Athenians’ side. There was no seat empty, and no Athenian offered to
give him one. Whereupon the Spartans called to the old man and gave him
the best seat on their side. The Athenians cheered the Spartans to show
how fine they thought this act. At this the Spartans said:
“The Athenians _know_ what is right but they don’t _do_ it.”
15
The Crown of Leaves
Greek boys and young men and even girls loved all sorts of outdoor
sports.
They didn’t play football or baseball or basketball, but they ran and
jumped and wrestled and boxed and threw the discus--a thing like a big,
heavy dinner-plate of iron.
From time to time matches were held in different parts of Greece to see
who was the best in these sports.
The Big Meet, however, took place only once every four years at a
place called Olympia in southern Greece; and these Olympic games, as
they were called, were the most important affairs held in Greece, for
all the winners from different parts of the country were here matched
against each other to see who should be the champion of all Greece.
The time when the games were held was a great national holiday, for
the games were in honor of the head god Jupiter, or Zeus as the Greeks
called him. People came from all over the known world to see the games
much as they do now when a World’s Fair is held or a big football game.
Only Greeks could enter this contest, and only those who had never
committed a crime or broken any laws--as a boy nowadays must have a
clean record in order to be allowed to play on his college or school
team.
If there happened to be a war going on at the time, and there usually
was, so important was this holiday that a truce was declared, and
everybody went off to the games. Nothing could be allowed to interfere
with the games, and even war was not as important. “Business before
pleasure!” When the games were finished, they started fighting again!
The Greek boys and young men would train for four years getting ready
for this big event, and then nine months before the great day they
would go to Olympia to get in training at an open-air gymnasium near
the field.
The games lasted five days and began and ended with a parade and
prayers and sacrifices to the Greek gods, beautiful statues to whom
were placed all about the field, for this was not only sport, but a
religious service in honor of Jupiter and the other gods.
There were all sorts of matches--in running, jumping, wrestling,
boxing, chariot-racing, and throwing the discus.
Any one who cheated would have been put out and never again allowed to
take part. The Greek believed in what we call being a good sport. He
didn’t brag if he won. He didn’t make excuses if he lost; he didn’t cry
out that the decision was unfair.
The athlete who won one or more of these games was the hero of all
Greece, and in particular of the town from which he came. The winner
received no money prize but was crowned with a wreath made of laurel
leaves. This he valued much more than an athlete nowadays does the
silver cup or gold medal he may win. Besides receiving the laurel
wreath, the winner had songs written to him by poets, and often statues
were made of him by sculptors.
There were not only athletic matches but contests between poets and
musicians to see who could write the best poetry or compose and play
the sweetest music on a kind of small harp called the lyre. The winners
of these contests did not receive a laurel wreath, but they were
carried in triumph on the shoulders of the throng, as you may have
seen the captain of a winning team picked up and raised aloft by his
fellow-players after he has won.
Now, in Greek History the first event which we can be absolutely sure
is true is the record of the winner of a foot-race in these Olympic
Games 776 years before Christ was born. And from this event the Greeks
began to count their history dates, as we do now from the birth of
Christ. It was their Year 1.
The four years’ time between the Olympic Games was called an Olympiad.
Up to this time, they had no calendar that gave the year or date,
so 776 is the date of the first Olympiad. Greek History before that
time may have been partly true, but we know much of it was mythical.
Beginning with 776, however, Greek history is pretty much all true.
[Illustration: Greek runner.]
After a long while they stopped having the games, but a few years ago
it was thought it would be a good thing to start them again. So, for
the first time since before Christ, new Olympic Games were again held
in 1896 A.D., not in Olympia, however, but in Athens. The games used
to be held only in Greece. Now they are held each time in a different
country. Only Greeks used to be allowed to take part. Now, however,
athletes from almost all the countries of the world are invited to
compete. War used to be stopped when the time for the games arrived.
Now the games are stopped when war is on.
From what we have learned of the Spartans’ training, we might guess
that they used to win most of the athletic prizes, and they did.
Do the Spartans still continue to win most of the prizes in the New
Olympic Games?
No. Not even the Greeks now carry off the chief prizes.
[Illustration]
16
A Bad Beginning
Have you ever heard of the Seven-League Boots, the boots in which one
could take many miles at a single step?
Well, there is a still bigger boot; it is over five hundred miles long,
and it is in the Mediterranean Sea.
No, it’s not a real boot, but it would look like one if you were miles
high in an airplane and looking down upon it.
It is called Italy.
Something very important happened in Italy, not long after the First
Olympiad in Greece. It was so important that it was called the Year 1,
and for a thousand years people counted from it as the Greeks did from
the First Olympiad, and as we do now from the birth of Christ. This
thing that happened was not the birth of a man, however. It was the
birth of a city, and this city was called Rome.
The history of Rome starts with stories that we know are fairy-tales
or myths in the same way that the history of Greece does. Homer told
about the wanderings of the Greek, Odysseus. A great many years later a
poet named Vergil told about the wanderings of a Trojan named Æneas.
Æneas fled from Troy when that city was burning down and started off to
find a new home. Finally after several years he came to Italy and the
mouth of a river called the Tiber. There Æneas met the daughter of the
man who was ruling over that country, a girl by the name of Lavinia,
and married her, and they lived happily ever after. So the children of
Æneas and Lavinia ruled over the land, and they had children, and their
children had children, and their children had children, until at last
boy twins were born. These twins were named Romulus and Remus. Here
endeth the first part of the story and the trouble begins, for they did
not live happily ever after.
At the time the twins were born, a man had stolen the kingdom, and he
feared that these two boys might grow up and take his stolen kingdom
away from him. So he put the twins in a basket and set them afloat on
the river Tiber, hoping that they might be carried out to sea or upset
and be drowned. This, he thought, was nearly all right, so long as he
didn’t kill them with his own hands. But the basket drifted ashore
instead of going out to sea or upsetting, and a mother wolf found the
twins and nursed them as if they were her own babies. And a woodpecker
also helped and fed them berries. At last a shepherd found them and
brought them up as if they were his own sons until they grew up and
became men. This sounds a good deal like the story of Paris who was
left out to die and was found and brought up by a shepherd also.
[Illustration: Romulus and Remus with the wolf.]
Each of the twins then wished to build a city. But they could not agree
which one was to do it, and in quarreling over the matter, Romulus
killed his own twin brother Remus. Romulus then built the city by the
Tiber River, on the spot where he and his brother had been saved and
nursed by the mother wolf. Here there were seven hills. This was in
753 B.C., and he named the city Roma after his own name, and the people
who lived there were called Romans. So that is why, ever afterward,
the Roman kings always said they were descended from the Trojan hero,
Æneas, the great-great-great-grandfather of Romulus.
Don’t you believe this story? Neither do I. But it is such an old, old
story every one is supposed to have heard it even though it is only a
legend.
In order to get people for the city which he had started, it is said
that Romulus invited all the thieves and bad men who had escaped from
jail to come and live in Rome, promising them that they would be safe
there.
Then as none of the men had wives, and there were no women in his new
city, Romulus thought up a scheme to get the men wives. He invited some
people called Sabines, who lived near-by, both men and women, to come
to Rome to a big party.
They accepted, and a great feast was spread. In the middle of the
feast, when every one was eating and drinking, a signal was given, and
each of the Romans seized a Sabine woman for his wife and ran off with
her.
The Sabine husbands immediately prepared themselves for war against the
Romans, who had stolen their wives. When the battle had begun between
the two armies, the Sabine women ran out in the midst of the fighting
between their new and old husbands and begged them both to stop. They
said they had come to love their new husbands and would not return to
their old homes.
What do you think of that?
It sounds like a pretty bad beginning for a new city, doesn’t it? and
you may well wonder how Rome turned out--a city that started with
Romulus killing his brother and that was settled by escaped prisoners
who stole the wives of their neighbors. We must remember, however, that
then they were nearer the time when Primitive Men lived whose only rule
of life was: kill or be killed, steal or be stolen; and whose usual way
of getting wives was to knock them in the head and drag them off to
their caves while they were senseless. Besides, they believed in the
same gods as the Greeks, and we have heard how their gods did all sorts
of wicked things themselves. This, too, was long before Christ was
born, and at that time they did not know anything about the Christian
religion or what we call right and wrong.
You see I have tried to think of some good excuses for the actions of
these first Romans.
17
Kings with Corkscrew Curls
After Rome’s bad start she had one king after another, and some of
these kings were pretty good and some were pretty bad.
But the most important city in the world at this time was far away from
Rome on the Tigris River. This city was called Nineveh, and here lived
the kings of the country called Assyria, which I told you about some
time ago.
As usual, the chief thing we hear about Assyria and the Assyrians is
that they were fighting with their neighbors. This, however, was not
the fault of their neighbors.
The Assyrian kings who lived in Nineveh wanted more land and power,
and so they fought their neighbors in order to take their land away
from them. These kings had long corkscrew curls, and you may think
that only girls wear long curls and that a man with curls would be
“girl-like.” But these kings were not at all that kind. They were such
terrible fighters that they were feared far and near. They treated
their prisoners terribly; they skinned them alive, cut off their ears,
pulled out their tongues, bored sticks into their eyes, then bragged
about it. They made the people whom they conquered pay them huge sums
of money and promise to fight with them whenever they went to war.
And so Assyria became so strong and powerful that she at last owned
everything of importance in the world, the land between the rivers
called Mesopotamia, and the land to the east, north, and south, and
Phenicia, and Egypt, and pretty nearly everything except Greece and
Italy.
This big, big country of Assyria was ruled by the kings at Nineveh,
who lived in great magnificence. They built wonderful palaces for
themselves, and on each side of the way that led to the palace they
placed rows of huge statues of bulls and lions with wings and men’s
heads as a rich man nowadays might plant a row of trees along the
driveway that leads up to his home. These winged animals are what are
called cherubs in the Bible.
Perhaps you have heard a particularly sweet and pretty little baby
called a cherub. Isn’t it strange that these hideous Assyrian monsters
should be called cherubs also?
When the Assyrian kings were not fighting men they were fighting wild
animals, for they were very fond of hunting with bow and arrow, and
they had pictures and statues made of themselves on horseback or in
chariots fighting lions. Often they would capture the animals they
hunted alive and put them in cages so that the people could come and
see them. This was something like a “zoo” such as we have nowadays.
[Illustration: An Assyrian cherub.]
The rulers of Assyria had very strange names. Sennacherib was one of
the most famous. Sennacherib lived about 700 B.C. Once upon a time
Sennacherib was fighting Jerusalem. His whole army was camped one
night when as they lay asleep something happened, for when the morning
came, none woke up; all were dead, both men and horses. An English poet
named Byron has written a poem called “The Destruction of Sennacherib”
describing this event. Perhaps they were poisoned; what do you think?
Assur-bani-pal was another king who ruled later--about 650 B.C. He was
a great fighter too, but he was also very fond of books and reading;
so Assur-bani-pal started the first public library. The books in that
first public library were, however, very peculiar. Of course they were
not printed books, and they were not even made of paper. They were
made of mud with the words pressed into the clay before it dried. This
writing was cuneiform, which I have already told you about. The books
were not arranged in bookcases, either, but were placed in piles on the
floor. They were, however, kept in careful order and numbered so that a
person who wanted to see a book in the library could call for it by its
number.
Assyria reached the height of her power during the reign of Sennacherib
and Assur-bani-pal, and everything in Nineveh was so lovely for the
Ninevites that the time when Assur-bani-pal reigned was called the
Golden Age.
But although everything in Nineveh was so lovely for the Ninevites,
everywhere else the Assyrians were hated and feared, for their armies
brought death and destruction wherever they went.
So it came to pass that not long after Assur-bani-pal died, two of the
neighbors of Nineveh could stand it no longer. These two neighbors
were the king of Babylon, who lived south, and a people called the
Medes, who lived to the east and belonged to the Aryan family. So the
king of Babylon and the Medes got together and attacked Nineveh, and
together they wiped that city off the face of the earth. This was
in 612 B.C.--Six-One-Two--and the power of Nineveh and Assyria was
killed dead. This, therefore is called the Fall of Nineveh, the end of
Nineveh. We might put up a tombstone:
[Illustration]
18
A City of Wonders and Wickedness
The king of Babylon had beaten Nineveh. But he didn’t stop with that.
He wanted his Babylon to be as great as Nineveh had been. So he went
on conquering other lands to the left and right until Babylon, in its
turn, became the leader and ruler of other countries. Was Babylon,
also, in its turn, to fall, as Nineveh had fallen?
When at last the king of Babylon died, he left his vast empire to his
son. Now, the king’s son was not called John or James or Charles or
anything simple like that. It was--Nebuchadnezzar, and I wonder if his
father called him by all that long name or shortened it to a nickname
like “Neb,” for instance, or “Chad,” or perhaps “Nezzar.” This is the
way Nebuchadnezzar wrote his name, for he used cuneiform writing. How
would you like to write your name in such a queer way?
[Illustration: Name of Nebuchadnezzar in cuneiform writing.]
Nebuchadnezzar set to work and made the city of Babylon the largest,
the most magnificent and the most wonderful city of that time and
perhaps of any time. The city was in the shape of a square and covered
more ground than the two largest cities in the world to-day--New York
and London--put together. He surrounded it with a wall fifty times as
high as a man--fifty times--whew!--and so broad that a chariot could
be driven along on the top, and in this wall he made one hundred huge
brass gates. The Euphrates River flowed under the wall, across the
city, and out under the wall on the other side.
Nebuchadnezzar could not find any one in Babylon who was beautiful
enough to be his queen. The Babylonian girls must have felt pretty
bad--or mad--about that. So he went to Media, the country that had
helped his father conquer Nineveh. There he found a lovely princess,
and so he married her and brought her home to Babylon.
Now, Media was a land of hills and mountains, whilst Babylon was on
level ground and without even a hill in sight. Nebuchadnezzar’s queen
found Babylonia so flat and uninteresting that she became homesick,
and she longed for her own country with its wild mountain scenery.
So, just to please her and keep her contented Nebuchadnezzar set to
work and _built_ a hill for her, but the queer thing was he built it
on top of the roof of his palace! On the sides of this hill he made
beautiful gardens, and these gardens he planted not only with flowers
but also with trees, so that his queen might sit in the shade and enjoy
herself. These were called Hanging Gardens. The Hanging Gardens and the
tremendous walls were known far and wide as one of the Seven Wonders of
the world.
Would you like to know what the other Wonders were?
Well, the pyramids in Egypt were one; the magnificent statue of Jupiter
at Olympia, where the Olympic Games were held, was another--so those
with the Hanging Gardens make three.
Nebuchadnezzar believed in idols like those terrible monsters the
Phenicians worshiped. The Jews away off in Jerusalem believed in one
God. Nebuchadnezzar wanted the Jews to worship his gods, but they would
not. He also wanted them to pay him taxes, and they would not. So he
sent his armies to Jerusalem, destroyed that city, burnt the beautiful
Temple that Solomon had built, and brought the Jews and all their
belongings to Babylon. There in Babylon Nebuchadnezzar kept the Jews
prisoners, and there in Babylon the Jews remained prisoners for fifty
years.
Babylon had become not only the most magnificent city in the world; it
had become also the most wicked. The people of Babylon gave themselves
up to the wildest pleasures. Their only thought seemed to be, “Let’s
eat, drink, and be merry”; they thought nothing of the morrow; the more
wicked the pleasure the more they liked it.
But although Nebuchadnezzar seemed able to do and able to have
everything in the world he wanted, he finally went crazy. He thought
he was a bull, and he used to get down on his hands and knees and eat
grass, imagining he was a beast of the field.
And Babylon, in spite of its tremendous walls and brass gates, was
doomed. Babylon was to be conquered. It didn’t seem possible. How could
it be conquered, and who was to do the conquering? You would probably
never guess.
19
A Surprise Party
When I was a boy I was always told, and you have probably been told the
same thing:
“You can have no dessert until you have eaten your dinner.”
No matter whether I was hungry or not, “No dinner, no dessert.” This
was a rule which my father said was “like the laws of the Medes and
Persians.”
I didn’t know then who the Medes and Persians were, but I know now
that they were two Aryan families living next to Babylon--you remember
Nebuchadnezzar had married a Median girl--and that they were governed
by laws which were fixed so hard and fast and were so unchangeable that
we still speak of any such thing that does not change as like “the laws
of the Medes and Persians.”
The Medes and the Persians had a religion which was neither like that
of the Jews nor like the idol worship of the Babylonians. It had been
started by a Persian named Zoroaster, who was a wise man like Solomon.
He may even have lived about the same time as Solomon, but probably a
good deal later.
Zoroaster went about among the people, teaching them wise sayings and
hymns. These wise sayings have been gathered into a book, which is now
the Persian Bible.
Zoroaster taught that there were two great spirits in the world, the
Good Spirit and the Bad Spirit.
The Good Spirit, he said, was Light, and the Bad Spirit, Darkness.
The Good or Light he called Mazda; where have you heard that word, I
wonder. So the Persians kept a fire, in which they thought was the Good
Spirit, constantly burning on their altars, and they had men watch
over this flame to see that it never went out. These men who watched
the flame were called Magi, and they were supposed to be able to do
all sorts of wonderful things, so that we call such wonderful things
“magic,” and the people who are able to do them we call “magicians.”
At the time of this story which I’m telling you, the ruler of the Medes
and the Persians was a great king named Cyrus.
But before I go on with this story I must tell you about a little
country not far from Troy. This little country was called Lydia.
Perhaps you may know a girl named Lydia. I do. Lydia was ruled over
by a king named Crœsus who was the richest man in the world. When we
want to describe a man as very wealthy, we still say he is “as rich as
Crœsus.”
Crœsus owned nearly all the gold-mines, of which there were a great
many in that country, and besides this he collected money in the form
of taxes from all the cities near him.
Before the time of Crœsus people did not have money such as we have
now. When they wished to buy anything, they simply traded something
they had for something they wanted--so many eggs for a pound of meat or
so much wine for a pair of sandals. To buy anything expensive, such as
a horse, they paid with a lump of gold or silver, which was weighed in
the scales to see just how heavy it was. It is hard for us to think how
people could get along without cents and nickels, dimes, quarters and
dollars--with no money at all--and yet they did.
Crœsus, in order to make things simpler, cut up his gold into small
bits. Now, it was not easy for every one to weigh each piece each time
it was traded, for he might not have any scales handy. So Crœsus had
each piece weighed and stamped with its weight and with his name or
initials to show that he guaranteed the weight. These pieces of gold
and silver were only lumps with Crœsus’ seal pressed into them, but
they were the first real money even though they were not round and
beautifully engraved like our coins.
Now, Cyrus, the great Persian king, thought he would like to own this
rich country of Lydia with all its gold-mines, so he set out to conquer
it.
When Cyrus was on the way Crœsus sent in a hurry to the oracle in
Greece to ask what was going to happen and who was going to win. You
will remember what I said about the oracle at Delphi and how people
used to ask the oracle questions--to have their fortunes told, as
nowadays some people ask the ouija board.
The oracle replied to Crœsus’ question:
“A great kingdom shall fall.”
Crœsus was delighted, for he thought the oracle meant that Cyrus’
kingdom would fall. The oracle _was_ right, but not in the way Crœsus
had thought.
A great kingdom did fall, but it was his own kingdom of Lydia and not
Cyrus’ that fell.
But Cyrus was still not satisfied with the capture of Lydia, and so at
last he attacked Babylon.
Now, the people in Babylon who thought of nothing but pleasure were
busy feasting and drinking and having a good time. Why should they
worry about Cyrus? Their city had walls that were so high and thick and
was protected by such strong gates of brass that it seemed as if no one
could possibly have captured it.
[Illustration: Delphic Oracle.]