Philip’s first years of kingship were devoted to the discipline of his

army. Hitherto most of the main battle fighting in the world had been

done by footmen in formation. In the very ancient Sumerian battle-pieces

we see spearmen in close order forming the main battle, just as they did

in the Zulu armies of the nineteenth century; the Greek troops of

Philip’s time were still fighting in that same style; the Theban phalanx

was a mass of infantry holding spears, the hinder ranks thrusting their

longer spears between the front-line men. Such a formation went through

anything less disciplined that opposed it. Mounted archers could, of

course, inflict considerable losses on such a mass of men, and

accordingly, as the horse came into warfare, horsemen appeared on either

side as an accessory to this main battle. The reader must remember that

the horse did not come into very effective use in western war until the

rise of the Assyrians, and then at first only as a chariot horse. The

chariots drove full tilt at the infantry mass and tried to break it.

Unless its discipline was very solid they succeeded. The Homeric

fighting is chariot fighting. It is not until the last thousand years

B.C. that we begin to find mounted soldiers, as distinct from

charioteers, playing a part in warfare. At first they appear to have

fought in a scattered fashion, each man doing his personal feats. So the

Lydians fought against Cyrus. It was Philip who seems to have created

charging cavalry. He caused his “companions” to drill for a massed

charge. And also he strengthened his phalanx by giving the rear men

longer spears than had been used hitherto, and so deepening its mass.

The Macedonian phalanx was merely a more solid version of the Theban

phalanx. None of these massed infantry formations was flexible enough to

stand a flank or rear attack. They had very slight manœuvring power.

Both Philip’s and his son’s victories followed, therefore, with

variations, one general scheme of co-operation between these two arms.

The phalanx advanced in the centre and held the enemy’s main body; on

one wing or the other the cavalry charges swept away the enemy cavalry,

and then swooped round upon the flank and rear of the enemy phalanx, the

front of which the Macedonian phalanx was already smiting. The enemy

main battle then broke and was massacred. As Alexander’s military

experience grew, he also added a use of catapults in the field, big

stone-throwing affairs, to break up the enemy infantry. Before his time

catapults had been used in sieges, but never in battles. He invented

“artillery preparation.”

With the weapon of his new army in his hand, Philip first turned his

attention to the north of Macedonia. He carried expeditions into Illyria

and as far as the Danube; he also spread his power along the coast as

far as the Hellespont. He secured possession of a port, Amphipolis, and

certain gold mines adjacent. After several Thracian expeditions he

turned southward in good earnest. He took up the cause of the Delphic

amphictyony against those sacrilegious Phocians, and so appeared as the

champion of Hellenic religion.

There was a strong party of Greeks, it must be understood, a

Pan-Hellenic party, in favour of the Greek headship of Philip. The chief

writer of this Pan-Hellenic movement was Isocrates. Athens, on the other

hand, was the head and front of the opposition to Philip, and Athens was

in open sympathy with Persia, even sending emissaries to the Great King

to warn him of the danger to him of a united Greece. The comings and

goings of twelve years cannot be related here. In 338 B.C. the long

struggle between division and Pan-Hellenism came to a decisive issue,

and at the battle of Chæronea Philip inflicted a crushing defeat upon

Athens and her allies. He gave Athens peace upon astonishingly generous

terms; he displayed himself steadfastly resolved to propitiate and

favour that implacable city; and in 338 B.C. a congress of Greek states

recognized him as captain-general for the war against Persia.

He was now a man of forty-seven. It seemed as though the world lay at

his feet. He had made his little country into the leading state in a

great Græco-Macedonian confederacy. That unification was to be the

prelude to a still greater one, the unification of the Western world

with the Persian empire into one world state of all known peoples. Who

can doubt he had that dream? The writings of Isocrates convince us that

he had it. Who can deny that he might have realized it? He had a

reasonable hope of living for perhaps another quarter century of

activity. In 336 B.C. his advanced guard crossed into Asia....

But he never followed with his main force. He was assassinated.

§ 2

It is necessary now to tell something of the domestic life of King

Philip. The lives of both Philip and his son were pervaded by the

personality of a restless and evil woman, Olympias, the mother of

Alexander.

She was the daughter of the king of Epirus, a country to the west of

Macedonia, and, like Macedonia, a semi-Greek land. She met Philip, or

was thrown in his way, at some religious gathering in Samothrace.

Plutarch declares the marriage was a love-match, and there seems to be

at least this much in the charges against Philip that, like many

energetic and imaginative men, he was prone to impatient love impulses.

He married her when he was already a king, and Alexander was born to him

three years later.

[Illustration: Macedonian warrior.

Bas-relief from Pella.]

It was not long before Olympias and Philip were bitterly estranged. She

was jealous of him, but there was another and graver source of trouble

in her passion for religious mysteries. We have already noted that

beneath the fine and restrained Nordic religion of the Greeks the land

abounded with religious cults of a darker and more ancient kind,

aboriginal cults with secret initiations, orgiastic celebrations, and

often with cruel and obscene rites. These religions of the shadows,

these practices of the women and peasants and slaves, gave Greece her

Orphic, Dionysic, and Demeter cults; they have lurked in the tradition

of Europe down almost to our own times. The witchcraft of the Middle

Ages, with its resort to the blood of babes, scraps of executed

criminals, incantations and magic circles, seems to have been little

else than the lingering vestiges of these solemnities of the dark

whites. In these matters Olympias was an expert and an enthusiast, and

Plutarch mentions that she achieved considerable celebrity by a use of

tame serpents in these pious exercises. The snakes invaded her domestic

apartments, and history is not clear whether Philip found in them matter

for exasperation or religious awe. These occupations of his wife must

have been a serious inconvenience to Philip, for the Macedonian people

were still in that sturdy stage of social development in which neither

enthusiastic religiosity nor uncontrollable wives are admired.

The evidence of a bitter hostility between mother and father peeps out

in many little things in the histories. She was evidently jealous of

Philip’s conquests; she hated his fame. There are many signs that

Olympias did her best to set her son against his father and attach him

wholly to herself. A story survives (in Plutarch’s _Life_) that

“whenever news was brought of Philip’s victories, the capture of a city

or the winning of some great battle, he never seemed greatly rejoiced to

hear it; on the contrary he used to say to his play-fellows: ‘Father

will get everything in advance, boys; he won’t leave any great task for

me to share with you.’” ...

It is not a natural thing for a boy to envy his father in this fashion

without some inspiration. That sentence sounds like an echo.

We have already pointed out how manifest it is that Philip planned the

succession of Alexander, and how eager he was to thrust fame and power

into the boy’s hands. He was thinking of the political structure he was

building--but the mother was thinking of the glory and pride of that

wonderful lady Olympias. She masked her hatred of her husband under the

cloak of a mother’s solicitude for her son’s future. When in 337 B.C.

Philip, after the fashion of kings in those days, married a second wife

who was a native Macedonian, Cleopatra, “of whom he was passionately

enamoured,” Olympias made much trouble.

Plutarch tells of a pitiful scene that occurred at Philip’s marriage to

Cleopatra. There was much drinking of wine at the banquet, and Attalus,

the father of the bride, being “intoxicated with liquor,” betrayed the

general hostility to Olympias and Epirus by saying he hoped there would

be a child by the marriage to give them a truly Macedonian heir.

Whereupon Alexander, taut for such an insult, cried out, “What then am

I?” and hurled his cup at Attalus. Philip, enraged, stood up and, says

Plutarch, drew his sword, only to stumble and fall. Alexander, blind

with rage and jealousy, taunted and insulted his father.

“Macedonians,” he said. “See there the general who would go from Europe

to Asia! Why! he cannot get from one table to another!”

How that scene lives still, the sprawl, the flushed faces, the angry

voice of the boy! Next day Alexander departed with his mother--and

Philip did nothing to restrain them. Olympias went home to Epirus;

Alexander departed to Illyria. Thence Philip persuaded him to return.

Fresh trouble arose. Alexander had a brother of weak intellect, Aridæus,

whom the Persian governor of Caria sought as a son-in-law. “Alexander’s

friends and his mother now infused notions into him again, though

perfectly groundless, that by so noble a match, and the support

consequent upon it, Philip designed the crown for Aridæus. Alexander, in

the uneasiness these suspicions gave him, sent one Thessalus, a player,

into Caria, to desire the grandee to pass by Aridæus, who was of

spurious birth, and deficient in point of understanding, and to take the

lawful heir to the crown into his alliance. Pixodarus was infinitely

more pleased with this proposal. But Philip no sooner had intelligence

of it, than he went to Alexander’s apartment, taking along with him

Philotas, the son of Parmenio, one of his most intimate friends and

companions, and, in his presence, reproached him with his degeneracy and

meanness of spirit, in thinking of being son-in-law to a man of Caria,

one of the slaves of a barbarian king. At the same time he wrote to the

Corinthians, insisting that they should send Thessalus to him in chains.

Harpalus and Niarchus, Phrygius and Ptolemy, some of the other

companions of the prince, he banished. But Alexander afterwards recalled

them, and treated them with great distinction.”

There is something very touching in this story of the father pleading

with the son he manifestly loved, and baffled by the web of mean

suggestion which had been spun about the boy’s imagination.

It was at the marriage of his daughter to her uncle, the king of Epirus

and the brother of Olympias, that Philip was stabbed. He was walking in

a procession into the theatre unarmed, in a white robe, and he was cut

down by one of his bodyguard. The murderer had a horse waiting, and

would have got away, but the foot of his horse caught in a wild vine and

he was thrown from the saddle by the stumble and slain by his

pursuers....

So at the age of twenty Alexander was at the end of his anxiety about

the succession, and established king in Macedonia.

Olympias then reappeared in Macedonia, a woman proudly vindicated. It is

said that she insisted upon paying the same funeral honours to the

memory of the murderer as to Philip, and that she consecrated the fatal

weapon to Apollo, inscribed with the name Myrtalis, by which Philip had

been wont to address her when their loves first began.[197] In Greece

there were great rejoicings over this auspicious event, and Demosthenes,

when he had the news, although it was but seven days after the death of

his own daughter, went into the public assembly at Athens in gay attire

wearing a chaplet.

Whatever Olympias may have done about her husband’s assassin, history

does not doubt about her treatment of her supplanter, Cleopatra. So soon

as Alexander was out of the way--and a revolt of the hillmen in the

north called at once for his attention--Cleopatra’s newly born child was

killed in its mother’s arms, and Cleopatra--no doubt after a little

taunting--was then strangled. These excesses of womanly feeling are said

to have shocked Alexander, but they did not prevent him from leaving his

mother in a position of considerable authority in Macedonia. She wrote

letters to him upon religious and political questions, and he showed a

dutiful disposition in sending her always a large share of the plunder

he made.

§ 3

These stories have to be told because history cannot be understood

without them. Here was the great world of men between India and the

Adriatic ready for union, ready as it had never been before for a

unifying control. Here was the wide order of the Persian empire with its

roads, its posts, its general peace and prosperity, ripe for the

fertilizing influence of the Greek mind. And these stories display the

quality of the human beings to whom those great opportunities came. Here

was this Philip who was a very great and noble man, and yet he was

drunken, he could keep no order in his household. Here was Alexander in

many ways gifted above any man of his time, and he was vain, suspicious,

and passionate, with a mind set awry by his mother.

We are beginning to understand something of what the world might be,

something of what our race might become, were it not for our still raw

humanity. It is barely a matter of seventy generations between ourselves

and Alexander; and between ourselves and the savage hunters our

ancestors, who charred their food in the embers or ate it raw, intervene

some four or five hundred generations. There is not much scope for the

modification of a species in four or five hundred generations. Make men

and women only sufficiently jealous or fearful or drunken or angry, and

the hot red eyes of the cavemen will glare out at us to-day. We have

writing and teaching, science and power; we have tamed the beasts and

schooled the lightning; but we are still only shambling towards the

light. We have tamed and bred the beasts, but we have still to tame and

breed ourselves.

From the very beginning of his reign the deeds of Alexander showed how

well he had assimilated his father’s plans, and how great were his own

abilities. A map of the known world is needed to show the course of his

life. At first, after receiving assurances from Greece that he was to be

captain-general of the Grecian forces, he marched through Thrace to the

Danube; he crossed the river and burnt a village, the second great

monarch to raid the Scythian country beyond the Danube; then recrossed

it and marched westward and so came down by Illyria. By that time the

city of Thebes was in rebellion, and his next blow was at Greece.

Thebes--unsupported of course by Athens--was taken and looted; it was

treated with extravagant violence; all its buildings, except the temple

and the house of the poet Pindar, were razed, and thirty thousand people

sold into slavery. Greece was stunned, and Alexander was free to go on

with the Persian campaign.

This destruction of Thebes betrayed a streak of crazy violence in the

new master of human destinies. It was too heavy a blow to have dealt. It

was a barbaric thing to do. No Greeks would have gone so far with

conquered Greeks. If the spirit of rebellion was killed, so also was the

spirit of help. The Greek states remained inert thereafter, neither

troublesome nor helpful. They would not support Alexander with their

shipping, a thing which was to prove a very grave embarrassment to

him.[198]

There is a story told by Plutarch about this Theban massacre, as if it

redounded to the credit of Alexander, but indeed it shows only how his

saner and his crazy sides were in conflict. It tells of a Macedonian

officer and a Theban lady. This officer was among the looters, and he

entered this woman’s house, inflicted unspeakable insults and injuries

upon her, and at last demanded whether she had gold or silver hidden.

She told him all her treasures had been put into the well, conducted him

thither, and, as he stooped to peer down, pushed him suddenly in and

killed him by throwing great stones upon him. Some allied soldiers came

upon this scene and took her forthwith to Alexander for judgment.

She defied him. Already the extravagant impulse that had ordered the

massacre was upon the wane, and he not only spared her, but had her

family and property and freedom restored to her. This Plutarch makes out

to be a generosity, but the issue is more complicated than that. It was

Alexander who was outraging and plundering and enslaving all Thebes.

That poor crumpled Macedonian brute in the well had been doing only what

he had been told he had full liberty to do. Is a commander first to give

cruel orders, and then to forgive and reward those who slay his

instruments? This gleam of remorse at the instance of one woman who was

not perhaps wanting in tragic dignity and beauty, is a poor set-off to

the murder of a great city.

Mixed with the craziness of Olympias in Alexander was the sanity of

Philip and the teachings of Aristotle. This Theban business certainly

troubled the mind of Alexander. Whenever afterwards he encountered

Thebans, he tried to show them special favour. Thebes, to his credit,

haunted him.

Yet the memory of Thebes did not save three other great cities from

similar brain storms; Tyre he destroyed, and Gaza, and a city in India,

in the storming of which he was knocked down in fair fight and wounded;

and of the latter place not a soul, not a child, was spared. He must

have been badly frightened to have taken so evil a revenge.

At the outset of the war the Persians had this supreme advantage, they

were practically masters of the sea. The ships of the Athenians and

their allies sulked unhelpfully. Alexander, to get at Asia, had to go

round by the Hellespont; and if he pushed far into the Persian empire,

he ran the risk of being cut off completely from his base. His first

task, therefore, was to cripple the enemy at sea, and this he could only

do by marching along the coast of Asia Minor and capturing port after

port until the Persian sea bases were destroyed. If the Persians had

avoided battle and hung upon his lengthening line of communications they

could probably have destroyed him, but this they did not do. A Persian

army not very much greater than his own gave battle on the banks of the

Granicus (334 B.C.) and was destroyed. This left him free to take

Sardis, Ephesus, Miletus, and, after a fierce struggle, Halicarnassus.

Meanwhile the Persian fleet was on his right flank and between him and

Greece, threatening much but accomplishing nothing.

In 333 B.C., pursuing this attack upon the sea bases, he marched along

the coast as far as the head of the gulf now called the Gulf of

Alexandretta. A huge Persian army, under the great king Darius III, was

inland of his line of march, separated from the coast by mountains, and

Alexander went right beyond this enemy force before he or the Persians

realized their proximity. Scouting was evidently very badly done by

Greek and Persian alike. The Persian army was a vast, ill-organized

assembly of soldiers, transport, camp followers, and so forth. Darius,

for instance, was accompanied by his harem, and there was a great

multitude of harem slaves, musicians, dancers, and cooks. Many of the

leading officers had brought their families to witness the hunting down

of the Macedonian invaders. The troops had been levied from every

province in the empire; they had no tradition or principle of combined

action. Seized by the idea of cutting off Alexander from Greece, Darius

moved this multitude over the mountains to the sea; he had the luck to

get through the passes without opposition, and he encamped on the plain

of Issus between the mountains and the shore. And there Alexander, who

had turned back to fight, struck him. The cavalry charge and the phalanx

smashed this great brittle host as a stone smashes a bottle. It was

routed. Darius escaped from his war chariot--that out-of-date

instrument--and fled on horseback, leaving even his harem in the hands

of Alexander.

All the accounts of Alexander after this battle show him at his best. He

was restrained and magnanimous. He treated the Persian princesses with

the utmost civility. And he kept his head; he held steadfastly to his

plan. He let Darius escape, unpursued, into Syria, and he continued his

march upon the naval bases of the Persians--that is to say, upon the

Phœnician ports of Tyre and Sidon.

Sidon surrendered to him; Tyre resisted.

Here, if anywhere, we have the evidence of great military ability on the

part of Alexander. His army was his father’s creation, but Philip had

never shone in the siege of cities. When Alexander was a boy of sixteen,

he had seen his father repulsed by the fortified city of Byzantium upon

the Bosphorus. Now he was face to face with an inviolate city which had

stood siege after siege, which had resisted Nebuchadnezzar the Great for

fourteen years. For the standing of sieges Semitic peoples hold the

palm. Tyre was then an island half a mile from the shore, and her fleet

was unbeaten. On the other hand, Alexander had already learnt much by

the siege of the citadel of Halicarnassus; he had gathered to himself a

corps of engineers from Cyprus and Phœnicia, the Sidonian fleet was

with him, and presently the king of Cyprus came over to him with a

hundred and twenty ships, which gave him the command of the sea.

Moreover, great Carthage, either relying on the strength of the mother

city or being disloyal to her, and being furthermore entangled in a war

in Sicily, sent no help.

[Illustration: The Campaigns & Empire of ALEXANDER the GREAT.]

The first measure of Alexander was to build a pier from the mainland to

the island, a dam which remains to this day; and on this, as it came

close to the walls of Tyre, he set up his towers and battering-rams.

Against the walls he also moored ships in which towers and rams were

erected. The Tyrians used fire-ships against this flotilla, and made

sorties from their two harbours. In a big surprise raid that they made

on the Cyprian ships they were caught and badly mauled; many of their

ships were rammed, and one big galley of five banks of oars and one of

four were captured outright. Finally a breach in the walls was made, and

the Macedonians, clambering up the débris from their ships, stormed the

city.

The siege had lasted seven months. Gaza held out for two. In each case

there was a massacre, the plundering of the city, and the selling of the

survivors into slavery. Then towards the end of 332 B.C. Alexander

entered Egypt, and the command of the sea was assured. Greece, which all

this while had been wavering in its policy, decided now at last that it

was on the side of Alexander, and the council of the Greek states at

Corinth voted its “captain-general” a golden crown of victory. From this

time onward the Greeks were with the Macedonians.

The Egyptians also were with the Macedonians. But they had been for

Alexander from the beginning. They had lived under Persian rule for

nearly two hundred years, and the coming of Alexander meant for them

only a change of masters; on the whole, a change for the better. The

country surrendered without a blow. Alexander treated its religious

feelings with extreme respect. He unwrapped no mummies as Cambyses had

done; he took no liberties with Apis, the sacred bull of Memphis. Here

in great temples, and upon a vast scale, Alexander found the evidences

of a religiosity, mysterious and irrational, to remind him of the

secrets and mysteries that had entertained his mother and impressed his

childhood. During his four months in Egypt he flirted with religious

emotions.

He was still a very young man, we must remember, divided against

himself. The strong sanity he inherited from his father had made him a

great soldier; the teaching of Aristotle had given him something of the

scientific outlook upon the world. He had destroyed Tyre; in Egypt, at

one of the mouths of the Nile, he now founded a new city, Alexandria, to

replace that ancient centre of trade. To the north of Tyre, near Issus,

he founded a second port, Alexandretta. Both of these cities flourish to

this day, and for a time Alexandria was perhaps the greatest city in the

world. The sites, therefore, must have been wisely chosen. But also

Alexander had the unstable emotional imaginativeness of his mother, and

side by side with such creative work he indulged in religious

adventures. The gods of Egypt took possession of his mind. He travelled

four hundred miles to the remote oasis of the oracle of Ammon. He wanted

to settle certain doubts about his true parentage. His mother had

inflamed his mind by hints and vague speeches of some deep mystery about

his parentage. Was so ordinary a human being as Philip of Macedon really

his father?

For nearly four hundred years Egypt had been a country politically

contemptible, overrun now by Ethiopians, now by Assyrians, now by

Babylonians, now by Persians. As the indignities of the present became

more and more disagreeable to contemplate, the past and the other world

became more splendid to Egyptian eyes. It is from the festering

humiliations of peoples that arrogant religious propagandas spring. To

the triumphant the downtrodden can say, “It is naught in the sight of

the true gods.” So the son of Philip of Macedon, the master-general of

Greece, was made to feel a small person amidst the gigantic temples. And

he had an abnormal share of youth’s normal ambition to impress

everybody. How gratifying then for him to discover presently that he was

no mere successful mortal, not one of these modern vulgar Greekish folk,

but ancient and divine, the son of a god, the Pharaoh god, son of Ammon

Ra!

Already in a previous chapter we have given a description of that

encounter in the desert temple.

Not altogether was the young man convinced. He had his moments of

conviction; he had his saner phases when the thing was almost a jest. In

the presence of Macedonians and Greeks he doubted if he was divine. When

it thundered loudly, the ribald Aristarchus could ask him: “Won’t you

do something of the sort, oh Son of Zeus?” But the crazy notion was,

nevertheless, present henceforth in his brain, ready to be inflamed by

wine or flattery.

Next spring (331 B.C.) he returned to Tyre, and marched thence round

towards Assyria, leaving the Syrian desert on his right. Near the ruins

of forgotten Nineveh he found a great Persian army, that had been

gathering since the battle of Issus, awaiting him. It was another huge

medley of contingents, and it relied for its chief force upon that now

antiquated weapon, the war chariot. Of these Darius had a force of two

hundred, and each chariot had scythes attached to its wheels and to the

pole and body of the chariot. There seem to have been four horses to

each chariot, and it will be obvious that if one of those horses was

wounded by javelin or arrow, that chariot was incapacitated. Against

broken footmen or a crowd of individualist fighters such vehicles might

be formidable; but Darius began the battle by flinging these instruments

against the cavalry and light infantry. Few reached their objective, and

those that did were readily disposed of. There was some manœuvring

for position. The well-drilled Macedonians moved obliquely across the

Persian front, keeping good order; the Persians, following this movement

to the flank, opened gaps in their array. Then suddenly the disciplined

Macedonian cavalry charged at one of these torn places and smote the

centre of the Persian host. The infantry followed close upon their

charge. The centre and left of the Persians crumpled up. For a while the

light cavalry on the Persian right gained ground against Alexander’s

left, only to be cut to pieces by the cavalry from Thessaly, which by

this time had become almost as good as its Macedonian model. The Persian

forces ceased to resemble an army. They dissolved into a vast multitude

of fugitives streaming under great dust clouds and without a single

rally across the hot plain towards Arbela. Through the dust and the

flying crowd rode the victors, slaying and slaying until darkness stayed

the slaughter. Darius led the retreat.

Such was the battle of Arbela. It was fought on October the 1st, 331

B.C. We know its date so exactly, because it is recorded that, eleven

days before it began, the soothsayers on both sides had been greatly

exercised by an eclipse of the moon.

Darius fled to the north into the country of the Medes. Alexander

marched on to Babylon. The ancient city of Hammurabi (who had reigned

seventeen hundred years before) and of Nebuchadnezzar the Great and of

Nabonidus, unlike Nineveh, was still a prosperous and important centre.

Like the Egyptians, the Babylonians were not greatly concerned at a

change of rule to Macedonian from Persian. The temple of Bel-Marduk was

in ruins, a quarry for building material, but the tradition of the

Chaldean priests still lingered, and Alexander promised to restore the

building. Thence he marched on to Susa, once the chief city of the

vanished and forgotten Elamites, and now the Persian capital. He went on

to Persepolis, where, as the climax of a drunken carouse, he burnt down

the great palace of the king of kings. This he afterwards declared was

the revenge of Greece for the burning of Athens by Xerxes.

§ 4

And now begins a new phase in the story of Alexander. For the next seven

years he wandered with an army chiefly of Macedonians in the north and

east of what was then the known world. At first it was a pursuit of

Darius. Afterwards it became ----? Was it a systematic survey of a world

he meant to consolidate into one great order, or was it a wild-goose

chase? His own soldiers, his own intimates, thought the latter, and at

last stayed his career beyond the Indus. On the map it looks very like a

wild-goose chase; it seems to aim at nothing in particular and to get

nowhere.

The pursuit of Darius III soon came to a pitiful end. After the battle

of Arbela his own generals seem to have revolted against his weakness

and incompetence; they made him a prisoner, and took him with them in

spite of his desire to throw himself upon the generosity of his

conqueror. Bessus, the satrap of Bactria, they made their leader. There

was at last a hot and exciting chase of the flying caravan which

conveyed the captive king of kings. At dawn, after an all-night pursuit,

it was sighted far ahead. The flight became a headlong bolt. Baggage,

women, everything was abandoned by Bessus and his captains; and one

other impediment also they left behind. By the side of a pool of water

far away from the road a Macedonian trooper presently found a deserted

mule-cart with its mules still in the traces. In this cart lay Darius,

stabbed in a score of places and bleeding to death. He had refused to go

on with Bessus, refused to mount the horse that was brought to him. So

his captains had run him through with their spears and left him.... He

asked his captors for water. What else he may have said we do not know.

The historians have seen fit to fabricate a quite impossible last dying

speech for him. Probably he said very little....

When, a little after sunrise, Alexander came up, Darius was already

dead....

To the historian of the world the wanderings of Alexander have an

interest of their own quite apart from the light they throw upon his

character. Just as the campaign of Darius I lifted the curtain behind

Greece and Macedonia, and showed us something of the silent background

to the north of the audible and recorded history of the early

civilizations, so now Alexander’s campaigns take us into regions about

which there had hitherto been no trustworthy record made.

We discover they were not desert regions, but full of a gathering life

of their own.

He marched to the shores of the Caspian, thence he travelled eastward

across what is now called Western Turkestan. He founded a city that is

now known as Herat; whence he went northward by Cabul and by what is now

Samarkand, right up into the mountains of Central Turkestan. He returned

southward, and came down into India by the Khyber Pass. He fought a

great battle on the Upper Indus against a very tall and chivalrous king,

Porus, in which the Macedonian infantry encountered an array of

elephants and defeated them. Possibly he would have pushed eastward

across the deserts to the Ganges valley, but his troops refused to go

further. Possibly, had they not done so, then or later he would have

gone on until he vanished eastward out of history. But he was forced to

turn about. He built a fleet and descended to the mouth of the Indus.

There he divided his forces. The main army he took along the desolate

coast back to the Persian Gulf, and on the way it suffered dreadfully

and lost many men through thirst. The fleet followed him by sea, and

rejoined him at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. In the course of this

six-year tour he fought battles, received the submission of many strange

peoples, and founded cities. He saw the dead body of Darius in June, 330

B.C.; he returned to Susa in 324 B.C. He found the empire in disorder:

the provincial satraps raising armies of their own, Bactria and Media in

insurrection, and Olympias making government impossible in Macedonia.

Harpalus, the royal treasurer, had bolted with all that was portable of

the royal treasure, and was making his way, bribing as he went, towards

Greece. Some of the Harpalus money is said to have reached Demosthenes.

But before we deal with the closing chapter of the story of Alexander,

let us say a word or so about these northern regions into which he

wandered. It is evident that from the Danube region right across South

Russia, right across the country to the north of the Caspian, right

across the country to the east of the Caspian, as far as the mountain

masses of the Pamir Plateau and eastward into the Tarim basin of Eastern

Turkestan, there spread then a series of similar barbaric tribes and

peoples all at about the same stage of culture, and for the most part

Aryan in their language and possibly Nordic in their race. They had few

cities, mostly they were nomadic; at times they settled temporarily to

cultivate the land. They were certainly already mingling in Central Asia

with Mongolian tribes, but the Mongolian tribes were not then prevalent

there.

An immense process of drying up and elevation has been going on in these

parts of the world during the last ten thousand years. Ten thousand

years ago there was probably a continuous water barrier between the

basin of the Obi and the Aral-Caspian sea. As this had dried up and the

marshy land had become steppe-like country, Nordic nomads from the west

and Mongolian nomads from the east had met and mixed, and the riding

horse had come back into the western world. It is evident this great

stretch of country was becoming a region of accumulation for these

barbaric peoples. They were very loosely attached to the lands they

occupied. They lived in tents and wagons rather than houses. A brief

cycle of plentiful and healthy years, or a cessation of tribal warfare

under some strong ruler, would lead to considerable increases of

population; then two or three hard years would suffice to send the

tribes wandering again in search of food.

From before the dawn of recorded history this region of human

accumulation between the Danube and China had been, as it were,

intermittently _raining_ out tribes southward and westward. It was like

a cloud bank behind the settled landscape that accumulated and then

precipitated invaders. We have noted how the Keltic peoples drizzled

westward, how the Italians, the Greeks, and their Epirote, Macedonian,

and Phrygian kindred came south. We have noted too the Cimmerian drive

from the east, like a sudden driving shower of barbarians across Asia

Minor, the southward coming of the Scythians and Medes and Persians, and

the Aryan descent into India. About a century before Alexander there had

been a fresh Aryan invasion of Italy by a Keltic people, the Gauls, who

had settled in the valley of the Po. Those various races came down out

of their northern obscurity into the light of history; and meanwhile

beyond that light the reservoir accumulated for fresh discharges.

Alexander’s march in Central Asia brings now into our history names that

are fresh to us; the Parthians, a race of mounted bowmen who were

destined to play an important rôle in history a century or so later, and

the Bactrians who lived in the sandy native land of the camel.

Everywhere he seems to have met Aryan-speaking peoples. The Mongolian

barbarians to the north-eastward were still unsuspected, no one imagined

there was yet another great cloud bank of population beyond the

Scythians and their kind, in the north of China, that was presently also

to begin a drift westward and southward, mixing as it came with the

Nordic Scythians and every other people of kindred habits that it

encountered. As yet only China knew of the Huns; there were no Turks in

Western Turkestan or anywhere else then, no Tartars in the world.

This glimpse of the state of affairs in Turkestan in the fourth century

B.C. is one of the most interesting aspects of the wanderings of

Alexander; another is his raid through the Punjab. From the point of

view of the teller of the human story it is provocative that he did not

go on into the Ganges country, and that consequently we have no

independent accounts by Greek writers of the life in ancient Bengal. But

there is a considerable literature in various Indian languages dealing

with Indian history and social life that still needs to be made

accessible to European readers.

§ 5

[Illustration: Alexander the Great

(silver coin of Lysimachus, 321-281 B.C.)]

Alexander had been in undisputed possession of the Persian empire for

six years. He was now thirty-one. In those six years he had created very

little. He had retained most of the organization of the Persian

provinces, appointing fresh satraps or retaining the former ones; the

roads, the ports, the organization of the empire was still as Cyrus, his

greater predecessor, had left them; in Egypt he had merely replaced old

provincial governors by new ones; in India he had defeated Porus, and

then left him in power much as he found him, except that Porus was now

called a satrap by the Greeks. Alexander had, it is true, planned out a

number of towns, and some of them were to grow into great towns;

seventeen Alexandrias he founded altogether;[199] but he had destroyed

Tyre, and with Tyre the security of the sea routes which had hitherto

been the chief westward outlet for Mesopotamia. Historians say that he

Hellenized the east. But Babylonia and Egypt swarmed with Greeks before

his time; he was not the cause, he was a part of the Hellenization. For

a time the whole world, from the Adriatic to the Indus, was under one

ruler; so far he had realized the dreams of Isocrates and Philip his

father. But how far was he making this a permanent and enduring union?

How far as yet was it anything more than a dazzling but transitory

flourish of his own magnificent self?

He was making no great roads, setting up no sure sea communications. It

is idle to accuse him of leaving education alone, because the idea that

empires must be cemented by education was still foreign to human

thought. But he was forming no group of statesmen about him; he was

thinking of no successor; he was creating no tradition--nothing more

than a personal legend. The idea that the world would have to go on

after Alexander, engaged in any other employment than the discussion of

his magnificence, seems to have been outside his mental range. He was

still young, it is true, but well before Philip was one and thirty he

had been thinking of the education of Alexander.

Was Alexander a statesman at all?

Some students of his career assure us that he was; that now at Susa he

planned a mighty world empire, seeing it not simply as a Macedonian

conquest of the world, but as a melting together of racial traditions.

He did one thing, at any rate, that gives colour to this idea; he held a

great marriage feast, in which he and ninety of his generals and friends

were married to Persian brides. He himself married a daughter of Darius,

though already he possessed an Asiatic wife in Roxana, the daughter of

the king of Samarkand. This wholesale wedding was made a very splendid

festival, and at the same time all of his Macedonian soldiers, to the

number of several thousands, who had married Asiatic brides, were given

wedding gifts. This has been called the Marriage of Europe and Asia; the

two continents were to be joined, wrote Plutarch, “in lawful wedlock and

by community of offspring.” And next he began to train recruits from

Persia and the north, Parthians, Bactrians, and the like, in the

distinctive disciplines of the phalanx and the cavalry. Was that also to

assimilate Europe and Asia, or was it to make himself independent of his

Macedonians? They thought the latter, at any rate, and mutinied, and it

was with some difficulty that he brought them to a penitent mood and

induced them to take part in a common feast with the Persians. The

historians have made a long and eloquent speech for him on this

occasion, but the gist of it was that he bade his Macedonians begone,

and gave no sign of how he proposed they should get home out of Persia.

After three days of dismay they submitted to him and begged his

forgiveness.

Here is the matter for a very pretty discussion. Was Alexander really

planning a racial fusion or had he just fallen in love with the pomp and

divinity of an Oriental monarch, and wished to get rid of these

Europeans to whom he was only a king-leader? The writers of his own

time, and those who lived near to his time, lean very much to the latter

alternative. They insist upon his immense vanity. They relate how he

began to wear the robes and tiara of a Persian monarch. “At first only

before the barbarians and privately, but afterwards he came to wear it

in public when he sat for the dispatch of business.” And presently he

demanded Oriental prostrations from his friends.

One thing seems to support the suggestion of great personal vanity in

Alexander. His portrait was painted and sculptured frequently, and

always he is represented as a beautiful youth, with wonderful locks

flowing backward from a broad forehead. Previously most men had worn

beards. But Alexander, enamoured of his own youthful loveliness, would

not part with it; he remained a sham boy at thirty-two; he shaved his

face, and so set a fashion in Greece and Italy that lasted many

centuries.

The stories of violence and vanity in his closing years cluster thick

upon his memory. He listened to tittle-tattle about Philotas, the son of

Parmenio, one of his most trusted and faithful generals. Philotas, it

was said, had boasted to some woman he was making love to that Alexander

was a mere boy; that, but for such men as his father and himself, there

would have been no conquest of Persia, and the like. Such assertions had

a certain element of truth in them. The woman was brought to Alexander,

who listened to her treacheries. Presently Philotas was accused of

conspiracy, and, upon very insufficient evidence, tortured and executed.

Then Alexander thought of Parmenio, whose other two sons had died for

him in battle. He sent swift messengers to assassinate the old man

before he could hear of his son’s death! Now Parmenio had been one of

the most trusted of Philip’s generals; it was Parmenio who had led the

Macedonian armies into Asia before the murder of Philip. There can be

little doubt of the substantial truth of this story, nor about the

execution of Callisthenes, the nephew of Aristotle, who refused

Alexander divine honours, and “went about with as much pride as if he

had demolished a tyranny, while the young men followed him as the only

freeman among thousands.” Mixed with such incidents we have the very

illuminating story of the drunken quarrel in which he killed Clitus. The

monarch and his company had been drinking hard, and the drink had made

the talk loud and free. There was much flattery of the “young god,” much

detraction of Philip, at which Alexander had smiled with

satisfaction.[200] Was he not the son of a god? This drunken

self-complacency was more than the honest Macedonians could stand; it

roused Clitus, his foster-brother, to a frenzy. Clitus reproached

Alexander with his Median costume and praised Philip, there was a loud

quarrel, and, to end it, Clitus was hustled out of the room by his

friends. He was, however, in the obstinate phase of drunkenness, and he

returned by another entrance. He was heard outside quoting Euripides “in

a bold and disrespectful tone”:

“Are these your customs? Is it thus that Greece

Rewards her combatants? Shall one man claim

The trophies won by thousands?”

Whereupon Alexander snatched a spear from one of his guards and ran

Clitus through the body as he lifted the curtain to come in....

One is forced to believe that this was the real atmosphere of the young

conqueror’s life. Then the story of his frantic and cruel display of

grief for Hephæstion can scarcely be all invention. If it is true, or in

any part true, it displays a mind ill-balanced and altogether wrapped up

in personal things, to whom empire was no more than opportunity for

egoistic display, and all the resources of the world stuff for freaks of

that sort of “generosity” which robs a thousand people to extort the

admiration of one astounded recipient.

[Illustration: The BREAK-UP of the EMPIRE of ALEXANDER at the close of

the Fourth Century, B.C.]

Hephæstion, being ill, was put upon a strict diet, but in the absence of

his physician at the theatre he ate a roasted fowl and drank a flagon

of iced wine, in consequence of which he died. Thereupon Alexander

decided upon a display of grief. It was the grief of a lunatic. He had

the physician crucified! He ordered every horse and mule in Persia to be

shorn, and pulled down the battlements of the neighbouring cities. He

prohibited all music in his camp for a long time, and, having taken

certain villages of the Cusæans, he caused all the adults to be

massacred, as a sacrifice to the manes of Hephæstion. Finally he set

aside ten thousand talents (a talent = £240) for a tomb. For those days

this was an enormous sum. None of which things did any real honour to

Hephæstion, but they served to demonstrate to an awe-stricken world what

a tremendous thing the sorrow of Alexander could be.

This last story and many such stories may be lies or distortions or

exaggerations. But they have a vein in common. After a bout of hard

drinking in Babylon a sudden fever came upon Alexander (323 B.C.), and

he sickened and died. He was still only thirty-three years of age.

Forthwith the world empire he had snatched at and held in his hands, as

a child might snatch at and hold a precious vase, fell to the ground and

was shattered to pieces.

Whatever appearance of a world-wide order may have gleamed upon men’s

imaginations vanished at his death. The story becomes the story of a

barbaric autocracy in confusion. Everywhere the provincial rulers set up

for themselves. In the course of a few years the entire family of

Alexander had been destroyed. Roxana, his barbarian wife, was prompt to

murder, as a rival, the daughter of Darius. She herself presently bore

Alexander a posthumous son, who was also called Alexander. He was

murdered, with her, a few years later (311 B.C.). Hercules, the only

other son of Alexander, was murdered also. So too was Aridæus, the

weak-minded half-brother (see § 2). Plutarch gives a last glimpse of

Olympias during a brief interval of power in Macedonia, accusing first

this person and then that of poisoning her wonderful son. Many she

killed in her fury. The bodies of some of his circle who had died after

his death she caused to be dug up, but we do not know if any fresh light

was shed upon his death by these disinterments. Finally Olympias was

killed in Macedonia by the friends of those she had slain.

§ 6

[Illustration: Tetradrachm with head of Seleucus I.]

From this welter of crime there presently emerged three leading figures.

Much of the old Persian empire, as far as the Indus eastward and almost

to Lydia in the west, was held by one general Seleucus, who founded a

dynasty, the Seleucid Dynasty; Macedonia fell to another Macedonian

general, Antigonus; a third Macedonian, Ptolemy, secured Egypt, and

making Alexandria his chief city, established a sufficient naval

ascendancy to keep also Cyprus and most of the coast of Phœnicia and

Asia Minor. The Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires lasted for a considerable

time: the forms of government in Asia Minor and the Balkans were more

unstable. Two maps will help the reader to a sense of the kaleidoscopic

nature of the political boundaries of the third century B.C. Antigonus

was defeated and killed at the battle of Ipsus (301), leaving

Lysimachus, the governor of Thrace, and Cassander, of Macedonia and

Greece, as equally transitory successors. Minor governors carved out

smaller states. Meanwhile the barbarians swung down into the broken-up

and enfeebled world of civilization from the west and from the east.

From the west came the Gauls, a people closely related to the Kelts.

They raided down through Macedonia and Greece to Delphi, and (227 B.C.)

two sections of them crossed the Bosphorus into Asia Minor, being first

employed as mercenaries and then setting up for themselves as

independent plunderers; and after raiding almost to the Taurus, they

settled in the old Phrygian land, holding the people about them to

tribute. (These Gauls of Phrygia became the Galatians of St. Paul’s

Epistle.) Armenia and the southern shores of the Black Sea became a

confusion of changing rulers. Kings with Hellenistic ideas appeared in

Cappadocia, in Pontus (the south shore of the Black Sea), in Bithynia,

and in Pergamum. From the east the Scythians and the Parthians and

Bactrians also drove southward.... For a time there were Greek-ruled

Bactrian states becoming more and more Orientalized; in the second

century B.C. Greek adventurers from Bactria raided down into North India

and founded short-lived kingdoms there, the last eastward fling of the

Greek; then gradually barbarism fell again like a curtain between the

Western civilizations and India.[201]

§ 7

Amidst all these shattered fragments of the burst bubble of Hellenic

empire one small state stands out and demands at least a brief section

to itself, the kingdom of Pergamum. We hear first of this town as an

independent centre during the struggle that ended in the battle of

Ipsus. While the tide of the Gaulish invasion swirled and foamed to and

fro about Asia Minor between the years 277 and 241, Pergamum for a time

paid them tribute, but she retained her general independence, and at

last, under Attalus I, refused her tribute and defeated them in two

decisive battles. For more than a century thereafter (until 133 B.C.)

Pergamum remained free, and was perhaps during that period the most

highly civilized state in the world. On the hill of the Acropolis was

reared a rich group of buildings, palaces, temples, a museum, and a

library, rivals of those of Alexandria of which we shall presently tell,

and almost the first in the world. Under the princes of Pergamum, Greek

art blossomed afresh, and the reliefs of the altar of the temple of Zeus

and the statues of the fighting and dying Gauls which were made there,

are among the great artistic treasures of mankind.

In a little while, as we shall tell later, the influence of a new power

began to be felt in the Eastern Mediterranean, the power of the Roman

republic, friendly to Greece and to Greek civilization; and in this

power the Hellenic communities of Pergamum and Rhodes found a natural

and useful ally and supporter against the Galatians and against the

Orientalized Seleucid empire. We shall relate how at last the Roman

power came into Asia, how it defeated the Seleucid empire at the battle

of Magnesia (190 B.C.), and drove it out of Asia Minor and beyond the

Taurus mountains, and how finally in 133 B.C. Attalus III, the last king

of Pergamum, bowing to his sense of an inevitable destiny, made the

Roman republic the heir to his kingdom, which became then the Roman

province of “Asia.”

§ 8

Nearly all historians are disposed to regard the career of Alexander the

Great as marking an epoch in human affairs. It drew together all the

known world, excepting only the western Mediterranean, into one drama.

But the opinions men have formed of Alexander himself vary enormously.

They fall, most of them, into two main schools. One type of scholar is

fascinated by the youth and splendour of this young man. These

Alexander-worshippers seem disposed to take him at his own valuation, to

condone every crime and folly either as the mere ebullience of a rich

nature or as the bitter necessity to some gigantic scheme, and to regard

his life as framed upon a design, a scheme of statesmanship, such as all

the wider knowledge and wider ideas of these later times barely suffice

to bring into the scope of our understanding. On the other hand, there

are those who see him only as a wrecker of the slowly maturing

possibilities of a free and tranquil Hellenized world.

[Illustration: A further Stage in the BREAK-UP of ALEXANDER’S EMPIRE in

the first half of the Third Century, B.C.]

Before we ascribe to Alexander or to his father Philip schemes of world

policy such as a twentieth-century historian-philosopher might approve,

we shall do well to consider very carefully the utmost range of

knowledge and thought that was possible in those days. The world of

Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle had practically no historical

perspective at all; there had not been such a thing as history in the

world, history, that is, as distinguished from mere priestly chronicles,

until the last couple of centuries. Even highly educated men had the

most circumscribed ideas of geography and foreign countries. For most

men the world was still flat and limitless. The only systematic

political philosophy was based on the experiences of minute city states,

and took no thought of empires. Nobody knew anything of the origins of

civilization. No one had speculated upon economics.[202]

[Illustration: A further Stage in the BREAK-UP of ALEXANDER’S EMPIRE

in the first half of the third century B.C.]

No one had worked out the reaction of one social class upon another. We

are too apt to consider the career of Alexander as the crown of some

process that had long been afoot; as the climax of a crescendo. In a

sense, no doubt, it was that; but much more true is it that it was not

so much an end as a beginning; it was the first revelation to the human

imagination of the oneness of human affairs. The utmost reach of the

thought of Greece before his time was of a Persian empire Hellenized, a

predominance in the world of Macedonians and Greeks. But before

Alexander was dead, and much more after he was dead and there had been

time to think him over, the conception of a world law and organization

was a practicable and assimilable idea for the minds of men.

For some generations Alexander the Great was for mankind the symbol and

embodiment of world order and world dominion. He became a fabulous

being. His head, adorned with the divine symbols of the demi-god

Hercules or the god Ammon Ra, appears on the coins of such among his

successors as could claim to be his heirs. Then the idea of world

dominion was taken up by another great people, a people who for some

centuries exhibited considerable political genius, the Romans; and the

figure of another conspicuous adventurer, Cæsar, eclipsed for the

western half of the old world the figure of Alexander.

So by the beginning of the third century B.C. we find already arisen in

the Western civilization of the old world three of the great structural

ideas that rule the mind of contemporary mankind. We have already traced

the escape of writing and knowledge from the secrets and mysteries and

initiations of the old-world priesthoods, and the development of the

idea of a universal knowledge, of a universally understandable and

communicable history and philosophy. We have taken the figures of

Herodotus and Aristotle as typical exponents of this first great idea,

the idea of _science_--using the word science in its widest and

properest sense, to include history and signify a clear vision of man

in relation to the things about him. We have traced also the

generalization of religion among the Babylonians, Jews, and other

Semitic peoples, from the dark worship in temples and consecrated places

of some local or tribal god to the open service of _one universal God of

Righteousness_, whose temple is the whole world. And now we have traced

also the first germination of the idea of a _world polity_. The rest of

the history of mankind is very largely the history of those three ideas

of science, of a universal righteousness, and of a human commonweal,

spreading out from the minds of the rare and exceptional persons and

peoples in which they first originated, into the general consciousness

of the race, and giving first a new colour, then a new spirit, and then

a new direction to human affairs.

XXV

SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA[203]

§ 1. _The Science of Alexandria._ § 2. _Philosophy of Alexandria._

§ 3. _Alexandria as a Factory of Religions._

§ 1

One of the most prosperous fragments of the brief world empire of

Alexander the Great was Egypt, which fell to the share of the Ptolemy

whose name we have already noted as one of the associates of Alexander

whom King Philip had banished. The country was at a secure distance from

plundering Gaul or Parthian, and the destruction of Tyre and the

Phœnician navy and the creation of Alexandria gave Egypt a temporary

naval ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Alexandria grew to

proportions that rivalled Carthage; eastward she had an overseas trade

through the Red Sea with Arabia and India; and westward her traffic

competed with the Carthaginian. In the Macedonian and Greek governors of

the Ptolemies, the Egyptians found a government more sympathetic and

tolerable than any they had ever known since they ceased to be a

self-governing empire. Indeed it is rather that Egypt conquered and

annexed the Ptolemies politically, than that the Macedonians ruled

Egypt.

There was a return to Egyptian political ideas, rather than any attempt

to Hellenize the government of the country. Ptolemy became Pharaoh, the

god king, and his administration continued the ancient tradition of

Pepi, Thotmes, Rameses, and Necho. Alexandria, however, for her town

affairs, and subject to the divine overlordship of Pharaoh, had a

constitution of the Greek city type. And the language of the court and

administration was Attic Greek. Greek became so much the general

language of educated people in Egypt that the Jewish community there

found it necessary to translate their Bible into the Greek language;

many men of their own people being no longer able to understand Hebrew,

Attic Greek for some centuries before and after Christ was the language

of all educated men from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf.

Of all Alexander’s group of young men, Ptolemy seems to have done most

to carry out those ideas of a systematic organization of knowledge with

which Aristotle had no doubt familiarized the court of Philip of

Macedon. Ptolemy was a man of very extraordinary intellectual gifts, at

once creative and modest, with a certain understandable cynicism towards

the strain of Olympias in the mind of Alexander. His contemporary

history of Alexander’s campaigns has perished; but it was a source to

which all the surviving accounts are deeply indebted.

The Museum he set up in Alexandria was in effect the first university in

the world. As its name implies, it was dedicated to the service of the

Muses, which was also the case with the Peripatetic school at Athens. It

was, however, a religious body only in form, in order to meet the legal

difficulties of endowment in a world that had never foreseen such a

thing as a secular intellectual process. It was essentially a college of

learned men engaged chiefly in research and record, but also to a

certain extent in teaching. At the outset, and for two or three

generations, the Museum at Alexandria presented such a scientific

constellation as even Athens at its best could not rival. Particularly

sound and good was the mathematical and geographical work. The names of

Euclid, familiar to every schoolboy, Eratosthenes, who measured the size

of the earth and came within fifty miles of the true diameter,

Apollonius, who wrote on conic sections, stand out. Hipparchus made the

first attempt to catalogue and map the stars with a view to checking any

changes that might be occurring in the heavens. Hero devised the first

steam engine. Archimedes came to Alexandria to study, and remained a

frequent correspondent of the Museum. The medical school of Alexandria

was equally famous. For the first time in the world’s history a standard

of professional knowledge was set up. Herophilus, the greatest of the

Alexandrian anatomists, is said to have conducted vivisections upon

condemned criminals.[204] Other teachers, in opposition to Herophilus,

condemned the study of anatomy and developed the science of drugs. But

this scientific blaze at Alexandria did not endure altogether for more

than a century. The organization of the Museum was not planned to ensure

its mental continuity. It was a “royal” college; its professors and

fellows (as we may call them) were appointed and paid by Pharaoh. “The

republican character of the private corporations called the schools or

academies at Athens was far more stable and independent.”[205] Royal

patronage was all very well so long as Pharaoh was Ptolemy I, or Ptolemy

II, but the strain degenerated, and the long tradition of Egyptian

priestcraft presently swallowed up the Ptolemies--and destroyed the

Aristotelian mentality of the Museum altogether. The Museum had not

existed for a hundred years before its scientific energy was extinct.

Side by side with the Museum, Ptolemy I created a more enduring monument

to himself in the great library. This was a combination of state library

and state publishing upon a scale hitherto unheard of. It was to be

altogether encyclopædic. If any stranger brought an unknown book to

Egypt, he had to have it copied for the collection, and a considerable

staff of copyists was engaged continually in making duplicates of all

the more popular and necessary works. The library, like a university

press, had an outward trade. It was a book-selling affair. Under

Callimachus, the head of the library during the tune of Ptolemy II and

III, the arrangement and cataloguing of the accumulations was

systematically undertaken. In those days, it must be remembered, books

were not in pages, but rolled like the music-rolls of the modern

piano-player, and in order to refer to any particular passage, a reader

had to roll back or roll forward very tediously, a process which wore

out books and readers together. One thinks at once of a simple and

obvious little machine by which such a roll could have been quickly

wound to and fro for reference, but nothing of the sort seems to have

been used. Every time a roll was read it was handled by two perspiring

hands. It was to minimize the waste of time and trouble that Callimachus

broke up long works, such as the History of Herodotus, into “books” or

volumes, as we should call them, each upon a separate roll. The library

of Alexandria drew a far vaster crowd of students than the teachers of

the Museum. The lodging and catering for these visitors from all parts

of the world became a considerable business interest for the Alexandrian

population.

[Illustration: Map of the WORLD according to ERATOSTHENES (200 B. C.)]

[Illustration: The Known World about 250 B.C.]

It is curious to note how slowly the mechanism of the intellectual life

improves. Contrast the ordinary library facilities of a middle-class

English home, such as the present writer is now working in, with the

inconveniences and deficiencies of the equipment of an Alexandrian

writer, and one realizes the enormous waste of time, physical

exertion, and attention that went on through all the centuries during

which that library flourished. Before the present writer lie half a

dozen books, and there are good indices to three of them. He can pick up

any one of these six books, refer quickly to a statement, verify a

quotation, and go on writing. Contrast with that the tedious unfolding

of a rolled manuscript. Close at hand are two encyclopædias, a

dictionary, an atlas of the world, a biographical dictionary, and other

books of reference. They have no marginal indices, it is true; but that

perhaps is asking for too much at present. There were no such resources

in the world in 300 B.C. Alexandria had still to produce the first

grammar and the first dictionary. This present book is being written in

manuscript; it is then taken by a typist and typewritten very

accurately. It can then, with the utmost convenience, be read over,

corrected amply, rearranged freely, retyped, and recorrected. The

Alexandrian author had to dictate or recopy every word he wrote. Before

he could turn back to what he had written previously, he had to dry his

last words by waving them in the air or pouring sand over them; he had

not even blotting-paper. Whatever an author wrote had to be recopied

again and again before it could reach any considerable circle of

readers, and every copyist introduced some new error.[206] Whenever a

need for maps or diagrams arose, there were fresh difficulties. Such a

science as anatomy, for example, depending as it does upon accurate

drawing, must have been enormously hampered by the natural limitations

of the copyist. The transmission of geographical fact again must have

been almost incredibly tedious. No doubt a day will come when a private

library and writing-desk of the year A.D. 1919 will seem quaintly clumsy

and difficult; but, measured by the standards of Alexandria, they are

astonishingly quick, efficient, and economical of nervous and mental

energy.

No attempt seems to have been made at Alexandria to print anything at

all. That strikes one at first as a very remarkable fact. The world was

crying out for books, and not simply for books. There was an urgent

public need for notices, proclamations, and the like. Yet there is

nothing in the history of the Western civilizations that one can call

printing until the fifteenth century A.D. It is not as though printing

was a recondite art or dependent upon any precedent and preliminary

discoveries. Printing is the most obvious of dodges. In principle it has

always been known. As we have already stated, there is ground for

supposing that the Palæolithic men of the Magdalenian period may have

printed designs on their leather garments. The “seals” of ancient

Sumeria again were printing devices. Coins are print. Illiterate persons

in all ages have used wooden or metal stamps for their signatures;

William I, the Norman Conqueror of England, for example, used such a

stamp with ink to sign documents. In China the classics were being

printed by the second century A.D. Yet either because of a complex of

small difficulties about ink or papyrus or the form of books, or because

of some protective resistance on the part of the owners of the slave

copyists, or because the script was too swift and easy to set men

thinking how to write it still more easily, as the Chinese character or

the Gothic letters did, or because of a gap in the social system between

men of thought and knowledge and men of technical skill, printing was

not used--not even used for the exact reproduction of illustrations.

The chief reason for this failure to develop printing systematically

lies, no doubt, in the fact that there was no abundant supply of

printable material of a uniform texture and convenient form. The supply

of papyrus was strictly limited, strip had to be fastened to strip, and

there was no standard size of sheet. Paper had yet to come from China to

release the mind of Europe. Had there been presses, they would have had

to stand idle while the papyrus rolls were slowly made. But this

explanation does not account for the failure to use block printing in

the case of illustrations and diagrams.

These limitations enable us to understand why it was that Alexandria

could at once achieve the most extraordinary intellectual triumphs--for

such a feat as that of Eratosthenes, for instance, having regard to his

poverty of apparatus, is sufficient to put him on a level with Newton or

Pasteur--and yet have little or no effect upon the course of politics

or the lives and thoughts of people round about her. Her Museum and

library were a centre of light, but it was light in a dark lantern

hidden from the general world. There were no means of carrying its

results even to sympathetic men abroad except by tedious letter-writing.

There was no possibility of communicating what was known there to the

general body of men. Students had to come at great cost to themselves to

this crowded centre because there was no other way of gathering even

scraps of knowledge. At Athens and Alexandria there were bookstalls

where manuscript note-books of variable quality could be bought at

reasonable prices, but any extension of education to larger classes and

other centres would have produced at once a restrictive shortage of

papyrus. Education did not reach into the masses at all; to become more

than superficially educated one had to abandon the ordinary life of the

times and come for long years to live a hovering existence in the

neighbourhood of ill-equipped and overworked sages. Learning was not

indeed so complete a withdrawal from ordinary life as initiation into a

priesthood, but it was still something in that nature.

And very speedily that feeling of freedom, that openness and directness

of statement which is the vital air of the true intellectual life, faded

out of Alexandria. From the first the patronage even of Ptolemy I set a

limit to political discussion. Presently the dissensions of the schools

let in the superstitions and prejudices of the city mob to scholastic

affairs.

Wisdom passed away from Alexandria and left pedantry behind. For the use

of books was substituted the worship of books. Very speedily the learned

became a specialized queer class with unpleasant characteristics of its

own. The Museum had not existed for half a dozen generations before

Alexandria was familiar with a new type of human being; shy, eccentric,

unpractical, incapable of essentials, strangely fierce upon trivialities

of literary detail, as bitterly jealous of the colleague within as of

the unlearned without, the bent Scholarly Man. He was as intolerant as a

priest, though he had no altar; as obscurantist as a magician, though he

had no cave. For him no method of copying was sufficiently tedious and

no rare book sufficiently inaccessible. He was a sort of by-product of

the intellectual process of mankind. For many precious generations the

new-lit fires of the human intelligence were to be seriously banked down

by this by-product.

Right thinking is necessarily an open process, and the only science and

history of full value to men consist of what is generally and clearly

known; this is surely a platitude, but we have still to discover how to

preserve our centres of philosophy and research from the caking and

darkening accumulations of narrow and dingy-spirited specialists. We

have still to ensure that a man of learning shall be none the less a man

of affairs, and that all that can be thought and known is kept plainly,

honestly, and easily available to the ordinary men and women who are the

substance of mankind.

§ 2

At first the mental activities of Alexandria centred upon the Museum,

and were mainly scientific. Philosophy, which in a more vigorous age had

been a doctrine of power over self and the material world, without

abandoning these pretensions, became in reality a doctrine of secret

consolation. The stimulant changed into an opiate. The philosopher let

the world, as the vulgar say, rip, the world of which he was a part, and

consoled himself by saying in very beautiful and elaborate forms that

the world was illusion and that there was in him something

quintessential and sublime, outside and above the world. Athens,[207]

politically insignificant, but still a great and crowded mart throughout

the fourth century, decaying almost imperceptibly so far as outer

seeming went, and treated with a strange respect that was half contempt

by all the warring powers and adventurers of the world, was the fitting

centre of such philosophical teaching. It was quite a couple of

centuries before the schools of Alexandria became as important in

philosophical discussion.

But of Philo the Jew in the first century A.D., and of Plotinus in the

third, interesting as the thought and influence of these men were, the

scale of this outline will not permit us to treat.

§ 3

If Alexandria was late to develop a distinctive philosophy, she was

early prominent as a great factory and exchange of religious ideas.

The Museum and Library represented only one of the three sides of the

triple city of Alexandria. They represented the Aristotelian, the

Hellenic, and Macedonian element. But Ptolemy I had brought together two

other factors to this strange centre. First there was a great number of

Jews, brought partly from Palestine, but largely also from those

settlements in Egypt which had never returned to Jerusalem; these latter

were the Jews of the Diaspora or Dispersion, a race of Jews who, as we

have already noted in Chapter XXI, had not shared the Babylonian

Captivity, but who were nevertheless in possession of the Bible and in

close correspondence with their co-religionists throughout the world.

These Jews populated so great a quarter of Alexandria that the town

became the largest Jewish city in the world, with far more Jews in it

than there were in Jerusalem. We have already noted that they had found

it necessary to translate their scriptures into Greek. And, finally,

there was a great population of native Egyptians, also for the most part

speaking Greek, but with the superstitious temperament of the dark

whites and with the vast tradition of forty centuries of temple religion

and temple sacrifices at the back of their minds. In Alexandria three

types of mind and spirit met, the three main types of the white race,

the clear-headed criticism of the Aryan Greek, the moral fervour and

monotheism of the Semitic Jew, and the deep Mediterranean tradition of

mysteries and sacrifices that we have already seen at work in the secret

cults and occult practices of Greece, ideas which in Hamitic Egypt ruled

proudly in great temples in the open light of day.

These three were the permanent elements of the Alexandrian blend. But in

the seaport and markets mingled men of every known race, comparing their

religious ideas and customs. It is even related that in the third

century B.C. Buddhist missionaries came from the court of King Asoka in

India. Aristotle remarks in his _Politics_ that the religious beliefs of

men are apt to borrow their form from political institutions, “men

assimilate the lives no less than the bodily forms of the gods to their

own,” and this age of Greek-speaking great empires under autocratic

monarchs was bearing hardly upon those merely local celebrities, the old

tribal and city deities. Men were requiring deities with an outlook at

least as wide as the empires, and except where the interests of

powerful priesthoods stood in the way, a curious process of assimilation

of gods was going on. Men found that though there were many gods, they

were all very much alike. Where there had been many gods, men came to

think there must be really only one god under a diversity of names. He

had been everywhere--under an alias. The Roman Jupiter, the Greek Zeus,

the Egyptian Ammon, the putative father of Alexander and the old

antagonist of Amenophis IV., the Babylonian Bel-Marduk, were all

sufficiently similar to be identified.

“Father of all in every age, in every clime adored

By saint, by savage and by sage, Jehovah, Jove or Lord.”

Where there were distinct differences, the difficulty was met by saying

that these were different _aspects_ of the same god. Bel-Marduk,

however, was now a very decadent god indeed, who hardly survived as a

pseudonym; Assur, Dagon, and the like, poor old gods of fallen nations,

had long since passed out of memory, and did not come into the

amalgamation. Osiris, a god popular with the Egyptian commonalty, was

already identified with Apis, the sacred bull in the temple of Memphis,

and somewhat confused with Ammon. Under the name of Serapis he became

the great god of Hellenic Alexandria.[208] He was Jupiter-Serapis. The

Egyptian cow goddess, Hathor or Isis, was also represented now in human

guise as the wife of Osiris, to whom she bore the infant Horus, who grew

up to be Osiris again. These bald statements sound strange, no doubt, to

a modern mind, but these identifications and mixing up of one god with

another are very illustrative of the struggle the quickening human

intelligence was making to cling still to religion and its emotional

bonds and fellowship, while making its gods more reasonable and

universal.

This fusing of one god with another is called _theocrasia_, and nowhere

was it more vigorously going on than in Alexandria. Only two peoples

resisted it in this period: the Jews, who already had their faith in the

One God of Heaven and Earth, Jehovah, and the Persians, who had a

monotheistic sun worship.

It was Ptolemy I who set up not only the Museum in Alexandria, but the

Serapeum, devoted to the worship of a trinity of gods which represented

the result of a process of theocrasia applied more particularly to the

gods of Greece and Egypt.

[Illustration: Isis and Horus]

This trinity consisted of the god Serapis (= Osiris + Apis), the goddess

Isis (= Hathor, the cow-moon goddess), and the child-god Horus. In one

way or another almost every other god was identified with one or other

of these three aspects of the one God, even the sun god Mithras of the

Persians. And they were each other; they were three, but they were also

one. They were worshipped with great fervour, and the jangling of a

peculiar instrument, the _sistrum_, a frame set with bells and used

rather after the fashion of the tambourine in the proceedings of the

modern Salvation Army, was a distinctive accessory to the ceremonies.

And now for the first time we find the idea of immortality becoming the

central idea of a religion that extended beyond Egypt. Neither the early

Aryans nor the early Semites seem to have troubled very much about

immortality, it has affected the Mongolian mind very little, but the

continuation of the individual life after death had been from the

earliest times an intense pre-occupation of the Egyptians. It played now

a large part in the worship of Serapis. In the devotional literature of

his cult he is spoken of as “the saviour and leader of souls, leading

souls to the light and receiving them again.” It is stated that “he

raises the dead, he shows forth the longed-for light of the sun to those

who see, whose holy tombs contain multitudes of sacred books”; and

again, “we never can escape him, he will save us, after death we shall

still be the care of his providence.”[209]

The ceremonial burning of candles and the offering of ex-votos, that is

to say of small models of parts of the human body in need of succour,

was a part of the worship of the Serapeum. Isis attracted many devotees,

who vowed their lives to her. Her images stood in the temple, crowned as

the Queen of Heaven and bearing the infant Horus in her arms. The

candles flared and guttered before her, and the wax ex-votos hung about

the shrine. The novice was put through a long and careful preparation,

he took vows of celibacy, and when he was initiated his head was shaved

and he was clad in a linen garment....

[Illustration: Serapis]

In this worship of Serapis, which spread very widely throughout the

civilized world in the third and second centuries B.C., we see the most

remarkable anticipations of usages and forms of expression that were

destined to dominate the European world throughout the Christian era.

The essential idea, the living spirit, of Christianity was, as we shall

presently show, a new thing in the history of the mind and will of man;

but the garments of ritual and symbol and formula that Christianity has

worn, and still in many countries wears to this day, were certainly

woven in the cult and temples of Jupiter, Serapis, and Isis that spread

now from Alexandria throughout the civilized world in the age of

theocrasia in the second and first centuries before Christ.[210]

XXVI

THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM[211]

§ 1. _The Story of Gautama._ § 2. _Teaching and Legend in

Conflict._ § 3. _The Gospel of Gautama Buddha._ § 4. _Buddhism and

Asoka._[212] § 5. _Two Great Chinese Teachers._ § 6. _The

Corruptions of Buddhism._ § 7. _The Present Range of Buddhism._

§ 1

It is interesting to turn from the mental and moral activities of Athens

and Alexandria, and the growth of human ideas in the Mediterranean

world, to the almost entirely separate intellectual life of India. Here

was a civilization which from the first seems to have grown up upon its

own roots and with a character of its own. It was cut off from the

civilizations to the west and to the east by vast mountain barriers and

desert regions. The Aryan tribes who had come down into the peninsula

soon lost touch with their kindred to the west and north, and developed

upon lines of their own. This was more particularly the case with those

who had passed on into the Ganges country and beyond. They found a

civilization already scattered over India, the Dravidian civilization.

This had arisen independently, just as the Sumerian, Cretan, and

Egyptian civilizations seem to have arisen, out of that widespread

development of the Neolithic culture, the heliolithic culture, whose

characteristics we have already described. They revived and changed this

Dravidian civilization much as the Greeks did the Ægean or the Semites

the Sumerian.

These Indian Aryans were living under different conditions from those

that prevailed to the north-west. They were living in a warmer climate,

in which a diet of beef and fermented liquor was destructive; they were

forced, therefore, to a generally vegetarian dietary, and the prolific

soil, almost unasked, gave them all the food they needed. There was no

further reason for them to wander; the crops and seasons were

trustworthy. They wanted little clothing or housing. They wanted so

little that trade was undeveloped. There was still land for every one

who desired to cultivate a patch--and a little patch sufficed. Their

political life was simple and comparatively secure; no great conquering

powers had arisen as yet in India, and her natural barriers sufficed to

stop the early imperialisms to the west of her and to the east.

Thousands of comparatively pacific little village republics and

chieftainships were spread over the land. There was no sea life, there

were no pirate raiders, no strange traders. One might write a history of

India coming down to four hundred years ago and hardly mention the sea.

The history of India for many centuries had been happier, less fierce,

and more dreamlike than any other history. The noblemen, the rajahs,

hunted; life was largely made up of love stories. Here and there a

maharajah arose amidst the rajahs and built a city, caught and tamed

many elephants, slew many tigers, and left a tradition of his splendour

and his wonderful processions.

It was somewhen between 500 and 600 B.C., when Crœsus was flourishing

in Lydia and Cyrus was preparing to snatch Babylon from Nabonidus, that

the founder of Buddhism was born in India. He was born in a small

republican tribal community in the north of Bengal under the Himalayas,

in what is now overgrown jungle country on the borders of Nepal. The

little state was ruled by a family, the Sakya clan, of which this man,

Siddhattha Gautama, was a member. Siddhattha was his personal name, like

Caius or John; Gautama, or Gôtama, his family name, like Cæsar or Smith;

Sakya his clan name, like Julius. The institution of caste was not yet

fully established in India, and the Brahmins, though they were

privileged and influential, had not yet struggled to the head of the

system; but there were already strongly marked class distinctions and a

practically impermeable partition between the noble Aryans and the

darker common people. Gautama belonged to the former race. His

teaching, we may note, was called the Aryan Path, the Aryan Truth.

It is only within the last half-century that the increasing study of the

Pali language, in which most of the original sources were written, has

given the world a real knowledge of the life and actual thought of

Gautama. Previously his story was overlaid by monstrous accumulations of

legend, and his teaching violently misconceived. But now we have a very

human and understandable account of him.

He was a good-looking, capable young man of fortune, and until he was

twenty-nine he lived the ordinary aristocratic life of his time. It was

not a very satisfying life intellectually. There was no literature

except the oral tradition of the Vedas, and that was chiefly monopolized

by the Brahmins; there was even less knowledge. The world was bound by

the snowy Himalayas to the north and spread indefinitely to the south.

The city of Benares, which had a king, was about a hundred miles away.

The chief amusements were hunting and love-making. All the good that

life seemed to offer, Gautama enjoyed. He was married at nineteen to a

beautiful cousin. For some years they remained childless. He hunted and

played and went about in his sunny world of gardens and groves and

irrigated rice-fields. And it was amidst this life that a great

discontent fell upon him. It was the unhappiness of a fine brain that

seeks employment. He lived amidst plenty and beauty, he passed from

gratification to gratification, and his soul was not satisfied. It was

as if he heard the destinies of the race calling to him. He felt that

the existence he was leading was not the reality of life, but a

holiday--a holiday that had gone on too long.

While he was in this mood he saw four things that served to point his

thoughts. He was driving on some excursion of pleasure, when he came

upon a man dreadfully broken down by age. The poor bent, enfeebled

creature struck his imagination. “Such is the way of life,” said Channa,

his charioteer, and “to that we must all come.” While this was yet in

his mind he chanced upon a man suffering horribly from some loathsome

disease. “Such is the way of life,” said Channa. The third vision was of

an unburied body, swollen, eyeless, mauled by passing birds and beasts

and altogether terrible. “That is the way of life,” said Channa.

The sense of disease and mortality, the insecurity and the

unsatisfactoriness of all happiness, descended upon the mind of Gautama.

And then he and Channa saw one of those wandering ascetics who already

existed in great numbers in India. These men lived under severe rules,

spending much time in meditation and in religious discussion. For many

men before Gautama in that land of uneventful sunshine had found life

distressing and mysterious. These ascetics were all supposed to be

seeking some deeper reality in life, and a passionate desire to do

likewise took possession of Gautama.

He was meditating upon this project, says the story, when the news was

brought to him that his wife had been delivered of his first-born son.

“This is another tie to break,” said Gautama.

He returned to the village amidst the rejoicings of his fellow clansmen.

There was a great feast and a Nautch dance to celebrate the birth of

this new tie, and in the night Gautama awoke in a great agony of spirit,

“like a man who is told that his house is on fire.” In the ante-room the

dancing girls were lying in strips of darkness and moonlight. He called

Channa, and told him to prepare his horse. Then he went softly to the

threshold of his wife’s chamber, and saw her by the light of a little

oil lamp, sleeping sweetly, surrounded by flowers, with his infant son

in her arm. He felt a great craving to take up the child in one first

and last embrace before he departed, but the fear of waking his wife

prevented him, and at last he turned away and went out into the bright

Indian moonshine to Channa waiting with the horses, and mounted and

stole away.

As he rode through the night with Channa, it seemed to him that Mara,

the Tempter of Mankind, filled the sky and disputed with him. “Return,”

said Mara, “and be a king, and I will make you the greatest of kings. Go

on, and you will fail. Never will I cease to dog your footsteps. Lust or

malice or anger will betray you at last in some unwary moment; sooner or

later you will be mine.”

[Illustration: Map to illustrate the RISE of BUDDHISM

[Patna-Pataliputra, Asoka’s capital.]]

Very far they rode that night, and in the morning he stopped outside the

lands of his clan, and dismounted beside a sandy river. There he cut

off his flowing locks with his sword, removed all his ornaments, and

sent them and his horse and sword back to his house by Channa. Then

going on he presently met a ragged man and exchanged clothes with him,

and so having divested himself of all worldly entanglements, he was free

to pursue his search after wisdom. He made his way southward to a resort

of hermits and teachers in a hilly spur running into Bengal northward

from the Vindhya Mountains, close to the town of Rajgir. There a number

of wise men lived in a warren of caves, going into the town for their

simple supplies and imparting their knowledge by word of mouth to such

as cared to come to them.

This instruction must have been very much in the style of the Socratic

discussions that were going on in Athens a couple of centuries later.

Gautama became versed in all the metaphysics of his age. But his acute

intelligence was dissatisfied with the solutions offered him.

The Indian mind has always been disposed to believe that power and

knowledge may be obtained by extreme asceticism, by fasting,

sleeplessness, and self-torment, and these ideas Gautama now put to the

test. He betook himself with five disciple companions to the jungle in a

gorge in the Vindhya Mountains, and there he gave himself up to fasting

and terrible penances. His fame spread, “like the sound of a great bell

hung in the canopy of the skies.”[213] But it brought him no sense of

truth achieved. One day he was walking up and down, trying to think in

spite of his enfeebled state. Suddenly he staggered and fell

unconscious. When he recovered, the preposterousness of these semi-magic

ways of attempting wisdom was plain to him.

He amazed and horrified his five companions by demanding ordinary food

and refusing to continue his self-mortifications. He had realized that

whatever truth a man may reach is reached best by a nourished brain in a

healthy body. Such a conception was absolutely foreign to the ideas of

the land and age. His disciples deserted him, and went off in a

melancholy state to Benares. The boom of the great bell ceased. Gautama

the wonderful had fallen.

For a time Gautama wandered alone, the loneliest figure in history,

battling for light.

When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its

advances, it secures its positions step by step, with but little

realization of the gains it has made, until suddenly, with an effect of

abrupt illumination, it realizes its victory. So it would seem it

happened to Gautama. He had seated himself under a great tree by the

side of a river to eat, when this sense of clear vision came to him. It

seemed to him that he saw life plain. He is said to have sat all day and

all night in profound thought, and then he rose up to impart his vision

to the world.

§ 2

Such is the plain story of Gautama as we gather it from a comparison of

early writings. But common men must have their cheap marvels and

wonders.

It is nothing to them that this little planet should at last produce

upon its surface a man thinking of the past and the future and the

essential nature of existence. And so we must have this sort of thing by

some worthy Pali scribe, making the most of it:

“When the conflict began between the Saviour of the World and the Prince

of Evil a thousand appalling meteors fell.... Rivers flowed back towards

their sources; peaks and lofty mountains where countless trees had grown

for ages rolled crumbling to the earth.... the sun enveloped itself in

awful darkness, and a host of headless spirits filled the air.”[214]

Of which phenomena history has preserved no authentication. Instead we

have only the figure of a lonely man walking towards Benares.

Extraordinary attention has been given to the tree under which Gautama

had this sense of mental clarity. It was a tree of the fig genus, and

from the first it was treated with peculiar veneration. It was called

the Bo Tree. It has long since perished, but close at hand lives another

great tree which may be its descendant, and in Ceylon there grows to

this day a tree, the oldest historical tree in the world, which we know

certainly to have been planted as a cutting from the Bo Tree in the year

245 B.C. From that time to this it has been carefully tended and

watered; its great branches are supported by pillars, and the earth has

been terraced up about it so that it has been able to put out fresh

roots continually. It helps us to realize the shortness of all human

history to see so many generations spanned by the endurance of one

single tree. Gautama’s disciples unhappily have cared more for the

preservation of his tree than of his thought, which from the first they

misconceived and distorted.

At Benares Gautama sought out his five pupils, who were still leading

the ascetic life. There is an account of their hesitation to receive him

when they saw him approaching. He was a backslider. But there was some

power of personality in him that prevailed over their coldness, and he

made them listen to his new convictions. For five days the discussion

was carried on. When he had at last convinced them that he was now

enlightened, they hailed him as the Buddha. There was already in those

days a belief in India that at long intervals Wisdom returned to the

earth and was revealed to mankind through a chosen person known as the

Buddha. According to Indian belief there have been many such Buddhas;

Gautama Buddha is only the latest one of a series. But it is doubtful if

he himself accepted that title or recognized that theory. In his

discourses he never called himself the Buddha.

He and his recovered disciples then formed a sort of Academy in the Deer

Park at Benares. They made themselves huts, and accumulated other

followers to the number of threescore or more. In the rainy season they

remained in discourse at this settlement, and during the dry weather

they dispersed about the country, each giving his version of the new

teachings. All their teaching was done, it would seem, by word of mouth.

There was probably no writing yet in India at all. We must remember that

in the time of Buddha it is doubtful if even the Iliad had been

committed to writing. Probably the Mediterranean alphabet, which is the

basis of most Indian scripts, had not yet reached India. The master,

therefore, worked out and composed pithy and brief verses, aphorisms,

and lists of “points,” and these were expanded in the discourse of his

disciples. It greatly helped them to have these points and aphorisms

numbered. The modern mind is apt to be impatient of the tendency of

Indian thought to a numerical statement of things, the Eightfold Path,

the Four Truths, and so on, but this enumeration was a mnemonic

necessity in an undocumented world.

§ 3

The fundamental teaching of Gautama, as it is now being made plain to us

by the study of original sources, is clear and simple and in the

closest harmony with modern ideas. It is beyond all dispute the

achievement of one of the most penetrating intelligences the world has

ever known.

We have what are almost certainly the authentic heads of his discourse

to the five disciples which embodies his essential doctrine. All the

miseries and discontents of life he traces to insatiable selfishness.

Suffering, he teaches, is due to the craving individuality, to the

torment of greedy desire. Until a man has overcome every sort of

personal craving his life is trouble and his end sorrow. There are three

principal forms the craving of life takes, and all are evil. The first

is the desire to gratify the senses, sensuousness. The second is the

desire for personal immortality. The third is the desire for prosperity,

worldliness. All these must be overcome--that is to say, a man must no

longer be living for himself--before life can become serene. But when

they are indeed overcome and no longer rule a man’s life, when the first

personal pronoun has vanished from his private thoughts, then he has

reached the higher wisdom, Nirvana, serenity of soul. For Nirvana does

not mean, as many people wrongly believe, extinction, but the extinction

of the futile personal aims that necessarily make life base or pitiful

or dreadful.

Now here, surely, we have the completest analysis of the problem of the

soul’s peace. Every religion that is worth the name, every philosophy,

warns us to lose ourselves in something greater than ourselves.

“Whosoever would save his life, shall lose it;” there is exactly the

same lesson.

The teaching of history, as we are unfolding it in this book, is

strictly in accordance with this teaching of Buddha. There is, as we are

seeing, no social order, no security, no peace or happiness, no

righteous leadership or kingship, unless men lose themselves in

something greater than themselves. The study of biological progress

again reveals exactly the same process--the merger of the narrow globe

of the individual experience in a wider being (compare what has been

said in Chaps. XII and XVIII). To forget oneself in greater interests is

to escape from a prison.

The self-abnegation must be complete. From the point of view of Gautama,

that dread of death, that greed for an endless continuation of his mean

little individual life which drove the Egyptian and those who learnt

from him with propitiations and charms into the temples, was as mortal

and ugly and evil a thing as lust or avarice or hate. The religion of

Gautama is flatly opposite to the “immortality” religions. And his

teaching is set like flint against asceticism, as a mere attempt to win

personal power by personal pains.

But when we come to the rule of life, the Aryan Path, by which we are to

escape from the threefold base cravings that dishonour human life, then

the teaching is not so clear. It is not so clear for one very manifest

reason, Gautama had no knowledge nor vision of history; he had no clear

sense of the vast and many-sided adventure of life opening out in space

and time. His mind was confined within the ideas of his age and people,

and their minds were shaped into notions of perpetual recurrence, of

world following world and of Buddha following Buddha, a stagnant

circling of the universe. The idea of mankind as a great Brotherhood

pursuing an endless destiny under the God of Righteousness, the idea

that was already dawning upon the Semitic consciousness in Babylon at

this time, did not exist in his world. Yet his account of the Eightfold

Path is, nevertheless, within these limitations, profoundly wise.

Let us briefly recapitulate the eight elements of the Aryan Path. First,

Right Views; Gautama placed the stern examination of views and ideas,

the insistence upon _truth_ as the first research of his followers.

There was to be no clinging to tawdry superstitions. He condemned, for

instance, the prevalent belief in the transmigration of souls. In a

well-known early Buddhist dialogue there is a destructive analysis of

the idea of an enduring individual soul. Next to Right Views came Right

Aspirations; because nature abhors a vacuum, and since base cravings are

to be expelled, other desires must be encouraged--love for the service

of others, desire to do and secure justice and the like. Primitive and

uncorrupted Buddhism aimed not at the destruction of desire, but at the

change of desire. Devotion to science and art, or to the betterment of

things manifestly falls into harmony with the Buddhistic Right

Aspirations, provided such aims are free from jealousy or the craving

for fame. Right Speech, Right Conduct, and Right Livelihood, need no

expansion here. Sixthly in this list came Right Effort, for Gautama had

no toleration for good intentions and slovenly application; the disciple

had to keep a keenly critical eye upon his activities. The seventh

element of the path, Right Mindfulness, is the constant guard against a

lapse into personal feeling or glory for whatever is done or not done.

And, finally, comes Right Rapture, which seems to be aimed against the

pointless ecstasies of the devout, such witless gloryings, for instance,

as those that went to the jingle of the Alexandrian sistrum.

We will not discuss here the Buddhistic doctrine of _Karma_, because it

belongs to a world of thought that is passing away. The good or evil of

every life was supposed to determine the happiness or misery of some

subsequent life, that was in some inexplicable way identified with its

predecessor. Nowadays we realize that a life goes on in its consequences

for ever, but we find no necessity to suppose that any particular life

resumes again. The Indian mind was full of the idea of cyclic

recurrence; everything was supposed to come round again. This is a very

natural supposition for men to make; so things seem to be until we

analyze them. Modern science has made clear to us that there is no such

exact recurrence as we are apt to suppose; every day is by an

infinitesimal quantity a little longer than the day before; no

generation repeats the previous generation precisely; history never

repeats itself; change, we realize now, is inexhaustible; all things are

eternally new. But these differences between our general ideas and those

Buddha must have possessed need not in any way prevent us from

appreciating the unprecedented wisdom, the goodness, and the greatness

of this plan of an emancipated life as Gautama laid it down somewhen in

the sixth century before Christ.

And if he failed in theory to gather together all the wills of the

converted into the one multifarious activity of our race battling

against death and deadness in time and space, he did in practice direct

his own life and that of all his immediate disciples into one

progressive adventure, which was to preach and spread the doctrine and

methods of Nirvana or soul-serenity throughout our fevered world. For

them at least his teaching was complete and full. But all men cannot

preach or teach; doctrine is but one of many of the functions of life

that are fundamentally righteous. To the modern mind it seems at least

equally acceptable that a man may, though perhaps against greater

difficulties, cultivate the soil, rule a city, make roads, build houses,

construct engines, or seek and spread knowledge, in perfect

self-forgetfulness and serenity. As much was inherent in Gautama’s

teaching, but the stress was certainly laid upon the teaching itself,

and upon withdrawal from rather than upon the ennoblement of the

ordinary affairs of men.

In certain other respects this primitive Buddhism differed from any of

the religions we have hitherto considered. It was primarily a religion

of conduct, not a religion of observances and sacrifices. It had no

temples, and since it had no sacrifices it had no sacred order of

priests. Nor had it any theology. It neither asserted nor denied the

reality of the innumerable and often grotesque gods who were worshipped

in India at that time. It passed them by.

§ 4

From the very first this new teaching was misconceived. One corruption

was perhaps inherent in its teaching. Because the world of men had as

yet no sense of the continuous progressive effort of life, it was very

easy to slip from the idea of renouncing self to the idea of renouncing

active life. As Gautama’s own experiences had shown, it is easier to

flee from this world than from self. His early disciples were strenuous

thinkers and teachers, but the lapse into mere monastic seclusion was a

very easy one, particularly easy in the climate of India, where an

extreme simplicity of living is convenient and attractive, and exertion

more laborious than anywhere else in the world.

And it was early the fate of Gautama, as it has been the fate of most

religious founders since his days, to be made into a wonder by his less

intelligent disciples in their efforts to impress the outer world. We

have already noted how one devout follower could not but believe that

the moment of the master’s mental irradiation must necessarily have been

marked by an epileptic fit of the elements. This is one small sample of

the vast accumulation of vulgar marvels that presently sprang up about

the memory of Gautama.

There can be no doubt that for the great multitude of human beings then

as now the mere idea of an emancipation from self is a very difficult

one to grasp. It is probable that even among the teachers Buddha was

sending out from Benares there were many who did not grasp it and still

less were able to convey it to their hearers. Their teaching quite

naturally took on the aspect of salvation not from oneself--that idea

was beyond them--but from misfortunes and sufferings here and hereafter.

In the existing superstitions of the people, and especially in the idea

of the transmigration of the soul after death, though this idea was

contrary to the Master’s own teaching, they found stuff of fear they

could work upon. They urged virtue upon the people lest they should live

again in degraded or miserable forms, or fall into some one of the

innumerable hells of torment with which the Brahminical teachers had

already familiarized their minds. They represented Buddha as the saviour

from almost unlimited torment.

There seems to be no limit to the lies that honest but stupid disciples

will tell for the glory of their master and for what they regard as the

success of their propaganda. Men who would scorn to tell a lie in

everyday life will become unscrupulous cheats and liars when they have

given themselves up to propagandist work; it is one of the perplexing

absurdities of our human nature. Such honest souls, for most of them

were indubitably honest, were presently telling their hearers of the

miracles that attended the Buddha’s birth--they no longer called him

Gautama, because that was too familiar a name--of his youthful feats of

strength, of the marvels of his everyday life, winding up with a sort of

illumination of his body at the moment of death. Of course it was

impossible to believe that Buddha was the son of a mortal father. He was

miraculously conceived through his mother dreaming of a beautiful white

elephant! Previously he had himself been a marvellous elephant with six

tusks; he had generously given them all to a needy hunter--and even

helped him to saw them off. And so on.

Moreover, a theology grew up about Buddha. He was discovered to be a

god. He was one of a series of divine beings, the Buddhas. There was an

undying “Spirit of all the Buddhas”; there was a great series of Buddhas

past and Buddhas (or Buddisatvas) yet to come. But we cannot go further

into these complications of Asiatic theology. “Under the overpowering

influence of these sickly imaginations the moral teachings of Gautama

have been almost hid from view. The theories grew and flourished; each

new step, each new hypothesis, demanded another; until the whole sky was

filled with forgeries of the brain, and the nobler and simpler lessons

of the founder of the religion were smothered beneath the glittering

mass of metaphysical subtleties.”[215]

[Illustration: Hariti (painting from Chinese Turkestan, 6th Cent'y.

A.D.)

[after Foucher]]

In the third century B.C. Buddhism was gaining wealth and power, and the

little groups of simple huts in which the teachers of the Order gathered

in the rainy season were giving place to substantial monastic buildings.

To this period belong the beginnings of Buddhistic art. Now if we

remember how recent was the adventure of Alexander, that all the Punjab

was still under Seleucid rule, that all India abounded with Greek

adventurers, and that there was still quite open communication by sea

and land with Alexandria, it is no great wonder to find that this early

Buddhist art was strongly Greek in character, and that the new

Alexandrian cult of Serapis and Isis was extraordinarily influential in

its development.

The kingdom of Gandhara on the northwest frontier near Peshawar, which

flourished in the third century B.C., was a typical meeting-place of

the Hellenic and Indian worlds. Here are to be found the earliest

Buddhist sculptures, and interwoven with them are figures which are

recognizably the figures of Serapis and Isis and Horus already worked

into the legendary net that gathered about Buddha. No doubt the Greek

artists who came to Gandhara were loath to relinquish a familiar theme.

But Isis, we are told, is no longer Isis but Hariti, a pestilence

goddess whom Buddha converted and made benevolent. Foucher traces Isis

from this centre into China, but here other influences were also at work

and the story becomes too complex for us to disentangle in this

_Outline_.[216] China had a Taoist deity, the Holy Mother, the Queen of

Heaven, who took on the name (originally a male name) of Kuan-yin and

who came to resemble the Isis figure very closely. The Isis figures, we

feel, must have influenced the treatment of Kuan-yin. Like Isis she was

also Queen of the Seas, Stella Maris. In Japan she was called Kwannon.

There seems to have been a constant exchange of the outer forms of

religion between east and west. We read in Hue’s Travels how perplexing

he and his fellow missionary found this possession of a common tradition

of worship. “The cross,” he says, “the mitre, the dalmatica, the cope,

which the Grand Lamas wear on their journeys, or when they are

performing some ceremony out of the temple; the service with double

choirs, the psalmody, the exorcisms, the censer, suspended from five

chains, which you can open or close at pleasure; the benedictions given

by the Lamas by extending the right hand over the heads of the faithful;

the chaplet, ecclesiastical celibacy, spiritual retirement, the worship

of the saints, the fasts, the processions, the litanies, the holy water,

all these are analogies between the Buddhists and ourselves.”[217]

[Illustration: CHINESE IMAGE OF KUAN-YIN.]

The cult and doctrine of Gautama, gathering corruptions and variations

from Brahminism and Hellenism alike, was spread throughout India by an

increasing multitude of teachers in the fourth and third centuries B.C.

For some generations at least it retained much of the moral beauty and

something of the simplicity of the opening phase. Many people who have

no intellectual grasp upon the meaning of self-abnegation and

disinterestedness have nevertheless the ability to appreciate a

splendour in the reality of these qualities. Early Buddhism was

certainly producing noble lives, and it is not only through reason that

the latent response to nobility is aroused in our minds. It spread

rather in spite of than because of the concessions that it made to

vulgar imaginations. It spread because many of the early Buddhists were

sweet and gentle, helpful and noble and admirable people, who compelled

belief in their sustaining faith.

Quite early in its career Buddhism came into conflict with the growing

pretensions of the Brahmins. As we have already noted, this priestly

caste was still only struggling to dominate Indian life in the days of

Gautama. They had already great advantages. They had the monopoly of

tradition and religious sacrifices. But their power was being challenged

by the development of kingship, for the men who became clanleaders and

kings were usually not of the Brahminical caste.

Kingship received an impetus from the Persian and Greek invasions of the

Punjab. We have already noted the name of King Porus whom, in spite of

his elephants, Alexander defeated and turned into a satrap. There came

also to the Greek camp upon the Indus a certain low-caste[218]

adventurer named Chandragupta Maurya, whom the Greeks called

Sandracottus, with a scheme for conquering the Ganges country. The

scheme was not welcome to the Macedonians, who were in revolt against

marching any further into India, and he had to fly the camp. He wandered

among the tribes upon the north-west frontier, secured their support,

and after Alexander had departed, overran the Punjab, ousting the

Macedonian representatives. He then conquered the Ganges country (321

B.C.), waged a successful war (303 B.C.) against Seleucus (Seleucus I)

when the latter attempted to recover the Punjab, and consolidated a

great empire reaching across all the plain of northern India from the

western to the eastern sea. And this King Chandragupta came into much

the same conflict with the growing power of the Brahmins, into the

conflict between crown and priesthood, that we have already noted as

happening in Babylonia and Egypt and China. He saw in the spreading

doctrine of Buddhism an ally against the growth of priestcraft and

caste. He supported and endowed the Buddhistic Order, and encouraged its

teachings.

He was succeeded by his son, who conquered Madras and was in turn

succeeded by Asoka (264 to 227 B.C.), one of the great monarchs of

history, whose dominions extended from Afghanistan to Madras. He is the

only military monarch on record who abandoned warfare after victory. He

had invaded Kalinga (255 B.C.), a country along the east coast of

Madras, perhaps with some intention of completing the conquest of the

tip of the Indian peninsula. The expedition was successful, but he was

disgusted by what he saw of the cruelties and horrors of war. He

declared, in certain inscriptions that still exist, that he would no

longer seek conquest by war, but by religion, and the rest of his life

was devoted to the spreading of Buddhism throughout the world.

He seems to have ruled his vast empire in peace and with great ability.

He was no mere religious fanatic. But in the year of his one and only

war he joined the Buddhist community as a layman, and some years later

he became a full member of the Order, and devoted himself to the

attainment of Nirvana by the Eightfold Path. How entirely compatible

that way of living then was with the most useful and beneficent

activities his life shows. Right Aspiration, Right Effort, and Right

Livelihood distinguished his career. He organized a great digging of

wells in India, and the planting of trees for shade. He appointed

officers for the supervision of charitable works. He founded hospitals

and public gardens. He had gardens made for the growing of medicinal

herbs. Had he had an Aristotle to inspire him, he would no doubt have

endowed scientific research upon a great scale. He created a ministry

for the care of the aborigines and subject races. He made provision for

the education of women. He made, he was the first monarch to make, an

attempt to educate his people into a common view of the ends and way of

life. He made vast benefactions to the Buddhist teaching orders, and

tried to stimulate them to a better study of their own literature. All

over the land he set up long inscriptions rehearsing the teaching of

Gautama, and it is the simple and human teaching and not the

preposterous accretions. Thirty-five of his inscriptions survive to this

day. Moreover, he sent missionaries to spread the noble and reasonable

teaching of his master throughout the world, to Kashmir, to Ceylon, to

the Seleucids, and the Ptolemies. It was one of these missions which

carried that cutting of the Bo Tree, of which we have already told, to

Ceylon.

[Illustration: Map to illustrate the spread of--Buddhism]

For eight and twenty years Asoka worked sanely for the real needs of

men. Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the

columns of history, their majesties and graciousnesses and serenities

and royal highnesses and the like, the name of Asoka shines, and shines

almost alone, a star. From the Volga to Japan his name is still

honoured. China, Tibet, and even India, though it has left his doctrine,

preserve the tradition of his greatness. More living men cherish his

memory to-day than have ever heard the names of Constantine or

Charlemagne.

§ 5

It is thought that the vast benefactions of Asoka finally corrupted

Buddhism by attracting to its Order great numbers of mercenary and

insincere adherents, but there can be no doubt that its rapid extension

throughout Asia was very largely due to his stimulus.

It made its way into Central Asia through Afghanistan and Turkestan, and

so reached China. Buddhist teaching had spread widely in China before

200 B.C.[219] Buddhism found there a popular and prevalent religion,

Taoism, a development of very ancient and primitive magic and occult

practices. It was reorganized as a distinctive cult by Chang Daoling in

the days of the Han dynasty. Tao means the Way, which corresponds

closely with the idea of the Aryan Path. The two religions spread side

by side and underwent similar changes, so that nowadays their outward

practice is very similar. Buddhism also encountered Confucianism, which

was even less theological and even more a code of personal conduct. And

finally it encountered the teachings of Lao Tse, “anarchist,

evolutionist, pacifist, and moral philosopher,”[220] which were not so

much a religion as a philosophical rule of life. The teachings of this

Lao Tse were later to become incorporated with the Taoist religion by

Chen Tuan, the founder of modern Taoism.

Confucius, the founder of Confucianism, like Lao Tse, the great southern

teacher (whom he met and admired), and Gautama, lived also in the sixth

century B.C. His life has some interesting parallelisms with that of

some of the more political of the Greek philosophers of the fifth and

fourth. The sixth century B.C. falls into the period assigned by Chinese

historians to the Chow Dynasty, but in those days the rule of that

dynasty had become little more than nominal; the emperor conducted the

traditional sacrifices of the Son of Heaven, and received a certain

formal respect. Even his nominal empire was not a sixth part of the

China of to-day. In Chapter XVI we have already glanced at the state of

affairs in China at this time; practically China was a multitude of

warring states open to the northern barbarians. Confucius was a subject

in one of those states, Lu; he was of aristocratic birth, but poor; and,

after occupying various official positions, he set up a sort of Academy

in Lu for the discovery and imparting of Wisdom. And we also find

Confucius travelling from state to state in China, seeking a prince who

would make him his counsellor and become the centre of a reformed world.

Plato, two centuries later, in exactly the same spirit, went as advisor

to the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, and we have already noted the

attitudes of Aristotle and Isocrates towards Philip of Macedonia.

The teaching of Confucius centred upon the idea of a noble life which he

embodied in a standard or ideal, the Aristocratic Man. This phrase is

often translated into English as the Superior Person, but as “superior”

and “person,” like “respectable” and “genteel,” have long become

semi-humorous terms of abuse, this rendering is not fair to

Confucianism. He did present to his time the ideal of a devoted public

man. The public side was very important to him. He was far more of a

constructive political thinker than Gautama or Lao Tse. His mind was

full of the condition of China, and he sought to call the Aristocratic

Man into existence very largely in order to produce the noble state. One

of his sayings may be quoted here: “It is impossible to withdraw from

the world, and associate with birds and beasts that have no affinity

with us. With whom should I associate but with suffering men? The

disorder that prevails is what requires my efforts. If right principles

ruled through the kingdom, there would be no necessity for me to change

its state.”

The political basis of his teaching seems to be characteristic of

Chinese moral ideas; there is a much directer reference to the State

than is the case with most Indian and European moral and religious

doctrine. For a time he was appointed magistrate in Chung-tu, a city of

the dukedom of Lu, and here he sought to regulate life to an

extraordinary extent, to subdue every relationship and action indeed to

the rule of an elaborate etiquette. “Ceremonial in every detail, such as

we are wont to see only in the courts of rulers and the households of

high dignitaries, became obligatory on the people at large and all

matters of daily life were subject to rigid rule. Even the food which

the different classes of people might eat was regulated; males and

females were kept apart in the streets; even the thickness of coffins

and the shape and situation of graves were made the subject of

regulations.”[221]

This is all, as people say, very Chinese. No other people have ever

approached moral order and social stability through the channel of

manners. Yet in China, at any rate, the methods of Confucius have had an

enormous effect, and no nation in the world to-day has such a universal

tradition of decorum and self-restraint.

Later on the influence of Confucius over his duke was undermined, and he

withdrew again into private life. His last days were saddened by the

deaths of some of his most promising disciples. “No intelligent ruler,”

he said, “arises to take me as his master, and my time has come to die.”

...

But he died to live. Says Hirth, “There can be no doubt that Confucius

has had a greater influence on the development of the Chinese national

character than many emperors taken together. He is, therefore, one of

the essential figures to be considered in connection with any history of

China. That he could influence his nation to such a degree was, it

appears to me, due more to the peculiarity of the nation than to that of

his own personality. Had he lived in any other part of the world, his

name would perhaps be forgotten. As we have seen, he had formed his

character and his personal views on man’s life from a careful study of

documents closely connected with the moral philosophy cultivated by

former generations. What he preached to his contemporaries was,

therefore, not all new to them; but, having himself, in the study of old

records, heard the dim voice of the sages of the past, he became, as it

were, the megaphone phonograph through which were expressed to the

nation those views which he had derived from the early development of

the nation itself.... The great influence of Confucius’s personality on

national life in China was due not only to his writings and his

teachings as recorded by others, but also to his doings. His personal

character, as described by his disciples and in the accounts of later

writers, some of which may be entirely legendary, has become the pattern

for millions of those who are bent on imitating the outward manners of a

great man.... Whatever he did in public was regulated to the minutest

detail by ceremony. This was no invention of his own, since ceremonial

life had been cultivated many centuries before Confucius; but his

authority and example did much to perpetuate what he considered

desirable social practices.”

The Chinese speak of Buddhism and the doctrines of Lao Tse and Confucius

as the Three Teachings. Together they constitute the basis and point of

departure of all later Chinese thought. Their thorough study is a

necessary preliminary to the establishment of any real intellectual and

moral community between the great people of the East and the Western

world.[222]

There are certain things to be remarked in common of all these three

teachers, of whom Gautama was indisputably the greatest and profoundest,

whose doctrines to this day dominate the thought of the great majority

of human beings; there are certain features in which their teaching

contrasts with the thoughts and feelings that were soon to take

possession of the western world. Primarily they are personal and

tolerant doctrines; they are doctrines of a Way, of a Path, of a

Nobility, and not doctrines of a church or a general rule. And they

offer nothing either for or against the existence and worship of the

current gods. The Athenian philosophers, it is to be noted, had just the

same theological detachment; Socrates was quite willing to bow politely

or sacrifice formally to almost any divinity,--reserving his private

thoughts. This attitude is flatly antagonistic to the state of mind that

was growing up in the Jewish communities of Judea, Egypt, and Babylonia,

in which the thought of the one God was first and foremost. Neither

Gautama nor Lao Tse nor Confucius had any inkling of this idea of a

_jealous_ God, a God who would have “none other gods,” a God of terrible

Truth, who would not tolerate any lurking belief in magic, witchcraft,

or old customs, or any sacrificing to the god-king or any trifling with

the stern unity of things.

[Illustration: Vishnu Brahma Siva]

§ 6

The intolerance of the Jewish mind did keep its essential faith clear

and clean. The theological disregard of the great Eastern teachers,

neither assenting nor denying, did on the other hand permit elaborations

of explanation and accumulations of ritual from the very beginning.

Except for Gautama’s insistence upon Right Views, which was easily

disregarded, there was no _self-cleansing_ element in either Buddhism,

Taoism, or Confucianism. There was no effective prohibition of

superstitious practices, spirit raising, incantations, prostrations, and

supplementary worships. At an early stage a process of encrustation

began, and continued. The new faiths caught almost every disease of the

corrupt religions they sought to replace; they took over the idols and

the temples, the altars and the censers.

Tibet to-day is a Buddhistic country, yet Gautama, could he return to

earth, might go from end to end of Tibet seeking his own teaching in

vain. He would find that most ancient type of human ruler, a god-king,

enthroned, the Dalai Lama, the “living Buddha.” At Lhassa he would find

a huge temple filled with priests, abbots, and lamas--he whose only

buildings were huts and who made no priests--and above a high altar he

would behold a huge golden idol, which he would learn was called

“Gautama Buddha”! He would hear services intoned before this divinity,

and certain precepts, which would be dimly familiar to him, murmured as

responses. Bells, incense, prostrations, would play their part in these

amazing proceedings. At one point in the service a bell would be rung

and a mirror lifted up, while the whole congregation, in an access of

reverence, bowed lower....

About this Buddhist countryside he would discover a number of curious

little mechanisms, little wind-wheels and water-wheels spinning, on

which brief prayers were inscribed. Every time these things spin, he

would learn, it counts as a prayer. “To whom?” he would ask. Moreover,

there would be a number of flagstaffs in the land carrying beautiful

silk flags, silk flags which bore the perplexing inscription, “_Om Mani

padme hum_,” “the jewel is in the lotus.” Whenever the flag flaps, he

would learn, it was a prayer also, very beneficial to the gentleman who

paid for the flag and to the land generally. Gangs of workmen,

employed by pious persons, would be going about the country cutting this

precious formula on cliff and stone. And this, he would realize at last,

was what the world had made of his religion! Beneath this gaudy glitter

was buried the Aryan Way to serenity of soul.[223]

[Illustration: Krishna

Kali, as an impersonation of Vengeance

Ganesa]

We have already noted the want of any progressive idea in primitive

Buddhism. In that again it contrasted with Judaism. The idea of a

Promise gave to Judaism a quality no previous or contemporary religion

displayed; it made Judaism historical and dramatic. It justified its

fierce intolerance because it pointed to an aim. In spite of the truth

and profundity of the psychological side of Gautama’s teaching, Buddhism

stagnated and corrupted for the lack of that directive idea. Judaism, it

must be confessed, in its earlier phases, entered but little into the

souls of men; it let them remain lustful, avaricious, worldly, or

superstitious; but because of its persuasion of a promise and of a

divine leadership to serve divine ends, it remained in comparison with

Buddhism bright and expectant, like a cared-for sword.

§ 7

For some time Buddhism flourished in India. But Brahminism, with its

many gods and its endless variety of cults, always flourished by its

side, and the organization of the Brahmins grew more powerful, until at

last they were able to turn upon this caste-denying cult and oust it

from India altogether. The story of that struggle is not to be told

here; there were persecutions and reactions, but by the eleventh

century, except for Orissa, Buddhist teaching was extinct in India. Much

of its gentleness and charity had, however, become incorporated with

Brahminism.

Over great areas of the world, as our map has shown, it still survives;

and it is quite possible that in contact with western science, and

inspired by the spirit of history, the original teaching of Gautama,

revived and purified, may yet play a large part in the direction of

human destiny.

But with the loss of India the Aryan Way ceased to rule the lives of any

Aryan peoples. It is curious to note that while the one great Aryan

religion is now almost exclusively confined to Mongolian peoples, the

Aryans themselves are under the sway of two religions, Christianity and

Islam, which are, as we shall see, essentially Semitic. And both

Buddhism and Christianity wear garments of ritual and formula that seem

to be derived through Hellenistic channels from that land of temples and

priestcraft, Egypt, and from the mentality of the brown Hamitic

peoples.

BOOK V

THE RISE AND COLLAPSE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

XXVII

THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS[224]

§ 1. _The Beginnings of the Latins._ § 2. _A New Sort of State._ §

3. _The Carthaginian Republic of Rich Men._ § 4. _The First Punic

War._ § 5. _Cato the Elder and the Spirit of Cato._ § 6. _The

Second Punic War._ § 7. _The Third Punic War._ § 8. _How the Punic

War Undermined Roman Liberty._ § 9. _Comparison of the Roman

Republic with a Modern State._

§ 1

It is now necessary to take up the history of the two great republics of

the Western Mediterranean, Rome and Carthage, and to tell how Rome

succeeded in maintaining for some centuries an empire even greater than

that achieved by the conquests of Alexander. But this new empire was, as

we shall try to make clear, a political structure differing very

profoundly in its nature from any of the great Oriental empires that had

preceded it. Great changes in the texture of human society and in the

conditions of social interrelations had been going on for some

centuries. The flexibility and transferability of money was becoming a

power and, like all powers in inexpert hands, a danger in human affairs.

It was altering the relations of rich men to the state and to their

poorer fellow citizens. This new empire, the Roman empire, unlike all

the preceding empires, was not the creation of a great conqueror. No

Sargon, no Thothmes, no Nebuchadnezzar, no Cyrus nor Alexander nor

Chandragupta, was its fountain head. It was made by a republic. It grew

by a kind of necessity through new concentrating and unifying forces

that were steadily gathering power in human affairs.

But first it is necessary to give some idea of the state of affairs in

Italy in the centuries immediately preceding the appearance of Rome in

the world’s story.

[Illustration: The WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN, 800-600 B.C.]

[Illustration: EARLY LATIUM]

Before 1200 B.C., that is to say before the rise of the Assyrian empire,

the siege of Troy, and the final destruction of Cnossos, but after the

time of Amenophis IV, Italy, like Spain, was probably still inhabited

mainly by dark white people of the more fundamental Iberian or

Mediterranean race.[225] This aboriginal population was probably a thin

and backward one. But already in Italy, as in Greece, the Aryans were

coming southward. By 1000 B.C. immigrants from the north had settled

over most of the north and centre of Italy, and, as in Greece, they had

inter-married with their darker predecessors and established a group of

Aryan languages, the Italian group, more akin to the Keltic

(Gaelic)[226] than to any other, of which the most interesting from the

historical point of view was that spoken by the Latin tribes in the

plains south and east of the river Tiber. Meanwhile the Greeks had been

settling down in Greece, and now they were taking to the sea and

crossing over to South Italy and Sicily and establishing themselves

there. Subsequently they established colonies along the French Riviera

and founded Marseilles upon the site of an older Phoenician colony.

Another interesting people also had come into Italy by sea. These were a

brownish sturdy people, to judge from the pictures they have left of

themselves; very probably they were a tribe of those Ægean “dark whites”

who were being driven out of Greece and Asia Minor and the islands in

between by the Greeks. We have already told the tale of Cnossos (Chapter

XVII) and of the settlement of the kindred Philistines in Palestine

(Chapter XXI, § 1). These Etruscans, as they were called in Italy, were

known even in ancient times to be of Asiatic origin, and it is tempting,

but probably unjustifiable, to connect this tradition with the Æneid,

the sham epic of the Latin poet Virgil, in which the Latin civilization

is ascribed to Trojan immigrants from Asia Minor. (But the Trojans

themselves were probably an Aryan people allied to the Phrygians.) These

Etruscan people conquered most of Italy north of the Tiber from the

Aryan tribes who were scattered over that country. Probably the

Etruscans ruled over a subjugated Italian population, so reversing the

state of affairs in Greece, in which the Aryans were uppermost.

Our map, which may be taken to represent roughly the state of affairs

about 750 B.C., also shows the establishments of the Phœnician

traders, of which Carthage was the chief, along the shores of Africa and

Spain.

Of all the peoples actually in Italy, the Etruscans were by far the most

civilized. They built sturdy fortresses of the Mycænean type of

architecture; they had a metal industry; they used imported Greek

pottery of a very fine type. The Latin tribes on the other side of the

Tiber were by comparison barbaric.

The Latins were still a rude farming people. The centre of their worship

was a temple to the tribal god Jupiter, upon the Alban Mount. There they

gathered for their chief festivals very much after the fashion of the

early tribal gathering we have already imagined at Avebury (Chapter

XII). This gathering-place was not a town. It was a high place of

assembly. There was no population permanently there. There were,

however, twelve townships in the Latin league. At one point upon the

Tiber there was a ford, and here there was a trade between Latins and

Etruscans. At this ford Rome had its beginnings. Traders assembled

there, and refugees from the twelve towns found an asylum and occupation

at this trading centre. Upon the seven hills near the ford a number of

settlements sprang up, which finally amalgamated into one city.

Most people have heard the story of the two brothers Romulus and Remus,

who founded Rome, and the legend of how they were exposed as infants and

sheltered and suckled by a wolf. Little value is now attached to this

tale by modern historians. The peninsula of Italy was not then the

smiling land of vineyards and olive orchards it has since become. It was

still a rough country of marsh and forest, in which the farmers grazed

their cattle and made their clearings. Rome, on the boundary between

Latin and Etruscan, was not in a very strong position for defence. At

first there were perhaps Latin kings in Rome, then it would seem the

city fell into the hands of Etruscan rulers whose tyrannous conduct led

at last to their expulsion, and Rome became a Latin-speaking republic.

The Etruscan kings were expelled from Rome in the sixth century B.C.,

while the successors of Nebuchadnezzar were ruling by the sufferance of

the Medes in Babylon, while Confucius was seeking a king to reform the

disorders of China, and while Gautama was teaching the Aryan Way to his

disciples at Benares.

[Illustration: Etruscan painting of a Ceremonial Burning of the Dead]