THE GREEKS
How it happened that a little rocky peninsula in a remote corner of the
Mediterranean was able to provide our world in less than two centuries
with the complete framework for all our present day experiments in
politics, literature, drama, sculpture, chemistry, physics and Heaven
knows what else, is a question which has puzzled a great many people for
a great many centuries and to which every philosopher, at one time or
another during his career, has tried to give an answer.
Respectable historians, unlike their colleagues of the chemical and
physical and astronomical and medical faculties, have always looked with
ill-concealed contempt upon all efforts to discover what one might call
“the laws of history.” What holds good of polliwogs and microbes and
shooting stars seems to have no business within the realm of human beings.
I may be very much mistaken, but it seems to me that there must be such
laws. It is true that thus far we have not discovered many of them.
But then again we have never looked very hard. We have been so busy
accumulating facts that we have had no time to boil them and liquefy them
and evaporate them and extract from them the few scraps of wisdom which
might be of some real value to our particular variety of mammal.
It is with considerable trepidation that I approach this new field
of research and taking a leaf out of the scientist’s book, offer the
following historical axiom.
According to the best knowledge of modern scientists, life (animate
existence as differentiated from inanimate existence) began when for once
all physical and chemical elements were present in the ideal proportion
necessary for the creation of the first living cell.
Translate this into terms of history and you get this:
“A sudden and apparently spontaneous outbreak of a very high form of
civilization is only possible when all the racial, climatic, economic and
political conditions are present in an ideal proportion or in as nearly
an ideal condition and proportion as they can be in this imperfect world.”
Let me elaborate this statement by a few negative observations.
A race with the brain development of a cave-man would not prosper, even
in Paradise.
Rembrandt would not have painted pictures, Bach would not have composed
fugues, Praxiteles would not have made statues if they had been born
in an igloo near Upernivik and had been obliged to spend most of their
waking hours watching a seal-hole in an ice-field.
Darwin would not have made his contributions to biology if he had been
obliged to gain his livelihood in a cotton mill in Lancashire. And
Alexander Graham Bell would not have invented the telephone if he had
been a conscripted serf and had lived in a remote village of the Romanow
domains.
In Egypt, where the first high form of civilization was found, the
climate was excellent, but the original inhabitants were not very robust
or enterprising, and political and economic conditions were decidedly
bad. The same held true of Babylonia and Assyria. The Semitic races which
afterwards moved into the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates
were strong and vigorous people. There was nothing the matter with the
climate. But the political and economic environment remained far from
good.
In Palestine the climate was nothing to boast of. Agriculture was
backward and there was little commerce outside of the caravan route
which passed through the country from Africa to Asia and vice versa.
Furthermore, in Palestine politics were entirely dominated by the priests
of the temple of Jerusalem and this of course did not encourage the
development of any sort of individual enterprise.
In Phoenicia, the climate was of little consequence. The race was strong
and trade conditions were good. The country, however, suffered from a
badly balanced economic system. A small class of ship owners had been
able to get hold of all the wealth and had established a rigid commercial
monopoly. Hence the government in Tyre and Sidon had at an early date
fallen into the hands of the very rich. The poor, deprived of all excuse
for the practice of a reasonable amount of industry, grew callous and
indifferent and Phoenicia eventually shared the fate of Carthage and went
to ruin through the short-sighted selfishness of her rulers.
In short, in every one of the early centers of civilization, certain of
the necessary elements for success were always lacking.
When the miracle of a perfect balance finally did occur, in Greece in
the fifth century before our era, it lasted only a very short time, and
strange to say, even then it did not take place in the mother country but
in the colonies across the Aegean Sea.
In another book I have given a description of those famous island-bridges
which connected the mainland of Asia with Europe and across which the
traders from Egypt and Babylonia and Crete since time immemorial had
traveled to Europe. The main point of embarkation, both for merchandise
and ideas bound from Asia to Europe, was to be found on the western coast
of Asia Minor in a strip of land known as Ionia.
A few hundred years before the Trojan war, this narrow bit of mountainous
territory, ninety miles long and only a few miles wide, had been
conquered by Greek tribes from the mainland who there had founded a
number of colonial towns of which Ephesus, Phocaea, Erythrae and Miletus
were the best known, and it was along those cities that at last the
conditions of success were present in such perfect proportion that
civilization reached a point which has sometimes been equaled but never
has been surpassed.
In the first place, these colonies were inhabited by the most active and
enterprising elements from among a dozen different nations.
In the second place, there was a great deal of general wealth derived
from the carrying trade between the old and the new world, between Europe
and Asia.
In the third place, the form of government under which the colonists
lived gave the majority of the freemen a chance to develop their talents
to the very best of their ability.
If I do not mention the climate, the reason is this; that in countries
devoted exclusively to commerce, the climate does not matter much. Ships
can be built and goods can be unloaded, rain or shine. Provided it does
not get so cold that the harbors freeze or so wet that the towns are
flooded, the inhabitants will take very little interest in the daily
weather reports.
But aside from this, the weather of Ionia was distinctly favorable to
the development of an intellectual class. Before the existence of books
and libraries, learning was handed down from man to man by word of mouth
and the town-pump was the earliest of all social centers and the oldest
of universities.
In Miletus it was possible to sit around the town-pump for 350 out of
every 365 days. And the early Ionian professors made such excellent use
of their climatic advantages that they became the pioneers of all future
scientific development.
The first of whom we have any report, the real founder of modern
science, was a person of doubtful origin. Not in the sense that he had
robbed a bank or murdered his family and had fled to Miletus from parts
unknown. But no one knew much about his antecedents. Was he a Boeotian
or a Phoenician, a Nordic (to speak in the jargon of our learned racial
experts) or a Semite?
It shows what an international center this little old city at the mouth
of the Meander was in those days. Its population (like that of New York
today) consisted of so many different elements that people accepted their
neighbors at their face value and did not look too closely into the
family antecedents.
Since this is not a history of mathematics or a handbook of philosophy,
the speculations of Thales do not properly belong in these pages, except
in so far as they tend to show the tolerance towards new ideas which
prevailed among the Ionians at a time when Rome was a small market-town
on a muddy river somewhere in a distant and unknown region, when the Jews
were still captives in the land of Assyria and when northern and western
Europe were naught but a howling wilderness.
In order that we may understand how such a development was possible, we
must know something about the changes which had taken place since the
days when Greek chieftains sailed across the Aegean Sea, intent upon the
plunder of the rich fortress of Troy. Those far-famed heroes were still
the product of an exceedingly primitive form of civilization. They were
over-grown children who regarded life as one long, glorified rough-house,
full of excitement and wrestling matches and running races and all the
many things which we ourselves would dearly love to do if we were not
forced to stick to the routine jobs which provide us with bread and
bananas.
The relationship between these boisterous paladins and their Gods was as
direct and as simple as their attitude towards the serious problems of
every-day existence. For the inhabitants of high Olympus, who ruled the
world of the Hellenes in the tenth century before our era, were of this
earth earthy, and not very far removed from ordinary mortals. Exactly
where and when and how man and his Gods had parted company was a more
or less hazy point, never clearly established. Even then the friendship
which those who lived beyond the clouds had always felt towards their
subjects who crawled across the face of the earth had in no way been
interrupted and it had remained flavored with those personal and intimate
touches which gave the religion of the Greeks its own peculiar charm.
Of course, all good little Greek boys were duly taught that Zeus was a
very powerful and mighty potentate with a long beard who upon occasion
would juggle so violently with his flashes of lightning and his
thunderbolts that it seemed that the world was coming to an end. But
as soon as they were a little older and were able to read the ancient
sagas for themselves, they began to appreciate the limitations of those
terrible personages of whom they had heard so much in their nursery
and who now appeared in the light of a merry family-party—everlastingly
playing practical jokes upon each other and taking such bitter sides in
the political disputes of their mortal friends that every quarrel in
Greece was immediately followed by a corresponding row among the denizens
of the aether.
Of course in spite of all these very human short-comings, Zeus remained a
very great God, the mightiest of all rulers and a personage whom it was
not safe to displease. But he was “reasonable” in that sense of the word
which is so well understood among the lobbyists of Washington. He was
reasonable. He could be approached if one knew the proper way. And best
of all, he had a sense of humor and did not take either himself or his
world too seriously.
This was, perhaps, not the most sublime conception of a divine figure,
but it offered certain very distinct advantages. Among the ancient Greeks
there never was a hard and fast rule as to what people must hold true
and what they must disregard as false. And because there was no “creed”
in the modern sense of the word, with adamantine dogmas and a class
of professional priests, ready to enforce them with the help of the
secular gallows, the people in different parts of the country were able
to reshape their religious ideas and ethical conceptions as best suited
their own individual tastes.
The Thessalians, who lived within hailing distance of Mount Olympus,
showed of course much less respect for their august neighbors than did
the Asopians who dwelled in a distant village on the Laconian Gulf. The
Athenians, feeling themselves under the direct protection of their own
patron saint, Pallas Athene, felt that they could take great liberties
with the lady’s father, while the Arcadians, whose valleys were far
removed from the main trade routes, clung tenaciously to a simpler faith
and frowned upon all levity in the serious matter of religion, and as
for the inhabitants of Phocis, who made a living from the pilgrims bound
for the village of Delphi, they were firmly convinced that Apollo (who
was worshiped at that profitable shrine) was the greatest of all divine
spirits and deserved the special homage of those who came from afar and
still had a couple of drachmas in their pocket.
The belief in only one God which soon afterwards was to set the Jews
apart from all other nations, would never have been possible if the life
of Judaea had not centered around a single city which was strong enough
to destroy all rival places of pilgrimage and was able to maintain an
exclusive religious monopoly for almost ten consecutive centuries.
In Greece such a condition did not prevail. Neither Athens nor Sparta
ever succeeded in establishing itself as the recognized capital of a
united Greek fatherland. Their efforts in this direction only led to long
years of unprofitable civil war.
No wonder that a race composed of such sublime individualists offered
great scope for the development of a very independent spirit of thought.
The Iliad and the Odyssey have sometimes been called the Bible of the
Greeks. They were nothing of the sort. They were just books. They were
never united into “The Book.” They told the adventures of certain
wonderful heroes who were fondly believed to be the direct ancestors of
the generation then living. Incidentally they contained a certain amount
of religious information because the Gods, without exception, had taken
sides in the quarrel and had neglected all other business for the joy of
watching the rarest prize-fight that had ever been staged within their
domain.
The idea, however, that the works of Homer might either directly or
indirectly have been inspired by Zeus or Minerva or Apollo never even
dawned upon the Greek mind. These were a fine piece of literature and
made excellent reading during the long winter evenings. Furthermore they
caused children to feel proud of their own race.
And that was all.
In such an atmosphere of intellectual and spiritual freedom, in a city
filled with the pungent smell of ships from all the seven seas, rich
with fabrics of the Orient, merry with the laughter of a well fed and
contented populace, Thales was born. In such a city he worked and taught
and in such a city he died. If the conclusions which he reached differed
greatly from the opinions held by most of his neighbors, remember that
his ideas never penetrated beyond a very limited circle. The average
Miletian may have heard the name of Thales, just as the average New
Yorker has probably heard the name of Einstein. Ask him who Einstein is,
and he will answer that he is a fellow with long hair who smokes a pipe
and plays the fiddle and who wrote something about a man walking through
a railroad train, about which there once was an article in a Sunday paper.
That this strange person who smokes a pipe and plays the fiddle has got
hold of a little spark of truth which eventually may upset (or at least
greatly modify) the scientific conclusions of the last sixty centuries,
is a matter of profound indifference to the millions of easy-going
citizens whose interest in mathematics does not reach beyond the conflict
which arises when their favorite batsman tries to upset the law of
gravity.
The text-books of ancient history usually get rid of the difficulty
by printing “Thales of Miletus (640-546 B.C.), the founder of modern
science.” And we can almost see the headlines in the “Miletus Gazette”
saying, “Local graduate discovers secret of true science.”
But just how and where and when Thales left the beaten track and struck
out for himself, I could not possibly tell you. This much is certain,
that he did not live in an intellectual vacuum, nor did he develop his
wisdom out of his inner consciousness. In the seventh century before
Christ, a great deal of the pioneer work in the realm of science had
already been done and there was quite a large body of mathematical
and physical and astronomical information at the disposal of those
intelligent enough to make use of it.
Babylonian star-gazers had searched the heavens.
Egyptian architects had done considerable figuring before they dared
to dump a couple of million tons of granite on top of a little burial
chamber in the heart of a pyramid.
The mathematicians of the Nile Valley had seriously studied the behavior
of the sun that they might predict the wet and dry seasons and give the
peasants a calendar by which they could regulate their work on the farms.
All these problems, however, had been solved by people who still regarded
the forces of nature as the direct and personal expression of the will
of certain invisible Gods who administered the seasons and the course of
the planets and the tides of the ocean as the members of the President’s
cabinet manage the department of agriculture or the post-office or the
treasury.
Thales rejected this point of view. But like most well educated people of
his day, he did not bother to discuss it in public. If the fruit vendors
along the water front wanted to fall upon their faces whenever there was
an eclipse of the sun and invoke the name of Zeus in fear of this unusual
sight, that was their business and Thales would have been the last man
to try to convince them that any schoolboy with an elementary knowledge
of the behavior of heavenly bodies would have foretold that on the 25th
of May of the year 585 B.C., at such and such an hour, the moon would
find herself between the earth and the sun and that therefore the town of
Miletus would experience a few minutes of comparative darkness.
Even when it appeared (as it did appear) that the Persians and the
Lydians had been engaged in battle on the afternoon of this famous
eclipse and had been obliged to cease killing each other for lack
of sufficient light, he refused to believe that the Lydian deities
(following a famous precedent established a few years previously during
a certain battle in the valley of Ajalon) had performed a miracle, and
had suddenly turned off the light of Heaven that the victory might go to
those whom they favored.
For Thales had reached the point (and that was his great merit) where
he dared to regard all nature as the manifestation of one Eternal Will,
subject to one Eternal Law and entirely beyond the personal influence
of those divine spirits which man was forever creating after his own
image. And the eclipse, so he felt, would have taken place just the
same if there had been no more important engagement that particular
afternoon than a dog fight in the streets of Ephesus or a wedding feast
in Halicarnassus.
Drawing the logical conclusions from his own scientific observations, he
laid down one general and inevitable law for all creation and guessed
(and to a certain extent guessed correctly) that the beginning of all
things was to be found in the water which apparently surrounded the world
on all sides and which had probably existed from the very beginning of
time.
Unfortunately we do not possess anything that Thales himself wrote. It
is possible that he may have put his ideas into concrete form (for the
Greeks had already learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians) but not
a page which can be directly attributed to him survives today. For our
knowledge of himself and his ideas we depend upon the scanty bits of
information found in the books of some of his contemporaries. From these,
however, we have learned that Thales in private life was a merchant with
wide connections in all parts of the Mediterranean. That, by the way, was
typical of most of the early philosophers. They were “lovers of wisdom.”
But they never closed their eyes to the fact that the secret of life is
found among the living and that “wisdom for the sake of wisdom” is quite
as dangerous as “art for art’s sake” or a dinner for the sake of the food.
To them, man with all his human qualities, good and bad and indifferent,
was the supreme measure of all things. Wherefore they spent their leisure
time patiently studying this strange creature as he was and not as they
thought that he ought to be.
This made it possible for them to remain on the most amicable terms with
their fellow citizens and allowed them to wield a much greater power
than if they had undertaken to show their neighbors a short cut to the
Millennium.
They rarely laid down a hard and fast rule of conduct.
But by their own example they managed to show how a true understanding of
the forces of nature must inevitably lead to that inner peace of the soul
upon which all true happiness depends and having in this way gained the
good-will of their community they were given full liberty to study and
explore and investigate and were even permitted to venture within those
domains which were popularly believed to be the exclusive property of the
Gods. And as one of the pioneers of this new gospel did Thales spend the
long years of his useful career.
Although he had pulled the entire world of the Greeks apart, although he
had examined each little piece separately, and had openly questioned all
sorts of things which the majority of the people since the beginning of
time had held to be established facts, he was allowed to die peacefully
in his own bed, and if any one ever called him to account for his
heresies, we fail to have a record of the fact.
And once he had shown the way, there were many others eager to follow.
There was, for example, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who left Asia Minor
for Athens at the age of thirty-six and spent the following years as a
“sophist” or private tutor in different Greek cities. He specialized
in astronomy and among other things he taught that the sun was not a
heavenly chariot, driven by a God, as was generally believed, but a
red-hot ball of fire, thousands and thousands of times larger than the
whole of Greece.
When nothing happened to him, when no bolt from Heaven killed him for
his audacity, he went a little further in his theories and stated boldly
that the moon was covered with mountains and valleys and finally he even
hinted at a certain “original matter” which was the beginning and the end
of all things and which had existed from the very beginning of time.
But here, as many other scientists after him were to discover, he trod
upon dangerous ground, for he discussed something with which people were
familiar. The sun and the moon were distant orbs. The average Greek
did not care what names the philosopher wished to call them. But when
the professor began to argue that all things had gradually grown and
developed out of a vague substance called “original matter”—then he went
decidedly too far. Such an assertion was in flat contradiction with the
story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who after the great flood had re-populated
the world by turning bits of stone into men and women. To deny the truth
of a most solemn tale which all little Greek boys and girls had been
taught in their early childhood was most dangerous to the safety of
established society. It would make the children doubt the wisdom of their
elders and that would never do. Hence Anaxagoras was made the subject of
a formidable attack on the part of the Athenian Parents’ League.
During the monarchy and the early days of the republic, the rulers of the
city would have been more than able to protect a teacher of unpopular
doctrines from the foolish hostility of the illiterate Attic peasants.
But Athens by this time had become a full-fledged democracy and the
freedom of the individual was no longer what it used to be. Furthermore,
Pericles, just then in disgrace with the majority of the people,
was himself a favorite pupil of the great astronomer, and the legal
prosecution of Anaxagoras was welcomed as an excellent political move
against the city’s old dictator.
A priest by the name of Diopheites, who also was a ward-leader in
one of the most densely populated suburbs, got a law passed which
demanded “the immediate prosecution of all those who disbelieved in the
established religion or held theories of their own about certain divine
things.” Under this law, Anaxagoras was actually thrown into prison.
Finally, however, the better elements in the city prevailed. Anaxagoras
was allowed to go free after the payment of a small fine and move to
Lampsacus in Asia Minor where he died, full of years and honor, in the
year 428 B.C.
His case shows how little is ever accomplished by the official
suppression of scientific theories. For although Anaxagoras was forced
to leave Athens, his ideas remained behind and two centuries later they
came to the notice of one Aristotle, who in turn used them as a basis
for many of his own scientific speculations. Reaching merrily across a
thousand years of darkness, he handed them on to one Abul-Walid Muhammad
ibn-Ahmad (commonly known as Averroës), the great Arab physician who in
turn popularized them among the students of the Moorish universities of
southern Spain. Then, together with his own observations, he wrote them
down in a number of books. These were duly carried across the Pyrenees
until they reached the universities of Paris and Boulogne. There they
were translated into Latin and French and English and so thoroughly were
they accepted by the people of western and northern Europe that today
they have become an integral part of every primer of science and are
considered as harmless as the tables of multiplication.
But to return to Anaxagoras. For almost an entire generation after his
trial, Greek scientists were allowed to teach doctrines which were at
variance with popular belief. And then, during the last years of the
fifth century, a second case took place.
The victim this time was a certain Protagoras, a wandering teacher who
hailed from the village of Abdera, an Ionian colony in northern Greece.
This spot already enjoyed a doubtful reputation as the birthplace of
Democritus, the original “laughing philosopher,” who had laid down the
law that “only that society is worth while which offers to the largest
number of people the greatest amount of happiness obtainable with the
smallest amount of pain,” and who therefore was regarded as a good
deal of a radical and a fellow who should be under constant police
supervision.
Protagoras, deeply impressed by this doctrine, went to Athens and there,
after many years of study, proclaimed that man was the measure of all
things, that life was too short to waste valuable time upon an inquiry
into the doubtful existence of any Gods, and that all energies ought
to be used for the purpose of making existence more beautiful and more
thoroughly enjoyable.
This statement, of course, went to the very root of the matter and it
was bound to shock the faithful more than anything that had ever been
written or said. Furthermore it was made during a very serious crisis in
the war between Athens and Sparta and the people, after a long series of
defeats and pestilence, were in a state of utter despair. Most evidently
it was not the right moment to incur the wrath of the Gods by an inquiry
into the scope of their supernatural powers. Protagoras was accused of
atheism, of “godlessness,” and was told to submit his doctrines to the
courts.
Pericles, who could have protected him, was dead and Protagoras, although
a scientist, felt little taste for martyrdom.
He fled.
Unfortunately, on the way to Sicily, his ship was wrecked, and it seems
that he was drowned, for we never hear of him again.
As for Diagoras, another victim of Athenian malevolence, he was really
not a philosopher at all but a young writer who harbored a personal
grudge against the Gods because they had once failed to give him their
support in a law-suit. He brooded so long upon his supposed grievance
that finally his mind became affected and he went about saying all sorts
of blasphemous things about the Holy Mysteries which just then enjoyed
great popularity among the people of northern Hellas. For this unseemly
conduct he was condemned to death. But ere the sentence was executed,
the poor devil was given the opportunity to escape. He went to Corinth,
continued to revile his Olympian enemies, and peacefully died of his own
bad temper.
And this brings us at last to the most notorious and the most famous case
of Greek intolerance of which we possess any record, the judicial murder
of Socrates.
When it is sometimes stated that the world has not changed at all and
that the Athenians were no more broadminded than the people of later
times, the name of Socrates is dragged into the debate as a terrible
example of Greek bigotry. But today, after a very exhaustive study of
the case, we know better and the long and undisturbed career of this
brilliant but exasperating soap-box orator is a direct tribute to the
spirit of intellectual liberty which prevailed throughout ancient Greece
in the fifth century before our era.
For Socrates, at a time when the common people still firmly believed in
a large number of divine beings, made himself the prophet of an only
God. And although the Athenians may not always have known what he meant
when he spoke of his “daemon” (that inner voice of divine inspiration
which told him what to do and say), they were fully aware of his very
unorthodox attitude towards those ideals which most of his neighbors
continued to hold in holy veneration and his utter lack of respect for
the established order of things. In the end, however, politics killed the
old man and theology (although dragged in for the benefit of the crowd)
had really very little to do with the outcome of the trial.
Socrates was the son of a stone-cutter who had many children and little
money. The boy therefore had never been able to pay for a regular
college course, for most of the philosophers were practical fellows and
often charged as much as two thousand dollars for a single course of
instruction. Besides, the pursuit of pure knowledge and the study of
useless scientific facts seemed to young Socrates a mere waste of time
and energy. Provided a person cultivated his conscience, so he reasoned,
he could well do without geometry and a knowledge of the true nature of
comets and planets was not necessary for the salvation of the soul.
All the same, the homely little fellow with the broken nose and the
shabby cloak, who spent his days arguing with the loafers on the corner
of the street and his nights listening to the harangues of his wife (who
was obliged to provide for a large family by taking in washing, as her
husband regarded the gaining of a livelihood as an entirely negligible
detail of existence), this honorable veteran of many wars and expeditions
and ex-member of the Athenian senate was chosen among all the many
teachers of his day to suffer for his opinions.
In order to understand how this happened, we must know something about
the politics of Athens in the days when Socrates rendered his painful but
highly useful service to the cause of human intelligence and progress.
All his life long (and he was past seventy when he was executed) Socrates
tried to show his neighbors that they were wasting their opportunities;
that they were living hollow and shallow lives; that they devoted
entirely too much time to empty pleasures and vain triumphs and almost
invariably squandered the divine gifts with which a great and mysterious
God had endowed them for the sake of a few hours of futile glory and
self-satisfaction. And so thoroughly convinced was he of man’s high
destiny that he broke through the bounds of all old philosophies and
went even farther than Protagoras. For whereas the latter had taught
that “man is the measure of all things,” Socrates preached that “man’s
invisible conscience is (or ought to be) the ultimate measure of all
things and that it is not the Gods but we ourselves who shape our
destiny.”
The speech which Socrates made before the judges who were to decide
his fate (there were five hundred of them to be precise and they had
been so carefully chosen by his political enemies that some of them
could actually read and write) was one of the most delightful bits of
commonsense ever addressed to any audience, sympathetic or otherwise.
“No person on earth,” so the philosopher argued, “has the right to tell
another man what he should believe or to deprive him of the right to
think as he pleases,” and further, “Provided that man remain on good
terms with his own conscience, he can well do without the approbation
of his friends, without money, without a family or even a home. But
as no one can possibly reach the right conclusions without a thorough
examination of all the pros and cons of every problem, people must be
given a chance to discuss all questions with complete freedom and without
interference on the part of the authorities.”
Unfortunately for the accused, this was exactly the wrong statement
at the wrong moment. Ever since the Peloponnesian war there had been
a bitter struggle in Athens between the rich and the poor, between
capital and labor. Socrates was a “moderate”—a liberal who saw good and
evil in both systems of government and who tried to find a compromise
which should satisfy all reasonable people. This, of course, had made
him thoroughly unpopular with both sides but thus far they had been too
evenly balanced to take action against him.
When at last in the year 403 B.C. the one-hundred-percent Democrats
gained complete control of the state and expelled the aristocrats,
Socrates was a doomed man.
His friends knew this. They suggested that he leave the city before it
was too late and this would have been a very wise thing to do.
For Socrates had quite as many enemies as friends. During the greater
part of a century he had been a sort of vocal “columnist,” a terribly
clever busy-body who had made it his hobby to expose the shams and the
intellectual swindles of those who regarded themselves as the pillars
of Athenian society. As a result, every one had come to know him. His
name had become a household word throughout eastern Greece. When he said
something funny in the morning, by night the whole town had heard about
it. Plays had been written about him and when he was finally arrested and
taken to prison there was not a citizen in the whole of Attica who was
not thoroughly familiar with all the details of his career.
Those who took the leading part in the actual trial (like that honorable
grain merchant who could neither read nor write but who knew all about
the will of the Gods and therefore was loudest in his accusations)
were undoubtedly convinced that they were rendering a great service to
the community by ridding the city of a highly dangerous member of the
so-called “intelligentsia,” a man whose teaching could only lead to
laziness and crime and discontent among the slaves.
It is rather amusing to remember that even under those circumstances,
Socrates pleaded his case with such tremendous virtuosity that a majority
of the jury was all for letting him go free and suggested that he might
be pardoned if only he would give up this terrible habit of arguing, of
debating, of wrangling and moralizing, in short, if only he would leave
his neighbors and their pet prejudices in peace and not bother them with
his eternal doubts.
But Socrates would not hear of it.
“By no means,” he exclaimed. “As long as my conscience, as long as the
still small voice within me, bids me go forth and show men the true road
to reason, I shall continue to buttonhole whomsoever I happen to meet and
I shall say what is on my mind, regardless of consequences.”
After that, there was no other course but to condemn the prisoner to
death.
Socrates was given a respite of thirty days. The holy ship which made an
annual pilgrimage to Delos had not yet returned from its voyage and until
then, the Athenian law did not allow any executions. The whole of this
month the old man spent quietly in his cell, trying to improve his system
of logic. Although he was repeatedly given the opportunity to escape, he
refused to go. He had lived his life and had done his duty. He was tired
and ready to depart. Until the hour of his execution he continued to talk
with his friends, trying to educate them in what he held to be right
and true, asking them to turn their minds upon the things of the spirit
rather than those of the material world.
Then he drank the beaker of hemlock, laid himself upon his couch and
settled all further argument by sleep everlasting.
For a short time, his disciples, rather terrified by this terrible
outburst of popular wrath, thought it wise to remove themselves from the
scene of their former activities.
But when nothing happened, they returned and resumed their former
occupation as public teachers, and within a dozen years after the death
of the old philosopher, his ideas were more popular than ever.
The city meanwhile had gone through a very difficult period. It was five
years since the struggle for the leadership of the Greek peninsula had
ended with the defeat of Athens and the ultimate victory of the Spartans.
This had been a complete triumph of brawn over brain. Needless to say
that it did not last very long. The Spartans, who never wrote a line
worth remembering or contributed a single idea to the sum total of human
knowledge (with the exception of certain military tactics which survive
in our modern game of football) thought that they had accomplished
their task when the walls of their rival had been pulled down and the
Athenian fleet had been reduced to a dozen ships. But the Athenian mind
had lost none of its shrewd brilliancy. A decade after the end of the
Peloponnesian war, the old harbor of the Piraeus was once more filled
with ships from all parts of the world and Athenian admirals were again
fighting at the head of the allied Greek navies.
Furthermore, the labor of Pericles, although not appreciated by his
own contemporaries, had made the city the intellectual capital of the
world—the Paris of the fourth century before the birth of Christ.
Whosoever in Rome or Spain or Africa was rich enough to give his sons a
fashionable education, felt flattered if the boys were allowed to visit a
school situated within the shadow of the Acropolis.
For this ancient world, which we modern people find so difficult to
understand properly, took the problem of existence seriously.
Under the influence of the early Christian enemies of pagan civilization,
the impression has gained ground that the average Roman or Greek was
a highly immoral person who paid a shallow homage to certain nebulous
Gods and for the rest spent his waking hours eating enormous dinners,
drinking vast bumpers of Salernian wine and listening to the pretty
prattle of Egyptian dancing girls, unless for a change he went to war and
slaughtered innocent Germans and Franks and Dacians for the pure sport of
shedding blood.
Of course, both in Greece and even more so in Rome, there were a great
many merchants and war contractors who had accumulated their millions
without much regard for those ethical principles which Socrates had so
well defined before his judges. Because these people were very wealthy,
they had to be put up with. This, however, did not mean that they
enjoyed the respect of the community or were regarded as commendable
representatives of the civilization of their day.
We dig up the villa of Epaphroditus, who amassed millions as one of
the gang who helped Nero plunder Rome and her colonies. We look at the
ruins of the forty room palace which the old profiteer built out of his
ill-gotten gains. And we shake our heads and say, “What depravity!”
Then we sit down and read the works of Epictetus, who was one of the
house slaves of the old scoundrel, and we find ourselves in the company
of a spirit as lofty and as exalted as ever lived.
I know that the making of generalizations about our neighbors and
about other nations is one of the most popular of indoor sports, but
let us not forget that Epictetus, the philosopher, was quite as truly
a representative of the time in which he lived as Epaphroditus, the
imperial flunkey, and that the desire for holiness was as great twenty
centuries ago as it is today.
Undoubtedly it was a very different sort of holiness from that which is
practiced today. It was the product of an essentially European brain and
had nothing to do with the Orient. But the “barbarians” who established
it as their ideal of what they held to be most noble and desirable were
our own ancestors, and they were slowly developing a philosophy of life
which was highly successful if we agree that a clear conscience and a
simple, straightforward life, together with good health and a moderate
but sufficient income, are the best guarantee for general happiness
and contentment. The future of the soul did not interest these people
overmuch. They accepted the fact that they were a special sort of mammal
which by reason of its intellectual application had risen high above
the other creatures which crawled upon this earth. If they frequently
referred to the Gods, they used the word as we use “atoms” or “electrons”
or “aether.” The beginning of things has got to have a name, but Zeus
in the mouth of Epictetus was as problematical a value as x or y in the
problems of Euclid and meant just as much or as little.
Life it was which interested those men and next to living, art.
Life, therefore, in all its endless varieties, they studied and following
the method of reasoning which Socrates had originated and made popular,
they achieved some very remarkable results.
That sometimes in their zeal for a perfect spiritual world they went to
absurd extremes was regrettable, but no more than human. But Plato is the
only one among all the teachers of antiquity who from sheer love for a
perfect world ever came to preach a doctrine of intolerance.
This young Athenian, as is well known, was the beloved disciple of
Socrates and became his literary executor.
In this capacity he immediately gathered all that Socrates had ever said
or thought into a series of dialogues which might be truthfully called
the Socratian Gospels.
When this had been done, he began to elaborate certain of the more
obscure points in his master’s doctrines and explained them in a series
of brilliant essays. And finally he conducted a number of lecture courses
which spread the Athenian ideas of justice and righteousness far beyond
the confines of Attica.
In all these activities he showed such whole-hearted and unselfish
devotion that we might almost compare him to St. Paul. But whereas St.
Paul had led a most adventurous and dangerous existence, ever traveling
from north to south and from west to east that he might bring the Good
Tidings to all parts of the Mediterranean world, Plato never budged from
his comfortable garden chair and allowed the world to come to him.
Certain advantages of birth and the possession of independent wealth
allowed him to do this.
In the first place he was an Athenian citizen and through his mother
could trace his descent to no one less than Solon. Then as soon as he
came of age he inherited a fortune more than sufficient for his simple
needs.
And finally, his eloquence was such that people willingly traveled to the
Aegean Sea if only they were allowed to follow a few of the lectures in
the Platonic University.
For the rest, Plato was very much like the other young men of his time.
He served in the army, but without any particular interest in military
affairs. He went in for outdoor sports, became a good wrestler, a fairly
good runner, but never achieved any particular fame in the stadium.
Again, like most young men of his time, he spent a great deal of his
time in foreign travel and crossed the Aegean Sea and paid a short visit
to northern Egypt, as his famous grandfather Solon had done before
him. After that, however, he returned home for good and during fifty
consecutive years he quietly taught his doctrines in the shadowy corners
of a pleasure garden which was situated on the banks of the river
Cephissus in the suburbs of Athens and was called the Academy.
He had begun his career as a mathematician, but gradually he switched
over to politics and in this field he laid the foundations for our
modern school of government. He was at heart a confirmed optimist and
believed in a steady process of human evolution. The life of man, so he
taught, rises slowly from a lower plane to a higher one. From beautiful
bodies, the world proceeds to beautiful institutions and from beautiful
institutions to beautiful ideas.
This sounded well on parchment, but when Plato tried to lay down certain
definite principles upon which his perfect state was to be founded, his
zeal for righteousness and his desire for justice were so great that they
made him deaf and blind to all other considerations. His Republic, which
has ever since been regarded as the last word in human perfection by
the manufacturers of paper Utopias, was a very strange commonwealth and
reflected and continues to reflect with great nicety the prejudices of
those retired colonels who have always enjoyed the comforts of a private
income, who like to move in polite circles and who have a profound
distrust of the lower classes, lest they forget “their place” and want to
have a share of those special privileges which by right should go to the
members of the “upper class.”
Unfortunately the books of Plato enjoyed great respect among the medieval
scholars of western Europe and in their hands the famous Republic became
a most formidable weapon in their warfare upon tolerance.
For these learned doctors were apt to forget that Plato had reached his
conclusions from very different premises than those which were popular in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
For instance, Plato had been anything but a pious man in the Christian
sense of the word. The Gods of his ancestors he had always regarded
with deep contempt as ill-mannered rustics from distant Macedonia. He
had been deeply mortified by their scandalous behavior as related in
the chronicles of the Trojan War. But as he grew older and sat and sat
and sat in his little olive grove and became more and more exasperated
by the foolish quarrels of the little city-states of his native land,
and witnessed the utter failure of the old democratic ideal, he grew
convinced that some sort of religion was necessary for the average
citizen, or his imaginary Republic would at once degenerate into a state
of rampant anarchy. He therefore insisted that the legislative body of
his model community should establish a definite rule of conduct for
all citizens and should force both freemen and slaves to obey these
regulations on pain of death or exile or imprisonment. This sounded
like an absolute negation of that broad spirit of tolerance and of that
liberty of conscience for which Socrates had so valiantly fought only a
short time before, and that is exactly what it was meant to be.
The reason for this change in attitude is not hard to find. Whereas
Socrates had been a man among men, Plato was afraid of life and escaped
from an unpleasant and ugly world into the realm of his own day dreams.
He knew of course that there was not the slightest chance of his ideas
ever being realized. The day of the little independent city-states,
whether imaginary or real, was over. The era of centralization had begun
and soon the entire Greek peninsula was to be incorporated into that vast
Macedonian Empire which stretched from the shores of the Maritsa to the
banks of the Indus River.
But ere the heavy hand of the conqueror descended upon the unruly
democracies of the old peninsula, the country had produced the greatest
of those many benefactors who have put the rest of the world under
eternal obligation to the now defunct race of the Greeks.
I refer of course to Aristotle, the wonder-child from Stagira, the man
who in his day and age knew everything that was to be known and added
so much to the sum total of human knowledge that his books became an
intellectual quarry from which fifty successive generations of Europeans
and Asiatics were able to steal to their hearts’ content without
exhausting that rich vein of pure learning.
At the age of eighteen, Aristotle had left his native village in
Macedonia to go to Athens and follow the lectures in Plato’s university.
After his graduation he lectured in a number of places until the year 336
when he returned to Athens and opened a school of his own in a garden
near the temple of Apollo Lyceus, which became known as the Lyceum and
soon attracted pupils from all over the world.
Strangely enough, the Athenians were not at all in favor of increasing
the number of academies within their walls. The town was at last
beginning to lose its old commercial importance and all of her more
energetic citizens were moving to Alexandria and to Marseilles and other
cities of the south and the west. Those who remained behind were either
too poor or too indolent to escape. They were the hide-bound remnant of
those old, turbulent masses of free citizens, who had been at once the
glory and the ruin of the long-suffering Republic. They had regarded
the “goings on” in Plato’s orchard with small favor. When a dozen years
after his death, his most notorious pupil came back and openly taught
still more outrageous doctrines about the beginning of the world and the
limited ability of the Gods, the old fogies shook their solemn heads and
mumbled dark threats against the man who was making their city a by-word
for free thinking and unbelief.
If they had had their own way, they would have forced him to leave their
country. But they wisely kept these opinions to themselves. For this
short-sighted, stoutish gentleman, famous for his good taste in books
and in clothes, was no negligible quantity in the political life of that
day, no obscure little professor who could be driven out of town by a
couple of hired toughs. He was no one less than the son of a Macedonian
court-physician and he had been brought up with the royal princes.
And furthermore, as soon as he had finished his studies, he had been
appointed tutor to the crown prince and for eight years he had been the
daily companion of young Alexander. Hence he enjoyed the friendship and
the protection of the most powerful ruler the world had ever seen and the
regent who administered the Greek provinces during the monarch’s absence
on the Indian front watched carefully lest harm should befall one who had
been the boon companion of his imperial master.
No sooner, however, had news of Alexander’s death reached Athens than
Aristotle’s life was in peril. He remembered what had happened to
Socrates and felt no desire to suffer a similar fate. Like Plato, he had
carefully avoided mixing philosophy with practical politics. But his
distaste for the democratic form of government and his lack of belief
in the sovereign abilities of the common people were known to all. And
when the Athenians, in a sudden outburst of fury, expelled the Macedonian
garrison, Aristotle moved across the Euboean Sound and went to live in
Calchis, where he died a few months before Athens was reconquered by the
Macedonians and was duly punished for her disobedience.
At this far distance it is not easy to discover upon what positive
grounds Aristotle was accused of impiety. But as usual in that nation of
amateur orators, his case was inextricably mixed up with politics and
his unpopularity was due to his disregard of the prejudices of a few
local ward-bosses, rather than to the expression of any startlingly new
heresies, which might have exposed Athens to the vengeance of Zeus.
Nor does it matter very much.
The days of the small independent republics were numbered.
Soon afterwards, the Romans fell heir to the European heritage of
Alexander and Greece became one of their many provinces.
Then there was an end to all further bickering, for the Romans in most
matters were even more tolerant than the Greeks of the Golden Age had
been and they permitted their subjects to think as they pleased, provided
they did not question certain principles of political expediency upon
which the peace and prosperity of the Roman state had, since time
immemorial, been safely builded.
All the same there existed a subtle difference between the ideals which
animated the contemporaries of Cicero and those which had been held
sacred by the followers of such a man as Pericles. The old leaders of
Greek thought had based their tolerance upon certain definite conclusions
which they had reached after centuries of careful experiment and
meditation. The Romans felt that they could do without the preliminary
study. They were merely indifferent, and were proud of the fact. They
were interested in practical things. They were men of action and had a
deep-seated contempt for words.
If other people wished to spend their afternoons underneath an old olive
tree, discussing the theoretical aspects of government or the influence
of the moon upon the tides, they were more than welcome to do so.
If furthermore their knowledge could be turned to some practical use,
then it was worthy of further attention. Otherwise, together with
singing and dancing and cooking, sculpture and science, this business
of philosophizing had better be left to the Greeks and to the other
foreigners whom Jupiter in his mercy had created to provide the world
with those things which were unworthy of a true Roman’s attention.
Meanwhile they themselves would devote their attention to the
administration of their ever increasing domains; they would drill the
necessary companies of foreign infantry and cavalry to protect their
outlying provinces; they would survey the roads that were to connect
Spain with Bulgaria; and generally they would devote their energies to
the keeping of the peace between half a thousand different tribes and
nations.
Let us give honor where honor is due.
The Romans did their job so thoroughly that they erected a structure
which under one form or another has survived until our own time, and that
in itself is no mean accomplishment. As long as the necessary taxes were
paid and a certain outward homage was paid to the few rules of conduct
laid down by their Roman masters, the subject-tribes enjoyed a very
large degree of liberty. They could believe or disbelieve whatever they
pleased. They could worship one God or a dozen Gods or whole temples
full of Gods. It made no difference. But whatever religion they chose to
profess, these strangely assorted members of a world-encircling empire
were forever reminded that the “pax Romana” depended for its success upon
a liberal application of the principle of “live and let live.” They must
under no condition interfere either with their own neighbors or with the
strangers within their gates. And if perchance they thought that their
Gods had been insulted, they must not rush to the magistrate for relief.
“For,” as the Emperor Tiberius remarked upon one memorable occasion, “if
the Gods think that they have just claims for grievance, they can surely
take care of themselves.”
And with such scant words of consolation, all similar cases were
instantly dismissed and people were requested to keep their private
opinions out of the courts.
If a number of Cappadocian traders decided to settle down among the
Colossians, they had a right to bring their own Gods with them and erect
a temple of their own in the town of Colossae. But if the Colossians
should for similar reasons move into the land of the Cappadocians, they
must be granted the same privileges and must be given an equal freedom of
worship.
It has often been argued that the Romans could permit themselves the
luxury of such a superior and tolerant attitude because they felt an
equal contempt for both the Colossians and the Cappadocians and all the
other savage tribes who dwelled outside of Latium. That may have been
true. I don’t know. But the fact remains that for half a thousand years,
a form of almost complete religious tolerance was strictly maintained
within the greater part of civilized and semi-civilized Europe, Asia and
Africa and that the Romans developed a technique of statecraft which
produced a maximum of practical results together with a minimum of
friction.
To many people it seemed that the millennium had been achieved and that
this condition of mutual forbearance would last forever.
But nothing lasts forever. Least of all, an empire built upon force.
Rome had conquered the world, but in the effort she had destroyed herself.
The bones of her young soldiers lay bleaching on a thousand battlefields.
For almost five centuries the brains of her most intelligent citizens
had wasted themselves upon the gigantic task of administering a colonial
empire that stretched from the Irish Sea to the Caspian.
At last the reaction set in.
Both the body and the mind of Rome had been exhausted by the impossible
task of a single city ruling an entire world.
And then a terrible thing happened. A whole people grew tired of life and
lost the zest for living.
They had come to own all the country-houses, all the town-houses, all the
yachts and all the stage-coaches they could ever hope to use.
They found themselves possessed of all the slaves in the world.
They had eaten everything, they had seen everything, they had heard
everything.
They had tried the taste of every drink, they had been everywhere,
they had made love to all the women from Barcelona to Thebes. All the
books that had ever been written were in their libraries. The best
pictures that had ever been painted hung on their walls. The cleverest
musicians of the entire world had entertained them at their meals.
And, as children, they had been instructed by the best professors and
pedagogues who had taught them everything there was to be taught. As a
result, all food and drink had lost its taste, all books had grown dull,
all women had become uninteresting, and existence itself had developed
into a burden which a good many people were willing to drop at the first
respectable opportunity.
There remained only one consolation, the contemplation of the Unknown and
the Invisible.
The old Gods, however, had died years before. No intelligent Roman any
longer took stock in the silly nursery rhymes about Jupiter and Minerva.
There were the philosophic systems of the Epicureans and the Stoics and
the Cynics, all of whom preached charity and self-denial and the virtues
of an unselfish and useful life.
But they were so empty. They sounded well enough in the books of Zeno
and Epicurus and Epictetus and Plutarch, which were to be found in every
cornerstore library.
But in the long run, this diet of pure reason was found to lack the
necessary nourishing qualities. The Romans began to clamor for a certain
amount of “emotion” with their spiritual meals.
Hence the purely philosophical “religions” (for such they really were, if
we associate the idea of religion with a desire to lead useful and noble
lives) could only appeal to a very small number of people, and almost all
of those belonged to the upper classes who had enjoyed the advantages of
private instruction at the hands of competent Greek teachers.
To the mass of the people, these finely-spun philosophies meant less than
nothing at all. They too had reached a point of development at which a
good deal of the ancient mythology seemed the childish invention of rude
and credulous ancestors. But they could not possibly go as far as their
so-called intellectual superiors and deny the existence of any and all
personal Gods.
Wherefore they did what all half-educated people do under such
circumstances. They paid a formal and outward tribute of respect to the
official Gods of the Republic and then betook themselves for real comfort
and happiness to one of the many mystery religions which during the last
two centuries had found a most cordial welcome in the ancient city on the
banks of the Tiber.
The word “mystery” which I have used before was of Greek origin. It
originally meant a gathering of “initiated people”—of men and women whose
“mouth had been shut” against the betrayal of those most holy secrets
which only the true members of the mystery were supposed to know and
which bound them together like the hocus pocus of a college fraternity or
the cabalistic incantations of the Independent Order of Sea-Mice.
During the first century of our era, however, a mystery was nothing more
nor less than a special form of worship, a denomination, a church. If a
Greek or a Roman (if you will pardon a little juggling with time) had
left the Presbyterian church for the Christian Science church, he would
have told his neighbors that he had gone to “another mystery.” For the
word “church,” the “kirk,” the “house of the Lord,” is of comparatively
recent origin and was not known in those days.
If you happen to be especially interested in the subject and wish
to understand what was happening in Rome, buy a New York paper next
Saturday. Almost any paper will do. Therein you will find four or five
columns of announcements about new creeds, about new mysteries, imported
from India and Persia and Sweden and China and a dozen other countries
and all of them offering special promises of health and riches and
salvation everlasting.
Rome, which so closely resembled our own metropolis, was just as full of
imported and domestic religions. The international nature of the city had
made this unavoidable. From the vine-covered mountain slopes of northern
Asia Minor had come the cult of Cybele, whom the Phrygians revered as the
mother of the Gods and whose worship was connected with such unseemly
outbreaks of emotional hilarity that the Roman police had repeatedly been
forced to close the Cybelian temples and had at last passed very drastic
laws against the further propaganda of a faith which encouraged public
drunkenness and many other things that were even worse.
Egypt, the old land of paradox and secrecy, had contributed half a dozen
strange divinities and the names of Osiris, Serapis and Isis had become
as familiar to Roman ears as those of Apollo, Demeter and Hermes.
As for the Greeks, who centuries before had given unto the world a
primary system of abstract truth and a practical code of conduct, based
upon virtue, they now supplied the people of foreign lands who insisted
upon images and incense with the far-famed “mysteries” of Attis and
Dionysus and Orpheus and Adonis, none of them entirely above suspicion as
far as public morals were concerned, but nevertheless enjoying immense
popularity.
The Phoenician traders, who for a thousand years had frequented the
shores of Italy, had made the Romans familiar with their great God Baal
(the arch-enemy of Jehovah) and with Astarte his wife, that strange
creature to whom Solomon in his old age and to the great horror of all
his faithful subjects had built a “high place” in the very heart of
Jerusalem; the terrible Goddess who had been recognized as the official
protector of the city of Carthage during her long struggle for the
supremacy of the Mediterranean and who finally after the destruction of
all her temples in Asia and Africa was to return to Europe in the shape
of a most respectable and demure Christian saint.
But the most important of all, because highly popular among the soldiers
of the army, was a deity whose broken images can still be found
underneath every rubbish pile that marks the Roman frontier from the
mouth of the Rhine to the source of the Tigris.
This was the great God Mithras.
Mithras, as far as we know, was the old Asiatic God of Light and Air and
Truth, and he had been worshiped in the plains of the Caspian lowlands
when our first ancestors took possession of those wonderful grazing
fields and made ready to settle those valleys and hills which afterwards
became known as Europe. To them he had been the giver of all good things
and they believed that the rulers of this earth exercised their power
only by the grace of his mighty will. Hence, as a token of his divine
favor, he sometimes bestowed upon those called to high offices a bit
of that celestial fire by which he himself was forever surrounded, and
although he is gone and his name has been forgotten, the kindly saints
of the Middle Ages, with their halo of light, remind us of an ancient
tradition which was started thousands of years before the Church was ever
dreamed of.
But although he was held in great reverence for an incredibly long time,
it has been very difficult to reconstruct his life with any degree
of accuracy. There was a good reason for this. The early Christian
missionaries abhorred the Mithras myth with a hatred infinitely more
bitter than that reserved for the common, every day mysteries. In their
heart of hearts they knew that the Indian God was their most serious
rival. Hence they tried as hard as possible to remove everything that
might possibly remind people of his existence. In this task they
succeeded so well that all Mithras temples have disappeared and that
not a scrap of written evidence remains about a religion which for
more than half a thousand years was as popular in Rome as Methodism or
Presbyterianism is in the United States of today.
However with the help of a few Asiatic sources and by a careful perusal
of certain ruins which could not be entirely destroyed in the days before
the invention of dynamite, we have been able to overcome this initial
handicap and now possess a fairly accurate idea about this interesting
God and the things for which he stood.
Ages and ages ago, so the story ran, Mithras was mysteriously born of a
rock. As soon as he lay in his cradle, several nearby shepherds came to
worship him and make him happy with their gifts.
As a boy, Mithras had met with all sorts of strange adventures. Many
of these remind us closely of the deeds which had made Hercules such a
popular hero with the children of the Greeks. But whereas Hercules was
often very cruel, Mithras was forever doing good. Once he had engaged in
a wrestling match with the sun and had beaten him. But he was so generous
in his victory, that the sun and he had become like brothers, and were
often mistaken for each other.
When the God of all evil had sent a drought which threatened to kill
the race of man, Mithras had struck a rock with his arrow, and behold!
plentiful water had gushed forth upon the parched fields. When Ahriman
(for that was the name of the arch-enemy) had thereupon tried to achieve
his wicked purpose by a terrible flood, Mithras had heard of it, had
warned one man, had told him to build a big boat and load it with his
relatives and his flocks and in this way had saved the human race from
destruction. Until finally, having done all he could to save the world
from the consequences of its own follies, he had been taken to Heaven to
rule the just and righteous for all time.
Those who wished to join the Mithras cult were obliged to go through an
elaborate form of initiation and were forced to eat a ceremonious meal
of bread and wine in memory of the famous supper eaten by Mithras and
his friend the Sun. Furthermore, they were obliged to accept baptism in
a font of water and do many other things which have no special interest
to us, as that form of religion was completely exterminated more than
fifteen hundred years ago.
Once inside the fold, the faithful were all treated upon a footing of
absolute equality. Together they prayed before the same candle-lit
altars. Together they chanted the same holy hymns and together they took
part in the festivities which were held each year on the twenty-fifth of
December to celebrate the birth of Mithras. Furthermore they abstained
from all work on the first day of the week, which even today is called
Sun-day in honor of the great God. And finally when they died, they were
laid away in patient rows to await the day of resurrection when the good
should enter into their just reward and the wicked should be cast into
the fire everlasting.
The success of these different mysteries, the widespread influence of
Mithraism among the Roman soldiers, points to a condition far removed
from religious indifference. Indeed the early centuries of the empire
were a period of restless search after something that should satisfy the
emotional needs of the masses.
But early in the year 47 of our own era something happened. A small
vessel left Phoenicia for the city of Perga, the starting point for
the overland route to Europe. Among the passengers were two men not
overburdened with luggage.
Their names were Paul and Barnabas.
They were Jews, but one of them carried a Roman passport and was well
versed in the wisdom of the Gentile world.
It was the beginning of a memorable voyage.
Christianity had set out to conquer the world.