THE PERSIANS AND THE GREEKS
The Persians are a people that up to this point come into the story
hardly at all. Suddenly, out of the East, they come right into its
very centre and are the principal actors in it for a century or two.
After the break-up of the Assyrian power, the strongest nation in the
alliance that had done that breaking was the nation of the Medes.
The Medes and Persians were of the same race, different altogether
from the Semitic. They were of that great race called Aryan, or
Indo-European, that came from the high lands in the centre of Asia.
Probably their numbers so increased that they had to find new
country. They pressed down southward and westward, towards the sun
and the more fertile lands. They were hardy and accustomed to moving
about. It was no hardship to them to make migrations. They moved
with their wives and children, flocks and herds, and all their small
household goods. A great number pressed down into India. Another
big stream flowing towards the west came as far as the Babylonian
eastern border.
These Aryan people from the north-west were great riders. It is
thought that they introduced the horse to the Babylonians, and that
from the Babylonians it came to Egypt.
The country of Elam had been invaded, and its {111} power shattered,
by the Assyrians shortly before the break-up of their own empire, and
this shattering, together with the fighting between the Assyrians and
the alliance formed against them, gave the Persians (who inhabited a
country to the east called Iran, and especially the part of that
country called Persis) the chance of getting possession of Elam.
This they did, and established themselves in Susa, the old capital
city of the Elamites. Persia was actually the vassal of Media, until
Cyrus, who was the Persian king at Susa, led a revolt against them.
Within three years he had conquered and taken their capital, and
Media was now a subject state to its own late subject, Persia.
Thus they were, then, established in their power along the Eastern
boundary of Babylonia, which had now become the master empire by the
defeat of Assyria. Nevertheless Cyrus, at the head of the Persian
army, took this mighty Babylon without a battle! But he had to fight
some hard battles first. It seems that the Medes had made treaties
with their allies of Babylon and Egypt which the Persians did not
feel disposed to pay attention to. This aroused such opposition to
the Persians that an alliance of Babylonians and Egyptians with
Crœsus, king of Lydia in Asia Minor, and with the Spartans, was
formed against them.
[Sidenote: Spartan mercenaries]
Notice particularly those Spartans. Sparta was the southern state of
Greece, and this is the first appearance of Greece in our story. It
is very notable. These great nations of the East already thought so
well of the fighting qualities of the Greek soldiers, and especially
of the Spartan soldiers, that it was worth their while to bring them
over and pay them to fight for them. There seems to be little doubt
that they were mercenaries, that is to say, soldiers who were {112}
paid to fight and who fought for pay. But the alliance was of no
avail. Within the space of a few months, in the summer of 546 B.C.,
the whole of Asia Minor was in the Persian hands, right away to the
Mediterranean shore. It was not until six years later that Cyrus had
leisure to attend to Babylon itself; but when he did attend to it the
resistance was not great. The Babylonian king's allies had been
broken. Cyrus took Syria and Palestine also in his own reign, and
after his death his son Cambyses pressed on down into Egypt and
conquered that ancient land likewise. The victorious career of the
Persians was only checked when they came against the Ethiopians and
Nubians in farther Africa.
[Sidenote: The Persian conquest]
Even the shore of the Mediterranean did not stay their progress.
They won many of the Greek islands, including Cyprus and Samos. The
empires of Egypt and of Babylonia had been great, but this was
greater than both of them together. And those two had been rivals.
This of Persia seemed to be without a rival. It is little wonder
that the Persian ruler assumed the title of King of Kings. He ruled
right away into India. He ruled all that seemed to matter or to
count for anything; and it had all been accomplished in not much more
than twenty years from the time of the first revolt of Cyrus against
the lordship of the Medes. How was it done?
That is a question which must be answered in different ways. No one
answer is enough. There were several causes which worked together
for this astounding success of the Persians. But one of the chief
causes, if not the chief of all, was Cyrus. We cannot doubt that.
Throughout the whole of this greatest of great stories which I am
trying to tell you we shall {113} not meet with an actor bigger and
more glorious than this Cyrus. I doubt whether we meet with another
quite as big. For not only were the extent of country and the power
of the nations that he conquered extraordinarily great, but he made a
very extraordinary use of his conquests. He must have been a great
leader of men, a man whom others were ready to obey and follow; and
he must have been a great general, according to the ideas of what
generalship and the manœuvring of armies meant at that time; but
besides all that he must have been a very wise man and a very good
man. There can be little doubt that he was far more merciful to the
people that he conquered than any other conqueror that has come into
our story yet. He treated them with far greater kindness. That is
proof of his goodness.
Then he was very content to leave them their own institutions,
including their religions, so long as they were obedient to him as
their over-lord. That shows his wisdom, for it meant that the people
he conquered were content to be under him. Under Cyrus, the Jews who
were in exile at Babylon were allowed to go back to Jerusalem, and he
gave orders which helped them to the re-building of the Temple there.
It is thought that it was partly by the help of these Jews in Babylon
that he was able to take that strong city, as he did, without a
fight. But it is said that he had to divert part of the stream of
the Euphrates in order to do so; and it is certain that he had
already broken the Babylonian power before he took the capital.
He was able to show this kindness and consideration for the religion
of other peoples, because his own religion and that of his Persians
was a very enlightened one. I think we shall not do wrong in calling
it the {114} most enlightened religion of all that we find before
Christ came. It was the religion called Zoroastrianism, from the
name of its founder, Zoroaster, who is also called Zarathustra. It
was the religion of those Indo-European people of whom we have seen
one part pressing down south into India and another part pressing
westward. Zoroaster is thought to have been the author of the most
ancient portions of what is called the Zend-Avesta, which means the
Avesta, or Sacred Writings, written in the language of Zend. Zend
belongs to the Aryan group of the Indo-European family of languages,
from another branch of which our own native English language has been
derived.
[Sidenote: Zoroaster]
Zoroaster taught that there is one great and good god, Ormuzd, but
that there is also another supernatural being, Ahriman, the spirit of
evil. It is accordingly as men do the will of Ormuzd, that is to
say, do good acts, that they will have a happy life after death. If
the good acts a man has done in life here are more in number and
importance than his bad acts he will go to paradise; if the bad acts
are more than the good he will go to hell and suffer everlasting
punishment. Justice, acting justly, was what Zoroaster recognised as
the most important thing of all.
You will see at once how near this very ancient belief comes to that
which we hold now, and how much more enlightened it is than other
religions which we have noticed. It contains the idea of one god
supreme over all the universe--not only supreme for a single nation
or for one portion of the earth.
Fire, that mysterious, useful, kindly thing by which man warms
himself, by which he cooks his food, and which, nevertheless, is
capable of such horrible destruction, seems to have been associated
closely with the {115} power of the good god, Ormuzd. Fire was
therefore a sacred element.
The cow, another kindly thing, because of its use to man, was also
sacred. In the religion which Zoroaster was brought up in the cow
had been sacrificed to ward off evils--with the idea, already
noticed, that the more precious to man the thing that he sacrificed,
the more favour his sacrifice would win with the gods. Zoroaster
taught that it was impious to kill the cow.
It was with this fine and enlightened religion in their hearts, then,
that Cyrus and his Persians came conquering the western world. They
conquered, but they treated those that they conquered with justice,
according to the great teaching of Zoroaster. As they believed in
one god over all the earth, they might permit the worship of that god
to be carried on according to the various customs that they found
where they went, so long as those customs were not altogether base
and evil.
And these Persians were a kindly people. That is one of the causes
of their victories. In the great story we find this often
repeated--that a people living in a mountainous country, in a severe
climate, and in surroundings which make their lives difficult and
their food hard to get, come down on the inhabitants of a country
where the soil is more fertile, the climate milder, and life
altogether easier, and drive these easy-going people out before them
as if they were sheep running away before wolves. It is a happening
which teaches the lesson that the strongest, the most effective, kind
of men are those that are accustomed to hardship.
But it is quite clear from all we have seen that those whom the
Persians thus conquered were practised warriors. They were
constantly fighting. The {116} Persians, however, seem to have come
upon them with a kind of fighting to which they were not altogether
accustomed. The difference between their methods was chiefly that
the Persians were so much quicker in movement. They were fine
archers, and they were very fine horsemen. It was this last, their
horsemanship, which seems to have been one of the great secrets of
their success. They had archers both on horse and on foot, but on
horse especially. Their method was to dash down upon the enemy in a
swift attack, the cavalry opening out to let the archers on foot
shoot their arrows. Then, when they had harassed the enemy with this
swift charge, it was not their way to come to close quarters with
him, at all events at the first onset, but rather to retire as
quickly as they came on, to re-form, and to come back to the attack
again.
The enemy, on their retirement, if he did not know their way of
fighting, was rather apt to think that they were retreating
altogether and were giving up the attack. Then the enemy was
inclined to start off in pursuit. That was exactly what suited the
Persians, for it meant that when they returned for the next attack
they found the enemy more broken up than before and less able to
resist. It was by repeated onsets of this nature that they got the
formation of an opposing army knocked to pieces; and then, in a final
attack, this time pressed closely home, they might, and they
generally did, defeat him.
But if it was thus a new style of fighting that the Persians brought
with them from the east, they also found themselves encountering a
mode of defence against their attack which was strange to them. And
this mode of defence came from the west.
In that allied army which we saw the Persians {117} defeating in Asia
Minor--the army led by Crœsus, king of Lydia--the Persians were
victorious. They were so decisively victorious that Crœsus
himself was taken prisoner by them, and the whole strength seems to
have been knocked out of the alliance by that single blow. And in
the defeated army we saw that there were soldiers from Sparta, which
is, as you see on the map, in that most southern and almost detached
part of Greece which is called the Peloponnese. The Spartans,
therefore, were Greeks, and the Greeks were among those that had the
worst of it in this great battle. But, for all that, it was a
Grecian mode of fighting that made the best of all defences against
the Persian way of attacking. This mode of defence is what was
called the "phalanx."
[Sidenote: City states]
You have to understand that the word Greece in those days did not
mean a single nation so much as a collection of small states settled
close beside one another. The peoples of the different states were
for the most part of the same race, no doubt, just like the Semitic
peoples in Syria and Palestine. But they differed from each other in
their customs and their ways of government far more than the Semites
did. They were very often fighting among themselves and, again like
the Semites, found it very difficult to let their jealousy of each
other die down and to unite together for defence against a foreign
foe. The Spartans were the most warlike of all the Grecian states.
Their government was conducted in such a way as to make all the males
in the country fighters.
Their idea of fighting was as different as possible from that of the
Persians. They had few horse-soldiers. They were drawn up for
battle in a close deep formation, I suppose like what we should call
"a solid {118} square," and it was this solid square that was called
the phalanx. The troops were heavily armed, with shield, sword, and,
most important of all for receiving the charge of cavalry, with long
spears. You can imagine what a solid defence this would make against
the lightly armed cavalry of the Persians. The arrows would not
cause very serious loss to the armoured and shielded Greeks, and when
the Persians did finally push their charge home the spears would so
receive them that it would be like charging a gigantic porcupine.
[Illustration: GREEK WARRIOR.]
Of course all that would depend on the phalanx keeping its solid
formation. If its ranks got at all broken up in pursuit, under the
mistaken idea that the Persians, after the first onslaught, were done
with, and were fleeing away, then it would be a very much less
formidable porcupine on which the horsemen would come when they
returned to the attack. Probably the Greeks quickly learnt the
Persians' methods and grew careful to keep their formation without
any big breaks in it.
[Sidenote: The phalanx]
These heavily armed soldiers of the Greeks were called hoplites.
After a while the phalanx was assisted by lighter armed and more
swiftly moving troops called peltasts, but the solid phalanx was
always the great strength of their armies. The peltasts were {119}
never regarded as of equal importance with the hoplites, though they
were very valuable assistants to the phalanx. The Greeks, living in
a comparatively small country with the sea on either side of them,
had not the same chance of getting horses for a numerous cavalry as
the nations that had all Asia or all the north-eastern parts of
Europe to draw on for their supply.
This phalanx of the Greeks is a very important feature in the great
story. It was chiefly, as we may suppose, by reason of their
adopting this formation and making such splendid use of it, that they
were sought after, as we know that they were, by other nations to
come to the assistance of their own armies. There grew up in Greece
a class of what we may call professional soldiers, ready to hire
themselves out for pay, to fight on any side that would make it worth
their while to do so. We find them thus, as what we call
"mercenaries," fighting sometimes for the Egyptians, sometimes
against them. Some of them we even find fighting for the Persians.
And they scarcely ceased fighting among themselves. The Persian
empire extended to Egypt, and to all the eastern shore of the
Mediterranean, but it was not powerful enough to prevent much
fighting between the peoples subject to it. It could not, however,
prevail much against Greece, in spite of the divisions between the
Greek states.
Our story now, say after 500 B.C., or thereabouts, is concerned very
much with the vain attempts of the Persians to subjugate the
Greeks--to get them under their yoke. And again I must remind you,
to get the picture at all clear and full, that the Mediterranean was
continually being ravaged by the ships of pirates and traders--ready
to be peaceful merchants if it paid {120} them better to be so, or to
attack other shipping or coast towns if they could do so with success.
The Peoples of the Sea was the old name for these raiders and
traders, who were of all nations, sometimes combining together, and
making themselves into quite a powerful navy, with headquarters in
Crete or another of the many islands. The most powerful, as a
nation, of any of these sea-raiders were the Phœnicians. They
planted many settlements along the coasts, either on islands or on
easily defended projecting headlands of the main shores. Such places
were of value to them for their ships to run into when beset by
storms or by enemies. The most important in our story was their
settlement at Carthage. This Carthage will play a very big part
later on.
But now we must take a look at the very remarkable part which Greece
was playing at this moment, 500 B.C. or so, and had played for some
years and was to play for many to come. I expect you will have
wondered that I have not spoken about Homer and the famous Siege of
Troy, and other great men and great events which happened long before
this time. Troy began to be besieged very shortly after 1200 B.C.
Homer lived at some time between 800 and 900 B.C. We have left them
far behind.
The reason why I did not pick them up and fit them into their place
in the story when we came to the years of their happening is that the
part played by Greece in the making of this great story--that is to
say, in the making of the world--is different from the part played by
any other people. It is such a different part that it is almost
another story, although it does really fit into the great story and
is a very important part of it.
{121}
The other great peoples that we have been talking about, the
Egyptians, Babylonians, and Persians, conquered vast countries,
founded vast empires. The Greeks did nothing of this kind. They
were fine and accomplished soldiers, as we have seen, but the various
states were too disunited for them to be able to bring their forces
together or to keep them for any length of time together.
[Sidenote: The genius of Greece]
But for many centuries they were by far the most accomplished people
in the world; their artists, both painters and sculptors, were far
ahead of the rest; their thinkers went deeper and with more clear
insight and wisdom than any others into the many problems and puzzles
that life and the world set for us; they had finer sculptors, finer
orators, finer poets, probably they had finer musicians; we have seen
that they had a finer battle formation.
In fact, in cleverness and in all the arts and sciences the Greeks
were not only superior to all those about them, but they were
superior to all that have been since--even to ourselves, though we
have had all these years in which to learn. We have learnt to make
trains go, and the telephone and poison gases, and guns that will
shoot twenty-five miles, and other things of that kind. But we are
not the equals of the Greeks of 500 B.C. in art, oratory, poetry or
philosophy. Had it not been for the Greek philosophers we cannot
tell what our philosophy might have been, for it is built up on the
foundations they laid; but we may doubt whether it would have been
nearly as far-seeing or as interesting.
And that is really the most important part that the Greeks took in
the making of the story--a part quite different from that of the
great empire-makers, and yet, {122} as I think you will agree, a
bigger part than any of theirs. For it made, or did a great deal to
make, the thought of the world what it is to-day. It did a great
deal to make the thought of the world what it was all down the pages
of the story, say from 1200 B.C. onwards. I mean that it made men
think about things--about art and philosophy and music, and about
life in general--as they do think. Had it not been for the Greeks we
should be thinking differently, and probably not nearly so wisely,
about all these things. That is the greatest work that the Greeks
have done in the world.
You may remember that we said the disasters which befell the Jews,
and their scattering throughout the other nations, made them able to
take their religious ideas with them, and to sow those ideas, as it
were seeds from which plants should spring, amongst those nations
into which they were driven. Something like the same kind of
scattering happened to the Greeks, and so enabled them to carry their
ideas over a great part of the world. Of their own accord they
would, no doubt, have carried them far. If you look at the map of
Greece, you will see that not only has the country the sea on three
sides of it, but that it is cut up, and cut into, by a wonderful
number of bays and gulfs of the sea, so that it would have a very
great length of seashore if all were added together. Naturally that
meant that the Greeks were great sea-goers. They were a great
"maritime" people, as we should say--from _mare_, which is Latin for
sea. A good deal of their excellence in art we may suspect that they
derived from those ancient Minoans whom we saw masters of Crete very
long ago. The Minoans, as the Minotaur legend showed us, were
masters of Athens also. They were the great sea-power in very
ancient {123} times. They left evidences of their art at Mycenæ in
Greece. The Greeks, following the Minoans in art, perhaps followed
them also in the skilful management of ships. We know, at all
events, that they went far and wide on the Mediterranean in ships,
certainly as great traders, probably often as pirates, and, whether
the one or the other, taking their thoughts, their arts, their
culture with them.
[Sidenote: The expansion of the Greeks]
But besides this--beside these expeditions which they went of their
own will, and beside the further spread of their culture, which their
soldiers, going out to fight for hire, would carry with them--some or
other of the Greeks were from time to time in the course of the story
obliged to fly over-sea, obliged to save themselves from the pressure
of enemies coming down on them from the north.
It is exactly what we saw happening in Babylonia that happened here
too in Greece. It is exactly what happened again and again in the
great story--the peoples from a wild barren country come pressing
down upon peoples living in a more fertile one. Out of Thrace, which
you will see on the map lying to the north of Greece, down through
Macedonia and Thessaly, came wild warlike tribes pressing on the
peoples of the more fertile south. Various reasons for their
movements are given by the Greeks who left their native country and
settled, some in the islands, some in Asia Minor. In some instances
it was admitted that they went under pressure of enemies; but that is
not a reason which would be very pleasant to their pride. Other
reasons were recorded, but probably this was really the most common.
In their sailings to and fro, and tradings, they would learn about
the countries on the Mediterranean shores. {124} Even if they had
not full knowledge of it before, they would have learnt all that they
needed to know about the western shore of Asia Minor in the course of
the ten years which are assigned to the Siege of Troy.
Ilus was father of Tros, king of Troy, and the Greeks called Troy
Ilium, after Ilus, rather than after the son Tros from whom the name
Troy came. And the Iliad is therefore the story of Ilium, otherwise
called Troy. This splendid poem is attributed to Homer as its
author, but what Homer probably did was to recite, or to sing to the
accompaniment of the lyre, these stories, which were only written
down years afterwards. We may imagine him something like the bard or
the troubadour. How much of his own invention he added to the story
we cannot know.
The story, as we have it from him, is that Queen Helen having been
taken from her home, with her own willing consent, by Paris and
carried to Troy, the Greeks went after her and tried to get her back.
They tried for the whole ten years which are ascribed to the Siege of
Troy. Helen was the most beautiful lady in the world, and the Iliad
is certainly one of the most beautiful poems.
But can we believe the story?
The Greeks were a singularly intelligent people. Does it seem the
act of any intelligent people to go on fighting for ten years in
order to get back even the most beautiful lady in the world? And if
they were at all intelligent they would certainly be apt to reflect
that she would not be likely to be equally beautiful at the end of
the ten years as she was at the beginning.
[Sidenote: The Siege of Troy]
A very learned Grecian scholar, Dr. Walter Leaf, has written a book
about the Siege of Troy which tells the story in a much less romantic
and poetical but a {125} much more probable way. And I want to tell
that story, as he tells it, very shortly to you, because it gives
such a good idea of the way that men were living along the shore of
Asia Minor at that time, say 1200 or so B.C.
Troy, you will see if you look at the map, stands, or stood, nearly
in the north-western corner of Asia Minor, its territory reaching up
to the shore of that narrow sea-channel which used to be called the
Hellespont and is now called the Dardanelles. Any Greek ships
wishing to go for trade through the Hellespont must pass close along
the coast of Troy land, so close that any people who had the command
of the land could sally out and interfere with their passage. The
current flows out westward through the Hellespont, and the wind
usually blows from north-west, against the ships going eastward.
The whole point of Dr. Leaf's argument is that at Troy there was a
market, or fair, at which the produce of the countries in the east
was sold to the Greeks and other people in the west, and that the
Trojans derived much profit from this market. The profit from this
market they would of course lose if the western people were able to
sail up through the Hellespont and do their trade direct with the
people along the shore of the Black Sea. The Trojans were, in fact,
what we nowadays call "middle-men," and you know how we are always
trying to bring the consumer, the person who wants to use the thing
produced, into direct touch with the producer, and so to do away with
the profit which the middle-man charges and which he again puts on to
the price of the thing when he sells it to the consumer. The Greeks
were the consumers. They wanted to do away with the middle-men, that
is to say {126} with the Trojans, and that, far more probably than
the bringing back of the beautiful lady, was why they spent so many
years and so many lives in the siege of Troy.
You will remember what we said before about the kind of ships that
these people had. They were propelled by rowing, or by sails which
were only useful when the wind was nearly directly behind them. They
had to put in to some harbourage every night, because they did not
dare to go along in the dark, without charts and without compass and
without knowledge of how to steer by the stars. Even in daytime they
hardly dared to go out of sight of land and of the landmarks which
they knew.
The islands in these seas lie so close to each other that it was
possible for them to creep along in this way from one to the other
and so to the coasts of Asia from Greece. And there was another
reason why they could not go long voyages--they had no light cisterns
in which to carry fresh water. They had to take it in heavy earthern
jars.
This need for water they could supply from rivers which ran out
westward through Troy land. They would lie along the coast there, as
they traded with the Trojan middle-men, or, possibly, as they waited
for a favouring wind to go through the Hellespont, which the Trojans
might allow them to do on payment of some toll money, as we should
call it, for the permission.
The reasons for thinking that the wish to do away with these Trojans
and their market was the real motive of the ten years' war are
strengthened when we look at the names of the peoples that came to
the help of the Greeks on the one side and of the Trojans on the
other. Those that came to the assistance of the Greeks {127} were
the peoples along the Mediterranean shores or on the islands; those
that aided the Trojans were the peoples from the east. So we have
the two set in rather distinct opposition to each other; the Trojans
and the eastern people who sent their things to the market at Troy
and had an interest in the market being kept up, and the western
peoples who wanted the market destroyed.
That is a very prosaic story, is it not, in comparison with the
romance about the beautiful lady? It is not the kind of story that
Homer or any other bard would care to sing or his listeners would
take pleasure in hearing. But I am afraid it is more likely to be
the true story of the reason why a practical and intelligent people
like the Greeks fought so hard and so long to annihilate Troy. I
have said so much about this famous siege because it gives such a
good opportunity of setting what are probably the facts beside the
fictions which have been founded on them. It teaches us how these
poetic stories were made.
[Sidenote: The Odyssey]
The other great poem attributed to Homer, the Odyssey, is only
another chapter, dealing with the adventures of one of the principal
Greek heroes, of the story of the siege. It is even more glorious
reading than the Iliad itself.
Now, whatever the truth be about the Trojan war, one fact is quite
clear and certain from its story, as well as from other evidence,
that the Greeks had dealings, constant dealings, with Asia Minor.
Therefore their thought, their art, their culture, and all that was
most remarkable in their character as a nation, was known in Asia
Minor, it was known among all these islands of the Ægean Sea and
along the southern, the African, shores of the Mediterranean.
Everywhere that it went {128} it was superior to the thought and the
culture of the native people, and everywhere it had its effect. I
want you to realise that. It was not by reason of the force of their
arms, though they were such good fighters, that the Greeks count for
so much in our great story, but by reason of the force of their
thought, and of their accomplishments.
Some hundred or two hundred years after the siege of Troy we find
certain colonies or cities of the Greeks founded along the western
shore of Asia Minor. The Greeks living in these cities were called
Ionians. Shortly before the coming of Cyrus, the all-conquering
Persian, those Ionians had been conquered by that king Crœsus of
Lydia whom we saw taking command of that ill-fated alliance formed
against Persia. The Persian had now, by the time, 500 B.C., to which
we have brought down the story, made himself master of all Asia
Minor. The Ionian cities had come under his dominance.
{129}