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Title: The greatest story in the world, Period I (of 3)
Author: Horace G. Hutchinson
Release date: November 21, 2024 [eBook #74770]
Language: English
Original publication: Canada: Longmans, Green and Co
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD, PERIOD I (OF 3) ***
[Illustration: Cover art]
[Frontispiece: THE GREAT PYRAMID FROM THE AIR (PRESENT DAY).]
THE GREATEST STORY
IN THE WORLD
BY HORACE G. HUTCHINSON
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
210 VICTORIA STREET, TORONTO
1923
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
{v}
PREFACE
There is much truth in the old saying about the difficulty of seeing
the wood for the trees. It is the aim of this short book to keep the
number of the trees as few as possible so that the wood, as a whole,
may be clearly visible.
It is designed to provide scholars and their teachers with an outline
of the most important facts in the history of mankind up to the date
of the firm establishment of the Roman Empire and the final
destruction of Jerusalem--a date at which the various threads of the
story come together to a point. In order to avoid confusing the
learner, and to enable him to get a clear view of the most important
facts, all less important facts and names and dates have been omitted.
With such an outline in his mind, the scholar, coming to the study of
a particular nation or period, should be able to fit that nation or
period into its proper place. In the absence of any such outline, he
must necessarily be at a loss to know the bearing of this or that
episode on the whole great story.
{vi}
I have to record, very gratefully, my deep obligation to Mr. R. B.
Lattimer for reading this book in MS., and for many valuable
suggestions and emendations.
H. G. H.
{vii}
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. Before History was Written
II. Egypt down to 1500 B.C.
III. Egyptian Religions, Sacred Writings, Etc.
IV. Babylonia
V. The Minoans in Crete
VI. The Meeting of the Empires
VII. The Jews and Israelites
VIII. The Persians and the Greeks
IX. The Glorious Days of Greece
X. The Meeting of the Nations round Sicily
XI. Macedon
XII. Rome and Carthage
XIII. Rome at Home and in the East
XIV. Rome Mistress of the World
XV. Troubles in the East
XVI. The Dispersal of the Jews
XVII. How the Threads draw together
Index
{ix}
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Great Pyramids, taken from an Aeroplane ... _Frontispiece_
A Baked Clay Tablet, inscribed with Babylonian Account of
the Deluge
_British Museum._
Cyperus Papyrus
Isis (with Horus) and Horus (with Symbols)
Bandaging a Mummy
_Wilkinson._
Ancient Egyptian Machine for raising Water, identical with
the "Shadoof" of the Present Day
_Wilkinson._
Assyrian King in his Robes
Coin of Knossos
Battering-Ram
Sennacherib in his Chariot returning from Battle
_Kouyurijik._
Greek Warrior, 7th-6th Century
_Gerhard_, 207.
Corinthian Architecture
_From Monument of Lysicrates._
Alexander the Great
_From a Bust in the British Museum._
Gallic Warriors
_From Bronzes in the British Museum._
Hannibal
Roman Legionaries
Slab from the Arch of Titus, representing the Spoils of
Jerusalem borne in Triumph
{1}
THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD
CHAPTER I
BEFORE HISTORY WAS WRITTEN
The greatest story in the world is the story of mankind around the
Mediterranean Sea. The reason why it is so great a story for us is
that it is really our own story. It is the story of the doings of
mankind from the earliest date at which we know anything at all about
man; and it is the story of the doings which have made you and me
what we are to-day, and have made our lives what they are.
You must first look at the world map to understand the story
properly. Take out the atlas or the globe of the world, and have a
look at the Mediterranean Sea as shown upon it. You will see how
very little space this sea occupies in comparison with the whole.
And I want you to observe this very particularly, because, as I hope
to show you, small though this space is, it is the space in, or
closely around, which nearly the whole story of man on the world, so
far as we know it, was made up to--what date shall we say?--only a
few hundred years ago--say the date of Columbus' discovery of
America. If you know the story of what happened in and about the
Mediterranean {2} Sea, you will know nearly all that anybody does
know of the really important things that men did in the world up to
the date of our Queen Elizabeth.
"But," you may say, "surely things were happening in other places, as
in China and in Peru, and in Mexico, and all over the world, all the
time?"
And so there were things happening, and things which made a very
great difference, no doubt, to the people to whom they happened; but
they were things that made scarcely any difference at all, so far as
we are able to see, to the history of the world. They made great
differences within the borders of the countries in which they
happened, but not beyond. The happenings that went on round the
shores of the Mediterranean were the making of the world as we know
it to-day: I mean, of course, in so far as men's actions have had
anything to do with the making of it.
For the first part of the story we shall be occupied with the eastern
end only of the Mediterranean; and I must ask you to carry your eye
just a little--not far--to the east again of the eastern shore of
that sea. That shore is called the Levant, from the Latin _levare_,
to rise, and it means the region in which the sun was seen to rise by
those who gave the name--that is to say, the East.
A very short way, as it looks on the map of the Western Hemisphere,
to the east of that Levant shore, you may see the two rivers
Euphrates and Tigris, rising very near together only a little south
of the Black Sea, yet not finding their way out into the sea till
they have gone a very long way south. Then, after coming together,
they go out in each other's company into the Persian Gulf. A great
part of that space between the two rivers is called Mesopotamia, {3}
and is the country where our armies had hard fighting in the Great
War. Mesopotamia is from Greek μέσος, meaning the middle, and
πόταμος, a river, and means the land in the middle of, or between,
the two rivers. Mediterranean, the name of the big sea, is from
Latin _medius_, meaning, again, the middle, and _terra_, the earth;
that is to say, the sea in the middle of the land. It is almost
entirely shut in by the land, its only way out being by the narrow
Straits of Gibraltar at the western end.
[Sidenote: The great rivers]
So there you see those two rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, running
south and making the land in the neighbourhood of their course very
rich and fertile, producing splendid crops and vegetation of all
kinds. And now, if you will carry your eye just a little to the west
and south of these, across Arabia and the Red Sea, you will see
another great river, only this time it is a river running, not from
the north to the south, but from the south to the north. It is the
Nile, the river of Egypt. It goes out into the Mediterranean past a
city called Alexandria. At its mouth it spreads out into a number of
channels, making an area intersected by water channels. This area
has something of the shape of the letter in the Greek alphabet which
corresponds to our "d" and is drawn thus Δ. That is roughly
the shape of the space occupied by these many mouths of the Nile, and
the region is therefore called the "Delta," which is the name of that
letter of the Greek alphabet.
I want you to take particular notice of these two great
river-courses, those of the Nile and of the Euphrates with the
Tigris. I say Euphrates "with Tigris," because the two are together
the fertilisers and waterers of the country lying between and around
{4} them. The Nile does his business of watering his own valley by
himself. It is most important that you should give your attention to
these two great water-courses, because it is along them that arose
the two greatest empires, the two strongest and most formidable
powers, of which the early history of the world has anything to tell
us.
You may easily understand how this should be so. Man, at first, from
what we are able to learn about him, knew very little of farming.
Such ideas as a "rotation of crops," or of manuring the fields were
probably quite unknown to him for very many ages. The first men whom
we are able to learn anything about seem to have depended on the
hunting of other animals for their living. Then came a time when
they began to live on their flocks and herds. Now, both for the
hunting and for the living by keeping cattle and sheep, they had to
be constantly on the move. They would kill out all the game in one
district and therefore have to move on to another. Or their cows and
sheep would eat up all the pasture in one place and so they had to be
moved to fresh feeding-grounds. These two first stages, which all
the scholars recognise, in man's story require that the people who
lived in them should be always moving, or at least ready to move.
The stages are called the Hunting Age and the Pastoral Age
respectively. The next age is called the Agricultural Age, when man
began to give "culture" to the "ager," or field. He was able to
settle then. It was not necessary for him to be constantly on the
move when he had begun to live by the crops which he grew. But he
was not yet a very clever or scientific farmer. He could grow good
crops only when Nature helped him very freely, only {5} on the best
soils, only in the river valleys or lands watered by the rivers, and
in a favourable climate.
The soil of Mesopotamia is still considered the most t naturally rich
in all the world: the Nile overflows its banks every year, and the
overflow leaves a wonderfully rich mud behind it; the climate both in
Mesopotamia and in Egypt is very favourable to the growth of
vegetation. Therefore, it is not to be wondered at that when men
began to lead a settled life they settled themselves down along the
courses of these two great rivers--I write two, because I am
regarding the Euphrates and Tigris as one, for the moment--and here
formed themselves into communities and nations so many in number and
so prosperous that they became stronger than any of their neighbours.
[Sidenote: Earliest man]
And now you are very likely to ask me, "What do we know about the
early history of man on the earth, and how do we know it?"
The first thing that we know about man on the earth is what we know
by finding the weapons or tools that show signs of his handiwork. It
is one of the most distinguishing marks of man, setting him most
clearly apart from all other animals, that he has been a maker of
tools and weapons for an immense number of years. Intelligent though
some dogs and monkeys and other animals are, not one of them has
thought of doing this. The oldest sort of tools or weapons that we
find are made of stone, generally of flint, chipped to a sharp edge
or point, so as to make axe or spear-head. We know them to be older
than any of the metal tools or weapons that we find, because we find
them in a deeper layer, or stratum, of the earth--a stratum deposited
before those which lie above it. And we find them in company with
fossil remains of animals which are {6} of less-developed species
than those in the strata above.
[Sidenote: Man's tools and weapons]
After a while--an immensely long while--there can be little doubt
that man discovered that the ore of metals, which is found in the
ground, can be fused, that is to say, melted by fire; that it can be
separated from its earthy surroundings, and so be made useful. Man
then began to make weapons and implements of metal, and found them
better than the weapons of stone. We may infer this from the fact
that the stone implements, of sharp and shapen flint, become less
numerous as we come to higher strata, or layers, in the ground, and
the metal implements are more numerous.
The metal of which the earliest metal implements were made is either
pure copper or bronze, which is a mixture of copper and tin. Copper
is not a very hard metal. I suppose that the more tin that was put
into the mixture, in comparison with the copper, the harder it would
be. And then, after a while--again a very very long while--man
discovered another, a harder, and therefore a better, kind of metal,
that is to say iron. And he has never found a better metal in all
the long years of his story since. Gold and platinum may be more
precious, because they are less common; but iron is a great deal more
useful to man. His weapons, his swords, bayonets, and cannons are
made of it; so are his ships; and you hardly can open your eyes in a
room without their resting on something made of iron. As soon as he
had found out the hardness of iron we may suppose that man quickly
gave up the use of the soft bronze, as he had formerly given up the
use of the stone in favour of the bronze. Thus it comes that you may
read of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. They refer
to these three stages {7} in man's history: first, when he was using
stone implements, made of the chipped flint or the like hard stone;
second, when he was using the bronze weapons and tools; and third,
when he was using iron.
"But," you will say, "all this is hardly history. It is not man's
story. We don't want to know so much what kind of tools and weapons
man had; we want to know what he did with them. You are not telling
us this."
It is quite true; I am not. But the reason why I have told you all
this about man's tools, before telling you what he did with them, is
that I want you to get clearly into your heads this truth--that even
the best and most learned of the men who have searched back into
history are able to tell us only a very small part of the whole story
of man's doings on the earth. They have found out, perhaps, all that
there is to find about the records that man has intentionally left of
himself. But the records begin rather far on--at what we may call a
late chapter--in the story. They begin only about six or seven
thousand years ago. And though that sounds a long time you must
understand that it really is quite short in comparison with all the
time that man has been living on the earth.
It is very difficult for us, who have lived only a few years, to form
an idea in our minds of a great many years. I hardly know how best I
may help you to do so. Suppose we take a thousand years as a length
for our consideration in the first place. Consider this, next, that
there are, certainly, people alive now who are a hundred years old,
and perhaps a little older. Imagine, if you can, the lives of ten
such persons who have lived one after the other. Imagine that each
{8} as a baby saw one of the others when that other was a hundred
years old. Thus it would only take ten of such happenings to cover
the whole stretch of a thousand years of which I want you to form
some idea. The years of the lives of ten very long-lived men would
cover it.
It is quite possible that you may have seen a living oak tree of much
more than a thousand years old. The people who have studied trees
tell us that there are oaks alive in England now which were alive in
the Saxon times; that is to say, some 1500 years ago--one and a half
thousand years. I know that these hints are not very effectual
towards helping you to get an idea of what a thousand years mean, but
they are the best that I can give you. They seem to help me to
realise just a little what this great stretch of years is. We can do
no better.
I wrote, a little while ago (p. 7), "the records that man has
intentionally left of himself." I put in that word "intentionally"
because, of course, the weapons and tools and implements and
ornaments that we find were not left, by those who used them, with
any intention that they should give us any information about their
users. They were just left, as a rule, accidentally. We can imagine
something from them about the kind of life that their users led, and
what kind of men they were that used them, but they were not trying
to give us any such information.
[Illustration: A BAKED CLAY TABLET INSCRIBED WITH BABYLONION ACCOUNT
OF THE DELUGE]
What we may call, I think, the intentional records began when we find
that man began to carve designs on stone of what he had been doing,
or to paint pictures showing his doings, and, especially, when he
began to cut written words on the stone. When we {9} begin to get
records of this kind, then we really do begin to read the story---we
begin to know what man was doing. And the first records of the kind
are of date some five thousand years before the birth of Christ; that
is to say, some seven thousand years ago.
[Sidenote: The first records]
And what do we find, from these carvings and pictures and writings,
that man was doing? The records that we are best able to read now
are those which we find in the more westerly of the two great
river-courses on which, as we have seen, man congregated. It is
along the Nile, in Egypt, that we find the record most clear. I have
little doubt that we might find it no less clear along the other
great river-courses, those of the Euphrates and Tigris, also, were it
not for this difference--that Egypt and the Nile region was very much
better supplied with hard stone than the Euphrates and Tigris region.
The result of that is that the inscriptions and figures cut on the
hard Egyptian stone are legible still. The other, more eastern,
records, cut on the brick which, in the absence of stone, the
builders made use of for nearly all building purposes, have crumbled
to pieces. The wonder, after so many years, is that anything at all
should be left, rather than that much has been lost. The Egyptian
climate is very dry, except near the river's mouth, at the Delta, and
that dryness has helped to preserve the records.
If we had the same records for the eastern as for the western
river-course, we should find, I expect, that the way the people lived
was very much alike in both. We may gather that it was a very
pleasant life, on the whole. The climate was delightfully warm; the
soil gave them plentiful crops with very {10} little work for it.
Probably the eastern people were the more pastoral, that is to say,
kept more cattle and sheep, but there were flocks and herds in the
Nile region also. And in both there were wild beasts for the hunting.
{11}
CHAPTER II
EGYPT DOWN TO 1500 B.C.
I told you that one of the ways by which man, at different ages of
the world, has been described is to speak of him in the Hunting
stage, the Pastoral, and the Agricultural. Although these people
along the great rivers probably settled down into the agricultural
stage earlier than others, still, that did not prevent them from
keeping cattle and hunting wild creatures. The older the
inscriptions and records, the more we see of the hunting, so that we
may imagine, as we should expect, that the quieter business of
farming gradually came to occupy more of their lives as time went on,
and that the hunting occupied them less. The wild beasts would no
doubt get hunted farther and farther back from the country that man
had settled in. An interesting fact is that one of the very oldest
of all the Egyptian engravings portrays ostriches, showing that these
great birds were inhabitants of Egypt at that time, though they do
not appear in any later engravings and are, of course, not living in
any part of Egypt now. These ostriches are carved on the face of a
sandstone rock, standing as nature placed it, and not worked into any
building. It is near a place which in the old days was called
Silsilla, and it was nearly at the southern end of the Egypt of those
times. For that Egypt did not extend nearly as far {12} south as the
country which we call by that name now. It ended at the first
cataract, where is now the town called Assouan. In ancient times
this Assouan was called Syene. Farther south than this, the country
was no longer called Egypt, but Nubia, though some Egyptians
inhabited the region a little south of the cataract. Look at your
map and you will very likely see that region still written down as
the "Nubian Desert." Look to the west of the line of the Nile and
you may read "Libyan Desert." Look to the right, again, and there is
"Arabian Desert."
[Sidenote: The Nile]
You will realise now what this means: that these people were here
living all along the banks of the great river, and that on either
side were deserts--sandy, barren wastes--which, for all they knew,
stretched away without end. They lived along this narrow and very
fertile strip which depended almost entirely on the river for its
fertility, and which that river fertilised in a very peculiar way.
At a certain time in the year it came down in a great flood and
inundated, that is to say, flowed over, all the low land lying on
either side of its course. This happened just about the season that
the star which we call Sirius, or the Dog-Star, but which they called
Sothis, or the star of their god Seth, showed itself above the
horizon at the moment of sunrise; and they dated the beginning of
their year from this rising with the sun of this exceedingly bright
and large star. This occurred in middle summer, so that the
beginning of their year, their "New Year's Day," was very different
from ours. It came nearly at the season of our Midsummer's Day. But
they had a very good reason for counting the beginning of their year
from it, because it was such a very important date for them. {13} It
really did begin a new year for them, for it was this inundation, or
overflow of the river, which gave their seeds, when they put them
into the ground, a chance of growing and giving them good crops.
After a time, during which the water had lain out over the low land,
it fell back again into the usual channel of the river and left all
the land which it had covered with a deposit, or layer, of rich dark
mud, better than any manure they could have given it.
We know now what it was that caused, and that still every year
causes, this overflow; it is the excessively heavy rainfall which
occurs annually in the interior of the country, where the sources of
the river are. But they did not know the reason, and made many
curious guesses to account for it.
Although there were these deserts around them, it seems certain that
the country quite close about the river had more trees and bushes on
it than it has now. For one thing, as the people settled in the
country and their numbers grew, they would be likely to clear off
patches of the woodland for their crops, and in the second place a
great eating down of the vegetation must have happened when they
began, as we know they did begin, to keep goats and, later, camels.
The long-necked camels would be able to reach up to the tops of small
trees, and to the lower branches of the taller ones, and, together,
it seems that the goats and camels made a great difference after a
while in the number of the trees. When a country is much stripped of
its trees, one of the results is that less rain falls there; so it is
quite sure that this stripping of the trees by the goats and camels
in Egypt caused the rainfall to be less than it had been before those
creatures were brought in. The country had to {14} depend more than
ever, for its crops, on the overflow of the river. Of course the
cutting down of the trees by carpenters with the stone or bronze axes
would help to reduce the numbers, and we know that the ancient
Egyptians understood the use of charcoal, which is made by burning
wood. So it is easy to understand that, in a country which had no
great supply of woodland to start with, what there was of it was soon
almost destroyed.
But until that destruction happened there was woodland enough to give
shelter to numbers of wild animals. Many of the animals which the
early Egyptians hunted were of kinds that are able to live in sandy
places where there is very little shelter, and, as it seems, very
little grass for them to eat. We find, by the old carvings and
written records, that they hunted the lion, leopard, jackal, wild
boars, antelopes of many kinds, wild sheep and oxen, the hippopotamus
in the river, and that they caught a variety of fish in the river and
in the Lake Moeris, into which water was led from the river by a
canal. The making of canals, to carry the water to places where it
was required, was done in very early days, and at the season of the
river's overflow water was led by a canal into this big lake which
acted as a reservoir, or storing place, for the water, from which
they could draw it off when wanted. The crocodiles, by which the
Nile was infested, were looked on as sacred.
They understood the use of nets for fishing, and used nets also for
surrounding four-footed animals and for catching birds. For the
killing of the larger and dangerous animals they had spears of
various make, and bows and arrows. It is doubtful whether they used
the boomerang--that wooden, flat, curved {15} weapon, used still by
the natives of Australia, which returns to the thrower after going
out to a distance of more than a hundred yards. There are carved
figures which look as if they might be figures of boomerangs, but
they might be "throwing sticks" such as some savage people still use
to give greater length of "leverage"--if you know what that means--to
increase the length and force of their throw of a spear. There were
immense numbers of wild-fowl about the river and the marshes. So the
ancient Egyptians must have had splendid sport.
[Sidenote: Domestic animals]
They seem to have kept, as domestic animals, ducks and geese, but it
was not till several thousand years later than the date of those
engravings in which we see the ostriches that our domestic fowls were
introduced. Hairy-coated sheep are shown on some of the early
carvings, but later a better sort of sheep, with woollier coat, and
curved, instead of straight, horns appears. They had oxen, which
drew their wooden ploughs and trod out the corn from the straw on the
threshing-floors, and were also used to draw weights. They had,
after a time, as we have seen, goats and camels, but the donkey was
the most common beast of burden, both when they traversed the desert
and when they were in their own fertile strip of country. Horses
were only brought in at rather a late date in the story. At first
they seem to have been used only for drawing chariots, and we find
them thus harnessed a long while before we are shown a rider mounted
on a horse, or, indeed, on any animal. They do not seem to have
known either the elephant or the giraffe, which are perhaps the most
remarkable creatures in all Africa. We know that they kept bees for
their honey. They had dogs, of a variety of breeds, and {16} used
them for hunting, apparently not regarding them as the unclean
creatures that most people in the East consider them now. They kept
cats and monkeys as pets, and used the cats to catch birds.
But the great business of their lives was the cultivation of their
crops. Egypt was a great corn-producing country. Make a note of
that in your minds, for the corn supply of Egypt became of great
importance in the later story of the Mediterranean and its shores.
The corn was principally of the kinds that we call wheat and barley.
And they had vegetables, such as lettuce, beans, peas, onions, and so
on. We may imagine a certain amount of sowing and hoeing, and
weeding and harvesting going on at the right seasons; but a great
deal of their time must have been taken up with the watering under
the scorching Egyptian sun. When the big flood had ceased to come
down from the rain-filled lakes in the south, and the river had gone
back into its ordinary channel, they had, after a while, to refresh
the ground again by raising water in buckets hung by a rope to a long
pole. The pole worked on a hinge about three-quarters of the way
down from the end to which the rope was fastened, so that the bucket
could be let down or drawn up by a man working at the end of the
pole. There are many pictures and carvings of this apparatus.
Probably very little rain fell at any part of the year in Egypt
itself after most of the trees had gone.
They had the palm trees on which the dates grow, and fig trees and
pomegranates. The wood of the palm must have been useful to them for
timber, in a country where timber trees were so scarce. And they had
the flax, of which they made linen. In early days there does not
seem to have been any cultivation of {17} the vine, though the wine
made in Egypt became quite important later. And they had the papyrus.
[Illustration: CYPERUS PAPYRUS.]
[Sidenote: The papyrus]
The papyrus was a plant which grew wild in the marshes, and it was of
the greatest importance to them, and also to us, because it was on
strips cut from the stalk and fastened flat together that the
substance was made which served them for paper, on which very much of
the story which I am now telling you was written. I have said that
much of the story is taken from the writings and pictures on stone,
whether on {18} the rocks as they stood where nature had put them, or
as the stone was worked into the tombs or monuments of kings and
great people, into pyramids and the like. But the greatest part of
the record is written on the papyrus. The stem of the plant was used
also for the building of boats, and it supplied them with material
for ropes. Though it was found wild, they cultivated it, and so
increased the natural supply.
It is likely that their houses were commonly built of brick. You
will have noticed that as the country was so poorly supplied with
timber-trees few wooden houses could be built. But the brick of
which the houses of most of the people were made would not be of the
brick that we know. You will remember that one of the burdens
imposed on the Israelites in Egypt was to make bricks "without
straw," and it may have happened to you to wonder at that, because,
as you know, our bricks are not made with straw. But straw and
pieces of reed were used in the making of much of the ancient brick,
because the clay often was not burnt in a kiln, but only dried by the
sun's heat. This did not give nearly so hard or lasting a brick as
the brick that was burnt by the fire in a kiln, but a mixture of the
straw helped to hold the clay together and to prevent its crumbling.
They knew all about the proper burning of bricks, to make them
durable, also, but this sun-drying was a less troublesome way, and
was used for the commoner kind of brick.
[Sidenote: Works of art]
At a very early period they became skilful in the making of pottery,
by which I mean vessels for household use, such as jugs, etc., in
clay, and they were clever workers of glass. They made ornaments of
gold, and engraved jewels. They were interested in {19} medicine,
and knew the use of splints for setting broken bones. They knew
something of the movement of the stars, as seen from the earth. We
have noticed that they began their New Year at the date of the rising
of Sothis, as they called the Dog-Star, about the season that the
Nile began to rise. The carvings and drawings on stone and on
papyrus are remarkable, even from the first, for the correctness and
firmness of the outline. The earliest show the hands and feet left
in a curiously unfinished state, and many of the figures have the two
legs shown as one. As time went on they came to draw the figure very
much more perfectly and with attention to finishing the hands and
feet. The faces indicate quite clearly the race of men to which the
originals of the portraits belonged.
But, of course, the achievements of the old Egyptians by which they
are best known to us are those gigantic monuments the Pyramids, that
strange head of the Sphinx, the many temples and the mummied corpses
found within them. All these, as well as their hieroglyphical or
picture writing, are connected very closely with their religious
beliefs; and this is such a very curious and interesting subject that
I propose to write about it in a chapter of its own.
I do not know whether you will agree, but it seems to me that the
story of mankind is much more amusing, and will do us much more good,
if we try to see how the peoples of the world lived from time to
time, what kind of people they were, and how they worked and played
and fought, rather than if we just study a list of the names of their
kings and of their towns. I do not think the names can help us much,
unless we know what the people that the names belonged to did, or
what happened in the towns so called. For that {20} reason I have
avoided mentioning any names that do not seem to have that kind of
interest in the story. I think they only confuse us and get in the
way of our seeing how the things happened that really did make a
difference in the world.
But you are not to suppose that when these Egyptian people had
settled themselves down along the course of this pleasant river, they
were allowed to remain there quite peaceably, without any
interference from their neighbours who lived in a far less fertile
and agreeable country. The greatest of all facts in Egypt was the
Nile. It went from end to end of the country. People went along it
in boats and ships, they fished in it, hunted the hippopotamus, and
possibly the crocodile, in it. Sometimes they were killed by either
of these, and especially by the latter. The Nile was their life.
Without it they would have died.
There was desert all about them, but it was not desert so deserted
that it was quite without inhabitants. There were "oases," or
fertile patches, in the desert itself, and the deserts had their
limits; there were tolerably fertile lands beyond them again. And it
has always been a wonder how the desert-dwellers, such as the Arabs
and some kinds of antelopes, do manage to subsist where there seems
to be so little for them to eat, and almost nothing for them to drink.
But there were people--Libyans on the west, Nubians on the south,
Ethiopians (what we should call negroes)--of various tribes who
probably were envious enough of the easy life that they saw their
neighbours living along the river-bank. Therefore, although it
sounds as if it were a very peaceful, as well as pleasant, life that
I have tried to show you that these {21} ancient Egyptians were
leading, you are not to suppose that they were not beset, from time
to time, by incursions and invasions and attacks by the peoples round
about them. It would take far too long to recite all these invasions
against which they succeeded more or less in holding their own. That
they were not always successful is quite evident from the records.
[Sidenote: The First Dynasty]
The record of Egyptian kings is given to us by an Egyptian priest,
named Manctho, and the date of the earliest king, the founder of what
is called the First Dynasty, has been estimated by some students to
have been as far back as 5500 years before Christ was born. That is
to say, more than seven thousand years ago. Other learned men have
supposed the date of this first king to be quite two thousand years
later in the story. This shows the very great difficulty of fixing
the dates of these events that happened so very long ago.
What is more important is that we know at least one of the great acts
of this first Egyptian king, whose name was Menes. It is known, from
inscriptions, that he united into one kingdom what had, before him,
been two countries, Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt.
And here I must warn you of a difficulty which may perplex you. On
the map you may see that Lower Egypt is the part near the Delta, that
is the mouth, or mouths, of the Nile where it flows into the sea.
Upper Egypt is the more southern part reaching as far south as the
first cataract. But, as you look at the map, this Lower Egypt looks
upper, to your eye. You must not pay any attention to that, but must
remember that the northern part must be lower, really, because it is
the part towards which the river runs; and a river, as you know, must
run from higher ground to {22} lower. Remember, then, that Lower
Egypt is the northern part, near the sea and Upper Egypt the southern.
Menes united these into one kingdom, but they were separated for a
time again, under later kings, and this shows that not only were the
Egyptians sometimes at war with the tribes from the deserts, who
invaded them, but also that the people along the river-banks were
sometimes fighting among themselves.
By a dynasty is meant both the king who is the founder, the first, of
that dynasty, and also those of his children and grandchildren, or
relatives, who followed him on the throne. It is as we may speak of
the Stuart dynasty or the Hanover dynasty, of our own kings. When
there were no more relations of a dynasty to come to the throne, or
when one king was conquered by a foreign invader, or by a revolution
of his own subjects, the next king was called the founder of a new
dynasty, which went on till his family also died out or was turned
out.
In the long history of Egypt, from the time of Menes, the founder of
the first dynasty, to the conquest of Egypt by Alexander of Macedon
in 332 B.C.--that is, 332 years before the birth of Christ--there
were thirty-one of these dynasties, or kingly families, which ruled
Egypt one after the other.
We speak of the rulers of all these dynasties as kings, but it is
evident that they did not all have the same authority over their
subjects. In our own history we know that sometimes the barons were
very powerful, and the king of England had great difficulty in
keeping them under his rule. Something of the same kind happened at
various times in Egypt. There were local chiefs, with a large
following of men, who {23} were nearly independent of the actual
king. But in the end the kings regained the authority over them.
[Sidenote: The new empire]
The capital city, in the earliest times, was Memphis, in Lower Egypt,
and so it remained until the ninth and tenth dynasties, when the
power of the Memphis kings was overthrown by conquerors from the
north, and the country was distracted by revolutions, so far as we
can learn, for a long period. Then a people called the Hyksos,
coming from the north-east, from Syria, invaded Egypt and established
their power there for many generations. And then came a new dynasty,
which is thought to have arisen from a combining together of the
chief men in Upper Egypt, of which Thebes was the capital. This
rising drove out the foreign Hyksos and gave a military strength to
Egypt which it never had before. The greatest king of this the
greatest period of Egypt in the old days was Tethmosis III. He was a
stepson of Hatshepsut, the wife of his father Tethmosis II., and
Hatshepsut herself ruled as queen until Tethmosis came of age. That
was in, or about, 1500 B.C.
The date of the founding of this, the eighteenth, dynasty was 1580
B.C.; and with this period begins what is called the New Empire. The
word "empire," taking the place of that of kingdom, seems to show
that the Egyptians were claiming to extend their power beyond their
own country. And we know that they actually did so.
I do not want, for the moment, to follow down the story of Egypt any
further than this, because it is time that we turned our eyes
eastward, to see what was going on along that other great river-fed
region, where the Euphrates and the Tigris flow down together. The
point which we have now come to in the Egyptian {24} story is a point
at or about which new and great things began to happen. The two
great world forces--that of Egypt on the one side and that of
Babylonia, which is the name given to the empire established in the
east, on the other--began to clash together as they had not clashed
before. Their rivalry, and the wars between them, and the catching
up into these wars and the squeezing between them of the unfortunate
smaller peoples that lived in the country by which the two big
empires were divided--these are the principal things in the story of
the world for a thousand years and more after the time of the
founding of the eighteenth dynasty. So we must now try to make out
something of the story of that other great power along those more
eastern rivers.
But before we go to that eastern story I want to put in a chapter,
the chapter that I spoke of a few pages back, to tell you something
about the religion of the old Egyptians, the strange gods that they
worshipped, the burial of their dead, their tombs, their language,
and their sacred writing or hieroglyphic.
I think, however, before we begin the new chapter, I should like you
to take a look at the map again and observe the position of the two
great river-courses--the western, which we have been talking about,
and the eastern, to which we are soon to come--because these are the
real big facts which matter in the world's story. The Egyptian
religion and all connected with it are most interesting, but the
clash of the big empires was what made the early history of the world.
[Sidenote: The two empires]
You will see, then, these great river regions and will imagine the
two powerful empires established in them, and then you will see that
there lies between the two a country in which lies the land of
Palestine, {25} where the Jews lived. You will see that the big
empires are divided from each other, nearly separated, by the Red Sea
running up into the land with two arms, the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf
of Akaba. Between these two stretches or arms lies the Sinai
Peninsula, and northward of Egypt and westward of Palestine there is
the Mediterranean Sea. The result of this distribution of sea and
land is that the only way by which the two big empires could come
into touch with one another was by way of Palestine. The southern
desert, even where those big arms of the sea did not run up into it,
was almost as impassable for the passage of armies as the sea itself.
Neither of the empires, in the early days, had much of a fleet, by
which they could get at one another across sea. The consequence is
that we have to regard that stretch of land which is occupied on the
map by Palestine as the bridge, and the only bridge, by which they
could come into contact, either for purposes of trade or of war.
It is only natural to think, therefore, that when they began, as they
did in the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, to make big wars on each
other, the tribes that held, or that vainly tried to hold, that
bridge, would be terribly squeezed and harassed by first one and then
the other of the big neighbours coming upon them, with very little
respect for their rights. That is, in fact, exactly what we know did
happen. And it is only a wonder that the Jews at that time were not
squeezed utterly out of existence between the two. It is one of the
biggest wonders, as well as one of the biggest facts, in history that
they were not so squeezed out. When I say it is one of the biggest
facts, I mean that it made an enormous difference to the history of
{26} the world, for if they had allowed themselves to be squeezed
out, if they had not even then showed that extraordinary toughness
and tenacity which has always been a great part of their national
character, the history of the world would have been very different
from what it has been, Christianity could not have spread through the
world as it has spread, and the whole course of events would have
been largely changed.
In what way it would have been changed we cannot say; but that it
would have been changed enormously we cannot doubt.
Keep, then, these great facts clearly in your minds: the position of
these two big empires to west and east, and the comparatively narrow
bridge between them, by which they could communicate with each other.
If you have this, like a map without any of the other names filled
in, in the background of your minds, you will be able to fit in the
happenings as they occur.
And now for our chapter on the Egyptian religions, beliefs, customs,
and so on.
{27}
CHAPTER III
EGYPTIAN RELIGIONS, SACRED WRITINGS, ETC.
Talking, if you will carefully think of it, you will find to be just
sending messages to one another by means of sounds. You learned to
talk--that is to say, to send messages in this way--when you were a
child, before you learned to write. So did the early Egyptians and
all early peoples. But the difference between you and them is that
you had some one to teach you to write, and they had not. They had
to invent a way of doing this for themselves.
When you were a child you saw the sun rising, winter and summer
following each other, and all the rest of the events in Nature, and
you had some one to tell you how they all happened. The early
Egyptians and the others saw all these things, but they had no one to
tell them how they happened. They had to puzzle them out, or try to
do so, for themselves.
They saw that such things were entirely beyond the power of any mere
man to make to happen; therefore they attributed the happenings to
some invisible power or powers immensely stronger and more gifted
than themselves. And of course they were perfectly right in so
doing. Only the mistake, or one of the mistakes, they made was this:
they imagined each of the greatest marvels that they saw to be caused
by a power which was busied with that particular marvel. {28} Thus
they thought that it was one power which made the corn to grow in the
spring-time, for instance; another power that caused the sun to rise
in the morning, and so on. They would see the flowing of a river,
with its appearance of being a live thing as it went along, now
smooth, now rippling, and they would go so far as to imagine that
each stream had its own particular power or god looking after it.
Or they might actually look on the marvellous thing as itself a god.
The sun, for instance, which they saw to give them light and warmth
and to be a very splendid object--many races thought, and not
unnaturally, that the sun itself was a god, and a very great god.
They saw the moon, and to some of them it seemed that the moon was a
power not unlike the sun, but less strong, and so it occurred to them
that perhaps the moon was a goddess and the wife of the great god the
sun. But the Egyptians, unlike others, looked on the moon as a male
deity. When they had gone thus far in guesses about the heavenly
bodies, they did not have to go any great way farther in order to
ascribe all sorts of power--less than the power of the sun or of the
moon--to the other planets and stars.
[Sidenote: Sacrifices]
And, once more, these early, unlearned men, who had no one to teach
them, but had to find out everything for themselves, saw indeed that
they received great good from, let us say, the warmth of the sun and
the overflowing of the river, and the growing of their crops, to give
them food. They could worship the power that they thought had given
them all this. But then, again, they would sometimes find themselves
visited by some dreadful disaster, perhaps an earthquake, or terrible
pestilence, or famine when the river did not overflow in its usual
way. And these evil {29} things they had to ascribe to some power
very much more strong than themselves. Thence they got the idea of
evil gods, or devils, as well as of the good and kind gods. The idea
arose that they must do something to avert these calamities, by
giving to the powers or gods who caused the calamities something that
the gods would like. And since men had to think that the gods would
like the things that they themselves liked, they sacrificed to them,
as it was called--that is to say, gave them gifts of such things as
they themselves liked best. It was rather a puzzle, perhaps, to know
how to give a gift to a being who was invisible, and who would not
come and take the gift away; but they solved that puzzle as best they
could. They burned some of the gifts, or sacrifices, so that the
solid flesh of the sacrificed creature was turned into smoke and went
up into the air and disappeared. Or they poured libation of wine or
of blood upon the earth, where it soaked in. So in both instances it
became invisible, and therefore it might be supposed that it had been
accepted by the invisible god.
And then, finally, there is this other point that I want you to
notice about the speculations, or guesses, of man in his earliest
ages, about the powers by which he was surrounded and which he was
trying to understand--early man did not distinguish so clearly as we
do between himself and the other animals. He regarded them as
closely related to himself. Many of the Red Indians and other tribes
even to-day believe themselves to be descended from some animal who
was the founder, the first ancestor, of their tribe. Men of that
tribe will on no account kill an animal of the species to which they
believe that their first ancestor belonged. Thus a tribe which
believes its ancestor to {30} have been a beaver, let us say, would
hold all beavers sacred, would never kill one, and very likely would
use the figure of a beaver as a kind of family crest. The beaver
would become a kind of god to them, and when it was looked on in this
way it was called the "totem" of the tribe.
I mention this idea of "totem" worship because it may have been
somewhat in this way that the Egyptians came to consider as sacred
such curious, and so many, animals as they did--cats, hawks, bulls,
crocodiles, even beetles. I do not say that it was thus that the
worship of these creatures came to prevail among the Egyptians. I do
not think that there is any at all clear evidence that it came about
in this way; but it may have been so, and it is rather difficult to
see how else it grew.
You may have noticed that I wrote, for the heading of this chapter,
"religions" in the plural, with an "s," not "religion." And this I
did because the religion of the ancient Egyptians was not one. There
are at least three different lines of religious thought and
speculation to be traced, so tangled up together that the whole
subject becomes very difficult to understand, but beyond all doubt
there are these three. There is this animal worship; there is the
worship of the sun and moon; and there is the worship of the two
opposed and yet connected powers that bring good and evil.
[Sidenote: Legends of the Gods]
The invention, the imagination, of the mind of early man was disposed
to making up stories about these gods. If the stories explained the
events that people saw happening, so much the better. Now there was
a god, by name Osiris, who was first worshipped, as it seems, only in
a town called Busiris. Near by {31} was a town called Buto, where it
is thought that a goddess, to whom they gave the name of Tsis, was
worshipped. For some reason which we do not know, the worship of
Osiris extended until it spread over the whole of Egypt, and with it
the worship of Isis, who was supposed to be the wife of Osiris. The
story of Osiris and Isis was told very differently at different times
and in different places. According to the Greek writer, Plutarch,
the legend which he heard about them went thus: that Osiris a very
long time ago reigned as a great king over all Egypt. He civilised
the people and taught them arts and science. He had a wicked brother
Seth, who made a conspiracy against him and killed him, and put his
body into a coffin and threw it into the Nile. The wife of Osiris,
Isis, after long search, found the body and brought it back. Then
she went on a visit to her son, Horus, who lived at Buto; and while
she was away the wicked Seth came back, found the body (mummified, as
we may suppose) of Osiris, took it away and cut it up into fourteen
pieces, so that Isis might never again have it as a whole body.
[Illustration: HORUS, ISIS (WITH HORUS)]
From that point there seem to be two versions of the story. One is
that Isis, having found the fourteen pieces, buried each piece where
she found it. Another is that she collected the pieces, put them all
together again, and that Osiris, thus made whole again, ruled in the
under-world as king of the dead.
Horus, according to one story, later attacked and slew his uncle, the
wicked Seth, to avenge his father; and in this contest between the
good Osiris and the bad Seth we perhaps see an attempt to account for
the good and evil in the world. If that is so, the good finally
triumphed in that story, because Horus, {32} the good son of the good
father, killed the bad Seth.
Another story, however, says that the struggle between Horus and Seth
was so equal that Egypt was divided between them, Lower Egypt going
to Horus and Upper Egypt to Seth.
On the inscriptions, in the hieroglyphic, or sacred graving, to which
we will come directly, Horus is represented by the figure of a
falcon, Seth by that of some animal which has been variously guessed
to be a jerboa or an okapi, but which looks very much as if it might
be some kind of dog. It has been conjectured that the contest
recorded between Horus and Seth may be a growth from wars waged
between tribes represented the one by the falcon and the other by
this four-footed animal of Seth's, whatever it may be.
The story, and the different shapes it takes, and the way in which
the incidents get transformed so as to fit in with the incidents of
quite a different story, may help you to understand something of the
way in which the legends grew. They not only grew, separately, into
very strange shapes, but they grew into one another, like
neighbouring trees with their branches inter-tangled, so that it is
very hard to distinguish them.
One thing you may have noticed in the story--that Osiris, according
to one version at least, becomes king of the dead in the nether
world. That means, of course, that these people so very long ago
believed in the life of a man's soul after his body was dead. That
is curious, is it not, seeing that they had had no revelation, so far
as we know, to tell them that it was so? We may speak of that a
little more, in a minute or two.
Probably you may have seen pictures of some of the {33} hieroglyphics
or sacred inscriptions, and if you have you may have noticed that
some of the figures have human bodies and beasts' heads.
Thus Horus is often shown with a man's body and a falcon's head.
Anubis has a man's body and a jackal's head, and the like happens
with many of the other animal gods. We may take it all as sign of
the confusion in the minds of these early people with regard to the
difference between gods and man and other animals.
[Sidenote: Various religions]
The confusion of religions in Egypt is particularly great, very
likely because different tribes brought in different beliefs and
gods, and they grew confused with the beliefs and gods already there.
Where they believed that there was such a great number of gods, it
was almost necessary that the power of each god must be supposed to
be restricted to a certain place. Otherwise the fighting between
them for mastery would be endless. We have seen, however, how, as
time went on, the idea grew of Osiris as a god universal throughout
Egypt. That was a long step forward in the direction of belief in a
single god, ruler and maker of all the universe. And yet then a
further confusion arose, which led a step farther again in the same
right direction, when Osiris began to be identified with--that is to
say, to be considered the same as--the Sun-god, whom they called Re
or Ra.
They had very many and various stories and fancies about this great
god Re, the Sun--that at dawn he began to sail across the sky in a
boat called the boat of the dawn, and again, at night, that he got
into another boat, the boat of the dark, and sailed along underneath
the earth all night to catch his morning boat again. Another story
was that he was born a baby in the dawn, {34} grew to his full manly
strength at midday, and then declined again into an old man, dying at
night. Stories of the same sort were invented to account for the
apparent movements of the moon and stars and other planets. Of
course they had no knowledge of the earth turning on its own axis, or
travelling round the sun.
It seems curious enough that Osiris should be at one time identified
with the sun, the god of the heavens, and yet be the ruler of the
under-world, where the souls of dead men and women went after death.
Perhaps it seems less curious when we remember that the sun himself
was supposed to sail nightly underneath the earth. But it is quite
impossible for us to have any clear idea of how they reasoned about
these things, partly because the accounts we have of it are all very
vague and given to us only by the records of the inscriptions which
survive, and by travellers, like the Greek Herodotus, to whom the
priests would not tell a great deal, and partly because the ideas of
the people even who held those beliefs must have been very far from
clear.
We know that they worshipped a great number of gods, and different
gods in different places. The bull, Apis, was a sacred animal which
was worshipped especially at Memphis, the capital of Lower Egypt.
Bast was the cat goddess, worshipped principally at Bubastis, where
thousands of mummied bodies of cats have been found. Horus, the
falcon; Seth, an animal not quite clearly identified; and Anubis, the
jackal, I have mentioned already. And they worshipped the crocodile,
the serpent, the ram, and many other creatures, but especially the
sacred beetle, the scarabæus, in whose likeness those "scarabs" which
we have in great numbers from Egypt, were made. {35} Very often the
"scarabs," in stone or glazed pottery, were engraved with the crests
of the kings and used as seals.
[Sidenote: The priests]
There were a very great many priests. Every town seems to have had
its temple to one or other of the many gods, and there were priests
attached to every temple. But all the priests were not only priests
and nothing else. I mean, that they might do other business as well;
rather as if a clergyman here were to be a tradesman or a lawyer as
well as doing his work in the Church. Sometimes the principal priest
would be the great man of the district, the chief land-owner. But
where religions were so many and so different, the customs must have
differed very much too.
During the course of the eighteenth dynasty, with which the new
empire and the great power of Egypt began, one of the kings tried to
do away with all these different religions and to extend the worship
of Osiris, identified with Ra, the Sun-god, over the whole of Egypt.
And he succeeded; but his success was only for a time, and after a
short period the Egyptians went back to the worship of their many
gods again.
It was very important, in the opinion of the Egyptians, that the gods
at each place, and of each kind, should be worshipped with the
exactly right ceremonies. If the ceremonies were not rightly
performed the god might be angry and bring all kinds of calamities
upon you. It seemed to them far more important that these rites
should be properly performed than that those who performed them
should lead very good lives. They had their laws and their customs
which regulated their conduct, but they do not seem to have feared
that the gods would visit them with punishment in {36} this life for
any wrong-doing. They did, however, consider that any acts of
injustice, such as robbery or dishonesty, would affect the state of
their soul after death. That would be the business of Osiris, the
ruler of the dead, to look after. We will speak of that in a minute.
The priests were the people who knew exactly how the worship of the
gods at each place should be performed. They could read the
religious instructions which were written in what is called the
hieroglyphic--the sacred engravings. The hieroglyphic was probably
the beginning of all writing.
If you can imagine a time when writing was unknown, and when there
was need to send communications from one to another, and that these
communications must not be known to the bearer of the message, how
would you set about doing it?
Well, one way, at least, of doing it would be by sending signs marked
on papyrus or parchment or on a slate, or whatever you might have
convenient for making marks on, and to hope that the man you were
sending them to would be clever enough to understand what you meant,
and that the man by whom you were sending them would not. And if you
wanted to send a message about any particular thing, the most easy
and obvious way to begin would be by making a simple drawing of that
thing. So, if you wanted to send a message about a bird, you would
draw the figure, or outline, of a bird. If you wanted to send a
message about an eye, a human eye, you might draw the figure of an
eye. I suggest these two things because they are two of the most
simple figures that actually do appear in the picture-writing which
is the old Egyptian hieroglyphic.
{37}
Now we can go a step farther. The eye is the thing that we see with.
Therefore, if we want to send a message to our friend and tell him
that we "see a bird," if we put the picture of an eye, which is the
organ of sight, and a bird next to it, our friend, if he is at all
intelligent, may understand the message to mean "I see a bird."
[Sidenote: Three kinds of writing]
That, or something like that, may have been--I do not say that it
was, but I think it most likely--the way in which this
picture-writing began. I ought not to call it picture-writing,
really, for it was not that. _Hieros_ is Greek for sacred, or for a
priest; _glyphein_ is Greek for to grave, or engrave. So
hieroglyphic meant sacred characters engraved; that is, cut in on
stone. The word for the sacred writing was hieratic, meaning simply
sacred, without the meaning of engraving. The hieratic was written
on papyrus. It was derived from the hieroglyphic, the hieroglyphic
being the older, but it was not quite the same because the pictures,
so to call them, had become a good deal simplified so that they could
be drawn much more quickly. The figures were not so carefully made,
and certain signs, sometimes not very like the original figures, came
to be understood as representing these figures.
That was one alteration from the hieroglyphic that was made, as time
went on; and then there came another, further change, still in the
direction of making simpler and simpler signs in place of the
original figures; and when this third kind of writing had established
itself it seems to have been found the easiest of the three and best
suited for everyday use. It was called "Demotic," from "demos,"
meaning the populace, whence we get our "democracy" and {38} the like
words. "Demotic," then, meant that it was the writing of the common
people, of the nation at large, as contrasted with the "hieratic,"
which was the writing used and known by the priests.
All the old religious writings and the instructions about the
ceremonies to be performed at the worship of the various gods were,
of course, in the sacred writing. And when the priests added to them
they were careful to do it in their own sacred script. And so, by
knowing this script, or writing, which the others did not, they grew
to have a knowledge of their own, which they kept rather jealously to
themselves. It gave them all the greater importance. And their
importance and power were very great.
[Sidenote: Egyptian dress]
They were distinguished from the rest of the people, probably on all
occasions, and certainly on the occasions of performing the religious
rites, by a peculiar costume. The costume in which we see the common
people figured in the earliest engravings is extremely simple. The
climate was warm and they did not require much covering. The dress
consists simply in a cloth wound around the loins and passing between
the legs, just as the most savage peoples in the world to-day wear
the loin-cloth.
A little later we find the engravings showing us the cloth
lengthening downward, perhaps as far as the knees, or even a little
lower in the female costume, but the upper part of the body was
generally bare in both sexes. Linen woven from the flax, for the art
of weaving was very early known, was the light material of which this
costume was made.
And then we find them wearing something not unlike a night-gown
to-day, rather open at the neck, and without sleeves. Another
variety of the linen {39} dress was as if it were a night-gown with
the front closed up to the neck, but all the right shoulder and
sleeve taken out of it, so that the left shoulder was covered, but
the right arm and shoulder were left all free.
That was the kind of dress of the common people. At first we see
them bare-foot. Gradually they took more and more to sandals, and
there are pictures of great men going along bare-foot, but followed
by a servant carrying their sandals--perhaps to put on when they came
to rough ground. But it is also likely that the wearing of the
sandals had a meaning in a religious rite which they might be going
to perform.
The head was at first always uncovered; but we see at one time a
fillet, or simple band for the hair, beginning to be worn; then we
come to a curious low cap, and next to a high, almost mitre-like cap,
and finally to a variety of headgear. The hair and the beard are
sometimes elaborately curled; but as a rule the Egyptians were
clean-shaven. The beard, however, was recognised as so important in
some of the religious ceremonies that it is said that a false beard
was sometimes worn on these sacred occasions. It is rather like the
wearing of wigs by our judges and barristers in Court.
At the beginning of the great eighteenth dynasty, we find the longer
gowns, which are like our night-gowns, worn more and more, and the
priestly garments and those of the great men becoming more and more
rich and long. Likely enough this change was due to the closer
intercourse which the Egyptians now began to have with the Eastern
Empire, where the longer and richer garments were commonly worn.
{40}
But, after all, when you hear or read the words Ancient Egypt, what,
at first, do you begin to think of? I know what ideas the words
first suggest to me--pyramids and mummies. They are both so
extraordinary and unlike what we find in other countries. And they
both have rather the same meaning at the back of them, namely, that
the Egyptians paid a very great respect to the bodies of the dead.
For the mummifying was, of course, to preserve the body, and the
pyramids were only one form of the immense and immensely expensive
tombs which they built for the mummies to be laid in.
And I do not want you to be misled by something that I wrote a few
pages back about the Egyptians not supposing that the favour of the
gods was to be won by good behaviour, but rather by very exact ritual
and ceremonies. That is true, but I also said then that they did
think that the behaviour of a person while alive made a great
difference to his future after death.
That is a fact that we may be quite certain of. There is a very
famous old Egyptian book, called _The Book of the Dead_, illustrated
with pictures showing all that happened, after his death, to a
certain illustrious Egyptian; how he passed through several gates,
each guarded by its own horrible demons, how he arrived at the great
judgment-seat at last, and how there his good deeds in this life were
weighed against his bad, and the good were found to be more than the
bad, so that he was allowed to go on to a place in which it hardly
seems as if he was likely to be very, very happy, but at least it was
far better fortune for him than if he had been found guilty and been
given to the tormentor. The tormentor is shown in many of {41} the
pictures waiting for him. He is a terrible creature, with teeth and
claws.
[Sidenote: Slaves]
The inner walls of some of the pyramids are covered with texts
describing events of this kind in the after-death life of kings.
Some are of such antiquity that they go back before the uniting into
one of the two kingdoms by Menes; and even in those far-away times
the instructions were lengthy and very precise about the kind of food
and drink, and means of protection from evil things, that should be
buried with the king for his use in the after-life. They had much
the same thoughts as we have about the difference between good
conduct and bad. One of the evil acts which would most certainly
condemn the doer to punishment after death was oppression of the
poor. Even as long ago as that it was accounted a virtue to be
kindly and generous to those who had been less fortunate than
yourself. It seems probable they were a kindly, rather gentle
people, inclined to peace and arts rather than to war, but compelled
to be in a constant state of defence against the incursions of
enemies who lived in less fertile lands. In the course of such
defence and resistance many prisoners would be taken. The prisoners
would be retained alive, as valuable slaves. It does not follow that
because they were slaves they would be ill-treated. A kind master
would treat a slave well out of kindness; and a sensible master, even
if he were not kind of heart, would treat a slave well because the
better a slave, like a horse, was fed and cared for, the more work
could be got out of him.
And that brings us again to the pyramids and the other great tombs of
the kings and temples of the gods; for it is very certain that but
for "slave labour," as it is called, the building of the pyramids
would have {42} been an impossibility. As it is, with all allowance
made for the multitude of the labourers and the cheapness of their
food and of the material for the building, the pyramids remain
perhaps the greatest wonder of man's making in all the world,
especially when we consider their age and the small engineering
appliances that the builders had for their making. How they dealt
with the huge blocks of stone is a marvel.
You probably know, roughly, the shape of a pyramid. The largest now
standing is the Great Pyramid, or the Pyramid of Cheops, near Gizeh.
Its base, or lowest and largest part, covers 13 acres, and its top is
150 feet higher than the top of St. Paul's Cathedral. A space of 13
acres measures about 250 yards each way and well over half a mile
round. Ask somebody to show you a piece of ground, near where you
live, that is about the size of 13 acres. Then remember that 150
feet is 50 yards, or more than the length of two cricket pitches, and
imagine St. Paul's dome all that higher. With that idea for the
height, and with an idea of the size of the piece of ground for the
size of the base, you may perhaps form some kind of idea of the
immense appearance of this pyramid rising out of the desert in the
clear Egyptian air. And the purpose of all this vast construction is
to make a covering over two little burial chambers in the middle of
it all, in which were laid, thousands of years ago, the mummied
bodies of King Cheops and of the queen who was his wife.
This is certainly the biggest pyramid now standing, and probably the
largest ever built; but there are many pyramids to which reference is
made in the inscriptions or writings which have entirely disappeared.
Probably their materials have been used for other {43} buildings, and
sand-storms from the desert have helped to cover their foundations.
[Sidenote: Temples]
A temple, in which the pious people might worship, was often
connected with the pyramid. When this was so, the temple always
seems to have been placed to the east of the burial pyramid, so that
the worshippers should look towards the body and to the west. It was
towards the west of the burial chamber that a passage was made, with
a door of exit for the soul to go out into the under-world. We have
to remember that even in life the Egyptian king was regarded as a
kind of god. It is difficult for us to find our way back into the
thoughts of these ancient people, who saw far less difference than we
know that we are obliged to see between the human nature and the
divine; but we must try to get back into their thoughts, if we want
to understand them.
And this, and a great deal more that I have written in this chapter
and in the one before, is true not of the early Egyptians only, but
of early man all the world over. I shall not keep you nearly so long
in my description of what went on in the old days along the Euphrates
and Tigris and elsewhere, because a good deal of what I am telling
you now about these old Egyptians applies to dwellers in those other
places.
Some of the inscriptions speak of the important part which a priest
accompanying the spirit in the under-world played in getting the
spirit through the various demon-guarded doors and arguing his case,
as a barrister might, before the judge. I say spirit, but in the
pictures the body is shown, very substantially. Of course it was all
the more to the priests' advantage to prove how useful they could be
in the after-life, as well as in this.
{44}
The mummies, as you must know, were dead bodies preserved by putting
chemicals into them and over them, and wrapping them round, and often
by painting their faces, and giving them altogether an appearance
which to us, discovering them after all these years, seems rather
dreadful, but no doubt was much admired. We have no record of the
time when the Egyptians began thus to "mummy" their dead; we may
almost say that we have no record of a time when they did not do so.
There were mummies long before Menes, whose date, you may remember,
has been guessed so early as 5500 years B.C. and so late as 3300 B.C.
At first it seems as if only kings were mummied. The kings were
always looked on as semi-divine, and later the people began to regard
the king as being almost identical with--almost the same as--Osiris.
It is as if they thought that the god came down in spirit to live in
the body of the reigning king.
[Illustration: BANDAGING A MUMMY.]
[Sidenote: Mummies]
Later on in the story, many great people, as well as the kings, were
mummied, and yet later again it became quite common with all classes.
Sacred animals, such as the cats in Bubastis, hawks in the temples of
Horus, and even crocodiles and quite large creatures, have been
found, mummied, in great numbers. The art and trade {45} of making
mummies was a very important one, and grew to greater perfection as
the artists began to learn more of the preserving power of chemicals.
Generally, they are the mummies of royal personages that have come
down to us in the best preservation, no doubt because the greatest
care and expense were given to their embalming. One of the best is
of that famous king Tethmosis III. who was the greatest hero of that
greatest eighteenth dynasty up, or down, to which we have now brought
our story.
I have said, and you will be ready to agree with it, that all this
care for the dead body shows what high value the Egyptians placed on
the corpse, although life and the soul had left it. But they had the
idea that the soul could be brought back again, by incantations, to
go into the body again through the mouth, and so make the mouth and
the legs and other parts move, almost as they did before death. That
idea explains perhaps why they took so much pains about keeping the
body perfect. It may explain why the wicked Seth, in his malice, cut
up the body of Osiris, whom he had murdered, and scattered the pieces
in fourteen different places, and also why the faithful Isis
collected them and put them all together again.
The Egyptians, like other ancient people and like many savage races
to-day, believed that a man possessed and had in his body, but
capable of separation from it, two souls, or spirits, and perhaps
more, and though that is an idea so very different from ours it is
not very difficult for us to understand a way in which it might have
come into their minds.
It has been thought likely by many who have given much learned and
deep attention to the subject, that the idea arose from what people
saw in dreams. {46} They would know, perhaps, that a friend of
theirs had gone away on a journey, yet they might go to sleep, and
see, in a dream, the friend beside them. What were they likely to
think? They had not our knowledge about dreams, and did not know
that all that they saw in them came from their own fancy. They would
be very likely to think, then, that their friend, in his soul or
spirit with something that looked like his body, really had come and
had stood beside them, although what we should call his real self was
far away. They would say, then, that he had a second self, or
spirit, which could be in one place and doing one thing while his
other self was in another place and doing quite a different thing.
Thus they might get the idea of one kind of soul and body which would
be different from the man whom they actually saw and spoke to when
they were awake.
And then, when a friend had died, had gone through that great change
which we call death, they would often, still in dreams, see him
again, as he had been in life, though they knew that his body had not
moved from the place where it had been buried. Other friends might
be able to assure them as to this. Therefore they might say, "Here
is another self or spirit of my friend, who is dead, which I saw come
and do this or that. It is the soul not of a living man, but of a
dead man." Thus the idea might arise of a second soul different from
that which was seen while the friend was alive.
You must understand that I am not saying that it certainly was thus
that the idea of more than one soul arose; but it may have been in
this way. It is a way in which we can easily see that it might have
come into their minds.
{47}
Many of the old writings and inscriptions give instructions about the
prayers and ceremonies and forms of words to be used for bringing
back the soul into the dead body, and these, of course, were best
understood by the priests. This, again, helped to make the priests
very important persons. The greatest people in the land performed
the priests' duties; and some of what we may call professed priests,
those whose whole business was the performance of these rites and
ceremonies, became the greatest people. Also some of these very same
people acted as judges and decided points of law, and gave
punishments for the breaking of the laws. You may realise, then, how
extensive their power was.
[Sidenote: Laws]
We do not know a great deal about their laws, but it is singular that
all we do know shows that they had very much the same ideas as to
what was right or wrong as we have. The king issued decrees. We
find decrees against the oppression of the poor by the large
landowners. Crime was punished by death, by fines, by mutilation,
such as by cutting off the nose or by the infliction of other wounds,
and by banishment out of the kingdom. They had their codes of laws,
for they are referred to in inscriptions, but the codes themselves
have not been found.
I do not know whether this short account will help you to get a
picture into your minds of the life of the ancient Egyptians. A
large part of the picture should be filled by the religious
ceremonies, by the worship of the gods and by the offerings which had
to be made, at stated times, to the souls of dead relations. The
power and the number of the priesthood became so great as to rival
that of the king, and actually one of the ruling dynasties was set up
by the priest class itself.
{48}
So now, with that picture, such as I have been able to set it before
your minds, of the people living along the Nile, let us go eastward
and see what was being done all that while along the courses of the
Tigris and Euphrates.
{49}
CHAPTER IV
BABYLONIA.
If you will look at the map once more you will see that the Euphrates
and the Tigris draw together near their outgoing into the Persian
Gulf and flow together as one stream. It was not always so, however.
At the earliest times of which we have any knowledge at all the sea
stretched up northward into the land to a point at which the two
rivers ran in separate channels, so that each went out by its own
mouth into the gulf.
I told you that I did not mean to make this story about the eastern
rivers nearly as long as that about the Nile. There are two reasons
for this. In the first place there is not so much to tell. The
records are not so many nor so full. The cause of that is plain.
Egypt is a land well furnished with hard stone, granite, and the
like. In the land which we will call Babylonia there is very little
stone. Therefore the builders built with brick. The inscriptions
were engraven on brick. And brick is not so long lasting a material
as stone. It does not take the mark of the graving tool as sharply
at the first cutting, and it is more liable to wear away in the
course of years. Moreover, the climate of Egypt, in its upper part
at least, is so dry that it is probably the best preserving climate
in the world--the climate in which inscriptions on stone or papyrus
would last and keep fresh longer than in any other. For these {50}
reasons we have more records from Egypt than from Babylonia.
But that is only a part, and the smaller part, of the whole reason
why this story that we are telling now may be told more shortly. The
larger reason is that a good deal of it has been told already in the
Egyptian story. There is no need for me to go back and re-tell you
the history of these Babylonians living through their ages of stone
weapons, bronze weapons, and iron weapons, and through their hunting
stage, their flock-keeping stage, and their agricultural stage; there
is no need to tell this, for it was told to you about the Egyptians,
and it is the story common to all mankind as they lived and worked
their way up from the most primitive conditions to civilisation.
You must please take all that for granted, as being true of the
Babylonians as of the rest of the world. You may imagine, too, that
the same puzzles beset them as beset the Egyptians when they began to
wonder how things, including themselves, had happened--how the world
had come into being and what the sun, moon, and stars were, and so
on. They, like the Egyptians, wondered about the invisible forces by
which they found themselves surrounded and more or less controlled.
They made rather different answers to the puzzles, but the puzzles
were the same.
[Illustration: ANCIENT EGYPTIAN MACHINE FOR RAISING WATER
(PRESENT-DAY "SHADOOF").]
And so a great deal of the life-story of the Egyptians, of their way
of living and so on, may be considered to be the way that the
Babylonians followed also. What will perhaps bring the life of the
Babylonians most clearly before your eyes will be to see, so far as
we can, the chief differences between their lives and the lives of
those old Egyptians.
[Sidenote: Water-raising]
Both nations lived along river-courses--we have {51} seen that. And
both were very dependent on the overflow of the rivers for the
fertilisation of their fields and for the growth of their crops.
But, though this was in a measure true of both, the dependence of the
Egyptians on the overflow of the Nile was much more complete {52}
than the dependence of these others on the overflow of the Euphrates
and Tigris. Those rivers were not so punctual in the date of the
overflow, and the difference between their lowest and highest flow
was not so great as in the Nile. Both countries, however, depended
largely on irrigation, that is to say, on leading the water by canals
from the main rivers to the fields where it was wanted. Egypt, even
when it had more trees than it has now, had probably less rainfall
than Babylonia; but in both countries the rivers were the sources and
givers of their food supply.
We have seen the Egyptians living along a river which went down
between desert country, barren country, on either side. The country
on either side the courses of the Euphrates and Tigris was not nearly
so barren and desert as that which lay about the Nile.
[Sidenote: The neighbouring states]
But now it becomes necessary to look at the map again. If you will
do so you will see just how this Babylonia is situated in relation to
the countries round about it. I speak of it as Babylonia, and speak
of the "other countries," but you are not to suppose that even at the
latest date to which we have brought down the story at present men
had at all the same distinct idea that we have now about where one
country ended and another began. You may have heard of "boundary
commissions," meaning committees of men appointed to trace out the
boundary line between two countries. The nations we are speaking of
had no boundary commissions: they had no clear idea of boundaries, or
of one nation having a right to live and to bear rule up to a certain
point or line and no farther. It was all very shifting, and one
nation took from another what it could get.
The shifting perhaps did not matter so much in {53} those days,
because people had not learnt to look on their homes as very settled,
or lasting. A good many of those among whom the story is to take us
now were, if not dwellers in tents themselves, at least the
descendants of those who had dwelt in tents only a generation or two
before.
But a look at the map will show you that this country, which we may
call, in a general way of speaking, Babylonia, had its bounds, its
limits, though it was not nearly as closely limited as Egypt was
between the deserts. Babylonia, you will see, has the Mediterranean
Sea on its west, but with Palestine and Syria between itself and that
sea. On the south there is the Persian Gulf; and Arabia, which is
largely desert and barren, also lies to the south and south-west. On
the north, away up towards the sources of the great rivers, is a wild
mountainous region whence, as we shall see, wild, fierce people were
apt to come down to harass the dwellers in the rich plain.
So, on these three sides we find Babylonia bounded, though the
boundaries are large as compared with the narrow boundaries of the
people along the Nile; but on the fourth, the eastern side, away
towards Persia and the heart of Asia, there seems no limit whatever,
either of mountain or of desert or of sea. The possibilities of
peoples coming in by that way seem without any limit. In this
respect, then, the situations of the two ancient empires of the world
were very different.
I am speaking of all this country as Babylonia, and it may occur to
you to wonder at that because you will have heard so much from your
Bibles of the Assyrians coming upon Palestine from this very country
round about the Euphrates. And so they {54} did; and at one period
in the story the Assyrians became so powerful that they took
possession of all this land, and just at that time it would be more
correct to call the land Assyria instead of Babylonia. But this was
for a period only. At the beginning of our knowledge of this region
Assyria was only a province, a northern province, of Babylonia, and
was ruled from Babylon. But the Assyrians became very strong and
revolted, and conquered those who had been their masters, and it was
during this victorious period that they made those incursions into
Palestine of which the Bible tells us. But at length the
Babylonians, their old masters, rose up against them and got the
mastery over them again, and after this blaze of glory Assyria sinks
back into its old place as a province of Babylon, in the northern
part of the empire.
Now who were they, where did they come from--the earliest of the
people whom we find to have lived in Babylonia? We do not quite know
that. What it is quite useful to note, however, is that we do seem
to know who they were not. They were not Semites--not a Semitic
people. It is useful to know they were not this, because Semitic is
just what most of the people whom we now meet in the human story were.
The name comes from Shem, the name of one of the sons of Noah in the
book of Genesis; and the so-called Semites appear, coming into the
story of mankind, out of Arabia, that strange desert country. They
came up thence into Babylonia, and in Babylonia, when they came to
it, there was already a people with a high civilisation, as we know
by evidences that have been found. It was different from the
civilisation of the Semitic people. The name given to that earlier
people and that earlier civilisation is Sumerian, and I {55} really
do not think you need trouble to inquire precisely what is meant by
that, for even the most learned have very little to tell us about it.
It had to have a name. Let us call it Sumerian, and say it was
different from the Semitic, probably older, and so leave it.
It is a curious thing about these Semites, who at a very early date
came in and took possession of all Babylonia, that though they
apparently came from Arabia and the south, they made their first
appearance in history in the north of Babylonia. How that happened
we cannot tell. Perhaps some records of a southern invasion have
been lost. Or they may have skirted round on the eastern side. It
is all guess-work. They appeared in the north, and they quickly
overran the country--not only of Babylonia, but of Palestine and of
Syria also--except, it may be, a strip of Syria along the
Mediterranean shore which is called on the map Phœnicia. That is
an exception which you will do well to bear in mind. It is
important, because these Phœnicians belonged to one of the
greatest civilisations of the old world, and because they too were
great makers of history, as you shall see before very long.
[Sidenote: "Ur of the Chaldees"]
On their western border, therefore, the people of the powerful empire
which began to be formed along the Tigris and Euphrates had tribes
very closely akin to themselves. On the east and on the north they
had neighbours of a different race from their own. It seems to have
been in the south of Babylonia, near the outgoing of the great
rivers, that the first capital of the empire was formed. Probably
this southern Babylonia is that "Ur of the Chaldees" from which we
are told that Abraham came and established himself in Palestine. He
came, as we see, living with {56} his family and his dependants in
tents, with flocks and herds, easily moving on from one place to
another when the sheep or oxen had eaten the grass or when water
failed. He was the patriarch (_pater_=father, and _arch_=ruler), the
father-ruler of the small tribe or large family that came with him.
In your history books you will sometimes read that "society was in
the patriarchal stage." That means that the people of whom the
historian is writing were living in the way in which Abraham and his
dependent people lived; and we may be sure that it was the way of
life of the greater number of those Semites who came up from Arabia
and took possession of Syria and Palestine at a very early date.
They took possession of the country of Babylonia also, and as they
settled along the fertile river-banks we may imagine that they would
begin to unite together into a nation and become strong, with a
feeling of union, in a way that it was not at all likely that the
small tribes of patriarchs and their families, moving about with
their flocks and herds, would unite. So the Babylonians and the
Syrians and the dwellers in Palestine would easily fall into the way
of regarding each other as of different nations, although really they
were of the same race.
There would be this difference, then: the settlers along the rivers
really would begin to lead settled lives, like the people who tilled
the soil in Egypt, but beyond those limits there would be wanderers,
with their cattle--wanderers for the most part of the same race as
the settlers, but growing more and more distinct and divided from
them in manners and feelings as time went on and they lived such
different lives.
I spoke of these Babylonians having just the same puzzles presented
to their minds by what we call "the {57} forces of Nature" as the
Egyptians had, but said that they answered them a little differently.
The Egyptians, as we saw, tried three different kinds of answer.
They made a great god of the sun, they made a great god of Osiris,
who was originally just the god of one place (like many others), and
they made gods of all sorts of animals. Now, trying to understand
the religion of the ancient Babylonians, we may rule out entirely all
idea of animal worship--that is to say, the third kind of answer
which the Egyptians made to their puzzles. It does not seem to have
been thought of by the Babylonians at all. Let us forget those
sacred cats and crocodiles of the Nile.
[Sidenote: Osiris and Ra]
And then, having cast them aside, we may see a very remarkable
likeness between the other guesses that the two peoples made, and the
way in which they tried to work the different guesses in with one
another. For you may remember that the Egyptians, after forming the
idea of Ra, the sun-god--a god that had his eye over all the
world--and after imagining Osiris to be so powerful as to rule
divinely over all Egypt: after they had thus exalted these two gods
at the expense of all the others, they then began to regard the two
as one--the one being but one form of the other--Osiris, as Ra,
traversing the heavens, and Ra, as Osiris, ruling the earth. And
since Ra, the Sun, was supposed to go under the earth at night, in
order to get back to the east to begin his journey across the sky
again the next morning, there was no great difficulty in imagining
him, again as Osiris, ruling over the dead in the under-world also.
And now, in Babylonia, we find that almost exactly the same thing
happened. Shamash was their name for the sun-god, the Egyptians' Ra.
Then there was a {58} god whom they called Merodach, or Marduk: he
was the god of Babylon. But Babylon was not always a great city.
The earliest capital city was south of Babylon. So Marduk was only
as one god among many. But then, as Babylon grew and became the
great centre, Marduk came to be regarded as the great god of all the
country, exactly as had happened with Osiris in Egypt. And then,
again just as in Egypt, they began to look on Shamash and on Marduk
as two forms of one and the same great deity. Thus, it is wonderful
how like each other were the guesses at truth in the two empires.
Bel-Merodach, as he was sometimes called (Bel or Baal means Lord),
became of such immense importance that the king was never considered
to be properly appointed as ruler until he had been received by
Merodach at Babylon, in the god's great temple there. The Assyrian
kings, whose capital was Nineveh, in the north of Babylonia, when
they had conquered their former masters of Babylon, still came to
Babylon and paid their homage to the Babylonian god.
But, again as in Egypt, there were a number of other gods besides
Marduk, in other places, whose authority was considered very powerful
just in these places; and there were other heavenly bodies besides
Shamash, the sun, that had worship. There was Sin, the moon, and
especially there was Ishtar, the planet Venus, the Ashtaroth that you
read of in the Bible. Ishtar was goddess of the spring and of all
the life-giving forces in Nature.
And in Babylonia, as in Egypt, there were immense numbers of priests,
and their power was great. They were occupied in the ceremonies to
the gods, and in care of the temples, and a great part of their time
was {59} taken up in watching the stars and planets. They saw that
many of the happenings on earth depended on the heavenly bodies--the
sun made the seed grow in the damp warm earth; perhaps they knew that
the moon affected the tides. At all events they saw that certain
events on earth happened at the same time as certain other events in
the heavens; so they grew to think that the earthly happenings were
caused by the changes of the planets in the sky far more than they
are.
[Sidenote: Astronomy]
But this mistaken idea about the influence of the stars on the earth
had the excellent effect that it made these old Babylonian priests to
be great star-gazers. They were great astronomers, and in spite of
their errors made great steps in knowledge. And because you can go
very little way in astronomy without mathematics, they became
mathematicians too. We owe a great deal to what these wise men of
the East, watching the stars so long ago, found out for us.
Some of the Babylonians also believed in fearful demons and powers of
evil, and it seems as if they imagined their gods to take much more
notice of their behaviour, their good and bad conduct, than the
Egyptians' gods were supposed to take. We saw that the Egyptian idea
was that so long as they performed all the religious rites exactly,
that was all that the gods cared about. But the Babylonians thought
that their gods did interest themselves a great deal about the right
or wrong conduct of the men over whom they ruled, and punished or
rewarded them in this life accordingly.
And through all this that I am telling you about the religion of the
early Babylonians, I want you to bear in mind that Abraham, the
founder of the Jewish nation, came from "Ur of the Chaldees," that
is, from the south of Babylonia. That means that he {60} came
carrying with him beliefs and customs that he and his clan (if I may
call it so) had learnt in Babylonia. Telling you these Babylonian
beliefs, I am really telling you the origins of the beliefs which
have come down to us through the Israelites. That is what makes
their story so particularly interesting for us.
The Babylonians, then, had an idea of a deity who punished their
wrong-doing by sending them illnesses and famine and so on. The
Egyptians had not this idea nearly so clearly, but they had the idea
that the man who did well in this life would have his reward in the
life after death. The Babylonians did not have this idea of the life
after death; we find, at least, no reason to think that they had it.
Abraham, therefore, came from Ur without this belief in a life after
death. It was only at a far later period--possibly, though by no
means certainly, as something they learned from the Egyptians--that
the belief in a future life came to the Jews and Israelites.
But although Abraham brought traditions from Ur, so soon as we are
allowed to know anything about the beliefs held by him and his people
we find them to be very much more pure and free from superstitions
than the Babylonian ones. The Babylonian idea of the creation was
that there was at first a great dragon of prodigious size. Merodach,
the chief of the gods, identified with the sun, then fought the
dragon, killed him, cut him in two; of one half of his body made the
firmament of heaven, of the other half made the earth. Then in the
heavens, as stars, he set the lesser gods, with the moon. The moon
ruled the night and regulated the division of the year into months
(moon-eths). Mona is the old Anglo-Saxon word for moon.
This account is inscribed on tablets, and so much is {61} readable,
but there is much more which has crumbled away so that it cannot be
read. The account of the Creation given in Genesis is, of course,
free of all this fantastic account of the fight with the dragon.
[Sidenote: The Flood]
There are other Babylonian tablets which give an account of the
Flood, but here again we find the idea that it is sent not by one
great god, but by several gods, working together. Over them all
seems to be the sun-god, here called Shamash, who is in Heaven. The
flood is so dreadful that it compels the lesser gods living on the
earth to fly to Heaven for refuge. There Ishtar (Venus), taking pity
on mankind, prays Shamash to stop the flood, and he consents to do
so. One of the earth gods had warned a certain man, named
Ut-napistim, that the flood was coming, and advised him to make a
ship to save himself from it. So Ut-napistim built the ship, made it
water-tight with pitch, put in it his family, pairs of all the
animals, workmen and a pilot, and so they floated for seven days
until the ship came to ground on a mountain to the east of the
Tigris. Then, apparently after another seven days, Ut-napistim sent
out first a dove, then a swallow, then a raven. The first two came
back, but the last did not, from which Ut-napistim concluded that the
raven had found dry ground somewhere.
You will see how like this is to the story of Noah and the Ark in the
Bible, and almost certainly it was with some such tradition as this
in their minds that Abraham and his people came from Ur.
It is my purpose, in this story of mankind around the Mediterranean,
to bother you as little as possible with names, either of persons or
of places, and as little as possible with dates, because the more we
have of them, the more difficult it becomes to remember those {62}
that are really important. For the years very far back it is
impossible to fix the dates at all exactly. What is important is to
know in what order the great events in the story happened.
The date at which Abraham came out of Ur and settled in the southern
part of what was afterwards called Judah has been determined by
scholars to have been about 2250 or 2300 B.C. You will remember that
the date to which we brought down the Egyptian story was about 1500
B.C. So Abraham came to Palestine about 750 years earlier than that.
Abraham's date is more or less fixed by the evidence of what is by
far the most famous code of ancient laws and customs that has come
down to us, far beyond anything of the kind that has been found in
Egypt, the code of Khammurabi. Khammurabi was king of Babylon, and
it is considered nearly sure that it is he who is meant by "Amraphel,
king of Shinar" mentioned in Genesis. He lived at the same time as
Abraham.
[Sidenote: Code of Khammurabi]
Now, this code, or list, of laws engraved on tablets is most
interesting to us not only because it is ancient, but also because it
is so very modern. I mean that although these laws were made so very
long ago, they are laws which we could very nearly accept as suitable
for us to live under to-day. Our lives would be very little altered
if we were to try to lead them according to those laws instead of
according to the laws under which we actually do live.
If Khammurabi, in 2250 B.C., had these laws engraven, we may be
nearly sure that they were the laws by which the country was governed
many years before that. How long before, we cannot tell. Tablets on
which some of them were recorded were found in {63} what has been
called the library (though I do not suppose that there were exactly
what we should call books in it, and the name "library" comes from
_liber_, a book)--collected by a certain great king of Assyria,
Assurbanipal or Sardanapalus, by name, who reigned in Nineveh, which
was the capital of Assyria, about 700 B.C. or a little later. A
great many similar records and tablets collected by this king have
been found. But a far more complete list of the laws was found later
at Susa, a city which was afterwards called Persepolis.
Not only are the laws themselves such as we might make and use, but
they seem to show that there existed in Babylon at that far-away time
a society and a kind of life not at all unlike ours. There were
doctors, lawyers and merchants, and the fees of the doctors and the
ways in which the merchants were to carry on their trade were fixed
by the laws. It is clear that there were a great many slaves
employed--that is a difference, of course, from our society. The
punishments for law-breaking were more severe than ours. Murder is
the only crime which we now punish with death. In Khammurabi's code,
burglary and stealing are punished by death; so is any attempt to
induce witnesses in a case at law to give false witness; and there
are numerous other offences for which death was the punishment in
Babylon, but for which we should make the offender pay a fine or go
to prison for a while. But we have to remember that it is not so
very many years ago even in this country since a man could be hanged
for forgery or for stealing a sheep. The laws of Khammurabi are not
more severe than ours were not much more than a hundred years ago.
When there were serfs in England, labourers almost {64} in a state of
slavery, English law made a great distinction between them and
freemen. An offence against the laws, if committed by a serf, was
very much more heavily punished than the same offence committed by a
freeman. And we find exactly the same distinction made in this
ancient code; the slave suffers far more heavily than the freeman.
Some of the laws show the importance of the canals for watering the
land, and each owner of land beside a canal was made responsible for
the canal bank which ran through or beside his property. If he let
it fall into bad repair, and the water, overflowing, damaged his
neighbour's land or drowned his sheep, he had to make good the loss
caused to his neighbour.
The law of "a tooth for a tooth" and "an eye for an eye" which we
find in the Bible, in the book of Exodus, we find here too. If you
knocked out a man's eye in a fight, you would have to submit to
having an eye of your own knocked out. If you knocked out a tooth, a
tooth of yours would be knocked out.
Susa, where the full code of Khammurabi was found, was the capital of
the kingdom of a people called Elamites, of whom you hear in the
Bible. Elam lay on the eastern, the Persian, side of Babylonia, and
the Elamites gave continual trouble to the Babylonian conquerors.
The code is cut on a great block of black stone eight feet high. It
is in forty-four columns and consists of no less than 3654 lines--a
lengthy document. And at the top of it there is cut the figure of
King Khammurabi receiving the tablets of the law from Shamash, the
great sun-god. It must remind us of Moses receiving the tablets with
the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.
There can be little doubt that these laws, more or {65} less as they
are graven on this stone, were those under which the greater number
of the Semitic tribes lived which inhabited Syria and Palestine.
Among these tribes were the Jews. For this reason we may imagine
that when the Babylonians made attacks upon them and reduced them, as
they did from time to time, to submission, their own laws and customs
were not much altered. They had to pay tribute, perhaps, and their
homes were broken up, and some of them, like the Jews, were taken
away into Babylonia, but they went among a people not altogether
different from themselves either in nationality or in their ways of
living.
[Sidenote: Art in Babylonia]
And just as we are surprised by the advanced state of civilisation
which these old laws show us, so we have to be no less astonished by
the fine works of art which they made. Stone, as we have said, was
rare in Babylonia; therefore they looked on it as precious, and kept
it for engraving. Some of the cut stones of very early date are
finely finished. In the Louvre in Paris there is a splendidly worked
Babylonian vase with a hunting scene of lions upon it, and it is
thought to have been made long before the time of this Khammurabi,
whose code we have been speaking of. There were lions in this
country then, though there are none now. You may remember many
references to lions in the Bible.
We know, then, that the Babylonians had their artists and their
workers in gold. Probably the gold came to them either through Egypt
or across the Red Sea from Nubia and Africa farther south; Babylonia
had no gold. Some, however, may have come from the East. They made
ornaments of the gold and of the cut stones, and their costume would
seem to have been like that of the Egyptians, but with more flowing
{66} skirts. We have seen that the Egyptians, just about the time
that they began to know more of the Babylonians, that is a little
before 1500 B.C., began to lengthen their skirts also. Probably the
dresses of the Babylonians were more rich in ornament than the
Egyptian. With both, as with the dwellers in all the warm climates
of the world, there can be little doubt that the dress was a natural
development from the cloth round the loins--the skirts lengthened
downwards and some species of jacket drawn on over the upper part of
the body. Or a long robe of light material, which I have likened to
a nightgown, was put on over the shoulders and hung down to the
ankles, perhaps, so that it did for both skirt and jacket in one. To
this it would be very easy and natural to add a girdle or sash, to
tie it in round the waist and prevent its flapping in too
inconvenient a manner.
[Illustration: ASSYRIAN KING IN HIS ROBES.]
Once you get the long robe, you come to something which would need
very little change to become the sort of robe which the Greeks and
Romans wore--what the Romans called the "toga." I should think these
long skirts would be very much in the way when those who wore them
wanted to run or make any swift movement, and I suppose that when we
read in {67} the Bible of people "girding up their loins," when they
were going on any expedition, it means that they tucked up these
skirts and fastened them round with the girdle about their waists, so
that they should not hang around their legs.
[Sidenote: Rise of Assyria]
In order to make this story pleasant and easy reading, as it ought to
be, I have said that I want to bother you about dates as little as
possible, but it is necessary to take some notice of them. In the
first place, for the understanding of this particular part of the
great story--the part that has to do with Babylonia--you ought to
know that the date at which the Assyrians, in the northeen section of
the country, with their capital of Nineveh, revolted against the rule
of Babylon, to which we find that they were subject when the story
opens, was about 1900 B.C. That is to say, about 400 years before
the great period of the Egyptian power, dating from 1500 B.C., or
thereabouts. Assyria, which at first was subject to Babylon,
revolted and became master of Babylon about 1900 B.C. and retained
that mastery, with some ups and downs, for about 1500 years. This
greatest story in the world deals with big spaces of time! Then the
Assyrian power went to pieces and Babylon established itself again as
the master power about the time of that Nebuchadnezzar of whom the
Bible tells us.
So we have to realise that when, in 1500 B.C., or rather sooner,
Egypt and Babylonia, according to the Egyptian records, began to
clash against each other harder than ever before, with the result of
squeezing very uncomfortably those Semitic tribes in Palestine, it
was a Babylonia under the Assyrian domination. And the Assyrians
were a more war-like people than the Babylonians. They had a
better-ordered and doubtless {68} a better-equipped army. Theirs
seems to have been almost what we should call a military state,
constituted for war, and they called themselves masters of the whole
country north of the Persian Gulf and of Egypt and of all east of the
Mediterranean Sea.
In the story of mankind we find it happening again and again that
after a people have been comfortably settled for a while in the
fertile plains and river valleys they lose the warlike habits by
means of which they got possession of these good lands, and are
overthrown by others coming from a more mountainous and barren
country where they have been obliged to live hardier lives. Thus,
these Assyrians from the north got the better of the Babylonians, and
the Assyrians in their turn were constantly being troubled by the
attacks of a people called the Hittites, from farther north again.
You read of the Hittites in the Bible. Not a very great deal is
known about them, but it is certain that they were a great power in
all that country lying north and north-west of Assyria which is now
called Asia Minor. They made incursions and attacks down south, and
it is probable that after their great attacks were repulsed they left
some of their tribes in the south, separated from the rest of the
nation. In the latter part of our story it is these scattered tribes
that we hear most about.
[Sidenote: Cuneiform writing]
Now, the earliest of the inscriptions which tell us anything about
these people of Babylonia goes back to the time before the Semites
had come up from Arabia in the south. Edim, or the plain of
Babylonia, from which we may suppose that the name Eden, in Genesis,
came, was probably then inhabited by those Sumerians of whom we know
very little. We know little, but we find inscriptions by them, and
the inscriptions are in {69} a very curious form of writing, a
writing which went on being used for thousands of years. It is
called cuneiform, from "cuneus," meaning a wedge, because all the
lines of the writing are inclined to go into the shape of a wedge.
You will remember something about the Egyptian hieroglyphic and
picture writing. Probably all writing began in this way, with making
pictures. Then it was found troublesome to make a picture of
everything that you wanted to say, and a few dashes or lines, very
roughly representing the thing, were used instead, and began to be
understood as standing for a sign of that thing.
This wedge writing of the Babylonians doubtless began in this way. I
say doubtless, because some of it is almost picture-writing, and the
older the inscriptions the more like actual pictures of the thing as
we see it the signs are. Thus, the sign which they made to mean
heaven was something like this *, which we call an asterisk, from
"aster," meaning a star. They made a drawing like a star to give the
idea of heaven, because heaven is the place where the stars are. The
rays, as we call them, of the star, were more wedge-shaped than the
lines of our asterisk, but that is a small difference. It is said
that when the "stilus," which is the tool they used for making the
inscriptions, is used to make the mark of a line on wet clay, the
shape into which that mark would naturally go is that of a wedge;
they had much clay for their bricks, and very likely that is why we
see this writing in the form that it has.
You may remember how we cited, as an instance of the way in which the
Egyptians developed their writing, that we had first the picture of
an eye, and then {70} the picture of a bird, and, putting the eye
before the bird, we got the idea "I see a bird." Now, in much the
same way, in the wedge-writing we find that an arrangement of three
upright wedges is taken as the sign which means "water." There is an
arrangement of a good many wedges which is the sign that means
"mouth," and this arrangement is in such a shape that it must make us
think that it came from an original drawing of a mouth. So, having
this sign for water and this other sign for a mouth, what these
cuneiform writers did when they wanted to make a sign which should
mean "drinking" was to put the sign for water inside the sign for
mouth. A good idea!
But all this writing, so far, proceeded on the plan of making signs
to represent things that you saw or the ideas that came from what you
saw. And then, I imagine, it occurred to some inventive genius to
say, "Suppose, instead of making these signs to represent things that
we see, that we make them represent sounds--make them stand for the
names that we call them by? Now, suppose we take the word 'dog':
(only he, of course, would make use of the Babylonian sound, whatever
it was, which they used for 'dog'). "Suppose we take the word
'dog,'" he said, "and suppose we take one of our signs, which we use
to represent things, and let it stand for the first sound that we
make in saying the word. Suppose that we take another sign to stand
for the second sound, the middle sound, in the word, and a third sign
to stand for the last sound."
"Well," the people to whom he suggested the idea might say, "you do
not seem to gain much by that. It would be much simpler and easier
to go on making the sign for a dog, as we always have done."
{71}
"Yes," he might answer, "that is quite true, so far as writing about
a dog, and a dog only, is concerned, but the advantage that I claim
for my idea is that these signs, which I say we might use to stand
for the sound that we make when we say 'dog,' may be used over and
over again, whenever we have to make those sounds. And we do not
make a very large number of different sounds--not nearly so many as
there are ideas and objects that we wish to write about. So, on my
plan, we shall not need nearly so many signs as we have been using."
[Sidenote: The alphabet]
I take it that it was thus, or in some way rather like this, that
what we call writing (that is to say, making signs on paper or some
other substance to represent the sounds by which we call things),
came to take the place of the more primitive way of sending messages,
or of making records, which was by drawing pictures of them. We, as
you know, have twenty-six signs, twenty-six letters, in what we call
our alphabet--twenty-six signs for the sounds that we make in
speaking. The alphabet is called so from the first two letters
"alpha" and "beta," corresponding to our "a" and "b," in the Greek
alphabet. Different alphabets have different numbers of letters,
standing for different sounds. In our own alphabet we know that the
same letter, that is to say the same sign, may stand for different
sounds. Take the very first letter "a," and take the words "father,"
"paper," and "many"; there you have three quite different sounds for
each of which the one sign "a" does the work. An alphabet with signs
enough to include all the sounds we make in talking would be terribly
long.
The cuneiform writing was in use up to within 100 years of the birth
of Christ, and its use extended {72} from very far up in the north of
Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf and away south-westward of the Red Sea
in Upper Egypt. It is there found on some very important tablets of
just about that greatest date in all Egyptian history, 1500. And it
was in use for trading and correspondence from Elam on the eastern
boundary of Babylonia, right to the Mediterranean Sea.
Thus it was of far more general use in those old days than the
picture-writing of the Egyptians. Probably it was far more
convenient. Then, in its turn, it fell out of use because of the
invention of a mode of writing more convenient still, and not unlike
ours--from which, indeed, ours is taken. But that is "another
story," as Rudyard Kipling says.
Let us just take a look now and see what Abraham and his descendants
were doing in this interval between their coming up from Ur, which
was in the land of the Chaldee, in the south of Babylonia, and the
year 1500 B.C. The story will not be long in the telling, because we
know so little about it.
What we do know is that they lived for many many years in the
southern part of the country which, later on, was called Judah. We
may imagine that they increased and multiplied, till they became a
large and formidable tribe. It is thought that they stayed in this
Southern Judah, leading a pastoral life, with sheep and cattle, for
some 600 years. And then there came upon them a time of famine, when
there was no food for their sheep or oxen and very little for
themselves. But they lived right on the great road by which the
traders and merchants travelled when they went from Egypt into
Babylonia, or _vice versâ_, and it was told to them that "there is
corn in Egypt."
{73}
You will remember that, about the corn in Egypt, from the story of
Joseph and his brethren, as told in the Bible. And the end of that
story, as you know, is that the whole tribe--all the children of
Israel, as the Bible says--moved down into that "land of Goshen"
which was in the north-east of Egypt. It was a country of rich land,
lying low.
Now, what are we to suppose was the reason that the Egyptians allowed
these foreigners to come down, as they did, and settle on this land
over which they claimed to rule? We may answer that question in this
way.
[Sidenote: The Shepherd Kings]
If the Israelites, as we now may call them--the tribe of which Jacob,
who was also called Israel, was the head--were in the south of Judah
for 600 years, between the time that they came from Chaldæa and the
time that they went into the land of Goshen, it must have been in
somewhere about the year 1700 B.C. that they made this later journey.
That is 200 years before the rule of the famous eighteenth dynasty.
And in 1700 B.C. the dynasty then ruling in Egypt was the so-called
Hyksos dynasty. It was also called the dynasty of the Shepherd
Kings. The Egyptians, as we have seen, had become weakened as a
nation. They were constantly quarrelling among themselves, rather as
the old English barons used to quarrel among themselves or against
the king. The result was that foreign invaders came in from time to
time, in the course of the story, and took the kingship for a while,
excluding all the native Egyptian great men from the throne.
These Hyksos, who had the rule in Egypt when the Israelites were
welcomed there, were invaders of this kind, foreigners who had seized
the throne and the {74} power. They were shepherds, living the
pastoral life--though perhaps they left off that when they became the
rulers of Egypt--and wherever they came from, whether direct from
Arabia or, as is more likely, from farther north, probably from
Syria, all scholars are, I think, agreed that they were Semites.
Josephus, the historian of the Jews, asserts that they actually were
the Israelites. Modern historians think him mistaken there. But,
though not Israelites, they were almost certainly of the same Arabian
origin.
And there you have the answer to the question how it came about that
the Israelites found a welcome in Egypt. The powerful people in the
country were their relations.
And so things went well with them for many years, perhaps about three
or four hundred; but other powers--"a Pharaoh that knew not
Joseph"--at length threw off the yoke of the Hyksos, the Shepherds,
and took the throne from them. The Israelites were shown no favour
then. They were set hard tasks, were treated like slaves, until
finally, under the leadership of a very great man and prophet, Moses,
they decided to flee away into the desert, away from the land of
Goshen, in which they were made so unhappy, although it was a fertile
land.
[Sidenote: After the Exodus]
Probably they were very useful slaves and tillers of the soil, and
probably that was the reason why, as we are told in the Bible,
Pharaoh was so unwilling to let them go. At length, however, go they
did--only, as we are further told, to be pursued, and only, as the
Bible also tells us, to be saved by a miracle at the passage of the
Red Sea.
This Exodus, as it is called, probably took place in 1200 B.C. or a
little earlier, and the Israelites wandered {75} some forty years in
the wilderness, living in tents, and moving about as the manner of
pastoral tribes was, and is, with their flocks and herds. We see,
then, that 1150 B.C. or a few years sooner, would be about the date
at which they would begin, under Joshua, the invasion of Canaan. Our
story has not reached that point yet.
{76}
CHAPTER V
THE MINOANS IN CRETE
Those, then, were the two great powers on land in the very old days
of the story of mankind. There was Egypt along the Nile, and
Babylonia--for a thousand and more years, rather to be called
Assyria--along the Euphrates and Tigris.
But there was also yet a third power, very great, very ancient, and
highly civilised, a sea-power, with its capital in the big island,
which you will sec on the map, lying to the south of Greece, Crete.
You will observe, perhaps, that it quite agrees with all that we find
in the later story of mankind, that a nation living on an island
should be powerful at sea. To-day you see the great sea-powers,
ourselves and Japan. We live on islands that are small when compared
with the lands of Germany, France, America, Russia, China; but we
have more power in ships and seamen. Perhaps America is going to
have a greater power than Japan, but at the time that I am writing
she has not.
It is only of rather recent years that we have come to know much
about this very ancient Cretan civilisation, and chiefly it is owing
to the work of a great antiquary, Sir Arthur Evans, that we have
discovered the story. It must be very interesting to be an antiquary
and to dig--or to order a gang of diggers to {77} dig under your
directions--and not to know what you may be going to turn up next:
now a gold ear-ring, now a bronze sword, now the edge of a worked
stone that may be the corner-stone of a building which more digging
may prove to be one of the greatest and most marvellous buildings in
the world!
[Sidenote: Knossos]
It sounds like a fairy story; but it was a fairy story which Sir
Arthur Evans made come true at a place in Crete where the ancient
city of Knossos used to be. He found wonderful things--an immense
palace, a place which inscriptions, also there discovered, show to
have been a temple of the gods as well. The king, it is evident, was
high-priest as well as king: we have seen that union of the two
offices, the king's and the priest's, before, both in Egypt and in
Babylonia. (When I say before, I mean that I wrote of it earlier in
the story. I do not mean that it came any earlier in the time of its
actual happening.) There is evidence to show that the Cretan people
were civilised, could make fine works of art and so on, right back to
the very earliest date at which the evidences from the peoples living
along the river-courses have anything to show us. Maybe the Cretans
acquired their civilisation even earlier than the others.
We cannot be sure of that. What we can be sure of is that an
enormous number of years ago they were marvellous engineers and
architects, as well as workers of ornaments, and of fine pottery and
glazed ware. The palace at Knossos is an immense place, with great
columns, walls, halls. We wonder as much at the splendid imagination
of the architect who could plan buildings on such a grand scale so
very long ago as we do at the engineer's power to work and lift into
position such huge stones as we find were used in the building. And
{78} the delicacy of the finish is wonderful too. It is not only the
vastness of the size that amazes us. That is the chief wonder of the
Egyptian pyramids. But the buildings and other remains in Crete are
more wonderful still.
This Cretan civilisation at so very early a date makes an
extraordinary chapter in the world's story. It would still have been
a story very extraordinary if it had been only just the story of what
happened in the island of Crete, and did not spread beyond it. But,
as a matter of fact, it did spread very far beyond that island. It
spread out north, east, south, and west--up into Greece, across to
Syria, down to Egypt, and away to Sicily.
In your books you are likely to read about all this as "the Minoan
civilisation." Probably there really was some great king of old in
Crete whose name was Minos. It is possible that there were many of
the name, and that all the kings of his dynasty were called Minos,
with some other name besides to distinguish them. However that may
be, the Cretan legendary story was that Minos was a very great king,
half divine, who gave laws and the arts of civilisation to his
people, rather as Khammurabi was supposed to have given laws to the
Babylonians. And, again like Khammurabi, Minos was supposed to have
received these laws from a deity, the greatest deity that the
Minoans, as they were called, knew. But this deity of theirs was
supposed to be female, a goddess, the goddess Ishtar of the
Babylonians--the Ashtaroth of the Bible. The Cretans, however, made
her the chief of all the gods. The Babylonians held her in second
place, as spouse of the chief god Shamash, the sun-god.
These splendid buildings of the Minoans, as they {79} have been
discovered for us by the digger, have a much more modern, a much less
strange, appearance than those either of Babylonia or of Egypt. The
Babylonian buildings especially look to us, as we make pictures of
them in our minds, like palaces of some great ogre. The supports at
each side of the doors and gates are very often in the form of huge
winged bulls. Human heads and figures of colossal size are to be
seen everywhere. And the human heads have generally great beards,
and perhaps the rest of the hair worked up into a square pattern,
with curls, so that they look horrible. All the insides of the
Babylonian palaces seem to have been adorned with enormous hunting
scenes, worked in a kind of gypsum which was found in the country. I
think we should feel terribly afraid if we suddenly found ourselves
in an ancient Babylonian palace or even an Egyptian one.
But I believe that we should feel very much happier and more at home
if we could be transported suddenly into one of the old Minoan
palaces. And I believe that I can make a guess why that is so.
[Sidenote: Cretan architecture]
The Babylonian and the Egyptian style of building was found in these
two countries, but neither Babylonians nor Egyptians went much across
the sea--the Mediterranean Sea. But these Cretans, as I have said,
were great sea-goers. They were the great naval power in the
Mediterranean. So they went, and carried with them their ideas and
their ways of building, everywhere. The effect of that is seen most
of all perhaps at the site of an old Greek city on the mainland of
Greece, Mycenæ, where great excavations have been made. But the
effect is found in many other places too. So it has come down
through the Greeks and through the Romans, and has been in the minds
{80} and in the eyes of later builders, although the builders were
generally, as we may suppose, not at all aware that they owed
anything to these builders of so many thousands of years ago.
It is a curious thing that in Egypt, in Babylonia, and also in Crete,
some of the very oldest buildings and some of the very oldest works
of art are the best. We have a comfortable idea in our minds that
we--that is to say, mankind--have been making progress, have been
improving, all through the story; but unfortunately there are some
things in which we do not seem to have improved--some kinds of work
in which the oldest is the best.
And as I have said that the ancient buildings found in Crete are of a
style that does not look nearly so strange to us as the ancient
buildings of the countries on the mainland, so the Minoan engravings
show us the people of that very far-off time dressed in a fashion
that seems almost familiar to us. They do not look nearly so strange
as the people that we see pictured and graven on the walls of those
other palaces and tombs and temples.
We find many evidences, and evidences of many different kinds, of the
sea-faring habits of the ancient Cretans, and of their great power.
We find Minoan works of art in the tombs of Egyptian kings, and
Egyptian ornaments in the Minoan palaces. We find, as I have said,
the Minoan bronze work as far to the west as Sicily. Athens, the
great Athens of Greece, seems to have been subject to the Minoans and
to have paid tribute to them. And a very cruel form some of that
tribute took. According to the old historians, they had to send
seven maidens and seven youths each year to Crete; and we seem to be
able to guess the purpose for which they were sent.
{81}
The legend is that they had to be sent each year to be devoured by,
or be sacrificed to, a Cretan monster called the Minotaur. The name
Minotaur is from Minos and tauros, meaning a bull. It was figured as
a half human, half bull-like monster.
[Sidenote: The Labyrinth]
One of the most famous of the buildings discovered by the diggers in
Crete is the Labyrinth, a building of an immense number of passages
in which you were almost certain to lose your way if you did not know
it. You would be lost, and never come back, and the Minotaur was
supposed to live in this Labyrinth, and you would wander about there
till he came upon you and killed you.
[Illustration: COIN OF KNOSSOS (SHOWING LABYRINTH).]
This legend of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth is particularly worth
attending to because it shows us so well how the unreal stories grew
up out of the real, and how we are sometimes able to find out the
real truth under the unreal story.
There was this real Labyrinth in Crete; and this tribute of seven
maids and seven youths was, we may be tolerably sure, demanded of the
Athenians. One or more of the drawings on the Minoan palace walls
show bull-fights going on, and in the bull-ring are not only men, but
also maidens, fighting the bull. One does not know whether all the
Athenian maidens and youths were intended for this bull-fighting, but
it is exceedingly likely that many of them were condemned to it, just
as prisoners of war and others were made to fight lions in the
amphitheatre at Rome. And out of this fact, of the maidens and
youths in the bull-ring, might very easily grow the story of the
Minotaur--the bull-monster of Minos--and his victim.
{82}
How Theseus slew the Minotaur and found his way out of the Labyrinth
by a clue given him by Ariadne, the king's daughter, who had fallen
in love with him, is all a further fancy that grew up out of the
solid facts of the Labyrinth and the bull-fighting.
It is very wonderful that these ancient people should have been able
to make their power felt so far from their home island, because of
the difficulty in crossing the open seas. Their ships were propelled
by the oars of rowers and by the wind in the sails when the wind was
in their favour--that is to say, was blowing in the direction in
which they wanted to go. The sails of modern sailing vessels are so
arranged that our ships can sail up into the wind, as it is called.
They can go in a direction at right angles to the direction of the
wind very easily, and even when it is a little opposed to them, by
means of setting the sails so as to catch the wind side-ways. But
there is no evidence that the Minoans were able to do this, and we
know that in far later days of our story no such device was used.
They had a squarish-shaped sail attached to the mast, more like our
lug-sail than any other kind of rigging that is used now. And yet,
with these poor appliances, they went to Egypt, to Syria, and to
Sicily, and no doubt farther west again. And they went in numbers,
for otherwise they would not have been able to subjugate the native
people as we know that they did at Athens.
[Sidenote: The pirates]
We may suppose that they went for a double purpose--for trade and
also for piracy, to take forcible possession of what they wanted
wherever they found it. In those days, and for a long time
afterwards, it does not seem as if they had any idea that it was
contrary to what was right and just to take anything that they were
able to take from another nation. Any {83} idea of what we call
international justice was very little thought of, if thought of at
all. They could, and they did, make laws among themselves which
surprise us by their justice, but these laws were for each nation
itself. We have seen the idea of a single god, supreme over a whole
nation, held at times by them, but even that did not mean that they
had an idea of a single god supreme over the whole of the world. He
was a national god only, and if the idea of the divine law was thus
national only, it was not likely that they would have the idea that
any laws made by man were to be obeyed beyond the limits of the
nation by which they were made.
So we may be sure that these ancient Minoans were what we should call
pirates. They swept the sea in their ships attacking and capturing
the ships of other peoples wherever they found them, and landing and
making forays on the mainland much as the Vikings of Norway did
around our own shores at a far later date. And this state of things
in the Mediterranean is worth particular attention because these
pirates, of one nation or another, will be found actively at work all
through the pages of this great story of mankind. The Mediterranean
was not freed from them until a very recent date.
Now, that piracy, together with the style of architecture and the
making of smaller works of art which they practised, are the two
great facts to remember about this wonderful civilisation of the
ancient Minoans. For just about the year 1500 B.C., at which we left
the story of Egypt, or a little later, some terrible catastrophe
overtook the Minoans. What happened we do not know. It has been
guessed that they suffered an invasion and a complete overthrow {84}
by the Dorians, a people who had come down from the north and had
taken possession of that southern part of Greece which is called the
Peloponnese. But nothing is certainly known, except that the Minoans
did suffer a very complete overthrow, that their power was shattered,
their splendid buildings were destroyed, and they seem to vanish out
of the story altogether. Their conquerors were evidently a people
far less civilised and accomplished than they. Antiquaries tell us
that there were at least two distinct stages in the making of
buildings and works of art under the Minoans before this last
catastrophe, but after that there is no building, no art work, worth
accounting for. It all went.
But they had left the mark of their genius in the buildings at Mycenæ
and elsewhere, and they had established the habit of piracy in the
seas about their island.
So now, I think, we have the frame set in which we may place the
picture. We have these ancient Egyptians leading the kind of life
that I have tried to show you. We have the Babylonians and Assyrians
along those other river-courses established as a great power in the
east, and we have the Minoans, very shortly to be overthrown and to
disappear, scouring the seas in their ships and having all the power
along the coasts. And between them, in the very midst, is that
country of Syria and Palestine which--especially Palestine, because
it is south of Syria--lies right in the course which the great
empires must traverse when they come to grips with each other.
Palestine is the country through which they must pass whether for
trade or for war with each other. You can imagine what a terrible
position that must have been. Syria {85} and Palestine, as you know,
were peopled by Semitic tribes, to which race the Babylonians also
belonged originally. But the divisions and differences, both between
the Babylonians and the others, and between these others, among
themselves, were many and of various kinds. Some must have regarded
each other as almost of the same kindred. Others must have seemed
quite strange and foreign. It was a great mixture.
And for the moment, in or about 1500 B.C., the Israelites as a nation
are not in Palestine at all. They are in the land of Goshen,
undergoing that oppression of which you know. Within 300 years or so
they will make their Exodus and begin their forty years of wandering
in the wilderness, to re-appear in the story, under the leadership of
Joshua; conquering the Canaanites and so establishing themselves
right in the most dangerous position of all, in Palestine, on the
highway between the two great empires.
{86}
CHAPTER VI
THE MEETING OF THE EMPIRES
It rather looks as if the casting out of the Hyksos, the foreign
"shepherd kings," made the Egyptians realise that they must combine
and unite and not go on fighting among themselves, if they meant to
be strong enough to resist the attacks of their neighbours. Whether
that was the reason or not, the records seem to show that just at
this time there began to be far less fighting between the big
landowners; and the king, Pharaoh, began to have more power in his
own hands, and to be able to give effect to his will, by means of his
vizier or prime minister, and the rest of his officers over all the
country.
Thus more strong by being united, the Egyptians drove out the Hyksos.
They also took forcible measures against the African tribes that were
pressing them on the south, and established their power right up to
the fourth cataract on the Nile, a long way farther south than the
boundary of the more ancient empire. Against Nubia, farther south
again, and against Libya, on their west, they fought effectively, and
thus we may suppose that they made themselves more safe than they
ever had been before from invasion by these African peoples.
There were two great kings of the name of Thothmes or Tethmosis, of
this eighteenth dynasty, under whom {87} most of these big
achievements were done--Thothmes I. and Thothmes III. The second
Thothmes reigned for a year or two only. Thothmes I. led the
Egyptian armies up through Palestine, overcame Syria, and went as a
conqueror as far east as the Euphrates, where he set up a column,
with an account of it all, to commemorate his victories.
But Thothmes III. was a more splendid Pharaoh still, and under him
Egypt came to the height of its military power. Syria had revolted;
so he marched north and utterly defeated the Syrians at Megiddo.
Then he turned east and fought his way across the Euphrates, where he
set up a column to his own glory beside that of Thothmes I. It is
recorded of him that he had presents given him by the king of
Babylon, and even by the king of the Hittites--that people from the
north who had established themselves in Asia Minor and who were
constantly giving trouble down in Syria.
[Sidenote: The Elamites]
And as for Babylon itself, there can be little doubt that at this
time it was in the midst of troubles. It was pressed upon thus, as
we see, by the growing power of Egypt on the west. Then on the
eastern side it was continually being troubled by that powerful
nation, the Elamites, whose capital was Susa. I do not want to
bother you much about these Elamites, though their power was great
and their civilisation an old civilisation. They were important
enough to Babylon, because they were constantly giving trouble, very
much as the stronger African tribes gave trouble to the Egyptians.
But apart from this they do not occupy any very big part in the great
story. They were not exactly what we should call world-makers, and
it is only the world-makers that we are taking as the actors {88} in
our story. They came rather near being world-makers in the great
sense, for there was a moment when they seriously threatened to
subjugate Babylonia, but the Babylonians just succeeded in defeating
them.
And then, of course, there were the Assyrians in the north, already
quite independent in reality, though Babylon still claimed a
suzerainty over them.
So now continually, for hundreds of years, the story goes on
repeating itself in the same way over and over again. The Assyrians
begin to get more and more power in the east and they are constantly
coming into conflict with the Egyptians who are constantly fighting
to retain their hold on that Syria which the wars of the two Thothmes
had made an Egyptian province. Syria lies north of Palestine: and
Palestine, being nearer to Egypt, was still more insistently claimed
by the Egyptians as theirs. You may realise how difficult the
position was for these Semitic tribes in Syria and Palestine, between
the two empires. The tribes were not united among themselves, so
that we can easily imagine (and we know that it actually did so
happen) that they tried to save themselves by making alliances with,
or admitting themselves as subject to, now one of the big empires and
now the other. That is the way the story went for hundreds of years
there. The Children of Israel, as you know, were not in the
Palestine story at the moment. It was about 1500 B.C. that the very
great Pharaoh Thothmes III. came to the throne, at the time when the
Israelites were in the land of Goshen. It was not until two or three
hundred years later that Moses led them (in Exodus) into the
wilderness.
Let us give the date of 1250 B.C. to the Exodus. It will then be
about the year 1200, or a little before, {89} that the Israelites
must have made their way, conquering, across Jordan and into the land
of Canaan.
Now, how did it happen that a people thus still called the Children
of Israel could have become so numerous and so powerful as to be able
to win these victories?
[Sidenote: The promised land]
In answer to the first question we may say that it was very many
years since the coming of Abraham from Chaldæa--more than a thousand
years. That gives time for a very large increase in numbers. Then
those years of desert wandering might very likely have made them
hardy. They had, too, as we know, deep faith in their "god of
battles"--the Jehovah--and in the divine promise that they should win
this land. And, finally, just at the moment when they came up out of
the desert and began their campaign against the peoples of Canaan the
great empires happened, as it seems, to have become rather exhausted
by their continual strife together, and the tribes of Palestine
themselves had been so crushed between the two that perhaps they had
not much power of resistance left.
And since there was all this perpetual fighting, it is interesting to
see in what manner and with what weapons the fighters fought. The
inscriptions tell us a great deal about them.
The people from the east seem to have learnt the use and value of
horses in battle earlier than the Egyptians, and fighting from
chariots seems to have been an earlier custom than fighting on
horseback. It is said that there are no pictures or carvings of an
earlier date than the Hyksos showing any of the Egyptians riding on
horses, but in the eighteenth dynasty they had their cavalry--that is
to say, their {90} mounted soldiers on horseback--as well as their
fighters in chariots. The chariots were not very elaborate. They
were two-wheeled. The boarding came up fairly high in front, to the
height of a man's elbows or thereabouts as he stood upright, but
sloped away at the sides towards the back; and the back was often
quite open. We see a pair of horses or even three abreast in some of
the gravings of the chariots.
The men in them, as I say, stood upright. Often there were two, of
whom one was for the driving and the other for the shooting, which
was nearly always with the bow and arrow. I suppose we may say that
the bow and arrow was their great weapon. Slings were used, as you
will know from the story of David and Goliath, but the disadvantage
of the sling, as compared with the bow and arrow, except for
skirmishing troops, is quite obvious. The slinging requires the
twirling of the sling, with the stone in it, round the head, before
the stone can be sent frying out; it requires plenty of room, or
else, in the twirling, you may easily break the next man's head! So
it is only of value to troops in "open formation," that is, with
spacious room between one man and the next. It does not do for close
formation. The bow and arrow is a far more convenient weapon for
this kind of fighting.
[Sidenote: Weapons and armour]
I have said that we often see gravings of one man driving the
horses--the charioteer--and of the other using the bow. We also
sometimes see that, in horseback fighting, one man, riding on one
horse, would lead and control another horse, on which would be riding
a man who would then have both his hands and all his attention free
for shooting with his bow and arrow. That is not always, nor perhaps
most often, {91} what we find. The more usual way was for the rider
to control the horse with his own hand on the reins as best he could
while he shot his arrows as he had opportunity and time. And they
were fine riders, turning round in the saddle--if they had a saddle;
but often they are shown riding bareback, and never, till much later,
with stirrups--and shooting backwards, over the horse's tail, as he
gallops away.
The battle-axe was a very common weapon; and a short sword and a
club, sometimes with a stone fixed in its head to give weight to the
blow, are also shown. The long spear appears to have come into
common use only gradually, and is not seen in the earliest pictures
of the fighting, though we do see short spears, for throwing.
It was not at all uncommon for the fighter on foot to have a man with
him who carried a large shield, which covered them both. I imagine
that an arrangement of that kind is meant when we read, as we do in
the Bible, of the "shield-bearer." For a man to carry a shield of
such size as this with any ease, it had to be a light shield, and we
know that the shields were commonly made of osier, like our baskets,
and covered with the skins of oxen or other beasts.
In the earliest times they seem to have worn very little armour, to
protect them from arrow or sword strokes, on the body; but helmets,
at first soft and padded, but later of metal, to defend the head,
were in early use, and they were usually made with a peak at the top
and sloping sides which would make a blow glance off them. Bronze,
as we have seen, was the metal which they first learnt to work, but
as they learnt to make weapons of iron, which was harder and could be
worked to a sharper edge, bronze went out of use.
{92}
By the time of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, when the great
empires began to meet in serious fighting, it is likely that both
knew something about the arrangement of their armies into separate
bodies of infantry and cavalry, and of the one supporting and helping
the other in somewhat like the modern manner.
This, then, would have been their way of fighting when they met in
the open field. It was a different matter when they came to the
assault of great cities, especially such as Babylon and Nineveh,
which were surrounded and protected, as we know, by walls of vast
height and thickness. The walls of Nineveh, for instance, were so
broad, even on the top, that three chariots could be driven along
them, one beside the other, and of course the width at the bottom
must have been very much larger. They had the material very ready at
hand for the making of these immense walls--in Babylonia and Assyria
at all events. They had abundance of clay, and for the greater part
of the walls they used the sun-dried bricks. But for the lower
parts, which had to bear the weight, they probably used harder
bricks, burnt in the kilns, for there are engravings of soldiers with
some kind of battering-ram hammering at the bricks from the lower
part of the wall of a city which they are attacking. The diggers
would be protected, by a shield held over their heads, from the
missiles sent down from the wall above.
[Sidenote: Against a walled city]
Then they had ladders for the scaling of these walls when they made
the attack. But of course the attackers down below would be at a
great disadvantage compared with the defenders on top of the wall.
They would have a much better chance if by any means they could hoist
themselves up to something like the same height as the defenders.
And this they {93} contrived to do by making movable towers of wood,
on wheels, which could be pushed along by men who were more or less
protected by the towers themselves from the people shooting at them
from the top of the wall. On the towers would be bowmen who would
shoot at the men on the wall, the shooters in the tower being
protected by the walls, except in so far as they had to show
themselves in order to shoot their arrows or throw their short spears.
[Illustration: A BATTERING-RAM.]
Another way that they had of hoisting themselves to the same height
as the defenders was to build a mound outside the walls. I suppose
the earth, as {94} they threw it up, would protect the builders
against the arrows shot from the wall. And then, when they had
raised the mound high enough, they would sometimes wheel their towers
to the top of this, and so it may be that, from the towers on top of
the mound, they may actually have had an advantage in height over the
defenders on the walls. That would give the opportunity for their
own fellow-soldiers below to set up the ladders and attempt the
scaling of the walls.
In that way, or in some ways like that, they attacked the walled
cities. You may have read words in the Bible that puzzled you about
"bringing a tower" against a city, or "casting up a bank" against it,
or some such words, and you may now know what they mean. They mean
the making of these movable towers for the attack, and throwing up
the mounds to bring the attackers to the same height as the
defenders. It must have been a much more exciting kind of warfare
than the pounding away with artillery at long range of many miles, as
is done in war now. It was more like the modern trench war, with
bombs and hand-grenades, when the trenches are close up to one
another.
That is a kind of general picture of the way in which you may imagine
these people making war on each other, constantly making war, in
Mesopotamia and in Syria and in Palestine, for hundreds and hundreds
of years. And I would remind you yet again that, except when the
Egyptians were taking a hand in it, it was warfare among nations that
were nearly all of the same original stock or race. The Hittites,
from the north, were a different people; but most of them had very
much the same ideas and the same ways of life; probably they could
understand each other's language, so that {95} really when the war
had passed over them for the time being the people who were left in
the country, looking after their flocks and their herds and their
crops, would not see much difference between living under one power
or under another. Probably it made very little change in their
lives. And that may explain, what otherwise seems almost impossible
to understand, how they could survive, how they could go on living at
all, in the midst of this perpetual fighting.
We know that the conquerors showed very little mercy. Women and
children were massacred or carried off into captivity, to be kept as
slaves. But after all that dreadful misery had passed over the land
the remnant that remained would go on much as before. Nothing in the
whole story is much more wonderful than the way in which the Syrians,
for instance, revolted again, very soon after being conquered and
subjugated by the first Thothmes; and the endurance of the Jews under
the repeated conquest of their country is one of the marvels of
history. It is difficult to understand how it was that they were not
entirely destroyed as a nation, and that they are among us, and in
every country of the world, as people of a very distinct character
and nationality to-day. This tenacity and endurance of the Jews has
had a very great effect in making the world such as it is now that we
are living in it.
[Sidenote: The Philistines]
One of the reasons why the Children of Israel under Joshua were able
to get a hold on the land of Canaan is that the Philistines had
already made their appearance there. The country of these
Philistines was a narrow stretch along the south-eastern edge of the
Mediterranean, running down to the border of Egypt. It seems
surprising that the Israelites should owe any {96} good thing to the
Philistines, because we always find the two peoples at bitter war
with each other; but it appears that just before the time of the
Israelites' coming up from the southern deserts the Philistines had
been making matters very difficult for the Egyptians in what the
Egyptians called their province of Palestine, and that this province
and the province of Syria also, a little to the north, were not
really under any effective Egyptian rule at all at the moment. The
tribes were not united together, and were weak in their disunion.
These Philistines were a warlike people. It is not known precisely
of what race they were. Some have thought that they were settlers
from Crete, which held, as we saw, rule over the sea. Other scholars
suppose them to have been, like most of the peoples of that region, a
branch of the great Semitic tree which we have seen spreading so
widely. But wherever they came from, there they were established
along this sea-coast, a people ready to fight by land or sea, ready
to go trading, too, no doubt, in their ships, if they could make
profit by it--a bold, enterprising people.
And there was another people, settled along another strip, farther
north, of the same coast--the Phœnicians. Almost exactly the same
account is to be given of them. They, too, were great sailors and
navigators, great traders, great pirates. We do not hear so much
about them just at this point of the great story which we have now
reached: the Philistines play a bigger part in it for the moment.
But the Phœnicians, you will see, are far more important really,
for in a few hundred years the Philistines are little more heard of.
The excellence of the Phœnicians as navigators made a big
difference to the story.
{97}
When the Israelites succeeded in pushing their army thus into
Palestine, westward of the Jordan river, their victory was by no
means complete. It was a long while before they got the better of
those Philistines near the coast, and at one time it looked very much
as if the Philistines would conquer them. We may suppose that they
did not come up out of the desert with much of the equipment
necessary for the attack of walled cities, such as I have just
described that necessary equipment to be.
[Sidenote: Israel and Judah]
The result of that was that even in the midst of the country which,
for the most part, they conquered, there still remained certain
strong cities in the hands of their enemies. Perhaps, as they had
taken the pasture lands, and all that they most wanted, and as they
saw that the capture of these strong places was almost beyond their
power, they came to some kind of agreement with the citizens to leave
those citizens in possession of the cities, provided they were left
in peace elsewhere. However that may be, it is certain that some of
those strong fortresses remained untaken by them, and it happened
that they were so placed as to divide the country which the
Israelites had overrun into two parts. The tribes of Judah and of
Simeon settled themselves in the country southward of this line of
fortresses, as we may almost call it. The rest of the tribes settled
to the north.
I draw your attention to that, because it helps to explain what
happened later when the division took place into the two kingdoms of
Israel and Judah. The tribes of Judah and Simeon, living in what
came to be called Judæa, of which Jerusalem was the capital, were
children of Israel, and of Abraham, just as much as those who
belonged to the kingdom of Israel so called.
{98}
It is a little confusing; and to save further confusion it will I
think be as well that I should now write of these Israelites
(including the inhabitants of Judæa) as Hebrews. The exact original
meaning of the name Hebrew is not very clear, but it was used at a
very early date, and we may use it conveniently to designate the
whole of the tribes that were led through their wanderings in the
desert by Moses and Aaron, and that came up and crossed over Jordan,
under Joshua, and settled in Canaan.
{99}
CHAPTER VII
THE JEWS AND THE ISRAELITES
If you will take a look on the map at all this country of Palestine
and Syria you will see how it is cut up by mountains, the Lebanon
range and others running down along it. One result of this must have
been to make it difficult for the tribes that were settled there to
unite and come together to resist the attacks of enemies from without.
In order to understand this great story properly you must bear in
mind all through how much of it happened as it did because of the
geographical position--that is to say, because the rivers ran just
where they did run and because the deserts and the seas and the
mountains lay just as they did lie round about the richer and more
pleasant land. Between the mountains lay plains and valleys where
the flocks might pasture. Canaan, you know, in the Bible is
described as a land "flowing with milk and honey." Those are words
meant to give you the idea of a rich, pleasant land, generally; but
perhaps they mean a little more besides. "Flowing with milk"
suggests a land where cows for milking would do well, and as for
honey, we are told by people who have gone hunting there that the
dogs often come out of the grass and the wild flowers quite yellow
with pollen--the pollen that the bees carry home with them on their
thighs. It is a great country for bees and honey.
{100}
But it was also, when the Hebrews first made their way into it, a
great country for Philistines. They were not pleasant neighbours.
The early chapters of the story of the Hebrews in Canaan are very
much taken up with fights against the Philistines. The duel between
David and Goliath is almost the best of the chapters; but the Samson
story is very good reading too. At one moment the Philistines very
nearly got the better of the Hebrews altogether; but then it seems as
if the danger made Samuel, the greatest of the Judges, realise that
if the people were to be successful against their Philistine enemies
they must be united under one head. It was very largely by Samuel's
act that Saul was appointed, and anointed with the sacred oil, as
king--the first king of the now united tribes.
You know the rest of that story, very likely: how they gradually got
the better of these strong enemies, how Saul slew his thousands and
David his tens of thousands, and how, under David's son, Solomon,
they came to the highest point of splendour and riches and power that
they ever reached. The capital city was Jerusalem in Judæa, the more
southern part of the kingdom. It is not to be supposed that in the
fulness of its power this united kingdom had anything to fear from
fortress cities of enemies in their midst. We may imagine all of
them wiped out, because we know that Solomon's ships went freely to
the coasts of Phœnicia, that cedar wood was brought from the
splendid cedar forests on Mount Lebanon, that the wealth of Africa,
in gold, ivory, apes and peacocks came to him by caravan through
Egypt or by sea.
Nevertheless the union lasted only a very short while. Under
Solomon's sons the kingdom was divided. {101} Rehoboam sitting on
his father's throne in Jerusalem and Jeroboam reigning over the
kingdom of Israel in the north. We begin, about this time, to be
tolerably sure about the dates, and the date of this division into
the two kingdoms is given as 937 B.C.
[Sidenote: The divided kingdom]
So there they were--Israel, bounded by Syria on the north, and with
Assyria pressing on from the west and coming now to the height of its
power; Judah nearer to Egypt and with the Assyrian power threatening
it scarcely less than Israel in the west. The first trouble from the
big empires between which they lay fell on Judah, from the Egyptian
side. Shishak, the Pharaoh of Egypt, made Judah pay tribute to him,
after coming with a conquering army, and apparently some of the
Israelite tribes had to pay tribute also. But Israel as a whole did
not come under his power.
As the story goes on we find the two kingdoms engaged in small wars
both with each other and with the neighbouring small nations. There
was continual fighting between the northern kingdom and Syria farther
to the north again. The moment of Israel's greatest strength was in
the reign of Omri, who founded its capital, Samaria. But Syria was a
more numerous and powerful nation than Israel without the aid of
Judah; and Ahab, the Israelitish king, was a vassal of Benhadad, king
of Syria, whose capital city was Damascus. Ahab aided Benhadad in
defending Syria from the attack of Shalmaneser II. of Assyria, but
the allies were badly beaten, and Israel had to pay tribute to
Assyria. She won back her independence for a short time, when
Assyria had other business to attend to, but just so soon as Assyria
had leisure to deal seriously with Israel and Syria again, Samaria
was taken. The Assyrians left them no opportunity for further
revolt. {102} As a nation, Israel disappears out of the story from
the year of the fall of Samaria, 722 B.C.
Assyria was now in the full tide of her power. Once the vassal of
Babylon, she had now made Babylon a vassal of hers. Judah had
escaped the fate of Israel by prudently taking sides with Assyria.
[Illustration: SENNACHERIB IN HIS CHARIOT.]
Egypt was not likely to be very pleased with this interference on the
part of Assyria with people whom she looked on as her tributaries.
Judah and the neighbouring small states must have been terribly
perplexed to know which was their wisest line to take--submission to
Assyria or to Egypt. Egypt, at the moment, was under a powerful
dynasty of Ethiopian, or what we should call negro, race. She began
to move against the aggressive Assyrians, and under Hezekiah Judah
decided to take the Egyptian side. A powerful combination was formed
against Assyria, which her {103} vassal Babylon joined, as well as
some of the peoples along the Mediterranean coast, the Philistines
and Phœnicians. But as yet Assyria was too strong or too clever
in her fighting methods for them all. The Egyptian army, with the
various allied forces, was seriously beaten, and Jerusalem was saved
only by the payment of a very heavy tribute to Sennacherib, the
Assyrian king.
[Sidenote: The fall of Assyria]
The power of Assyria was very great, and the Jews may well have
thought that they would find safety under her protection. Yet within
less than a hundred years, Assyria, as a great power, had ceased to
exist, and Judæa had once more to suffer for her alliance with the
beaten side. Sennacherib's victory over the Egyptians was in 701
B.C., and his son Ezar-haddon invaded and occupied Egypt and held it
for some ten years. But Assyria soon began to be pressed by a wild
and war-like people, the Scythians, coming from the north. Then the
Babylonians, allying themselves with the Medes, a nation whose
country lay on the north-west of Babylonia, attacked Assyria from the
south, and while all this confusion and fighting was going on in the
east, Pharaoh Necho of Egypt thought the moment good for trying to
get back the old Egyptian provinces of Palestine and Syria.
By the year 608 B.C. the Babylonians were besieging Nineveh, the
great capital city of the Assyrians, and Necho was marching up into
Palestine. Syria and Palestine, still faithful to the eastern
empire, opposed him, but were utterly defeated in a battle at
Megiddo. Once more Judah suffered by being on the losing side. In
607, a year later, Nineveh was taken and its fortifications razed to
the ground by the victorious Babylonians. The mighty Assyrian empire
was no more.
{104}
The explanation of this rapid fall of a people that had been so
powerful seems to be that it was a power that depended entirely on
its army, that the whole nation was occupied in war, and that there
were no reserves, no population from which the armies could be
recruited and made strong again, when once those already in the field
began to be shaken. It was, as we should say, entirely a military
state. To the peoples of Syria and Palestine we may suppose that it
made little difference whether Assyrians or Babylonians were the
great power in the east. However that may have been, they were
still, like the horseshoe that a blacksmith is making, "between the
hammer and the anvil." It was now, as it had been a thousand or more
years before, between the hammer of Babylon and the anvil of Egypt
that they lay.
Nor, as we may suppose, did this change of power in the east appear
to make the position of Egypt very different. The Egyptian king may
well have thought that it gave him the better opportunity for
extending his own authority eastward and northward. We have seen
how, in former years, Thothmes, and again Thothmes III., advanced
victoriously as far as Carchemish, on the Euphrates. Each set up a
column there as a monument to his victories. But neither got much
farther.
And now again, in this later time, the Egyptian king pressed up
victoriously, and again the Babylonians met him and gave him battle,
at the very same point--Carehemish.
If you will take a look at the map you will see, perhaps, why it was
that these names of battle-places occur again and again. Twice
already we have had great battles at Megiddo. Three times Carehemish
{105} seems to have been the turning-point in a campaign. If we
understand the geography, the way the land lies, the rivers,
mountains, plains and forests, we see the reason. In the first
place, an army coming up northward from Egypt would find a few strong
cities perhaps, such as Gaza and Ascalon, in the south, but after
these were passed it would come to a plain country which gave the
inhabitants no great opportunity of making a strong defence till it
came to the river Kishon, on which is the city of Megiddo. There
begins a wooded and mountainous country excellent for defence by a
less strong force against a stronger.
Then, if that line of defence was broken through, the natural
way--for it was the way that both traders and fighters went--would be
north eastward up through Damascus and so on till you came to the
Euphrates, a great river, in itself a formidable defence, and there
stood the city of Carehemish. That explains why these two, Megiddo
and Carehemish, were the places of the great battles.
[Sidenote: Nebuchadnezzar]
I suppose that the greatest of them all, in its effect on our story,
was the third Carehemish battle which, in the year 605 B.C.,
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, fought against the king of Egypt.
For the victory of Babylon was so decisive that from this time
forward, for a long while, there seems to have been very little
question about which power was the greatest in the world. It was
Babylon.
While Assyria and Babylon had been fighting together, Pharaoh Necho,
as we have seen, had taken advantage of their trouble and had
conquered the Jews and some allied forces at Megiddo, and as a
consequence of that victory Judah had once again become subject to
Egypt. Yet again, then, when Nebuchadnezzar {106} won his great
battle at Carchemish, the Jews were on the side of the loser. Even
after Carchemish, they seem to have inclined to the Egyptian, rather
than to the Babylonian alliance, perhaps because Egypt was the nearer
neighbour. And they retained that characteristic, which we have seen
all through the story, of being a stubborn people, with a spirit not
easy to subdue. In 597 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar found them giving
trouble, and punished them by taking many of the inhabitants,
including the king and Ezekiel the prophet, to Babylon.
But even so, within ten years the Jews that were left in Jerusalem
again tried to form alliances against Babylon, and this time the
great eastern power seems to have resolved to make a final end of the
business. Jerusalem was attacked by a siege, and so resolutely
defended that it held out for nearly a year and a half; but in the
end it had to yield. Its defending walls and many of its chief
buildings were overthrown, and, most dreadful of all in the eyes of
the Jews, their holy temple of Jehovah was destroyed by fire after
being robbed of its valuable and sacred vessels.
The date of the Fall of Jerusalem is 586 B.C. Surely it must have
seemed to the unhappy people, in spite of the hope of return which
even Jeremiah, the prophet of all this terrible calamity, held out to
them, that they were wiped out as a nation. The might of Babylon
must have appeared too great ever to be overthrown.
I have said so much about the Jews and their misfortunes, although
they were a people of so little apparent importance in comparison
with the great empires on either side of them, because all that
happened to them, small nation though they were, has been really of
the very greatest importance in {107} making the story of the world
what it is. It is through them, and by reason of these disasters,
and others of the same kind of which I will tell you soon, that they
were scattered all over the world. And being thus scattered, and
holding to their traditions and to their religion with a tenacity
which no other people in the whole story ever has shown, they took
those traditions and that religion everywhere.
[Sidenote: The religion of the Jews]
And here I would draw your attention to a fact about the Jews and the
Jewish religion which we are rather apt to forget. We are accustomed
to speak of Jews and Christians as if they were entirely opposed to
each other in every possible way, as if the one was absolutely the
opposite of the other. And so, in one, and perhaps the very most
important, point of the Christian religion they are, because the Jews
deny the divine nature of Christ which is the very chief point in the
Christian religion. But, for all that, we must never forget that it
was on the Jewish religion that the Christian religion was founded.
It was the religion that came into the minds and hearts of men who
had been trained up in the Jewish religion. The early Christians
were Jews, for the most part. Christ Himself was a Jew, brought up
in the Jewish religion, and we know that He said He came to "fulfil,"
not to destroy. He was, on His human side, the last of those Hebrew
prophets of whom the first, in point of time, was Amos.
It was on the Jewish religion as its stock that the Christian
religion was grafted, as a gardener grafts a new branch into an old
stem and the new takes up the sap from the old. There was another
branch later grafted on the Jewish religious stem, besides the
Christian--a very different branch, the Mohammedan {108} religion.
When we consider what an immense effect Christianity in the first
place, and Mohammedanism in the second, have had in the making of
this world-story, we shall see, I think, that we are right in
attributing a great importance to what happened to the Jews, from
whom came these other religions, as well as their own, which they
still hold now. What happened to them was thus much more important
in the story than what far stronger powers did, such as the Hittites,
who possessed all Asia Minor and threatened Egypt, or the Elamites;
who nearly overthrew the Babylonians, or the Syrians, who at one time
were far stronger than either Israel or Judah, or even both of them
together.
[Sidenote: The Bible]
We know that the Jews won their intense faith in Jehovah, their
national god, only with difficulty. They were of the same race as
the tribes about them who worshipped Baal and Ashtaroth, and they
were constantly inclined towards that pagan worship, as we know from
the Bible. But in the end the higher religion won, and their
religion was intensely real to the Jews. It was a very big thing in
their lives. They believed that Jehovah punished them in this life
for the wrong things that they did, such as oppression of the poor,
or unjust dealing, and they believed that he punished the nation for
wrong things that the nation did. They had not the belief of the
Egyptians in reward and punishment in an after-life.
And they considered their god as an exacting, a "jealous" god. He
would punish them if they worshipped in the so-called "groves," which
were often posts or stones set up on the "high places" to the pagan
gods, or if they were slack in his worship, or in making sacrifice to
him.
All these peoples had, in common, a belief in winning {109} the
favour of the gods by sacrifice. The more precious to them the thing
sacrificed, the more value they deemed it would have in the sight of
the gods; and that is how it is that we see them at one time actually
sacrificing their own children, as the most valuable offering that
they could make. The instance of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice
Isaac will occur to your minds.
And wherever they went, into whatever land of exile they were carried
by their conquerors, they would take with them those sacred writings,
that record of their history, that story of the creation of the
world, and that code of their laws and of their religious customs,
which, with very much more that they had not got, we now mean when we
speak of the Bible. Wherever they went they had this holy record
assuring them that they were the chosen people of Jehovah. Among the
influences which enabled them to keep so distinct from the nations
into whose midst they came, we must surely place very high the
influence of the Bible--that is to say, of so many of its books as
had been written at that time.
The might of Babylon, as I have said, must have seemed so great to
the Jews, carried away into exile, that it never could be overthrown.
And yet, within less than fifty years from the siege and capture of
Jerusalem, Babylon itself was taken by a power of such overmastering
strength that the Babylonians only once afterwards, and to no effect,
attempted to regain independence.
This extraordinary "judgment," as the Jews regarded it, was executed
by the hand of the Persians under their great leader Cyrus.
{110}
CHAPTER VIII
THE PERSIANS AND THE GREEKS
The Persians are a people that up to this point come into the story
hardly at all. Suddenly, out of the East, they come right into its
very centre and are the principal actors in it for a century or two.
After the break-up of the Assyrian power, the strongest nation in the
alliance that had done that breaking was the nation of the Medes.
The Medes and Persians were of the same race, different altogether
from the Semitic. They were of that great race called Aryan, or
Indo-European, that came from the high lands in the centre of Asia.
Probably their numbers so increased that they had to find new
country. They pressed down southward and westward, towards the sun
and the more fertile lands. They were hardy and accustomed to moving
about. It was no hardship to them to make migrations. They moved
with their wives and children, flocks and herds, and all their small
household goods. A great number pressed down into India. Another
big stream flowing towards the west came as far as the Babylonian
eastern border.
These Aryan people from the north-west were great riders. It is
thought that they introduced the horse to the Babylonians, and that
from the Babylonians it came to Egypt.
The country of Elam had been invaded, and its {111} power shattered,
by the Assyrians shortly before the break-up of their own empire, and
this shattering, together with the fighting between the Assyrians and
the alliance formed against them, gave the Persians (who inhabited a
country to the east called Iran, and especially the part of that
country called Persis) the chance of getting possession of Elam.
This they did, and established themselves in Susa, the old capital
city of the Elamites. Persia was actually the vassal of Media, until
Cyrus, who was the Persian king at Susa, led a revolt against them.
Within three years he had conquered and taken their capital, and
Media was now a subject state to its own late subject, Persia.
Thus they were, then, established in their power along the Eastern
boundary of Babylonia, which had now become the master empire by the
defeat of Assyria. Nevertheless Cyrus, at the head of the Persian
army, took this mighty Babylon without a battle! But he had to fight
some hard battles first. It seems that the Medes had made treaties
with their allies of Babylon and Egypt which the Persians did not
feel disposed to pay attention to. This aroused such opposition to
the Persians that an alliance of Babylonians and Egyptians with
Crœsus, king of Lydia in Asia Minor, and with the Spartans, was
formed against them.
[Sidenote: Spartan mercenaries]
Notice particularly those Spartans. Sparta was the southern state of
Greece, and this is the first appearance of Greece in our story. It
is very notable. These great nations of the East already thought so
well of the fighting qualities of the Greek soldiers, and especially
of the Spartan soldiers, that it was worth their while to bring them
over and pay them to fight for them. There seems to be little doubt
that they were mercenaries, that is to say, soldiers who were {112}
paid to fight and who fought for pay. But the alliance was of no
avail. Within the space of a few months, in the summer of 546 B.C.,
the whole of Asia Minor was in the Persian hands, right away to the
Mediterranean shore. It was not until six years later that Cyrus had
leisure to attend to Babylon itself; but when he did attend to it the
resistance was not great. The Babylonian king's allies had been
broken. Cyrus took Syria and Palestine also in his own reign, and
after his death his son Cambyses pressed on down into Egypt and
conquered that ancient land likewise. The victorious career of the
Persians was only checked when they came against the Ethiopians and
Nubians in farther Africa.
[Sidenote: The Persian conquest]
Even the shore of the Mediterranean did not stay their progress.
They won many of the Greek islands, including Cyprus and Samos. The
empires of Egypt and of Babylonia had been great, but this was
greater than both of them together. And those two had been rivals.
This of Persia seemed to be without a rival. It is little wonder
that the Persian ruler assumed the title of King of Kings. He ruled
right away into India. He ruled all that seemed to matter or to
count for anything; and it had all been accomplished in not much more
than twenty years from the time of the first revolt of Cyrus against
the lordship of the Medes. How was it done?
That is a question which must be answered in different ways. No one
answer is enough. There were several causes which worked together
for this astounding success of the Persians. But one of the chief
causes, if not the chief of all, was Cyrus. We cannot doubt that.
Throughout the whole of this greatest of great stories which I am
trying to tell you we shall {113} not meet with an actor bigger and
more glorious than this Cyrus. I doubt whether we meet with another
quite as big. For not only were the extent of country and the power
of the nations that he conquered extraordinarily great, but he made a
very extraordinary use of his conquests. He must have been a great
leader of men, a man whom others were ready to obey and follow; and
he must have been a great general, according to the ideas of what
generalship and the manœuvring of armies meant at that time; but
besides all that he must have been a very wise man and a very good
man. There can be little doubt that he was far more merciful to the
people that he conquered than any other conqueror that has come into
our story yet. He treated them with far greater kindness. That is
proof of his goodness.
Then he was very content to leave them their own institutions,
including their religions, so long as they were obedient to him as
their over-lord. That shows his wisdom, for it meant that the people
he conquered were content to be under him. Under Cyrus, the Jews who
were in exile at Babylon were allowed to go back to Jerusalem, and he
gave orders which helped them to the re-building of the Temple there.
It is thought that it was partly by the help of these Jews in Babylon
that he was able to take that strong city, as he did, without a
fight. But it is said that he had to divert part of the stream of
the Euphrates in order to do so; and it is certain that he had
already broken the Babylonian power before he took the capital.
He was able to show this kindness and consideration for the religion
of other peoples, because his own religion and that of his Persians
was a very enlightened one. I think we shall not do wrong in calling
it the {114} most enlightened religion of all that we find before
Christ came. It was the religion called Zoroastrianism, from the
name of its founder, Zoroaster, who is also called Zarathustra. It
was the religion of those Indo-European people of whom we have seen
one part pressing down south into India and another part pressing
westward. Zoroaster is thought to have been the author of the most
ancient portions of what is called the Zend-Avesta, which means the
Avesta, or Sacred Writings, written in the language of Zend. Zend
belongs to the Aryan group of the Indo-European family of languages,
from another branch of which our own native English language has been
derived.
[Sidenote: Zoroaster]
Zoroaster taught that there is one great and good god, Ormuzd, but
that there is also another supernatural being, Ahriman, the spirit of
evil. It is accordingly as men do the will of Ormuzd, that is to
say, do good acts, that they will have a happy life after death. If
the good acts a man has done in life here are more in number and
importance than his bad acts he will go to paradise; if the bad acts
are more than the good he will go to hell and suffer everlasting
punishment. Justice, acting justly, was what Zoroaster recognised as
the most important thing of all.
You will see at once how near this very ancient belief comes to that
which we hold now, and how much more enlightened it is than other
religions which we have noticed. It contains the idea of one god
supreme over all the universe--not only supreme for a single nation
or for one portion of the earth.
Fire, that mysterious, useful, kindly thing by which man warms
himself, by which he cooks his food, and which, nevertheless, is
capable of such horrible destruction, seems to have been associated
closely with the {115} power of the good god, Ormuzd. Fire was
therefore a sacred element.
The cow, another kindly thing, because of its use to man, was also
sacred. In the religion which Zoroaster was brought up in the cow
had been sacrificed to ward off evils--with the idea, already
noticed, that the more precious to man the thing that he sacrificed,
the more favour his sacrifice would win with the gods. Zoroaster
taught that it was impious to kill the cow.
It was with this fine and enlightened religion in their hearts, then,
that Cyrus and his Persians came conquering the western world. They
conquered, but they treated those that they conquered with justice,
according to the great teaching of Zoroaster. As they believed in
one god over all the earth, they might permit the worship of that god
to be carried on according to the various customs that they found
where they went, so long as those customs were not altogether base
and evil.
And these Persians were a kindly people. That is one of the causes
of their victories. In the great story we find this often
repeated--that a people living in a mountainous country, in a severe
climate, and in surroundings which make their lives difficult and
their food hard to get, come down on the inhabitants of a country
where the soil is more fertile, the climate milder, and life
altogether easier, and drive these easy-going people out before them
as if they were sheep running away before wolves. It is a happening
which teaches the lesson that the strongest, the most effective, kind
of men are those that are accustomed to hardship.
But it is quite clear from all we have seen that those whom the
Persians thus conquered were practised warriors. They were
constantly fighting. The {116} Persians, however, seem to have come
upon them with a kind of fighting to which they were not altogether
accustomed. The difference between their methods was chiefly that
the Persians were so much quicker in movement. They were fine
archers, and they were very fine horsemen. It was this last, their
horsemanship, which seems to have been one of the great secrets of
their success. They had archers both on horse and on foot, but on
horse especially. Their method was to dash down upon the enemy in a
swift attack, the cavalry opening out to let the archers on foot
shoot their arrows. Then, when they had harassed the enemy with this
swift charge, it was not their way to come to close quarters with
him, at all events at the first onset, but rather to retire as
quickly as they came on, to re-form, and to come back to the attack
again.
The enemy, on their retirement, if he did not know their way of
fighting, was rather apt to think that they were retreating
altogether and were giving up the attack. Then the enemy was
inclined to start off in pursuit. That was exactly what suited the
Persians, for it meant that when they returned for the next attack
they found the enemy more broken up than before and less able to
resist. It was by repeated onsets of this nature that they got the
formation of an opposing army knocked to pieces; and then, in a final
attack, this time pressed closely home, they might, and they
generally did, defeat him.
But if it was thus a new style of fighting that the Persians brought
with them from the east, they also found themselves encountering a
mode of defence against their attack which was strange to them. And
this mode of defence came from the west.
In that allied army which we saw the Persians {117} defeating in Asia
Minor--the army led by Crœsus, king of Lydia--the Persians were
victorious. They were so decisively victorious that Crœsus
himself was taken prisoner by them, and the whole strength seems to
have been knocked out of the alliance by that single blow. And in
the defeated army we saw that there were soldiers from Sparta, which
is, as you see on the map, in that most southern and almost detached
part of Greece which is called the Peloponnese. The Spartans,
therefore, were Greeks, and the Greeks were among those that had the
worst of it in this great battle. But, for all that, it was a
Grecian mode of fighting that made the best of all defences against
the Persian way of attacking. This mode of defence is what was
called the "phalanx."
[Sidenote: City states]
You have to understand that the word Greece in those days did not
mean a single nation so much as a collection of small states settled
close beside one another. The peoples of the different states were
for the most part of the same race, no doubt, just like the Semitic
peoples in Syria and Palestine. But they differed from each other in
their customs and their ways of government far more than the Semites
did. They were very often fighting among themselves and, again like
the Semites, found it very difficult to let their jealousy of each
other die down and to unite together for defence against a foreign
foe. The Spartans were the most warlike of all the Grecian states.
Their government was conducted in such a way as to make all the males
in the country fighters.
Their idea of fighting was as different as possible from that of the
Persians. They had few horse-soldiers. They were drawn up for
battle in a close deep formation, I suppose like what we should call
"a solid {118} square," and it was this solid square that was called
the phalanx. The troops were heavily armed, with shield, sword, and,
most important of all for receiving the charge of cavalry, with long
spears. You can imagine what a solid defence this would make against
the lightly armed cavalry of the Persians. The arrows would not
cause very serious loss to the armoured and shielded Greeks, and when
the Persians did finally push their charge home the spears would so
receive them that it would be like charging a gigantic porcupine.
[Illustration: GREEK WARRIOR.]
Of course all that would depend on the phalanx keeping its solid
formation. If its ranks got at all broken up in pursuit, under the
mistaken idea that the Persians, after the first onslaught, were done
with, and were fleeing away, then it would be a very much less
formidable porcupine on which the horsemen would come when they
returned to the attack. Probably the Greeks quickly learnt the
Persians' methods and grew careful to keep their formation without
any big breaks in it.
[Sidenote: The phalanx]
These heavily armed soldiers of the Greeks were called hoplites.
After a while the phalanx was assisted by lighter armed and more
swiftly moving troops called peltasts, but the solid phalanx was
always the great strength of their armies. The peltasts were {119}
never regarded as of equal importance with the hoplites, though they
were very valuable assistants to the phalanx. The Greeks, living in
a comparatively small country with the sea on either side of them,
had not the same chance of getting horses for a numerous cavalry as
the nations that had all Asia or all the north-eastern parts of
Europe to draw on for their supply.
This phalanx of the Greeks is a very important feature in the great
story. It was chiefly, as we may suppose, by reason of their
adopting this formation and making such splendid use of it, that they
were sought after, as we know that they were, by other nations to
come to the assistance of their own armies. There grew up in Greece
a class of what we may call professional soldiers, ready to hire
themselves out for pay, to fight on any side that would make it worth
their while to do so. We find them thus, as what we call
"mercenaries," fighting sometimes for the Egyptians, sometimes
against them. Some of them we even find fighting for the Persians.
And they scarcely ceased fighting among themselves. The Persian
empire extended to Egypt, and to all the eastern shore of the
Mediterranean, but it was not powerful enough to prevent much
fighting between the peoples subject to it. It could not, however,
prevail much against Greece, in spite of the divisions between the
Greek states.
Our story now, say after 500 B.C., or thereabouts, is concerned very
much with the vain attempts of the Persians to subjugate the
Greeks--to get them under their yoke. And again I must remind you,
to get the picture at all clear and full, that the Mediterranean was
continually being ravaged by the ships of pirates and traders--ready
to be peaceful merchants if it paid {120} them better to be so, or to
attack other shipping or coast towns if they could do so with success.
The Peoples of the Sea was the old name for these raiders and
traders, who were of all nations, sometimes combining together, and
making themselves into quite a powerful navy, with headquarters in
Crete or another of the many islands. The most powerful, as a
nation, of any of these sea-raiders were the Phœnicians. They
planted many settlements along the coasts, either on islands or on
easily defended projecting headlands of the main shores. Such places
were of value to them for their ships to run into when beset by
storms or by enemies. The most important in our story was their
settlement at Carthage. This Carthage will play a very big part
later on.
But now we must take a look at the very remarkable part which Greece
was playing at this moment, 500 B.C. or so, and had played for some
years and was to play for many to come. I expect you will have
wondered that I have not spoken about Homer and the famous Siege of
Troy, and other great men and great events which happened long before
this time. Troy began to be besieged very shortly after 1200 B.C.
Homer lived at some time between 800 and 900 B.C. We have left them
far behind.
The reason why I did not pick them up and fit them into their place
in the story when we came to the years of their happening is that the
part played by Greece in the making of this great story--that is to
say, in the making of the world--is different from the part played by
any other people. It is such a different part that it is almost
another story, although it does really fit into the great story and
is a very important part of it.
{121}
The other great peoples that we have been talking about, the
Egyptians, Babylonians, and Persians, conquered vast countries,
founded vast empires. The Greeks did nothing of this kind. They
were fine and accomplished soldiers, as we have seen, but the various
states were too disunited for them to be able to bring their forces
together or to keep them for any length of time together.
[Sidenote: The genius of Greece]
But for many centuries they were by far the most accomplished people
in the world; their artists, both painters and sculptors, were far
ahead of the rest; their thinkers went deeper and with more clear
insight and wisdom than any others into the many problems and puzzles
that life and the world set for us; they had finer sculptors, finer
orators, finer poets, probably they had finer musicians; we have seen
that they had a finer battle formation.
In fact, in cleverness and in all the arts and sciences the Greeks
were not only superior to all those about them, but they were
superior to all that have been since--even to ourselves, though we
have had all these years in which to learn. We have learnt to make
trains go, and the telephone and poison gases, and guns that will
shoot twenty-five miles, and other things of that kind. But we are
not the equals of the Greeks of 500 B.C. in art, oratory, poetry or
philosophy. Had it not been for the Greek philosophers we cannot
tell what our philosophy might have been, for it is built up on the
foundations they laid; but we may doubt whether it would have been
nearly as far-seeing or as interesting.
And that is really the most important part that the Greeks took in
the making of the story--a part quite different from that of the
great empire-makers, and yet, {122} as I think you will agree, a
bigger part than any of theirs. For it made, or did a great deal to
make, the thought of the world what it is to-day. It did a great
deal to make the thought of the world what it was all down the pages
of the story, say from 1200 B.C. onwards. I mean that it made men
think about things--about art and philosophy and music, and about
life in general--as they do think. Had it not been for the Greeks we
should be thinking differently, and probably not nearly so wisely,
about all these things. That is the greatest work that the Greeks
have done in the world.
You may remember that we said the disasters which befell the Jews,
and their scattering throughout the other nations, made them able to
take their religious ideas with them, and to sow those ideas, as it
were seeds from which plants should spring, amongst those nations
into which they were driven. Something like the same kind of
scattering happened to the Greeks, and so enabled them to carry their
ideas over a great part of the world. Of their own accord they
would, no doubt, have carried them far. If you look at the map of
Greece, you will see that not only has the country the sea on three
sides of it, but that it is cut up, and cut into, by a wonderful
number of bays and gulfs of the sea, so that it would have a very
great length of seashore if all were added together. Naturally that
meant that the Greeks were great sea-goers. They were a great
"maritime" people, as we should say--from _mare_, which is Latin for
sea. A good deal of their excellence in art we may suspect that they
derived from those ancient Minoans whom we saw masters of Crete very
long ago. The Minoans, as the Minotaur legend showed us, were
masters of Athens also. They were the great sea-power in very
ancient {123} times. They left evidences of their art at Mycenæ in
Greece. The Greeks, following the Minoans in art, perhaps followed
them also in the skilful management of ships. We know, at all
events, that they went far and wide on the Mediterranean in ships,
certainly as great traders, probably often as pirates, and, whether
the one or the other, taking their thoughts, their arts, their
culture with them.
[Sidenote: The expansion of the Greeks]
But besides this--beside these expeditions which they went of their
own will, and beside the further spread of their culture, which their
soldiers, going out to fight for hire, would carry with them--some or
other of the Greeks were from time to time in the course of the story
obliged to fly over-sea, obliged to save themselves from the pressure
of enemies coming down on them from the north.
It is exactly what we saw happening in Babylonia that happened here
too in Greece. It is exactly what happened again and again in the
great story--the peoples from a wild barren country come pressing
down upon peoples living in a more fertile one. Out of Thrace, which
you will see on the map lying to the north of Greece, down through
Macedonia and Thessaly, came wild warlike tribes pressing on the
peoples of the more fertile south. Various reasons for their
movements are given by the Greeks who left their native country and
settled, some in the islands, some in Asia Minor. In some instances
it was admitted that they went under pressure of enemies; but that is
not a reason which would be very pleasant to their pride. Other
reasons were recorded, but probably this was really the most common.
In their sailings to and fro, and tradings, they would learn about
the countries on the Mediterranean shores. {124} Even if they had
not full knowledge of it before, they would have learnt all that they
needed to know about the western shore of Asia Minor in the course of
the ten years which are assigned to the Siege of Troy.
Ilus was father of Tros, king of Troy, and the Greeks called Troy
Ilium, after Ilus, rather than after the son Tros from whom the name
Troy came. And the Iliad is therefore the story of Ilium, otherwise
called Troy. This splendid poem is attributed to Homer as its
author, but what Homer probably did was to recite, or to sing to the
accompaniment of the lyre, these stories, which were only written
down years afterwards. We may imagine him something like the bard or
the troubadour. How much of his own invention he added to the story
we cannot know.
The story, as we have it from him, is that Queen Helen having been
taken from her home, with her own willing consent, by Paris and
carried to Troy, the Greeks went after her and tried to get her back.
They tried for the whole ten years which are ascribed to the Siege of
Troy. Helen was the most beautiful lady in the world, and the Iliad
is certainly one of the most beautiful poems.
But can we believe the story?
The Greeks were a singularly intelligent people. Does it seem the
act of any intelligent people to go on fighting for ten years in
order to get back even the most beautiful lady in the world? And if
they were at all intelligent they would certainly be apt to reflect
that she would not be likely to be equally beautiful at the end of
the ten years as she was at the beginning.
[Sidenote: The Siege of Troy]
A very learned Grecian scholar, Dr. Walter Leaf, has written a book
about the Siege of Troy which tells the story in a much less romantic
and poetical but a {125} much more probable way. And I want to tell
that story, as he tells it, very shortly to you, because it gives
such a good idea of the way that men were living along the shore of
Asia Minor at that time, say 1200 or so B.C.
Troy, you will see if you look at the map, stands, or stood, nearly
in the north-western corner of Asia Minor, its territory reaching up
to the shore of that narrow sea-channel which used to be called the
Hellespont and is now called the Dardanelles. Any Greek ships
wishing to go for trade through the Hellespont must pass close along
the coast of Troy land, so close that any people who had the command
of the land could sally out and interfere with their passage. The
current flows out westward through the Hellespont, and the wind
usually blows from north-west, against the ships going eastward.
The whole point of Dr. Leaf's argument is that at Troy there was a
market, or fair, at which the produce of the countries in the east
was sold to the Greeks and other people in the west, and that the
Trojans derived much profit from this market. The profit from this
market they would of course lose if the western people were able to
sail up through the Hellespont and do their trade direct with the
people along the shore of the Black Sea. The Trojans were, in fact,
what we nowadays call "middle-men," and you know how we are always
trying to bring the consumer, the person who wants to use the thing
produced, into direct touch with the producer, and so to do away with
the profit which the middle-man charges and which he again puts on to
the price of the thing when he sells it to the consumer. The Greeks
were the consumers. They wanted to do away with the middle-men, that
is to say {126} with the Trojans, and that, far more probably than
the bringing back of the beautiful lady, was why they spent so many
years and so many lives in the siege of Troy.
You will remember what we said before about the kind of ships that
these people had. They were propelled by rowing, or by sails which
were only useful when the wind was nearly directly behind them. They
had to put in to some harbourage every night, because they did not
dare to go along in the dark, without charts and without compass and
without knowledge of how to steer by the stars. Even in daytime they
hardly dared to go out of sight of land and of the landmarks which
they knew.
The islands in these seas lie so close to each other that it was
possible for them to creep along in this way from one to the other
and so to the coasts of Asia from Greece. And there was another
reason why they could not go long voyages--they had no light cisterns
in which to carry fresh water. They had to take it in heavy earthern
jars.
This need for water they could supply from rivers which ran out
westward through Troy land. They would lie along the coast there, as
they traded with the Trojan middle-men, or, possibly, as they waited
for a favouring wind to go through the Hellespont, which the Trojans
might allow them to do on payment of some toll money, as we should
call it, for the permission.
The reasons for thinking that the wish to do away with these Trojans
and their market was the real motive of the ten years' war are
strengthened when we look at the names of the peoples that came to
the help of the Greeks on the one side and of the Trojans on the
other. Those that came to the assistance of the Greeks {127} were
the peoples along the Mediterranean shores or on the islands; those
that aided the Trojans were the peoples from the east. So we have
the two set in rather distinct opposition to each other; the Trojans
and the eastern people who sent their things to the market at Troy
and had an interest in the market being kept up, and the western
peoples who wanted the market destroyed.
That is a very prosaic story, is it not, in comparison with the
romance about the beautiful lady? It is not the kind of story that
Homer or any other bard would care to sing or his listeners would
take pleasure in hearing. But I am afraid it is more likely to be
the true story of the reason why a practical and intelligent people
like the Greeks fought so hard and so long to annihilate Troy. I
have said so much about this famous siege because it gives such a
good opportunity of setting what are probably the facts beside the
fictions which have been founded on them. It teaches us how these
poetic stories were made.
[Sidenote: The Odyssey]
The other great poem attributed to Homer, the Odyssey, is only
another chapter, dealing with the adventures of one of the principal
Greek heroes, of the story of the siege. It is even more glorious
reading than the Iliad itself.
Now, whatever the truth be about the Trojan war, one fact is quite
clear and certain from its story, as well as from other evidence,
that the Greeks had dealings, constant dealings, with Asia Minor.
Therefore their thought, their art, their culture, and all that was
most remarkable in their character as a nation, was known in Asia
Minor, it was known among all these islands of the Ægean Sea and
along the southern, the African, shores of the Mediterranean.
Everywhere that it went {128} it was superior to the thought and the
culture of the native people, and everywhere it had its effect. I
want you to realise that. It was not by reason of the force of their
arms, though they were such good fighters, that the Greeks count for
so much in our great story, but by reason of the force of their
thought, and of their accomplishments.
Some hundred or two hundred years after the siege of Troy we find
certain colonies or cities of the Greeks founded along the western
shore of Asia Minor. The Greeks living in these cities were called
Ionians. Shortly before the coming of Cyrus, the all-conquering
Persian, those Ionians had been conquered by that king Crœsus of
Lydia whom we saw taking command of that ill-fated alliance formed
against Persia. The Persian had now, by the time, 500 B.C., to which
we have brought down the story, made himself master of all Asia
Minor. The Ionian cities had come under his dominance.
{129}
CHAPTER IX
THE GLORIOUS DAYS OF GREECE
It is amusing to stop now and then in the course of a story to wonder
how it would have gone if one or other of the events in it had
happened rather differently. Sometimes it seems as if just one event
turned the whole course of what happened afterwards.
So here in this great story of ours we may wonder what would have
happened to the world if the Persians, pushing their way westward,
had not come up against that strong wall of opposition which they
found in the Greek phalanx. There was no other power, so far as we
know, at this time, in the west, that was at all likely to be able to
stop them.
If we look at what happened in the more southward direction of their
advance, in Egypt, we shall perhaps be inclined to think that they
would not have gone very much farther westward than they did, for the
Egyptian story of that time shows that they were not able to
establish their power very securely in that country. For nearly
forty years after the Persian conquest of Egypt by Cambyses, the son
of Cyrus, Egypt was held as a province of Persia, but in 488 B.C. the
Egyptians made a successful revolt and threw off the Persian yoke for
a time. Three years later they were again subdued by Xerxes, who was
then king of Persia, but only fifteen years afterwards they were
{130} again revolting, and through the whole of that century, 500 to
400 B.C., they were continually rising against their Persian masters,
never quite succeeding in winning their freedom, but constantly
giving trouble, never completely subdued. It is evident that the
Persians, after their first and most effective conquest, never had a
very secure hold over the people of the Nile.
Then, if we turn to look at what was going on farther north, where
the Persian cavalry were coming up against that famous Greek phalanx,
we shall see good reason why the Persians were not able to give a
great deal of attention to making their position good in Egypt. The
wonder is that they should have found any forces at all to spare for
that enterprise.
The Persian monarch had assumed the title of King of Kings. He
claimed dominion over the whole world, as the Persians knew it. It
must have been most vexatious to him, and to that great claim and
title of his, to find the claim opposed and contested. He had
conquered Greeks before--those Spartans whom he had met fighting in
the alliance under King Crœsus. He would conquer them again. He
would crush them and take possession of their country.
After all that they had accomplished, the conquest of Greece cannot
have seemed to the Persians as if it would be a hard matter. Greece,
as a single nation, did not exist. There were many Grecian states,
but they were always fighting among themselves, each striving for the
supremacy. The chief of the fighting states were Sparta and Athens.
Each of these would form alliances from time to time with other
states to fight against the other. Just at this moment, that is just
before 500 B.C., the contention between them was most severe. The
forms of the government in the two {131} were sharply opposed. The
government of Athens had lately fallen into the hands of the people.
The people, the democracy (from _demos_, the people, and _kratos_,
power) had deposed their king and driven him out of the country. The
Spartans, who hated the idea of a democratic government, sympathised
with him, and no doubt would have restored him to power had they been
able to do so; but he went to Asia Minor, to the court of Darius, who
was then king of Persia, and besought his help. The Persian was very
willing to give it, but it was not until some years later, in 490
B.C., that the first actual invasion of Greece by the Persians took
place. That invasion practically began and ended with what was one
of the most famous battles in the world's history, the battle of
Marathon.
[Sidenote: Marathon]
It was fought on a small plain, only some three miles wide, on the
seashore, where the Persians had disembarked their forces. And here
I would give you a word of warning which must apply to all this story
of the glorious days of Greece. The battles--Marathon, Thermopylæ,
and Salamis--have become very famous, and rightly famous. They were
of importance in the story because they--Marathon and Salamis, at all
events, which were Grecian victories--put a stop to that westward
advance of the Persians which might have extended we cannot say how
far but for those victories. But they were battles in which the
forces engaged on the one side or the other were almost ridiculously
small in comparison with the armies which we have seen put into the
field. They were fought over very small spaces of land or sea, and
they were very quickly over.
But though they are rightly famous, for the reason which I have
spoken of, a good deal of their fame is due to the splendid way in
which their story has been told {132} to us by the great historian
Herodotus, and, as you know, the best story in the world can be made
to seem very poor if it is badly told; and a poor story can be made
interesting by good telling. These people, these Greeks, with their
extraordinary accomplishments, had the power of telling stories very
well, and the stories really were good in themselves. They were good
stories, and stories of important events, but the events are rather
apt to appear even more important than they really were, just because
their story is told so very well.
That is the word of warning which I want to give you about all these
stories of the glorious days of Greece.
In giving you the outlines of the great story of the world, as I am
trying to do in this book, there is no space for an account of these
battles. You must read about them elsewhere, and all I can do is to
tell you how they fit into the big story, where they come, and how it
was that they happened. The Greeks, at this battle of Marathon,
defeated the Persians and utterly demolished any chance of the
success which this first invasion of Greece by the Persians could
have had. The Persians returned again to the attack, but it was not
until ten years later; and then it was attempted in a different
manner.
There had been an effort at the invasion of Greece even before that
which was defeated at Marathon. Those Ionian cities along the coast
of Asia Minor had revolted against the Persian rule, and had been
aided by the Athenians, who were closely related to them. A Persian
expedition had set out four years before the Marathon enterprise to
punish the Athenians for helping the Ionians in that revolt which the
Persians {133} had easily repressed. It set out both by land and
sea, with the intention that the fleet should support the land army,
but the fleet was caught and shattered in a storm, and although the
Persian power was supposed to be established over Thrace and even as
far west as Macedonia, their land army was fallen upon and broken up
by attacks of the wild tribes on the borders of Thrace without ever
reaching Greek territory at all.
But though this expedition, thus planned to act together by land and
sea, had been a failure, it was just the same kind of enterprise,
only on a far larger scale, that was attempted by Xerxes, then King
of Kings, ten years after the Persian overthrow at Marathon. King
Xerxes himself was the leader.
[Sidenote: Xerxes]
I think we may be safe in saying that no forces as large as these, in
the number of men enrolled in them, had ever before been collected
for a military purpose, and also that no former expedition had ever
been planned with so much care and forethought. Xerxes made two
bridges for the passing of his army across the Hellespont; he cut a
canal through the Isthmus at Mount Athos for the passage of his
fleet. The fleet, you see, if you will look at the map, would coast
round along the south of Thrace, accompanying the army, till it came
to the Peninsula at the end of which is Mount Athos. Xerxes had
established stations in Thrace for the supply of his army with food
and all needful things as it went along. It was just off Mount Athos
that the storm had scattered the fleet of the former expedition that
he had sent against Greece. By making this canal, and so letting the
ships go through the Isthmus, he avoided the danger of another storm
off the end of the Peninsula.
But there were other dangers besides those from {134} the wind and
waves, for a fleet in any part of the Mediterranean. Although the
Persian monarch might style himself King of Kings, there was another
power that ruled the sea at this time, the power of Carthage, that
colony of the Phœnicians of which I asked you to take note the
first time that it found a place in this story. The Phœnicians,
as we have seen, had planted colonies of their own at all convenient
places along the Mediterranean shore, and of all these Carthage had
grown to be by far the strongest in its numbers. It was regarded as
the capital city, the headquarters, of all that half-merchant and
half-pirate host which we have seen always going to and fro on the
waters of the great inland sea. For fifty years and more before the
battle of Marathon was fought it had become a great power, the chief
naval power of the world, and it had already come into collision with
the Greeks.
For the Greeks, too, as we know, sent out their colonies. They sent
them to Ionia, eastward along the coast of Asia Minor, and they also
sent them westward, round the heel and toe of Italy, as far as that
great island of Sicily lying nearly opposite to where you see
Carthage on the African shore. Sicily and the African continent lie
at no great distance from each other at the nearest points. And the
Carthaginians and other Phœnicians had come into conflict with the
Greek colonists in Sicily long before Greece was threatened by the
Persians. Xerxes, before making his attempt on Greece, assured
himself that his fleet would not be attacked by the great naval
power, by making an alliance with Carthage. Phœnician ships were
among the best that fought for him. His plans seem to have been laid
with every possible care and completeness. The overthrow of Greece,
and of {135} that liberty which all Grecian states, in spite of their
jealousy of each other and of their incessant quarrels, prized so
very highly, seemed certain. It looked as if the King of Kings, who
would rule absolutely, according to the Eastern idea, was sure to
bring them under his subjection. The danger was so great that for
the moment the states of Greece were able to put their jealousies on
one side. Athens and Sparta, and the less powerful states with which
one or other was in alliance at the time, drew together. It was a
terrible moment for them.
The first great battle of the war made it more terrible still.
Command of the united land forces of Greece fell, naturally, into the
hands of Sparta. The utmost that they were able to gather was but
little over 5000 men, of which no more than 500 were actually
Spartans. The smallness of the force may give us an idea of the
small population of those city states of Greece.
[Sidenote: Thermopylæ]
With this gallant body of defenders Leonidas, the Spartan general,
encountered the Persian host in the narrow mountain pass of
Thermopylæ. It was a situation in which the Persian could make
little or no use of his strongest arm, the cavalry, and he was held
back, with heavy loss to his soldiers, so much less heavily armed
than the Greeks. How that battle would have gone had it been
prolonged, we cannot know, for a traitor, one of the great traitors
of history, revealed to the Persians another pass across the
mountains. They had partly traversed that other pass, and were
already threatening the flank and rear of his army, when Leonidas was
informed of their movement. He knew his position to be hopeless. He
{136} bade the allied troops, who were not his countrymen, retreat
and find safety if they could. As for himself and his devoted band
of Spartans, they sallied out of the pass, threw themselves on the
Persian masses, and went down fighting to the death, an example of
gallantry to all future ages.
And Athens, Athens lying, as you see, right before the victors once
they had come through the difficult pass--what hope was there for
her? None. Her doom seemed certain.
The Athenians saved themselves by a sacrifice that has perhaps only
been equalled by the Russians when they burnt their capital of Moscow
at the approach of Napoleon's grand army. They quitted their loved
city; they left it to be destroyed by the Persians, and moved
themselves and their households to islands nearest the coast where
they would be under the protection of their ships, which had not yet
encountered the Persian fleet. Of these islands one was named
Salamis, and between the island and the mainland the Greeks and
Persians met in that naval battle which saved Greece. The Persian
fleet was utterly defeated. The danger from the sea had vanished.
The army of the Persians remained, victorious, in possession of all
the territory of Athens. But it had lost the support of its ships.
It was an age of heroes. I do not suppose that any other great
victory was due so largely to the genius and determination of one
single man as this at Salamis to the Athenian admiral Themistocles.
The King of Kings, however, did not behave in any very heroic manner.
He scuttled back with the broken remnants of his fleet to his own
shores.
[Sidenote: Platæa]
The following year made the repulse of the Persians {137} complete.
Their army was defeated in a great battle at Platæa, and on the very
same day the Grecian fleet engaged and again badly beat the fleet
which the Persians had managed to reform. But this time it was not
the Persian fleet that was threatening the coast of Greece. This
second naval fight was off the coast of Asia Minor, by a headland
from which the battle had its name--Mycale.
That day made an end of the Persian threat to Greece. It did more;
it gave the Greeks a sense that they were a stronger folk than the
Persians, if they met in conditions and numbers at all equal. And
that feeling of strength always makes a people that can feel it
actually stronger. It helped to make their greatness. The result of
the battle at Platæa had been very doubtful in the midst of the
fight. The Greeks had been saved only by the steadfast courage of
the Spartans. But its conclusion was decisive. Persia was a real
danger to Greece no more. On the contrary, it is Greece that we now
find carrying the war into Asia Minor and freeing those Ionian coast
cities from the yoke of Persia. Perpetual jealousies between the
states still prevented Greece from extending her power far. The
Persian could still set one combination of states against another.
The wonder only is that, in the midst of their fights with each
other, they were able to engage in schemes of foreign attack at all.
We may be quite sure of one thing, that the Grecian states never
could have stopped the advance of Persia if it had not been for the
marvellous courage and discipline of the Spartans, and that the
Spartans never could have had this marvellous courage and discipline
if it had not been for the remarkable character of their institutions
and their government. Their great idea {138} was that the individual
man or woman did not matter at all. What mattered was the
state--that the state should be powerful, should have good soldiers
to defend it and to attack its enemies. It was with that purpose in
view that all its laws were made. The Spartans lived not for
themselves but for the state. Hardihood, therefore, and courage were
what they aimed at in themselves and their children, so that the
state might be well served. The Spartan punishments for offences
against the laws were fearfully severe. So were the punishments of
children by their parents, and for a child to cry or utter a sound
under such punishment was regarded as a dreadful disgrace to it.
"Spartan fortitude" is a proverbial saying even amongst us to-day.
It was training of this kind which made the Spartan troops so
steadfast in battle and which gave the Spartans on the whole the
leadership over the other states.
It was a very noble idea, very self-sacrificing--this of each citizen
living not for himself alone but for the state; but these people were
not large-minded enough to carry the idea a little farther and see
that it would be for the advantage of all Greece if each state could
sacrifice its own interests and good for the sake of the whole. They
could sacrifice themselves as individuals for Sparta, but they had no
idea of sacrificing Sparta for Greece. On the contrary, they were
terribly eager to build up the power of Sparta at the cost of Athens
or of any other state. They would even ally themselves with the
enemy of all Greece, with Persia, in order to do so.
The other states were equally selfish about their own state
interests, but their individuals had not the same idea of
self-sacrifice for the good of the state; {139} and therefore their
states were not so powerful as Sparta, nor their soldiers so brave
and well disciplined.
The Athenians, however, were far more cultivated, better artists,
musicians, orators, writers and so on, than the Spartans.
The most glorious days of Greece, we may say, reached from 500 B.C.
to 350 B.C. I have made it a rule in this story to bother you as
little as possible with names, either of places or persons, and only
now and then with dates, because too many names and figures always
seem to me to confuse a story; but I am going to name now a few of
the greatest persons in these glorious days of Greece because they
are the persons who have been makers of the world's very best
thoughts and best artistic products.
[Sidenote: Greek literature]
Homer, that great singer, sang--it is much to be doubted whether he
ever wrote---long before this period. There were also Sappho, the
poetess, and Alcæus, who wrote in those metres from which we have
named our Sapphics and Alcaics. These did not come within the most
glorious days. But in that splendid time, and inspired no doubt by
its splendour, came Sophocles and Æschylus, writers of the finest
tragedies; there was Euripides, who was a tragic writer for the stage
too, yet has imagined some of his scenes in a lighter and livelier
way than those older and fearfully grim writers of the drama. Later
came Aristophanes, the comic dramatist, who brings on birds and frogs
as actors in his plays. There was the mighty orator, Demosthenes.
Oratory and speech-making were very much studied and practised.
Probably there were a large number of speakers whom even to-day we
would think extraordinarily fine. There were a host of painters
{140} and musicians; but we cannot hear their music and the pictures
have perished.
Then there was Socrates, the great philosopher, and Plato, who wrote
the dialogues in which Socrates, who was his master, was the chief
speaker. Socrates was not a writer. I suppose we can never know how
much in the dialogues is Plato's and how much Socrates'. We may
suspect that very much is due to Plato, though he gives Socrates
nearly all the credit. Later came Aristotle, who wrote about
everything--about philosophy, about science, about morality, about
natural history, about government. Plato, before him, or Socrates
speaking to us by Plato's pen, had been very much interested in the
art of government--in discussing the best form of government. But
the government which they all discussed was the government of those
small city states which we have seen in Greece. They did not concern
themselves with government of large nations and empires.
[Sidenote: Sculpture]
But almost more glorious than any of these were the sculptors, of
whom the greatest were Phidias and Praxiteles. The work of the
sculptors was employed chiefly in connection with the work of the
architects, of the builders of the temples and the public buildings.
The temples were splendidly ornamented with the most perfect statues
and cuttings in marble that man has ever produced. The architecture
of the Greeks was more perfect than that of any nation before or
since. We may suppose, as we have seen, that it owed much to the
example of that very fine Minoan art which was produced in Crete very
long before, and which was carried to the mainland of Greece, and is
especially seen in excavations at Mycenæ.
What is most noticeable about the Egyptian, and also about the
Babylonian, architecture of temples and {141} tombs is their enormous
size. They seem to have tried to impress the imagination of men by
buildings of such size that men going in and out of them are no
bigger than ants, comparatively. And they succeed in being
impressive in this way. They are terrifying. But the Greek works do
not terrify. They are works of pure beauty, and it is their beauty
which still charms us as no other work of its kind has ever done.
[Illustration: CORINTHIAN ARCHITECTURE (MONUMENT OF LYSICRATES).]
The sculptures, as I said, are seen chiefly in what remains of the
temples, and most of the statues are of gods and goddesses and heroes
who were supposed to be super-human; but although they took those
divine and half-divine persons as the objects and models of their
art, the gods and all that had to do with religion seem to have been
of far less importance in the lives of these Greeks than they were in
the lives of any of {142} the people whom we have met in the whole
course of our story.
The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the peoples of Syria and Palestine,
and the Persians all were very much occupied with doing service to
their gods, and some of them regulated their lives very much by doing
what they thought the gods would wish them to do. With the Greeks,
religious ceremonies, or acting as the gods would have them act,
hardly came into their lives at all. The persons of Homer's poems
pay more attention to the gods than the Greeks of the later time to
which we have now come. The former do seem to have had an idea that
the chief of the gods, whom they called Zeus, living on top of Mount
Olympus with inferior gods and goddesses about him, did interfere
with the affairs of men and did punish men who did not do the divine
will. But it was a religion that a people so intelligent as these
later Greeks could hardly be expected to believe in. They seem to
have kept up some pretence of belief, for it was brought as part of a
charge against the great philosopher Socrates, on which he was
actually condemned to death, that he had spoken impiously of the
gods, but we may suspect that this was only used against him by
enemies who really had as little respect as he had for such gods as
these.
At all events, I do not think that we shall be wrong in saying that
these Greeks had no religion at all which made really any difference
in their lives until Christianity was brought to them by the Jews,
and especially by St. Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles--which
means to the peoples that were not of Jewish race.
But they had strong and clear ideas, for all that, of right and
wrong, of justice and so on. If they believed {143} at all in a life
after death it was of a life so shadowy, and their idea of it was so
vague, that it certainly made no difference to their life on earth.
The Egyptians were very careful in preserving their dead, in the form
of mummies. The Greeks did not treat their dead with quite so much
respect. They often burned the bodies, so they had no occasion for
immense tombs. A small vase would contain the ashes.
[Sidenote: Life of Greek cities]
It is interesting to try to imagine the way of life of these people
in their city states. We may suppose them to have been a people of
very busy active minds, always ready to discuss any new thing,
whether it were in art, in philosophy, or science. We may imagine
endless discussions going on under the porticoes which gave them
shelter from the hot sun. "Stoa," these porticoes or colonnades were
called in Greek, and it is from the people disputing there that we
get the name of the "Stoic" philosophers. Opposed to them in dispute
would be the "Epicureans," or disciples of Epicurus.
These would be disputing, and pupils listening to them, imbibing
lessons in oratory and philosophy, and then out in the street might
perhaps pass some important person like Pericles, the great
statesman, or Alcibiades, or Nicias, the admiral. Any of these would
be followed by a great retinue of friends and hangers-on and slaves.
In another part of the city there would be busy shops. Most of the
Grecian cities were on the coast; and there would be the port and
ships coming and going. Then there would be the gymnasia, where the
athletes could be watched, doing exercises, playing games, throwing
the javelin or the discus, wrestling, and so on.
Some half of the population of the city would {144} probably be
slaves, slaves taken in war or by purchase from their parents in
Thrace or other barbarous lands. There was a great slave market in
Athens itself, and the sea-faring traders and pirates of whom we have
spoken did a little slave-trading among their other business.
Probably it was seldom that the slaves were badly treated, and we
know that they often were set free and often had quite a good time
even while they were slaves. The name "slave" really comes from
Slav. It is taken from the name of the Slavonic people, because it
was from them that most of the slaves were taken. It is not derived
from that Latin word "servus," which is translated "slave," and from
which our "serf"--the serfs of the Anglo-Saxons--is taken. A slave
might rise to quite high employment, and it is curious to think that
the large police force in Athens was at one time composed of more
than a thousand slaves from Scythia, that land of wild tribes even
farther north and east than Thrace.
It seems that the disputations and all the business were very much
the affair of the men only. The women took hardly any part. We have
spoken of the poetess Sappho; but this was long before. It is
evident that the ladies were more important in the Greek society of
Homer's day than they were later. We read of no Greek lady of the
glorious days as famous in art or music or literature; and only a
very few seem to have been allowed to give their opinions on
philosophy or politics. It seems as if they counted for less than
they ought to count.
The Greeks were great game-players, especially great at athletic
games; and we must not forget that though religion appears to have
made little difference in their lives, they were a people who had
great respect {145} for old customs and were therefore careful to
keep up and perform in proper manner religious ceremonies. In some
of them the women took a part.
Even in the very midst of their struggle against the Persians, the
Greek states were only with the greatest difficulty able to lay aside
their jealousy of each other and to come together to fight; and after
that danger from the east had been dispelled they were free to fight
with each other, or to quarrel about the leadership. They did fight
and quarrel unceasingly for some 150 years. After the final repulse
of the Persians, Athens for a time gained the leadership, owing to
the disgust of the states at the insolence of the Spartans, who had
been leaders before. But Sparta was too strong to be put down
easily. At last a combination of the rest of the states under the
leadership of Thebes fairly conquered Sparta and took possession of
the Spartan territory.
[Sidenote: Peloponnesian War]
The most famous of this long succession of fights is that between
Sparta on the one side and Athens, as the leader, on the other. It
is usually called the Peloponnesian War, the Peloponnese being all
that part of Greece below the Isthmus of Corinth, and it is chiefly
famous because its story has been so wonderfully well told by
Thucydides.
Thucydides was a very famous Greek historian. So, too, was
Herodotus, who wrote long before him. But Herodotus was more of a
story-teller. He was a traveller who wrote about what he saw; and
always writes truly when he is telling us of what he himself saw. He
has strange tales to tell, about one-eyed men and men who carried
their heads under one arm, and so on, which were told him by people
whom he met; but he tells them with a warning that he will not vouch
for them, because he did not see such things himself.
{146}
But he has no idea of telling us the real reason why the stories that
he tells happened as they did--the political causes, as we should
say, of the events. Any trivial reason seems good enough to him to
account for a great war. He would have been quite ready to accept
the beautiful lady idea as the reason of the siege of Troy.
Thucydides, on the contrary, looked into the true reasons of the
events. He, rather than Herodotus, was the "father of history."
There were other fine Greek historians, and notably one, Xenophon,
who went with an extraordinary expedition of the Greeks---10,000 in
number--who penetrated, fighting, far into Asia Minor; and then had
to retreat again, still fighting, having done very little good. He
went and came back with that expedition and wrote the story of it.
But he was not the equal, as historian, of Thucydides, who wrote of
the Peloponnesian War, and who wrote, further, of wars which the
Greeks, especially the Athenians, had now to carry yet farther
afield--or oversea--and not for the first time, to Sicily.
And there, in Sicily, there met together Greeks, Carthaginians, and
another people--of a new name, not altogether unimportant in the
story---Latins or Romans from the neighbourhood of that city
established on the Tiber.
The story, which I am now trying to carry down to the year 330 B.C.
or so, has shifted its scene westward. We have seen how near that
island of Sicily lies both to Europe, by way of the toe of Italy, and
to Africa, by way of Carthage. It is a kind of bridge or
stepping-stone between the two. We must see how the nations met
there.
{147}
CHAPTER X
THE MEETING OF THE NATIONS ROUND SICILY
Carthage was one of the colonies founded by the Phœnicians. It
was not one of the earliest, but it had the advantage of a good
harbour for the protection of the ships of those days. It grew in
importance and in numbers of inhabitants, so that it soon became the
chief of all the stations of the kind which the Phœnicians had
planted, sending their colonists out from their native capital cities
of Tyre and Sidon.
Now Tyre and Sidon were captured by that great king Nebuchadnezzar of
Babylon about a hundred years or so before the Persian attacks on
Greece, and the effect of that capture of the two capital cities was
to leave Carthage as the most powerful city belonging to the
Phœnicians. Carthage, then, from that time, became the capital,
the chief city, of this great naval power. It was the headquarters
of naval power in the Mediterranean. Greek colonists from many
different states of Greece had already spread themselves along the
shores of Sicily, and even so far as the shores of Spain and those
Balearic Islands (or islands of the slingers) where, as we are told,
a boy's dinner was always set up on top of a pole and he was not
allowed to eat it until he had knocked it down with a stone from his
sling. Naturally, the inhabitants learned to be good slingers.
{148}
Now, the Phœnicians were evidently not people of the kind that are
contented to sit still. They were energetic, pushing; and of course
they came into conflict with the Greek colonies. The principal
conflicts took place in, or around, Sicily, where the Phœnicians,
as well as the Greeks, had long been settled. It was not until
Carthage had grown to considerable power that the Phœnicians could
hope to do much against the Greeks, and about that time some of the
Greek cities also gained strength for military and naval enterprise
by coming into rather closer union with each other.
The constitution of very many of the Greek city states went through
the same succession of changes. After the rule of the aristocratic
party, that is to say, of the best-born people, who were the rich
landowners, there came a time of rule by the democracy, that is to
say by the poorer, the common people. This democratic rule was so
disorderly that a strong single ruler generally arose out of the
disorder and established his power, somewhat as Napoleon I. did out
of the disorder of the French Revolution. These rulers, or
dictators, were called tyrants in Greece, and the changes of the
constitutions in the government of their colonial cities in Sicily
went on in exactly the same way as in Greece itself. A strong ruler
established over one city would often be able to make good his power
over another city near him. Thus began to be formed alliances of
cities under the rule of one or of a few leading men; and so the
Sicilian Greeks found some strength of their own to oppose to the
strength of Carthage.
Historians tell us of such sweeping successes of the Phœnicians in
the earliest conflicts that if we were to {149} believe them all we
should have to believe that hardly a Greek was left in Sicily. But
evidently that is not exactly how it did happen, for it was just
while the Persians were threatening Greece that Gelo, one of the
greatest of the Sicilian "tyrants," established Syracuse as the
capital city of Sicily and the headquarters of his power. The Greek
colonists had largely assimilated the native peoples to themselves.
There had been marriages between them, and Greek thought had
penetrated here as it had everywhere that the Greeks went. So the
strength of the Greeks in Sicily did not depend on the colonists.
Only the Greek colonists seem to have been far more successful in
getting help from the native people than the Phœnician colonists
were. The Phœnicians, however, had their friends in Sicily, even
among the Greeks themselves, for there were jealousies between the
Greek cities in Sicily as everywhere else.
[Sidenote: Phœnicians defeated]
I told you that Xerxes for the safety of his fleet had made an
alliance with Carthage before making his great attack on Greece. It
was something more than a mere arrangement that his ships should not
be meddled with as they went to and fro. It was an agreement for
some more active help than this. Carthage was to attack the Greek
colonial power in Sicily at the same time as Xerxes fell upon the
mainland of Greece from the east. The two attacks were so well timed
that it is said that the battle which decided the result of the
Phœnician expedition against Sicily was fought on the very same
day as the battle of Salamis which decided the fate of the Persian
attack on Greece. And the result of the one battle was the same as
that of the other. Gelo completely vanquished the Phœnicians; so
completely that Sicily had rest from their troubling nearly {150} all
through what remained of that century--that is to say, for ninety
years or so.
During that period the arts and civilisation made great advance in
the cities of Sicily. Again, as before, it was really the jealousy
and fighting of the Greek cities among themselves that brought them
under fresh attack by what they called the barbarian power. Again
the Carthaginians came upon them. They were disunited, fighting
among themselves. The Athenian navy had come to Sicily to take its
part in the fighting, as is told in the splendid history of
Thucydides. It was fighting which all grew out of that Peloponnesian
War which was fought between Athens, as the leading state in the main
part of Greece, on the one side, and Sparta, as the great power of
the Peloponnese, on the other. The Syracusans, of Sicily, were
originally a Corinthian colony, from Corinth, on the Isthmus between
the greater part of Greece and the Peloponnese. The Athenian navy
came to Sicily in the year 415 B.C., and if it had made a vigorous
attack on Syracuse at its first coming it is probable that the city
would have fallen. The Athenian admiral, however, delayed; he
allowed the Syracusans time to improve their defences, and he had to
sit down to blockade the city both by land and sea. A small Spartan
force came to the help of the besieged, they put all their own naval
power into the struggle, and in the spring of 413 B.C. fought and
defeated the Athenian fleet.
They were just in time, for the very next day strong reinforcements
arrived from Athens. With this new force the besiegers tried to
recover their lost positions, but were defeated. The Syracusans then
blocked the mouth of the harbour in which the Athenian ships lay, and
after a final struggle both by land and {151} sea, the Athenians were
hopelessly beaten; those who survived had a wretched fate as captives.
But even after this great defence and complete victory there were
many different and opposing interests in Sicily. Sometimes a city
which you would expect to find helping one side, is found fighting on
just the opposite side. The story of the whole would be far too long
to tell here. The effect of it all was that when a new Carthaginian
force attacked the Sicilian Greeks in 409 B.C. the Greeks were
weakened and disunited after all these contentions among themselves.
[Sidenote: Dionysius of Syracuse]
Again, it was a tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius, who drew together the
Grecian strength, together with that of the native Sicilians, but it
was not until half the Greek cities on the island had been lost and
their civilisation destroyed. It is evident that Dionysius was a
ruler of very much more than common ability. These tyrants who
seized the power in so many of the Greek states, both at home and in
the colonies, did not generally sit on their thrones very securely or
very long, but Dionysius reigned for no less than thirty-eight years.
He employed a large number of mercenary troops, both Greeks and
others; he had Sparta as an ally, and he sustained four invasions of
the Carthaginians. He made alliances with some of the states on the
Italian mainland, and made war on others, till he became master of
much of the southern region of Italy. But it was for a time only,
and the power of Syracuse was never firmly established on any part of
the mainland.
After the death of Dionysius there was continual fighting, for and
around Sicily, between the Carthaginians on the one side and the
Sicilian Greeks, with various and often-changing alliances, on the
other. At one moment we see the Sicilians actually carrying {152}
the war into Africa, while at the very same moment the Carthaginians
are attacking the Sicilians in Sicily itself!
And so the story goes, a story of continual contests, with
continually changing results, down to 300 B.C. and later, and
gradually we begin to hear more and more of a certain small, and at
first quite insignificant, state in Italy, namely, Rome, taking part
in the contest. It is a part that becomes greater and greater as
time goes on till it fills almost every chapter and page.
But now that we have traced the story of what was happening in and
about Sicily, and Carthage, and Italy, down to this date of about 300
B.C., we have to turn back again, first to Greece itself and then to
the eastern side of the Mediterranean, for tremendous events have
been going on there during the last half-century of this period.
We left it, you will remember, with the Persians repulsed, no longer
a serious danger to Greece, yet the Greeks themselves unable, because
of their own jealousies and divisions, to make any large conquests in
Asia Minor. A new power, of over-mastering strength, suddenly
appears in that eastern portion of our picture--the power of Macedon.
{153}
CHAPTER XI
MACEDON
The country of Macedon, as you will see on the Greek map, lies
northward of Greece. It was inhabited by tribes of the Slavs, or
Slavonic people, who lived the agricultural and pastoral life,
tilling the soil and having flocks and herds. About 100 years after
the battle of Salamis, a baby was born of the royal house of
Macedonia. He was given the name of Philip. His childhood was spent
at Thebes, in Greece, where he had been sent, or had been taken, as a
hostage. When he came to the throne of Macedon he seems at once to
have begun to strengthen the army, and to improve its organisation.
He had acquired his ideas of what an army should be, as we may
suppose, while he was being educated at Thebes. The Macedonian army
was formed much on the model of the Greek army, but there were
certain differences, and every one of the differences seems to have
been an improvement.
There was a phalanx, after the model of the Greek phalanx, and
therein was the great strength of the infantry. But the phalanx of
the Macedonians was not quite so closely packed (there was more space
between one soldier and the next) as the Greek phalanx, and it was
able to adopt this more open formation by means of giving to each
soldier a longer spear or pike than the Greek soldier had. Thus the
Macedonian phalanx was able to move more quickly than the Greek,
{154} and also could cover more ground with the same number of men.
Now as to the cavalry. The Greeks, as we saw, were not nearly so
well off as the Persians for horses. They had not the unlimited
extent of horse-raising country that the Persians had in the lands
towards the east. But the Macedonians, on the contrary, were almost
as well off in this way as the Persians themselves. Away back in
Thrace and Scythia they had these unlimited extents, so their cavalry
became a very strong force.
And the same lands which provided them with horses provided them with
soldiers also. Philip began to use his great strength of arms by
making himself master of the countries on all sides of the kingdom of
Macedon, to which he had succeeded. There were many Greek colonies
or small cities along the coast of Macedonia itself. These he took
possession of with little trouble. Certain of the Greeks at home
began to be alarmed by the growth of this power in the north. You
may have heard of some famous orations called "Philippics," delivered
by the great orator Demosthenes, at Athens. Their name comes from
this very Philip of Macedon, because it was in the hope of rousing
the Athenians to take strong measures, and to unite with other states
to oppose his power, that they were made.
But, as usual, there were jealousies. Athens did at length combine
with Thebes to oppose Philip, but by that time he had found allies in
Greece itself. He marched south, met the Thebans and Athenians at
Chæronea, in 338 B.C., and won a battle which makes a very great
difference in our story, for it was so decisive that it practically
put an end, once for all, to the independence of Greece. Greece for
many years had to {155} do what Macedonia ordered. Philip was given,
or assumed, command of all the Greek armies, with a title which has
been translated "Captain-General." Commander-in-Chief might describe
it nearly as well, and is a title better known to us.
And now, for the first time, we have a really united Greece. But
though a united Greece, it was not a free Greece. It was united
because it was under the masterful rule of the Macedonians.
But, being united, and joined moreover with the forces of the
Macedonians and their allies it probably was the greatest fighting
force the world had yet known. There was one direction in particular
in which it was likely that it would make its force felt--against
Persia.
[Sidenote: Alexander the Great]
In the midst of the preparation for the invasion of the Persian
empire, Philip was assassinated, after reigning for twenty-three
years, and was succeeded by his son Alexander--Alexander the
Great--then only twenty years old. And Alexander the Great died only
twelve years later. He was therefore only thirty-two years old at
his death. Yet he had time to win the name of Great; and when you
hear his story you will think that it was well deserved, for the
story is extraordinary.
It is extraordinary by reason of the immense extent of territory over
which Alexander went victoriously and with marvellous rapidity. But
the explanation is not very far to seek--it lies in that very
powerful army and fighting machine which had been delivered to him by
his father; in that, and in the lack of resisting power in the
enemies whom it overcame, is the explanation of his success.
The fighting power of the Persian empire had spent itself; and partly
it had spent itself in the destruction {156} of the fighting power of
the nations with which it had come into touch. In that, as it seems,
taken together with the very real strength of Alexander's army, lies
the explanation. The Persian power, moreover, apart from its loss in
actual fighting, had probably lost much by life in conditions more
easy and pleasant than those in the more rugged and barren country
from which Cyrus had led the Persians. We have noticed the same
change in the character of conquering nations already, and may see it
yet again in course of the great story.
As for this particular story which we are telling at the moment,
about Alexander and the march of his ever-victorious army, it will be
a short story although such a marvellous one. It is short, just
because the march had scarcely a stopping-place, scarcely a check,
all through.
This Alexander, succeeding to the throne of Macedonia and to all that
his father Philip had made of that throne, and to the
command-in-chief of the great army which Philip had created, had been
educated by perhaps the most wonderful man of that wonderful Greek
nation--the philosopher Aristotle. We call him philosopher, but
there was no branch of the learning of that time, and it was a time
of great learning, which he does not seem to have known perfectly.
The additions that he made to every branch of that learning are most
astonishing.
[Illustration: ALEXANDER THE GREAT. (From the British Museum.)]
We have to look on this young Alexander, then, as being as perfectly
trained and taught as it was possible for a young man to be, and as
having come into his kingdom with this great army ready to start,
with all its plans laid, for the Persian invasion. Let us see what
use he made of it. We know its composition--a certain number of
Macedonian native soldiers, Greek and other allies; and we know its
general way of {157} fighting, with the quickly moving Macedonian
phalanx, armed with the long pikes, and the hosts of cavalry on good
horses. But he was a very young king. The Greeks seem to have
thought they had a chance, on his accession, of freeing themselves
from the Macedonian yoke. Even in his own kingdom there was trouble,
and some of the tribes in the north rose in revolt. Alexander
crushed all these various attempts against his power. Twice he had
to march south, to Thebes, that city where he had been as a boy.
Once it admitted him at the head of his army without a fight, but on
the second occasion, when it had taken arms again against Macedon on
hearing a false rumour that Alexander had been killed in some
fighting in the north, he came down and razed the city walls and
punished the inhabitants with fearful severity.
These home troubles occupied two years of his reign, and in the third
year he crossed the Hellespont with his great army and had his first
big meeting with the Persian forces on the river Granicus. He was
completely victorious.
[Sidenote: Battle of Issus]
But Darius, the Persian monarch, still claiming the title of King of
Kings, was not likely to be content with the result of a single
battle. He gathered his strength anew, and again met Alexander in
the following year, at Issus, in Syria. This time his defeat was
even more decisive than before.
Alexander advanced southward conquering. He took all the
Phœnician cities of the coast, though Tyre made an obstinate
defence, and swept down into Egypt. Egypt appears to have made no
attempt--perhaps it had little wish--to resist him. By this time
there were many Greeks in Egypt, and it is likely that they would
receive the forces of the Macedonians, {158} among which were many of
their kinsmen, almost more as friends than foes. The city of
Alexandria, founded by him, or in his honour, takes its name from him.
The Persians, however, were not yet done with. By 321 B.C., two
years after his defeat at Issus, Darius had collected an army greater
than ever before, and Alexander, coming eastward out of Egypt, met
this vast host, said to have been a million strong, at Gaugemela, or
Arbela, and in this third and last conflict his victory was decisive.
Darius fled eastward, with Alexander constantly in pursuit of him.
Alexander took the great cities of Babylon and Susa on his way. The
fugitive Darius was assassinated in Parthia, and Alexander's lordship
over the ancient empire was complete.
Yet that was not enough for him. He pushed forward into India,
across high mountain ranges and wide rivers. What he accomplished
there, in the way of conquest, was marvellous, yet it had no big
effect on the great story, because his conquests beyond the mountains
were not lasting. His wonderful troops, though they must have looked
on him as almost supernatural in his ability to lead them on to
victory, began to long for their homes, probably to wonder if they
would ever see them again after coming so far. He reached the shores
of the Indian Ocean, and thence set his face to return homeward.
In Babylonia he stayed awhile, arranging for the government of the
immense empire of which he was the undisputed master, and there he
died, of a fever which is said to have been brought on, or greatly
increased, by intemperate drinking--a death unworthy of his
extraordinary achievements and of a pupil of such a master as
Aristotle.
{159}
And death at thirty-two! The exploits of Alexander and his army are
unequalled in the whole course of the story of the world. Yet we
must ever remember how much of that immense achievement was due to
the genius of his father Philip, who created all the fighting force
which the son led so triumphantly. The fame of the son is so
glorious that the father's work is rather hidden by it. What Philip
might have done, if he had lived, with the great machine of war which
he devised we cannot tell, but it is sure that Alexander could not
have achieved his conquests as he did but for the machinery which his
father had made ready for him.
[Sidenote: Death of Alexander]
No doubt death came for the great conqueror quite unexpectedly in his
thirty-third year, and he had made no arrangements as to who was to
be his successor on the throne of the vast empire that he had won.
There was no lack of claimants for it. Many of his victorious
generals were willing enough, and there was much confused fighting
among the victors and the forces under the command of each. One of
the principal generals, Ptolemæus, or Ptolemy, was the commander of
the armies that held Egypt. In Babylonia and Syria it appears that
there was a period of rivalry and struggle between several of the
leading generals, until at length one of them, Seleucus, prevailed
over the rest, and he claimed to be, and in large measure really was,
ruler of Syria and of the East as Ptolemy was ruler of Egypt. The
proud title of King of Kings, which the Persian monarchs had assumed,
now came to nothing, seeing that there were at least two kings now in
this eastern part of the world. Seleucus and his successors, called
the Seleucidæ, became established as Kings of Syria, in its new {160}
capital city of Antioch; and Ptolemy and his successors, called the
Ptolemies, became no less firmly seated on the throne of the ancient
Pharaohs in Egypt.
Others of Alexander's generals who became rulers of one or other part
of his empire after his death were Antigonus, Lysimachus, and
Cassander. Cassander was son of Antipater, whom Alexander had left
as his regent in Macedonia to govern the country for him when he went
on his wars against the Persians. All these generals and their
followers continued fighting, with various results, until the great
and decisive battle at Ipsus (not Issus), of which the practical
result was that Cassander was established as king of Macedonia and
Greece. The battle of Ipsus was fought in 301 B.C., twenty-two years
later than the battle of Issus. Seleucus and Lysimachus were the
victorious leaders over Antigonus, who was killed during the fight in
this battle of Ipsus; and to Lysimachus had already been assigned the
kingdom of Thrace.
So now, in 300 B.C., we have Cassander over Macedonia and Greece,
Lysimachus over Thrace, Seleucus over Syria and Babylonia, and
Ptolemy over Egypt. That is the condition of affairs at that date on
this eastern side of the picture. But it had not been brought about
without some sharp fighting between Seleucus and Ptolemy, and here,
as before, Palestine was like the horseshoe between the blacksmith's
hammer and his anvil. It lay right in the path between the two great
combatants.
[Sidenote: The Jews in Egypt]
Alexander, when he went conquering, with little or no opposition,
into Egypt, had shown much favour to the Jews. We have seen that
many of them had returned, under favour of Cyrus the Persian, from
their Babylonian exile, to Jerusalem. The temple had been {161}
rebuilt, not without a good deal of interference from their Syrian
neighbours; the religious rites had been re-instituted and were
strictly observed.
Alexander, it appears, showed consideration to the Jews in Jerusalem.
He was, we may presume, a Greek in his religious views--that is to
say, that religion made very little difference and had very little
part in his life. He would not care what god a subject people liked
to worship, so long as they did not oppose him. He took some of the
Jews down with him, or had them brought, into Egypt, where there were
already some of their nation, and they were given quarters of their
own and a synagogue, or place of assembly and worship, in the new
city of Alexandria. So here we have yet another step in that
dispersion of the Jews which was to bring their religion, on which
Christianity is founded, into all parts of the world.
I mentioned too that, rather as the Jewish religion became known
throughout the world by the dispersion of those who followed it, so
also did the thought and culture of the Greeks become known by the
way in which that wonderful people was spread abroad. I have been
writing of Macedonians hitherto as though they were a people
altogether different from the Greeks, and so in truth, and in origin,
they were. But I want you to realise that though they conquered
Greece by their force of arms, it was (as always happened whenever
Greeks met people of other nationality) the Greek thought that
conquered their thought. They began more and more to think in the
Greek way. Moreover, their very armies were largely Greek.
Thus it came to pass, in course of time, that the distinction between
Macedonian and Greek began to be lost. After all, Macedon was a very
near neighbour {162} of Greece herself. There must have been much
coming and going between the two. Therefore the "Hellenising" of the
world, as you may read it described--which means making the thought
of the world like the thought of Hellas, which is another name for
Greece--went on very fast and was spread abroad very widely. There
is no part of that world which is the scene of our great story which
it had not reached and in which it had not made a considerable
difference in the lives of the inhabitants. Over a large part of it
Greek had become the language in use among the better-educated
classes. Seleucus was particularly active in introducing Greeks and
Greek customs into the kingdom under his rule.
The possession of Palestine, inevitably, because of its position, had
been very much disputed between Seleucus and Ptolemy after
Alexander's death, but the dispute was decided by the battle of
Ipsus, which seems to have cleared the air all round. Palestine then
became subject to Egypt and so remained under successive Ptolemies
for more than a hundred years.
[Sidenote: Alexandria]
The Jews in Judæa, with that love of their own customs which has
always been remarkably strong in their nation, held out against the
introduction of Greek thought and language, and so on, longer than
any of their neighbours, but many Jews, as we have seen, had settled
in Alexandria. The first three, at least, of the Ptolemies, who
successively reigned in Egypt, showed favour to them; they had
synagogues in other cities of Egypt besides Alexandria, and those
Jews of Egypt, besides those who were in Babylonia and other parts of
Asia, had the habit of coming up to Jerusalem, where was the Temple,
to attend their great religious ceremonies. And these Jews brought
to Jerusalem the {163} Greek language and thought, so that the Greek
influence penetrated there too at last.
Alexandria became a great city for men of letters, learned men and
writers, as well a great city of trade and a great seaport. The
largest library of the ancient world was collected--and later was
destroyed by fire--in that city. And there, probably before 250
B.C., the books of the Old Testament, originally written in Hebrew,
were translated into Greek. Possibly not all were translated at that
time, but it seems at least certain that the first five books, called
the Pentateuch, were done into Greek about that date. Wherever they
went the Jews never lost sight of their sacred books. The records of
their history and their religious institutions were always with them.
Under the later kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty the government of
Egypt was less strongly maintained, the power of Egypt waned, and in
198 B.C. the Egyptians were thoroughly defeated by the Syrians on the
banks of the Jordan, and Judæa and Jerusalem came under the rule of
the Syrian king. He did not interfere with their religion or their
customs, and for a while the change of rulers appears to have made
very little difference to them.
Such, then, is the outline which I would have you carry in your minds
of the position of those peoples of the story on the eastern side of
the Mediterranean, in Egypt southward, and in Thrace, Macedon, and
Greece. And now I would ask you to come back again to look at the
western side of the picture, for the time has fully come when we
should bring more prominently into it a figure which will grow larger
and larger until it grows to such a size as to fill in the whole
frame, and more than the frame--the figure of world-conquering Rome.
{164}
CHAPTER XII
ROME AND CARTHAGE
I am afraid you will have suffered disappointment from time to time
in the course of the telling of this greatest of great stories. I am
afraid that I have been obliged to speak rather slightingly of that
beautiful lady for whose sake you will have heard that the Trojan War
was fought, the lady about whom Homer sang. I have made my excuses
for that disrespectful treatment.
There is another famous lady of whom Virgil, the great Latin poet,
sings--Queen Dido, of Carthage. His story goes that Æneas, the
Trojan, escaping over-sea after the fall of Troy, was swept by storms
into Carthage, where Dido entertained him pleasantly. From her court
he went to Italy, and from him the Romans were said to be descended.
The Æneid--that is, the story of Æneas--is the name of Virgil's poem
in which this tale is told. You may believe as much or as little of
it as you like, for there is no evidence at all that it is true; but
it is a fine tale, finely told.
Then there is the story about Romulus and Remus and the good old
wolf-mother, and the rest of it--all very pleasant too. But I do not
think that you need believe any more of that either than you like.
[Sidenote: The Gauls in Rome]
They are not very ancient stories, nothing like as old as some of the
stories about Egypt and Babylonia for which there is plenty of
evidence. A thousand {165} years or so B.C. could cover them all.
Yet for what was really going on round about what came to be called
Rome we have very little evidence until a great deal later. One
other pretty tale certainly has some truth in it--the story that the
Gauls came down upon Rome, and that the Capitol, or strong citadel,
on which the sentries must have gone to sleep, was only saved by the
alarm being given by some geese. There may be some doubt as to
whether the geese really were there, and were the city's saviours,
for it is possible that this too, like other tales, may have seemed
to the poets to be a pretty story to tell, and they may have told it
to please their hearers without inquiring closely into its truth; but
however it may have been about the geese, there is no doubt at all
about the Gauls. They were there, and in terrible numbers, and they
only consented to go away on being bribed to do so with an immense
sum of money. So it is not a very dignified appearance that this
great Rome makes on her first appearance in our story--saved from
Gauls, in the first instance, by geese, and in the second place by
bribes! This happened in 390 B.C.
[Illustration: GALLIC WARRIORS. (From the British Museum.)]
By Gaul we generally understand France--the Gallic, or Gaulic nation.
But Gaul at that time was the name of the country not only of what we
now call France, but of a great deal of the north of what we call
Italy. So the Gauls had not very far to come to reach Rome.
Although the Capitol, the citadel, was saved from the Gauls at this
time, the Gauls destroyed the city completely, and after their
retirement the Romans set about its rebuilding.
You will see, of course, that I have only told you, so far, who the
Romans were not. I have not told you who they were. But I have a
very good reason for {166} that. I have not told you, and I am not
going to tell you, because I do not know.
Rome has been called the City of the Seven Hills, because it is built
on those seven hills which stand above the River Tiber that runs out
westward into the Mediterranean Sea. What we do know is that peoples
from the neighbouring country came and settled themselves on one or
other of these hills. They were peoples of different origins. The
most civilised, in the earliest days of this settlement, were from
the district called Etruria. They were Etruscans. The Sabines were
another of these peoples. And there were Latins from Latium, in
which district Rome itself was situated.
These peoples became united into one state under rulers of the Latin
race, and that, in very few words, appears to have been the origin of
the Roman nation. The Etruscans seem at first to have been pushed
off the hills into the plains by the others, and there was frequent
fighting between the plain people and the hill people. For their
protection from the attacks from the plains, the early kings of Rome
built walls round the seven hills; but the Etruscans, though they had
given way at first to the Latins and Sabines, must have come back as
conquerors. They were a powerful people. They imposed their own
kings upon the Romans, and Romans and Etruscans together became the
strongest nation in the country.
Probably the Romans never were satisfied with their Etruscan kings,
who seem to have governed with great severity. More than a hundred
years before the Gauls came upon them, which was in 390 B.C., they
successfully rebelled, drove out the kings and set up a republic.
The Etruscans strove to restore them, and the struggle went on until
a very important victory was gained by {167} the Roman republican
armies at Veii. The Romans had never been so strong in Italy before,
and although the attack of the Gauls threatened them with destruction
only six years later, those barbarians, after a seven months' siege
of the Capitol, went back and made no attempt at establishing their
power permanently. The Romans rebuilt their walls and their houses.
They were engaged in almost perpetual fighting with other peoples, of
whom we should notice particularly the Samnites, in one or other part
of Italy. Now and again they met with reverses, but on the whole
they prevailed and extended their authority over the countries that
they conquered. The aid of the Romans was sought by now one and now
another people who found themselves pressed by hostile neighbours;
and the help was given in consideration that those who were helped
should regard their helper for ever after as their master.
[Sidenote: Pyrrhus]
It was a little later than 300 B.C. that the Greek city states
established along the southern shores of Italy found themselves
bothered by the attacks of some inland neighbours and called for the
aid of Rome. There was one of these cities, however, and the most
important, which repelled the assistance of the Roman Republic,
jealous of her growing power. This was Tarentum. And just at the
moment when the struggle between the Roman forces and this Greek
city, which must inevitably have ended in the defeat of the Greeks,
was about to commence, Tarentum found a new ally in Pyrrhus, the king
of Epirus.
Epirus, as you may see, is the north-western region of Greece, and
the nearest to Italy. Pyrrhus had allied himself by marriage with
Ptolemy of Egypt and had made a great effort to gain the throne of
Macedonia, {168} but was defeated in that attempt and had to content
himself awhile with being king of his own little country of Epirus.
It was then that there came to him, and was welcomed by him, a call
to their assistance by the people of Tarentum menaced by the Roman
armies.
[Sidenote: Pyrrhic victories]
Pyrrhus marched into Italy with a force that was strong in cavalry
and also in elephants. The elephants seem to have terrified the
Romans, and Pyrrhus won several victories. But though he won
victories it was always at so great a cost to his own force that the
phrase "a Pyrrhic victory," which you may have heard, is taken even
now to mean a victory in which the victor loses more heavily than the
vanquished.
We are now, I would have you see, at a point of some particular
interest in the great story, for it is the first time that Greek and
Roman have been facing each other and fighting each other in any
large force and as nation against nation.
Pyrrhus, after his victories, called on Rome to surrender. His army
was then on the Roman territory of Latium. Rome replied that she
would hold no parley with a foe as long as any of his troops were on
her soil. It was a proud reply, worthy of her future greatness, to a
victorious enemy at her very gates; but she had formed a strong
confederation of several states that acknowledged her as their
sovereign and was still formidable. Pyrrhus won another victory, but
again gained little by it, and finding that his project did not
prosper in Italy itself he went over to Sicily.
He came to that island on the invitation of the Greek city states
there, who wished his help to rid them of the Carthaginians, but here
again, although he won victories, he could not establish his power.
He {169} made himself thoroughly unpopular with the Greeks, who had
called him in, by the despotic manner in which he tried to lord it
over them, and, what was still worse for him, his attacks on the
Carthaginians drove them to make an alliance with the Romans against
him. A result of that alliance was that when, after three years of
unproductive fighting in Sicily, he went back to the mainland of
Italy, his fleet was attacked and severely handled by the
Carthaginians. He fought one more battle against the Romans and
their confederates, in Italy, but he did not receive much support
from the Tarentines or any of the Italian-Greek cities. This time it
was not even a "Pyrrhic victory" for him, but a decisive defeat, and
he went back to his native Epirus after a six years' absence. He was
killed some years later in a political revolution in Greece.
The total result of the enterprise of Pyrrhus was to establish Rome
more firmly than ever as the mistress state of Italy, and to bring
her into alliance, which was very soon to be broken, with the great
sea-power of the Carthaginians.
The story of Rome herself, within the city walls, during all the
years from the expulsion of the Etruscan kings down to the date,
about 280 B.C., to which we have now come, was one of perpetual
struggle between the patricians, the aristocratic party, and the
plebs, the party of the people, the populace. The patricians had all
the power after the first driving out of the Tarquins, as the
Etruscan kings were called, because they had been the chief managers
of the revolution against them, but all through the later years the
populace grew in power, and took the power out of the hands of the
patricians. The constitution of the state became, as we should say,
more and more democratic. {170} The power fell more and more into
the hands of the "demos," the plebeians, the common people.
The Romans, as you saw, had made an alliance with the Carthaginians
at the time of the invasion of Italy and Sicily by Pyrrhus; but it
was a friendship that lasted only a very short while. Our story is
now coming to a point at which it will be very largely occupied by
wars between these two nations who are now, for the moment, friends.
The Romans continually accused the Carthaginians of treachery and of
broken faith. The Roman name for the Carthaginians was "Punici,"
which is somehow derived from the name, Phœnicia, of the country
from which, as you know, the colony of Carthage was founded. So
bitterly did the Romans resent their acts of treachery that the words
"Punica fides," that is to say, Punic, or Carthaginian, faith, were
used as a kind of proverb to express a faith or fidelity which was no
faith at all--a promise made only to be broken. Probably they were
not very true to their engagements; they were a very bold,
enterprising people, wonderful sailors, considering the ships that
they had. They went round Africa, they planted colonies all along
the shores of Spain, they went to the Cassiterides, or tin islands,
which are said to have been our own British islands. It is a
marvellous record of adventure.
But they do not seem to have been as highly civilised as the Romans,
who had been very largely influenced by this time by that
civilisation and culture of Greece which we have seen spreading
itself very widely. Greece had some influence even with them, for
among the temples for the worship of those gods Baal and Astaroth,
which they had brought with them from Phœnicia, was a temple to
the Greek god {171} Apollo. But in thinking over the whole story of
the intercourse and the fighting between Rome and Carthage we ought
to remember that it is almost entirely from the Roman point of view
that we have the story told. We do not know much of what the
Carthaginians might have had to say about the Romans. They might
perhaps have said something about broken faith on the Roman side
also. It is likely that neither party was very particular about
keeping promises which it was more convenient not to keep.
[Sidenote: First Punic war]
However that may be, it was almost inevitable that trouble must break
out between them before long; for here was the great and growing land
power of Rome on the northern side of the Mediterranean stretching
down the long leg of Italy; here was Carthage, with its powerful
navy, its determined sailors, and its adventurous courage, on the
southern shore; and there was Sicily, supposed to be independent of
both, lying like a football just at the very toe of Italy, ready to
be kicked, and reaching nearly over to the Carthaginian coast. It
was an unfortunate position for that island, and may remind us of the
position of Palestine as the bridge between the great ancient empires
of Egypt and Babylonia. There is this difference between the
positions of the two, that the fighting round about Sicily was sure
to be largely naval, an affair of sea-fights. It was not so in
Palestine.
Pyrrhus was driven back home to Epirus out of Italy in 275 B.C. In
268 B.C., only seven years later, began the first of those great
struggles between Rome and Carthage which are known as the Punic
Wars. There were three of these wars, interrupted by truces
which--owing, as the Romans said, to the infamous "Punica
fides"--never were lasting. The true reason {172} doubtless was that
both powers were too masterful in character to endure a rival. One
or other had to have the upper hand. There were times in the
struggle when it looked very doubtful indeed which would have it.
Sicily was of great importance to the Romans, because they depended
much on the supply of corn which it gave them. That was another
reason, besides the reason of its position as a kind of bridge or
stepping-stone between the two great rivals, why it became their
battle-field. If the Carthaginians could get Sicily, they could cut
off much of the enemy's food supply. The Romans, for their own
preservation, had to make sure of Sicily. It was over the possession
of Sicily that this first Punic war broke out.
The Romans had gradually made their fleet stronger and stronger until
they were powerful enough to risk a sea battle with the great naval
forces of Carthage, and they twice met and beat the navies of
Carthage, once in 260 B.C. and again four years later. Thus, having
command of the sea, they ventured to send an army into Africa,
against Carthage itself, but there they suffered a very heavy defeat
and their general was taken captive. The Carthaginians were much
aided in this victory by Spartan mercenaries. But the fate of
Sicily, where there were both Roman and Carthaginian armies, remained
to be decided. The war went on, with varying results, in and around
that unfortunate island, with now the one nation and now the other
gaining a victory, until a decision was at length reached by a great
victory of the Romans in 241 B.C. This war had lasted twenty-seven
years.
And here we may note a point in which Rome seems to have been like
our own country, of which {173} Napoleon I. complained that she
always won "the last battle of a war." Many times we see her very
hardly pressed, with the enemy at the gates of the city; but she goes
on fighting and she wins the last battle, the battle which counts and
which settles the result in her favour.
This was more particularly so in the Second Punic War, which began in
219 B.C.
Carthage had very great trouble with her own mercenary troops at the
end of the first war against Rome; they demanded their pay, which was
long overdue. That matter was largely settled by such heavy fighting
between them and the Carthaginians themselves that comparatively few
of the mercenaries were left alive at the end of it to receive pay,
if there had been any for them.
In the years that followed, Carthage became rich and prosperous. She
had a large trade with the interior of Africa as well as with all the
coast cities round the Mediterranean. She worked mines in Spain, and
in order to draw more wealth from that rich and fertile country she
gradually made herself mistress of a great part of it, and it was the
capture by Carthage of Saguntum, a city in southern Spain, which was
in the Roman alliance, that led to the outbreak in 219 B.C. of the
Second Punic War.
[Sidenote: Hannibal]
The Carthaginian general who captured Saguntum, and thus provoked
this greatest of the three Punic Wars, was Hannibal, perhaps the most
famous leader of armies in all history.
In telling this story of the world in mere outline, as I am trying to
tell it, it is impossible to speak of any of the details of his
extraordinary campaign. He had his army there in southern Spain. He
marched with it, {174} meeting no very serious opposition, through
Spain into that northern part of Italy which was then part of Gaul,
and he thence descended into southern Italy and into the very heart
of the Roman country itself. He won three great victories over the
Roman armies on the way, and finally, a fourth, at Cannæ, in the
autumn of 216 B.C., three years after he set out from Spain; and
after Cannæ Rome herself seemed to lie at his mercy.
[Illustration: HANNIBAL.]
Why he did not at once press on and lay siege to the city is one of
the puzzles of history. His army had been continuously marching and
fighting; he may have thought that it needed rest. Almost certainly
he expected further forces to be sent him from Carthage. But these
forces did not come.
[Sidenote: Battle of Zama]
There were several rival parties in Carthage itself, and it seems
likely that there was jealousy of Hannibal's great successes.
Whatever the reason, the help he expected was very long in coming.
He stayed on in Italy with his army which had been so victorious.
The Romans would not come to another fixed battle with him, but they
hovered about his army, continually harassing it. Probably it lost
much of its fighting force in this time of waiting. It was not until
nine years after Cannæ that Hannibal's brother, Hasdrubal, was sent
with an army to his help, and by that time the Romans had so
recovered their strength that they met and defeated, on the Metaurus,
this army of Hasdrubal's; and it was really this great battle that
settled the war. It left Hannibal helpless for any big fighting in
Italy. {175} It left the Romans free to make their power firm again
in Spain. They were so little troubled by the presence of Hannibal,
in his present condition, in Italy, that they again sent a force
oversea into Africa. This time their arms were completely successful
over the Carthaginians and their African allies. The Carthaginians,
in their alarm, recalled Hannibal, to see if his genius could save
them. But it was too late. He was defeated in the battle of Zama,
in 202 B.C., and therewith came the end of the Second Punic War.
Really it was the end of Carthage as a formidable rival to the power
of Rome. In the arrangements which followed she was compelled to
give up her fleet, to give up all her claims on Spain, and on the
islands in the Mediterranean, and to be content with her possessions
in Africa itself.
Again, Rome had won the last battle.
Why she did not meet her doom after Cannæ, we can never know. Had
Hannibal pressed forward after that victory the whole course of the
great story would probably have been quite different. To what extent
the hand of Providence interferes at such moments of the story as
these we cannot tell--or to what extent man is allowed to work out
his own fortunes without that correcting hand. Undoubtedly there are
certain moments when it looks very much as if Providence had actively
intervened; and perhaps, in our ignorance, we had better not attempt
to say more than that.
For more than fifty years, Rome had no trouble from Carthage, nor can
she really have been very seriously troubled when, in 149 B.C., she
declared the Third Punic War. Carthage had existed during that
half-century as an opulent and large city. She had made alliance
with some of the African peoples. There {176} were certain of the
Romans who deemed her power dangerous. A pretext for a quarrel was
easily found. Rome had now become so powerful that there was no
question as to where the battle-fields of this war would be. There
was no prospect of a Punic force in Italy or Sicily. The war, which
began in 149, lasted for three years, for the Carthaginians within
their walls made a desperate resistance which was worthy of their
splendid history; but at the last they had to yield. No mercy was
shown; the city was destroyed. Carthage ceased to exist.
{177}
CHAPTER XIII
ROME AT HOME AND IN THE EAST
As we have seen, there was a moment in the Second Punic War, just
after the Battle of Cannæ, when it seems marvellous that Rome escaped
destruction. What is almost more marvellous still is that it was
just during the same time that she was fighting so hard, and in the
end so victoriously, against the Carthaginians that she was able to
fight and to extend her power towards the East, over Macedon, Greece,
Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. It is an extent of conquest which must
seem most marvellous of all when we consider how quickly it was all
done. It is only a few pages back that we have seen her coming into
the great story at all, as an actor of any importance, and now she
begins to take such a masterful part in it that all the rest become
of little account when compared with her.
How did that happen? We may be very sure that it could never have
happened unless those Romans had been very uncommon people, unless
they had possessed great courage and determination, and unless they
had devised a very excellent form of government, both for themselves
and also for the nations over whom their armies and their fleet got
the mastery. The fighting forces had to be of splendid qualities in
order to win that mastery, but the government had to be wonderfully
wise in order to keep it.
{178}
It is a point that you should notice particularly, that all through
the story of Rome, even from those days when the story is really so
little known that you need not believe much more of it than you
like--from the days of Romulus and Remus and of the mother-wolf--we
are told that Romulus himself appointed a body of men called the
Senate to manage the affairs of the city. What I want you to notice
is that the name Senate comes from the Latin word "senex," meaning an
old man. This governing assembly was an assembly of the old men, and
they were thought likely to be the best rulers because they had lived
long in the world and had been learning the lessons that it had to
teach them longer than younger men.
[Sidenote: The Senate]
All through their story, down to a later date than that to which we
have followed it, they paid very much reverence to old age. The
power of the father was very great over his children, and the
authority of the mother was looked up to only a little less than his.
The children were thus brought up in the habit of obedience to their
parents, and there is not the least doubt that this habit must have
helped them to be obedient to military discipline when they had to go
out and fight.
Even after their fathers had died they had a great reverence for
their memory, and this reverence made them try to be worthy sons of
their fathers and to rival them in fine actions, in showing courage
and so on. And this same feeling made them very respectful of all
the customs that their fathers had followed. The custom of their
ancestors was the custom that they thought they ought to follow.
Religion, in the sense of expecting a reward or punishment from the
gods, whether for good or for bad deeds, does not seem {179} to have
counted for much in their lives, but this idea, of living in a manner
of which their ancestors would have approved, to some extent took the
place of religion. It made fine men and women of them, ready to
fight their best for the state and to die for it.
I do not mean that the Senate was chosen by Romulus really of the
hundred oldest men in his city--a hundred is said to have been its
number at first, but it increased to many times a hundred as time
went on--but it would have been made up of men of age and experience
chosen from the most important citizens. Thus it continued right on
to the time when the Tarquins, the Etruscan kings, were driven out;
and after they were driven out the Senators chose, each year, two of
their own number to be the rulers of the state for that year. As
these rulers, called consuls, ruled for a year only, it is probable
that the Senate knew pretty well what they were likely to do during
that year. The Senate would not elect consuls who would go against
the will of the Senate. So probably it was the Senate that really
had the power.
The Senate was thus an aristocratic body, as we might call it. The
men who composed it were called "patricians"; and there again you see
the idea of reverence for the father's authority, because "patrician"
comes from "pater," meaning a father.
But, as we have noticed already, the plebs, or common people, that is
to say, all who were not patricians, began to assert themselves more
and more against the government by this patrician, or aristocratic,
class. After a while they gained the right of holding their own
assembly, called the Comitia (from "co" or "com," meaning together,
and "ire" to {180} go)--they "went together" in this assembly. And
as they were, of course, far more in number than the Senate, they
succeeded by degrees in getting more and more power of law-making and
so on into their hands. They, according to the laws which they
succeeded in passing, became the chief power in the state, and the
Senate was only a bad second to them.
But though that was the condition of things according to the law, the
power which the Senate retained was, in fact, very considerable,
because the Senate, still only a few hundred in number, were always
there, in Rome, ready to be called together and come to a decision.
The Comitia, composed of members many of whom lived at a distance
outside Rome, and not at hand to express their views and give their
votes, could not decide matters nearly so quickly; and often, when
Rome was so constantly at war, important decisions had to be taken
quickly.
Chiefly for this reason, though in part for various other reasons
too, the power of the Senate was still great, and far greater than it
would have been if they had kept strictly to what they were allowed
to do by law.
The Forum, that famous place of assembly, of which we may still see
the remains in Rome, was the site where the Comitia met. It was only
those who were owners of land, or who owned property of a certain
value, who had the right to vote in the Comitia, and it was a right
that belonged only to citizens of the Roman Republic and a few cities
outside, which had won this privilege by some special services
rendered to the Republic. In its beginnings the Comitia may have
been open to patricians only, but by the time that Rome came to take
any big part in the story of the {181} world the Comitia had become
the assembly of the people, as opposed to the patrician Senate.
[Sidenote: The Legions]
The ownership of land or of property sufficient to give a man a vote
for the Comitia made him a citizen in another sense also, namely,
that he was obliged, if summoned, to take arms for the Republic and
serve in war, and these citizens, thus summoned, became the famous
Roman legions which won battles all over the world. After a while,
as the power of Rome extended, legions were formed in subject
provinces far away from the capital city, but they were always under
the command of Roman officers.
It would take far too long to tell you about all the stages by which
the people, the common citizens, grew to have more and more power,
and the patricians to have less. You must understand that the Senate
was not in the least like our House of Lords. The eldest son of a
Senator did not become a Senator when his father died, but the
numbers of the Senate were kept up by elections, and some of the
highest officials of the Comitia became Senators by reason of their
holding these offices, so that by degrees many of the plebs, that is,
of the people themselves, became Senators, and this made the citizens
more content than they would otherwise have been with the Senate
deciding how the wars should be carried on and when it was right to
make war and peace with their enemies.
The number of soldiers in a legion was from four to six thousand.
These legionaries, as they were called, all being--at first, at all
events--holders of property in the Roman Republic, must have felt
that it was for themselves and for their own property that they went
to fight. That must have added to their courage and determination.
They were heavily-armed {182} infantry soldiers, and to each legion
was assigned some auxiliary lighter-armed troops and some cavalry.
The way of fighting was much the same as that of the Macedonian
phalanx, and it was actually the Macedonian phalanx that the Roman
legions came clashing up against when Rome began to extend herself
eastward beyond Italy.
That came about in this way. Philip V., king of Macedon, had allied
himself with the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War, that war in
which Hannibal seemed to have Rome at his mercy. During its progress
the Romans had made alliances with several powers in the East: with
Egypt, where one of the Ptolemies was king; with Rhodes, the large
island lying just off the coast of Asia Minor, which had a strong
navy; with Pergamus, a city state on the mainland, which also had a
strong fleet; and of course she was the defender, in Italy and in
Sicily, of the Greek colonies there.
When she was threatened by Philip of Macedon on her north-eastern
side, she put herself at the head of a confederation of Greek states
against Philip.
Philip, on his part, had made an ally of Antiochus, one of the
dynasty of Seleucus, who was king of Syria, and they agreed between
them to take possession of Egypt, which had little power of its own
at this time to withstand them.
[Sidenote: Rome against Macedon]
Thus the Romans, with all the trouble with Carthage on their hands on
the one side, had these enemies in Macedonia and right away to Asia
Minor on the other. But the alliance with Pergamus and Rhodes gave
them strength in the eastern waters of the Mediterranean.
Then, in 201 B.C., the Punic War ended, in a manner probably quite
different from that which Philip and his {183} Syrian friend had
expected. Rome was free to turn her full attention to the East.
The legions met the Macedonians in several battles in Greece itself;
a force sent from Rhodes defeated an army that Philip had sent into
Asia Minor, where his ally Antiochus, who had troubles in his own
kingdom, seems to have given him very little help. Another of his
armies was broken up by the Greeks themselves at Corinth. In fact he
suffered disaster in all directions. Within two years the war was
over. The power of Macedon was crushed. Philip was allowed, by the
treaty of peace which followed, to keep his kingdom of Macedonia, but
he lost all that he had claimed to hold in Asia Minor, and Greece was
set free from the sovereignty of the Macedonians which had weighed
over them ever since the conquests of Alexander.
At the end of the Punic War Rome had claimed, and had annexed as her
own by right of conquest, both Sicily and Spain, from which she had
expelled the Carthaginians, but she did not at first, after the
defeat of Philip, claim any of the territory which he lost in the
war. She left Greece to enjoy the freedom she had won for her. But
she had, of course, increased her reputation and her power towards
the east of Italy enormously. The Greeks looked on Rome as their
liberator and champion. About Antiochus they perhaps would not have
troubled themselves, since he had proved such a feeble ally to
Philip, but Antiochus began to stir up trouble for himself by his own
imprudence and ambition.
He had given such feeble help to his ally, Philip, partly because he
was engaged in an attack on Egypt. Already, nearly twenty years
before, he had attempted to gain possession of the Egyptian provinces
Phœnicia {184} and Palestine, but had been heavily defeated near
Gaza.
Now, just at the time that Philip was being finally beaten off the
field in Greece, Antiochus was completely successful against Egypt.
The reigning Ptolemy was a child, the government was in weak hands,
Antiochus had little trouble. Amongst other consequences of his
victories, one was that Palestine and Jerusalem passed from the hands
of Egypt into the control of Syria, and it seems that the Jews
resented the manner in which the later Ptolemies had ruled them, and
welcomed the change. The Egyptian garrison was driven out.
Philip, conquered by the Romans, had lost his hold of the Greek
cities in Asia Minor, and Antiochus seems to have thought it was the
moment to take advantage of the misfortunes of his ally and seized
those cities for his own.
Both the Egyptian enterprise and also this in Asia Minor were a
direct offence to the Romans, seeing that both Egyptians and Greeks
were their allies and looked to Rome for protection.
They did not look in vain. It is likely that Antiochus did not
realise how great Rome had become. She was a long way off. But a
few years ago she was scarcely known. We may imagine that he had
very little idea of the might of the nation whose allies he had dared
to attack. Perhaps the Romans themselves did not realise their own
strength or the weakness of the enemy, for they tried their best to
come to terms with him.
It was all to no purpose. Antiochus actually ventured into Greece
itself with an army; but before he achieved anything of importance
the Romans had {185} come to the help of the Greeks, and the Syrian
force broke up and melted away after the very first battle.
[Sidenote: The Legions in Asia]
But the Romans had not finished with them yet. They had seen,
perhaps, that the Syrians were less formidable than they had thought.
The Syrian navy was beaten heavily by the combined navies of Rome,
Rhodes, and Pergamus. The following year, that is, 190 B.C., saw a
sight new to our story--Roman legions in Asia Minor. They were under
the leadership of one of the Scipios, who was consul for the year and
brother of that Scipio who had led the Roman legions in Africa in the
last years of the Second Punic War, and for his victories had been
given the surname of Scipio "Africanus." Scipio Africanus
accompanied his brother, the consul, with the legions in Asia Minor.
There West met East, and there was no doubt, after the first clash of
arms, with which the victory must be. The Roman legionaries under
this Scipio, who assumed the title of "Asiaticus," as his brother
took that of "Africanus," had a discipline and a battle formation
against which the impetuous attacks of the more lightly armed Syrians
broke and wasted themselves. Just so far as the Romans chose to
advance must those others recede before them. They had all Asia
behind them for their retreat. Rome at her strongest could not
utterly destroy the power of the East as she had destroyed the power
of Carthage; but she could drive it back and back at her pleasure, so
long and so far as she chose to put out her power. The East would
come on again after each driving back, like flies at some great
creature which has whisked them away for a moment, but they could not
really get through the great creature's hide; certainly they could
not get to any vital part, {186} to any centre of his body where they
could do him real hurt. Rome had perpetual trouble with these
buzzing swarms in the East all through her days of world-power; but
it was this kind of trouble--vexatious, and costing her much money
and many lives of her soldiers, but never threatening her own life or
power, as the Gauls from the north had threatened it once, and were
to threaten it, and worse than threaten it, again.
After the first punishment had been given to Antiochus, Rome did not
annex any of his dominions or form them into a province under a Roman
governor. There is this remarkable difference that we may see
between the Romans and other conquerors whom we have met in the
course of this great story, that the Romans, before they went on
farther, always consolidated, made solid and firm and almost a part
of themselves, what they won.
They acted on the principle _divide et impera_, that is, disunite
people and then you can rule them. They did not interfere much with
the customs and laws of the peoples that they conquered. They let
them manage their affairs in their own way. They expected them
perhaps to pay tribute and to furnish soldiers for the army. So long
as they did this they were not greatly troubled by their Roman
governors. But--and this is the point on which the Romans insisted,
and to which they owed a very great deal of their success--although
these peoples were allowed to manage their own affairs, within their
own borders, they were not allowed to make wars or treaties of peace
and alliance or anything of that kind with their neighbours. On all
such questions they had to refer back to Rome and ask her permission
and advice and help.
One sees what the effect of that must have been--to {187} make these
always look to Rome as their sovereign. That was one effect.
Another was that they were not able to combine together and so become
strong enough to be a danger to that sovereign. And Rome was wise in
her dealings with them. She punished them heavily if they did not
obey her, but rewarded them, by giving them rights and privileges, if
they were very faithful in obeying and in helping her.
[Sidenote: The prudence of Rome]
She was prudent, at this moment, in not attempting to annex any of
the domain of Antiochus, because, if she had, she would have had this
province lying far away out in the East, and between herself and this
province would have been Greece and Macedonia, which were supposed to
be free countries, though they doubtless knew that Rome could take
them for her own if she chose.
Antiochus, lately the ally of Philip, had attacked and taken Philip's
cities in Asia as soon as he knew that the Romans had broken Philip's
power. Philip, in revenge, had helped the Romans when they attacked
Antiochus, but he did not get much reward for it, in the treaty of
peace. He was dissatisfied and restless; the Greek cities, as usual,
quarrelled among themselves. Another page of the story was turned
when Perseus, son of Philip, succeeding his father on the throne of
Macedon, made an alliance of Thracians, Syrians, Greeks, and others,
and declared war against Rome. What followed? The Greeks were very
brave while the Roman legions were in Italy. As soon as the legions
marched on Greece the fighting spirit went out of the Greek cities.
Syria was too far East to help the West. Macedon and Thrace met Rome
in a big battle fought at Pydna. Perseus was utterly beaten. He was
taken prisoner and brought to Rome. Macedonia {188} was allowed some
form of freedom, but she began intriguing and giving trouble again;
Rome could suffer it no longer, and she made Macedonia into a Roman
province.
The story of the Greek states after Pydna was much the same. The
authority of Rome over them was really supreme if she cared to exert
it, but for a while she contented herself with the punishment of
those that had helped Perseus. Again, it was their own imprudence
which compelled Rome to take action. They formed a confederacy and
were ill-advised enough to go to war with her. It was a war that
gave Rome no trouble. The Greek armies made little resistance, some
of the cities had their walls razed to the ground. Even yet, Greece
was not formally annexed as a Roman province, but the Roman governor
of Macedonia was given some authority over Greece also, and the
states were forbidden to form any more alliances with each other.
Rome might do as she would with them.
[Sidenote: Rome must be obeyed]
This being so, you will see that Rome was now in a position to
advance her power, whenever it pleased her, into Asia Minor without
leaving unconquered nations between the centre of her power and those
Eastern nations. But she went slowly, perhaps to make the more sure.
She reduced the power of those strong naval states, Rhodes and
Pergamus, although they had lately been her allies. She acted, in
all her dealings, with a purely selfish regard to her own interests.
Egypt acknowledged her supremacy. A new king of Syria was appointed
under her direction, and as he was quite young a Roman guardian was
given to guide his actions. It was said, and no doubt it was said
truly, by the Greek historian Polybius, whom the Romans {189} had
taken prisoner to Rome, that in all the world men knew that there was
nothing else to be done, if Rome gave an order, but to obey it.
And now I want you to pause a moment in the story and see whither it
has brought us. For we have now come to a condition of the world
which had never been seen before.
{190}
CHAPTER XIV
ROME MISTRESS OF THE WORLD
We have never before seen the world in the condition to which we have
brought it now, in the whole course of the story.
At first, you will remember, there were the two great empires
warring, the Nile Valley empire and the empire of the Euphrates and
Tigris. Then came the Persian. He overthrew them both. But then he
came up against a wall too strong for him to break down, in the
opposition of Greece; and he broke his own head against that wall.
After him came Alexander, the Macedonian, going through the world, as
it was then known, like a flash of lightning, getting the better of
everything that stood in his way as if it was of no account at all.
But like a flash of lightning his light went out again, and he left
the world he had conquered to be cut up into pieces and quarrelled
for by the generals that he had led to the conquest.
Then the scene of action shifted westward along the inland sea.
Carthage had grown to power at the cost of Phœnicia, her
mother-land, and over against Carthage had grown together, in a
wonderfully short time, this new Roman power. Carthage and Rome had
fought, and Rome had utterly prevailed.
Then Rome, looking eastward, and troubled by King Pyrrhus, who had
helped the Carthaginians, came in touch with the Macedonians and the
Greeks, {191} and after a period of trouble got the better of both,
came up against the peoples of Asia Minor, and had them at her mercy
whenever she chose to put out her strength. Already Egypt, though
independent nominally, had acknowledged Rome as sovereign.
[Sidenote: Pax Romana]
So you see whither we have come. Hitherto it has always been a
struggling world that the story has had to tell of--one or the other
master holding power a short while perhaps, but never really having a
hold over the whole world and getting all his opponents under. It is
quite otherwise now. Rome is mistress; and she is not going to let
go her hold for a very long while. When she does lose hold it will
be really because her grip has lost power owing to her own maladies,
rather than that any other very formidable foe has come against her.
You will understand, of course, what I mean when I talk of "the whole
world" at this point of the story, and what that Greek historian,
Polybius, of whom I told you in the last chapter, meant by it. He
knew, no doubt, that there was a great deal of the world, in the
sense of land inhabited by human beings, beyond the wide lands over
which the Roman power really did extend. But neither he nor any one
else in the Greek or Roman world of that day thought that these lands
and their inhabitants counted for anything. They did not matter.
These peoples were called barbarians. They were considered rather as
we consider the North American Indians or the negroes. They were far
more formidable to the Romans than either of these are to us, because
the people away to the east and north-east of Syria, to the north of
Asia Minor and Thrace and of Italy itself, all these had limitless
lands behind them, on the sides farthest {192} from the central power
of Rome, to retreat into when she came with any power against them.
For the most part they were peoples who led a wandering life. It was
no trouble to them to strike their tents and go back into the wilds.
But it was terrible trouble for the legions to follow them very far
into those wilds; and the legions could not easily force them to a
decided battle if they did follow them.
Therefore the Romans doubtless knew that however far they might push
out their power in the east and north there would always be peoples
on the edge of the lands which they could really make their own who
would be apt to give trouble and would require small campaigns to be
waged against them from time to time. Probably they made up their
minds to that. But inside that wide barbarian fringe, and with the
Atlantic Ocean on the west and the nearly uninhabited deserts of
Africa on the south--within the wide expanse of which these form the
boundary, the Roman power was such that if Rome said a thing had to
be done, there was no man who questioned it. Done that thing had to
be. That is what is meant by a phrase that you have most likely
heard, the "Pax Romana," the Roman peace. It meant the peace which
Rome could, and did, enforce within these regions under her power--a
peace that could not be broken because every man knew that whatever
she said was to be done, must be done. There was no help for it.
Of course the peace was not perfect, it was not untroubled. No peace
ever is. But it was peace of a kind that the world had never known
before. The whole world--the whole world that mattered--was for the
first time under one single authority. It was also for the last
time; for it is a condition that the {193} world has never been in
again since the break-up of the Roman power. So I think I was
justified in asking you to stop a moment in the course of the story
in order to consider the position of affairs to which it has brought
us. It is interesting, is it not?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mithridates]
Now, I do not know that there is any need to trouble you with all the
smaller happenings which led to Rome's asserting herself more and
more strongly in the East. Probably she would have done better if
she had established her power more strongly in Syria rather earlier
than she did. In the end she took it and turned it into one of her
provinces as well as the other lands that she conquered; but by the
time she did so a certain king called Mithridates, of a certain
kingdom called Pontus, on the Black Sea, to the north of Syria, had
made himself very strong, and gave the Romans a terrible deal of
trouble about the year 88 B.C. and onward.
But long before that, and even while she was claiming to impose her
"Pax Romana," the Roman peace, on all the world, she had very little
peace within her own borders. It is all an outgrowth of the old
trouble that we saw beginning as far back as the time when the Romans
drove out those Etruscan kings and formed themselves into a Republic.
All through their story we have seen the Senate, which was for the
most part the high-born, the rich party, on the one side, and the
Comitia, or assembly of the plebeians, on the other. And the last
was perpetually struggling to get power and to take power away from
the first. That struggle still went on until it ended in neither of
them having any power at all. And that happened in this way.
{194}
As Rome grew rich, by the plunder and taxation of the provinces that
she conquered and annexed, an immense number of slaves were brought
into Italy. They cultivated the land for their masters a great deal
more cheaply than the native small farmers could cultivate it, and at
the same time a great deal of corn and other things that these
farmers used to grow was brought in from the provinces at a cheap
price. The small farmers, what we might call peasants, could not
grow corn in Italy as cheaply as this, so the fields fell out of
cultivation and the peasants flocked into the towns where they could
get their share of the cheap corn.
Great discontent grew out of this. Two brothers, who were leading
men of the people, Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, got laws passed to
give the people a chance of cultivating their land on better terms,
but the selfishness of the rich party, who were opposed to them, made
these laws of no use.
[Sidenote: The power of the generals]
The people had succeeded in getting one of their own class, Marius by
name, appointed as general of an army in Africa, which conquered a
restless and powerful people called the Numidians, who had been
giving much anxiety to the Romans and had defeated the armies under
the general that the Senate had sent out in command. When Marius
came back, as victor, from Africa, some of the northern barbarous
tribes were harassing Italy itself. He took command of the army
against them, and again was completely successful. Thus he rose to
great power, and one of his acts, when at the height of his power,
was to repeal the law according to which it had always been
compulsory on the people to serve in certain legions, and to allow
them to enlist in what legions they pleased.
{195}
Do you see what that meant? It meant that the people would go and
enlist under a popular general, and, this being so, the general
became the authority to whom they gave their allegiance and to whom
they looked up as their head. It was no longer to Rome that the
soldiers looked as the great authority. They looked to their general.
That made a very great difference in the whole state of affairs. It
meant that the general who was able to rely on his army became really
independent of the power of either Senate or Comitia. They might
give him orders, but he had the armed force at his back and could
almost please himself as to whether he should obey the orders or not.
Thus it was that the real power passed altogether out of the hands of
the Senate and Comitia and fell into that of the commanders of the
legions, or of whichever of the several commanders of legions might
prove the strongest. The Senate or the Comitia, sometimes the one
and sometimes the other, might appoint the commanders, but once the
commanders were appointed, the power was with them so long as they
could rely on the support of the soldiers.
The Senate succeeded in getting leaders devoted to their interests
appointed to command some of the legions, and the Comitia got men of
their own side appointed to others, and so it came to pass that there
were these two opposing forces in the world, the legions that were
under a general who was on the side of the aristocratic party and the
legions that were commanded by one who favoured the popular side.
It is much more easy to see, long after it all happened, how one
state of affairs grows out of what has gone before, than it is for
the people who are acting in them {196} to see it. We can see how it
all happened much better than they can have seen then, but I suppose
that even those Romans who were in the very middle of it all and were
actors in the story must have realised that something was going on
which they had never known before, and which was certain to make a
great difference, when they saw one of these commanders of the
legions march his forces right up to Rome and take forcible
possession of the city.
[Illustration: ROMAN LEGIONARIES.]
This commander was Sulla, and he acted as he did because Rome at the
time had fallen into such a state of lawlessness, owing to the fights
between the rich people and the poor, and to all the evil causes that
I have mentioned, that no man's property or life was safe. Sulla
came in with his soldiers and enforced what we might call Martial
Law. He restored order, but he restored it only by terribly severe
punishments. He was on the side of the Senate, of the rich and
patrician class. This was in the year 88 B.C. But he did not stay
in Rome. That war on the eastern boundary of the Empire with King
Mithridates of Pontus required attention. Mithridates had been
terribly successful at its commencement. He had overrun Asia Minor,
and it is said that in a single day 80,000 persons who claimed to be
Romans, or to be {197} under the protection of the great Roman power,
were massacred.
[Sidenote: Sulla and Pompey]
Sulla was a great general. Mithridates had advanced into Greece, but
he made no stand against the legions. His armies were defeated in
Asia Minor too, and by 84 B.C. this, which was called the First
Mithridatic War, was over. A treaty was made whereby the territories
of the king of Pontus were strictly defined, and Sulla came back to
Rome.
The popular party had been busy while he was away. Marius, their
champion, was dead, but his place had been taken by another popular
general, Cinna. When Sulla returned he found Rome in possession of
Cinna and the populace. With his own legions Sulla overthrew Cinna
and his power, and his punishment of his opponents was even more
fearfully cruel than before. The story of the years that followed is
a terrible one. The life of no man of any importance was safe in
Rome if he was suspected of showing any favour to the popular cause.
And now another very great name comes into the story, that of
Pompey--Pompey the Great as he was sometimes called. In Rome, Sulla
had drowned in blood the opposition of the popular party; but there
were legions outside Italy itself, and some of them, in Spain, were
under popular leadership. Against these Pompey went out as commander
on the patrician side. After some three years of fighting he was
completely successful. Sulla, wearied of power and tyranny, had
thrown up his dictatorship at Rome and had retired into the country
and to private life. Pompey led back his victorious legions, and
with his soldiers at the gates of the city demanded the honours which
he thought due to him as victor.
{198}
There was no denying them to him, and he was elected Consul.
The condition of affairs in Italy was bad. There had been a great
uprising of the slaves who had become very numerous and had banded
themselves together, to a number said to be 70,000. They traversed
the country, pillaging and acting in defiance of all law.
Pompey, as Consul and with the military power at his command, showed
himself a far less cruel dictator than Sulla. He revoked many of the
worst laws and lawless institutions of Sulla. The slave revolt, as
it was called, was put down. Something like order was restored
again. And when all this had been done in Italy, Pompey was given,
or maybe took for himself, command of a fleet and of armies in the
East, for the special purpose of destroying the sea pirates in the
eastern part of the Mediterranean and strengthening the Roman power
in Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor. The treaty with Mithridates had not
succeeded in making peace in that corner of the world for long, and,
though he had been beaten in one or two battles by the legions, he
was still in the field and far beyond the boundaries which that
treaty had assigned to him.
[Sidenote: Julius Cæsar]
Pompey carried all before him. He put down the pirates in a series
of sea fights, settled affairs in Syria, which he at length made into
a Roman province, and then went northward, where he met Mithridates
and defeated him so decisively that he gave the Romans no further
trouble, and shortly afterwards took his own life. With all these
victories to his credit, Pompey returned to Italy, where by that time
had come into the story one whose name, great as was that of Pompey,
was to become greater even than his--Julius Cæsar.
Cæsar had gained fame both as an orator and as a {199} soldier. His
sympathies were with the popular party. He had been chosen as
Consul, but had not yet entered into that office when Pompey came
back, triumphant, from the East. We might expect that Pompey, who
was on the patrician side, would be opposed to Cæsar, but Pompey was
dissatisfied with his treatment by his own party. He seems to have
promised his soldiers, as a reward for their bravery and their
victories, that they should be given grants of land, to live on, in
Italy. The Senate were not ready to confirm this promise, and they
did not approve of all that he had done in Asia Minor.
The result was that Cæsar and Pompey became friends and allies.
Cæsar married Pompey's daughter. They brought into their alliance
one Crassus, whose chief value to them as a friend was that he had
immense wealth. This combination was known as the Triumvirate, or
combination of three men (from _tres_, meaning three, and _vir_,
meaning man). Acting together, the three could get any laws passed
that they pleased. One of the measures which they joined in passing
made an immense difference in our story. It was that measure which
gave to Cæsar the command of the legions in Gaul.
The difference that it was to make was not seen just at first. Cæsar
went up north to his command. His campaign against the Gauls, of
which he himself has written the account in his "Commentaries," are a
little out of the direct line of our great story. They had their
effect on the big story, for if they had ended in any other way than
the way in which they did, if Cæsar had been killed or conquered--and
he was nearly killed or conquered more than once--the big story might
have gone quite differently. But as it was, {200} in the end--and
the end of his campaigns in Gaul did not come until nine years had
passed--he was completely victorious. During those years he made an
expedition to Great Britain, but did not stay there long. At the end
of the nine years he came back. He was chosen as Consul for the
second time. He came back to the borders of Italy at the head of his
victorious legions. He was commanded by the Senate to disband his
troops before coming to Rome to be made Consul. The Senate and
Pompey, for Pompey still was chief man in Rome, did not want a
general with soldiers devoted to him at the gates of the city.
Cæsar halted for a time, while messages about this went to and fro
between him and the Senate, the Senate ordering him to disband the
troops, and Cæsar refusing. He halted on the banks of a small
stream, the Rubicon, which has become very famous because it was the
boundary of Italy beyond which he was forbidden to go at the head of
troops.
Finally, in the year 49 B.C., he determined to go against the order
of the Senate and brave the consequences. _Cæsar crossed the
Rubicon!_
The crossing of that river meant war. Cæsar knew it. The Senate
knew it. Pompey knew it. The great Pompey fled before him, and took
command of the Senatorial armies in Greece. Cæsar, who had no fleet,
went in pursuit.
They met at Pharsalia, in Thessaly, and there was fought one of the
great battles of history. Cæsar gained the day, and Pompey again
fled, into Egypt. Again Cæsar pursued him, and was met on coming to
Egypt by a messenger who thought to find favour with him by bringing
him the head of Pompey, who had been murdered. But Cæsar was a
generous enemy. {201} Pompey had been his friend, and he mourned his
death with respect.
[Sidenote: Cleopatra]
There was trouble in Egypt at this time. The rulers were supposed to
be one of the Ptolemies and Cleopatra, also of the same family, the
two sharing the throne. But the Ptolemy had thrust the queen out and
claimed to rule alone. Cæsar, captivated by the beauty of Cleopatra,
restored her to her share in the government. Then he marched up with
his force into Syria. There, too, there was trouble.
The trouble was with a powerful people called the Parthians, coming
from that part of Asia, east of the Euphrates, from which the
Persians had come long ago. They were a warlike nation, fighting on
horseback, lightly clad in mail; and their mode of fighting was like
that of the Persians of old--to come galloping down upon the enemy,
to shower arrows, discharged from horseback, upon him, to gallop off
again, turning in the saddle and shooting as they went, and then to
reform, to come back again, and repeat the same tactics until the
enemy's formation was broken up.
Really it was very like the fighting of the Persians, which, as we
saw, was broken by the solid Greek phalanx. But these Parthians
prevailed in several battles against the Roman legions. They had
defeated a Roman army under the command of that Crassus who was one
of the triumvirate. Of these three, Cæsar was the only one who was
alive after Pompey's murder in Egypt.
Cæsar met the Parthian forces and defeated them very heavily. He
drove them back over the Euphrates; and the Euphrates we have to look
on as the boundary, eastward, of the Roman power. The Romans did not
try to press farther. They had enough, and more {202} than enough,
work on their hands in making good the conquests they had gained.
Cæsar returned to Rome, victorious; but still he had enemies, in the
shape of armies in the field, under commanders appointed by the
Senate. There were some such forces in Africa. Thither Cæsar went
and made an end of them. Still there were others in Spain, and
there, at length, he seems to have put out the last spark of
opposition by a victory in the battle of Munda in 45 B.C. He had
crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. What he had accomplished in those
four years is wonderful. Victorious in Greece, Egypt, Syria, Africa,
Spain. All enemies had gone down before him. He was elected
"dictator for life" of the Roman Commonwealth.
{203}
CHAPTER XV
TROUBLES IN THE EAST
We have seen that in the year 190 B.C. a new thing happened in Asia
Minor--Roman legions appeared there for the first time in history.
It was an appearance which was a sign of what was sure to come, that
Rome, when it pleased her to do so, would conquer all that country.
Conquer it all, and subdue it to her own power, in course of time she
did. The last people that she succeeded in perfectly subduing were
the Jews.
Judæa, at the date of the arrival in Asia of the legions, was held as
a province of the kingdom of Syria by one of the dynasty of Seleucus.
Seleucus and his Court were, practically, Grecian. Antioch, the
capital of Syria (several of the Seleucid kings were called
Antiochus), was practically a Greek city. The influence of Greek
thought began to flow into Judæa and Jerusalem more and more from
Syria and the north, and we have seen already how it flowed in from
Egypt and Alexandria. It brought in strange knowledge, strange
speculations and, so far as the Greeks troubled themselves about
religion, a strange religion. We have seen from of old how intensely
the Jews were devoted to their own religion, and how they retained it
in exile and in persecution. A very large number of them held to it
fiercely now against all these new ideas that the Greeks were
bringing in.
So, all through the hundred years that follow, the {204} story of the
Jews is the story of a series of struggles for the mastery in
Jerusalem between the party that favoured the Greek new ways and the
party faithful to the old Jewish ways. The latter came to be called
Pharisees and the former are represented by the Sadducees, as you
read of them in the Bible.
Besides this cause of unrest, there was still constantly trouble
between Syria and Egypt. The fact that both were overshadowed
equally by the growing power of Rome did not prevent them quarrelling
about their own claims in Palestine. And Judæa, as ever of old, lay
between the two rivals. Judæa knew little peace in these days of the
so-called _Pax Romana_.
[Sidenote: Fortitude of the Jews]
The insults which the national religion and laws suffered from the
"Gentiles," as the Jews called the Greeks and all who were not of
their own race and way of thinking, roused their great resentment.
The fighting between the parties was fierce. There was one moment in
the story when the Jews under those great fighters, the Maccabees,
became really the strongest power, so long as Rome did not care to
exert her power, in all that region--stronger than Syria, of which
she had lately been a mere province. She had power as extensive as
Solomon had wielded when king of Israel and Judah united. But it did
not endure. The rivalry between the two parties within Judæa itself
weakened her. At the date of Pompey's coming to Syria, about a
hundred years later than the first coming of the legions, Judæa was
again in subjection to Syria, and Syria herself was made into a Roman
province. Judæa, like the rest of the world, turned her eyes to Rome
as mistress of them all; but, of them all, the eyes of Judæa
expressed, probably, the least obedience and submission, the
strongest purpose of resistance.
{205}
It is this strength of resistance that has made the Jews, in spite of
all the calamities that they have continually had to endure all
through the course of our story, still play such an active and large
part in it. All read with reverence the same sacred Book. Even
those Jews that had been scattered, and had settled far from
Jerusalem, looked up to Jerusalem as their capital city. The Temple
of their great God was there. They received and obeyed orders from
there. They went up there to great feasts and religious ceremonies.
There were very many Jews in the many Greek cities of Asia Minor,
very many in Egypt, many in Cyprus and other islands, many in Greece
itself. Although Judæa was a small subject state when Pompey saw it,
and had an official appointed by Rome as its ruler, it was important
to him to have the favour of the Jews on his side, just because they
were so far and widely dispersed and could exercise influence in so
many lands.
At first, in the struggle between Cæsar and Pompey, the favour of the
Jews had been given to Pompey. Probably they were disposed to fight
for the side that they thought most likely to win, so as to get some
future favours for themselves in return. As a matter of fact, both
Greeks and Romans were so little concerned with religious things
that, except for insulting the Jewish customs by their indifference,
they showed very little hostility to them.
When Cæsar went to Egypt he gave the Jews every opportunity of
worshipping God in their own way and living their peculiar life in
the manner that pleased them. The official appointed by Rome to
govern Judæa at this time was Antipater, a native of the neighbouring
land of Idumæa, and his son, who {206} succeeded him in the
governorship, was called Herod, Herod the Great, who ruled, with the
title of king (though he was only a king by leave of Rome, and king
of a country paying tribute to Rome), until the year 4 B.C. We are
just coming now to the Christian Era, as we call it. The years will
then no longer grow fewer and fewer as they come to the year of the
birth of Christ; but more and more as they mount up away from that
date.
In the early days of the rule of Herod in Judæa, that is, about the
year 40 B.C., there came a new danger on the land. Those Parthians,
whom Julius Cæsar had defeated, swarmed back again, on their horses,
across the Euphrates, and swept over a great part of the country.
Herod implored the help of Rome, and not in vain; but Julius Cæsar
was no longer the world's master then. He had been dead for several
years.
You must, I am sure, remember that scene in the Senate-house in
Rome--if you do not remember reading it in any history book you will
have heard of it from Shakespeare's play of Julius Cæsar--how his
best friends clustered round him, and the dearest of all gave him a
fatal dagger-stroke. "_Et tu, Brute!_" he exclaimed, as even Brutus,
his most intimate friend, dealt a death blow.
The assassins of Cæsar asserted that they did the foul deed for the
good of the State, to rid Rome of the tyranny of the dictator. That
may have been the real reason of some of them. Others may have been
thinking of their own advantage and how they might advance if they
put such a big man as Cæsar out of the way. But whatever their
intentions were, the effect on the State was terrible.
The great orator, Cicero, had hopes that the {207} Republic might be
restored, that the rule of one man might be ended and the good old
days come back again. But the people in Rome were not such as they
had been in those good old days when they followed the good old
customs. It is no wonder that they had changed.
See what had happened. Rome had conquered the world. Masses of
wealth from the conquered provinces had been brought to her and were
constantly coming in. The rich men had their splendid houses and
villas. They vied with each other in giving feasts and
entertainments to the populace, in order to gain the votes of the
people and to be elected to high positions, at home or abroad, in
which they could make large fortunes by receiving bribes or by taxing
the provinces. All their old ideas of what it was right to do had
been upset by the Greek thought that prevailed through all the world
that was at all educated. There was no respect for the laws, and
they had no religion that made any difference to their conduct.
[Sidenote: Octavius and Antony]
Therefore, when Cæsar was killed, and his power to dictate and to
make the laws obeyed went, at once there was terrible lawlessness,
several parties in the city trying to get the power into their hands.
Cæsar had been appointed dictator for life, but no arrangement had
been made about what should happen at his death. So it went for the
space of two years or so, and out of all the troubles of these two
years we find a state of things coming about very like that which
happened before, when Pompey and Cæsar were the two most powerful
men--powerful, because each had legions willing to obey him. There
was a third at that time, Crassus, powerful in his wealth. Two men
now again came to the front, each with military forces at his
back--Octavius and Antony. There was a third, of less {208} power,
Lepidus. Pompey and Cæsar had been friends at first, and were joined
together to rule the affairs of Rome. Afterwards they fell fighting,
with the result that you know--the complete victory of Cæsar.
Crassus had been killed, fighting in the East; and that was the end
of that which was called the first Triumvirate.
Antony, the nephew and the friend of Cæsar, had designs of succeeding
to his power, but almost at the outset he found Octavius, who was
Cæsar's grand-nephew, opposing him. Antony had been Consul, with
Cæsar, in 44 B.C. Now he had command of legions in the north of
Italy, and when he went to take up that command he found Brutus,
Cæsar's assassin, holding possession of a town called Mutina, which
he refused to give up. Antony attacked him. The Senate took the
side of Brutus and sent Octavius up in command of some of the legions
to oppose Antony. Antony was defeated before the town that he was
besieging, and fled.
He fled, but he still had his army. He was joined by Lepidus, who
brought with him a strong army from the south. Octavius may have
thought this combined force too formidable for him, but whatever his
reason was he made friends with Antony, whom he had lately been
fighting, and with Lepidus, and the Senate seems to have approved of
their combination. Perhaps they were so strong that they had no
choice, but were obliged to seem to approve. And so what is called
the second Triumvirate came into existence.
Brutus and Cassius, who were trying to bring back the old republican
ways of Government, still held out; but they were defeated at the
famous battle of Philippi, and the Triumvirate had all power in the
Roman world.
{209}
They proceeded to map out that world in pieces, so that each should
take his portion. To Lepidus, as perhaps the least important, was
given Africa; to Antony went Egypt and the East. Octavius seems to
have had the best of the bargain from the start, with the home
legions and Italy, Greece and Spain, together with Gaul that Cæsar
had conquered, for his own. Antony married Octavia, who was sister
of Octavius; so it all looked a very good arrangement.
But just as trouble had crept in between the chief men of the first
Triumvirate, so too with this second.
Antony was not a very prudent man, and Octavius was. Antony had the
most troublesome frontier to defend, for to the east was that country
of the Parthians who had come upon Judæa. Herod's appeal for help
was heard by the Triumvirate. It was Antony's special task to deal
with them; and, for the time being, he dealt with them successfully,
though he did not march against them himself. But one of his
generals took the field and drove them back over the Euphrates,
whence they had come.
That was not by any means the end of these Parthians, however. We
have seen how they fought--charging down on the legions, shooting a
flight of arrows, then off again, and again coming back to perform
the same manœuvres. Just as they did in each particular battle of
a war, so they did in the war itself, as a whole. If the war went
against them, away they went, over the Euphrates and as far east as
the Romans cared to pursue. They must have known that the Romans
would not go on pursuing for ever, farther and farther from their
base. And the Parthians had all Asia to retreat into.
So they retreated, and left Judæa and Herod in {210} peace, but a
very few years later they were making trouble again, and this time
Antony himself led an army against them, into Parthia itself, and met
with a disastrous defeat. And now Octavius, who had been making his
own power very firm in Rome and Italy all this while, thought the
time was come when he might declare war against Antony--his
brother-in-law, and until lately his friend.
Antony had given him much cause. You will remember that Queen
Cleopatra whom Cæsar had put on the Egyptian throne beside Ptolemy.
Cæsar had fallen in love with her. Antony fell in love with her too.
For her sake he divorced and sent back Octavia, his wife, to her
brother, Octavius, at Rome. He assumed all the airs of an Eastern
despotic ruler, with Cleopatra as his queen. A great many of his own
people and friends and servants were disgusted by this. Probably the
support that they had given him was not given very whole-heartedly.
Certainly Octavius could easily find an excuse for making war on him,
for Antony's ideas of government were not at all such as agreed with
the Romans' idea of how government should be conducted by a Roman
citizen.
The deciding battle between the two was a sea-fight off Actium.
Cleopatra was there, but even she does not seem to have fought very
bravely for Antony. She turned out of the fight before it was really
decided, and fled, with her ships, to Egypt. Her flight probably did
decide the result, and Antony, with such ships as could escape, went
to Egypt after her. Octavius did not pursue them at once, but a year
later he went to Egypt, and, rather than face his coming, Antony and
Cleopatra committed suicide.
[Sidenote: Octavius victorious]
Several years before this, Octavius had dealt with {211} the other
man of the Triumvirate, Lepidus. Lepidus, like Antony, seems to have
acted just as if he wished Octavius to have a good excuse for getting
rid of him, or of his power. He came to Sicily from Africa,
apparently at Octavius' bidding; and when he tried, or was accused of
trying, to gain possession of Sicily for himself, Octavius replied by
defeating his forces, taking Lepidus himself to Italy, and, with more
magnanimity than conquerors often show, allowing him to retain his
high office of Pontifex Maximus.
He could well afford to be generous, for he was now Master of the
World; master as not even his grand-uncle Cæsar, by whom he had been
adopted as a son, had been world-master. Cæsar was assassinated in
the very year following his election as dictator. Octavius put down
his last rival, Antony, at Actium in 31 B.C., and his world-mastery
endured until his death in 14 A.D.
I have said that Octavius was a very prudent man. He wished all the
old forms of republican government to go on just as they had before.
And so they did go on, but Octavius must have known, and everybody
else must have known, that they went on just because he allowed them
to do so, that he could stop them or alter them at any moment if he
pleased, that the government was in form republican--government by
persons elected by the people--but that it really was government by
one man. And far better it should be so. The other way had been
tried and had failed terribly; it had resulted in fearful
lawlessness. Now the Pax Romana, that peace of the world under the
controlling power of Rome, really did begin to be something like a
real fact. It had been very much of a fiction up to now. Of course
there were troubles on the frontier. {212} Those Parthians, who had
defeated Antony, had to be dealt with; and they were dealt with, and
that disgrace to the Roman arms was wiped out.
I am not sure that the most troublous spot in all the Empire of Rome
was not that little kingdom of Judæa (sometimes it was a kingdom,
under a petty king like Herod, but oftener it was under a Roman
governor who had the title of procurator), which never seems to have
been able to rest for long together.
{213}
CHAPTER XVI
THE DISPERSAL OF THE JEWS
It is rather puzzling to find, now and again, in this greatest of all
stories, that several different people are called by the same name,
and also that the same person is called by different names. Now,
besides this Herod of whom we have been talking, there were several
others. There was Herod Antipas, his son, before whom Christ was
sent by Pontius Pilate, and also there was Herod Agrippa, his
grandson, who was king of Judæa for a while, reigning, with such
limited power as the Romans allowed him, from A.D. 37 to his death in
44. But for the most part, during all the early years of the
Christian Era, Judæa was governed by one or other Roman procurator
and was not even in name a kingdom.
Octavius, of whom I have been telling you how he became master of the
world, lived till the year 14 A.D. (Anno Domini, or year of our
Lord), that is, fourteen years from the date sometimes assigned to
our Lord's birth. And now you may be puzzled, because you may
remember that it is said in the Bible that a decree went out from
Cæsar Augustus, about the time of Christ's birth, that all the world
should be taxed. Cæsar Augustus, you see, as Master of the World!
The explanation is that Cæsar Augustus and Octavius were one and the
same person. He had been adopted as a {214} son by his great-uncle
Julius Cæsar, and then had taken the name of Cæsar. Augustus was not
a name, but a title, given by the Romans, just as one of the Pompeys,
and also one of the Herods, was called Magnus, or the Great.
Augustus means the August one--the Magnificent.
I have said that Octavius was a prudent man. He showed his prudence
in the way that he allowed Antony, who was imprudent, to do all kinds
of foolish things before he set to work to crush his power. He was
equally prudent in his dealing with Lepidus, his other rival. And
after he had made an end of the power of these two, and was the
greatest man in the world, he showed his prudence in refusing to
claim any great title which might give any enemies at Rome a chance
of saying that he was grasping at power and trying to rule like a
despot, as Antony had done. No doubt he remembered what had happened
to his great-uncle.
So he maintained many of the forms of the republican government and
many of the old titles of the officials of the government, but it was
quite evident all the time that he had the real power, and it was not
any less real because he did not make a big show of claiming it. No
doubt the Romans were all the more ready to leave the real power in
his hands on that account. When his old rival Lepidus died he took
to himself the high office of Pontifex Maximus which he had allowed
Lepidus to hold during his life.
Before his death, having no son of his own at that time alive, he
adopted, as the Roman law permitted, his step-son Tiberius as his
colleague during his life and as his successor after his death; and
the Romans fully approved of his doing so. Thus, when he died in
A.D. 14, Tiberius succeeded him as ruler of Rome and of {215} the
world. He had not extended the limits of the Roman power, but he had
made that power far more secure both in the West and in the East.
The _Pax Romana_ had become a far more real peace under him than it
had been before.
But there never was any real peace in Judæa for long together. The
national sentiment, as we should call it, of the old Jewish party,
the Conservatives, who are called Pharisees in the Bible, was too
strong for them to be at peace for any length of time under foreign
rule. King Agrippa, of whom we were speaking, was a personal friend
of both Caius Caligula and of Claudius, the two Roman Emperors who
succeeded Tiberius. We may speak of them as Emperors (imperators) by
this time, for it was a title which they took without dispute.
Agrippa made himself very well liked by the Jews, and it seems to
have been to please them that he had St. James beheaded and St. Peter
cast into prison, as is told in the Bible. The Bible, too, in the
Acts of the Apostles, tells us of his death in the year A.D. 44. He
was the last king of the Jews, and at his death Judæa fell again
under the government of the procurators.
[Sidenote: The procurators of Judæa]
The procurators all seem to have been oppressive in their government.
Probably their task was a very difficult one. They had to govern a
people who all through the story had shown themselves stronger in the
independence of their spirit and in following their own ways of life
than any other. The force of Roman soldiers of the legions and of
allied troops that they had at hand to uphold their authority must
have been very small in comparison with the force that the Jews and
their friends could muster at short notice. They must have depended
a great deal on the fame of the {216} Roman power, and on the
knowledge which the Jews must have had that if Rome really cared to
take serious measures against them they could have no hope of
success. Rome's power, if she cared to exert it, would be
overwhelming.
But Rome was far away. Perhaps she would not take the trouble to
exert that power.
That is how the Jewish party probably thought about it all; and the
procurators and even the kings of Judæa had to try to uphold the
Roman power as best they could, and yet to do what they could not to
drive the Jews into the rebellion that they were always on the point
of making, and now and again actually did make.
Pontius Pilate was procurator at the time of Christ's trial. You
know how he gained the execration of all the Christian world ever
since by sacrificing Christ to the hate of the Jews. He had sent
Christ to Herod Antipas, because Herod was ruler of Galilee, not of
Judæa, at the time, and Christ was considered, from his birthplace,
to be a Galilæan. Pilate no doubt would have been well pleased if
Herod had taken the responsibility on himself of judging the case,
but Herod sent Christ back to Pilate. The Christians were already
many enough to be a formidable body, and the rulers of Judæa had now
to deal with three parties bitterly opposed to each other, the Jews
who held to their old traditions, the Jews who had become Christians,
and the small governing class of Romans and their friends.
[Illustration: FROM THE ARCH OF TITUS (SHOWING THE SPOILS OF
JERUSALEM CARRIED IN TRIUMPH).]
A good deal of what we know of the story comes from Josephus, the
great Jewish historian, and an enemy of the Romans. He would be
likely to say hard things of the procurators. But, even allowing
{217} for that, it does seem as if the later procurators, after the
death of King Herod Agrippa, were very oppressive.
It was in the time of Florus, who was procurator from A.D. 64 to 66,
that the trouble which had been growing came to a head. The state of
things in Jerusalem and Judæa generally was terrible. Bands of
assassins called Sicarii, or daggermen (from _sica_, a dagger), went
about almost unmolested by authority. They were supposed to be very
zealous for the old faith, and no doubt it was to escape them that
St. Paul was taken, as we are told in the Bible, secretly and by
night, from Jerusalem to Cæsarea. He lay in prison there, awaiting
trial, for two years, while the procurator Felix, who had been a very
oppressive governor, was succeeded by Festus--"most noble Festus," as
Paul calls him--a more just and lenient ruler. Albinus followed
Festus as procurator, from A.D. 62 to 64, and then came Florus, the
most exacting of them all.
What finally caused the Jews to rise up in fury against the Roman
power was that Florus stripped the Temple, which was just completed
in its building, of some of its sacred treasures. At first the
rebellion met with a surprising success. Florus had called in the
aid of the governor of Syria, with a force of 20,000 regular troops
and 13,000 auxiliaries, but this was defeated and broken up by the
Jews in a battle at Beth-horon. Probably the fate of Jerusalem was
hastened by this victory, for its effect was that Rome took so
serious a view of the revolt that she sent her ablest general,
Vespasian, with ample forces to subdue it. The result was certain;
yet again the Jews showed their extraordinary toughness in resisting
so long as they did. The other cities soon fell to the Roman arms,
but Jerusalem itself held out for three {218} years after the
beginning of Vespasian's campaign. It fell in the year A.D. 70, and
the fate that had befallen Carthage was now suffered by Jerusalem.
The newly built Temple was destroyed--"not one stone left upon
another," as had been foretold; the walls of the city were thrown
down; the houses were burnt to the ground; most of the inhabitants
were killed, and the rest taken away into slavery or otherwise
dispersed over the earth. Jerusalem ceased to exist. The Jewish
nation no longer had a capital city or a home.
{219}
CHAPTER XVII
HOW THE THREADS DRAW TOGETHER
That is the point to which we have now brought the story, and that is
the point at which I mean to leave it. It is a point at which most
of the threads of the story come together. It might almost seem to
us, looking back over it, as if it were the point to which it had
been designed, by some great designer, that the story of man should
work itself out.
You see what the state of the world is.
There is this great and wonderful machine of world government, the
Roman power, in full operation. The power could reach to any part of
the wide empire; the legions would march along those Roman roads,
made, as you probably know, with a wonderful straightness, up hill
and down dale, never turning aside from the direction at which they
aimed unless it were for a very steep mountain. They went, as the
Romans themselves went, direct to their ends, straight, with no
faltering.
Posts, or stations for communication, were established along those
roads, after the manner of a relay race. A messenger would come
galloping along from Rome to the first post out, and there he would
hand his message, his letter, to another man who would go galloping
with it to the next post along the road, which led perhaps to the
north of Gaul, perhaps to the east of Thrace, perhaps {220} to the
west of Spain, direct to the provincial governor or the commander of
the legions to whom the letter was addressed; and so on, stage by
stage, till it came to its destination.
It is wonderful, is it not? Have you not wondered, when you read of
St. Paul's trial, at its being said, "This man might have been set at
liberty if he had not appealed to Cæsar"?
It is wonderful, surely, that all that distance away, in Palestine, a
man, a Jew, just because he was a Roman citizen (probably Paul's
parents had acquired the right of citizenship by buying it--as could
legally be done) could appeal from the decision of his judges there
and claim to be taken all the way to Rome. And this at a time when
he could only go by horseback overland or by sail oversea!
You know how St. Paul did go in a ship from Alexandria. That would
have been a corn ship; for Rome was getting most of her corn from
Egypt at this time. And you know what adventures and calamities he
had by the way. He was acquitted finally, on that charge, but he had
spent two years in prison at Cæsarea, and two more in Rome. And
after this acquittal, he was re-arrested, re-tried and executed--a
terrible story!
But for the moment the point I want you to see is how far and how
certainly Rome could reach out her arm and do justice, or what was
called justice. It was a very wonderful machine.
[Sidenote: Influence of Greece]
So there was this machine, which had all the material power and was
wonderful for purposes of government--for organisation, as we say.
But, then, look at the world, the cities, the civilisations in which
it was operating. Their thought, their art, their literature, {221}
was not Roman; it was Greek. Of all the Eastern part of the world,
of Greece itself and all to the east of Greece, right away to the
Euphrates and south of Egypt, we may say that it had learned to think
in the Greek way before it had ever heard of the Romans at all.
Indeed, we may talk, if we please, of Roman art, Roman literature and
so on; but if we do we have to remember all the time that there is
very little in it that was original. It was nearly all copied from
the Greek. The Romans had great men. They had their great orator,
Cicero; but he was less great than his Greek predecessor,
Demosthenes. They had Livy and Tacitus, the historians. Tacitus had
a style of his own. Perhaps he is the most original writer in prose
that Rome produced. But Livy compares more with Thucydides, and the
comparison is hardly to the advantage of the Roman historian.
Besides, we may ask, "How would Livy have written if he had not had
Thucydides and other Greeks to be his guides?"
We may ask, but we can have no certain answer. The answer that we
are obliged to make is that it is scarcely to be believed that these
Romans would have done as well, or nearly as well, as they did, if
the Greeks had not set them such a good example.
Then we may look at the poets. The _Æneid_ of Virgil is certainly
modelled on the _Iliad_ of Homer, and, fine though it is, it is far
less admirable than the work of the far older Greek poet. Horace
stands more by himself, but he uses metres which we know that he
borrowed from the Greek, and it is quite possible that he stands
rather alone because Greek originals on which he may have modelled
his own verse have been lost.
Of writers for the theatre, there is no Roman to {222} put "in the
same street," as we say, with Æschylus, Sophocles, or Aristophanes.
In science and philosophy none to compare with Aristotle and Plato.
And in the arts, all the finest sculpture and architecture in Rome is
known to have been copied from the Greeks. Where are the Roman names
to put with those of Phidias and Praxiteles?
Everywhere, throughout the world, if a great literary work or a great
artistic work was done, it was done either by a Greek or by some one
of another race who had learnt from the Greeks. If Rome had
conquered and possessed the world by her arms, Greece had conquered
and possessed it by her thought. Already, before the Roman conquest
of the world, she had achieved this conquest to the east of Italy.
By means of the Roman machinery of government, and those straight
roads of the Romans, Greek thought was distributed all through the
Western world too.
So get that picture clear in your minds, of the Roman Empire as a
means of sending out the Greek culture everywhere.
There is something else that you have to see coming in on top of the
Greek thought, distributed along with that thought, through all the
world. That something else is Christianity.
You have seen this--if you will remember--that in the course of our
story we found that the Greeks, the Greeks at the time when the
Persian conquerors from the east came up against them and could make
their way no farther west, were the first people whom we met in the
whole course of the story to whom religion did not mean a great deal
in their lives. To the ancient Egyptians it had meant very much. To
the {223} ancient Babylonians it was the same. The Persians came
with the wonderful religion of Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, which
influenced their lives enormously. The Greeks were the first of the
peoples to whom religion meant very little. There were a few
ceremonies, annually performed, and so on; but nothing that affected
their character.
With the Romans it was the same. The early Roman had reverence for
the "mos majorum"--the custom of their fathers. They had high ideas
of justice and of such virtues as courage and of their duties as
citizens. But no religion affected their lives or their thoughts.
[Sidenote: Influence of the Jews]
Now, you saw how the Jews from time to time were dispersed--to Egypt,
to Babylonia, to various parts of Asia Minor, to the islands and to
the Greek cities. The Greeks, not caring deeply for religious
things, although greatly interested in philosophy and speculations
about the mysteries of life, allowed the Jews to follow their own
religion and customs wherever they settled. And the Jews adhered to
their own religion and customs very strictly and tenaciously. They
did not lose them in the countries in which they were dispersed. But
they did not bring the people among whom they settled to their own
way of thinking. They did not try to do so. Their idea of their
religion was that it was for them only, for the Jews, for "the seed
of Abraham"--that is, the descendants of Abraham.
When Christianity came, founded on the Jewish religion, this was all
altered. Yet it was not altered just at first. You will remember
that it was said that the Gospel, the good message, of Christianity
was "for the Jew first, and also for the Gentile." By "Gentile" was
meant any man or woman who was not a Jew. {224} But you will also
remember that this idea, the idea that Christianity--the religion
which branched out from the old Jewish religion--could be for any
others than the Jews came as quite a new idea--almost as a shock, as
we might say. You will remember perhaps how St. Peter dreamed that
dream about the meats that were "common or unclean," as he considered
them. In his dream he declined to eat those meats. Then he was
rebuked for calling these things, which had been divinely created,
common and unclean.
When he awoke, he accepted that dream as a warning to him that he was
not to look on the Gentile as a man so "common and defiled" in
comparison with the Jew as not to be able to receive the message of
Christianity.
[Sidenote: Message to the Gentiles]
But in order to spread Christianity from its source and around
Jerusalem, it was not necessary in the first instance to go actually
to the Gentiles. You have seen how the Jews were dispersed
throughout the cities of the world. The gospel could be carried to
these first, to these Jews of the various dispersals which had taken
place in course of their terribly troubled story. They were
everywhere, all over the known world; and to these the Christian
message could, and did, go; and many of them received it and became
Christians. From them, no doubt, as well as from St. Paul, "the
apostle to the Gentiles," and other special messengers and
missionaries, Christianity spread to those among whom these dispersed
and exiled Jews were living, but it was only gradually that the idea
grew that it was a world religion, and not for the Jews only.
To one other point I would draw your attention. Most of Christ's
followers were very humble men, of {225} little or no education.
They heard the words and carried His message among their own people.
But the cities of the world, as we have seen, were inhabited by men
whose minds were filled with Greek thought, Greek philosophy. They
had no religion that made a real difference in their lives, although
they speculated eagerly about "the unknown god," and paid reverence
to such deities as "Diana of the Ephesians"; but they were highly
educated.
If these fishermen of the Sea of Galilee, who were Christ's first
disciples, these humble men of whom I wrote just now, had gone about
from city to city and spoken of Christ and of Christianity in the
very simple language in which they must have spoken of these things,
what effect could they have had on the people whose minds were full
of philosophical speculations? Very little. To accept the gospel of
Christ "like a little child" would have been quite impossible for
these men whose minds were formed by the Greek thought.
But after those first humble fishermen and the like came others, men
of learning: St. Luke, who was a doctor, a medical man, a scientific
man; St. John and St. Paul. All these, and many more, no doubt, who
became fervent Christians, had been educated in the Greek philosophy.
The writings of St. John and of St. Paul show beyond possibility of
mistake that this philosophy was familiar to them and that their
minds and thoughts worked in the ways that it had taught them.
Directly they began to feel the reality of Christ's message, and that
He really was a divine Person, then they, naturally, were able to see
in His message and teaching a great deal that the fishermen had not
understood. They saw that it was a message which could be {226}
interpreted in such a way as to fit in with all that philosophical
speculation with which the minds of all educated men in the world
were full. It not only fitted in with that speculation, but it
seemed to come as the crown and the completion of it all. It gave it
just what it had been very badly wanting. It brought God into a
world that had been seeking, seeking very hard, to find God, but a
world, as we have seen, that, in spite of all the seeking, was
practically Godless.
[Sidenote: The designed end]
Now, that is the conclusion of this Greatest Story in the World, or,
at least, it is the point at which it seems best to me to leave it.
The threads of the story have come together now. They have come
together in this sense, that we have the great machine formed by the
Roman government ready to convey any message throughout the length
and breadth of the world (or of what was then counted as making up
the world). That is the first thing. Then we have the Greek thought
distributed all along the world roads which this machine had made,
and along which it keeps up the communications. And finally we have
the Jews, that people of such extraordinary toughness, so
marvellously determined to hold on to their own ways of life and of
serving God, thoroughly dispersed all the world over, and so carrying
their religion and their religious books, which are the base of the
Christian religion, with them everywhere.
These are the three great facts which have come together at this
point at which we are leaving this great story--the Roman
world-power, the Greek world-thought, the Christian world-religion.
That the last had to go through dreadful trials and suffer terrible
persecution before it could become world-wide (even as the world was
understood then) makes no {227} difference. The foundations had been
laid on which it was to be built.
I do not know how it may seem to you, but to me it rather looks as if
the whole story, all through the ages, even from the first page where
we began to trace it, say some five thousand years before Christ, had
been working up to just this point--as if it all had been designed to
this end.
Understand me--I do not say that it is so. None of us is able to
tell how far man has been allowed to act of his own free will in
forming his story on the earth, and in what chapters and pages of the
story his acts have been determined by a Higher Power. We know that
he is allowed much freedom. We are sure, too, that the freedom is
not unlimited. Therefore it is impossible for us to tell, of any
particular action or series of actions, whether they are all man's
own or whether they have been arranged for him. I will only say
this, that it looks to me very much as if it had been arranged that
the Roman power, the Greek thought, and the Christian religion should
come together just at this moment in our story and complete each
other for the service of man. I say that it looks to me as if it
were so. Do each of you think it out for yourself and see how it
appears to you.
{229}
INDEX
ABRAHAM, in Chaldæa, 55
Actium, battle of, 210
Æneas, 164
Agricultural Age, the, 4
Alexander, the Great, 155 _et seq._
death of, 158
his generals, 160
Animals, in Egypt, 14 _et seq._
Antony, 209 _et seq._
and Cleopatra, 210
Art, in Babylonia, 65
Assyria, rise of, 54, 67-68
fall of, 103
Astronomy, in Babylon, 59
BABYLONIA, 49 _et seq._
and Egypt, 25
Bast, the Cat-goddess, 34
Book of the Dead, the, 40
Bronze Age, the, 6
CÆSAR, JULIUS, 198
assassination of, 206
commands in Gaul, 199
crosses Rubicon, 200
defeats Pompey, 200
Dictator for life, 202
in Britain, 199
subdues Parthians, 201
Camels, in Egypt, 13
Carchemish, battles at, 104-5
Carthage, destruction of, 176
Carthaginians, 147 _et seq._
defeated by Gelo, 149
Cinna, 197
Cleopatra restored by Cæsar to throne, 201
and Antony, 210
Comitia, 179 _et seq._
Corn, in Egypt, 16
Costume, in Babylonia, 66
in Egypt, 38 _et seq._
Creation of World, Babylonian account of, 60
Crete, 76 _et seq._
Crœsus, king of Lydia, 117
Cuneiform writing, 69 _et seq._
Cyrus, the Persian, 111 _et seq._
sends back exiled Jews, 113
DELTA, the, 3
EGYPT, 11 _et seq._
hunting in, 15
Upper and Lower, 21
Egyptian religions, 27 _et seq._
Etruscans, the, 166
Euphrates, the, 2
Evans, Sir Arthur, 76
FAMOUS Romans, compared with Famous Greeks, 221
First Dynasty of Egyptian Kings, 21
Flood, the. Babylonian account of, 61
GELO, defeats Carthaginians, 149
Goats, in Egypt, 13
Gracchus, Tiberius and Caius, 194
Granicus, river, battle on, 157
Greece great men of, 139
Greek learning, philosophy, art, etc., 121 _et seq._
states, jealousy between, 145 _et passim_
states, downfall of Sparta, 145
warrior, 118
HANNIBAL, 173-4
Herodotus, 34, 146
Hieroglyphic, 36
Historians, Thucydides and Herodotus compared, 146
Horses, in battle, 89
Horus, Egyptian god, 31
Hunting Age, the, 4
Hyksos, the "Shepherd" Kings of Egypt, 23
IONIANS, the, 128
Ipsus, battle of, 160
Iron Age, the, 6
Isis, Egyptian goddess, 31
Israel, divided from Judah, 101
Issus, battle of, 157
JEHOVAH,89
Jerusalem, taken by Nebuchadnezzar, 106
destruction of, by the Romans, 218
Jewish religion, basis of Christian religion, 107
its character, 108 _et seq._
Jews, the, in Alexandria, 161
Canaan,95
Egypt, 73-74
Jews, Greek influence among, 204
Pharisees and Sadducees, 204
revolt against Rome, 205
Herod, the great, king of, 206, 217
under Roman procurators, 215
KHAMMURABI, Code of, 62 _et seq._
Knossos, 77 _et seq._
LABYRINTH, at Crete, 81
Legions, the, 181 _et seq._
in Asia Minor, 185
power passing to, 195
Levant, the, 2
MARATHON, battle of, 131-2
Marduk, or Merodach, 58
Marius, 194, 197
Megiddo, battles at, 104
Memphis, 23
Mesopotamia, 3
Minoans, their sea-power, 82-83
Minos, king of Crete, 78
Minotaur, the, 81
Mithridates, king of Pontus, 193, 196
Moses, 74
Mummies, 44
Mycenæ, Cretan buildings at, 79
NEBUCHADNEZZAR, king of Babylon, 105
Nile, the river, 3, 5, 11 _et seq._
OAKS, old, in England, 8
Octavius, 209 _et seq._
Octavius, Master of the World, 211
called Cæsar Augustus, 213
Osiris, Egyptian god, 31
Ostriches, carved, 11
PALESTINE, between the two Empires, 25
Papyrus, 17
Parthians, the, subdued by Julius Cæsar, 201
Pastoral Age, the, 4
"Pax Romana," 192
Peloponnesian War, 145, 150
Peoples of the Sea, 120
Persian Gulf, 2
Persians, the, 110 _et seq._
their battle methods, 116
Phalanx, the Greek, 117
the Macedonian, 153
Philip, king of Macedon, 153 _et seq._
Philistines, the, 95-100
Philosophers, Stoic and Epicurean, 143
Phœnicians, 96
Platæa, battle of, 137
Pompey, the Great, 197 _et seq._
Pontius Pilate, 213
at trial of Christ, 216
Postal Service, in Roman Empire, 220
Pottery, 18
Priests, their power in Egypt, 36, 38, 47
Ptolemy, 159
Punic Wars, the, 172 _et seq._
Pyramids, the, 42
Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, 167 _et seq._
RE, the sun-god, 33
Rome, 164 _et seq._
constitution of, 178 _et seq._
Rome, conquers Macedon, 187
Egypt, 188
Mistress of the World, 190 _et seq._
slaves in, 194, 198
SACRED animals, 30
Salamis, battle of, 136
Scarabs, 34
Seleucus, 159
Semites, 55 _et seq._
Senate, of Rome, 178 _et seq._
Sennacherib, in his chariot, 102
Seth, Egyptian god, 31
Shanash, Babylonian sun-god, 57
Sicily, Greeks in, 148
its importance to Rome, 172
Silsilla, 11
Solomon, his kingdom, 100
Sothis, the star of Seth, the Dog-star, 12
Souls, Egyptian idea of, 45
Spartans, soldiers in Asia Minor, 111
virtues of, 138
Stone Age, the, 6
Sulla, 196-7
Sumerians, 54
Syracuse, siege of, by Athenians, 150
Dionysius, tyrant and saviour of, 151
TETHMOSIS III., 23
Themistocles, salvation of Greece due to, 136
Thermopylæ, battle of, 135
Three great facts that worked together, 226-7
Tigris, river, 2
"Totem," worship of, 30
Triumvirate, the first, 199
the second, 208
Troy, the siege of, etc., 124
Homer's account of the siege of, 124
more probable story of the siege of, 125 _et seq._
WAR, methods and engines of, 90 _et seq._
Water-raising machine, 51
XERXES, king of Persia, his attempt on Greece, 133
his alliance with Carthage, 134
ZOROASTER, or Zarathustra, 114
THE END
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