The prosperity of the Hebrew people was short-lived. Hiram died, and
the help of Tyre ceased to strengthen Jerusalem. Egypt grew strong
again. The history of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah
becomes a history of two little states ground between, first, Syria,
then Assyria and then Babylon to the north and Egypt to the south. It
is a tale of disasters and of deliverances that only delayed disaster.
It is a tale of barbaric kings ruling a barbaric people. In 721 B.C.
the kingdom of Israel was swept away into captivity by the Assyrians
and its people utterly lost to history. Judah struggled on until in
604 B.C., as we have told, it shared the fate of Israel. There may be
details open to criticism in the Bible story of Hebrew history from the
days of the Judges onward, but on the whole it is evidently a true
story which squares with all that has been learnt in the excavation of
Egypt and Assyria and Babylon during the past century.
It was in Babylon that the Hebrew people got their history together and
evolved their tradition. The people who came back to Jerusalem at the
command of Cyrus were a very different people in spirit and knowledge
from those who had gone into captivity. They had learnt civilization.
In the development of their peculiar character a very great part was
played by certain men, a new sort of men, the Prophets, to whom we must
now direct our attention. These Prophets mark the appearance of new
and remarkable forces in the steady development of human society.
XXII
PRIESTS AND PROPHETS IN JUDEA
The fall of Assyria and Babylon were only the first of a series of
disasters that were to happen to the Semitic peoples. In the seventh
century B.C. it would have seemed as though the whole civilized world
was to be dominated by Semitic rulers. They ruled the great Assyrian
empire and they had conquered Egypt; Assyria, Babylon, Syria were all
Semitic, speaking languages that were mutually intelligible. The trade
of the world was in Semitic hands. Tyre, Sidon, the great mother cities
of the Phœnician coast, had thrown out colonies that grew at last to
even greater proportion in Spain, Sicily and Africa. Carthage, founded
before 800 B.C., had risen to a population of more than a million. It
was for a time the greatest city on earth. Its ships went to Britain
and out into the Atlantic. They may have reached Madeira. We have
already noted how Hiram co-operated with Solomon to build ships on the
Red Sea for the Arabian and perhaps for the Indian trade. In the time
of the Pharaoh Necho, a Phœnician expedition sailed completely round
Africa.
At that time the Aryan peoples were still barbarians. Only the Greeks
were reconstructing a new civilization of the ruins of the one they had
destroyed, and the Medes were becoming “formidable,” as an Assyrian
inscription calls them, in central Asia. In 800 B.C. no one could have
prophesied that before the third century B.C. every trace of Semitic
dominion would be wiped out by Aryan-speaking conquerors, and that
everywhere the Semitic peoples would be subjects or tributaries or
scattered altogether. Everywhere except in the northern deserts of
Arabia, where the Bedouin adhered steadily to the nomadic way of life,
the ancient way of life of the Semites before Sargon I and his
Akkadians went down to conquer Sumeria. But the Arab Bedouin were
never conquered by Aryan masters.
Now of all these civilized Semites who were beaten and overrun in these
five eventful centuries one people only held together and clung to its
ancient traditions and that was this little people, the Jews, who were
sent back to build their city of Jerusalem by Cyrus the Persian. And
they were able to do this, because they had got together this
literature of theirs, their Bible, in Babylon. It is not so much the
Jews who made the Bible as the Bible which made the Jews. Running
through this Bible were certain ideas, different from the ideas of the
people about them, very stimulating and sustaining ideas, to which they
were destined to cling through five and twenty centuries of hardship,
adventure and oppression.
Foremost of these Jewish ideas was this, that their God was invisible
and remote, an invisible God in a temple not made with hands, a Lord of
Righteousness throughout the earth. All other peoples had national gods
embodied in images that lived in temples. If the image was smashed and
the temple razed, presently that god died out. But this was a new
idea, this God of the Jews, in the heavens, high above priests and
sacrifices. And this God of Abraham, the Jews believed, had chosen
them to be his peculiar people, to restore Jerusalem and make it the
capital of Righteousness in the World. They were a people exalted by
their sense of a common destiny. This belief saturated them all when
they returned to Jerusalem after the captivity in Babylon.
Is it any miracle that in their days of overthrow and subjugation many
Babylonians and Syrians and so forth and later on many Phœnicians,
speaking practically the same language and having endless customs,
habits, tastes and traditions in common, should be attracted by this
inspiring cult and should seek to share in its fellowship and its
promise? After the fall of Tyre, Sidon, Carthage and the Spanish
Phœnician cities, the Phœnicians suddenly vanish from history; and as
suddenly we find, not simply in Jerusalem but in Spain, Africa, Egypt,
Arabia, the East, wherever the Phœnicians had set their feet,
communities of Jews. And they were all held together by the Bible and
by the reading of the Bible. Jerusalem was from the first only their
nominal capital; their real city was this book of books. This is a new
sort of thing in history. It is something of which the seeds were sown
long before, when the Sumerians and Egyptians began to turn their
hieroglyphics into writing. The Jews were a new thing, a people
without a king and presently without a temple (for as we shall tell
Jerusalem itself was broken up in 70 A.D.), held together and
consolidated out of heterogeneous elements by nothing but the power of
the written word.
And this mental welding of the Jews was neither planned nor foreseen
nor done by either priests or statesmen. Not only a new kind of
community but a new kind of man comes into history with the development
of the Jews. In the days of Solomon the Hebrews looked like becoming a
little people just like any other little people of that time clustering
around court and temple, ruled by the wisdom of the priest and led by
the ambition of the king. But already, the reader may learn from the
Bible, this new sort of man of which we speak, the Prophet, was in
evidence.
As troubles thicken round the divided Hebrews the importance of these
Prophets increases.
THE BLACK OBELISK OF SHALMANESER II
THE BLACK OBELISK OF SHALMANESER II
This obelisk (in the British Museum) of the King of Assyria mentions,
in cuneiform, “Jehu the son of Omri.” Panel showing Jewish captives
bringing tribute
What were these Prophets? They were men of the most diverse origins.
The Prophet Ezekiel was of the priestly caste and the Prophet Amos wore
the goatskin mantle of a shepherd, but all had this in common, that
they gave allegiance to no one but to the God of Righteousness and that
they spoke directly to the people. They came without licence or
consecration. “Now the word of the Lord came unto me;” that was the
formula. They were intensely political. They exhorted the people
against Egypt, “that broken reed,” or against Assyria or Babylon; they
denounced the indolence of the priestly order or the flagrant sins of
the King. Some of them turned their attention to what we should now
call “social reform.” The rich were “grinding the faces of the poor,”
the luxurious were consuming the children’s bread; wealthy people made
friends with and imitated the splendours and vices of foreigners; and
this was hateful to Jehovah, the God of Abraham, who would certainly
punish this land.
ANOTHER PANEL OF THE BLACK OBELISK
ANOTHER PANEL OF THE BLACK OBELISK
Captive Princes making obeisance to Shalmaneser II
These fulminations were written down and preserved and studied. They
went wherever the Jews went, and wherever they went they spread a new
religious spirit. They carried the common man past priest and temple,
past court and king and brought him face to face with the Rule of
Righteousness. That is their supreme importance in the history of
mankind. In the great utterances of Isaiah the prophetic voice rises to
a pitch of splendid anticipation and foreshadows the whole earth united
and at peace under one God. Therein the Jewish prophecies culminate.
All the Prophets did not speak in this fashion, and the intelligent
reader of the prophetic books will find much hate in them, much
prejudice, and much that will remind him of the propaganda pamphlets of
the present time. Nevertheless it is the Hebrew Prophets of the period
round and about the Babylonian captivity who mark the appearance of a
new power in the world, the power of individual moral appeal, of an
appeal to the free conscience of mankind against the fetish sacrifices
and slavish loyalties that had hitherto bridled and harnessed our race.
XXIII
THE GREEKS
Now while after Solomon (whose reign was probably about 960 B.C.) the
divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah were suffering destruction and
deportation, and while the Jewish people were developing their
tradition in captivity in Babylon, another great power over the human
mind, the Greek tradition, was also arising. While the Hebrew prophets
were working out a new sense of direct moral responsibility between the
people and an eternal and universal God of Right, the Greek
philosophers were training the human mind in a new method and spirit of
intellectual adventure.
The Greek tribes as we have told were a branch of the Aryan- speaking
stem. They had come down among the Ægean cities and islands some
centuries before 1000 B.C. They were probably already in southward
movement before the Pharaoh Thothmes hunted his first elephants beyond
the conquered Euphrates. For in those days there were elephants in
Mesopotamia and lions in Greece.
It is possible that it was a Greek raid that burnt Cnossos, but there
are no Greek legends of such a victory though there are stories of
Minos and his palace (the Labyrinth) and of the skill of the Cretan
artificers.
STATUE OF MELEAGER
STATUE OF MELEAGER
Note the progress in plastic power from the earlier wooden statue on
left
_Photo: Sebah & Foaillier_
Like most of the Aryans these Greeks had singers and reciters whose
performances were an important social link, and these handed down from
the barbaric beginnings of their people two great epics, the _Iliad_,
telling how a league of Greek tribes besieged and took and sacked the
town of Troy in Asia Minor, and the _Odyssey_, being a long adventure
story of the return of the sage captain, Odysseus, from Troy to his own
island. These epics were written down somewhen in the eighth or
seventh century B.C., when the Greeks had acquired the use of an
alphabet from their more civilized neighbours, but they are supposed to
have been in existence very much earlier. Formerly they were ascribed
to a particular blind bard, Homer, who was supposed to have sat down
and composed them as Milton composed Paradise Lost. Whether there
really was such a poet, whether he composed or only wrote down and
polished these epics and so forth, is a favourite quarrelling ground
for the erudite. We need not concern ourselves with such bickerings
here. The thing that matters from our point of view is that the Greeks
were in possession of their epics in the eighth century B.C., and that
they were a common possession and a link between their various tribes,
giving them a sense of fellowship as against the outer barbarians.
They were a group of kindred peoples linked by the spoken and
afterwards by the written word, and sharing common ideals of courage
and behaviour.
The epics showed the Greeks a barbaric people without iron, without
writing, and still not living in cities. They seem to have lived at
first in open villages of huts around the halls of their chiefs outside
the ruins of the Ægean cities they had destroyed. Then they began to
wall their cities and to adopt the idea of temples from the people they
had conquered. It has been said that the cities of the primitive
civilizations grew up about the altar of some tribal god, and that the
wall was added; in the cities of the Greeks the wall preceded the
temple. They began to trade and send out colonies. By the seventh
century B.C. a new series of cities had grown up in the valleys and
islands of Greece, forgetful of the Ægean cities and civilization that
had preceded them; Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Samos, Miletus
among the chief. There were already Greek settlements along the coast
of the Black Sea and in Italy and Sicily. The heel and toe of Italy
was called Magna Græcia. Marseilles was a Greek town established on
the site of an earlier Phœnician colony.
Now countries which are great plains or which have as a chief means of
transport some great river like the Euphrates or Nile tend to become
united under some common rule. The cities of Egypt and the cities of
Sumeria, for example, ran together under one system of government. But
the Greek peoples were cut up among islands and mountain valleys; both
Greece and Magna Græcia are very mountainous; and the tendency was all
the other way. When the Greeks come into history they are divided up
into a number of little states which showed no signs of coalescence.
They are different even in race. Some consist chiefly of citizens of
this or that Greek tribe, Ionic, Æolian or Doric; some have a mingled
population of Greeks and descendants of the pre-Greek “Mediterranean”
folk; some have an unmixed free citizenship of Greeks lording it over
an enslaved conquered population like the “Helots” in Sparta. In some
the old leaderly Aryan families have become a close aristocracy; in
some there is a democracy of all the Aryan citizens; in some there are
elected or even hereditary kings, in some usurpers or tyrants.
RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF ZEUS AT OLYMPIA
RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF ZEUS AT OLYMPIA
_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_
And the same geographical conditions that kept the Greek states divided
and various, kept them small. The largest states were smaller than
many English counties, and it is doubtful if the population of any of
their cities ever exceeded a third of a million. Few came up even to
50,000. There were unions of interest and sympathy but no coalescences.
Cities made leagues and alliances as trade increased, and small cities
put themselves under the protection of great ones. Yet all Greece was
held together in a certain community of feeling by two things, by the
epics and by the custom of taking part every fourth year in the
athletic contests at Olympia. This did not prevent wars and feuds, but
it mitigated something of the savagery of war between them, and a truce
protected all travellers to and from the games. As time went on the
sentiment of a common heritage grew and the number of states
participating in the Olympic games increased until at last not only
Greeks but competitors from the closely kindred countries of Epirus and
Macedonia to the north were admitted.
The Greek cities grew in trade and importance, and the quality of their
civilization rose steadily in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.
Their social life differed in many interesting points from the social
life of the Ægean and river valley civilizations. They had splendid
temples but the priesthood was not the great traditional body it was in
the cities of the older world, the-repository of all knowledge, the
storehouse of ideas. They had leaders and noble families, but no
quasi- divine monarch surrounded by an elaborately organized court.
Rather their organization was aristocratic, with leading families which
kept each other in order. Even their so- called “democracies” were
aristocratic; every citizen had a share in public affairs and came to
the assembly in a democracy, _but everybody was not a citizen_. The
Greek democracies were not like our modern “democracies” in which
everyone has a vote. Many of the Greek democracies had a few hundred
or a few thousand citizens and then many thousands of slaves, freedmen
and so forth, with no share in public affairs. Generally in Greece
affairs were in the hands of a community of substantial men. Their
kings and their tyrants alike were just men set in front of other men
or usurping a leadership; they were not quasi-divine overmen like
Pharaoh or Minos or the monarchs of Mesopotamia. Both thought and
government therefore had a freedom under Greek conditions such as they
had known in none of the older civilizations. The Greeks had brought
down into cities the individualism, the personal initiative of the
wandering life of the northern parklands. They were the first
republicans of importance in history.
THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE (POSEIDON), PÆSTUM, SICILY
THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE (POSEIDON), PÆSTUM, SICILY
_Photo: Alinari_
And we find that as they emerge from a condition of barbaric warfare a
new thing becomes apparent in their intellectual life. We find men who
are not priests seeking and recording knowledge and enquiring into the
mysteries of life and being, in a way that has hitherto been the
sublime privilege of priesthood or the presumptuous amusement of kings.
We find already in the sixth century B.C.—perhaps while Isaiah was
still prophesying in Babylon—such men as Thales and Anaximander of
Miletus and Heraclitus of Ephesus, who were what we should now call
independent gentlemen, giving their minds to shrewd questionings of the
world in which we live, asking what its real nature was, whence it came
and what its destiny might be, and refusing all ready-made or evasive
answers. Of these questionings of the universe by the Greek mind, we
shall have more to say a little later in this history. These Greek
enquirers who begin to be remarkable in the sixth century B.C. are the
first philosophers, the first “wisdom-lovers,” in the world.
And it may be noted here how important a century this sixth century
B.C. was in the history of humanity. For not only were these Greek
philosophers beginning the research for clear ideas about this universe
and man’s place in it and Isaiah carrying Jewish prophecy to its
sublimest levels, but as we shall tell later Gautama Buddha was then
teaching in India and Confucius and Lao Tse in China. From Athens to
the Pacific the human mind was astir.
XXIV
THE WARS OF THE GREEKS AND PERSIANS
While the Greeks in the cities in Greece, South Italy and Asia Minor
were embarking upon free intellectual enquiry and while in Babylon and
Jerusalem the last of the Hebrew prophets were creating a free
conscience for mankind, two adventurous Aryan peoples, the Medes and
the Persians, were in possession of the civilization of the ancient
world and were making a great empire, the Persian empire, which was far
larger in extent than any empire the world had seen hitherto. Under
Cyrus, Babylon and the rich and ancient civilization of Lydia had been
added to the Persian rule; the Phœnician cities of the Levant and all
the Greek cities in Asia Minor had been made tributary, Cambyses had
subjected Egypt, and Darius I, the Mede, the third of the Persian
rulers (521 B.C.), found himself monarch as it seemed of all the world.
His couriers rode with his decrees from the Dardanelles to the Indus
and from Upper Egypt to Central Asia.
The Greeks in Europe, it is true, Italy, Carthage, Sicily and the
Spanish Phœnician settlements, were not under the Persian Peace; but
they treated it with respect and the only people who gave any serious
trouble were the old parent hordes of Nordic people in South Russia and
Central Asia, the Scythians, who raided the northern and north-eastern
borders.
Of course the population of this great Persian empire was not a
population of Persians, The Persians were only the small conquering
minority of this enormous realm. The rest of the population was what
it had been before the Persians came from time immemorial, only that
Persian was the administrative language. Trade and finance were still
largely Semitic, Tyre and Sidon as of old were the great Mediterranean
ports and Semitic shipping plied upon the seas. But many of these
Semitic merchants and business people as they went from place to place
already found a sympathetic and convenient common history in the Hebrew
tradition and the Hebrew scriptures. A new element which was
increasing rapidly in this empire was the Greek element. The Greeks
were becoming serious rivals to the Semites upon the sea, and their
detached and vigorous intelligence made them useful and, unprejudiced
officials.
FINE PIECE OF ATHENIAN POTTERY
FINE PIECE OF ATHENIAN POTTERY
Showing Greek merchant vesselswith sails and oars statue on left
_Brit. Mus._
It was on account of the Scythians that Darius I invaded Europe. He
wanted to reach South Russia, the homeland of the Scythian horsemen.
He crossed the Bosphorus with a great army and marched through Bulgaria
to the Danube, crossed this by a bridge of boats and pushed far
northward. His army suffered terribly. It was largely an infantry
force and the mounted Scythians rode all round it, cut off its
supplies, destroyed any stragglers and never came to a pitched battle.
Darius was forced into an inglorious retreat.
He returned himself to Susa but he left an army in Thrace and
Macedonia, and Macedonia submitted to Darius. Insurrections of the
Greek cities in Asia followed this failure, and the European Greeks
were drawn into the contest. Darius resolved upon the subjugation of
the Greeks in Europe. With the Phœnician fleet at his disposal he was
able to subdue one island after another, and finally in 490 B.C. he
made his main attack upon Athens. A considerable Armada sailed from
the ports of Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean, and the
expedition landed its troops at Marathon to the north of Athens. There
they were met and signally defeated by the Athenians.
An extraordinary thing happened at this time. The bitterest rival of
Athens in Greece was Sparta, but now Athens appealed to Sparta, sending
a herald, a swift runner, imploring the Spartans not to let Greeks
become slaves to barbarians. This runner (the prototype of all
“Marathon” runners) did over a hundred miles of broken country in less
than two days. The Spartans responded promptly and generously; but
when, in three days, the Spartan force reached Athens, there was
nothing for it to do but to view the battlefield and the bodies of the
defeated Persian soldiers. The Persian fleet had returned to Asia. So
ended the first Persian attack on Greece.
The next was much more impressive. Darius died soon after the news of
his defeat at Marathon reached him, and for four years his son and
successor, Xerxes, prepared a host to crush the Greeks. For a time
terror united all the Greeks. The army of Xerxes was certainly the
greatest that had hitherto been assembled in the world. It was a huge
assembly of discordant elements. It crossed the Dardanelles, 480 B.C.,
by a bridge of boats; and along the coast as it advanced moved an
equally miscellaneous fleet carrying supplies. At the narrow pass of
Thermopylæ a small force of 1400 men under the Spartan Leonidas
resisted this multitude, and after a fight of unsurpassed heroism was
completely destroyed. Every man was killed. But the losses they
inflicted upon the Persians were enormous, and the army of Xerxes
pushed on to Thebes and Athens in a chastened mood. Thebes surrendered
and made terms. The Athenians abandoned their city and it was burnt.