HISTORY OF
ANCIENT CIVILIZATION
BY
CHARLES SEIGNOBOS
DOCTOR OF LETTERS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
ADELPHI TERRACE
MCMVII
(All rights reserved)
EDITOR'S NOTE
In preparing this volume, the Editor has used both the three-volume edition and the two-volume edition of the "Histoire de la Civilisation." He has usually preferred the order of topics of the two-volume edition, but has supplemented the material therein with other matter drawn from the three-volume edition.
A few corrections to the text have been given in foot-notes. These notes are always clearly distinguished from the elucidations of the author.
A.H.W.
CONTENTS
Prehistoric Times. Prehistoric archæology — Prehistoric remains; their antiquity — Prehistoric science — The four ages.
The Rough Stone Age. Remains found in the gravels — The cave-men.
The Polished Stone Age. Lake-villages — Megalithic monuments.
The Bronze Age. Bronze — Bronze objects.
The Iron Age. Iron — Iron weapons — Epochs of the Iron Age.
Conclusions: How the four ages are to be conceived; uncertainties; solved questions.
History and the Documents. History — Legends — History in general — Great divisions of history — Ancient history — Modern history — The Middle Ages.
Sources for the History of Ancient Civilizations. Books — Monuments — Inscriptions — Languages — Lacunæ.
Races and Peoples. Anthropology — The races — Civilized peoples — Aryans and Semites.
The Egyptians. Egypt — The country — The Nile — Fertility of the soil — The accounts of Herodotus — Champollion — Egyptologists — Discoveries.
The Egyptian Empire. Antiquity of the Egyptian people — Memphis and the pyramids — Egyptian civilization — Thebes — The Pharaoh — The subjects — Despotism — Isolation of the Egyptians.
Religion of the Egyptians. The gods — Osiris — Ammon-râ — Gods with animal heads — Sacred animals — The bull Apis — Worship of the dead — Judgment of the soul — Mummies — Book of the Dead — The arts — Industry — Architecture— Tombs— Temples— Sculpture— Painting— Literature — Destinies of the Egyptian civilization.
The Assyrians and Babylonians. Chaldea — The land — The people — The cities.
The Assyrians — Assyria — Origins — Ancient accounts — Modern discoveries — Inscriptions on bricks — Cuneiform writing — The Assyrian people — The king — Fall of the Assyrian Empire.
The Babylonians. The second Chaldean empire — Babylon — The Tower of Babylon.
Customs and Religion. Customs — Religion — The gods — Astrology — Sorcery — The sciences.
The Arts. Architecture — Palaces — Sculpture.
The Aryans of India. The Aryans — Aryan languages — The Aryan people.
Primitive Religion of the Hindoos. The Aryans on the Indus — The Vedas — The gods — Indra — Agni — The cult — Worship of ancestors.
Brahmanic Society. The Hindoos on the Ganges — Castes — The Impure — The Brahmans — The new religion of Brahma — Transmigration of souls — Character of this religion — The rites — Purity — Penances — The monks.
Buddhism. Buddha — Nirvana — Charity — Fraternity — Tolerance — Later history of Buddhism — Changes in Buddhism — Buddha transformed into a god — Mechanical prayer — Amelioration of manners.
The Persians. The religion of Zoroaster — Iran — The Iranians — Zoroaster — The Zend-Avesta — Ormuzd and Ahriman — Angels and demons — Creatures of Ormuzd and Ahriman — The cult — Morality — Funerals — Destiny of the soul — Character of Mazdeism.
The Persian Empire. The Medes — The Persians — Cyrus — The inscription of Behistun — The Persian empire — The satrapies — Revenues of the empire — The Great King — Services rendered by the Persians — Susa and Persepolis — Persian architecture.
The Phœnicians. The Phœnician people — The land — The cities — Phœnician ruins — Organization of the Phœnician — Tyre — Carthage — Carthaginian army — The Carthaginians — The Phœnician religion.
Phœnician Commerce. Occupations of the Phœnicians — Caravans — Marine commerce — Commodities — Secret kept by the Phœnicians — Colonies — Influence of the Phœnicians — The alphabet.
The Hebrews. Origin of the Hebrew people — The Bible — The Hebrews — The patriarchs — The Israelites — The call of Moses — Israel in the desert — The Promised Land.
The Religion of Israel. One God — The people of God — The covenant — The Ten Commandments — The Law — Religion constituted the Jewish people.
The Empire of Israel. The Judges — The Hangs — Jerusalem — The tabernacle — The temple.
The Prophets. Disasters of Israel — Sentiments of the Israelites — The prophets — The new teaching — The Messiah.
The Jewish People. Return to Jerusalem — The Jews — The synagogues — Destruction of the temple — The Jews after the dispersion.
Greece and the Greeks. The country — The sea — The climate — Simplicity of Greek life — The people — Origin of the Greeks — Legends — The Trojan War — The Homeric Poems — The Greeks at the time of Homer — The Dorians — The Ionians — The Hellenes — The cities.
The Hellenes Beyond the Sea. Colonization — Character of the colonies — Traditions touching the colonies — Importance of the Greek colonies.
Greek Religion. The gods — Polytheism — Anthropomorphism — Mythology — Local gods — The great gods — Attributes of the gods — Olympus and Zeus — Morality of the Greek mythology.
The Heroes. Various sorts of heroes — Presence of the heroes — Intervention of the heroes.
Worship. Principle of the cult of the gods — The great Feasts — the sacred games — Omens — Oracles — Amphictyonies.
Sparta. The People — Laconia — The Helots — The Periœci — Condition of the Spartiates.
Education. The children — The girls — The discipline — Laconism — Music — The dance — Heroism of the women.
Institutions. The kings and the council — The ephors — The army — The hoplites — The phalanx — Gymnastics — Athletes — Rôle of the Spartiates.
Athens. Origins of the Athenian people — Attica — Athens — The revolutions in Athens — Reforms of Cleisthenes.
The Athenian People. The slaves — The foreigners — The citizens.
The Government. The assembly — The courts — The magistrates — Character of the government — The demagogues.
Private Life. Children — Marriage — Women.
Wars. The Persian wars — Origin of these wars — Comparison of the two adversaries — First Persian war — Second Persian war — Reasons for the victory of the Greeks — Results of the wars.
Wars of the Greeks among Themselves. The Peloponnesian war — War with Sparta — Savage character of the wars — Effects of these wars.
The Arts in Greece. Athens in the time of Pericles — Pericles — Athens and her monuments — Importance of Athens.
Letters. Orators — Sages — Sophists — Socrates and the philosophers — The chorus — Tragedy and comedy — Theatre.
Arts. The Grecian temples — Characteristics of Grecian architecture — Sculpture — Pottery — Painting.
The Greeks in the Orient. Asia before Alexander — Decadence of the Persian empire — Expedition of the Ten Thousand — Agesilaus.
Conquest of Asia by Alexander. Macedon — Philip — Demosthenes — The Macedonian supremacy — Alexander — The phalanx — Departure of Alexander — Victories of Granicus, Issus, and Arbela — Death of Alexander — Projects of Alexander.
The Hellenes In The Orient. Dismemberment of the empire of Alexander — The Hellenistic kingdoms — Alexandria — Museum — Pergamum.
Later Period of Greek History. Decadence of the cities — Rich and poor — Strife between rich and poor — Democracy and oligarchy — The tyrants — Exhaustion of Greece.
The Roman Conquest. The leagues — The allies of the Romans — The last struggles.
The Hellenes in the Occident. Influence of Greece on Rome — Architecture — Sculpture — Literature — Epicureans and Stoics.
Ancient Peoples of Italy. The Etruscans — Etruria — The Etruscan people — The Etruscan tombs — Industry and commerce — Religion — The augurs — Influence of the Etruscans.
The Italian People. Umbrians and Oscans — The Sacred Spring — The Samnites — The Greeks of Italy.
Latins And Romans. The Latins — Rome — Roma Quadrata and the Capitol.
Religion and the Family. Religion — The Roman gods — Form of the gods — Principle of the Roman religion — Worship — Formalism — Prayer — Omens — The priests.
Worship of Ancestors. The dead — Worship of the dead — Cult of the hearth.
The Family. Religion of the family — Marriage — Women — Children — Father of the family.
The Roman City. Formation of the Roman people — The kings — The Roman people — The plebeians — Strife between patricians and plebeians — The tribunes of the plebs — Triumph of the plebs.
The Roman People. Right of citizenship — The nobles — The knights — The plebs — Freedmen.
The Government of the Republic. The comitia — Magistrates — Censors — Senate — The course of offices.
Roman Conquest. The Roman army — Military service — The levy — Legions and allies — Military exercises — Camp — Order of battle — Discipline — Colonies and military roads.
Character of the Conquests. War — Conquest of Italy — Punic wars — Hannibal — Conquest of the Orient — Conquest of barbarian lands — The triumph — Booty — Allies of Rome — Motives of conquest.
Results of the Conquests. Empire of the Roman people — The public domain — Agrarian laws.
The Conquered Peoples. The provincials — Provinces — The proconsuls — Tyranny and oppression of the proconsuls — The publicans — Bankers — Defencelessness of the provincials.
Slavery. Sale of slaves — Condition of slaves — Number of slaves — Urban slaves — Rural slaves — Treatment of slaves — Ergastulum and mill — Character of the slaves — Revolts — Admission to citizenship.
Transformation of Life in Rome. Influence of Greece and the Orient.
Changes in Religion. Greek gods — The Bacchanals — Superstitions of the Orient — Sceptics.
Changes in Manners. The old customs — Cato the Elder — The new manners — Oriental luxury — Greek humanity — Lucullus — The new education — New status of women — Divorce.
Fall of the Republic. Causes of the decadence — Destruction of the peasant class — The city plebs — Electoral corruption — Corruption of the Senate — Corruption of the army.
The Revolution. Necessity of the revolution — Civil wars — The Gracchi — Marius and Sulla — Pompey and Cæsar — End of the Republic — Need of peace — Power of the individual.
The Empire at its Height. The twelve Cæsars — The emperor — Apotheosis — Senate and people — The prætorians — Freedmen of the emperors — Despotism and disorder.
The Century of the Antonines. Marcus Aurelius — Conquests of the Antonines.
Imperial Institutions. Extent of the empire in the second century — Permanent army — Deputies and agents of the emperor — Municipal life — Imperial regime.
Social Life Under the Empire. The continued decadence at Rome — The shows — Theatre — Circus — Amphitheatre — Gladiators — The Roman peace — Fusion of the peoples — Superstitions.
Arts and Sciences in Rome. Letters — Imitation of the Greeks — The Augustan Age — Orators and rhetoricians — Importance of the Latin literature and language — Arts — Sculpture and painting — Architecture — Characteristics of Roman architecture — Rome and its monuments.
Roman Law. The Twelve Tables — Symbolic process — Formalism — Jurisprudence — The prætor's edict — Civil law and the law of nations — Written reason.
The Christian Religion. Origin of Christianity — Christ — Charity — Equality — Poverty and humility — The kingdom of God.
First Centuries of the Church. Disciples and apostles — The church — Sacred books — Persecutions — Martyrs — Catacombs.
The Monks of the Third Century. Solitaries — Asceticism — Cenobites.
The Later Empire. The revolutions of the third century — Military anarchy — Worship of Mithra — Taurobolia — Confusion of religions.
Regime of the Later Empire. Reforms of Diocletian and Constantine — Constantinople — The palace — The officials — Society of the later empire.
Church and State. Triumph of Christianity — Organization of the church — Councils — Heretics — Paganism — Theodosius.
CHAPTER I[ToC]
THE ORIGINS OF CIVILIZATION
PREHISTORIC ARCHÆOLOGY
Prehistoric Remains.—One often finds buried in the earth, weapons, implements, human skeletons, débris of every kind left by men of whom we have no direct knowledge. These are dug up by the thousand in all the provinces of France, in Switzerland, in England, in all Europe; they are found even in Asia and Africa. It is probable that they exist in all parts of the world.
These remains are called prehistoric because they are more ancient than written history. For about fifty years men have been engaged in recovering and studying them. Today most museums have a hall, or at least, some cases filled with these relics. A museum at Saint-German-en-Laye, near Paris, is entirely given up to prehistoric remains. In Denmark is a collection of more than 30,000 objects. Every day adds to the discoveries as excavations are made, houses built, and cuts made for railroads.
These objects are not found on the surface of the ground, but ordinarily buried deeply where the earth has not been disturbed. They are recovered from a stratum of gravel or clay which has been deposited gradually and has fixed them in place safe from the air, a sure proof that they have been there for a long time.
Prehistoric Science.—Scholars have examined the débris and have asked themselves what men have left them. From their skeletons, they have tried to construct their physical appearance; from their tools, the kind of life they led. They have determined that these instruments resemble those used by certain savages today. The study of all these objects constitutes a new science, Prehistoric Archæology.[1]
The Four Ages.—Prehistoric remains come down to us from very diverse races of men; they have been deposited in the soil at widely different epochs since the time when the mammoth lived in western Europe, a sort of gigantic elephant with woolly hide and curved tusks. This long lapse of time may be divided into four periods, called Ages:
1. The Rough Stone Age.
2. The Polished Stone Age.
3. The Bronze Age.
4. The Iron Age.
The periods take their names from the materials used in the manufacture of the tools,—stone, bronze, iron. These epochs, however, are of very unequal length. It may be that the Rough Stone Age was ten times as long as the Age of Iron.
THE ROUGH STONE AGE
Gravel Débris.—The oldest remains of the Stone Age have been found in the gravels. A French scholar found between 1841 and 1853, in the valley of the Somme, certain sharp instruments made of flint. They were buried to a depth of six metres in gravel under three layers of clay, gravel, and marl which had never been broken up. In the same place they discovered bones of cattle, deer, and elephants. For a long time people made light of this discovery. They said that the chipping of the flints was due to chance. At last, in 1860, several scholars came to study the remains in the valley of the Somme and recognized that the flints had certainly been cut by men. Since then there have been found more than 5,000 similar flints in strata of the same order either in the valley of the Seine or in England, and some of them by the side of human bones. There is no longer any doubt that men were living at the epoch when the gravel strata were in process of formation. If the strata that cover these remains have always been deposited as slowly as they are today, these men whose bones and tools we unearth must have lived more than 200,000 years ago.
The Cave Men.—Remains are also found in caverns cut in rock, often above a river. The most noted are those on the banks of the Vézère, but they exist in many other places. Sometimes they have been used as habitations and even as graves for men. Skeletons, weapons, and tools are found here together. There are axes, knives, scrapers, lance-points of flint; arrows, harpoon-points, needles of bone like those used by certain savages to this day. The soil is strewn with the bones of animals which these men, untidy like all savages, threw into a corner after they had eaten the meat; they even split the bones to extract the marrow just as savages do now. Among the animals are found not only the hare, the deer, the ox, the horse, the salmon, but also the rhinoceros, the cave-bear, the mammoth, the elk, the bison, the reindeer, which are all extinct or have long disappeared from France. Some designs have been discovered engraved on the bone of a reindeer or on the tusk of a mammoth. One of these represents a combat of reindeer; another a mammoth with woolly hide and curved tusks. Doubtless these men were the contemporaries of the mammoth and the reindeer. They were, like the Esquimaux of our day, a race of hunters and fishermen, knowing how to work in flint and to kindle fires.
POLISHED STONE AGE
Lake Dwellings.—In 1854, Lake Zurich being very low on account of the unusual dryness of the summer, dwellers on the shore of the lake found, in the mud, wooden piles which had been much eaten away, also some rude utensils. These were the remains of an ancient village built over the water. Since this time more than 200 similar villages have been found in the lakes of Switzerland. They have been called Lake Villages. The piles on which they rest are trunks of trees, pointed and driven into the lake-bottom to a depth of several yards. Every village required 30,000 to 40,000 of these.
A wooden platform was supported by the pile work and on this were built wooden houses covered with turf. Objects found by the hundred among the piles reveal the character of the life of the former inhabitants. They ate animals killed in the chase—the deer, the boar, and the elk. But they were already acquainted with such domestic animals as the ox, the goat, the sheep, and the dog. They knew how to till the ground, to reap, and to grind their grain; for in the ruins of their villages are to be found grains of wheat and even fragments of bread, or rather unleavend cakes. They wore coarse cloths of hemp and sewed them into garments with needles of bone. They made pottery but were very awkward in its manufacture. Their vases were poorly burned, turned by hand, and adorned with but few lines. Like the cave-men, they used knives and arrows of flint; but they made their axes of a very hard stone which they had learned to polish. This is why we call their epoch the Polished Stone Age. They are much later than the cave-men, for they know neither the mammoth nor the rhinoceros, but still are acquainted with the elk and the reindeer.[2]
Megalithic Monuments.—Megalith is the name given to a monument formed of enormous blocks of rough stone. Sometimes the rock is bare, sometimes covered with a mass of earth. The buried monument is called a Tumulus on account of its resemblance to a hill. When it is opened, one finds within a chamber of rock, sometimes paved with flag-stones. The monuments whose stone is above ground are of various sorts. The Dolmen, or table of rock, is formed of a long stone laid flat over other stones set in the ground. The Cromlech, or stone-circle, consists of massive rocks arranged in a circle. The Menhir is a block of stone standing on its end. Frequently several menhirs are ranged in line. At Carnac in Brittany four thousand menhirs in eleven rows are still standing. Probably there were once ten thousand of these in this locality. Megalithic monuments appear by hundreds in western France, especially in Brittany; almost every hill in England has them; the Orkney Islands alone contain more than two thousand. Denmark and North Germany are studded with them; the people of the country call the tumuli the tombs of the giants.
Megalithic monuments are encountered outside of Europe—in India, and on the African coast. No one knows what people possessed the power to quarry such masses and then transport and erect them. For a long time it was believed that the people were the ancient Gauls, or Celts, whence the name Celtic Monuments. But why are like remains found in Africa and in India?
When one of these tumuli still intact is opened, one always sees a skeleton, often several, either sitting or reclining; these monuments, therefore, were used as tombs. Arms, vases, and ornaments are placed at the side of the dead. In the oldest of these tombs the weapons are axes of polished stone; the ornaments are shells, pearls, necklaces of bone or ivory; the vases are very simple, without handle or neck, decorated only with lines or with points. Calcined bones of animals lie about on the ground, the relics of a funeral repast laid in the tomb by the friends of the dead. Amidst these bones we no longer find those of the reindeer, a fact which proves that these monuments were constructed after the disappearance of this animal from western Europe, and therefore at a time subsequent to that of the lake villages.
THE AGE OF BRONZE
Bronze Age.—As soon as men learned to smelt metals, they preferred these to stone in the manufacture of weapons. The metal first to be used was copper, easier to extract because found free, and easier to manipulate since it is malleable without the application of heat. Pure copper, however, was not employed, as weapons made of it were too fragile; but a little tin was mixed with it to give it more resistance. It is this alloy of copper and tin that we call bronze.
Bronze Utensils.—Bronze was used in the manufacture of ordinary tools—knives, hammers, saws, needles, fish-hooks; in the fabrication of ornaments—bracelets, brooches, ear-rings; and especially in the making of arms—daggers, lance-points, axes, and swords. These objects are found by thousands throughout Europe in the mounds, under the more recent dolmens, in the turf-pits of Denmark, and in rock-tombs. Near these objects of bronze, ornaments of gold are often seen and, now and then, the remains of a woollen garment. It cannot be due to chance that all implements of bronze are similar and all are made according to the same alloy. Doubtless they revert to the same period of time and are anterior to the coming of the Romans into Gaul, for they are never discovered in the midst of débris of the Roman period. But what men used them? What people invented bronze? Nobody knows.
THE IRON AGE
Iron.—As iron was harder to smelt and work than bronze, it was later that men learned how to use it. As soon as it was appreciated that iron was harder and cut better than bronze, men preferred it in the manufacture of arms. In Homer's time iron is still a precious metal reserved for swords, bronze being retained for other purposes. It is for this reason that many tombs contain confused remains of utensils of bronze and weapons of iron.
Iron Weapons.—These arms are axes, swords, daggers, and bucklers. They are ordinarily found by the side of a skeleton in a coffin of stone or wood, for warriors had their arms buried with them. But they are found also scattered on ancient battle-fields or lost at the bottom of a marsh which later became a turf-pit. There were found in a turf-pit in Schleswig in one day 100 swords, 500 lances, 30 axes, 460 daggers, 80 knives, 40 stilettos—and all of iron. Not far from there in the bed of an ancient lake was discovered a great boat 66 feet long, fully equipped with axes, swords, lances, and knives.
It is impossible to enumerate the iron implements thus found. They have not been so well preserved as the bronze, as iron is rapidly eaten away by rust. At the first glance, therefore, they appear the older, but in reality are more recent.
Epoch of the Iron Age.—The inhabitants of northern Europe knew iron before the coming of the Romans, the first century before Christ. In an old cemetery near the salt mines of Hallstadt in Austria they have opened 980 tombs filled with instruments of iron and bronze without finding a single piece of Roman money. But the Iron Age continued under the Romans. Almost always iron objects are found accompanied by ornaments of gold and silver, by Roman pottery, funeral urns, inscriptions, and Roman coins bearing the effigy of the emperor. The warriors whom we find lying near their sword and their buckler lived for the most part in a period quite close to ours, many under the Merovingians, some even at the time of Charlemagne. The Iron Age is no longer a prehistoric age.
CONCLUSIONS
How the Four Ages are to be Conceived.—The inhabitants of one and the same country have successively made use of rough stone, polished stone, bronze, and iron. But all countries have not lived in the same age at the same time. Iron was employed by the Egyptians while yet the Greeks were in their bronze age and the barbarians of Denmark were using stone. The conclusion of the polished stone age in America came only with the arrival of Europeans. In our own time the savages of Australia are still in the rough stone age. In their settlements may be found only implements of bone and stone similar to those used by the cave-men. The four ages, therefore, do not mark periods in the life of humanity, but only epochs in the civilization of each country.
Uncertainties.—Prehistoric archæology is yet a very young science. We have learned something of primitive men through certain remains preserved and discovered by chance. A recent accident, a trench, a landslip, a drought may effect a new discovery any day. Who knows what is still under ground? The finds are already innumerable. But these rarely tell us what we wish to know. How long was each of the four ages? When did each begin and end in the various parts of the world? Who planned the caverns, the lake villages, the mounds, the dolmens? When a country passes from polished stone to bronze, is it the same people changing implements, or is it a new people come on the scene? When one thinks one has found the solution, a new discovery often confounds the archæologists. It was thought that the Celts originated the dolmens, but these have been found in sections which could never have been traversed by Celts.
What has been determined.—Three conclusions, however, seem certain:
1.—Man has lived long on the earth, familiar as he was with the mammoth and the cave-bear; he lived at least as early as the geological period known as the Quaternary.
2.—Man has emerged from the savage state to civilized life; he has gradually perfected his tools and his ornaments from the awkward axe of flint and the necklace of bears' teeth to iron swords and jewels of gold. The roughest instruments are the oldest.
3.—Man has made more and more rapid progress. Each age has been shorter than its predecessor.
FOOTNOTES:
[ [1] It originated especially with French, Swiss, and scholars.
[ [2] According to Lubbock (Prehistoric Times, N.Y., 1890, p. 212) the reindeer was not known to the Second Stone Age.—ED.
CHAPTER II[ToC]
HISTORY AND THE RECORDS
HISTORY
Legends.—The most ancient records of people and their doings are transmitted by oral tradition. They are recited long before they are written down and are much mixed with fable. The Greeks told how their heroes of the oldest times had exterminated monsters, fought with giants, and battled against the gods. The Romans had Romulus nourished by a wolf and raised to heaven. Almost all peoples relate such stories of their infancy. But no confidence is to be placed in these legends.
History.—History has its true beginning only with authentic accounts, that is to say, accounts written by men who were well informed. This moment is not the same with all peoples. The history of Egypt commences more than 3,000 years before Christ; that of the Greeks ascends scarcely to 800 years before Christ; Germany has had a history only since the first century of our era; Russia dates back only to the ninth century; certain savage tribes even yet have no history.
Great Divisions of History.—The history of civilization begins with the oldest civilized people and continues to the present time. Antiquity is the most remote period, Modern Times the era in which we live.
Ancient History.—Ancient History begins with the oldest known nations, the Egyptians and Chaldeans (about 3,000 years before our era), and surveys the peoples of the Orient, the Hindoos, Persians, Phœnicians, Jews, Greeks, and last of all the Romans. It terminates about the fifth century A.D., when the Roman empire of the west is extinguished.
Modern History.—Modern History starts with the end of the fifteenth century, with the invention of printing, the discovery of America and of the Indies, the Renaissance of the sciences and arts. It concerns itself especially with peoples of the West, of Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Russia, and America.
The Middle Age.—Between Antiquity and Modern Times about ten centuries elapse which belong neither to ancient times (for the civilization of Antiquity has perished) nor to modern (since modern civilization does not yet exist). This period we call the Middle Age.
SOURCES OF INFORMATION FOR THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PEOPLES
The Sources.—The Assyrians, Greeks, and Romans are no longer with us; all the peoples of antiquity have passed away. To know their religion, their customs, and arts we have to seek for instruction in the remains they have left us. These are books, monuments, inscriptions, and languages, and these are our means for the study of ancient civilizations. We term these sources because we draw our knowledge from them. Ancient History flows from these sources.
Books.—Ancient peoples have left written records behind them. Some of these peoples had sacred books—for example, the Hindoos, the Persians, and the Jews; the Greeks and Romans have handed down to us histories, poems, speeches, philosophical treatises. But books are very far from furnishing all the information that we require. We do not possess a single Assyrian or Phœnician book. Other peoples have transmitted very few books to us. The ancients wrote less than we, and so they had a smaller literature to leave behind them; and as it was necessary to transcribe all of this by hand, there was but a small number of copies of books. Further, most of these manuscripts have been destroyed or have been lost, and those which remain to us are difficult to read. The art of deciphering them is called Palæography.
The Monuments.—Ancient peoples, like ourselves, built monuments of different sorts: palaces for their kings, tombs for the dead, fortresses, bridges, aqueducts, triumphal arches. Of these monuments many have fallen into ruin, have been razed, shattered by the enemy or by the people themselves. But some of them survive, either because there was no desire to destroy them, or because men could not. They still stand in ruins like the old castles, for repairs are no longer made; but enough is preserved to enable us to comprehend their former condition. Some of them are still above ground, like the pyramids, the temples of Thebes and of the island of Philæ, the palace of Persepolis in Persia, the Parthenon in Greece, the Colosseum in Rome, and the Maison Carrée and Pont du Gard in France. Like any modern monument, these are visible to the traveller. But the majority of these monuments have been recovered from the earth, from sand, from river deposits, and from débris. One must disengage them from this thick covering, and excavate the soil, often to a great depth. Assyrian palaces may be reached only by cutting into the hills. A trench of forty feet is necessary to penetrate to the tombs of the kings of Mycenæ. Time is not the only agency for covering these ruins; men have aided it. When the ancients wished to build, they did not, as we do, take the trouble to level off the space, nor to clear the site. Instead of removing the débris, they heaped it together and built above it. The new edifice in turn fell into ruins and its débris was added to that of more remote time; thus there were formed several strata of remains. When Schliemann excavated the site of Troy, he had passed through five beds of débris; these were five ruined villages one above another, the oldest at a depth of fifty feet.
By accident one town has been preserved to us in its entirety. In 79 A.D. the volcano of Vesuvius belched forth a torrent of liquid lava and a rain of ashes, and two Roman cities were suddenly buried, Herculaneum by lava, and Pompeii by ashes; the lava burnt the objects it touched, while the ashes enveloped them, preserving them from the air and keeping them intact. As we remove the ashes, Pompeii reappears to us just as it was eighteen centuries ago. One still sees the wheel-ruts in the pavement, the designs traced on the walls with charcoal; in the houses, the pictures, the utensils, the furniture, even the bread, the nuts, and olives, and here and there the skeleton of an inhabitant surprised by the catastrophe. Monuments teach us much about the ancient peoples. The science of monuments is called Archæology.
Inscriptions.—By inscriptions one means all writings other than books. Inscriptions are for the most part cut in stone, but some are on plates of bronze. At Pompeii they have been found traced on the walls in colors or with charcoal. Some have the character of commemorative inscriptions just as these are now attached to our statues and edifices; thus in the monument of Ancyra the emperor Augustus publishes the story of his life.
The greatest number of inscriptions are epitaphs graven on tombs. Certain others fill the function of our placards, containing, as they do, a law or a regulation that was to be made public. The science of inscriptions is called Epigraphy.
Languages.—The languages also which ancient peoples spoke throw light on their history. Comparing the words of two different languages, we perceive that the two have a common origin—an evidence that the peoples who spoke them were descended from the same stock. The science of languages is called Linguistics.
Lacunæ.—It is not to be supposed that books, monuments, inscriptions, and languages are sufficient to give complete knowledge of the history of antiquity. They present many details which we could well afford to lose, but often what we care most to know escapes us. Scholars continue to dig and to decipher; each year new discoveries of inscriptions and monuments are made; but there remain still many gaps in our knowledge and probably some of these will always exist.
RACES AND PEOPLES
Anthropology.—The men who people the earth do not possess exact resemblances, some differing from others in stature, the form of the limbs and the head, the features of the face, the color of the hair and eyes. Other differences are found in language, intelligence, and sentiments. These variations permit us to separate the inhabitants of the earth into several groups which we call races. A race is the aggregate of those men who resemble one another and are distinguished from all others. The common traits of a race—its characteristics—constitute the type of the race. For example, the type of the negro race is marked by black skin, frizzly hair, white teeth, flat nose, projecting lips, and prominent jaw. That part of Anthropology which concerns itself with races and their sub-divisions is called Ethnology.[3] This science is yet in its early development on account of its complete novelty, and is very complex since types of men are very numerous and often very difficult to differentiate.
The Races.—The principal races are:
1.—The White race, which inhabits Europe, the north of Africa, and western Asia.
2.—The Yellow race in eastern Asia to which belong the Chinese, the Mongols, Turks, and Hungarians, who invaded Europe as conquerors. They have yellow skin, small regular eyes, prominent cheek-bones, and thin beard.
3.—The Black race, in central Africa. These are the Negroes, of black skin, flat nose, woolly hair.
4.—The Red race, in America. These are the Indians, with copper-colored skin and flat heads.
Civilized Peoples.—Almost all civilized peoples belong to the white race. The peoples of the other races have remained savage or barbarian, like the men of prehistoric times.[4]
It is within the limits of Asia and Africa that the first civilized peoples had their development—the Egyptians in the Nile valley, the Chaldeans in the plain of the Euphrates. They were peoples of sedentary and peaceful pursuits. Their skin was dark, the hair short and thick, the lips strong. Nobody knows their origin with exactness and scholars are not agreed on the name to give them (some terming them Cushites, others Hamites). Later, between the twentieth and twenty-fifth centuries B.C. came bands of martial shepherds who had spread over all Europe and the west of Asia—the Aryans and the Semites.
The Aryans and the Semites.—There is no clearly marked external difference between the Aryans and the Semites. Both are of the white race, having the oval face, regular features, clear skin, abundant hair, large eyes, thin lips, and straight nose. Both peoples were originally nomad shepherds, fond of war. We do not know whence they came, nor is there agreement whether the Aryans came from the mountain region in the northwest of the Himalayas or from the plains of Russia. What distinguishes them is their spiritual bent and especially their language, sometimes also their religion. Scholars by common consent call those peoples Aryan who speak an Aryan language: in Asia, the Hindoos and Persians; in Europe, the Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Scandinavians, Slavs (Russians, Poles, Serfs), and Celts.[5]
Similarly, we call Semites those peoples who speak a Semitic language: Arabs, Jews and Syrians. But a people may speak an Aryan or a Semitic language and yet not be of Aryan or Semitic race; a negro may speak English without being of English stock. Many of the Europeans whom we classify among the Aryans are perhaps the descendants of an ancient race conquered by the Aryans and who have adopted their language, just as the Egyptians received the language of the Arabs, their conquerors.
These two names (Aryan and Semite), then, signify today rather two groups of peoples than two distinct races. But even if we use the terms in this sense, one may say that all the greater peoples of the world have been Semites or Aryans. The Semitic family included the Phœnicians, the people of commerce; the Jews, the people of religion; the Arabs, the people of war. The Aryans, some finding their homes in India, others in Europe, have produced the nations which have been, and still are, foremost in the world—in antiquity, the Hindoos, a people of great philosophical and religious ideas; the Greeks, creators of art and of science; the Persians and Romans, the founders, the former in the East, the latter in the West, of the greatest empires of antiquity; in modern times, the Italians, French, Germans, Dutch, Russians, English and Americans.
The history of civilization begins with the Egyptians and the Chaldeans; but from the fifteenth century before our era, history concerns itself only with the Aryan and Semitic peoples.
FOOTNOTES:
[ [3] Ethnography is the study of races from the point of view of their objects and customs.
[ [4] The Chinese only of the yellow race have elaborated among themselves an industry, a regular government, a polite society. But placed at the extremity of Asia they have had no influence on other civilized peoples. [The Japanese should be included.—ED.]
[ [5] The English and French are mixtures of Celtic and German blood.
CHAPTER III[ToC]
ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE EAST
THE EGYPTIANS
The Land of Egypt.—Egypt is only the valley of the Nile, a narrow strip of fertile soil stretching along both banks of the stream and shut in by mountains on either side, somewhat over 700[6] miles in length and 15 in width. Where the hills fall away, the Delta begins, a vast plain cut by the arms of the Nile and by canals. As Herodotus says, Egypt is wholly the gift of the Nile.
The Nile.—Every year at the summer solstice the Nile, swollen by the melted snows of Abyssinia, overflows the parched soil of Egypt. It rises to a height of twenty-six or twenty-seven feet, sometimes even to thirty-three feet.[7] The whole country becomes a lake from which the villages, built on eminences, emerge like little islands. The water recedes in September; by December it has returned to its proper channel. Everywhere has been left a fertile, alluvial bed which serves the purpose of fertilization. On the softened earth the peasant sows his crop with almost no labor. The Nile, then, brings both water and soil to Egypt; if the river should fail, Egypt would revert, like the land on either side of it, to a desert of sterile sand where the rain never falls. The Egyptians are conscious of their debt to their stream. A song in its honor runs as follows: "Greeting to thee, O Nile, who hast revealed thyself throughout the land, who comest in peace to give life to Egypt. Does it rise? The land is filled with joy, every heart exults, every being receives its food, every mouth is full. It brings bounties that are full of delight, it creates all good things, it makes the grass to spring up for the beasts."
Fertility of the Country.—Egypt is truly an oasis in the midst of the desert of Africa. It produces in abundance wheat, beans, lentils, and all leguminous foods; palms rear themselves in forests. On the pastures irrigated by the Nile graze herds of cattle and goats, and flocks of geese. With a territory hardly equal to that of Belgium, Egypt still supports 5,500,000 inhabitants. No country in Europe is so thickly populated, and Egypt in antiquity was more densely thronged than it is today.
The Accounts of Herodotus.—Egypt was better known to the Greeks than the rest of the Orient. Herodotus had visited it in the fifth century B.C. He describes in his History the inundations of the Nile, the manners, costume, and religion of the people; he recounts events of their history and tales which his guides had told him. Diodorus and Strabo also speak of Egypt. But all had seen the country in its decadence and had no knowledge of the ancient Egyptians.
Champollion.—The French expedition to Egypt (1798-1801) opened the country to scholars. They made a close examination of the Pyramids and ruins of Thebes, and collected drawings and inscriptions. But no one could decipher the hieroglyphs, the Egyptian writing. It was an erroneous impression that every sign in this writing must each represent a word. In 1821 a French scholar, Champollion, experimented with another system. An official had reported that there was an inscription at Rosetta in three forms of writing—parallel with the hieroglyphs was a translation in Greek. The name of King Ptolemy, was surrounded with a cartouche.[8] Champollion succeeded in finding in this name the letters P, T, O, L, M, I, S. Comparing these with other names of kings similarly enclosed, he found the whole alphabet. He then read the hieroglyphs and found that they were written in a language like the Coptic, the language spoken in Egypt at the time of the Romans, and which was already known to scholars.
Egyptologists.—Since Champollion, many scholars have travelled over Egypt and have ransacked it thoroughly. We call these students Egyptologists, and they are to be found in every country of Europe. A French Egyptologist, Mariette (1821-1881), made some excavations for the Viceroy of Egypt and created the museum of Boulak. France has established in Cairo a school of Egyptology, directed by Maspero.
Discoveries.—Not every country yields such rich discoveries as does Egypt. The Egyptians constructed their tombs like houses, and laid in them objects of every kind for the use of the dead—furniture, garments, arms, and edibles. The whole country was filled with tombs similarly furnished. Under this extraordinarily dry climate everything has been preserved; objects come to light intact after a burial of 4,000 or 5,000 years. No people of antiquity have left so many traces of themselves as the Egyptians; none is better known to us.
THE EGYPTIAN EMPIRE
Antiquity of the Egyptian People.—An Egyptian priest said to Herodotus, "You Greeks are only children." The Egyptians considered themselves the oldest people of the world. Down to the Persian conquest (520[9] B.C.) there were twenty-six dynasties of kings. The first ran back 4,000 years,[10] and during these forty centuries Egypt had been an empire. The capital down to the tenth dynasty (the period of the Old Empire) was at Memphis in Lower Egypt, later, in the New Empire, at Thebes in Upper Egypt.
Memphis and the Pyramids.—Memphis, built by the first king of Egypt, was protected by an enormous dike. The village has existed for more than five thousand years; but since the thirteenth century the inhabitants have taken the stones of its ruins to build the houses of Cairo; what these people left the Nile recaptured. The Pyramids, not far from Memphis, are contemporaneous with the old empire; they are the tombs of three kings of the fourth dynasty. The greatest of the pyramids, 480 feet high, required the labor of 100,000 men for thirty years.[11] To raise the stones for it they built gradually ascending platforms which were removed when the structure was completed.
Egyptian Civilization.—The statues, paintings, and instruments which are taken from the tombs of this epoch give evidence of an already civilized people. When all the other eminent nations of antiquity—the Hindoos, Persians, Jews, Greeks, Romans—were still in a savage state, 3,500 years before our era, the Egyptians had known for a long time how to cultivate the soil, to weave cloths, to work metals, to paint, sculpture, and to write; they had an organized religion, a king, and an administration.
Thebes.—At the eleventh dynasty Thebes succeeds Memphis as capital. The ruins of Thebes are still standing. They are marvellous, extending as they do on both banks of the Nile, with a circuit of about seven miles. On the left bank there is a series of palaces and temples which lead to vast cemeteries. On the right bank two villages, Luxor and Karnak, distant a half-hour one from the other, are built in the midst of the ruins. They are united by a double row of sphinxes, which must have once included more than 1,000 of these monuments. Among these temples in ruins the greatest was the temple of Ammon at Karnak. It was surrounded by a wall of over one and one-third miles in length; the famous Hall of Columns, the greatest in the world, had a length of 334 feet, a width of 174 feet,[12] and was supported by 134 columns; twelve of these are over 65 feet high. Thebes was for 1,500 years the capital and sacred city, the residence of kings and the dwelling-place of the priests.
The Pharaoh.—The king of Egypt, called Pharaoh, was esteemed as the son of the Sun-god and his incarnation on earth; divinity was ascribed to him also. We may see in a picture King Rameses II standing in adoration before the divine Rameses who is sitting between two gods. The king as man adores himself as god. Being god, the Pharaoh has absolute power over men; as master, he gives his orders to his great nobles at court, to his warriors, to all his subjects. But the priests, though adoring him, surround and watch him; their head, the high priest of the god Ammon, at last becomes more powerful than the king; he often governs under the name of the king and in his stead.
The Subjects of Pharaoh.—The king, the priests, the warriors, the nobles, are proprietors of all Egypt; all the other people are simply their peasants who cultivate the land for them. Scribes in the service of the king watch them and collect the farm-dues, often with blows of the staff. One of these functionaries writes as follows to a friend, "Have you ever pictured to yourself the existence of the peasant who tills the soil. The tax-collector is on the platform busily seizing the tithe of the harvest. He has his men with him armed with staves, his negroes provided with strips of palm. All cry, 'Come, give us grain,' If the peasant hasn't it, they throw him full length on the earth, bind him, draw him to the canal, and hurl him in head foremost."
Despotism.—The Egyptian people has always been, and still is, gay, careless, gentle, docile as an infant, always ready to submit to tyranny. In this country the cudgel was the instrument of education and of government. "The young man," said the scribes, "has a back to be beaten; he hears when he is struck." "One day," says a French traveller, "finding myself before the ruins of Thebes, I exclaimed, 'But how did they do all this?' My guide burst out laughing, touched me on the arm and, showing me a palm, said to me, 'Here is what they used to accomplish all this. You know, sir, with 100,000 branches of palms split on the backs of those who always have their shoulders bare, you can build many a palace and some temples to boot.'"
Isolation of the Egyptians.—The Egyptians moved but little beyond their borders. As the sea inspired them with terror, they had no commerce and did not trade with other peoples. They were not at all a military nation. Their kings, it is true, often went on expeditions at the head of mercenaries either against the negroes of Ethiopia or against the tribes of Syria. They gained victories which they had painted on the walls of their palaces, they brought back troops of captives whom they used in building monuments; but they never made great conquests. Foreigners came more to Egypt than Egyptians went abroad.
Religion of the Egyptians.—"The Egyptians," said Herodotus, "are the most religious of all men." We do not know any people so devout; almost all their paintings represent men in prayer before a god; almost all their manuscripts are religious books.
Egyptian Gods.—The principal deity is a Sun-god, creator, beneficent, "who knows all things, who exists from the beginning." This god has a divine wife and son. All the Egyptians adored this trinity; but not all gave it the same name. Each region gave a different name to these three gods. At Memphis they called the father Phtah, the mother Sekhet, the son Imouthes; at Abydos they called them Osiris, Isis, and Horus; at Thebes, Ammon, Mouth, and Chons. Then, too, the people of one province adopted the gods of other provinces. Further, they made other gods emanate from each god of the trinity. Thus the number of gods was increased and religion was complicated.
Osiris.—These gods have their history; it is that of the sun; for the sun appeared to the Egyptians, as to most of the primitive peoples, the mightiest of beings, and consequently a god. Osiris, the sun, is slain by Set, god of the night; Isis, the moon, his wife, bewails and buries him; Horus, his son, the rising sun, avenges him by killing his murderer.
Ammon-râ.—Ammon-râ, god of Thebes, is represented as traversing heaven each day in a bark ("the good bark of millions of years"); the shades of the dead propel it with long oars; the god stands at the prow to strike the enemy with his lance. The hymn which they chanted in his honor is as follows: "Homage to thee; thou watchest favoringly, thou watchest truly, O master of the two horizons.... Thou treadest the heavens on high, thine enemies are laid low. The heaven is glad, the earth is joyful, the gods unite in festal cheer to render glory to Râ when they see him rising in his bark after he has overwhelmed his enemies. O Râ, give abounding life to Pharaoh, bestow bread for his hunger (belly), water for his throat, perfumes for his hair."
Animal-Headed Gods.—The Egyptians often represented their gods with human form, but more frequently under the form of a beast. Each god has his animal: Phtah incarnates himself in the beetle, Horus in the hawk, Osiris in the bull. The two figures often unite in a man with the head of an animal or an animal with the head of a man. Every god may be figured in four forms: Horus, for example, as a man, a hawk, as man with the head of a hawk, as a hawk with the head of a man.
Sacred Animals.—What did the Egyptians wish to designate by this symbol? One hardly knows. They, themselves, came to regard as sacred the animals which served to represent the gods to them: the bull, the beetle, the ibis, the hawk, the cat, the crocodile. They cared for them and protected them. A century before the Christian era a Roman citizen killed a cat at Alexandria; the people rose in riot, seized him, and, notwithstanding the entreaties of the king, murdered him, although at the same time they had great fear of the Romans. There was in each temple a sacred animal which was adored. The traveller Strabo records a visit to a sacred crocodile of Thebes: "The beast," said he, "lay on the edge of a pond, the priests drew near, two of them opened his mouth, a third thrust in cakes, grilled fish, and a drink made with meal."
The Bull Apis.—Of these animal gods the most venerated was the bull Apis. It represented at once Osiris and Phtah and lived at Memphis in a chapel served by the priests. After its death it became an Osiris (Osar-hapi), it was embalmed, and its mummy deposited in a vault. The sepulchres of the "Osar-hapi" constituted a gigantic monument, the Serapeum, discovered in 1851 by Marietta.
Cult of the Dead.—The Egyptians adored also the spirits of the dead. They seem to have believed at first that every man had a "double" (Kâ), and that when the man was dead his double still survived. Many savage peoples believe this to this day. The Egyptian tomb in the time of the Old Empire was termed "House of the Double." It was a low room arranged like a chamber, where for the service of the double there were placed all that he required, chairs, tables, beds, chests, linen, closets, garments, toilet utensils, weapons, sometimes a war-chariot; for the entertainment of the double, statues, paintings, books; for his sustenance, grain and foods. And then they set there a double of the dead in the form of a statue in wood or stone carved in his likeness. At last the opening to the vault was sealed; the double was enclosed, but the living still provided for him. They brought him foods or they might beseech a god that he supply them to the spirit, as in this inscription, "An offering to Osiris that he may confer on the Kâ of the deceased N. bread, drink, meat, geese, milk, wine, beer, clothing, perfumes—all good things and pure on which the god (i.e. the Kâ) subsists."
Judgment of the Soul.—Later, originating with the eleventh dynasty, the Egyptians believed that the soul flew away from the body and sought Osiris under the earth, the realm into which the sun seemed every day to sink. There Osiris sits on his tribunal, surrounded by forty-two judges; the soul appears before these to give account of his past life. His actions are weighed in the balance of truth, his "heart" is called to witness. "O heart," cries the dead, "O heart, the issue of my mother, my heart when I was on earth, offer not thyself as witness, charge me not before the great god." The soul found on examination to be bad is tormented for centuries and at last annihilated. The good soul springs up across the firmament; after many tests it rejoins the company of the gods and is absorbed into them.
Mummies.—During this pilgrimage the soul may wish to re-enter the body to rest there. The body must therefore be kept intact, and so the Egyptians learned to embalm it. The corpse was filled with spices, drenched in a bath of natron, wound with bandages and thus transformed into a mummy. The mummy encased in a coffin of wood or plaster was laid in the tomb with every provision necessary to its life.
Book of the Dead.—A book was deposited with the mummy, the Book of the Dead, which explains what the soul ought to say in the other world when it makes its defence before the tribunal of Osiris: "I have never committed fraud; ... I have never vexed the widow; ... I have never committed any forbidden act; ... I have never been an idler; ... I have never taken the slave from his master; ... I never stole the bread from the temples; ... I never removed the provisions or the bandages of the dead; I never altered the grain measure; ... I never hunted sacred beasts; I never caught sacred fish; ... I am pure; ... I have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothing to the naked; I have sacrificed to the gods, and offered funeral feasts to dead." Here we see Egyptian morality: observance of ceremonies, respect for everything pertaining to the gods, sincerity, honesty, and beneficence.
THE ARTS
Industry.—The Egyptians were the first to practice the arts necessary to a civilized people. From the first dynasty, 3,000[13] years B.C., paintings on the tomb exhibit men working, sowing, harvesting, beating and winnowing grain; we have representations of herds of cattle, sheep, geese, swine; of persons richly clothed, processions, feasts where the harp is played—almost the same life that we behold 3,000 years later. As early as this time the Egyptians knew how to manipulate gold, silver, bronze; to manufacture arms and jewels, glass, pottery, and enamel; they wove garments of linen and wool, and cloths, transparent or embroidered with gold.
Architecture.—They were the oldest artists of the world. They constructed enormous monuments which appear to be eternal, for down to the present, time has not been able to destroy them. They never built, as we do, for the living, but for the gods and for the dead, i.e., temples and tombs. Only a slight amount of débris is left of their houses, and even the palaces of their kings in comparison with the tombs appear, in the language of the Greeks, to be only inns. The house was to serve only for a lifetime, the tomb for eternity.
Tombs.—The Great Pyramid is a royal tomb. Ancient tombs ordinarily had this form. In Lower Egypt there still remain pyramids arranged in rows or scattered about, some larger, others smaller. These are the tombs of kings and nobles. Later the tombs are constructed underground, some under earth, others cut into the granite of the hills. Each generation needs new ones, and therefore near the town of living people is built the richer and greater city of the dead (necropolis).
Temples.—The gods also required eternal and splendid habitations. Their temples include a magnificent sanctuary, the dwelling of the god, surrounded with courts, gardens, chambers where the priests lodge, wardrobes for his jewels, utensils, and vestments. This combination of edifices, the work of many generations, is encircled with a wall. The temple of Ammon at Thebes had the labors of the kings of all the dynasties from the twelfth to the last. Ordinarily in front of the temple a great gate-way is erected, with inclined faces—the pylone. On either side of the entrance is an obelisk, a needle of rock with gilded point, or perhaps a colossus in stone representing a sitting giant. Often the approach to the temple is by a long avenue rimmed with sphinxes.
Pyramids, pylones, colossi, sphinxes, and obelisks characterize this architecture. Everything is massive, compact, and, above all, immense. Hence these monuments appear clumsy but indestructible.
Sculpture.—Egyptian sculptors began with imitating nature. The oldest statues are impressive for their life and freshness, and are doubtless portraits of the dead. Of this sort is the famous squatting scribe of the Louvre.[14] But beginning with the eleventh dynasty the sculptor is no longer free to represent the human body as he sees it, but must follow conventional rules fixed by religion. And so all the statues resemble one another—parallel legs, the feet joined, arms crossed on the breast, the figure motionless; the statues are often majestic, but always stiff and monotonous. Art has ceased to reproduce nature and is become a conventional symbol.
Painting.—The Egyptians used very solid colors; after 5,000 years they are still fresh and bright. But they were ignorant of coloring designs; they knew neither tints, shadows, nor perspective. Painting, like sculpture, was subject to religious rules and was therefore monotonous. If fifty persons were to be represented, the artist made them all alike.
Literature.—The literature of the Egyptians is found in the tombs—not only books of medicine, of magic and of piety, but also poems, letters, accounts of travels, and even romances.
Destiny of the Egyptian Civilization.—The Egyptians conserved their customs, religion, and arts even after the fall of their empire. Subjects of the Persians, then the Greeks, and at last of the Romans, they kept their old usages, their hieroglyphics, their mummies and sacred animals. At last between the third and second centuries A.D., Egyptian civilization was slowly extinguished.
FOOTNOTES:
[ [6] Following the curves of the stream.—ED.
[ [7] In some localities, e.g. Thebes, the flood is even higher.—ED.
[ [8] An enclosing case.
[ [9] 525 B.C.—ED.
[10] The chronology of early Egyptian history is uncertain. Civilization existed in this land much earlier than was formerly supposed.—ED.
[11] According to Petrie ("History of Egypt," New York, 1895, i., 40) twenty years were consumed.—ED.
[12] Perrot and Chipiez ("History of Ancient Egyptian Art," London. 1883, i., 365) give 340 feet by 170.—ED.
[13] Probably much earlier than this.—ED.
[14] The Louvre Museum in Paris has an excellent collection of Egyptian subjects.
CHAPTER IV[ToC]
ASSYRIANS AND BABYLONIANS
CHALDEA
The Land.—From the high and snowy mountains of Armenia flow two deep and rapid rivers, the Tigris to the east, the Euphrates to the west. At first in close proximity, they separate as they reach the plain. The Tigris makes a straight course, the Euphrates a great détour towards the sandy deserts; then they unite before emptying into the sea. The country which they embrace is Chaldea. It is an immense plain of extraordinarily fertile soil; rain is rare and the heat is overwhelming. But the streams furnish water and this clayey soil when irrigated by canals becomes the most fertile in the world. Wheat and barley produce 200-fold; in good years the returns are 300-fold. Palms constitute the forests and from these the people make their wine, meal and flour.[15]
The People.—For many centuries, perhaps as long as Egypt, Chaldea has been the abode of civilized peoples. Many races from various lands have met and mingled in these great plains. There were Turanians of the yellow race, similar to the Chinese, who came from the north-east; Cushites, deep brown in color, related to the Egyptians, came from the east; Semites, of the white race, of the same stock as the Arabs, descended from the north.[16] The Chaldean people had its origin in this mixture of races.
The Cities.—Chaldean priests related that their kings had ruled for 150,000 years. While this is a fable, they were right in ascribing great antiquity to the Chaldean empire. The soil of Chaldea is everywhere studded with hills and each of these is a mass of débris, the residue of a ruined city. Many of these have been excavated and many cities brought to view, (Our, Larsam, Bal-ilou), and some inscriptions recovered. De Sarsec, a Frenchman, has discovered the ruins of an entire city, overwhelmed by the invader and its palace destroyed by fire. These ancient peoples are still little known to us; many sites remain to be excavated when it is hoped new inscriptions will be found. Their empire was destroyed about 2,300 B.C.; it may then have been very old.[17]
THE ASSYRIANS
Assyria.—The country back of Chaldea on the Tigris is Assyria. It also is fertile, but cut with hills and rocks. Situated near the mountains, it experiences snow in winter and severe storms in summer.
Origins.—Chaldea had for a long time been covered with towns while yet the Assyrians lived an obscure life in their mountains. About the thirteenth century B.C. their kings leading great armies began to invade the plains and founded a mighty empire whose capital was Nineveh.
Ancient Accounts.—Until about forty years ago we knew almost nothing of the Assyrians—only a legend recounted by the Greek Diodorus Siculus. Ninus, according to the story, had founded Nineveh and conquered all Asia Minor; his wife, Semiramis, daughter of a goddess, had subjected Egypt, after which she was changed into the form of a dove. Incapable kings had succeeded this royal pair for the space of 1,300 years; the last, Sardanapalus, besieged in his capital, was burnt with his wives. This romance has not a word of truth in it.
Modern Discoveries.—In 1843, Botta, the French consul at Mossoul, discovered under a hillock near the Tigris, at Khorsabad, the palace of an Assyrian king. Here for the first time one could view the productions of Assyrian art; the winged bulls cut in stone, placed at the gate of the palace were found intact and removed to the Louvre Museum in Paris. The excavations of Botta drew the attention of Europe, so that many expeditions were sent out, especially by the English; Place and Layard investigated other mounds and discovered other palaces. These ruins had been well preserved, protected by the dryness of the climate and by a covering of earth. They found walls adorned with bas-reliefs and paintings; statues and inscriptions were discovered in great number. It was now possible to study on the ground the plan of the structures and to publish reproductions of the monuments and inscriptions.
The palace first discovered, that of Khorsabad, had been built by King Sargon at Nineveh, the site of the capital of the Assyrian kings. The city was built on several eminences, and was encircled by a wall 25 to 30 miles[18] in length, in the form of a quadrilateral. The wall was composed of bricks on the exterior and of earth within. The dwellings of the city have disappeared leaving no traces, but we have recovered many palaces constructed by various kings of Assyria. Nineveh remained the residence of the kings down to the time that the Assyrian empire was destroyed by the Medes and Chaldeans.
Inscriptions on the Bricks.—In these inscriptions every character is formed of a combination of signs shaped like an arrow or wedge, and this is the reason that this style of writing is termed cuneiform (Latin cuneus and forma). To trace these signs the writer used a stylus with a triangular point; he pressed it into a tablet of soft clay which was afterwards baked to harden it and to make the impression permanent. In the palace of Assurbanipal a complete library of brick tablets has been found in which brick serves the purpose of paper.
Cuneiform Writing.—For many years the cuneiform writing has occupied the labors of many scholars impatient to decipher it. It has been exceedingly difficult to read, for, in the first place, it served as the writing medium of five different languages—Assyrian, Susian, Mede, Chaldean, and Armenian, without counting the Old Persian—and there was no knowledge of these five languages. Then, too, it is very complicated, for several reasons:
1. It is composed at the same time of symbolic signs, each of which represents a word (sun, god, fish), and of syllabic signs, each of which represents a syllable.
2. There are nearly two hundred syllabic signs, much alike and easy to confuse.
3. The same sign is often the representation of a word and a syllable.
4. Often (and this is the hardest condition) the same sign is used to represent different syllables. Thus the same sign is sometimes read "ilou," and sometimes "an." This writing was difficult even for those who executed it. "A good half of the cuneiform monuments which we possess comprises guides (grammars, dictionaries, pictures), which enable us to decipher the other half, and which we consult just as Assyrian scholars did 2,500 years ago."[19]
Cuneiform inscriptions have been solved in the same manner as the Egyptian hieroglyphics—there was an inscription in three languages—Assyrian, Mede, and Persian. The last gave the key to the other two.
The Assyrian People.—The Assyrians were a race of hunters and soldiers. Their bas-reliefs ordinarily represent them armed with bow and lance, often on horseback. They were good knights—alert, brave, clever in skirmish and battle; also bombastic, deceitful, and sanguinary. For six centuries they harassed Asia, issuing from their mountains to hurl themselves on their neighbors, and returning with entire peoples reduced to slavery. They apparently made war for the mere pleasure of slaying, ravaging, and pillaging. No people ever exhibited greater ferocity.
The King.—Following Asiatic usage they regarded their king as the representative of God on earth and gave him blind obedience. He was absolute master of all his subjects, he led them in battle, and at their head fought against other peoples of Asia. On his return he recorded his exploits on the walls of his palace in a long inscription in which he told of his victories, the booty which he had taken, the cities burned, the captives beheaded or flayed alive. We present some passages from these stories of campaigns:
Assurnazir-hapal in 882 says, "I built a wall before the great gates of the city; I flayed the chiefs of the revolt and with their skins I covered this wall. Some were immured alive in the masonry, others were crucified or impaled along the wall. I had some of them flayed in my presence and had the wall hung with their skins. I arranged their heads like crowns and their transfixed bodies in the form of garlands."
In 745 Tiglath-Pilezer II writes, "I shut up the king in his royal city. I raised mountains of bodies before his gates. All his villages I destroyed, desolated, burnt. I made the country desert, I changed it into hills and mounds of débris."
In the seventh century Sennacherib wrote: "I passed like a hurricane of desolation. On the drenched earth the armor and arms swam in the blood of the enemy as in a river. I heaped up the bodies of their soldiers like trophies and I cut off their extremities. I mutilated those whom I took alive like blades of straw; as punishment I cut off their hands." In a bas-relief which shows the town of Susa surrendering to Assurbanipal one sees the chiefs of the conquered tortured by the Assyrians; some have their ears cut off, the eyes of others are put out, the beard torn out, while some are flayed alive. Evidently these kings took delight in burnings, massacres, and tortures.
Ruin of the Assyrian Empire.—The Assyrian régime began with the capture of Babylon (about 1270). From the ninth century the Assyrians, always at war, subjected or ravaged Babylonia, Syria, Palestine, and even Egypt. The conquered always revolted, and the massacres were repeated. At last the Assyrians were exhausted. The Babylonians and Medes made an alliance and destroyed their empire. In 625 their capital, Nineveh, "the lair of lions, the bloody city, the city gorged with prey," as the Jewish prophets call it, was taken and destroyed forever. "Nineveh is laid waste," says the prophet Nahum, "who will bemoan her?"
THE BABYLONIANS
The Second Chaldean Empire.—In the place of the fallen Assyrian empire there arose a new power—in ancient Chaldea. This has received the name Babylonian Empire or the Second Chaldean Empire. A Jewish prophet makes one say to Jehovah, "I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation which shall march through the breadth of the land to possess dwelling places that are not theirs. Their horses are swifter than leopards. Their horsemen spread themselves; (their horsemen) shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to eat." They were a people of knights, martial and victorious, like the Assyrians. They subjected Susiana, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Jordan. But their régime was short: founded in 625, the Babylonian Empire was overthrown by the Persians in 538 B.C.
Babylon.—The mightiest of its kings, Nebuchadrezzar (or Nebuchadnezzar), 604-561, who destroyed Jerusalem and carried the Jews into captivity, built many temples and places in Babylon, his capital. These monuments were in crude brick as the plain of the Euphrates has no supply of stone; in the process of decay they have left only enormous masses of earth and débris. And yet it has been possible on the site of Babylon to recover some inscriptions and to restore the plan of the city. The Greek Herodotus who had visited Babylon in the fifth century B.C., describes it in detail. The city was surrounded by a square wall cut by the Euphrates; it covered about 185 square miles, or seven times the extent of Paris. This immense space was not filled with houses; much of it was occupied with fields to be cultivated for the maintenance of the people in the event of a siege. Babylon was less a city than a fortified camp. The walls equipped with towers and pierced by a hundred gates of brass were so thick that a chariot might be driven on them. All around the wall was a large, deep ditch full of water, with its sides lined with brick. The houses of the city were constructed of three or four stories. The streets intersected at right angles. The bridge and docks of the Euphrates excited admiration; the fortified palace also, and the hanging gardens, one of the seven wonders of the world. These gardens were terraces planted with trees, supported by pillars and rows of arches.
Tower of Babylon.—Hard by the city Nebuchadnezzar had aimed to rebuild the town of Babel. "For the admiration of men," he says in an inscription: "I rebuilt and renovated the wonder of Borsippa, the temple of the seven spheres of the world. I laid the foundations and built it according to its ancient plan." This temple, in the form of a square, comprised seven square towers raised one above another, each tower being dedicated to one of the seven planets and painted with the color attributed by religion to this planet. They were, beginning with the lowest: Saturn (black), Venus (white), Jupiter (purple), Mercury (blue), Mars (vermilion), the moon (silver), the sun (gold). The highest tower contained a chapel with a table of gold and magnificent couch whereon a priestess kept watch continually.
CUSTOMS AND RELIGION
Customs.—We know almost nothing of these peoples apart from the testimony of their monuments, and nearly all of these refer to the achievements of their kings. The Assyrians are always represented at war, hunting, or in the performance of ceremonies; their women never appear on the bas-reliefs; they were confined in a harem and never went into public life. The Chaldeans on the contrary, were a race of laborers and merchants, but of their life we know nothing. Herodotus relates that once a year in their towns they assembled all the girls to give them in marriage; they sold the prettiest, and the profits of the sale of these became a dower for the marriage of the plainest. "According to my view," he adds, "this is the wisest of all their laws."
Religion.—The religion of the Assyrians and Chaldeans was the same, for the former had adopted that of the latter. It is very obscure to us, since it originated, like that of the Chaldean people, in a confusion of religions very differently mingled. The Turanians, like the present yellow race of Siberia, imagined the world full of demons (plague, fever, phantoms, vampires), engaged in prowling around men to do them harm; sorcerers were invoked to banish these demons by magical formulas. The Cushites adored a pair of gods, the male deity of force and the female of matter. The Chaldean priests, united in a powerful guild, confused the two religions into a single one.
The Gods.—The supreme god at Babylon is Ilou; in Assyria, Assur. No temple was raised to him. Three gods proceed from him: Anou, the "lord of darkness," under the figure of a man with the head of a fish and the tail of an eagle; Bel, the "sovereign of spirits," represented as a king on the throne; Nouah, the "master of the visible world," under the form of a genius with four extended wings. Each has a feminine counterpart who symbolizes fruitfulness. Below these gods are the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets, for in the transparent atmosphere of Chaldea the stars shine with a brilliancy which is strange to us; they gleam like deities. To these the Chaldeans raised temples, veritable observatories in which men who adored them could follow all their motions.
Astrology.—The priests believed that these stars, being powerful deities, had determining influence on the lives of men. Every man comes into the world under the influence of a planet and this moment decides his destiny; one may foretell one's fortune if the star under which one is born is known. This is the origin of the horoscope. What occurs in heaven is indicative of what will come to pass on earth; a comet, for example, announces a revolution. By observing the heavens the Chaldean priests believed they could predict events. This is the origin of Astrology.
Sorcery.—The Chaldeans had also magical words; these were uttered to banish spirits or to cause their appearance. This custom, a relic of the Turanian religion, is the origin of sorcery. From Chaldea astrology and sorcery were diffused over the Roman empire, and later over all Europe. In the formulas of sorcery of the sixteenth century corrupted Assyrian words may still be detected.[20]
Sciences.—On the other hand it is in Chaldea that we have the beginning of astronomy. From this land have come down to us the zodiac, the week of seven days in honor of the seven planets; the division of the year into twelve months, of the day into twenty-four hours, of the hour into sixty minutes, of the minute into sixty seconds. Here originated, too, the system of weights and measures reckoned on the unit of length, a system adopted by all the ancient peoples.
ARTS
Architecture.—We do not have direct knowledge of the art of the Chaldeans, since their monuments have fallen to ruin. But the Assyrian artists whose works we possess imitated those of Chaldea, and so we may form a judgment at the same time of the two countries. The Assyrians like the Chaldeans built with crude, sun-dried brick, but they faced the exterior of the wall with stone.
Palaces.—They constructed their palaces[21] on artificial mounds, making these low and flat like great terraces. The crude brick was not adapted to broad and high arches. Halls must therefore be straight and low, but in compensation they were very long. An Assyrian palace, then, resembled a succession of galleries; the roofs were flat terraces provided with battlements. At the gate stood gigantic winged bulls. Within, the walls were covered now with panelling in precious woods, now with enamelled bricks, now with plates of sculptural alabaster. Sometimes the chambers were painted, and even richly encrusted marbles were used.
Sculpture.—The sculpture of the Assyrian palaces is especially admirable. Statues, truly, are rare and coarse; sculptors preferred to execute bas-reliefs similar to pictures on great slabs of alabaster. They represented scenes which were often very complicated—battles, chases, sieges of towns, ceremonies in which the king appeared with a great retinue. Every detail is scrupulously done; one sees the files of servants in charge of the feast of the king, the troops of workmen who built his palace, the gardens, the fields, the ponds, the fish in the water, the birds perched over their nests or flitting from tree to tree. Persons are exhibited in profile, doubtless because the artist could not depict the face; but they possess dignity and life. Animals often appeared, especially in hunting scenes; they are ordinarily made with a startling fidelity. The Assyrians observed nature and faithfully reproduced it; hence the merit of their art.
The Greeks themselves learned in this school, by imitating the Assyrian bas-reliefs. They have excelled them, but no people, not even the Greeks, has better known how to represent animals.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] A Persian song enumerates 300 different uses of the palm.
[16] Or perhaps from the east (Arabia).—ED.
[17] Recent discoveries confirm the view of a very ancient civilization—ED.
[18] Somewhat exaggerated. See Perrot and Chipiez, "History of Art in Assyria and Chaldea," ii., 60; and Maspero, "Passing of the Empires," p. 468.—ED.
[19] Lenormant, "Ancient History."
[20] For example, hilka, hilka, bescha, bescha (begone! begone! bad! bad!)
[21] The temples were pyramidal, of stones or terraces similar to the tower of Borsippa.
CHAPTER V[ToC]
THE ARYANS OF INDIA
THE ARYANS
Aryan Languages.—The races which in our day inhabit Europe—Greeks and Italians to the south, Slavs in Russia, Teutons in Germany, Celts in Ireland—speak very different languages. When, however, one studies these languages closely, it is perceived that all possess a stock of common words, or at least certain roots. The same roots occur in Sanscrit, the ancient language of the Hindoos, and also in Zend, the ancient tongue of the Persians. Thus,
Father—père (French), pitar (Sanscrit), pater (Greek and Latin). It is the same word pronounced in various ways. From this (and other such examples) it has been concluded that all—Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Latins, Celts, Germans, Slavs—once spoke the same language, and consequently were one people.
The Aryan People.—These peoples then called themselves Aryans and lived to the north-west of India, either in the mountains of Pamir, or in the steppes of Turkestan or Russia; from this centre they dispersed in all directions. The majority of the people—Greeks, Latins, Germans, Slavs—forgot their origin; but the sacred books of the Hindoos and the Persians preserve the tradition. Effort has been made[22] to reconstruct the life of our Aryan ancestors in their mountain home before the dispersion. It was a race of shepherds; they did not till the soil, but subsisted from their herds of cattle and sheep, though they already had houses and even villages.
It was a fighting race; they knew the lance, the javelin, and shield. Government was patriarchal; a man had but one wife; as head of the family he was for his wife, his children, and his servants at once priest, judge, and king. In all the countries settled by the Aryans they have followed this type of life—patriarchal, martial, and pastoral.
PRIMITIVE RELIGION OF THE HINDOOS
The Aryans on the Indus.—About 2,000 years before our era some Aryan tribes traversed the passes of the Hindu-Kush and swarmed into India. They found the fertile plains of the Indus inhabited by a people of dark skin, with flat heads, industrious and wealthy; they called these aborigines Dasyous (the enemy). They made war on them for centuries and ended by exterminating or subjecting them; they then gradually took possession of all the Indus valley (the region of the five rivers).[23] They then called themselves Hindoos.
The Vedas.—These people were accustomed in their ceremonies to chant hymns (vedas) in honor of their gods. These chants constituted a vast compilation which has been preserved to the present time. They were collected, perhaps, about the fourteenth century B.C. when the Aryans had not yet passed the Indus. The hymns present to us the oldest religion of the Hindoos.
The Gods.—The Hindoo calls his gods devas (the resplendent). Everything that shines is a divinity—the heavens, the dawn, the clouds, the stars—but especially the sun (Indra) and fire (Agni).
Indra.—The sun, Indra, the mighty one, "king of the world and master of creatures," bright and warm, traverses the heavens on a car drawn by azure steeds; he it is who hurls the thunderbolt, sends the rain, and banishes the clouds. India is a country of violent tempests; the Hindoo struck with this phenomenon explained it in his own fashion. He conceived the black cloud as an envelope in which were contained the waters of heaven; these beneficent waters he called the gleaming cows of Indra. When the storm is gathering, an evil genius, Vritra, a three-headed serpent, has driven away the cows and enclosed them in the black cavern whence their bellowings are heard (the far-away rumblings of thunder). Indra applies himself to the task of finding them; he strikes the cavern with his club, the strokes of which are heard (the thunderbolt), and the forked tongue of the serpent (the lightning) darts forth. At last the serpent is vanquished, the cave is opened, the waters released fall on the earth, Indra the victor appears in glory.
Agni.—Fire (Agni, the tireless) is regarded as another form of the sun. The Hindoo, who produces it by rapidly rubbing two pieces of wood together, imagines that the fire comes from the wood and that the rain has placed it there. He conceives it then as the fire of heaven descended to earth; in fact, when one places it on the hearth, it springs up as if it would ascend toward heaven. Agni dissipates darkness, warms mankind, and cooks his food; it is the benefactor and the protector of the house. It is also "the internal fire," the soul of the world; even the ancestor of the human race is the "son of lightning." Thus, heat and light, sources of all life, are the deities of the Hindoo.
Worship.—To adore his gods he strives to reproduce what he sees in heaven. He ignites a terrestrial fire by rubbing sticks, he nourishes it by depositing on the hearth, butter, milk, and soma, a fermented drink. To delight the gods he makes offerings to them of fruits and cakes; he even sacrifices to them cattle, rams and horses; he then invokes them, chanting hymns to their praise. "When thou art bidden by us to quaff the soma, come with thy sombre steeds, thou deity whose darts are stones. Our celebrant is seated according to prescription, the sacred green is spread, in the morning stones have been gathered together. Take thy seat on the holy sward; taste, O hero, our offering to thee. Delight thyself in our libations and our chants, vanquisher of Vritra, thou who art honored in these ceremonies of ours, O Indra."
The Hindoo thinks that the gods, felicitated by his offerings and homage, will in their turn make him happy. He says naïvely, "Give sacrifice to the gods for their profit, and they will requite you. Just as men traffic by the discussion of prices, let us exchange force and vigor, O Indra. Give to me and I will give to you; bring to me and I will bring to you."
Ancestor Worship.—At the same time the Hindoo adores his ancestors who have become gods, and perhaps this cult is the oldest of all. It is the basis of the family. The father who has transmitted the "fire of life" to his children makes offering every day at his hearth-fire, which must never be extinguished, the sacrifice to gods and ancestors, and utters the prayers. Here it is seen that among Hindoos, as among other Aryans, the father is at once a priest and a sovereign.
THE BRAHMANIC SOCIETY
The Hindoos on the Ganges.—The Hindoos passing beyond the region of the Indus, between the fourteenth and tenth century B.C. conquered all the immense plains of the Ganges. Once settled in this fertile country, under a burning climate, in the midst of a people of slaves, they gradually changed customs and religion. And so the Brahmanic society was established. Many works in Sanscrit are preserved from this time, which, with the Vedas, form the sacred literature of the Hindoos. The principal are the great epic poems, the Mahabarata, which has more than 200,000 verses; the Ramayana with 50,000, and the laws of Manou, the sacred code of India.
Caste.—In this new society there were no longer, as in the time of the Vedas, poets who chanted hymns to the gods. The men who know the prayers and the ceremonies are become theologians by profession; the people revere and obey them. The following is their conception of the structure of society: the supreme god, Brahma, has produced four kinds of men to each of whom he has assigned a mission. From his mouth he drew the Brahmans, who are, of course, the theologians; their mission is to study, to teach the hymns, to perform the sacrifices. The Kchatrias have come from his arms; these are the warriors who are charged with the protection of the people. The Vaïcyas proceed from the thigh; they must raise cattle, till the earth, loan money at interest, and engage in commerce. The Soudras issue from his foot; their only mission is to serve all the others.
There were already in the Aryan people theologians, warriors, artisans, and below them aborigines reduced to slavery. These were classes which one could enter and from which one could withdraw. But the Brahmans determined that every man should be attached to the condition in which he was born, he and his descendants for all time. The son of a workman could never become a warrior, nor the son of a warrior a theologian. Thus each is chained to his own state. Society is divided into four hereditary and closed castes.
The Unclean.—Whoever is not included in one of the four castes is unclean, excluded from society and religion. The Brahmans reckoned forty-four grades of outcasts; the last and the lowest is that of the pariahs; their very name is an insult. The outcasts may not practise any honorable trade nor approach other men. They may possess only dogs and asses, for these are unclean beasts. "They must have for their clothing the garments of the dead; for plates, broken pots; ornaments of iron; they must be ceaselessly on the move from one place to another."
The Brahmans.—In the organization of society the Brahmans were assigned the first place. "Men are the first among intelligent beings; the Brahmans are the first among men. They are higher than warriors, than kings, even. As between a Brahman of ten years of age and a Kchatria of one hundred years, the Brahman is to be regarded as the father." These are not priests as in Egypt and Chaldea, but only men who know religion, and pass their time in reading and meditating on the sacred books; they live from presents made to them by other men. To this day they are the dominating class of India. As they marry only among themselves, better than the other Hindoos they have preserved the Aryan type and have a clearer resemblance to Europeans.
The New Religion of Brahma.—The Brahmans did not discard the ancient gods of the Vedas, they continued to adore them. But by sheer ingenuity they invented a new god. When prayers are addressed to the gods, the deities are made to comply with the demands made on them, as if they thought that prayer was more powerful than the gods. And so prayer (Brahma) has become the highest of all deities. He is invoked with awe:[24] "O god, I behold in thy body all the gods and the multitudes of living beings. I am powerless to regard thee in thine entirety, for thou shinest like the fire and the sun in thine immensity. Thou art the Invisible, thou art the supreme Intelligence, thou art the sovereign treasure of the universe, without beginning, middle, or end; equipped with infinite might. Thine arms are without limit, thine eyes are like the moon and the sun, thy mouth hath the brightness of the sacred fire. With thyself alone thou fillest all the space between heaven and earth, and thou permeatest all the universe." Brahma is not only supreme god; he is the soul of the universe. All beings are born from Brahma, all issue naturally from him, not as a product comes from the hands of an artisan, but "as the tree from the seed, as the web from the spider." Brahma is not a deity who has created the world; he is the very substance of the world.
Transmigration of Souls.—There is, then, a soul, a part of the soul of Brahma, in every being, in gods, in men, in animals, in the very plants and stones. But these souls pass from one body into another; this is the transmigration of souls. When a man dies, his soul is tested; if it is good, it passes into the heaven of Indra there to enjoy felicity; if it is bad, it falls into one of the twenty-eight hells, where it is devoured by ravens, compelled to swallow burning cakes, and is tormented by demons. But souls do not remain forever in heaven or in the hells; they part from these to begin a new life in another body. The good soul rises, entering the body of a saint, perhaps that of a god; the evil soul descends, taking its abode in some impure animal—in a dog, an ass, even in a plant. In this new state it may rise or fall. And this journey from one body to another continues until the soul by degrees comes to the highest sphere. From lowest to highest in the scale, say the Brahmans, twenty-four millions of years elapse. At last perfect, the soul returns to the level of Brahma from which it descends and is absorbed into it.
Character of this Religion.—The religion of the Aryans, simple and happy, was that of a young and vigorous people. This is complicated and barren; it takes shape among men who are not engaged in practical life; it is enervated by the heat and vexatious of life.
Rites.—The practice of the religion is much more complicated. Hymns and sacrifices are still offered to the gods, but the Brahmans have gradually invented thousands of minute customs so that one's life is completely engaged with them. For all the ceremonies of the religious life there are prayers, offerings, vows, libations, ablutions. Some of the religious requirements attach themselves to dress, ornaments, etiquette, drinking, eating, mode of walking, of lying down, of sleeping, of dressing, of undressing, of bathing. It is ordered: "That a Brahman shall not step over a rope to which a calf is attached; that he shall not run when it rains; that he shall not drink water in the hollow of his hand; that he shall not scratch his head with both his hands. The man who breaks clods of earth, who cuts grass with his nails or who bites his nails is, like the outcast, speedily hurried to his doom." An animal must not be killed, for a human soul may perhaps be dwelling in the body; one must not eat it on penalty of being devoured in another life by the animals which one has eaten.
All these rites have a magical virtue; he who observes them all is a saint; he who neglects any of them is impious and destined to pass into the body of an animal.
Purity.—The principal duty is keeping one's self pure; for every stain is a sin and opens one to the attack of evil spirits. But the Brahmans are very scrupulous concerning purity: men outside of the castes, many animals, the soil, even the utensils which one uses are so many impure things; whoever touches these is polluted and must at once purify himself. Life is consumed in purifications.
Penances.—For every defect in the rites, a penance is necessary, often a terrible one. He who involuntarily kills a cow must clothe himself in its skin, and for three months, day and night, follow and tend a herd of cows. Whoever has drunk of arrack[25] must swallow a boiling liquid which burns the internal organs until death results.
The Monks.—To escape so many dangers and maintain purity, it is better to leave the world. Often a Brahman when he has attained to a considerable age withdraws to the desert, fasts, watches, refrains from speech, exposes himself naked to the rain, holds himself erect between four fires under the burning sun. After some years, the solitary becomes "penitent"; then his only subsistence is from almsgiving; for whole days he lifts an arm in the air uttering not a word, holding his breath; or perchance, he gashes himself with razor-blades; or he may even keep his thumbs closed until the nails pierce the hands. By these mortifications he destroys passion, releases himself from this life, and by contemplation rises to Brahma. And yet, this way of salvation is open only to the Brahman; and even he has the right to withdraw to the desert only in old age, after having studied the Vedas all his life, practised all the rites, and established a family.
BUDDHISM
Buddha.—Millions of men who were not Brahmans, suffered by this life of minutiæ and anguish. A man then appeared who brought a doctrine of deliverance. He was not a Brahman, but of the caste of the Kchatrias, son of a king of the north. To the age of twenty-nine he had lived in the palace of his father. One day he met an old man with bald head, of wrinkled features, and trembling limbs; a second time he met an incurable invalid, covered with ulcers, without a home; again he fell in with a decaying corpse devoured by worms. And so, thought he, youth, health, and life are nothing for they offer no resistance to old age, to sickness, and to death. He had compassion on men and sought a remedy. Then he met a religious mendicant with grave and dignified air; following his example he decided to renounce the world. These four meetings had determined his calling.
Buddha fled to the desert, lived seven years in penitence, undergoing hunger, thirst, and rain. These mortifications gave him no repose. He ate, became strong, and found the truth. Then he reëntered the world to preach it; he made disciples in crowds who called him Buddha (the scholar); and when he died after forty-five years of preaching, Buddhism was established.
Nirvana.—To live is to be unhappy, taught Buddha. Every man suffers because he desires the goods of this world, youth, health, life, and cannot keep them. All life is a suffering; all suffering is born of desire. To suppress suffering, it is necessary to root out desire; to destroy it one must cease from wishing to live, "emancipate one's self from the thirst of being." The wise man is he who casts aside everything that attaches to this life and makes it unhappy. One must cease successively from feeling, wishing, thinking. Then, freed from passion, volition, even from reflection, he no longer suffers, and can, after his death, come to the supreme good, which consists in being delivered from all life and from all suffering. The aim of the wise man is the annihilation of personality: the Buddhists call it Nirvana.
Charity.—The Brahmans also considered life as a place of suffering and annihilation as felicity. Buddha came not with a new doctrine, but with new sentiments.
The religion of the Brahmans was egoistic. Buddha had compassion on men, he loved them, and preached love to his disciples. It was just this word of sympathy of which despairing souls were in need. He bade to love even those who do us ill. Purna, one of his disciples, went forth to preach to the barbarians. Buddha said to him to try him, "There are cruel, passionate, furious men; if they address angry words to you, what would you think?" "If they addressed angry words to me," said Purna, "I should think these are good men, these are gentle men, these men who attack me with wicked words but who strike me neither with the hand nor with stones." "But if they strike you, what would you think?" "I should think that those were good men who did not strike me with their staves or with their swords." "But if they did strike you with staff and sword, what would you think then?" "That those are good men who strike me with staff and sword, but do not take my life." "But if they should take your life?" "I should think them good men who delivered me with so little pain from this body filled as it is with pollution." "Well, well, Purna! You may dwell in the country of the barbarians. Go, proceed on the way to complete Nirvana and bring others to the same goal."
Fraternity.—The Brahmans, proud of their caste, assert that they are purer than the others. Buddha loves all men equally, he calls all to salvation even the pariahs, even the barbarians—all he declares are equal. "The Brahman," said he, "just like the pariah, is born of woman; why should he be noble and the other vile?" He receives as disciples street-sweepers, beggars, cripples, girls who sleep on dung-hills, even murderers and thieves; he fears no contamination in touching them. He preaches to them in the street in language simple with parables.
Tolerance.—The Brahmans passed their lives in the practice of minute rites, regarding as criminal whoever did not observe them. Buddha demanded neither rites nor exertions. To secure salvation it was enough to be charitable, chaste, and beneficent. "Benevolence," says he, "is the first of virtues. Doing a little good avails more than the fulfilment of the most arduous religious tasks. The perfect man is nothing unless he diffuses himself in benefits over creatures, unless he comforts the afflicted. My doctrine is a doctrine of mercy; this is why the fortunate in the world find it difficult."
Later History of Buddhism.—Thus was established about 500 years before Christ a religion of an entirely new sort. It is a religion without a god and without rites; it ordains only that one shall love his neighbor and become better; annihilation is offered as supreme recompense. But, for the first time in the history of the world, it preaches self-renunciation, the love of others, equality of mankind, charity and tolerance. The Brahmans made bitter war upon it and extirpated it in India. Missionaries carried it to the barbarians in Ceylon, in Indo-China, Thibet, China, and Japan. It is today the religion of about 500,000,000[26] people.
Changes in Buddhism.—During these twenty centuries Buddhism has undergone change. Buddha had himself formed communities of monks. Those who entered these renounced their family, took the vow of poverty and chastity; they had to wear filthy rags and beg their living. These religious rapidly multiplied; they founded convents in all Eastern Asia, gathered in councils to fix the doctrine, proclaimed dogmas and rules. As they became powerful they, like the Brahmans, came to esteem themselves as above the rest of the faithful. "The layman," they said, "plight to support the religious and consider himself much honored that the holy man accepts his offering. It is more commendable to feed one religious than many thousands of laymen." In Thibet the religious, men and women together, constitute a fifth of the entire population, and their head, the Grand Lama, is venerated as an incarnation of God.
At the same time that they transformed themselves into masters, the Buddhist religious constructed a complicated theology, full of fantastic figures. They say there is an infinite number of worlds. If one surrounded with a wall a space capable of holding 100,000 times ten millions of those worlds, if this wall were raised to heaven, and if the whole space were filled with grains of mustard, the number of the grains would not even then equal one-half the number of worlds which occupy but one division of heaven. All these worlds are full of creatures, gods, men, beasts, demons, who are born and who die. The universe itself is annihilated and another takes its place. The duration of each universe is called kalpa; and this is the way we obtain an impression of a kalpa: if there were a rock twelve miles in height, breadth, and length, and if once in a century it were only touched with a piece of the finest linen, this rock would be worn and reduced to the size of a kernel of mango before a quarter of a kalpa had elapsed.
Buddha Transformed into a God.—It no longer satisfied the Buddhists to honor their founder as a perfect man; they made him a god, erecting idols to him, and offering him worship. They adored also the saints, his disciples; pyramids and shrines were built to preserve their bones, their teeth, their cloaks. From every quarter the faithful came to venerate the impression of the foot of Buddha.
Mechanical Prayer.—Modern Buddhists regard prayer as a magical formula which acts of itself. They spend the day reciting prayers as they walk or eat, often in a language which they do not understand. They have invented prayer-machines; these are revolving cylinders and around these are pasted papers on which the prayer is written; every turn of the cylinder counts for the utterance of the prayer as many times as it is written on the papers.
Amelioration of Manners.—And yet Buddhism remains a religion of peace and charity. Wherever it reigns, kings refrain from war, and even from the chase; they establish hospitals, caravansaries, even asylums for animals. Strangers, even Christian missionaries, are hospitably received; they permit the women to go out, and to walk without veiling themselves; they neither fight nor quarrel. At Bangkok, a city of 400,000 souls, hardly more than one murder a year is known.
Buddhism has enfeebled the intelligence and sweetened the character.[27]
FOOTNOTES:
[22] The process is as follows: when a word (or rather a root) is found in several Aryan languages at once, it is admitted that this was in use before the dispersion occurred, and therefore the people knew the object designated by the word.
[23] The Punjab.—ED.
[24] Prayer of the Mahabarata cited by Lenormant.
[25] A spirituous liquor made by the natives.—ED.
[26] A high estimate.—ED.
[27] India is for us the country of the Vedas, the Brahmans, and Buddha. We know the religion of the Hindoos, but of their political history we are ignorant.
CHAPTER VI[ToC]
THE PERSIANS
THE RELIGION OF ZOROASTER
Iran.—Between the Tigris and the Indus, the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf rises the land of Iran, five times as great as France,[28] but partly sterile. It is composed of deserts of burning sand and of icy plateaux cut by deep and wooded valleys. Mountains surround it preventing the escape of the rivers which must lose themselves in the sands or in the salt lakes. The climate is harsh, very uneven, torrid in summer, frigid in winter; in certain quarters one passes from 104° above zero to 40° below, from the cold of Siberia to the heat of Senegal. Violent winds blow which "cut like a sword." But in the valleys along the rivers the soil is fertile. Here the peach and cherry are indigenous; the country is a land of fruits and pastures.
The Iranians.—Aryan tribes inhabited Iran. Like all the Aryans, they were a race of shepherds, but well armed and warlike. The Iranians fought on horseback, drew the bow, and, to protect themselves from the biting wind of their country, wore garments of skin sewed on the body.
Zoroaster.—Like the ancient Aryans, they first adored the forces of nature, especially the sun (Mithra). Between the tenth and seventh[29] centuries before our era their religion was reformed by a sage, Zarathustra (Zoroaster). We know nothing certainly about him except his name.
The Zend-Avesta.—No writing from the hand of Zoroaster is preserved to us; but his doctrine, reduced to writing long after his death, is conserved in the Zend-Avesta (law and reform), the sacred books of the Persians. It was a compilation written in an ancient language (the Zend) which the faithful themselves no longer understood. It was divided into twenty-one books, inscribed on 12,000 cow skins, bound by golden cords. The Mohammedans destroyed it when they invaded Persia. But some Persian families, faithful to the teaching of Zoroaster, fled into India. Their posterity, whom we call Parsees, have there maintained the old religion. An entire book of the Zend-Avesta and fragments of two others have been found among them.
Ormuzd and Ahriman.—The Zend-Avesta is the sacred book of the religion of Zoroaster. According to these writings Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd), "the omniscient sovereign," created the world. He is addressed in prayer in the following language: "I invoke and celebrate the creator, Ahura Mazda, luminous, glorious, most intelligent and beautiful, eminent in purity, who possessest the good knowledge, source of joy, who hast treated us, hast fashioned us, and hast nourished us." Since he is perfect in his goodness, he can create only that which is good. Everything bad in the world has been created by an evil deity, Angra Manyou, (Ahriman), the "spirit of anguish."
Angels and Demons.—Over against Ormuzd, the god and the creator, is Ahriman, wicked and destructive. Each has in his service a legion of spirits. The soldiers of Ormuzd are the good angels (yazatas), those of Ahriman the evil demons (devs). The angels dwell in the East in the light of the rising sun; the demons in the West in the shadows of the darkness. The two armies wage incessant warfare; the world is their battleground, for both troops are omnipresent. Ormuzd and his angels seek to benefit men, to make them good and happy; Ahriman and his demons gnaw around them to destroy them, to make them unhappy and wicked.
Creatures of Ormuzd and Ahriman.—Everything good on the earth is the work of Ormuzd and works for good; the sun and fire that dispel the night, the stars, fermented drinks that seem to be liquid fire, the water that satisfies the thirst of man, the cultivated fields that feed him, the trees that shade him, domestic animals—especially the dog,[30] the birds (because they live in the air), among all these the cock since he announces the day. On the other hand everything that is baneful comes from Ahriman and tends to evil: the night, drought, cold, the desert, poisonous plants, thorns, beasts of prey, serpents, parasites (mosquitoes, fleas, bugs) and animals that live in dark holes—lizards, scorpions, toads, rats, ants. Likewise in the moral world life, purity, truth, work are good things and come from Ormuzd; death, filth, falsehood, idleness are bad, and issue from Ahriman.
Worship.—From these notions proceed worship and morality. Man ought to adore the good god[31] and fight for him. According to Herodotus, "The Persians are not accustomed to erect statues, temples, or altars to their gods; they esteem those who do this as lacking in sense for they do not believe, as the Greeks do, that the gods have human forms."[32] Ormuzd manifests himself only under the form of fire or the sun. This is why the Persians perform their worship in the open air on the mountains, before a lighted fire. To worship Ormuzd they sing hymns to his praise and sacrifice animals in his honor.
Morality.—Man fights for Ormuzd in aiding his efforts and in overcoming Ahriman's. He wars against darkness in supplying the fire with dry wood and perfumes; against the desert in tilling the soil and in building houses; against the animals of Ahriman in killing serpents, lizards, parasites, and beasts of prey. He battles against impurity in keeping himself clean, in banishing from himself everything that is dead, especially the nails and hair, for "where hairs and clipped nails are, demons and unclean animals assemble." He fights against falsehood by always being truthful. "The Persians," says Herodotus,[33] "consider nothing so shameful as lying, and after falsehood nothing so shameful as contracting debts, for he who has debts necessarily lies." He wars against death by marrying and having many children. "Terrible," says the Zend-Avesta, "are the houses void of posterity."
Funerals.—As soon as a man is dead his body belongs to the evil spirit. It is necessary, then, to remove it from the house. But it ought not to be burned, for in this way the fire would be polluted; it should not be buried, for so is the soil defiled; nor is it to be drowned, and thus contaminate the water. These dispositions of the corpse would bring permanent pollution. The Persians resorted to a different method. The body with face toward the sun was exposed in an elevated place and left uncovered, securely fixed with stones; the bearers then withdrew to escape the demons, for they assemble "in the places of sepulture, where reside sickness, fever, filth, cold, and gray hairs." Dogs and birds, pure animals, then come to purify the body by devouring it.
Destiny of the Soul.—The soul of the dead separates itself from the body. In the third night after death it is conducted over the "Bridge of Assembling" (Schinvat) which leads to the paradise above the gulf of inferno. There Ormuzd questions it on its past life. If it has practised the good, the pure spirits and the spirits of dogs support it and aid it in crossing the bridge and give it entrance into the abode of the blest; the demons flee, for they cannot bear the odor of virtuous spirits. The soul of the wicked, on the other hand, comes to the dread bridge, and reeling, with no one to support it, is dragged by demons to hell, is seized by the evil spirit and chained in the abyss of darkness.
Character of Mazdeism.—This religion originated in a country of violent contrasts, luxuriant valleys side by side with barren steppes, cool oases with burning deserts, cultivated fields and stretches of sand, where the forces of nature seem engaged in an eternal warfare. This combat which the Iranian saw around him he assumed to be the law of the universe. Thus a religion of great purity was developed, which urged man to work and to virtue; but at the same time issued a belief in the devil and in demons which was to propagate itself in the west and torment all the peoples of Europe.
THE PERSIAN EMPIRE
The Medes.—Many were the tribes dwelling in Iran; two of these have become noted in history—the Medes and the Persians. The Medes at the west, nearer the Assyrians, destroyed Nineveh and its empire (625). But soon they softened their manners, taking the flowing robes, the indolent life, the superstitious religion of the degenerate Assyrians. They at last were confused with them.
The Persians.—The Persians to the east preserved their manners, their religion, and their vigor. "For twenty years," says Herodotus, "the Persians teach their children but three things—to mount a horse, to draw the bow, and to tell the truth."
Cyrus.—About 550 Cyrus, their chief, overthrew the king of the Medes, reunited all the peoples of Iran, and then conquered Lydia, Babylon, and all Asia Minor. Herodotus recounts in detail a legend which became attached to this prince. Cyrus himself in an inscription says of himself, "I am Cyrus, king of the legions, great king, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumir and Akkad, king of the four regions, son of Cambyses, great king of Susiana, grand-son of Cyrus, king of Susiana."
The Inscription of Behistun.—The eldest son of Cyrus, Cambyses, put to death his brother Smerdis and conquered Egypt. What occurred afterward is known to us from an inscription. Today one may see on the frontier of Persia, in the midst of a plain, an enormous rock, cut perpendicularly, about 1,500 feet high, the rock of Behistun. A bas-relief carved on the rock represents a crowned king, with left hand on a bow; he tramples on one captive while nine other prisoners are presented before him in chains. An inscription in three languages relates the life of the king: "Darius the king declares, This is what I did before I became king. Cambyses, son of Cyrus, of our race, reigned here before me. This Cambyses had a brother Smerdis, of the same father and the same mother. One day Cambyses killed Smerdis. When Cambyses had killed Smerdis the people were ignorant that Smerdis was dead. After this Cambyses made an expedition to Egypt and while he was there the people became rebellious; falsehood was then rife in the country, in Persia, in Media and the other provinces. There was at that time a magus named Gaumata; he deceived the people by saying that he was Smerdis, the son of Cyrus. Then the whole people rose in revolt, forsook Cambyses and went over to the pretender. After this Cambyses died from a wound inflicted by himself.
"After Gaumata had drawn away Persia, Media, and the other countries from Cambyses, he followed out his purpose: he became king. The people feared him on account of his cruelty: he would have killed the people so that no one might learn that he was not Smerdis, the son of Cyrus. Darius the king declares there was not a man in all Persia or in Media who dared to snatch the crown from this Gaumata, the magus. Then I presented myself, I prayed Ormuzd. Ormuzd accorded me his protection.... Accompanied by faithful men I killed this Gaumata and his principal accomplices. By the will of Ormuzd I became king. The empire which had been stolen from our race I restored to it. The altars that Gaumata, the magus, had thrown down I rebuilt to the deliverance of the people; I received the chants and the sacred ceremonials." Having overturned the usurper, Darius had to make war on many of the revolting princes, "I have," said he, "won nineteen battles and overcome nine kings."
The Persian Empire.—Darius then subjected the peoples in revolt and reëstablished the empire of the Persians. He enlarged it also by conquering Thrace and a province of India. This empire reunited all the peoples of the Orient: Medes and Persians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Jews, Phœnicians, Syrians, Lydians, Egyptians, Indians; it covered all the lands from the Danube on the west to the Indus on the east, from the Caspian Sea on the north to the cataracts of the Nile on the south. It was the greatest empire up to this time. One tribe of mountaineers, the last to come, thus received the heritage of all the empires of Asia.
The Satrapies.—Oriental kings seldom concerned themselves with their subjects more than to draw money from them, levy soldiers, and collect presents; they never interfered in their local affairs. Darius, like the rest, left each of the peoples of his empire to administer itself according to its own taste, to keep its language, its religion, its laws, often its ancient princes. But he took care to regulate the taxes which his subjects paid him. He divided all the empire into twenty[34] districts called satrapies. There were in the same satrapy peoples who differed much in language, customs, and beliefs; but each satrapy was to pay a fixed annual tribute, partly in gold and silver, partly in natural products (wheat, horses, ivory). The satrap, or governor, had the tribute collected and sent it to the king.
Revenues of the Empire.—The total revenue of the king amounted to sixteen millions of dollars and this money was paid by weight. This sum was in addition to the tributes in kind. These sixteen millions of dollars, if we estimate them by the value of the metals at this time, would be equivalent to one hundred and twenty millions in our day. With this sum the king supported his satraps, his army, his domestic servants and an extravagant court; there still remained to him every year enormous ingots of metal which accumulated in his treasuries. The king of Persia, like all the Orientals, exercised his vanity in possessing an immense treasure.
The Great King.—No king had ever been so powerful and rich. The Greeks called the Persian king The Great King. Like all the monarchs of the East, the king had absolute sway over all his subjects, over the Persians as well as over tributary peoples. From Herodotus one can see how Cambyses treated the great lords at his court. "What do the Persians think of me?" said he one day to Prexaspes, whose son was his cupbearer. "Master, they load you with praises, but they believe that you have a little too strong desire for wine." "Learn," said Cambyses in anger, "whether the Persians speak the truth. If I strike in the middle of the heart of your son who is standing in the vestibule, that will show that the Persians do not know what they say." He drew his bow and struck the son of Prexaspes. The youth fell; Cambyses had the body opened to see where the shot had taken effect The arrow was found in the middle of the heart. The prince, full of joy said in derision to the father of the young man, "You see that it is the Persians who are out of their senses; tell me if you have seen anybody strike the mark with so great accuracy." "Master," replied Prexaspes, "I do not believe that even a god could shoot so surely."[35]
Services Rendered by the Persians.—The peoples of Asia have always paid tribute to conquerors and given allegiance to despots. The Persians, at least, rendered them a great service: in subjecting all these peoples to one master they prevented them from fighting among themselves. Under their domination we do not see a ceaseless burning of cities, devastation of fields, massacre or wholesale enslavement of inhabitants. It was a period of peace.
Susa and Persepolis.—The kings of the Medes and Persians, following the example of the lords of Assyria, had palaces built for them. Those best known to us are the palaces at Susa and Persepolis. The ruins of Susa have been excavated by a French engineer,[36] who has discovered sculptures, capitals, and friezes in enameled bricks which give evidence of an advanced stage of art. The palace of Persepolis has left ruins of considerable mass. The rock of the hill had been fashioned into an enormous platform on which the palace was built. The approach to it was by a gently rising staircase so broad that ten horsemen could ascend riding side by side.
Persian Architecture.—Persian architects had copied the palaces of the Assyrians. At Persepolis and Susa, as in Assyria, are flat-roofed edifices with terraces, gates guarded by monsters carved in stone, bas-reliefs and enameled bricks, representing hunting-scenes and ceremonies. At three points, however, the Persians improved on their models:
(1) They used marble instead of brick; (2) they made in the halls painted floors of wood; (3) they erected eight columns in the form of trunks of trees, the slenderest that we know, twelve times as high as they were thick.
Thus their architecture is more elegant and lighter than that of Assyria.
The Persians had made little progress in the arts. But they seem to have been the most honest, the sanest, and the bravest people of the time. For two centuries they exercised in Asia a sovereignty the least cruel and the least unjust that it had ever known.
FOOTNOTES:
[28] That is, of about the same area as that part of the United States east of the Mississippi, with Minnesota and Iowa. Modern Persia is not two-thirds of this area.—ED.
[29] Most historians place Zoroaster before 1000 B.C.—ED.
[30] "I created the dog," said Ormuzd, "with a delicate scent and strong teeth, attached to man, biting the enemy to protect the herds. Thieves and wolves come not near the sheep-fold when the dog is on guard, strong in voice and defending the flocks."
[31] Certain Persian heretics of our day, on the contrary, adore only the evil god, for, they say, the principle of the good being in itself good and indulgent does not require appeasing. They are called Yezidis (worshippers of the devil).
[32] Herod., i., 131.
[33] i., 138.
[34] Herodotus mentions 20, but we find as many as 31 enumerated in the inscriptions.
[35] Herod., iii., 34, 35. Compare also iii., 78, 79; and the book of Esther.
[36] M. Dieulafoi.
CHAPTER VII[ToC]
THE PHŒNICIANS
THE PHŒNICIAN PEOPLE
The Land.—Phœnicia is the narrow strip of country one hundred and fifty miles long by twenty-four to thirty wide, shut in between the sea of Syria and the high range of Lebanon. It is a succession of narrow valleys and ravines confined by abrupt hills which descend towards the sea; little torrents formed by the snows or rain-storms course through these in the early spring; in summer no water remains except in wells and cisterns. The mountains in this quarter were always covered with trees; at the summit were the renowned cedars of Lebanon, on the ridges, pines and cypresses; while lower yet palms grew even to the sea-shore. In the valleys flourished the olive, the vine, the fig, and the pomegranate.
The Cities.—At intervals along the rocky coast promontories or islands formed natural harbors. On these the Phœnicians had founded their cities; Tyre and Arad were each built on a small island. The people housed themselves in dwellings six to eight stories in height. Fresh water was ferried over in ships. The other cities, Gebel, Beirut, and Sidon arose on the mainland. The soil was inadequate to support these swarms of men, and so the Phœnicians were before all else seamen and traders.
Phœnician Ruins.—Not a book of the Phœnicians has come down to us, not even their sacred book. The sites of their cities have been excavated. But, in the words of the scholar sent to do this work, "Ruins are not preserved, especially in countries where people are not occupied with them," and the Syrians are not much occupied with ruins. They have violated the tombs to remove the jewels of the dead, have demolished edifices to secure stone for building purposes, and Mussulman hatred of chiseled figures has shattered the sculptures.[37] Very little is found beyond broken marble, cisterns, wine-presses cut in the rock and some sarcophagi hewn in rock. All this débris gives us little information and we know very little more of the Phœnicians than Greek writers and Jewish prophets have taught us.
Political Organization of the Phœnicians.—The Phœnicians never built an empire. Each city had its little independent territory, its assemblies, its king, and its government. For general state business each city sent delegates to Tyre, which from the thirteenth century B.C. was the principal city of Phœnicia. The Phœnicians were not a military people, and so submitted themselves to all the conquerors—Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians. They fulfilled all their obligations to them in paying tribute.
Tyre.—From the thirteenth century Tyre was the most notable of the cities. Its island becoming too small to contain it, a new city was built on the coast opposite. Tyrian merchants had founded colonies in every part of the Mediterranean, receiving silver from the mines of Spain and commodities from the entire ancient world. The prophet Isaiah[38] calls these traders princes; Ezekiel[39] describes the caravans which came to them from all quarters. It is Hiram, a king of Tyre, from whom Solomon asked workmen to build his palace and temple at Jerusalem.
Carthage.—A colony of Tyre surpassed even her in power. In the ninth century some Tyrians, exiled by a revolution, founded on the shore of Africa near Tunis the city of Carthage. A woman led them, Elissar, whom we call Dido (the fugitive). The inhabitants of the country, says the legend, were willing to sell her only as much land as could be covered by a bull's hide; but she cut the hide in strips so narrow that it enclosed a wide territory; and there she constructed a citadel. Situated at the centre of the Mediterranean, provided with two harbors, Carthage flourished, sent out colonies in turn, made conquests, and at last came to reign over all the coasts of Africa, Spain, and Sardinia. Everywhere she had agencies for her commerce and subjects who paid her tribute.
The Carthaginian Army.—To protect her colonies from the natives, to hold her subjects in check who were always ready to revolt, a strong army was necessary. But the life of a Carthaginian was too valuable to risk it without necessity. Carthage preferred to pay mercenary soldiers, recruiting them among the barbarians of her empire and among the adventurers of all countries. Her army was a bizarre aggregation in which all languages were spoken, all religions practised, and in which every soldier wore different arms and costume. There were seen Numidians clothed in lion skins which served them as couch, mounted bareback on small fleet horses, and drawing the bow with horse at full gallop; Libyans with black skins, armed with pikes; Iberians from Spain in white garments adorned with red, armed with a long pointed sword; Gauls, naked to the girdle, bearing enormous shields and a rounded sword which they held in both hands; natives of the Balearic Islands, trained from infancy to sling with stones or balls of lead. The generals were Carthaginians; the government distrusted them, watched them closely, and when they were defeated, had them crucified.
The Carthaginians.—Carthage had two kings, but the senate was the real power, being composed of the richest merchants of the city. And so every state question for this government became a matter of commerce. The Carthaginians were hated by all other peoples, who found them cruel, greedy, and faithless. And yet, since they had a good fleet, had money to purchase soldiers, and possessed an energetic government, they succeeded in the midst of barbarous and divided peoples in maintaining their empire over the western Mediterranean for 300 years (from the sixth to the third century B.C.).
The Phœnician Religion.—The Phœnicians and the Carthaginians had a religion similar to that of the Chaldeans. The male god, Baal, is a sun-god; for the sun and the moon are in the eyes of the Phœnicians the great forces which create and which destroy. Each of the cities of Phœnicia has therefore its divine pair: at Sidon it is Baal Sidon (the sun) and Astoreth (the moon); at Gebel, Baal Tammouz and Baaleth; at Carthage, Baal-Hamon, and Tanith. But the same god changes his name according as he is conceived as creator or destroyer; thus Baal as destroyer is worshipped at Carthage under the name of Moloch. These gods, represented by idols, have their temples, altars, and priests. As creators they are honored with orgies, with tumultuous feasts; as destroyers, by human victims. Astoreth, the great goddess of Sidon, whom they represented by the crescent of the moon and the dove, had her cult in the sacred woods. Baal Moloch is figured at Carthage as a bronze colossus with arms extended and lowered. When they wished to appease him they laid children in his hands who fell at once into a pit of fire. During the siege of Carthage by Agathocles the principal men of the city sacrificed to Moloch as many as two hundred of their children.
This sensual and sanguinary religion inspired other peoples with horror, but they imitated it. The Jews sacrificed to Baal on the mountains; the Greeks adored Astarte of Sidon under the name of Aphrodite, and Baal Melkhart of Tyre under the name of Herakles.
PHŒNICIAN COMMERCE
Phœnicians Occupations.—Crowded into a small territory, the Phœnicians gained their livelihood mainly from commerce. None of the other peoples of the East—the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, nor the barbarian tribes of the West (Spaniards, Gauls, Italians) had a navy. The Phœnicians alone in this time dared to navigate. They were the commission merchants of the old world; they went to every people to buy their merchandise and sold them in exchange the commodities of other countries. This traffic was by caravan with the East, by sea with the West.
Caravans.—On land the Phœnicians sent caravans in three directions:
1.—Towards Arabia, from which they brought gold, agate, and onyx, incense and myrrh, and the perfumes of Arabia; pearls, spices, ivory, ebony, ostrich plumes and apes from India.
2.—Towards Assyria, whence came cotton and linen cloths, asphalt, precious stones, perfumery, and silk from China.
3.—Towards the Black Sea, where they went to receive horses, slaves, and copper vases made by the mountaineers of the Caucasus.
Marine Commerce.—For their sea commerce they built ships from the cedars of Lebanon to be propelled by oars and sails. In their sailing it was not necessary to remain always in sight of the coast, for they knew how to direct their course by the polar star. Bold mariners, they pushed in their little boats to the mouth of the Mediterranean; they ventured even to pass through the strait of Gibraltar or, as the ancients called it, the Pillars of Hercules, and took the ocean course to the shores of England, and perhaps to Norway, Phœnicians in the service of a king of Egypt started in the seventh century B.C. to circumnavigate Africa, and returned, it is said, at the end of three years by the Red Sea. An expedition issuing from Carthage skirted the coast of Africa to the Gulf of Guinea; the commander Hanno wrote an account of the voyage which is still preserved.
Commodities.—To civilized peoples the Phœnicians sold the products of their industry. In barbarous countries they went to search for what they could not find in the Orient. On the coast of Greece they gathered shell-fish from which they extracted a red tint, the purple; cloths colored with purple were used among all the peoples of ancient times for garments of kings and great lords.
From Spain and Sardinia they brought the silver which the inhabitants took from the mines. Tin was necessary to make bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, but the Orient did not furnish this, and so they sought it even on the coasts of England, in the Isles of Tin (the Cassiterides). In every country they procured slaves. Sometimes they bought them, as lately the slavers bought negroes on the coast of Africa, for all the peoples of this time made commerce in slaves; sometimes they swooped down on a coast, threw themselves on the women and children and carried them off to be retained in their own cities or to be sold abroad; for on occasion they were pirates and did not scruple to plunder strangers.
The Secrets Kept by the Phœnicians.—The Phœnicians did not care to have mariners of other peoples come into competition with them. On the return from these far countries they concealed the road which they had travelled. No one in antiquity knew where were the famous Isles of the Cassiterides from which they got their tin. It was by chance that a Greek ship discovered Spain, with which the Phœnicians had traded for centuries. Carthage drowned the foreign merchants whom they found in Sardinia or on the shore of Gibraltar. Once a Carthaginian merchantman, seeing a strange ship following it, was run aground by the pilot that the foreigner might not see where he was going.
Colonies.—In the countries where they traded, the Phœnicians founded factories, or branch-houses. They were fortified posts on a natural harbor. There they landed their merchandise, ordinarily cloths, pottery, ornaments, and idols.[40] The natives brought down their commodities and an exchange was made, just as now European merchants do with the negroes of Africa. There were Phœnician markets in Cyprus, in Egypt, and in all the then barbarous countries of the Mediterranean—in Crete, Greece, Sicily, Africa, Malta, Sardinia, on the coasts of Spain at Malaga and Cadiz, and perhaps in Gaul at Monaco. Often around these Phœnician buildings the natives set up their cabins and the mart became a city. The inhabitants adopted the Phœnician gods, and even after the city had become Greek, the cult of the dove-goddess was found there (as in Cythera), that of the god Melkhart (as at Corinth), or of the god with the bull-face that devours human victims (as in Crete).
Influence of the Phœnicians.—It is certain that the Phœnicians in founding their trading stations cared only for their own interest. But it came to pass that their colonies contributed to civilization. The barbarians of the West received the cloths, the jewels, the utensils of the peoples of the East who were more civilized, and, receiving them, learned to imitate them. For a long time the Greeks had only vases, jewels, and idols brought by the Phœnicians, and these served them as models. The Phœnicians brought simultaneously from Egypt and from Assyria industry and commodities.
The Alphabet.—At the same time they exported their alphabet. The Phœnicians did not invent writing. The Egyptians knew how to write many centuries before them, they even made use of letters each of which expressed its own sound, as in our alphabet. But their alphabet was still encumbered with ancient signs which represented, some a syllable, others an entire word. Doubtless the Phœnicians had need of a simpler system for their books of commerce. They rejected all the syllabic signs and ideographs, preserving only twenty-two letters, each of which marks a sound (or rather an articulation of the language). The other peoples imitated this alphabet of twenty-two letters. Some, like the Jews, wrote from right to left just as the Phœnicians themselves did; others, like the Greeks, from left to right. All have slightly changed the form of the letters, but the Phœnician alphabet is found at the basis of all the alphabets—Hebrew, Lycian, Greek, Italian, Etruscan, Iberian, perhaps even in the runes of the Norse. It is the Phœnicians that taught the world how to write.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] Renan ("Mission de Phénicio," p. 818) says, "I noticed at Tripolis a sarcophagus serving as a public fountain and the sculptured face of it was turned to the wall. I was told that a governor had placed it thus so as not to provide distractions for the inhabitants."
[38] See ch. xxiii.
[39] See chs. xxvi., xxvii., xxviii.
[40] These idols, one of their principal exports, are found wherever the Phœnicians traded.
CHAPTER VIII[ToC]
THE HEBREWS
ORIGIN OF THE HEBREW PEOPLE
The Bible.—The Jews united all their sacred books into a single aggregation which we call by a Greek name the Bible, that is to say, the Book. It is the Book par excellence. The sacred book of the Jews became also the sacred book of the Christians. The Bible is at the same time the history of the Jewish nation, and all that we know of the sacred people we owe to the sacred books.
The Hebrews.—When the Semites had descended from the mountains of Armenia into the plains of the Euphrates, one of their tribes, at the time of the first Chaldean empire, withdrew to the west, crossed the Euphrates, the desert, and Syria and came to the country of the Jordan beyond Phœnicia. This tribe was called the Hebrews, that is to say, the people from beyond the river. Like the majority of the Semites they were a race of nomadic shepherds. They did not till the soil and had no houses; they moved from place to place with their herds of cattle, sheep, and camels, seeking pasturage and living in tents as the Arabs of the desert do to this day. In the book of Genesis one has a glimpse of this nomad life.
The Patriarchs.—The tribe was like a great family; it was composed of the chief, his wives, his children, and his servants. The chief had absolute authority over all; for the tribe he was father, priest, judge, and king. We call these tribal chiefs patriarchs. The principal ones were Abraham and Jacob; the former the father of the Hebrews, the latter of the Israelites. The Bible represents both of them as designed by God to be the scions of a sacred people. Abraham made a covenant with God that he and his descendants would obey him; God promised to Abraham a posterity more numerous than the stars of heaven. Jacob received from God the assurance that a great nation should issue from himself.
The Israelites.—Moved by a vision Jacob took the name of Israel (contender with God). His tribe was called Beni-Israel (sons of Israel) or Israelites. The Bible records that, driven by famine, Jacob abandoned the Jordan country to settle with all his house on the eastern frontier of Egypt, to which Joseph, one of his sons who had become minister of a Pharaoh, invited him. There the sons of Israel abode for several centuries. Coming hither but seventy in number, they multiplied, according to the Bible, until they became six hundred thousand men, without counting women and children.
The Call of Moses.—The king of Egypt began to oppress them, compelling them to make mortar and bricks for the construction of his strong cities. It was then that one of them, Moses, received from God the mission to deliver them. One day while he was keeping his herds on the mountain, an angel appeared to him in the midst of a burning bush, and he heard these words: "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. I have seen the affliction of my people which is in Egypt, I have heard their cry against their oppressors, I know their sorrows. And I am come down to deliver them out of the hands of the Egyptians and to bring them to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites.... Come now therefore and I will send thee unto Pharaoh that thou mayest bring forth my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt."[41] The Israelites under the guidance of Moses fled from Egypt (the Exodus); they journeyed to the foot of Mount Sinai, where they received the law of God, and for an entire generation wandered in the deserts to the south of Syria.
Israel in the Desert.—Often the Israelites wished to turn back. "We remember," said they, "the fish which we ate in Egypt, the cucumbers, melons, leeks, and onions. Let us appoint a chief who will lead us back to Egypt." Moses, however, held them to obedience. At last they reached the land promised by God to their race.
The Promised Land.—It was called the land of Canaan or Palestine; the Jews named it the land of Israel, later Judea. Christians have termed it the Holy Land. It is an arid country, burning with heat in the summer, but a country of mountains. The Bible describes it thus: "Jehovah thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills, a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig-trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive and honey, wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack anything in it." The Israelites according to their estimate were then 601,700 men capable of bearing arms, divided among twelve tribes, ten descended from Jacob, two from Joseph; this enumeration does not include the Levites or priests to the number of 23,000. The land was occupied by several small peoples who were called Canaanites. The Israelites exterminated them and at last occupied their territory.
THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
One God.—The other ancient peoples adored many gods; the Israelites believed in but one God, immaterial, who made the world and governs it. "In the beginning," says the book of Genesis, "God created the heavens and the earth." He created plants and animals, he "created man in his own image." All men are the handiwork of God.
The People of God.—But among all mankind God has chosen the children of Israel to make of them "his people." He called Abraham and said to him, "I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after me ... to be a God unto thee and to thy seed." He appeared to Jacob: "I am God," said he to him, "the God of thy father; fear not to go down into Egypt, for I will make of thee there a great nation." When Moses asks his name, he replies, "Thou shalt say to the children of Israel, The Lord, the God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob hath sent me unto you. This is my name forever."
The Covenant.—There is, then, a covenant between the Israelites and God. Jehovah (the Eternal) loves and protects the Israelites, they are "a holy nation," "his most precious jewel among all the nations." He promises to make them mighty and happy. In return, the Israelites swear to worship him, to serve him, to obey him in everything as a lawgiver, a judge, and a sovereign.
The Ten Commandments.—Jehovah, lawgiver of the Israelites, dictated his precepts to Moses on Mount Sinai amidst lightnings and thunderings. They were inscribed on two tables, the Tables of the Law, in these terms:
"Hear, O Israel, I am Jehovah, thy God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the land of bondage." (Then follow the ten commandments to be found in the twentieth chapter of the book of Exodus.)
The Law.—Beside the ten commandments, the Israelites are required to obey many other divine ordinances. These are all delivered to them in the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, and constitute the Law of Israel. The Law regulates the ceremonies of religion, establishes the feasts—including the Sabbath every seven days, the Passover in memory of the escape from Egypt, the week of harvest, the feast of Tabernacles during the vintage; it organizes marriage, the family, property, government, fixes the penalty of crimes, indicates even foods and remedies. It is a code at once religious, political, civil and penal. God the ruler of the Israelites has the right to regulate all the details of their lives.
Religion has made the Jewish People.—The Israelites did not receive with docility the government of God. Moses on his death-bed could say to the Levites in delivering to them the book of the law, "Take this book that it may be a witness against you, Israel, for I know thy rebellion and thy stiff neck" (Deut. xxxi. 27). "During my life you have been rebellious against the Lord, and how much more after my death." During these centuries some of the Israelites, often the majority of the nation, had been idolaters. They became similar to the other Semites of Syria. Only the Israelites who remained faithful to God formed the Jewish people. It is the religion of Jehovah which has transformed an obscure tribe into the holy nation, a small nation, but one of the most significant in the history of the world.
THE KINGDOM OF ISRAEL
The Judges.—Once established in Palestine the Hebrews remained divided for several centuries. "In those days," says the Bible, "there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Often the Israelites forgot Jehovah and served the gods of neighboring tribes. Then "the anger of the Lord was kindled against the Israelites, and he delivered them into the hands of their enemies." When they had repented and had humbled themselves, "the Lord raised up judges who delivered them out of the hand of those that spoiled them." "But it came to pass that at the death of the judge they corrupted themselves anew ... bowing themselves to other gods." These judges—Gideon, Jephthah, Samson—were warriors who came in the name of Jehovah to free the people. Then they fell at once into idolatry again and their servitude was repeated.
The Kings.—At last the Israelites were wearied and asked of Samuel, the high-priest, that he would give them a king. Samuel unwillingly placed Saul at their head. This king should have been the ready servant of the will of God; he dared to disobey him, upon which the high-priest said to him, "Thou hast rejected the word of the Lord and the Lord hath rejected thee from being king over Israel." A war-chief, David, was set in his place. He defeated all the enemies of Israel, captured from them Mount Zion, and transferred his capital thither. This was Jerusalem.
Jerusalem.—Compared with Babylon or Thebes, Jerusalem was a poor capital. The Hebrews were not builders; their religion prevented them from raising temples; the houses of individuals were shaped like cubes of rock which may be seen today on the sides of Lebanon in the midst of vines and fig-trees. But Jerusalem was the holy city of the Hebrews. The king had his palace there—the palace of Solomon, who astonished the Hebrews with his throne of ivory; Jehovah had his temple there, the first Hebrew temple.
The Tabernacle.—The emblem of the covenant between God and Israel was a great chest of cedar-wood furnished with rings of gold, which contained the tables of the Law. This was borne before the people on high feast-days; it was the Ark of the Covenant. To preserve this ark and necessary objects of worship, Moses is said to have made the Tabernacle—a pavilion of wood covered with skins and hangings. It was a portable temple which the Hebrews carried with them until they could erect a true temple in the promised land.
The Temple.—The Temple of Jerusalem, built at last under Solomon, was divided into three parts:
1.—To the rear, the Holy of Holies, in which rested the ark of the covenant; the high-priest only had the right to enter here, and that but once a year.
2.—In the middle, the Holy Place, in which were kept the altar of incense, the candle-stick with the seven arms, the table of shew-bread; the priests entered to burn incense and to present the offerings.
3.—At the front, the Court open to the people, where the victims were sacrificed on the great altar.
The Temple of Jerusalem was from the first the centre of the nation; from all Palestine the people came to be present at the ceremonies. The high-priest who directed the worship was a person sometimes of greater power than the king.
THE PROPHETS
Disasters of Israel.—Solomon was the last king who enjoyed great power. After him ten tribes separated themselves and constituted the kingdom of Israel, whose inhabitants worshipped the golden calves and the gods of the Phœnicians. Two tribes only remained faithful to Jehovah and to the king at Jerusalem; these formed the kingdom of Judah (977).[42] The two kingdoms exhausted their energies in making war on each other. Then came the armies of the Eastern conquerors; Israel was destroyed by Sargon, king of Assyria (722); Judah, by Nabuchodonosor (Nebuchadrezzar), king of Chaldea (586).
Sentiments of the Israelites.—Faithful Israelites regarded these woes as a chastisement: God was punishing his people for their disobedience; as before, he delivered them from their conquerors. "The children of Israel had sinned against Jehovah, their God, they had built them high places in every city, they imitated the nations around them, although the Lord had forbidden them to do like them; they made them idols of brass; they bowed themselves before all the host of heaven [the stars], they worshipped Baal. It is for this that Jehovah rejected all the race of Israel, he afflicted them and delivered them into the hands of those that plundered them."
The Prophets.—Then appeared the prophets, or as they were called, the Seers: Elijah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel. Usually they came from the desert where they had fasted, prayed, and given themselves to meditation. They came in the name of Jehovah, not as warriors in judgment, but as preachers. They called the Israelites to repent, to overthrow their idols, to return to Jehovah; they foretold all the woes that would come upon them if they did not reconcile themselves to him. They preached and uttered prophecies at the same time.
The New Teaching.—These men on fire with the divine spirit found the official religion at Jerusalem mean and cold. Why should they, like the idolaters, slaughter cattle and burn incense to the honor of God? "Hear the word of Jehovah," says Isaiah: "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices? I am full of the burnt offerings of rams and of the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats.... Bring no more vain oblations, your incense is an abomination to me.... When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you ... for your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean ... cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.... Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." In place of sacrifices, the prophets would set justice and good works.
The Messiah.—Israel deserved its afflictions, but there would be a limit to the chastisement. "O my people," says Isaiah in the name of Jehovah, "be not afraid of the Assyrian: he shall smite thee with a rod ... after the manner of Egypt ... for yet a very little while and the indignation shall cease ... and the burden shall be taken away from off thy shoulder." The prophets taught the people to look for the coming of Him who should deliver them; they prepared the way for the Messiah.
THE JEWISH PEOPLE
Return to Jerusalem.—The children of Judah, removed to the plain of the Euphrates, did not forget their country, but sang of it in their chants: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof, for there they that carried us away required a song ... saying, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion.' How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" After seventy years of captivity, Cyrus, victor over Babylon, allowed the Israelites to return to Palestine. They rebuilt Jerusalem, reconstructed the temple, restored the feasts, and recovered the sacred books. As a sign that they were again the people of Jehovah they renewed the covenant with him; it was a formal treaty, written and signed by the chiefs of the people.
The Jews.—The little kingdom of Jerusalem maintained itself for seven centuries, governed now by a king, now by the high-priest, but always paying tribute to the masters of Syria—to the Persians first, later to the Macedonians and the Syrians, and last of all to the Romans. Faithful to the end to Jehovah, the Jews (their proper name since the return) continued to live the law of Moses, to celebrate at Jerusalem the feasts and the sacrifices. The high-priest, assisted by a council of the elders, preserved the law; scribes copied it and doctors expounded it to the people. The faithful obliged themselves to observe it in the smallest details. The Pharisees were eminent among them for their zeal in fulfilling all its requirements.
The Synagogues.—Meanwhile the Jews for the sake of trade were pushing beyond the borders of Judæa into Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and even to Italy. Some of them were to be found in all the great cities—Alexandria, Damascus, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth and Rome. Dispersed among the Gentiles, the Jews were strenuous to preserve their religion. They raised no temples, for the law prevented this; there could be but one Jewish temple, that at Jerusalem, where they celebrated the solemn feasts. But they joined themselves together to read and comment on the word of God. These places of assembling were called Synagogues, from a Greek word signifying meetings.
Destruction of the Temple.—The Christ appeared at this moment. The Jews crucified him and persecuted his disciples not only in Judæa but in every city where they found them in any number. In the year 70 A.D. Jerusalem, in revolt against the Romans, was taken by assault, and all the inhabitants were massacred or sold into slavery. The Romans burnt the temple and carried away the sacred utensils. From that time there was no longer a centre of the Jewish religion.
Fortunes of the Jews after the Dispersion.—The Jewish nation survived the ruin of its capital. The Jews, scattered throughout the world, learned to dispense with the temple. They preserved their sacred books in the Hebrew tongue. Hebrew is the primitive language of Israel; the Jews since the return from Babylon no longer spoke it, but adopted the languages of the neighboring peoples—the Syriac, the Chaldean, and especially the Greek. The Rabbis, however, instructed in the religion, still learned the Hebrew, explained it, and commented on the Scripture.[43] Thus the Jewish religion was preserved, and, thanks to it, the Jewish people. It made converts even among the Gentiles; there were in the empire proselytes, that is, people who practised the religion of Jehovah without being of the Jewish race.
The Christian Church, powerful since the fourth century, commenced to persecute the Jews. This persecution has endured to this day in all Christian countries. Usually the Jews were tolerated on account of their wealth and because they transacted all banking operations; but they were kept apart, not being permitted to hold any office. In the majority of cities they were compelled to wear a special costume, to live in a special quarter,[44] gloomy, filthy, unhealthy, and sometimes at Easter time to send one of their number to suffer insult. The people suspected them of poisoning fountains, of killing children, of profaning the consecrated host; often the people rose against them, massacred them, and pillaged their houses. Judges under the least pretext had them imprisoned, tortured, and burned. Sometimes the church tried to convert them by force; sometimes the government exiled them en masse from the country and confiscated their goods. The Jews at last disappeared from France,[45] from Spain, England, and Italy. In Portugal, Germany, and Poland, and in the Mohammedan lands they maintained themselves. From these countries after the cessation of persecution they returned to the rest of Europe.
FOOTNOTES:
[41] Exodus iii, 1-10.
[42] There is much uncertainty regarding the chronology of this period.—ED.
[43] The Talmud is the accumulation of these commentaries.
[44] The Jewish Quarter at Rome was called the Ghetto. This name has since been applied to all Jewish quarters.
[45] Except at Avignon, on the domains of the Pope, and in Alsace-Lorraine.
CHAPTER IX[ToC]
GREECE AND THE GREEKS
The Country.—Greece is a very little country (about 20,000 square miles), hardly larger than Switzerland; but it is a country of great variety, bristling with mountains, indented with gulfs—a country originally constituted to influence mightily the character of the men who inhabited it.
A central chain, the Pindus, traverses Greece through the centre and covers it with its rocky system. Toward the isthmus of Corinth it becomes lower; but the Peloponnesus, on the other side of the isthmus, is elevated about 2,000 feet above the sea level, like a citadel crowned with lofty chains, abrupt and snowy, which fall perpendicularly into the sea. The islands themselves scattered along the coast are only submerged mountains whose summits rise above the surface of the sea. In this diverse land there is little tillable ground, but almost everywhere bare rock. The streams, like brooks, leave between their half-dried channel and the sterile rock of the mountain only a narrow strip of fertile soil. In this beautiful country are found some forests, cypresses, laurels, palms, here and there vines scattered on the rocky hillsides; but there are no rich harvests and no green pasturages. Such a country produces wiry mountaineers, active and sober.
The Sea.—Greece is a land of shores: smaller than Portugal, it has as great a coast-line as Spain. The sea penetrates it to a great number of gulfs, coves, and indentations; it is ordinarily surrounded with projecting rocks, or with approaching islands that form a natural port. This sea is like a lake; it has not, like the ocean, a pale and sombre color; usually it is calm, lustrous, and, as Homer says, "of the color of violets."
No sea lends itself better to navigation with small ships. Every morning the north wind rises to conduct the barques of Athens to Asia; in the evening the south wind brings them back to port. From Greece to Asia Minor the islands are placed like stepping-stones; on a clear day the mariner always has land in view. Such a sea beckons people to cross it.
And so the Greeks have been sailors, traders, travellers, pirates, and adventurers; like the Phœnicians, they have spread over all the ancient world, carrying with them the merchandise and the inventions of Egypt, of Chaldea, and of Asia.
The Climate.—The climate of Greece is mild. In Athens it freezes hardly once in twenty years; in summer the heat is moderated by the breeze from the sea.[46] Today the people still lie in the streets from the month of May to September. The air is cool and transparent; for many leagues could once be seen the crest of the statue of Pallas. The contours of distant mountains are not, as with us, enveloped in haze, but show a clear line against the clear sky. It is a beautiful country which urges man to take life as a feast, for everything is happy about him. "Walking at night in the gardens, listening to the grasshoppers, playing the lute in the clear of the moon, going to drink at the spring at the mountain, carrying with him some wine that he may drink while he sings, spending the days in dancing—these are Greek pleasures, the joys of a race poor, economical, and eternally young."
Simplicity of Greek Life.—In this country men are not melted with the heat nor stiffened with cold; they live in the open air gay and at slight expense. Food in great quantity is not required, nor warm clothing, nor a comfortable house. The Greek could live on a handful of olives and a sardine. His entire clothing consisted of sandals, a tunic, a large mantle; very often he went bare-footed and bare-headed. His house was a meagre and unsubstantial building; the air easily entered through the walls. A couch with some coverings, a coffer, some beautiful vases, a lamp,—this was his furniture. The walls were bare and whitened with lime. This house was only a sleeping place.
THE PEOPLE
Origin of the Greeks.—The people who inhabited this charming little land were an Aryan people, related to the Hindoos and the Persians, and like them come from the mountains of Asia or the steppes beyond the Caspian Sea. The Greeks had forgotten the long journey made by their ancestors; they said that they, like the grasshoppers, were the children of the soil.[47] But their language and the names of their gods leave no doubt of their origin.... Like all the Aryans, the primitive Greeks nourished themselves with milk and with the flesh of their herds; they moved about under arms, always ready to fight, and grouped themselves in tribes governed by patriarchs.
The Legends.—The Greeks like all the other ancient peoples were ignorant of their origin. They neither knew whence their ancestors had come nor when they had established themselves in Greece, nor what they had done there. To preserve the exact memory of things as they occur, there is need of some means of fixing them; but the Greeks did not know how to write; they did not employ writing until about the eighth century B.C. They had no way of calculating the number of years. Later they adopted the usage of counting the years according to the great feast which was celebrated every four years at Olympia; a period of four years was called an olympiad. But the first olympiad was placed in 776 B.C., and the chronology of the Greeks does not rise beyond this date.
And yet they used to tell in Greece a great number of legends about this primitive period. These were especially the exploits of ancient kings and of heroes who were adored as demi-gods. These stories were so mingled with fable that it is impossible to know how much truth they may contain. They said at Athens that the first king, Cecrops, was half man and half serpent; at Thebes, that Cadmus, founder of the city, had come from Phœnicia to seek his sister Europa who had been stolen by a bull; that he had killed a dragon and had sowed his teeth, from which was sprung a race of warriors, and that the noble families of Thebes descended from these warriors. At Argos it was said that the royal family was the issue of Pelops to whom Zeus had given a shoulder of ivory to replace the one devoured by a goddess. Thus each country had its legends and the Greeks continued to the end to relate them and to offer worship to their ancient heroes—Perseus, Bellerophon, Herakles, Theseus, Minos, Castor and Pollux, Meleager, Œdipus. The majority of the Greeks, even among the better educated, admitted, at least in part, the truth of these traditions. They accepted as historical facts the war between the two sons of Œdipus, king of Thebes, and the expedition of the Argonauts, sailing forth in quest of the Golden Fleece, which was guarded by two brazen-footed bulls vomiting flames.
The Trojan War.—Of all these legends the most fully developed and the most celebrated was the legend of the Trojan War. It recounted that about the twelfth century, Troy, a rich and powerful city, held sway over the coast of Asia. Paris, a Trojan prince, having come to Greece, had abducted Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Agamemnon, king of Argos, made a league of the kings of Greece; a Greek army went in a fleet of two hundred galleys to besiege Troy. The siege endured ten years because the supreme god, Zeus, had taken the side of the Trojans. All the Greek chiefs participated in this adventure. Achilles, the bravest and the most beautiful of these, killed Hector, the principal defender of Troy, and dragged his corpse around the city; he fought clad in divine armor which had been presented him by his mother, a goddess of the sea; in turn he died, shot by an arrow in the heel. The Greeks, despairing of taking the city by force, employed a trick: they pretended to depart, and left an immense horse of wood in which were concealed the chiefs of the army. The Trojans drew this horse into the city; during the night the chiefs came forth and opened the city to the Greeks. Troy was burnt, the men slaughtered, the women led away as slaves. But the chiefs of the Greeks on their return were beset by tempest. Some perished in the sea, others were cast on foreign shores. Odysseus, the most crafty of the chiefs, was for ten years buffeted from one land to another, losing successively all his ships, himself the sole survivor of the disasters.
All antiquity had steadfast faith in the Trojan War. 1184 B.C. was set as the date of the ending of the siege, and men pointed out the site of the city. In 1874 Schliemann purposed to excavate this site; it was necessary to traverse the débris of many cities which lay over it; at last at a depth of about fifty feet he found in the deepest bed of débris the traces of a mighty city reduced to ashes, and in the ruins of the principal edifice a casket filled with gems of gold which he called the Treasury of Priam. There was no inscription, and the city, the whole wall of which we have been able to bring to light, was a very small one. A large number of small, very rude idols have been found, which represent an owl-headed goddess (the Greeks thus represented the goddess Pallas). Beyond this no proof has been found that this city was called Troy.
The Homeric Poems.—It is the two poems attributed to Homer which have made the taking of Troy renowned throughout the world—the Iliad, which related the combats of the Greeks and the exploits of Achilles before Troy; and the Odyssey, which recounts the adventures of Odysseus (Ulysses) after the capture of Troy.
These two poems were handed down for centuries without being committed to writing; the rhapsodists, wandering singers, knew long passages from them by heart and recited them at feasts. It is not till the sixth century that Pisistratus, a prince of Athens, had them collected and edited.[48] The two poems became from that time and always remained the most admired works of Greek literature.
The Greeks said that the author of these poems was Homer, a Greek of Ionia, who lived about the tenth or the ninth century B.C. They represented him as a blind old man, poor and a wanderer. Seven towns disputed the honor of being his birth-place. This tradition was received without hesitation. But at the end of the eighteenth century a German scholar, Wolf, noticed certain contradictions in these poems, and at last asserted that they were not the work of a single poet, but a collection of fragments from several different poets. This theory has been attacked and supported with great energy: for a half century men have flown into a passion for or against the existence of Homer. Today we begin to think the problem insoluble. What is certain is that these poems are very old, probably of the ninth century. The Iliad was composed in Asia Minor and is perhaps the result of the union of two poems—one dedicated to the combats of the Trojans, and the other to the adventures of Achilles. The Odyssey appears to be the work of one author; but it cannot be affirmed that it is of the same author as the Iliad.
The Greeks at the Time of Homer.—We are not able to go back very far in the history of the Greeks; the Homeric poems are their oldest historical document. When these were composed, about the ninth century B.C., there was not yet any general name to designate all the inhabitants of Greece: Homer mentions them under the names of their principal tribes. From his description it appears that they have made some progress since their departure from Asia. They know how to till the ground, how to construct strong cities and to organize themselves into little peoples. They obey kings; they have a council of old men and an assembly of the people. They are proud of their institutions, they despise their less advanced neighbors, the Barbarians, as they call them. Odysseus, to show how rude the Cyclops were, says, "They have no rules of justice nor places where they deliberate; each one governs himself, his wife, and children, and has no association with others." But these Greeks themselves are half barbarians; they do not know how to write, to coin money, nor the art of working in iron. They hardly dare to trust themselves on the sea and they imagine that Sicily is peopled with monsters.
The Dorians.—Dorians was the name given to those sons of the mountaineers who had come from the north and had expelled or subjected those dwelling in the plains and on the shore of the Peloponnesus; the latter, crowded into too narrow limits, sent colonies into Asia. Of these mountain bands the most renowned came from a little canton called Doris and preserved the name Dorians. These invaders told how certain kings of Sparta, the posterity of Herakles, having been thrust out by their subjects, had come to seek the Dorians in their mountains. These people of the mountains, moved by their love for Herakles, had followed his descendants and had replaced them on their throne. By the same stroke they dispossessed the inhabitants and took their place. They were a martial, robust, and healthy race, accustomed to cold, to meagre food, to a scant existence. Men and women wore a short tunic which did not reach to the knee. They spoke a rude and primitive dialect. The Dorians were a race of soldiers, always obliged to keep themselves under arms; they were the least cultivated in Greece, since, situated far from the sea, they preserved the customs of the barbarous age; they were the most Greek because, being isolated, they could neither mingle with strangers nor imitate their manners.
The Ionians.—The peoples of Attica, the isles, and the coast of Asia were called Ionians; no one knows the origin of the name. Unlike the Dorians, they were a race of sailors or traders, the most cultured of Greece, gaining instruction from contact with the most civilized peoples of the Orient; the least Greek, because they associated with Asiatics and had in part adopted their dress. They were peaceful and industrious, living luxuriously, speaking a smooth dialect, and wearing long flowing garments like the Orientals.
The Hellenes.—Dorians and Ionians—these are the two opposing races, the most remarkable of Greece, and the most powerful: Sparta is Dorian, Athens is Ionian. But the majority of the Greeks are neither Dorians nor Ionians: they are called Æolians, a vague name which covers very different peoples.
All the Greeks from early times take the name "Hellenes" which they have kept to this day. What is the origin of the term? They did not know any more than we: they said only that Dorus and Æolus were sons of Hellen, and Ion was his grandson.
Cities.—The Hellenes were still in little peoples as at the time of Homer. The land of Greece, cut by mountains and sea, breaks naturally into a large number of small cantons, each isolated from its neighbor by an arm of the sea or by a wall of rocks, so that it is easy to defend the land and difficult to communicate with other parts. Each canton constituted a separate state which was called a city. There were more than a hundred of these; counting the colonies, more than a thousand. To us a Greek state seems a miniature. The whole of Attica was but little larger than the state of Delaware, and Corinth or Megara was much smaller. Usually the state was only a city with a strip of shore and a harbor, or some villages scattered in the plain around a citadel. From one state one sees the citadel, mountains, or harbor of the next state. Many of them count their citizens only by thousands; the largest included hardly 200,000 or 300,000.
The Hellenes never formed one nation; they never ceased to fight and destroy one another. And yet all spoke the same language, worshipped the same gods, and lived the same sort of a life. In these respects they recognized the bonds of a common race and distinguished themselves from all other peoples whom they called barbarians and regarded with disdain.
THE HELLENES BEYOND SEA
Colonization.—The Hellenes did not inhabit Greece alone. Colonists from the Greek cities had gone forth to found new cities in all the neighboring countries. There were little states in all the islands of the Archipelago, over all the coast of Asia Minor, in Crete and Cyprus, on the whole circumference of the Black Sea as far as the Caucasus and the Crimea, along the shore of Turkey in Europe (then called Thrace), on the shore of Africa, in Sicily, in south Italy, and even on the coasts of France and Spain.
Character of These Colonies.—Greek colonies were being founded all the time from the twelfth century to the fifth; they issued from various cities and represented all the Greek races—Dorian, Ionian, and Æolian. They were established in the wilderness, in an inhabited land, by conquest, or by an agreement with the natives. Mariners, merchants, exiles, or adventurers were their founders. But with all this diversity of time, place, race, and origin, the colonies had common characteristics: they were established at one stroke and according to certain fixed rules. The colonists did not arrive one by one or in small bands; nor did they settle at random, building houses which little by little became a city, as is the case now with European colonists in America. All the colonists started at once under a leader, and the new city was founded in one day. The foundation was a religious ceremony; the "founder" traced a sacred enclosure, constructed a sacred hearth, and lighted there the holy fire.
Traditions Concerning the Colonists.—The old stories about the founding of some of these colonies enable us to see how they differed from modern colonies. The account of the settlement of Marseilles runs as follows: Euxenus, a citizen of Phocæa, coming to Gaul in a merchant galley, was invited by a Gallic chief to the marriage of his daughter; according to the custom of this people, the young girl about the time of the feast entered bearing a cup which she was to present to the one whom she would choose for a husband; she stopped before the Greek and offered him the cup. This unpremeditated act appeared to have been inspired from heaven; the Gallic chief gave his daughter to Euxenus and permitted him and his companions to found a city on the gulf of Marseilles. Later the Phocæans, seeing their city blockaded by the Persian army, loaded on their ships their families, their movables, the statues and treasures of their temple and went to sea, abandoning their city. As they started, they threw into the sea a mass of red-hot iron and swore never to return to Phocæa until the iron should rise to the surface of the water. Many violated this oath and returned; but the rest continued the voyage and after many adventures came to Marseilles.
At Miletus the Ionians who founded the city had brought no wives with them; they seized a city inhabited by the natives of Asia, slaughtered all the men, and forcibly married the women and girls of the families of their victims. It was said that the women, affronted in this manner, swore never to eat food with their captors and never to call them by the name of husband; this custom was for centuries preserved among the women of Miletus.[49]
The colony at Cyrene in Africa was founded according to the express command of the oracle of Apollo. The inhabitants of Thera, who had received this order, did not care to go to an unknown country. They yielded only at the end of seven years since their island was afflicted with dearth; they believed that Apollo had sent misfortune on them as a penalty. Nevertheless the citizens who were sent out attempted to abandon the enterprise, but their fellow-citizens attacked them and forced them to return. After having spent two years on an island where no success came to them, they at last came to settle at Cyrene, which soon became a prosperous city.[50]
Importance of the Colonies.—Wherever they settled, the colonists constituted a new state which in no respect obeyed the mother town from which they had come out. And so the whole Mediterranean found itself surrounded by Greek cities independent one of the others. Of these cities many became richer and more powerful than their mother towns; they had a territory which was larger and more fertile, and in consequence a greater population. Sybaris, it was said, had 300,000 men who were capable of bearing arms. Croton could place in the field an infantry force of 120,000 men. Syracuse in Sicily, Miletus in Asia had greater armies than even Sparta and Athens. South Italy was termed Great Greece. In comparison with this great country fully peopled with Greek colonies the home country was, in fact, only a little Greece. And so it happened that the Greeks were much more numerous in the neighboring countries than in Greece proper; and among these people of the colonies figure a good share of the most celebrated names: Homer, Alcæus, Sappho, Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Democritus, Empedocles, Aristotle, Archimedes, Theocritus, and many others.
FOOTNOTES:
[46] "Balmy and clement," says Euripides, "is our atmosphere. The cold of winter has no extremes for us, and the shafts of the sun do not wound."
[47] Autochthones.
[48] The story of the collection of the Homeric poems by Pisistratus is without foundation—"eine blosse Fabel." Busolt, "Griechische Geschichte." Gotha, 1893, i., 127.—ED.
[49] Probably this custom has another origin the recollection of which was lost.—ED.
[50] Herodotus, iv., 150-158.
CHAPTER X[ToC]
GREEK RELIGION
The Gods. Polytheism.—The Greeks, like the ancient Aryans, believed in many gods. They had neither the sentiment of infinity nor that of eternity; they did not conceive of God as one for whom the heavens are only a tent and the earth a foot-stool. To the Greeks every force of nature—the air, the sun, the sea—was divine, and as they did not conceive of all these phenomena as produced by one cause, they assigned each to a particular god. This is the reason that they believed in many gods. They were polytheists.
Anthropomorphism.—Each god was a force in nature and carried a distinct name. The Greeks, having a lively imagination, figured under this name a living being, of beautiful form and human characteristics. A god or goddess was represented as a beautiful man or woman. When Odysseus or Telemachus met a person peculiarly great and beautiful, they began by asking him if he were not a god. Homer in describing the army pictured on the shield of Achilles adds, "Ares and Athena led the army, both clad in gold, beautiful and great, as becomes the gods, for men were smaller." Greek gods are men; they have clothing, palaces, bodies similar to ours; if they cannot die, they can at least be wounded. Homer relates how Ares, the god of war, struck by a warrior, fled howling with pain. This fashion of making gods like men is what is called Anthropomorphism.
Mythology.—The gods, being men, have parents, children, property. Their mothers were goddesses, their brothers were gods, and their children other gods or men who were half divine. This genealogy of the gods is what is called the Theogony. The gods have also a history; we are told the story of their birth, the adventures of their youth, their exploits. Apollo, for example, was born on the island of Delos to which his mother Latona had fled; he slew a monster which was desolating the country at the foot of Parnassus. Each canton of Greece had thus its tales of the gods. These are called myths; the sum of them is termed Mythology, or the history of the gods.
The Local Gods.—The Greek gods, even under their human form, remained what they were at first, phenomena of nature. They were thought of both as men and as forces of nature. The Naiad is a young woman, but at the same time a bubbling fountain. Homer represents the river Xanthus as a god, and yet he says, "The Xanthus threw itself on Achilles, boiling with fury, full of tumult, foam, and the bodies of the dead." The people itself continued to say "Zeus rains" or "Zeus thunders." To the Greek the god was first of all rain, storm, heaven, or sun, and not the heaven, sun, or earth in general, but that corner of the heaven under which he lived, the land of his canton, the river which traversed it. Each city, then, had its divinities, its sun-god, its earth-goddess, its sea-god, and these are not to be confounded with the sun, the earth, and the sea of the neighboring city. The Zeus of Sparta is not the same as the Zeus of Athens; in the same oath one sometimes invokes two Athenas or two Apollos. A traveller who would journey through Greece[51] would therefore meet thousands of local gods (they called them Poliades, or gods of the city). No torrent, no wood, no mountain was without its own deity,[52] although often a minor divinity, adored only by the people of the vicinity and whose sanctuary was only a grotto in the rock.
The Great Gods.—Above the innumerable legion of local gods of each canton the Greeks imagined certain great divinities—the heaven, the sun, the earth, and the sea—and these everywhere had the same name, and had their temple or sanctuary in every place. Each represented one of the principal forces of nature. These gods common to all the Greeks were never numerous; if all are included, we have hardly twenty.[53] We have the bad habit of calling them by the name of a Latin god. The following are their true names: Zeus (Jupiter), Hera (Juno), Athena (Minerva), Apollo, Artemis (Diana), Hermes (Mercury), Hephaistos (Vulcan), Hestia (Vesta), Ares (Mars), Aphrodite (Venus), Poseidon (Neptune), Amphitrite, Proteus, Kronos (Saturn), Rhea (Cybele), Demeter (Ceres), Persephone (Proserpina), Hades (Pluto), Dionysos (Bacchus). It is this little group of gods that men worshipped in all the temples, that men ordinarily invoked in their prayers.
Attributes of the Gods.—Each of these great gods had his form, his costume, his instruments (which we call his attributes); it is thus that the faithful imagined him and that the sculptors represented him. Each has his character which is well known to his worshippers. Each has his rôle in the world, performing his determined functions, ordinarily with the aid of secondary divinities who obey him.
Athena, virgin of clear eye, is represented standing, armed with a lance, a helmet on the head, and gleaming armor on the breast. She is the goddess of the clear air, of wisdom, and of invention, a goddess of dignity and majesty.
Hephaistos, the god of fire, is figured with a hammer and in the form of a lame and ugly blacksmith. It is he who forges the thunderbolt.
Artemis, shy maiden, armed with bow and quiver, courses the forests hunting with a troop of nymphs. She is the goddess of the woods, of the chase, and of death.
Hermes, represented with winged sandals, is the god of the fertile showers. But he has other offices; he is the god of streets and squares, the god of commerce, of theft, and of eloquence. He it is who guides the souls of the dead, the messenger of the gods, the deity presiding over the breeding of cattle.
Almost always a Greek god has several functions, quite dissimilar to our eyes, but to the Greeks bearing some relation to one another.
Olympus and Zeus.—Each one of these gods is like a king in his own domain. Still the Greeks had remarked that all the forces of nature do not operate by chance and that they act in harmony; the same word served them for the idea of order and of universe. They supposed, then, that the gods were in accord for the administration of the world, and that they, like men, had laws and government among them.
In the north of Greece there was a mountain to whose snowy summit no man had ever climbed. This was Olympus. On this summit, which was hidden by clouds from the eyes of men, it was imagined the gods assembled. Meeting under the light of heaven, they conferred on the affairs of the world. Zeus, the mightiest of them, presided over the gathering: he was god of the heavens and of the light, the god "who masses the clouds," who launches the thunderbolt—an old man of majestic mien, with long beard, sitting on a throne of gold. It is he who commands and the other gods bow before him. Should they essay to resist, Zeus menaces them; Homer makes him say,[54] "Bind to heaven a chain of gold, and all of you, gods or goddesses, throw your weight upon it; all your united efforts cannot draw Zeus, the sovereign ordainer, to the earth. On the contrary, if I wished to draw the chain to myself, I should bring with it the earth and the very sea. Then I would attach it to the summit of Olympus and all the universe would be suspended. By so much am I superior to gods and men."
Morality of the Greek Mythology.—The greater part of their gods were conceived by the Greeks as violent, sanguinary, deceitful, dissolute. They ascribed to them scandalous adventures or dishonest acts. Hermes was notorious for his thieving, Aphrodite for her coquetry, Ares for his ferocity. All were so vain as to persecute those who neglected to offer sacrifices to them. Niobe had seen all her children pierced with arrows by Apollo because she herself had boasted of her numerous family. The gods were so jealous that they could not endure seeing a man thoroughly happy; prosperity for the Greeks was the greatest of dangers, for it never failed to draw the anger of the gods, and this anger became a goddess (Nemesis) about whom were told such anecdotes as the following: Once Polycrates of Samos, become very powerful, feared the jealousy of the gods; and so a ring of gold which he still retained was cast into the sea that his good fortune might not be unmixed with evil. Some time after, a fisherman brought to Polycrates an enormous fish and in its belly was found the ring. This was a certain presage of evil. Polycrates was besieged in his city, taken, and crucified. The gods punished him for his good fortune.
Greek mythology was immoral in that the gods gave bad examples to men. The Greek philosophers were already saying this and were inveighing against the poets who had published these stories. A disciple of Pythagoras affirmed that his master, descending to hell, had seen the soul of Homer hanging to a tree and that of Hesiod bound to a column to punish them for calumniating the gods. "Homer and Hesiod," Said Xenophanes, "attribute to the gods all the acts which among men are culpable and shameful; there is but one god who neither in body nor in soul resembles men." And he added this profound remark: "If oxen and lions had hands and could manipulate like men, they would have made gods with bodies similar to their own, horses would have framed gods with horses' bodies, and cattle with cattle's.... Men think that the gods have their feelings, their voice, and their body." Xenophanes was right; the primitive Greeks had created their gods in their own image. As they were then sanguinary, dissolute, jealous, and vain, their gods were the same. Later, as the people became better, their descendants were shocked with all these vices; but the history and the character of the gods were fixed by the ancient traditions, and later generations, without daring to change them, had received the gross and dishonest gods of their ancestors.
THE HEROES
The Hero.—The hero in Greece is a man who has become illustrious, and after death a mighty spirit—not a god, but a demi-god. The heroes do not live on Olympus in the heaven of the gods, they do not direct the life of the world. And yet they, too, possess a power higher than that of any human, and this permits them to aid their friends and destroy their enemies. For this reason the Greeks rendered them worship as to the gods and implored their protection. There was not a city, not a tribe, not a family but had its hero, a protecting spirit which it adored.
Different Kinds of Heroes.—Of these heroes many are legendary persons (Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon); some without doubt never existed (Herakles, Œdipus); others like Hellen, Dorus, Æolus are only names. But their worshippers regarded them as men of the olden time; and, in fact, the most of the heroes lived at one time. Many are historical personages: generals like Leonidas, Lysander; philosophers like Democritus and Aristotle; legislators like Lycurgus and Solon. The people of Croton adored even one of their fellow-citizens, Philip by name, because he had been in his time the most beautiful man in Greece. The leader who had guided a band of colonists and founded a city became for the inhabitants the Founder; a temple was raised to him and every year sacrifices were offered to him. The Athenian Miltiades was thus worshipped in a city of Thrace. The Spartiate Brasidas, killed in the defence of Amphipolis, had divine honors paid to him in that city, for the inhabitants had come to regard him as their Founder.
Presence of the Heroes.—The hero continued to reside in the place where his body was interred, either in his tomb or in the neighborhood. A story told by Herodotus (v. 67) depicts this belief in a lively way. The city of Sicyon adored the hero Adrastus and in a public place was a chapel dedicated to his honor. Cleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon, took a fancy to rid himself of this hero. He went to the oracle at Delphi to ask if it would aid him in expelling Adrastus. The oracle replied to his question that Adrastus was king of the Sicyonians and Cleisthenes was a brigand. The tyrant, not daring to evict the hero, adopted a ruse; he sent to Thebes to seek the bones of Melanippus, another hero, and installed them with great pomp in the sanctuary of the city. "He did this," says Herodotus, "because Melanippus during his life had been the greatest enemy of Adrastus and had killed his brother and his son-in-law." Then he transferred to Melanippus the festivals and the sacrifices formerly paid to the honor of Adrastus. He was persuaded, and all the Greeks with him, that the hero would be irritated and would flee.
Intervention of the Heroes.—The heroes have divine power; like the gods, they can according to their whim send good or evil. The poet Stesichorus had spoken ill of the famous Helen (that Helen who the legend states was carried away to Troy); he suddenly became blind; when he retracted what he had said, the heroine restored his sight.
The protecting heroes of a city kept it from plagues and famine and even fought against its enemies. At the battle of the Marathon the Athenian soldiers saw in the midst of them Theseus, the mythical founder of Athens, clad in shining armor. During the battle of Salamis the heroes Ajax and Telamon, once kings of Salamis, appeared on the highest point of the island extending their hands to the Greek fleet. "It is not we," said Themistocles, "that have vanquished the Persians; it is the gods and heroes." In "Œdipus at Colonus," a tragedy of Sophocles, Œdipus at the point of death receives the visit of the king of Athens and of the king of Thebes, both of whom as gods request him to have his body interred in their territory, and to become a protecting hero. Œdipus at last consents to be buried in the soil of the Athenians, and says to the king, "Dead, I shall not be a useless inhabitant of this country, I shall be a rampart for you, stronger than millions of warriors." In himself alone a hero was as efficient as a whole army; his spirit was mightier than all living men.
WORSHIP
Principles of Worship of the Gods.—Gods and heroes, potent as they were, bestowed on men all good or evil fortune according to their will. It was dangerous to have them against you, wise to have them on your side. They were conceived as like men, irritated if they were neglected, contented if they were venerated. On this principle worship was based. It consisted in doing things agreeable to the gods to obtain their favor. Plato expresses as follows[55] the thought of the common man, "To know how to say and do those things that are pleasing to the gods, either in prayers or in offerings, this is piety which brings prosperity to individuals and to states. The reverse is impiety which ruins everything." "It is natural," says Xenophon at the end of his treatise on Cavalry, "that the gods should favor those especially who not only consult them in need, but honor them in the day of prosperity." Religion was first of all a contract; the Greek sought to delight the gods and in return required their services. "For a long time," says a priest of Apollo to his god, "I have burned fat bullocks for you; now grant my petitions and discharge your arrows against my enemies."
The Great Festivals.—Since the gods had the feelings of men they were to be pleased in the same way as men. Wine, cakes, fruits, food were brought to them. Palaces were built for them. Festivals were given in their honor, for they were "joyous gods" who loved pleasure and beautiful spectacles. A festival was not, as with us, purely an occasion of rejoicing, but a religious ceremony. On those days free from the daily toil men were required to rejoice in public before the god. The Greek, without doubt, delighted in these fêtes; but it is for the god and not for himself that he celebrates them. "The Ionians," says an ancient hymn to Apollo, "delight thee with trial of strength, the hymn, and the dance."
The Sacred Games.—From these diversions offered to the gods originated the solemn games. Each city had them to the honor of its gods; ordinarily only its citizens were admitted to them; but in four districts of Greece were celebrated games at which all Greeks could be present and participate. These are called the Four Great Games.
The principal of these four festivals was that at Olympia. This was given every four years in honor of Zeus and continued five or six days. The multitude coming from all parts of Greece filled the amphitheatre. They commenced by sacrificing victims and addressing prayers to Zeus and the other gods. Then came the contests; they were:
The foot-race around the stadion.
The Pentathlon, so called because it comprised five exercises. The competitors were to leap, run from one end of the stadion to the other, make a long throw of the metal discus, hurl the javelin, and wrestle.
Boxing, in which one fought with arms bound with thongs of hide.
The chariot races, which were held in the hippodrome; the cars were light and were drawn by four horses.
The judges of the games were clothed in purple, crowned with laurel. After the combat a herald proclaimed before the whole assembly the name of the victor and of his city. A crown of olive was the only reward given him; but his fellow-citizens on his return received him as a conquering hero; sometimes they threw down a section of the city wall to give him entrance. He arrived in a chariot drawn by four horses, clothed in purple, escorted by all the people. "These victories which we leave today to the athletes of the public shows appeared then the greatest of all. Poets of greatest renown celebrated them; Pindar, the most illustrious lyric poet of antiquity, has hardly done more than sing of chariot races. It is related that a certain Diagoras, who had seen his two sons crowned on the same day, was borne in triumph by them in the sight of the spectators. The people, holding such an honor too great for a mortal, cried out, 'Perish, Diagoras, for after all you cannot become a god.' Diagoras, suffocated with emotion, died in the arms of his sons. In his eyes and the eyes of the Greeks the fact that his sons possessed the stoutest fists and the nimblest limbs in Greece was the acme of earthly happiness."[56] The Greeks had their reasons for thus admiring physical prowess: in their wars in which they fought hand to hand the most vigorous athletes were the best soldiers.
Omens.—In return for so much homage, so many festivals and offerings, the Greeks expected no small amount of service from their gods. The gods protected their worshippers, gave them health, riches, victory. They preserved them from the evils that menaced them, sending signs which men interpreted. These are called Omens. "When a city," says Herodotus,[57] "is about to suffer some great misfortune, this is usually anticipated by signs. The people of Chios had omens of their defeat: of a band of one hundred youths sent to Delphi but two returned; the others had died of the plague. About the same time the roof of a school of the city fell on the children who were learning to read; but one escaped of the one hundred and twenty. Such were the anticipating signs sent them by the deity."
The Greeks regarded as supernatural signs, dreams, the flight of birds in the heavens, the entrails of animals sacrificed—in a word, everything that they saw, from the tremblings of the earth and eclipses to a simple sneeze. In the expedition to Sicily, Nicias, the general of the Athenians, at the moment of embarking his army for the retreat, was arrested by an eclipse of the moon; the gods, thought he, had sent this prodigy to warn the Athenians not to continue their enterprise. And so Nicias waited; he waited twenty-seven days offering sacrifices to appease the gods. During this inactivity the enemy closed the port, destroyed the fleet, and exterminated his army. The Athenians on learning this news found but one thing with which to reproach Nicias: he should have known that for an army in retreat the eclipse of the moon was a favorable sign. During the retreat of the Ten Thousand, Xenophon, the general, making an address to his soldiers, uttered this sentiment: "With the help of the gods we have the surest hope that we shall save ourselves with glory." At this point a soldier sneezed. At once all adored the god who had sent this omen. "Since at the very instant when we are deliberating concerning our safety," exclaimed Xenophon, "Zeus the savior has sent us an omen, let us with one consent offer sacrifices to him."[58]
The Oracles.—Often the god replies to the faithful who consult him not by a mute sign, but by the mouth of an inspired person. The faithful enter the sanctuary of the god seeking responses and counsel. These are Oracles.
There were oracles in many places in Greece and Asia. The most noted were at Dodona in Epirus, and at Delphi, at the foot of Mount Parnassus. At Dodona it was Zeus who spoke by the rustling of the sacred oaks. At Delphi it was Apollo who was consulted. Below his temple, in a grotto, a current of cool air issued from a rift in the ground. This air the Greeks thought[59] was sent by the god, for he threw into a frenzy those who inhaled it. A tripod was placed over the orifice, a woman (the Pythia), prepared by a bath in the sacred spring, took her seat on the tripod, and received the inspiration. At once, seized with a nervous frenzy, she uttered cries and broken sentences. Priests sitting about her caught these expressions, set them to verse, and brought them to him who sought advice of the god.
The oracles of the Pythia were often obscure and ambiguous. When Crœsus asked if he should make war on the Persians, the reply was, "Crœsus will destroy a great empire." In fact, a great empire was destroyed, but it was that of Crœsus.
The Spartans had great confidence in the Pythia, and never initiated an expedition without consulting her. The other Greeks imitated them, and Delphi thus became a sort of national oracle.
Amphictyonies.—To protect the sanctuary of Delphi twelve of the principal peoples of Greece had formed an association called an Amphictyony.[60] Every year deputies from these peoples assembled at Delphi to celebrate the festival of Apollo and see that the temple was not threatened; for this temple contained immense wealth, a temptation to pillage it. In the sixth century the people of Cirrha, a neighboring city of Delphi, appropriated these treasures,[61] The Amphictyons declared war against them for sacrilege. Cirrha was taken and destroyed, the inhabitants sold as slaves, the territory left fallow. In the fourth century the Amphictyons made war on the Phocidians also who had seized the treasury of Delphi, and on the people of Amphissa who had tilled a field dedicated to Apollo.
Still it is not necessary to believe that the assembly of the Amphictyons ever resembled a Greek senate. It was concerned only with the temple of Apollo, not at all with political affairs. It did not even prevent members of the Amphictyony fighting one another. The oracle and the Amphictyony of Delphi were more potent than the other oracles and the other amphictyonies; but they never united the Greeks into a single nation.
FOOTNOTES:
[51] See the account of the traveller Pausanias.
[52] "There are," says Hesiod, "30,000 gods on the fruitful earth."
[53] Greek scholars formed a select society of twelve gods and goddesses, but their choice was arbitrary, and all did not agree on the same series. The Greeks of different countries and of different epochs often represented the same god under different forms. Further, the majority of the gods seem to us to have vague and undetermined attributes; this is because they were not the same everywhere.
[54] Iliad, viii., 18.
[55] In the dialogue "Eutyphron."
[56] Taine, "Philosophy of Art."
[57] Herodotus, vi., 27
[58] Xenophon, "Anabasis," iii, 2.
[59] This idea gained currency only in the later periods of Grecian history.—ED.
[60] There were similar amphictyonies at Delos, Calauria, and Onchestus.
[61] The special charge against Cirrha was the levying of toll on pilgrims coming to Delphi.—ED.
CHAPTER XI[ToC]
SPARTA
THE PEOPLE
Laconia.—When the Dorian mountaineers invaded the Peloponnesus, the main body of them settled at Sparta in Laconia. Laconia is a narrow valley traversed by a considerable stream (the Eurotas) flowing between two massive mountain ranges with snowy summits. A poet describes the country as follows: "A land rich in tillable soil, but hard to cultivate, deep set among perpendicular mountains, rough in aspect, inaccessible to invasion." In this enclosed country lived the Dorians of Sparta in the midst of the ancient inhabitants who had become, some their subjects, others their serfs. There were, then, in Laconia three classes: Helots, Periœci, Spartiates.
The Helots.—The Helots dwelt in the cottages scattered in the plain and cultivated the soil. But the land did not belong to them—indeed, they were not even free to leave it. They were, like the serfs of the Middle Ages, peasants attached to the soil, from father to son. They labored for a Spartiate proprietor who took from them the greater part of the harvest. The Spartiates instructed them, feared them, and ill treated them. They compelled them to wear rude garments, beat them unreasonably to remind them of their servile condition, and sometimes made them intoxicated to disgust their children with the sight of drunkenness. A Spartiate poet compares the Helots to "loaded asses stumbling under their burdens and the blows inflicted."
The Periœci.—The Periœci (those who live around) inhabited a hundred villages in the mountains or on the coast. They were sailors, they engaged in commerce, and manufactured the objects necessary to life. They were free and administered the business of their village, but they paid tribute to the magistrates of Sparta and obeyed them.
Condition of the Spartiates.—Helots and Periœci despised the Spartiates, their masters. "Whenever one speaks to them of the Spartiates," says Xenophon,[62] "there isn't one of them who can conceal the pleasure he would feel in eating them alive." Once an earthquake nearly destroyed Sparta: the Helots at once rushed from all sides of the plain to massacre those of the Spartiates who had escaped the catastrophe. At the same time the Periœci rose and refused obedience. The Spartiates' bearing toward the Periœci was certain to exasperate them. At the end of a war in which many of the Helots had fought in their army, they bade them choose those who had especially distinguished themselves for bravery, with the promise of freeing them. It was a ruse to discover the most energetic and those most capable of revolting. Two thousand were chosen; they were conducted about the temples with heads crowned as an evidence of their manumission; then the Spartiates put them out of the way, but how it was done no one ever knew.[63]
And yet the oppressed classes were ten times more, numerous than their masters. While there were more than 200,000 Helots and 120,000 Periœci, there were never more than 9,000 Spartiate heads of families. In a matter of life and death, then, it was necessary that a Spartiate be as good as ten Helots. As the form of battle was hand-to-hand, they needed agile and robust men. Sparta was like a camp without walls; its people was an army always in readiness.
EDUCATION
The Children.—They began to make soldiers of them at birth. The newly-born infant was brought before a council; if it was found deformed, it was exposed on the mountain to die; for an army has use only for strong men. The children who were permitted to grow up were taken from their parents at the age of seven years and were trained together as members of a group. Both summer and winter they went bare-foot and had but a single mantle. They lay on a heap of reeds and bathed in the cold waters of the Eurotas. They ate little and that quickly and had a rude diet. This was to teach them not to satiate the stomach. They were grouped by hundreds, each under a chief. Often they had to contend together with blows of feet and fists. At the feast of Artemis they were beaten before the statue of the goddess till the blood flowed; some died under this ordeal, but their honor required them not to weep. They were taught to fight and suffer.
Often they were given nothing to eat; provision must be found by foraging. If they were captured on these predatory expeditions, they were roughly beaten. A Spartiate boy who had stolen a little fox and had hidden it under his mantle, rather than betray himself let the animal gnaw out his vitals. They were to learn how to escape from perplexing situations when they were in the field.
They walked with lowered glance, silent, hands under the mantle, without turning the head and "making no more noise than statues." They were not to speak at table and were to obey all men that they encountered. This was to accustom them to discipline.
The Girls.—The other Greeks kept their daughters secluded in the house, spinning flax. The Spartiates would have robust women capable of bearing vigorous children. The girls, therefore, were trained in much the same manner as the boys. In their gymnasia they practised running, leaping, throwing the disc and Javelin. A poet describes a play in which Spartiate girls "like colts with flowing manes make the dust fly about them." They were reputed the healthiest and bravest women in Greece.
The Discipline.—The men, too, have their regular life and this a soldier's life. The presence of many enemies requires that no one shall weaken. At seventeen years the Spartiate becomes a soldier and this he until he is sixty. The costume, hour of rising and retiring, meals, exercise—everything is fixed by regulations as in barracks.
Since the Spartiate engages only in war, he is to prepare himself for that; he exercises himself in running, leaping, and wielding his arms; he disciplines all the members of the body—the neck, the arms, the shoulders, the legs, and that too, every day. He has no right to engage in trade, to pursue an industry, nor to cultivate the earth; he is a soldier and is not to allow himself to be diverted to any other occupation. He cannot live at his pleasure with his own family; the men eat together in squads; they cannot leave the country without permission. It is the discipline of a regiment in the enemy's territory.
Laconism.—These warriors had a rude life, with clean-cut aims and proud disposition. They spoke in short phrases—or as we say, laconically—the word has still persisted. The Greeks cited many examples of these expressions. To a garrison in danger of being surprised the government sent this message, "Attention!" A Spartan army was summoned by the king of Persia to lay down his arms; the general replied, "Come and take them." When Lysander captured Athens, he wrote simply, "Athens is fallen."
Music. The Dance.—The arts of Sparta were those that pertained to an army. The Dorian conquerors brought with them a peculiar sort of music—the Dorian style, serious, strong, even harsh. It was military music; the Spartiates went into battle to the sound of the flute so that the step might be regular.
Their dance was a military movement. In the "Pyrrhic" the dancers were armed and imitated all the movements of a battle; they made the gestures of striking, of parrying, of retreating, and of throwing the javelin.
Heroism of the Women.—The women stimulated the men to combat; their exhibitions of courage were celebrated in Greece, so much so that collections of stories of them were made.[64] A Spartan mother, seeing her son fleeing from battle, killed him with her own hand, saying; "The Eurotas does not flow for deer." Another, learning that her five sons had perished, said, "This is not what I wish to know; does victory belong to Sparta?" "Yes." "Then let us render thanks to the gods."
THE INSTITUTIONS OF SPARTA
The Kings and the Council.—The Spartiates had at first, like the other Greeks, an assembly of the people. All these institutions were preserved, but only in form. The kings, descendants of the god Herakles, were loaded with honors; they were given the first place at the feasts and were served with a double portion; when they died all the inhabitants made lamentation for them. But no power was left to them and they were closely watched.
The Senate was composed of twenty-eight old men taken from the rich and ancient families, appointed for life; but it did not govern.
The Ephors.—The real masters of Sparta were the Ephors (the name signifies overseers), five magistrates who were renewed every year. They decided peace and war, and had judicial functions; when the king commanded the army, they accompanied him, directed the operations, and sometimes made him return. Usually they consulted the senators and took action in harmony with them. Then they assembled the Spartiates in one place, announced to them what had been decided and asked their approbation. The people without discussing the matter approved the action by acclamation. No one knew whether he had the right to refuse assent; accustomed to obey, the Spartiate never refused. It was, therefore, an aristocracy of governing families. Sparta was not a country of equality. There were some men who were called Equals, but only because they were equal among themselves. The others were termed Inferiors and had no part in the government.
The Army.—Thanks to this régime, the Spartiates preserved the rude customs of mountaineers; they had no sculptors, no architects, no orators, no philosophers. They had sacrificed everything to war; they became "adepts in the military art,"[65] and instructors of the other Greeks. They introduced two innovations especially: a better method of combat, a better method of athletic exercise.
The Hoplites.—Before them the Greeks marched into battle in disorder; the chiefs, on horseback or in a light chair, rushed ahead, the men following on foot, armed each in his own fashion, helter-skelter, incapable of acting together or of resisting. A battle reduced itself to a series of duels and to a massacre. At Sparta all the soldiers had the same arms; for defence, the breastplate covering the chest, the casque which protected the head, the greaves over the legs, the buckler held before the body. For offence the soldier had a short sword and a long lance. The man thus armed was called a hoplite. The Spartan hoplites were drawn up in regiments, battalions, companies, squads, almost like our armies. An officer commanded each of these groups and transmitted to his men the orders of his superior officer, so that the general in chief might have the same movement executed throughout the whole army. This organization which appears so simple to us was to the Greeks an astonishing novelty.
The Phalanx.—Come into the presence of the enemy, the soldiers arrange themselves in line, ordinarily eight ranks deep, each man close to his neighbor, forming a compact mass which we call a Phalanx. The king, who directs the army, sacrifices a goat to the gods; if the entrails of the victim are propitious, he raises a chant which all the army takes up in unison. Then they advance. With rapid and measured step, to the sound of the flute, with lance couched and buckler before the body, they meet the enemy in dense array, overwhelm him by their mass and momentum, throw him into rout, and only check themselves to avoid breaking the phalanx. So long as they remain together each is protected by his neighbor and all form an impenetrable mass on which the enemy could secure no hold. These were rude tactics, but sufficient to overcome a disorderly troop. Isolated men could not resist such a body. The other Greeks understood this, and all, as far as they were able, imitated the Spartans; everywhere men were armed as hoplites and fought in phalanx.
Gymnastics.—To rush in orderly array on the enemy and stand the shock of battle there was need of agile and robust men; every man had to be an athlete. The Spartans therefore organized athletic exercises, and in this the other Greeks imitated them; gymnastics became for all a national art, the highest esteemed of all the arts, the crowning feature of the great festivals.
In the most remote countries, in the midst of the barbarians of Gaul or of the Black Sea, a Greek city was recognized by its gymnasium. There was a great square surrounded by porticoes or walks, usually near a spring, with baths and halls for exercise. The citizens came hither to walk and chat: it was a place of association. All the young men entered the gymnasium; for two years or less they came here every day; they learned to leap, to run, to throw the disc and the javelin, to wrestle by seizing about the waist. To harden the muscles and strengthen the skin they plunged into cold water, dispensed with oil for the body, and rubbed the flesh with a scraper (the strigil).
Athletes.—Many continued these exercises all their lives as a point of honor and became Athletes. Some became marvels of skill. Milo of Croton in Italy, it was said, would carry a bull on his shoulders; he stopped a chariot in its course by seizing it from behind. These athletes served sometimes in combats as soldiers, or as generals. Gymnastics were the school of war.
Rôle of the Spartiates.—The Spartans taught the other Greeks to exercise and to fight. They always remained the most vigorous wrestlers and the best soldiers, and were recognized as such by the rest of Greece. Everywhere they were respected. When the rest of the Greeks had to fight together against the Persians, they unhesitatingly took the Spartans as chiefs—and with justice, said an Athenian orator.
FOOTNOTES:
[62] "Hellenica," iii., 3, 6.
[63] See Thucydides, iv., 80.
[64] A collection by Plutarch is still preserved.
[65] A phrase of Xenophon.
CHAPTER XII[ToC]
ATHENS
THE ATHENIAN PEOPLE
Attica.—The Athenians boasted of having always lived in the same country; their ancestors, according to their story, originated from the soil itself. The mountaineers who conquered the south land passed by the country without invading it; Attica was hardly a temptation to them.
Attica is composed of a mass of rocks which in the form of a triangle advances into the sea. These rocks, renowned for their blocks of marble and for the honey of their bees,[66] are bare and sterile. Between them and the sea are left three small plains with meagre soil, meanly watered (the streams are dry in summer) and incapable of supporting a numerous population.
Athens.—In the largest of these plains, a league from the sea, rises a massive isolated rock: Athens was built at its foot. The old city, called the Acropolis, occupied the summit of the rock.
The inhabitants of Attica commenced, not by forming a single state, but by founding scattered villages, each of which had its own king and its own government. Later all these villages united under one king,[67] the king of Athens, and established a single city. This does not mean that all the people came to dwell in one town. They continued to have their own villages and to cultivate their lands; but all adored one and the same protecting goddess, Athena, divinity of Athens, and all obeyed the same king.
Athenian Revolutions.—Later still the kings were suppressed. In their place Athens had nine chiefs (the archons) who changed every year. This whole history is little known to us for no writing of the time is preserved. They used to say that for centuries the Athenians had lived in discord; the nobles (Eupatrids) who were proprietors of the soil oppressed the peasants on their estates; creditors held their debtors as slaves. To reëstablish order the Athenians commissioned Solon, a sage, to draft a code of laws for them (594).
Solon made three reforms:
1. He lessened the value of the money, which allowed the debtors to release themselves more easily.
2. He made the peasants proprietors of the land that they cultivated. From this time there were in Attica more small proprietors than in any other part of Greece.
3. He grouped all the citizens into four classes according to their incomes. Each had to pay taxes and to render military service according to his wealth, the poor being exempt from taxation and military service.
After Solon the Athenians were subject to Pisistratus, one of their powerful and clever citizens; but in 510 the dissensions revived.
Reforms of Cleisthenes.—Cleisthenes, leader of one of the parties, used the occasion to make a thoroughgoing revolution.
There were many strangers in Athens, especially seamen and traders who lived in Piræus near the harbor. Cleisthenes gave them the rights of citizenship and made them equal[68] to the older inhabitants. From this time there were two populations side by side—the people of Attica and those of Piræus. A difference of physical features was apparent for three centuries afterward: the people of Attica resembled the rest of the Greeks; those in Piræus resembled Asiatics. The Athenian people thus augmented was a new people, the most active in Greece.
THE ATHENIAN PEOPLE
In the fifth century the society of Athens was definitely formed: three classes inhabited the district of Attica—slaves, foreigners, and citizens.
The Slaves.—The slaves constituted the great majority of the population; there was no man so poor that he did not have at least one slave; the rich owned a multitude of them, some as many as five hundred. The larger part of the slaves lived in the house occupied with grinding grain, kneading bread, spinning and weaving cloth, performing the service of the kitchens, and in attendance on their masters. Others labored in the shops as blacksmiths, as dyers, or in stone quarries or silver mines. Their master fed them but sold at a profit everything which they produced, giving them in return nothing but their living. All the domestic servants, all the miners, and the greater part of the artisans were slaves. These men lived in society but without any part in it; they had not even the disposition of their own bodies, being wholly the property of other men. They were thought of only as objects of property; they were often referred to as "a body" (σωμα). There was no other law for them than the will of their master, and he had all power over them—to make them work, to imprison them, to deprive them of their sustenance, to beat them. When a citizen went to law, his adversary had the right to require that the former's slaves should be put to the torture to tell what they knew. Many Athenian orators commend this usage as an ingenious means for obtaining true testimony. "Torture," says the orator Isæus, "is the surest means of proof; and so when you wish to clear up a contested question, you do not address yourselves to freemen, but, placing the slaves to the torture, you seek to discover the truth."
Foreigners.—The name Metics was applied to people of foreign origin who were established in Athens. To become a citizen of Athens it was not enough, as with us, to be born in the country; one must be the son of a citizen. It might be that some aliens had resided in Attica for several generations and yet their family not become Athenian. The metics could take no part in the government, could not marry a citizen, nor acquire land. But they were personally free, they had the right of commerce by sea, of banking and of trade on condition that they take a patron to represent them in the courts. There were in Athens more than ten thousand families of metics, the majority of them bankers or merchants.
The Citizens.—To be a citizen of Athens it was necessary that both parents should be citizens. The young Athenian, come to maturity at about eighteen years of age, appeared before the popular assembly, received the arms which he was to bear and took the following oath: "I swear never to dishonor these sacred arms, not to quit my post, to obey the magistrates and the laws, to honor the religion of my country." He became simultaneously citizen and soldier. Thereafter he owed military service until he was sixty years of age. With this he had the right to sit in the assembly and to fulfil the functions of the state.
Once in a while the Athenians consented to receive into the citizenship a man who was not the son of a citizen, but this was rare and a sign of great favor. The assembly had to vote the stranger into its membership, and then nine days after six thousand citizens had to vote for him on a secret ballot. The Athenian people was like a closed circle; no new members were admitted except those pleasing to the old members, and they admitted few beside their sons.
THE GOVERNMENT OF ATHENS
The Assembly.—The Athenians called their government a democracy (a government by the people). But this people was not, as with us, the mass of inhabitants, but the body of citizens, a true aristocracy of 15,000 to 20,000 men who governed the whole nation as masters. This body had absolute power, and was the true sovereign of Athens. It assembled at least three times a month to deliberate and to vote. The assembly was held in the open air on the Pnyx; the citizens sat on stone benches arranged in an amphitheatre; the magistrates before them on a platform opened the session with a religious ceremony and a prayer, then a herald proclaimed in a loud voice the business which was to occupy the assembly, and said, "Who wishes to speak?" Every citizen had the right to this privilege; the orators mounted the tribune according to age. When all had spoken, the president put the question; the assembly voted by a show of hands, and then dissolved.
The Courts.—The people itself, being sovereign, passed judgment in the courts. Every citizen of thirty years of age could participate in the judicial assembly (the Heliæa). The heliasts sat in the great halls in sections of five hundred; the tribunal was, then, composed of one thousand to fifteen hundred judges. The Athenians had no prosecuting officer as we have; a citizen took upon himself to make the accusation. The accused and the accuser appeared before the court; each delivered a plea which was not to exceed the time marked off by a water-clock. Then the judges voted by depositing a black or white stone. If the accuser did not obtain a certain number of votes, he himself was condemned.
The Magistrates.—The sovereign people needed a council to prepare the business for discussion and magistrates to execute their decisions. The council was composed of five hundred citizens drawn by lot for one year. The magistrates were very numerous: ten generals to command the army, thirty officials for financial administration, sixty police officials to superintend the streets, the markets, weights and measures, etc.[69]
Character of This Government.—The power in Athens did not pertain to the rich and the noble, as in Sparta. In the assembly everything was decided by a majority of votes and all the votes were equal. All the jurors, all the members of the council, all the magistrates except the generals were chosen by lot. The citizens were equal not only in theory, but also in practice. Socrates said[70] to a well-informed Athenian who did not dare to speak before the people: "Of what are you afraid? Is it of the fullers, the shoe-makers, the masons, the artisans, or the merchants? for the assembly is composed of all these people."
Many of these people had to ply their trade in order to make a living, and could not serve the state gratuitously; and so a salary was instituted: every citizen who sat in the assembly or in the courts received for every day of session three obols (about eight cents of our money), a sum just sufficient to maintain life at that time. From this day the poor administered the government.
The Demagogues.—Since all important affairs whether in the assembly or in the courts were decided by discussion and discourse, the influential men were those who knew how to speak best. The people accustomed themselves to listen to the orators, to follow their counsels, to charge them with embassies, and even to appoint them generals. These men were called Demagogues (leaders of the people). The party of the rich scoffed at them: in a comedy Aristophanes represents the people (Demos) under the form of an old man who has lost his wits: "You are foolishly credulous, you let flatterers and intriguers pull you around by the nose and you are enraptured when they harangue you." And the chorus, addressing a charlatan, says to him, "You are rude, vicious; you have a strong voice, an impudent eloquence, and violent gestures; believe me, you have all that is necessary to govern Athens."
PRIVATE LIFE
The Athenians created so many political functions that a part of the citizens was engaged in fulfilling them. The citizen of Athens, like the functionary or soldier of our days, was absorbed in public affairs. Warring and governing were the whole of his life. He spent his days in the assembly, in the courts, in the army, at the gymnasium, or at the market. Almost always he had a wife and children, for his religion commanded this, but he did not live at home.
The Children.—When a child came into the world, the father had the right to reject it. In this case it was laid outside the house where it died from neglect, unless a passer-by took it and brought it up as a slave. In this custom Athens followed all the Greeks. It was especially the girls that were exposed to death. "A son," says a writer of comedy, "is always raised even if the parents are in the last stage of misery; a daughter is exposed even though the parents are rich."
If the father accepted the child, the latter entered the family. He was left at first in the women's apartments with the mother. The girls remained there until the day of their marriage; the boys came out when they were seven years old. The boy was then entrusted to a preceptor (pedagogue), whose business it was to teach him to conduct himself well and to obey. The pedagogue was often a slave, but the father gave him the right to beat his son. This was the general usage in antiquity.
Later the boy went to school, where he learned to read, write, cipher, recite poetry, and to sing in the chorus or to the sound of the flute. At last came gymnastics. This was the whole of the instruction; it made men sound in body and calm in spirit—what the Greeks called "good and beautiful."
To the young girl, secluded with her mother, nothing of the liberal arts was taught; it was thought sufficient if she learned to obey. Xenophon represents a rich and well-educated Athenian speaking thus of his wife with Socrates: "She was hardly twenty years old when I married her, and up to that time she had been subjected to an exacting surveillance; they had no desire that she should live, and she learned almost nothing. Was it not enough that one should find in her a woman who could spin the flax to make garments, and who had learned how to distribute duties to the slaves?" When her husband proposed that she become his assistant, she replied with great surprise, "In what can I aid you? Of what am I capable? My mother has always taught me that my business was to be prudent." Prudence or obedience was the virtue which was required of the Greek woman.
Marriage.—At the age of fifteen the girl married. The parents had chosen the husband; it might be a man from a neighboring family, or a man who had been a long-time friend of the father, but always a citizen of Athens. It was rare that the young girl knew him; she was never consulted in the case. Herodotus, speaking of a Greek, adds: "This Callias deserves mention for his conduct toward his daughters; for when they were of marriageable age he gave them a rich dowry, permitted them to choose husbands from all the people, and he then married them to the men of their choice."
Athenian Women.—In the inner recess of the Athenian house there was a retired apartment reserved for the women—the Gynecæum. Husband and relatives were the only visitors; the mistress of the household remained here all day with her slaves; she directed them, superintended the house-keeping, and distributed to them the flax for them to spin. She herself was engaged with weaving garments. She left the house seldom save for the religious festivals. She never appeared in the society of men: "No one certainly would venture," says the orator Isæus, "to dine with a married woman; married women do not go out to dine with men or permit themselves to eat with strangers." An Athenian woman who frequented society could not maintain a good reputation.
The wife, thus secluded and ignorant, was not an agreeable companion. The husband had taken her not for his life-long companion, but to keep his house in order, to be the mother of his children, and because Greek custom and religion required that he should marry. Plato says that one does not marry because he wants to, but "because the law constrains him." And the comic poet Menander had found this saying: "Marriage, to tell the truth, is an evil, but a necessary evil." And so the women in Athens, as in most of the other states of Greece, always held but little place in society.
FOOTNOTES:
[66] The marble of Pentelicus and the honey of Hymettus.
[67] This legendary king was called Theseus.
[68] Certain limitations, however, are referred to below, under "Metics."—ED.
[69] Not to mention the Archons, whom they had not ventured to suppress.
[70] Xenophon, "Memorabilia," iii., 7, 6.
CHAPTER XIII[ToC]
WARS OF THE GREEKS
THE PERSIAN WARS
Origin of the Persian Wars.—While the Greeks were completing the organization of their cities, the Persian king was uniting all the nations of the East in a single empire. Greeks and Orientals at length found themselves face to face. It is in Asia Minor that they first meet.
On the coast of Asia Minor there were rich and populous colonies of the Greeks;[71] Cyrus, the king of Persia, desired to subject them. These cities sent for help to the Spartans, who were reputed the bravest of the Greeks, and this action was reported to Cyrus; he replied,[72] "I have never feared this sort of people that has in the midst of the city a place where the people assemble to deceive one another with false oaths." (He was thinking of the market-place.) The Greeks of Asia were subdued and made subject to the Great King.
Thirty years later King Darius found himself in the presence of the Greeks of Europe. But this time it was the Greeks that attacked the Great King. The Athenians sent twenty galleys to aid the revolting Ionians; their soldiers entered Lydia, took Sardis by surprise and burned it. Darius revenged himself by destroying the Greek cities of Asia, but he did not forget the Greeks of Europe. He had decreed, they say, that at every meal an officer should repeat to him: "Master, remember the Athenians." He sent to the Greek cities to demand earth and water, a symbol in use among the Persians to indicate submission to the Great King. Most of the Greeks were afraid and yielded. But the Spartans cast the envoys into a pit, bidding them take thence earth and water to carry to the king. This was the beginning of the Median wars.
Comparison of the Two Adversaries.—The contrast between the two worlds which now entered into conflict is well marked by Herodotus[73] in the form of a conversation of King Xerxes with Demaratus, a Spartan exile: "'I venture to assure you,' said Demaratus, 'that the Spartans will offer you battle even if all the rest of the Greeks fight on your side, and if their army should not amount to more than one thousand men.' 'What!' said Xerxes, 'one thousand men attack so immense an army as mine! I fear your words are only boasting; for although they be five thousand, we are more than one thousand to one. If they had a master like us, fear would inspire them with courage; they would march under the lash against a larger army; but being free and independent, they will have no more courage than that with which nature has endowed them.' 'The Spartans,' replied Demaratus, 'are not inferior to anybody in a hand-to-hand contest, and united in a phalanx they are the bravest of all men. Yet, though free, they have an absolute master, the Law, which they dread more than all your subjects do you; they obey it, and this law requires them to stand fast to their post and conquer or die.'" This is the difference between the two parties to the conflict: on the one side, a multitude of subjects united by force under a capricious master; on the other, little martial republics whose citizens govern themselves according to laws which they respect.
First Persian War.—There were two Persian wars. The first was simply an expedition against Athens; six hundred galleys sent by Darius disembarked a Persian army on the little plain of Marathon, seven hours distant from Athens.
Religious sentiment prevented the Spartans from taking the field before the full moon, and it was still only the first quarter; the Athenians had to fight alone.[74] Ten thousand citizens armed as hoplites camped before the Persians. The Athenians had ten generals, having the command on successive days; of these Miltiades, when his turn came, drew up the army for battle. The Athenians charged the enemy in serried ranks, but the Persians seeing them advancing without cavalry and without archers, thought them fools. It was the first time that the Greeks had dared to face the Persians in battle array. The Athenians began by turning both flanks, and then engaged the centre, driving the Persians in disorder to the sea and forcing them to reëmbark on their ships.
The victory of Marathon delivered the Athenians and made them famous in all Greece (490).
Second Persian War.—The second war began ten years later with an invasion. Xerxes united all the peoples of the empire, so that the land force amounted, as some say, to 1,700,000 men.[75] There were Medes and Persians clad in sleeved tunics, armed with cuirasses of iron, bucklers, bows and arrows; Assyrians with cuirass of linen, armed with clubs pointed with iron; Indians clad in cotton with bows and arrows of bamboo; savages of Ethiopia with leopard skins for clothing; nomads armed only with lassos; Phrygians armed with short pikes; Lydians equipped like Greeks; Thracians carrying javelins and daggers. The enumeration of these fills twenty chapters in Herodotus.[76] These warriors brought with them a crowd equally numerous of non-combatants, of servants, slaves, women, together with a mass of mules, horses, camels, and baggage wagons.
This horde crossed the Hellespont by a bridge of boats in the spring of 480. For seven days and nights it defiled under the lash. Then traversing Thrace, it marched on Greece, conquering the peoples whom it met.
The Persian fleet, 1,200 galleys strong, coasted the shores of Thrace, passing through the canal at Mount Athos which Xerxes had had built for this very purpose.
The Greeks, terrified, submitted for the most part to the Great King and joined their armies to the Persian force. The Athenians sent to consult the oracle of Delphi, but received only the reply; "Athens will be destroyed from base to summit." The god being asked to give a more favorable response, replied, "Zeus accords to Pallas [protectress of Athens] a wall of wood which alone shall not be taken; in that shall you and your children find safety." The priests of whom they asked the interpretation of this oracle bade the Athenians quit Attica and go to establish themselves elsewhere. But Themistocles explained the "wall of wood" as meaning the ships; they should retire to the fleet and fight the Persians on sea.
Athens and Sparta, having decided on resistance, endeavored to form a league of the Greeks against the Persians. Few cities had the courage to enter it, and these placed themselves under the command of the Spartans. Four battles in one year settled the war. At Thermopylæ, Leonidas, king of Sparta, who tried to bar the entrance to a defile was outflanked and overwhelmed. At Salamis, the Persian fleet, crowded into a narrow space where the ships embarrassed one another, was defeated by the Greek navy (480). At Platæa the rest of the Persian army left in Greece was annihilated by the Greek hoplites; of 300,000 men but 40,000 escaped. The same day at Mycale, on the coast of Asia, an army of the Greeks landed and routed the Persians (479). The Greeks had conquered the Great King.
Reasons for the Greek Victory.—The Median war was not a national war between Greeks and barbarians. All the Greeks of Asia and half the Greeks of Europe fought on the Persian side. Many of the other Greeks gave no assistance. In reality it was a fight of the Great King and his subjects against Sparta, Athens, and their allies.
The conquest of this great horde by two small peoples appeared at that time as a prodigy. The gods, said the Greeks, had fought for them. But there is less wonder when we examine the two antagonists more closely: the Persian army was innumerable, and Xerxes had thought that victory was a matter of numbers. But this multitude was an embarrassment to itself. It did not know where to secure food for itself, it advanced but slowly, and it choked itself on the day of combat. Likewise the ships arranged in too close order drove their prows into neighboring ships and shattered their oars. Then in this immense crowd there were, according to Herodotus, many men but few soldiers. Only the Persians and Medes, the flower of the army, fought with energy; the rest advanced only under the lash, they had come under pressure to a war which had no interest for them, ill-armed and without discipline, ready to desert as soon as no one was watching them. At Platæa the Medes and Persians were the only ones to do any fighting; the subjects kept aloof.
The Persian soldiers were ill-equipped; they were embarrassed by their long robes, the head was poorly protected by a felt hat, the body ill-defended by a shield of wicker-work. For arms they had a bow, a dagger, and a very short pike; they could fight only at a great distance or hand-to-hand. The Spartans and their allies, on the contrary, secure in the protection of great buckler, helmet and greaves, marched in solid line and were irresistible; they broke the enemy with their long pikes and at once the battle became a massacre.
Results of the Persian Wars.—Sparta had commanded the troops, but as Herodotus says,[77] it was Athens who had delivered Greece by setting an example of resistance and constituting the fleet of Salamis. It was Athens who profited by the victory. All the Ionian cities of the Archipelago and of the coast of Asia revolted and formed a league against the Persians. The Spartans, men of the mountains, could not conduct a maritime war, and so withdrew; the Athenians immediately became chiefs of the league. In 476[78] Aristides, commanding the fleet, assembled the delegates of the confederate cities. They decided to continue the war against the Great King, and engaged to provide ships and warriors and to pay each year a contribution of 460 talents ($350,000). The treasure was deposited at Delos in the temple of Apollo, god of the Ionians. Athens was charged with the leadership of the military force and with collecting the tax. To make the agreement irrevocable Aristides had a mass of hot iron cast into the sea, and all swore to maintain the oaths until the day that the iron should mount to the surface.
A day came, however, when the war ceased, and the Greeks, always the victors, concluded a peace, or at least a truce,[79] with the Great King. He surrendered his claim on the Asiatic Greeks (about 449).
What was to become of the treaty of Aristides? Were the confederate cities still to pay their contribution now that there was no more fighting? Some refused it even before the war was done. Athens asserted that the cities had made their engagements in perpetuity and forced them to pay them.
The war finished, the treasury at Delos had no further use; the Athenians transferred the money to Athens and used it in building their monuments. They maintained that the allies paid for deliverance from the Persians; they, therefore, had no claim against Athens so long as she defended them from the Great King. The allies had now become the tributaries of Athens: they were now her subjects. Athens increased the tax on them, and required their citizens to bring their cases before the Athenian courts; she even sent colonists to seize a part of their lands. Athens, mistress of the league, was sovereign over more than three hundred cities spread over the islands and the coasts of the Archipelago, and the tribute paid her amounted to six hundred talents a year.
STRIFE AMONG THE GREEK STATES
The Peloponnesian War.—After the foundation of the Athenian empire in the Archipelago the Greeks found themselves divided between two leagues—the maritime cities were subject to Athens; the cities of the interior remained under the domination of Sparta. After much preliminary friction war arose between Sparta and her continental allies on the one side and Athens and her maritime subjects on the other. This was the Peloponnesian War. It continued twenty-seven years (431-404), and when it ceased, it was revived under other names down to 360.
These wars were complicated affairs. They were fought simultaneously on land and sea, in Greece, Asia, Thrace, and Sicily, ordinarily at several points at once. The Spartans had a better army and ravaged Attica; the Athenians had a superior fleet and made descents on the coasts of the Peloponnesus. Then Athens sent its army to Sicily where it perished to the last man (413); Lysander, a Spartan general, secured a fleet from the Persians and destroyed the Athenian fleet in Asia (405). The Athenian allies who fought only under compulsion abandoned her. Lysander took Athens, demolished its walls, and burnt its ships.
Wars against Sparta.—Sparta was for a time mistress on both land and sea. "In those days," says Xenophon, "all cities obeyed when a Spartan issued his orders." But soon the allies of Sparta, wearied of her domination, formed a league against her. The Spartans, driven at first from Asia, still maintained their power in Greece for some years by virtue of their alliance with the king of the Persians (387). But the Thebans, having developed a strong army under the command of Epaminondas, fought them at Leuctra (371) and at Mantinea (362). The allies of Sparta detached themselves from her, but the Thebans could not secure from the rest of the Greeks the recognition of their supremacy. From this time no Greek city was sovereign over the others.
Savage Character of These Wars.—These wars between the Greek cities were ferocious. A few incidents suffice to show their character. At the opening of the war the allies of Sparta threw into the sea all the merchants from cities hostile to them. The Athenians in return put to death the ambassadors of Sparta without allowing them to speak a word. The town of Platæa was taken by capitulation, and the Spartans had promised that no one should be punished without a trial; but the Spartan judges demanded of every prisoner if during the war he had rendered any service to the Peloponnesians; when the prisoner replied in the negative, he was condemned to death. The women were sold as slaves. The city of Mitylene having revolted from Athens was retaken by her. The Athenians in an assembly deliberated and decreed that all the people of Mitylene should be put to death. It is true that the next day the Athenians revised the decree and sent a second ship to carry a more favorable commission, but still more than one thousand Mityleneans were executed.
After the Syracusan disaster all the Athenian army was taken captive. The conquerors began by slaughtering all the generals and many of the soldiers. The remainder were consigned to the quarries which served as prison. They were left there crowded together for seventy days, exposed without protection to the burning sun of summer, and then to the chilly nights of autumn. Many died from sickness, from cold and hunger—for they were hardly fed at all; their corpses remained on the ground and infected the air. At last the Syracusans drew out the survivors sold them into slavery.
Ordinarily when an army invaded a hostile state it levelled the houses, felled the trees, burned the crops and killed the laborers. After battle it made short shrift of the wounded and killed prisoners in cold blood. In a captured city everything belonged to the captor: men, women, children were sold as slaves. Such was at this time the right of war. Thucydides sums up the case as follows:[80] "Business is regulated between men by the laws of justice when there is obligation on both sides; but the stronger does whatever is in his power, and the weaker yields. The gods rule by a necessity of their nature because they are strongest; men do likewise."
Results of These Wars.—These wars did not result in uniting the Greeks into one body. No city, Sparta more than Athens, was able to force the others to obey her. They only exhausted themselves by fighting one another. It was the king of Persia who profited by the strife. Not only did the Greek cities not unite against him, but all in succession allied themselves with him against the other Greeks. In the notorious Peace of Antalcidas (387) the Great King declared that all the Greek cities of Asia belonged to him, and Sparta recognized this claim. Athens and Thebes did as much some years later. An Athenian orator said, "It is the king of Persia who governs Greece; he needs only to establish governors in our cities. Is it not he who directs everything among us? Do we not summon the Great King as if we were his slaves?" The Greeks by their strife had lost the vantage that the Median war had gained for them.
FOOTNOTES:
[71] Twelve Ionian colonies, twelve Æolian, four Dorian.
[72] Herod., i., 153.
[73] Herod., vii., 103, 104.
[74] 1,000 Platæans came to the assistance of the Athenians.—ED.
[75] Herodotus's statements of the numbers in Xerxes' army are incredible.—ED.
[76] Herod., vii., 61-80.
[77] vii., 139.
[78] The chronology of these events is uncertain.—ED.
[79] Called the Peace of Cimon, but it is very doubtful whether Cimon really concluded a treaty. [With more right may it be called the Peace of Callias, who was probably principal ambassador.—ED.]
[80] In his chapters on the Mityleneans.
CHAPTER XIV[ToC]
THE ARTS IN GREECE
ATHENS AT THE TIME OF PERICLES
Pericles.—In the middle of the fifth century Athens found herself the most powerful city in Greece. Pericles, descended from one of the noble families, was then the director of the affairs of the state. He wasted neither speech nor personality, and never sought to flatter the vanity of the people. But the Athenians respected him and acted only in accordance with his counsels; they had faith in his knowledge of all the details of administration, of the resources of the state, and so they permitted him to govern. For forty years Pericles was the soul of the politics of Athens; as Thucydides his contemporary said, "The democracy existed in name; in reality it was the government of the first citizen."
Athens and Her Monuments.—In Athens, as in the majority of Greek cities, the houses of individuals were small, low, packed closely together, forming narrow streets, tortuous and ill paved. The Athenians reserved their display for their public monuments. Ever after they levied heavy war taxes on their allies they had large sums of money to expend, and these were employed in erecting beautiful edifices. In the market-place they built a portico adorned with paintings (the Poikile), in the city a theatre, a temple in honor of Theseus, and the Odeon for the contests in music. But the most beautiful monuments rose on the rock of the Acropolis as on a gigantic pedestal. There were two temples of which the principal, the Parthenon, was dedicated to Athena, protecting goddess of the city; a colossal statue of bronze which represented Athena; and a staircase of ornamental character leading up to the Propylæa. Athens was from this time the most beautiful of the Greek cities.[81]
Importance of Athens.—Athens became at the same time the city of artists. Poets, orators, architects, painters, sculptors—some Athenians by birth, others come from all corners of the Greek world—met here and produced their masterpieces. There were without doubt many Greek artists elsewhere than at Athens; there had been before the fifth century, and there were a long time afterward; but never were so many assembled at one time in the same city. Most of the Greeks had fine sensibilities in matters of art; but the Athenians more than all others had a refined taste, a cultivated spirit and love of the beautiful. If the Greeks have gained renown in the history of civilization, it is that they have been a people of artists; neither their little states nor their small armies have played a great rôle in the world. This is why the fifth century is the most beautiful moment in the history of Greece; this is why Athens has remained renowned above all the rest of the Greek cities.
LETTERS
The Orators.—Athens is above all the city of eloquence. Speeches in the assembly determine war, peace, taxes, all state business of importance; speeches before the courts condemn or acquit citizens and subjects. Power is in the hands of the orators; the people follow their counsels and often commit to them important public functions: Cleon is appointed general; Demosthenes directs the war against Philip.
The orators have influence; they employ their talents in eloquence to accuse their political enemies. Often they possess riches, for they are paid for supporting one party or the other: Æschines is retained by the king of Macedon; Demosthenes accepts fees from the king of Persia.
Some of the orators, instead of delivering their own orations, wrote speeches for others. When an Athenian citizen had a case at court, he did not desire, as we do, that an advocate plead his case for him; the law required that each speak in person. He therefore sought an orator and had him compose a speech which he learned by heart and recited before the tribunal.
Other orators travelled through the cities of Greece speaking on subjects which pleased their fancy. Sometimes they gave lectures, as we should say.
The oldest orators spoke simply, limiting themselves to an account of the facts without oratorical flourishes; on the platform they were almost rigid without loud speaking or gesticulation. Pericles delivered his orations with a calm air, so quietly, indeed, that no fold of his mantle was disturbed. When he appeared at the tribune, his head, according to custom, crowned with leaves, he might have been taken, said the people, "for a god of Olympus." But the orators who followed wished to move the public. They assumed an animated style, pacing the tribune in a declamatory and agitated manner. The people became accustomed to this form of eloquence. The first time that Demosthenes came to the tribune the assembly shouted with laughter; the orator could not enunciate, he carried himself ill. He disciplined himself in declamation and gesture and became the favorite of the people. Later when he was asked what was the first quality of the orator, he replied, "Action, and the second, action, and the third, action." Action, that is delivery, was more to the Greeks than the sense of the discourse.
The Sages.—For some centuries there had been, especially among the Greeks of Asia, men who observed and reflected on things. They were called by a name which signifies at once wise men and scholars. They busied themselves with physics, astronomy, natural history, for as yet science was not separated from philosophy. Such were in the seventh century the celebrated Seven Sages of Greece.
The Sophists.—About the time of Pericles there came to Athens men who professed to teach wisdom. They gathered many pupils and charged fees for their lessons. Ordinarily they attacked the religion, customs, and institutions of Greek cities, showing that they were not founded on reason. They concluded that men could not know anything with certainty (which was quite true for their time), that men can know nothing at all, and that nothing is true or false: "Nothing exists," said one of them, "and if it did exist, we could not know it." These professors of scepticism were called sophists. Some of them were at the same time orators.
Socrates and the Philosophers.—Socrates, an old man of Athens, undertook to combat the sophists. He was a poor man, ugly, and without eloquence. He opened no school like the sophists but contented himself with going about the city, conversing with those he met, and leading them by the force of his questions to discover what he himself had in mind. He sought especially the young men and gave them instruction and counsel. Socrates made no pretensions as a scholar: "All my knowledge," said he, "is to know that I know nothing." He would call himself no longer a sage, like the others, but a philosopher, that is to say, a lover of wisdom. He did not meditate on the nature of the world nor on the sciences; man was his only interest. His motto was, "Know thyself." He was before all a preacher of virtue.
As he always spoke of morals and religion, the Athenians took him for a sophist.[82] In 399 he was brought before the court, accused "of not worshipping the gods of the city, of introducing new gods, and of corrupting the youth." He made no attempt to defend himself, and was condemned to death. He was then seventy years old.
Xenophon, one of his disciples, wrote out his conversations and an apology for him.[83] Another disciple, Plato, composed dialogues in which Socrates is always the principal personage. Since this time Socrates has been regarded as the "father of philosophy." Plato himself was the head of a school (429-348); Aristotle (384-322), a disciple of Plato, summarized in his books all the science of his time. The philosophers that followed attached themselves to one or the other of these two masters: the disciples of Plato called themselves Academicians,[84] those of Aristotle, Peripatetics.[85]
The Chorus.—It was an ancient custom of the Greeks to dance in their religious ceremonies. Around the altar dedicated to the god a group of young men passed and repassed, assuming noble and expressive attitudes, for the ancients danced with the whole body. Their dance, very different from ours, was a sort of animated procession, something like a solemn pantomime. Almost always this religious dance was accompanied by chants in honor of the god. The group singing and dancing at the same time was called the Chorus. All the cities had their festival choruses in which the children of the noblest families participated after long time of preparation. The god required the service of a troop worthy of him.
Tragedy and Comedy.—In the level country about Athens the young men celebrated in this manner each year religious dances in honor of Dionysos, the god of the vintage. One of these dances was grave; it represented the actions of the god. The leader of the chorus played Dionysos, the chorus itself the satyrs, his companions. Little by little they came to represent also the life of the other gods and the ancient heroes. Then some one (the Greeks call him Thespis) conceived the idea of setting up a stage on which the actor could play while the chorus rested. The spectacle thus perfected was transferred to the city near the black poplar tree in the market. Thus originated Tragedy.
The other dance was comic. The masked dancers chanted the praises of Dionysos mingled with jeers addressed to the spectators or with humorous reflections on the events of the day. The same was done for the comic chorus as for the tragic chorus: actors were introduced, a dialogue, all of a piece, and the spectacle was transferred to Athens. This was the origin of Comedy. This is the reason that from this time tragedy has been engaged with heroes, and comedy with every-day life.
Tragedy and comedy preserved some traces of their origin. Even when they were represented in the theatre, they continued to be played before the altar of the god. Even after the actors mounted on the platform had become the most important personages of the spectacle, the choir continued to dance and to chant around the altar. In the comedies, like the masques in other days, sarcastic remarks on the government came to be made; this was the Parabasis.
The Theatre.—That all the Athenians might be present at these spectacles there was built on the side of the Acropolis the theatre of Dionysos which could hold 30,000 spectators. Like all the Greek theatres, it was open to heaven and was composed of tiers of rock ranged in a half-circle about the orchestra where the chorus performed and before the stage where the play was given.
Plays were produced only at the time of the festivals of the god, but then they continued for several days in succession. They began in the morning at sunrise and occupied all the time till torch-light with the production of a series of three tragedies (a trilogy) followed by a satirical drama. Each trilogy was the work of one author. Other trilogies were presented on succeeding days, so that the spectacle was a competition between poets, the public determining the victor. The most celebrated of these competitors were Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. There were also contests in comedy, but there remain to us only the works of one comic poet, Aristophanes.
THE ARTS
Greek Temples.—In Greece the most beautiful edifices were constructed to the honor of the gods, and when we speak of Greek architecture it is their temples that we have in mind.
A Greek temple is not, like a Christian church, designed to receive the faithful who come thither to pray. It is the palace[86] where the god lives, represented by his idol, a palace which men feel under compulsion to make splendid. The mass of the faithful do not enter the interior of the temple; they remain without, surrounding the altar in the open air.
At the centre of the temple is the "chamber" of the god, a mysterious sanctuary without windows, dimly lighted from above.[87] On the pavement rises the idol of wood, of marble, or of ivory, clad in gold and adorned with garments and jewels. The statue is often of colossal size; in the temple of Olympia Zeus is represented sitting and his head almost touches the summit of the temple. "If the god should rise," they said, "his head would shatter the roof." This sanctuary, a sort of reliquary for the idol, is concealed on every side from the eyes. To enter, it is necessary to pass through a porch formed by a row of columns.
Behind the "chamber" is the "rear-chamber" in which are kept the valuable property of the god—his riches,[88] and often the gold and silver of the city. The temple is therefore storehouse, treasury, and museum.
Rows of columns surround the building on four sides, like a second wall protecting the god and his treasures. There are three orders of columns which differ in base and capital, each bearing the name of the people that invented it or most frequently used it. They are, in the order of age, the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian. The temple is named from the style of the columns supporting it.
Above the columns, around the edifice are sculptured surfaces of marble (the metopes) which alternate with plain blocks of marble (the triglyphs). Metopes and triglyphs constitute the frieze.
The temple is surmounted with a triangular pediment adorned with statues.
Greek temples were polychrome, that is to say, were painted in several colors, yellow, blue, and red. For a long time the moderns refused to believe this; it was thought that the Greeks possessed too sober taste to add color to an edifice. But traces of painting have been discovered on several temples, which cannot leave the matter in doubt. It has at last been concluded, on reflection, that these bright colors were to give a clearer setting to the lines.
Characteristics of Greek Architecture.—A Greek temple appears at first a simple, bare edifice; it is only a long box of stone set upon a rock; the façade is a square surmounted by a triangle. At first glance one sees only straight lines and cylinders. But on nearer inspection "it is discovered[89] that not a single one of these lines is truly straight." The columns swell at the middle, vertical lines are slightly inclined to the centre, and horizontal lines bulge a little at the middle. And all this is so fine that exact measurements are necessary to detect the artifice. Greek architects discovered that, to produce a harmonious whole, it is necessary to avoid geometrical lines which would appear stiff, and take account of illusions in perspective. "The aim of the architect," says a Greek writer, "is to invent processes for deluding the sight."
Greek artists wrought conscientiously for they worked for the gods. And so their monuments are elaborated in all their parts, even in those that are least in view, and are constructed so solidly that they exist to this day if they have not been violently destroyed. The Parthenon was still intact in the seventeenth century. An explosion of gunpowder wrecked it.
The architecture of the Greeks was at once solid and elegant, simple and scientific. Their temples have almost all disappeared; here and there are a very few,[90] wholly useless, in ruins, with roofs fallen in, often nothing left but rows of columns. And yet, even in this state, they enrapture those who behold them.
Sculpture.—Among the Egyptians and the Assyrians sculpture was hardly more than an accessory ornament of their edifices; the Greeks made it the principal art. Their most renowned artists, Phidias, Praxiteles, and Lysippus, were sculptors.
They executed bas-reliefs to adorn the walls of a temple, its façade or its pediment. Of this style of work is the famous frieze of the Panathenaic procession which was carved around the Parthenon, representing young Athenian women on the day of the great festival of the goddess.[91]
They sculptured statues for the most part, of which some represented gods and served as idols; others represented athletes victorious in the great games, and these were the recompense of his victory.
The most ancient statues of the Greeks are stiff and rude, quite similar to the Assyrian sculptures. They are often colored. Little by little they become graceful and elegant. The greatest works are those of Phidias in the fifth century and of Praxiteles in the fourth. The statues of the following centuries are more graceful, but less noble and less powerful.
There were thousands of statues in Greece,[92] for every city had its own, and the sculptors produced without cessation for five centuries. Of all this multitude there remain to us hardly fifteen complete statues. Not a single example of the masterpieces celebrated among the Greeks has come down to us. Our most famous Greek statues are either copies, like the Venus of Milo, or works of the period of the decadence, like the Apollo of the Belvidere.[93] Still there remains enough, uniting the fragments of statues and of bas-reliefs which are continually being discovered,[94] to give us a general conception of Greek sculpture.
Greek sculptors sought above everything else to represent the most beautiful bodies in a calm and noble attitude. They had a thousand occasions for viewing beautiful bodies of men in beautiful poses, at the gymnasium, in the army, in the sacred dances and choruses. They studied them and learned to reproduce them; no one has ever better executed the human body.
Usually in a Greek statue the head is small, the face without emotion and dull. The Greeks did not seek, as we do, the expression of the face; they strove for beauty of line and did not sacrifice the limbs for the head. In a Greek statue it is the whole body that is beautiful.
Pottery.—The Greeks came to make pottery a real art. They called it Ceramics (the potter's art), and this name is still preserved. Pottery had not the same esteem in Greece as the other arts, but for us it has the great advantage of being better known than the others. While temples and statues fell into ruin, the achievements of Greek potters are preserved in the tombs. This is where they are found today. Already more than 20,000 specimens have been collected in all the museums of Europe. They are of two sorts:
1. Painted vases, with black or red figures, of all sizes and every form;
2. Statuettes of baked earth; hardly known twenty years ago, they have now attained almost to celebrity since the discovery of the charming figurines of Tanagra in Bœotia. The most of them are little idols, but some represent children or women.
Painting.—There were illustrious painters in Greece—Zeuxis, Parrhasius, and Apelles. We know little of them beyond some anecdotes, often doubtful, and some descriptions of pictures. To obtain an impression of Greek painting we are limited to the frescoes found in the houses of Pompeii, an Italian city of the first century of our era. This amounts to the same as saying we know nothing of it.
FOOTNOTES:
[81] The moderns have called this time the Age of Pericles, because Pericles was then governing and was the friend of many of these artists; but the ancients never employed the phrase.
[82] See Aristophanes' "Clouds."
[83] The "Memorabilia" and "Apologia."
[84] Because Plato had lectured in the gardens of a certain Academus.
[85] Because Aristotle had given instruction while moving about. [Or rather from a favorite walk (Peripatus) in the Lyceum.—ED.]
[86] The Greek word for temple signifies "dwelling."
[87] But not by a square opening in the roof as formerly supposed.—ED. See Gardner, "Ancient Athens," N.Y., 1902, p. 268.
[88] The Parthenon contained vases of gold and silver, a crown of gold, shields, helmets, swords, serpents of gold, an ivory table, eighteen couches, and quivers of ivory.
[89] Boutmy, "Philosophie de l'Architecture en Grèce."
[90] The most noted are the Parthenon at Athens and the temple of Poseidon at Pæstum, in south Italy.
[91] Knights and other subjects were also shown.—ED.
[92] Even in the second century after the Romans had pillaged Greece to adorn their palaces, there were many thousands of statues in the Greek cities.
[93] It is not certain that the Apollo Belvidere was not a Roman copy.
[94] In the ruins of Olympia has been found a statue of Hermes, the work of Praxiteles.
CHAPTER XV[ToC]
THE GREEKS IN THE ORIENT
ASIA BEFORE ALEXANDER
Decadence of the Persian Empire.—The Greeks, engaged in strife, ceased to attack the Great King; they even received their orders from him. But the Persian empire still continued to become enfeebled. The satraps no longer obeyed the government; each had his court, his treasure, his army, made war according to his fancy, and in short, became a little king in his province. When the Great King desired to remove a satrap, he had scarcely any way of doing it except by assassinating him. The Persians themselves were no longer that nation before which all the Asiatic peoples were wont to tremble. Xenophon, a Greek captain, who had been in their pay, describes them as follows: "They recline on tapestries wearing gloves and furs. The nobles, for the sake of the pay, transform their porters, their bakers, and cooks into knights—even the valets who served them at table, dressed them or perfumed them. And so, although their armies were large, they were of no service, as is apparent from the fact that their enemies traversed the empire more freely than their friends. They no longer dared to fight. The infantry as formerly was equipped with buckler, sword, and axe, but they had no courage to use them. The drivers of chariots before facing the enemy basely allowed themselves to be overthrown at once or leaped down from the cars, so that these being no longer under control injured the Persians more than the enemy. For the rest, the Persians do not disguise their military weakness, they concede their inferiority and do not dare to take the field except there are Greeks in their army. They have for their maxim 'never to fight Greeks without Greek auxiliaries on their side.'"
Expedition of the Ten Thousand.—This weakness was very apparent when in 400 Cyrus, brother of the Great King Artaxerxes, marched against him to secure his throne. There were then some thousands of adventurers or Greek exiles who hired themselves as mercenaries. Cyrus retained ten thousand of them. Xenophon, one of their number, has written the story of their expedition.
This army crossed the whole of Asia even to the Euphrates without resistance from any one.[95] They at last came to battle near Babylon. The Greeks according to their habit broke into a run, raising the war-cry. The barbarians took flight before the Greeks had come even within bow-shot. The Greeks followed in pursuit urging one another to keep ranks.
When the war-chariots attacked them, they opened their ranks and let them through. Not a Greek received the least stroke with the exception of one only who was wounded with an arrow. Cyrus was killed; his army disbanded without fighting, and the Greeks remained alone in the heart of a hostile country threatened by a large army. And yet the Persians did not dare to attack them, but treacherously killed their five generals, twenty captains, and two hundred soldiers who had come to conclude a truce.
The friendless mercenaries elected new chiefs, burned their tents and their chariots, and began their retreat. They broke into the rugged mountains of Armenia, and notwithstanding famine, snow, and the arrows of the natives who did not wish to let them pass, they came to the Black Sea and returned to Greece after traversing the whole Persian empire. At their return (399) their number amounted still to 8,000.
Agesilaus.—Three years after, Agesilaus, king of Sparta, with a small army invaded the rich country of Asia Minor, Lydia, and Phrygia. He fought the satraps and was about to invade Asia when the Spartans ordered his return to fight the armies of Thebes and Athens. Agesilaus was the first of the Greeks to dream of conquering Persia. He was distressed to see the Greeks fighting among themselves. When they announced to him the victory at Corinth where but eight Spartans had perished and 10,000 of the enemy, instead of rejoicing he sighed and said, "Alas, unhappy Greece, to have lost enough men to have subjugated all the barbarians!" He refused one day to destroy a Greek city. "If we exterminate all the Greeks who fail of their duty," said he, "where shall we find the men to vanquish the barbarians?" This feeling was rare at that time. In relating these words of Agesilaus Xenophon, his biographer, exclaims, "Who else regarded it as a misfortune to conquer when he was making war on peoples of his own race?"
CONQUEST OF ASIA BY ALEXANDER
Macedon.—Sparta and Athens, exhausted by a century of wars, had abandoned the contest against the king of Persia. A new people resumed it and brought it to an end; these were the Macedonians. They were a very rude people, crude, similar to the ancient Dorians, a people of shepherds and soldiers. They lived far to the north of Greece in two great valleys that opened to the sea. The Greeks had little regard for them, rating them as half barbarians; but since the kings of Macedon called themselves sons of Herakles they had been permitted to run their horses in the races of the Olympian games. This gave them standing as Greeks.
Philip of Macedon.—These kings ruling in the interior, remote from the sea, had had but little part in the wars of the Greeks. But in 359 B.C. Philip ascended the throne of Macedon, a man young, active, bold, and ambitious. Philip had three aims:
1. To develop a strong army;
2. To conquer all the ports on the coast of Macedon;
3. To force all the other Greeks to unite under his command against the Persians.
He consumed twenty-four years in fulfilling these purposes and succeeded in all. The Greeks let him alone, often even aided him; in every city he bribed partisans who spoke in his favor. "No fortress is impregnable," said he, "if only one can introduce within it a mule laden with gold." And by these means he took one after another all the cities of northern Greece.
Demosthenes.—The most illustrious opponent of Philip was the orator Demosthenes. The son of an armorer, he was left an orphan at the age of seven, and his guardians had embezzled a part of his fortune. As soon as he gained his majority he entered a case against them and compelled them to restore the property. He studied the orations of Isæus and the history of Thucydides which he knew by heart. But when he spoke at the public tribune he was received with shouts of laughter; his voice was too feeble and his breath too short. For several years he labored to discipline his voice. It is said that he shut himself up for months with head half shaved that he might not be tempted to go out, that he declaimed with pebbles in his mouth, and on the sea-shore, in order that his voice might rise above the uproar of the crowd. When he reappeared on the tribune, he was master of his voice, and, as he preserved the habit of carefully preparing all his orations, he became the most finished and most potent orator of Greece.
The party that then governed Athens, whose chief was Phocion, wished to maintain the peace: Athens had neither soldiers nor money enough to withstand the king of Macedon. "I should counsel you to make war," said Phocion, "when you are ready for it." Demosthenes, however, misunderstood Philip, whom he regarded as a barbarian; he placed himself at the service of the party that wished to make war on him and employed all his eloquence to move the Athenians from their policy of peace. For fifteen years he seized every occasion to incite them to war; many of his speeches have no other object than an attack on Philip. He himself called these Philippics, and there are three of them. (The name Olynthiacs has been applied to the orations delivered with the purpose of enlisting the Athenians in the aid of Olynthus when it was besieged by Philip.) The first Philippic is in 352. "When, then, O Athenians, will you be about your duty? Will you always roam about the public places asking one of another: What is the news? Ah! How can there be anything newer than the sight of a Macedonian conquering Athens and dominating Greece? I say, then, that you ought to equip fifty galleys and resolve, if necessary, to man them yourselves. Do not talk to me of an army of 10,000 or of 20,000 aliens that exists only on paper. I would have only citizen soldiers."
In the third Philippic (341) Demosthenes calls to the minds of the Athenians the progress made by Philip, thanks to their inaction. "When the Greeks once abused their power to oppress others, all Greece rose to prevent this injustice; and yet today we suffer an unworthy Macedonian, a barbarian of a hated race, to destroy Greek cities, celebrate the Pythian games, or have them celebrated by his slaves. And the Greeks look on without doing anything, just as one sees hail falling while he prays that it may not touch him. You let increase his power without taking a step to stop it, each regarding it as so much time gained when he is destroying another, instead of planning and working for the safety of Greece, when everybody knows that the disaster will end with the inclusion of the most remote."
At last, when Philip had taken Elatea on the borders of Bœotia, the Athenians, on the advice of Demosthenes, determined to make war and to send envoys to Thebes. Demosthenes was at the head of the embassy; he met at Thebes an envoy come from Philip; the Thebans hesitated. Demosthenes besought them to bury the old enmities and to think only of the safety of Greece, to defend its honor and its history. He persuaded them to an alliance with Athens and to undertake the war. A battle was fought at Chæronea in Bœotia, Demosthenes, then at the age of forty-eight, serving as a private hostile. But the army of the Athenians and Thebans, levied in haste, was not equal to the veterans of Philip and was thrown into rout.
The Macedonian Supremacy.—Philip, victorious at Chæronea, placed a garrison in Thebes and offered peace to Athens. He then entered the Peloponnesus and was received as a liberator among the peoples whom Sparta had oppressed. From this time he met with no resistance. He came to Corinth and assembled delegates from all the Greek states (337)[96] except Sparta.
Here Philip published his project of leading a Greek army to the invasion of Persia. The delegates approved the proposition and made a general confederation of all the Greek states. Each city was to govern itself and to live at peace with its neighbors. A general council was initiated to prevent wars, civil dissensions, proscriptions, and confiscations.
This confederacy made an alliance with the king of Macedon and conferred on him the command of all the Greek troops and navies. Every Greek was prohibited making war on Philip on pain of banishment.
Alexander.—Philip of Macedon was assassinated in 336. His son Alexander was then twenty years old. Like all the Greeks of good family he was accustomed to athletic exercises, a vigorous fighter, an excellent horseman (he alone had been able to master Bucephalus, his war-horse). But at the same time he was informed in politics, in eloquence, and in natural history, having had as teacher from his thirteenth to his seventeenth year Aristotle, the greatest scholar of Greece. He read the Iliad with avidity, called this the guide to the military art, and desired to imitate its heroes. He was truly born to conquer, for he loved to fight and was ambitious to distinguish himself. His father said to him, "Macedon is too small to contain you."
The Phalanx.—Philip left a powerful instrument of conquest, the Macedonian army, the best that Greece had seen. It comprised the phalanx of infantry and a corps of cavalry.
The phalanx of Macedonians was formed of 16,000 men ranged with 1,000 in front and 16 men deep. Each had a sarissa, a spear about twenty feet in length. On the field of battle the Macedonians, instead of marching on the enemy facing all in the same direction, held themselves in position and presented their pikes to the enemy on all sides, those in the rear couching their spears above the heads of the men of the forward ranks. The phalanx resembled "a monstrous beast bristling with iron," against which the enemy was to throw itself. While the phalanx guarded the field of battle, Alexander charged the enemy at the head of his cavalry. This Macedonian cavalry was a distinguished body formed of young nobles.
Departure of Alexander.—Alexander started in the spring of 334 with 30,000 infantry (the greater part of these Macedonians) and 4,500 knights; he carried only seventy talents (less than eighty thousand dollars) and supplies for forty days. He had to combat not only the crowd of ill-armed peoples such as Xerxes had brought together, but an army of 50,000 Greeks enrolled in the service of the Great King under a competent general, Memnon of Rhodes. These Greeks might have withstood the invasion of Alexander, but Memnon died and his army dispersed. Alexander, delivered from his only dangerous opponent, conquered the Persian empire in two years.
Victories of Granicus, Issus, and Arbela.—Three victories gave the empire to Alexander. In Asia Minor he overthrew the Persian troops stationed behind the river Granicus (May, 333). At Issus, in the ravines of Cilicia, he routed King Darius and his army of 600,000 men (November, 333). At Arbela, near the Tigris, he scattered and massacred a still more numerous army (331).
This was a repetition of the Median wars. The Persian army was ill equipped and knew nothing of manœuvring; it was embarrassed with its mass of soldiers, valets, and baggage. The picked troops alone gave battle, the rest were scattered and massacred. Between the battles the conquest was only a triumphal progress. Nobody resisted (except the city of Tyre, commercial rival of the Greeks); what cared the peoples of the empire whether they were subject to Darius or Alexander? Each victory gave Alexander the whole of the country: the Granicus opened Asia Minor, Issus Syria and Egypt, Arbela the rest of the empire.
Death of Alexander.—Master now of the Persian empire Alexander regarded himself as the heir of the Great King. He assumed Persian dress, adopted the ceremonies of the Persian court and compelled his Greek generals to prostrate themselves before him according to Persian usage. He married a woman of the land and united eighty of his officers to daughters of the Persian nobles. He aimed to extend his empire to the farthest limits of the ancient kings and advanced even to India, warring with the combative natives. After his return with his army to Babylon (324), he died at the age of thirty-three, succumbing to a fever of brief duration (323).
Projects of Alexander.—It is very difficult to know exactly what Alexander's purposes were. Did he conquer for the mere pleasure of it? Or did he have a plan? Did he wish to fuse into one all the peoples of his empire? Was he following the example already set him by Persia? Or did he, perhaps, imitate the Great King simply for vain-glory? And so of his intentions we know nothing. But his acts had great results. He founded seventy cities—many Alexandrias in Egypt, in Tartary, and even in India. He distributed to his subjects the treasures that had been uselessly hoarded in the chests of the Great King. He stimulated Greek scholars to study the plants, the animals, and the geography of Asia. But what is of special importance, he prepared the peoples of the Orient to receive the language and customs of the Greeks. This is why the title "Great" has been assigned to Alexander.
THE HELLENES IN THE ORIENT
Dissolution of the Empire of Alexander.—Alexander had united under one master all the ancient world from the Adriatic to the Indus, from Egypt to the Caucasus. This vast empire endured only while he lived. Soon after his death his generals disputed as to who should succeed him; they made war on one another for twenty years, at first under the pretext of supporting some one of the house of Alexander—his brother, his son, his mother, his sisters or one of his wives, later openly in their own names.
Each had on his side a part of the Macedonian army or some of the Greek mercenary soldiers. The Greeks were thus contending among themselves who should possess Asia. The inhabitants were indifferent in these wars as they had been in the strife between the Greeks and the Persians. When the war ceased, there remained but three generals; from the empire of Alexander each of them had carved for himself a great kingdom: Ptolemy had Egypt, Seleucus Syria, Lysimachus Macedonia. Other smaller kingdoms were already separated or detached themselves later: in Europe Epirus; in Asia Minor, Pontus, Bithynia, Galatia, Cappadocia, Pergamos; in Persia, Bactriana and Parthia. Thus the empire of Alexander was dismembered.
The Hellenistic Kingdoms.—In these new kingdoms the king was a Greek; accustomed to speak Greek, to adore the Greek gods, and to live in Greek fashion, he preserved his language, his religion, and his customs. His subjects were Asiatics, that is to say, barbarians; but he sought to maintain a Greek court about him; he recruited his army with Greek mercenaries, his administrative officers were Greeks, he invited to his court Greek poets, scholars, and artists.
Already in the time of the Persian kings there were many Greeks in the empire as colonists, merchants, and especially soldiers. The Greek kings attracted still more of these. They came in such numbers that at last the natives adopted the costume, the religion, the manners, and even the language of the Greeks. The Orient ceased to be Asiatic, and became Hellenic. The Romans found here in the first century B.C. only peoples like the Greeks and who spoke Greek.[97]
Alexandria.—The Greek kings of Egypt, descendants of Ptolemy,[98] accepted the title of Pharaoh held by the ancient kings, wore the diadem, and, like the earlier sovereigns, had themselves worshipped as children of the Sun. But they surrounded themselves with Greeks and founded their capital on the edge of the sea in a Greek city, Alexandria, a new city established by the order of Alexander.
Built on a simple plan, Alexandria was more regular than other Greek cities. The streets intersected at right angles; a great highway 100 feet broad and three and one-half miles in length traversed the whole length of the city. It was bordered with great monuments—the Stadium where the public games were presented, the Gymnasium, the Museum, and the Arsineum. The harbor was enclosed with a dike nearly a mile long which united the mainland to the island of Pharos. At the very extremity of this island a tower of marble was erected, on the summit of which was maintained a fire always burning to guide the mariners who wished to enter the port. Alexandria superseded the Phœnician cities and became the great port of the entire world.
The Museum.—The Museum was an immense edifice of marble connected with the royal palace. The kings of Egypt purposed to make of it a great scientific institution.
The Museum contained a great library.[99] The chief librarian had a commission to buy all the books that he could find. Every book that entered Egypt was brought to the library; copyists transcribed the manuscript and a copy was rendered the owner to indemnify him. Thus they collected 400,000 volumes, an unheard-of number before the invention of printing. Until then the manuscripts of celebrated books were scarce, always in danger of being lost; now it was known where to find them. In the Museum were also a botanical and zoölogical garden, an astronomical observatory, a dissecting room established notwithstanding the prejudices of the Egyptians, and even a chemical laboratory.[100]
The Museum provided lodgings for scholars, mathematicians, astronomers, physicians, and grammarians. They were supported at the expense of the state; often to show his esteem for them the king dined with them. These scholars held conferences and gave lectures. Auditors came from all parts of the Greek world; it was to Alexandria that the youth were sent for instruction. In the city were nearly 14,000 students.
The Museum was at once a library, an academy, and a school—something like a university. This sort of institution, common enough among us, was before that time completely unheard of. Alexandria, thanks to its Museum, became the rendezvous for all the Orientals—Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, and Syrians; each brought there his religion, his philosophy, his science, and all were mingled together. Alexandria became and remained for several centuries the scientific and philosophical capital of the world.
Pergamum.—The kingdom of Pergamum in Asia Minor was small and weak. But Pergamum, its capital, was, like Alexandria, a city of artists and of letters. The sculptors of Pergamum constituted a celebrated school in the third century before our era.[101] Pergamum, like Alexandria, possessed a great library where King Attalus had assembled all the manuscripts of the ancient authors.
It was at Pergamum that, to replace the papyrus on which down to that time they used to write, they invented the art of preparing skins. This new paper of Pergamum was the parchment on which the manuscripts of antiquity have been preserved.
FOOTNOTES:
[95] An episode told by Xenophon shows what fear the Greeks inspired. One day, to make a display before the queen of Cilicia, Cyrus had his Greeks drawn up in battle array. "They all had their brazen helmets, their tunics of purple, their gleaming shields and greaves. The trumpet sounded, and the soldiers, with arms in action, began the charge; hastening their steps and raising the war-cry, they broke into a run. The barbarians were terrified; the Cilician queen fled from her chariot, the merchants of the market abandoning their goods took to flight, and the Greeks returned with laughter to their tents."
[96] There were two assemblies in Corinth—the first in, 338, the second in 337.—ED.
[97] The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles composed in Asia Minor were written in Greek.
[98] They were called Lagidæ from the father of Ptolemy I.
[99] The library of the Museum was burnt during the siege of Alexandria by Cæsar. But it had a successor in the Serapeum which contained 300,000 volumes. This is said to have been burnt in the seventh century by the Arabs. [The tale of the destruction of the library under orders of Omar is doubtful.—ED.]
[100] King Ptolemy Philadelphus who had great fear of death passed many years searching for an elixir of life.
[101] There still remain to us some of the statues executed by the orders of King Attalus to commemorate his victory over the Gauls of Asia.
CHAPTER XVI[ToC]
THE LAST YEARS OF GREECE
DECADENCE OF THE GREEK CITIES
Rich and Poor.—In almost all the Greek cities the domains, the shops of trade, the merchant ships, in short, all the sources of financial profit were in the hands of certain rich families. The other families, that is to say, the majority of the citizens,[102] had neither lands nor money. What, then, could a poor citizen do to gain a livelihood? Hire himself as a farmer, an artisan, or a sailor? But the proprietors already had their estates, their workshops, their merchantmen manned by slaves who served them much more cheaply than free laborers, for they fed them ill and did not pay them. Could he work on his own account? But money was very scarce; he could not borrow, since interest was at the rate of ten per cent. Then, too, custom did not permit a citizen to become an artisan. "Trade," said the philosophers, "injures the body, enfeebles the soul and leaves no leisure to engage in public affairs." "And so," says Aristotle, "a well-constituted city ought not to receive the artisan into citizenship." The citizens in Greece constituted a noble class whose only honorable functions, like the nobles of ancient France, were to govern and go to war; working with the hands was degrading. Thus by the competition of slaves and their exalted situation the greater part of the citizens were reduced to extreme misery.
Social Strife.—The poor governed the cities and had no means of living. The idea occurred to them to despoil the rich, and the latter, to resist them, organized associations. Then every Greek city was divided into two parties: the rich, called the minority, and the poor, called the majority or the people. Rich and poor hated one another and fought one another. When the poor got the upper hand, they exiled the rich and confiscated their goods; often they even adopted these two radical measures:
1. The abolition of debts;
2. A new partition of lands.
The rich, when they returned to power, exiled the poor. In many cities they took this oath among themselves: "I swear always to be an enemy to the people and to do them all the injury I can."
No means were found of reconciling the two parties: the rich could not persuade themselves to surrender their property; the poor were unwilling to die of hunger. According to Aristotle all revolutions have their origin in the distribution of wealth. "Every civil war," says Polybius, "is initiated to subvert wealth."
They fought savagely, as is always the case between neighbors. "At Miletus the poor were at first predominant and forced the rich to flee the city. But afterwards, regretting that they had not killed them all, they took the children of the exiles, assembled them in barns and had them trodden under the feet of cattle. The rich reëntered the city and became masters of it. In their turn they seized the children of the poor, coated them with pitch, and burned them alive."
Democracy and Oligarchy.—Each of the two parties—rich and poor—had its favorite form of government and set it in operation when the party held the city. The party of the rich was the Oligarchy which gave the government into the hands of a few people. That of the poor was the Democracy which gave the power to an assembly of the people. Each of the two parties maintained an understanding with the similar party in the other cities. Thus were formed two leagues which divided all the Greek cities: the league of the rich, or Oligarchy, the league of the poor, or Democracy. This régime began during the Peloponnesian War. Athens supported the democratic party, Sparta the oligarchic. The cities in which the poor had the sovereignty allied themselves with Athens; the cities where the rich governed, with Sparta. Thus at Samos when the poor gained supremacy they slew two hundred of the rich, exiled four hundred of them, and confiscated their lands and houses. Samos then adopted a democratic government and allied itself with Athens. The Spartan army came to besiege Samos, bringing with it the rich exiles of Samos who wished to return to the city by force. The city was captured, set up an oligarchy, and joined the league of Sparta.
The Tyrants.—At length, the poor perceived that the democratic form of government did not give them strength enough to maintain the contest. In most of the cities they consented to receive a chief. This chief was called Tyrant. He governed as master without obeying any law, condemning to death, and confiscating property at will. Mercenaries defended him against his enemies. The following anecdote represents the policy of the tyrants: "Periander, tyrant of Corinth, sent one day to Thrasybulus, tyrant of Miletus, to ask what conduct he ought to follow in order to govern with safety. Thrasybulus led the envoy into the field end walked with him through the wheat, striking off with his staff all heads that were higher than the others. He sent off the envoy without further advice." The messenger took him for a fool, but Periander understood: Thrasybulus was counselling him to slay the principal citizens.
Everywhere the rich were killed by the tyrant and their goods confiscated; often the wealth was distributed among the poor. This is why the populace always sustained the tyrant.
There were tyrants in Greece from the sixth century; some, like Pisistratus, Polycrates, and Pittacus, were respected for their wisdom. At that time every man was called tyrant who exercised absolute power outside the limits of the constitution; it was not a title of reproach.
But when the tyrants made incessant warfare on the rich they became sanguinary and so were detested. Their situation is depicted in the famous story of Damocles. This Damocles said to Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, "You are the happiest of men." "I will show you the delight of being a tyrant," replied Dionysius. He had Damocles served with a sumptuous feast and ordered his servants to show the guest the same honors as to himself. During the feast Damocles raised his eyes and perceived a sword suspended to the ceiling held only by a horse hair, and hanging directly over his head. The comparison was a striking one—the tyrant's life hung only by a thread. The rich, his enemies, watched for an opportunity to cut it, for it was regarded as praiseworthy to assassinate a tyrant. This danger irritated him and made him suspicious and cruel. He dared not trust anybody, believed himself secure only after the massacre of all his enemies, and condemned the citizens to death on the slightest suspicion. Thus the name tyrant became a synonym of injustice.
Exhaustion of Greece.—The civil wars between rich and poor continued for nearly three centuries (430-150 B.C.). Many citizens were massacred, a greater number exiled. These exiles wandered about in poverty. Knowing no trade but that of a soldier, they entered as mercenaries into the armies of Sparta, Athens, the Great King, the Persian satraps—in short, of anybody who would hire them. There were 50,000 Greeks in the service of Darius against Alexander. It was seldom that such men returned to their own country.
Thus the cities lost their people. At the same time families became smaller, many men preferring not to marry or raise children, others having but one or two. "Is not this," says Polybius, "the root of the evil, that of these two children war or sickness removes one, then the home becomes deserted and the city enfeebled?" A time came when there were no longer enough citizens in the towns to resist a conqueror.
THE ROMAN CONQUEST
The Greek Leagues.—The most discerning of the Greeks commenced to see the danger during the second war of Rome with Carthage. In an assembly held at Naupactus in 207 B.C. a Greek orator said, "Turn your eyes to the Occident; the Romans and Carthaginians are disputing something else than the possession of Italy. A cloud is forming on that coast, it increases, and impends over Greece."[103]
The Greek cities at this time grouped themselves in two leagues hostile to each other. Two little peoples, the Ætolians and Achæans, had the direction of them; they commanded the armies and determined on peace and war, just as Athens and Sparta once did. Each league supported in the Greek states one of the two political parties—the Ætolian League the democratic, the Achæan League[104] the oligarchical.
The Roman Allies.—Neither of the two leagues was strong enough to unite all the Greek states. The Romans then appeared. Philip, the king of Macedon (197), and later Antiochus,[105] the king of Syria (193-169), made war on them. Both were beaten. Rome destroyed their armies and made them surrender their fleets.
Perseus, the new king of Macedon, was conquered, made prisoner, and his kingdom overthrown (167).[106] The Greeks made no effort to unite for the common defence; rich and poor persisted in their strife, and each hated the other more than the foreigner. The democratic party allied itself with Macedon, the oligarchical party called in the Romans.[107] While the Theban democrats were fighting in the army of Philip, the Theban oligarchs opened the town to the Roman general. At Rhodes all were condemned to death who had acted or spoken against Rome. Even among the Achæans, Callicrates, a partisan of the Romans, prepared a list of a thousand citizens whom he accused of having been favorable to Perseus; these suspects were sent to Rome where they were held twenty years without trial.
The Last Fight.—The Romans were not at first introduced as enemies. In 197 the consul Flamininus, after conquering the king of Macedon, betook himself to the Isthmus of Corinth and before the Greeks assembled to celebrate the games, proclaimed that "all the Greek peoples were free." The crowd in transports of joy approached Flamininus to thank him; they wished to salute their liberator, see his form, touch his hand; crowns and garlands were cast upon him. The pressure upon him was so great that he was nearly suffocated.
The Romans seeing themselves in control soon wished to command. The rich freely recognized their sovereignty; Rome served them by shattering the party of the poor. This endured for forty years. At last in 147, Rome being engaged with Carthage, the democratic party gained the mastery in Greece and declared war on the Romans. A part of the Greeks were panic-stricken; many came before the Roman soldiers denouncing their compatriots and themselves; others betook themselves to a safe distance from the cities; some hurled themselves into wells or over precipices. The leaders of the opposition confiscated the property of the rich, abolished debts, and gave arms to the slaves. It was a desperate contest. Once overcome, the Achæans reassembled an army and marched to the combat with their wives and children. The general Diœus shut himself in his house with his whole family and set fire to the building. Corinth had been the centre of the resistance; the Romans entered it, massacred the men, and sold the women and children as slaves. The city full of masterpieces of art was pillaged and burnt; pictures of the great painters were thrown into the dust, Roman soldiers lying on them and playing at dice.
THE HELLENES IN THE OCCIDENT
Influence of Greece on Rome.—The Romans at the time of their conquest of the Greeks were still only soldiers, peasants, and merchants; they had no statues, monuments, literature, science, or philosophy. All this was found among the Greeks. Rome sought to imitate these, as the Assyrian conquerors imitated the Chaldeans, as the Persians did the Assyrians. The Romans kept their costume, tongue, and religion, and never confused these with those of the Greeks. But thousands of Greek scholars and artists came to establish themselves in Rome and to open schools of literature and of eloquence. Later it was the fashion for the youth of the great Roman families to go as students to the schools of Athens and Alexandria. Thus the arts and science of the Greeks were gradually introduced into Rome. "Vanquished Greece overcame her savage conqueror," says Horace, the Roman poet; "she brought the arts to uncultured Latium."
Architecture.—The Romans had a national architecture. But they borrowed the column from the Greeks and often imitated their buildings. Many Roman temples resemble a Greek temple.
A wealthy Roman's house is composed ordinarily of two parts: the first, the ancient Roman house; the other is only a Greek house added to the first.
Sculpture.—The Greeks had thousands of statues, in temples, squares of the city, gymnasia, and in their dwellings. The Romans regarded themselves as the owners of everything that had belonged to the vanquished people. Their generals, therefore, removed a great number of statues, transporting them to the temples and the porticos of Rome. In the triumph of Æmilius Paullus, victor over the king of Macedon (Perseus), a notable spectacle was two hundred and fifty cars full of statues and paintings.
Soon the Romans became accustomed to adorn with statues their theatres, council-halls, and private villas; every great noble wished to have some of them and gave commissions for them to Greek artists. Thus a Roman school of sculpture was developed which continued to imitate ancient Greek models. And so it was Greek sculpture, a little blunted and disfigured, which was spread over all the world subject to the Romans.
Literature.—The oldest Latin writer was a Greek, Livius Andronicus, a freedman, a schoolmaster, and later an actor. The first works in Latin were translations from the Greek. Livius Andronicus had translated the Odyssey and several tragedies. The Roman people took pleasure in Greek pieces and would have no others. Even the Roman authors who wrote for the theatre did nothing but translate or arrange Greek tragedies and comedies. Thus the celebrated works of Plautus and of Terence are imitations of the comedies of Menander and of Diphilus, now lost to us.
The Romans imitated also the Greek historians. For a long time it was the fashion to write history, even Roman history, in Greek.
The only great Roman poets declare themselves pupils of the Greeks. Lucretius writes only to expound the philosophy of Epicurus; Catullus imitates the poets of Alexander; Vergil, Theocritus and Homer; Horace translates the odes of the Greek lyrics.
Epicureans and Stoics.—The Romans had a practical and literal spirit, very indifferent to pure science and metaphysics. They took interest in Greek philosophy only so far as they believed it had a bearing on morals.
Epicureans and Stoics were two sects of Greek philosophers. The Epicureans maintained that pleasure is the supreme good, not sensual pleasure, but the calm and reasonable pleasure of the temperate man; happiness consists in the quiet enjoyment of a peaceful life, surrounded with friends and without concern for imaginary goods. For the Stoics the supreme good is virtue, which consists in conducting one's self according to reason, with a view to the good of the whole universe. Riches, honor, health, beauty, all the goods of earth are nothing for the wise man; even if one torture him, he remains happy in the possession of the true good.
The Romans took sides for one or the other philosophy, usually without thoroughly comprehending either. Those who passed for Epicureans spent their lives in eating and drinking and even compared themselves to swine. Those calling themselves Stoics, like Cato and Brutus, affected a rude language, a solemn demeanor and emphasized the evils of life. Nevertheless these doctrines, spreading gradually, aided in destroying certain prejudices of the Romans. Epicureans and Stoics were in harmony on two points: they disdained the ancient religion and taught that all men are equal, slaves or citizens, Greeks or barbarians. Their Roman disciples renounced in their school certain old superstitions, and learned to show themselves less cruel to their slaves, less insolent toward other peoples.
The conquest of Greece by the Romans gave the arts, letters, and morals of the Greeks currency in the west, just as the conquest of the Persian empire by the Greeks had carried their language, customs, and religion into the Orient.