constantine the Great,
was emperor. He was a terrible ruffian, but people of tender qualities
could hardly hope to survive in that hard-fighting age. During a long
and checkered career, Constantine had experienced many ups and downs.
Once, when almost defeated by his enemies, he thought that he would try
the power of this new Asiatic deity of whom everybody was talking. He
promised that he too would become a Christian if he were successful in
the coming battle. He won the victory and thereafter he was convinced of
the power of the Christian God and allowed himself to be baptised.
From that moment on, the Christian church was officially recognised and
this greatly strengthened the position of the new faith.
But the Christians still formed a very small minority of all the people,
(not more than five or six percent,) and in order to win, they were
forced to refuse all compromise. The old gods must be destroyed. For a
short spell the emperor Julian, a lover of Greek wisdom, managed to save
the pagan Gods from further destruction. But Julian died of his wounds
during a campaign in Persia and his successor Jovian re-established the
church in all its glory. One after the other the doors of the ancient
temples were then closed. Then came the emperor Justinian (who built the
church of Saint Sophia in Constantinople), who discontinued the school
of philosophy at Athens which had been founded by Plato.
That was the end of the old Greek world, in which man had been allowed
to think his own thoughts and dream his own dreams according to his
desires. The somewhat vague rules of conduct of the philosophers had
proved a poor compass by which to steer the ship of life after a deluge
of savagery and ignorance had swept away the established order of
things. There was need of something more positive and more definite.
This the Church provided.
During an age when nothing was certain, the church stood like a rock and
never receded from those principles which it held to be true and sacred.
This steadfast courage gained the admiration of the multitudes and
carried the church of Rome safely through the difficulties which
destroyed the Roman state.
There was however, a certain element of luck in the final success of
the Christian faith. After the disappearance of Theodoric's Roman-Gothic
kingdom, in the fifth century, Italy was comparatively free from foreign
invasion. The Lombards and Saxons and Slavs who succeeded the Goths were
weak and backward tribes. Under those circumstances it was possible for
the bishops of Rome to maintain the independence of their city. Soon the
remnants of the empire, scattered throughout the peninsula, recognised
the Dukes of Rome (or bishops) as their political and spiritual rulers.
The stage was set for the appearance of a strong man. He came in the
year 590 and his name was Gregory. He belonged to the ruling classes of
ancient Rome, and he had been "prefect" or mayor of the city. Then he
had become a monk and a bishop and finally, and much against his will,
(for he wanted to be a missionary and preach Christianity to the heathen
of England,) he had been dragged to the Church of Saint Peter to be made
Pope. He ruled only fourteen years but when he died the Christian world
of western Europe had officially recognised the bishops of Rome, the
Popes, as the head of the entire church.
This power, however, did not extend to the east. In Constantinople the
Emperors continued the old custom which had recognised the successors of
Augustus and Tiberius both as head of the government and as High Priest
of the Established Religion. In the year 1453 the eastern Roman Empire
was conquered by the Turks. Constantinople was taken, and Constantine
Paleologue, the last Roman Emperor, was killed on the steps of the
Church of the Holy Sophia.
A few years before, Zoe, the daughter of his brother Thomas, had married
Ivan III of Russia. In this way did the grand-dukes of Moscow fall heir
to the traditions of Constantinople. The double-eagle of old Byzantium
(reminiscent of the days when Rome had been divided into an eastern and
a western part) became the coat of arms of modern Russia. The Tsar who
had been merely the first of the Russian nobles, assumed the aloofness
and the dignity of a Roman emperor before whom all subjects, both high
and low, were inconsiderable slaves.
The court was refashioned after the oriental pattern which the eastern
Emperors had imported from Asia and from Egypt and which (so they
flattered themselves) resembled the court of Alexander the Great. This
strange inheritance which the dying Byzantine Empire bequeathed to an
unsuspecting world continued to live with great vigour for six more
centuries, amidst the vast plains of Russia. The last man to wear
the crown with the double eagle of Constantinople, Tsar Nicholas, was
murdered only the other day, so to speak. His body was thrown into a
well. His son and his daughters were all killed. All his ancient rights
and prerogatives were abolished, and the church was reduced to the
position which it had held in Rome before the days of Constantine.
The eastern church however fared very differently, as we shall see
in the next chapter when the whole Christian world is going to be
threatened with destruction by the rival creed of an Arab camel-driver.
MOHAMMED
AHMED, THE CAMEL-DRIVER, WHO BECAME THE PROPHET OF THE ARABIAN DESERT
AND WHOSE FOLLOWERS ALMOST CONQUERED THE ENTIRE KNOWN WORLD FOR THE
GREATER GLORY OF ALLAH, THE ONLY TRUE GOD
SINCE the days of Carthage and Hannibal we have said nothing of the
Semitic people. You will remember how they filled all the chapters
devoted to the story of the Ancient World. The Babylonians, the
Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Jews, the Arameans, the Chaldeans, all
of them Semites, had been the rulers of western Asia for thirty or forty
centuries. They had been conquered by the Indo-European Persians who had
come from the east and by the Indo-European Greeks who had come from the
west. A hundred years after the death of Alexander the Great, Carthage,
a colony of Semitic Phoenicians, had fought the Indo-European Romans
for the mastery of the Mediterranean. Carthage had been defeated and
destroyed and for eight hundred years the Romans had been masters of the
world. In the seventh century, however, another Semitic tribe appeared
upon the scene and challenged the power of the west. They were the
Arabs, peaceful shepherds who had roamed through the desert since the
beginning of time without showing any signs of imperial ambitions.
Then they listened to Mohammed, mounted their horses and in less than
a century they had pushed to the heart of Europe and proclaimed the
glories of Allah, "the only God," and Mohammed, "the prophet of the only
God," to the frightened peasants of France.
The story of Ahmed, the son of Abdallah and Aminah (usually known as
Mohammed, or "he who will be praised,"); reads like a chapter in the
"Thousand and One Nights." He was a camel-driver, born in Mecca.
He seems to have been an epileptic and he suffered from spells of
unconsciousness when he dreamed strange dreams and heard the voice of
the angel Gabriel, whose words were afterwards written down in a book
called the Koran. His work as a caravan leader carried him all over
Arabia and he was constantly falling in with Jewish merchants and with
Christian traders, and he came to see that the worship of a single God
was a very excellent thing. His own people, the Arabs, still revered
queer stones and trunks of trees as their ancestors had done, tens of
thousands of years before. In Mecca, their holy city, stood a little
square building, the Kaaba, full of idols and strange odds and ends of
Hoo-doo worship.
Mohammed decided to be the Moses of the Arab people. He could not well
be a prophet and a camel-driver at the same time. So he made himself
independent by marrying his employer, the rich widow Chadija. Then he
told his neighbours in Mecca that he was the long-expected prophet sent
by Allah to save the world. The neighbours laughed most heartily and
when Mohammed continued to annoy them with his speeches they decided to
kill him. They regarded him as a lunatic and a public bore who deserved
no mercy. Mohammed heard of the plot and in the dark of night he fled to
Medina together with Abu Bekr, his trusted pupil. This happened in the
year 622. It is the most important date in Mohammedan history and is
known as the Hegira--the year of the Great Flight.
In Medina, Mohammed, who was a stranger, found it easier to proclaim
himself a prophet than in his home city, where every one had known him
as a simple camel-driver. Soon he was surrounded by an increasing number
of followers, or Moslems, who accepted the Islam, "the submission to the
will of God," which Mohammed praised as the highest of all virtues.
For seven years he preached to the people of Medina. Then he believed
himself strong enough to begin a campaign against his former neighbours
who had dared to sneer at him and his Holy Mission in his old
camel-driving days. At the head of an army of Medinese he marched across
the desert. His followers took Mecca without great difficulty, and
having slaughtered a number of the inhabitants, they found it quite easy
to convince the others that Mohammed was really a great prophet.
From that time on until the year of his death, Mohammed was fortunate in
everything he undertook.
There are two reasons for the success of Islam. In the first place,
the creed which Mohammed taught to his followers was very simple. The
disciples were told that they must love Allah, the Ruler of the World,
the Merciful and Compassionate. They must honour and obey their parents.
They were warned against dishonesty in dealing with their neighbours
and were admonished to be humble and charitable, to the poor and to the
sick. Finally they were ordered to abstain from strong drink and to be
very frugal in what they ate. That was all. There were no priests, who
acted as shepherds of their flocks and asked that they be supported at
the common expense. The Mohammedan churches or mosques were merely large
stone halls without benches or pictures, where the faithful could gather
(if they felt so inclined) to read and discuss chapters from the Koran,
the Holy Book. But the average Mohammedan carried his religion with him
and never felt himself hemmed in by the restrictions and regulations
of an established church. Five times a day he turned his face towards
Mecca, the Holy City, and said a simple prayer. For the rest of the time
he let Allah rule the world as he saw fit and accepted whatever fate
brought him with patient resignation.
Of course such an attitude towards life did not encourage the Faithful
to go forth and invent electrical machinery or bother about railroads
and steamship lines. But it gave every Mohammedan a certain amount of
contentment. It bade him be at peace with himself and with the world in
which he lived and that was a very good thing.
The second reason which explains the success of the Moslems in their
warfare upon the Christians, had to do with the conduct of those
Mohammedan soldiers who went forth to do battle for the true faith.
The Prophet promised that those who fell, facing the enemy, would go
directly to Heaven. This made sudden death in the field preferable to
a long but dreary existence upon this earth. It gave the Mohammedans an
enormous advantage over the Crusaders who were in constant dread of a
dark hereafter, and who stuck to the good things of this world as long
as they possibly could. Incidentally it explains why even to-day Moslem
soldiers will charge into the fire of European machine guns quite
indifferent to the fate that awaits them and why they are such dangerous
and persistent enemies.
Having put his religious house in order, Mohammed now began to enjoy
his power as the undisputed ruler of a large number of Arab tribes. But
success has been the undoing of a large number of men who were great in
the days of adversity. He tried to gain the good will of the rich people
by a number of regulations which could appeal to those of wealth.
He allowed the Faithful to have four wives. As one wife was a costly
investment in those olden days when brides were bought directly from
the parents, four wives became a positive luxury except to those who
possessed camels and dromedaries and date orchards beyond the dreams of
avarice. A religion which at first had been meant for the hardy hunters
of the high skied desert was gradually transformed to suit the needs
of the smug merchants who lived in the bazaars of the cities. It was a
regrettable change from the original program and it did very little good
to the cause of Mohammedanism. As for the prophet himself, he went on
preaching the truth of Allah and proclaiming new rules of conduct until
he died, quite suddenly, of a fever on June the seventh of the year 632.
His successor as Caliph (or leader) of the Moslems was his
father-in-law, Abu-Bekr, who had shared the early dangers of the
prophet's life. Two years later, Abu-Bekr died and Omar ibn Al-Khattab
followed him. In less than ten years he conquered Egypt, Persia,
Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine and made Damascus the capital of the
first Mohammedan world empire.
Omar was succeeded by Ali, the husband of Mohammed's daughter, Fatima,
but a quarrel broke out upon a point of Moslem doctrine and Ali was
murdered. After his death, the caliphate was made hereditary and the
leaders of the faithful who had begun their career as the spiritual head
of a religious sect became the rulers of a vast empire. They built a
new city on the shores of the Euphrates, near the ruins of Babylon and
called it Bagdad, and organising the Arab horsemen into regiments of
cavalry, they set forth to bring the happiness of their Moslem faith to
all unbelievers. In the year 700 A.D. a Mohammedan general by the name
of Tarik crossed the old gates of Hercules and reached the high rock on
the European side which he called the Gibel-al-tarik, the Hill of Tarik
or Gibraltar.
Eleven years later in the battle of Xeres de la Frontera, he defeated
the king of the Visigoths and then the Moslem army moved northward
and following the route of Hannibal, they crossed the passes of the
Pyrenees. They defeated the Duke of Aquitania, who tried to halt them
near Bordeaux, and marched upon Paris. But in the year 732 (one hundred
years after the death of the prophet,) they were beaten in a battle
between Tours and Poitiers. On that day, Charles Martel (Charles with
the Hammer) the Frankish chieftain, saved Europe from a Mohammedan
con-quest. He drove the Moslems out of France, but they maintained
themselves in Spain where Abd-ar-Rahman founded the Caliphate of
Cordova, which became the greatest centre of science and art of
mediaeval Europe.
This Moorish kingdom, so-called because the people came from Mauretania
in Morocco, lasted seven centuries. It was only after the capture of
Granada, the last Moslem stronghold, in the year 1492, that Columbus
received the royal grant which allowed him to go upon a voyage of
discovery. The Mohammedans soon regained their strength in the new
conquests which they made in Asia and Africa and to-day there are as
many followers of Mohammed as there are of Christ.
CHARLEMAGNE
HOW CHARLEMAGNE, THE KING OF THE FRANKS, CAME TO BEAR THE TITLE OF
EMPEROR AND TRIED TO REVIVE THE OLD IDEAL OF WORLD-EMPIRE
THE battle of Poitiers had saved Europe from the Mohammedans. But the
enemy within--the hopeless disorder which had followed the disappearance
of the Roman police officer--
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