Greece seemed in the hands of the conqueror, but again came _A Short History of the World

against the odds and all expectations. The Greek fleet, though not a

third the size of the Persian, assailed it in the bay of Salamis and

destroyed it. Xerxes found himself and his immense army cut off from

supplies and his heart failed him. He retreated to Asia with one half

of his army, leaving the rest to be defeated at Platea (479 B.C.) what

time the remnants of the Persian fleet were hunted down by the Greeks

and destroyed at Mycalæ in Asia Minor.

ALL THAT REMAINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF CORINTH

_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_

The Persian danger was at an end. Most of the Greek cities in Asia

became free. All this is told in great detail and with much

picturesqueness in the first of written histories, the _History_ of

Herodotus. This Herodotus was born about 484 B.C. in the Ionian city

of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, and he visited Babylon and Egypt in his

search for exact particulars. From Mycalæ onward Persia sank into a

confusion of dynastic troubles. Xerxes was murdered in 465 B.C. and

rebellions in Egypt, Syria and Media broke up the brief order of that

mighty realm. The history of Herodotus lays stress on the weakness of

Persia. This history is indeed what we should now call

propaganda—propaganda for Greece to unite and conquer Persia.

Herodotus makes one character, Aristagoras, go to the Spartans with a

map of the known world and say to them: “These Barbarians are not

valiant in fight. You on the other hand have now attained the utmost

skill in war .... No other nations in the world have what they possess:

gold, silver, bronze, embroidered garments, beasts and slaves. _All

this you might have for yourselves, if you so desired_.”

THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE (POSEIDON) AT CAPE SUNIUM

_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_

XXV

THE SPLENDOUR OF GREECE

The century and a half that followed the defeat of Persia was one of

very great splendour for the Greek civilization. True that Greece was

torn by a desperate struggle for ascendancy between Athens, Sparta and

other states (the Peloponnesian War 431 to 404 B.C.) and that in 338

B.C. the Macedonians became virtually masters of Greece; nevertheless

during this period the thought and the creative and artistic impulse of

the Greeks rose to levels that made their achievement a lamp to mankind

for all the rest of history.

The head and centre of this mental activity was Athens. For over

thirty years (466 to 428 B.C.) Athens was dominated by a man of great

vigour and liberality of mind, Pericles, who set himself to rebuild the

city from the ashes to which the Persians had reduced it. The beautiful

ruins that still glorify Athens to-day are chiefly the remains of this

great effort. And he did not simply rebuild a material Athens. He

rebuilt Athens intellectually. He gathered about him not only

architects and sculptors but poets, dramatists, philosophers and

teachers. Herodotus came to Athens to recite his history (438 B.C.).

Anaxagoras came with the beginnings of a scientific description of the

sun and stars. Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides one after the other

carried the Greek drama to its highest levels or beauty and nobility.

The impetus Pericles gave to the intellectual life of Athens lived on

after his death, and in spite of the fact that the peace of Greece was

now broken by the Peloponnesian War and a long and wasteful struggle

for “ascendancy” was beginning. Indeed the darkling of the political

horizon seems for a time to have quickened rather than discouraged

men’s minds.

Already long before the time of Pericles the peculiar freedom of Greek

institutions had given great importance to skill in discussion.

Decision rested neither with king nor with priest but in the assemblies

of the people or of leading men. Eloquence and able argument became

very desirable accomplishments therefore, and a class of teachers

arose, the Sophists, who undertook to strengthen young men in these

arts. But one cannot reason without matter, and knowledge followed in

the wake of speech. The activities and rivalries of these Sophists led

very naturally to an acute examination of style, of methods of thought

and of the validity of arguments. When Pericles died a certain

Socrates was becoming prominent as an able and destructive critic of

bad argument—and much of the teaching of the Sophists was bad argument.

A group of brilliant young men gathered about Socrates. In the end

Socrates was executed for disturbing people’s minds (399 B.C.), he was

condemned after the dignified fashion of the Athens of those days to

drink in his own house and among his own friends a poisonous draught

made from hemlock, but the disturbance of people’s minds went on in

spite of his condemnation. His young men carried on his teaching.

PART OF THE FAMOUS FRIEZE OF THE PARTHENON, ATHENS

A specimen of Grecian sculpture in its finest expression. Compare the

advance of art with that seen in the animals shown on p. 105

_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_

THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS

The marvellous group of Temples and monuments built under the

inspriration of Pericles

_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_

THE THEATRE AT EPIDAUROS, GREECE

A wonderfully preserved specimen showing the vast auditorium

_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_

Chief among these young men was Plato (427 to 347 B.C.) who presently

began to teach philosophy in the grove of the Academy. His teaching

fell into two main divisions, an examination of the foundations and

methods of human thinking and an examination of political institutions.

He was the first man to write a Utopia, that is to say the plan of a

community different from and better than any existing community. This

shows an altogether unprecedented boldness in the human mind which had

hitherto accepted social traditions and usages with scarcely a

question. Plato said plainly to mankind: “Most of the social and

political ills from which you suffer are under your control, given only

the will and courage to change them. You can live in another and a

wiser fashion if you choose to think it out and work it out. You are

not awake to your own power.” That is a high adventurous teaching that

has still to soak in to the common intelligence of our race. One of

his earliest works was the Republic, a dream of a communist

aristocracy; his last unfinished work was the Laws, a scheme of

regulation for another such Utopian state.

THE CARYATIDES OF THE ERECHTHEUM

The ancient sanctuary on the Acropolis at Athens

_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_

ATHENE OF THE PARTHENON

_Photo: Alinart_

The criticism of methods of thinking and methods of government was

carried on after Plato’s death by Aristotle, who had been his pupil and

who taught in the Lyceum. Aristotle came from the city of Stagira in

Macedonia, and his father was court physician to the Macedonian king.

For a time Aristotle was tutor to Alexander, the king’s son, who was

destined to achieve very great things of which we shall soon be

telling. Aristotle’s work upon methods of thinking carried the science

of Logic to a level at which it remained for fifteen hundred years or

more, until the mediæval schoolmen took up the ancient questions again.

He made no Utopias. Before man could really control his destiny as

Plato taught, Aristotle perceived that he needed far more knowledge and

far more accurate knowledge than he possessed. And so Aristotle began

that systematic collection of knowledge which nowadays we call Science.

He sent out explorers to collect _facts_. He was the father of

natural history. He was the founder of political science. His students

at the Lyceum examined and compared the constitutions of 158 different

states ....

Here in the fourth century B.C. we find men who are practically “modern

thinkers.” The child-like, dream-like methods of primitive thought had

given way to a disciplined and critical attack upon the problems of

life. The weird and monstrous symbolism and imagery of the gods and

god monsters, and all the taboos and awes and restraints that have

hitherto encumbered thinking are here completely set aside. Free,

exact and systematic thinking has begun. The fresh and unencumbered

mind of these newcomers out of the northern forests has thrust itself

into the mysteries of the temple and let the daylight in.

XXVI

THE EMPIRE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT

From 431 to 404 B.C. the Peloponnesian War wasted Greece. Meanwhile to

the north of Greece, the kindred country of Macedonia was rising slowly

to power and civilization. The Macedonians spoke a language closely

akin to Greek, and on several occasions Macedonian competitors had

taken part in the Olympic games. In 359 B.C. a man of very great

abilities and ambition became king of this little country—Philip.

Philip had previously been a hostage in Greece; he had had a thoroughly

Greek education and he was probably aware of the ideas of

Herodotus—which had also been developed by the philosopher Isocrates—of

a possible conquest of Asia by a consolidated Greece.

He set himself first to extend and organize his own realm and to

remodel his army. For a thousand years now the charging horse-chariot

had been the decisive factor in battles, that and the close-fighting

infantry. Mounted horsemen had also fought, but as a cloud of

skirmishers, individually and without discipline. Philip made his

infantry fight in a closely packed mass, the Macedonian phalanx, and he

trained his mounted gentlemen, the knights or companions, to fight in

formation and so invented cavalry. The master move in most of his

battles and in the battles of his son Alexander was a cavalry charge.

The phalanx _held_ the enemy infantry in front while the cavalry swept

away the enemy horse on his wings and poured in on the flank and rear

of his infantry. Chariots were disabled by bowmen, who shot the horses.

With this new army Philip extended his frontiers through Thessaly to

Greece; and the battle of Chæronia (338 B.C.), fought against Athens

and her allies, put all Greece at his feet. At last the dream of

Herodotus was bearing fruit. A congress of all the Greek states

appointed Philip captain-general of the Græco- Macedonian confederacy

against Persia, and in 336 B.C. his advanced guard crossed into Asia

upon this long premeditated adventure. But he never followed it. He

was assassinated; it is believed at the instigation of his queen

Olympias, Alexander’s mother. She was jealous because Philip had

married a second wife.

BUST OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT

_(As in the British Museum)_

But Philip had taken unusual pains with his son’s education. He had

not only secured Aristotle, the greatest philosopher in the world, as

this boy’s tutor, but he had shared his ideas with him and thrust

military experience upon him. At Chæronia Alexander, who was then only

eighteen years old, had been in command of the cavalry. And so it was

possible for this young man, who was still only twenty years old at the

time of his accession, to take up his father’s task at once and to

proceed successfully with the Persian adventure.

In 334 B.C.—for two years were needed to establish and confirm his

position in Macedonia and Greece—he crossed into Asia, defeated a not

very much bigger Persian army at the battle of the Granicus and

captured a number of cities in Asia Minor. He kept along the

sea-coast. It was necessary for him to reduce and garrison all the

coast towns as he advanced because the Persians had control of the

fleets of Tyre and Sidon and so had command of the sea. Had he left a

hostile port in his rear the Persians might have landed forces to raid

his communications and cut him off. At Issus (333 B.C.) he met and

smashed a vast conglomerate host under Darius III. Like the host of

Xerxes that had crossed the Dardanelles a century and a half before, it

was an incoherent accumulation of contingents and it was encumbered

with a multitude of court officials, the harem of Darius and many camp

followers. Sidon surrendered to Alexander but Tyre resisted

obstinately. Finally that great city was stormed and plundered and

destroyed. Gaza also was stormed, and towards the end of 332 B.C. the

conqueror entered Egypt and took over its rule from the Persians.

ALEXANDER’S VICTORY OVER THE PERSIANS AT ISSUS

_(From the Pompeian Mosaic)_

Alexander charges in on the left, Darius is in the chariot to the right

At Alexandretta and at Alexandria in Egypt he built great cities,

accessible from the land and so incapable of revolt. To these the trade

of the Phœnician cities was diverted. The Phœnicians of the western

Mediterranean suddenly disappear from history—and as immediately the

Jews of Alexandria and the other new trading cities created by

Alexander appear.

In 331 B.C. Alexander marched out of Egypt upon Babylon as Thothmes and

Rameses and Necho had done before him. But he marched by way of Tyre.

At Arbela near the ruins of Nineveh, which was already a forgotten

city, he met Darius and fought the decisive battle of the war. The

Persian chariot charge failed, a Macedonian cavalry charge broke up the

great composite host and the phalanx completed the victory. Darius led

the retreat. He made no further attempt to resist the invader but fled

northward into the country of the Medes. Alexander marched on to

Babylon, still prosperous and important, and then to Susa and

Persepolis. There after a drunken festival he burnt down the palace of

Darius, the king of kings.

THE APOLLO BELVEDERE

_(In the Vatican Museum)_

Thence Alexander presently made a military parade of central Asia,

going to the utmost bounds of the Persian empire. At first he turned

northward. Darius was pursued; and he was overtaken at dawn dying in

his chariot, having been murdered by his own people. He was still

living when the foremost Greeks reached him. Alexander came up to find

him dead. Alexander skirted the Caspian Sea, he went up into the

mountains of western Turkestan, he came down by Herat (which he

founded) and Cabul and the Khyber Pass into India. He fought a great

battle on the Indus with an Indian king, Porus, and here the Macedonian

troops met elephants for the first time and defeated them. Finally he

built himself ships, sailed down to the mouth of the Indus, and marched

back by the coast of Beluchistan, reaching Susa again in 324 B.C. after

an absence of six years. He then prepared to consolidate and organize

this vast empire he had won. He sought to win over his new subjects.

He assumed the robes and tiara of a Persian monarch, and this roused

the jealousy of his Macedonian commanders. He had much trouble with

them. He arranged a number of marriages between these Macedonian

officers and Persian and Babylonian women: the “Marriage of the East

and West.” He never lived to effect the consolidation he had planned.

A fever seized him after a drinking bout in Babylon and he died in 323

B.C.

Immediately this vast dominion fell to pieces. One of his generals,

Seleucus, retained most of the old Persian empire from the Indus to

Ephesus; another, Ptolemy, seized Egypt, and Antigonus secured

Macedonia. The rest of the empire remained unstable, passing under the

control of a succession of local adventurers. Barbarian raids began

from the north and grew in scope and intensity. Until at last, as we

shall tell, a new power, the power of the Roman republic, came out of

the west to subjugate one fragment after another and weld them together

into a new and more enduring empire.

XXVII

THE MUSEUM AND LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA

Before the time of Alexander Greeks had already been spreading as

merchants, artists, officials, mercenary soldiers, over most of the

Persian dominions. In the dynastic disputes that followed the death of

Xerxes, a band of ten thousand Greek mercenaries played a part under

the leadership of Xenophon. Their return to Asiatic Greece from Babylon

is described in his _Retreat of the Ten Thousand_, one of the first war

stories that was ever written by a general in command. But the

conquests of Alexander and the division of his brief empire among his

subordinate generals, greatly stimulated this permeation of the ancient

world by the Greeks and their language and fashions and culture. Traces

of this Greek dissemination are to be found far away in central Asia

and in north-west India. Their influence upon the development of Indian

art was profound.

For many centuries Athens retained her prestige as a centre of art and

culture; her schools went on indeed to 529 A.D., that is to say for

nearly a thousand years; but the leadership in the intellectual

activity of the world passed presently across the Mediterranean to

Alexandria, the new trading city that Alexander had founded. Here the

Macedonian general Ptolemy had become Pharaoh, with a court that spoke

Greek. He had become an intimate of Alexander before he became king,

and he was deeply saturated with the ideas of Aristotle. He set

himself, with great energy and capacity, to organize knowledge and

investigation. He also wrote a history of Alexander’s campaigns which,

unhappily, is lost to the world.

Alexander had already devoted considerable sums to finance the

enquiries of Aristotle, but Ptolemy I was the first person to make a

permanent endowment of science. He set up a foundation in Alexandria

which was formerly dedicated to the Muses, the Museum of Alexandria.

For two or three generations the scientific work done at Alexandria was

extraordinarily good. Euclid, Eratosthenes who measured the size of

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

who wrote on conic sections, Hipparchus who made the first star map and

catalogue, and Hero who devised the first steam engine are among the

greater stars of an extraordinary constellation of scientific pioneers.

Archimedes came from Syracuse to Alexandria to study, and was a

frequent correspondent of the Museum. Herophilus was one of the

greatest of Greek anatomists, and is said to have practised

vivisection.

For a generation or so during the reigns of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II

there was such a blaze of knowledge and discovery at Alexandria as the

world was not to see again until the sixteenth century A.D. But it did

not continue. There may have been several causes of this decline.

Chief among them, the late Professor Mahaffy suggested, was the fact

that the Museum was a “royal” college and all its professors and

fellows were appointed and paid by Pharaoh. This was all very well

when Pharaoh was Ptolemy I, the pupil and friend of Aristotle. But as

the dynasty of the Ptolemies went on they became Egyptianized, they

fell under the sway of Egyptian priests and Egyptian religious

developments, they ceased to follow the work that was done, and their

control stifled the spirit of enquiry altogether. The Museum produced

little good work after its first century of activity.

Ptolemy I not only sought in the most modern spirit to organize the

finding of fresh knowledge. He tried also to set up an encyclopædic

storehouse of wisdom in the Library of Alexandria. It was not simply a

storehouse, it was also a book-copying and book-selling organization.

A great army of copyists was set to work perpetually multiplying copies

of books.

Here then we have the definite first opening up of the intellectual

process in which we live to-day; here we have the systematic gathering

and distribution of knowledge. The foundation of this Museum and

Library marks one of the great epochs in the history of mankind. It is

the true beginning of Modern History.

ARISTOTLE

From Herculaneum, probably Fourth Century B.C.

_Photo: Dr. Singer_

Both the work of research and the work of dissemination went on under

serious handicaps. One of these was the great social gap that

separated the philosopher, who was a gentleman, from the trader and the

artisan. There were glass workers and metal workers in abundance in

those days, but they were not in mental contact with the thinkers. The

glass worker was making the most beautifully coloured beads and phials

and so forth, but he never made a Florentine flask or a lens. Clear

glass does not seem to have interested him. The metal worker made

weapons and jewellery but he never made a chemical balance. The

philosopher speculated loftily about atoms and the nature of things,

but he had no practical experience of enamels and pigments and philters

and so forth. He was not interested in substances. So Alexandria in

its brief day of opportunity produced no microscopes and no chemistry.

And though Hero invented a steam engine it was never set either to pump

or drive a boat or do any useful thing. There were few practical

applications of science except in the realm of medicine, and the

progress of science was not stimulated and sustained by the interest

and excitement of practical applications. There was nothing to keep

the work going therefore when the intellectual curiosity of Ptolemy I

and Ptolemy II was withdrawn. The discoveries of the Museum went on

record in obscure manuscripts and never, until the revival of

scientific curiosity at the Renascence, reached out to the mass of

mankind.

Nor did the Library produce any improvements in book making. That

ancient world had no paper made in definite sizes from rag pulp. Paper

was a Chinese invention and it did not reach the western world until

the ninth century A.D. The only book materials were parchment and

strips of the papyrus reed joined edge to edge. These strips were kept

on rolls which were very unwieldy to wind to and fro and read, and very

inconvenient for reference. It was these things that prevented the

development of paged and printed books. Printing itself was known in

the world it would seem as early as the Old Stone Age; there were seals

in ancient Sumeria; but without abundant paper there was little

advantage in printing books, an improvement that may further have been

resisted by trades unionism on the part of the copyists employed.

Alexandria produced abundant books but not cheap books, and it never

spread knowledge into the population of the ancient world below the

level of a wealthy and influential class.

STATUETTE OF MAITREYA: THE BUDDHA TO COME

A Græco-Buddhist sculpture of the Third Century A.D.

_(From Malakand, N. W. Province, now in the India Museum)_

So it was that this blaze of intellectual enterprise never reached

beyond a small circle of people in touch with the group of philosophers

collected by the first two Ptolemies. It was like the light in a dark

lantern which is shut off from the world at large. Within the blaze

may be blindingly bright, but nevertheless it is unseen. The rest of

the world went on its old ways unaware that the seed of scientific

knowledge that was one day to revolutionize it altogether had been

sown. Presently a darkness of bigotry fell even upon Alexandria.

Thereafter for a thousand years of darkness the seed that Aristotle had

sown lay hidden. Then it stirred and began to germinate. In a few

centuries it had become that widespread growth of knowledge and clear

ideas that is now changing the whole of human life.

THE DEATH OF BUDDHA

Græco-Buddhist carving from Sivat Valley, N. W. Province, probably A.D.

350

_India Mus._

Greece seemed in the hands of the conqueror, but again came victory