A Short History of the World Part 11

Of course the population of this great Persian empire was not a population of Persians, The Persians were only the small conquering minority of this enormous realm. The rest of the population was what it had been before the Persians came from time immemorial, only that Persian was the administrative language.

Trade and finance were still largely Semitic, Tyre and Sidon as of old were the great Mediterranean ports and Semitic shipping plied upon the seas. But many of these Semitic merchants and business people as {135} they went from place to place already found a sympathetic and convenient common history in the Hebrew tradition and the Hebrew scriptures. A new element which was increasing rapidly in this empire was the Greek element. The Greeks were becoming serious rivals to the Semites upon the sea, and their detached and vigorous intelligence made them useful and, unprejudiced officials.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FINE PIECE OF ATHENIAN POTTERY]

It was on account of the Scythians that Darius I invaded Europe.

He wanted to reach South Russia, the homeland of the Scythian hors.e.m.e.n. He crossed the Bosphorus with a great army and marched through Bulgaria to the Danube, crossed this by a bridge of boats and pushed far northward. His army suffered terribly. It was largely an infantry force and the mounted Scythians rode all round it, cut off its supplies, destroyed any stragglers and never came to a pitched battle. Darius was forced into an inglorious retreat.

He returned himself to Susa but he left an army in Thrace and Macedonia, and Macedonia submitted to Darius. Insurrections of the Greek cities in Asia followed this failure, and the European Greeks were drawn into the contest. Darius resolved upon the subjugation of the Greeks in Europe. With the Phoenician fleet at his disposal he was able to subdue one island after another, and finally in 490 B.C. he made his main attack upon Athens. A considerable Armada sailed from the ports of Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean, and the expedition landed its troops at Marathon to the north of Athens. There they were met and signally defeated by the Athenians.

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An extraordinary thing happened at this time. The bitterest rival of Athens in Greece was Sparta, but now Athens appealed to Sparta, sending a herald, a swift runner, imploring the Spartans not to let Greeks become slaves to barbarians. This runner (the prototype of all "Marathon" runners) did over a hundred miles of broken country in less than two days. The Spartans responded promptly and generously; but when, in three days, the Spartan force reached Athens, there was nothing for it to do but to view the battlefield and the bodies of the defeated Persian soldiers.

The Persian fleet had returned to Asia. So ended the first Persian attack on Greece.

The next was much more impressive. Darius died soon after the news of his defeat at Marathon reached him, and for four years his son and successor, Xerxes, prepared a host to crush the Greeks.

For a time terror united all the Greeks. The army of Xerxes was certainly the greatest that had hitherto been a.s.sembled in the world. It was a huge a.s.sembly of discordant elements. It crossed the Dardanelles, 480 B.C., by a bridge of boats; and along the coast as it advanced moved an equally miscellaneous fleet carrying supplies. At the narrow pa.s.s of Thermopylae a small force of 1400 men under the Spartan Leonidas resisted this mult.i.tude, and after a fight of unsurpa.s.sed heroism was completely destroyed. Every man was killed. But the losses they inflicted upon the Persians were enormous, and the army of Xerxes pushed on to Thebes and Athens in a chastened mood. Thebes surrendered and made terms.

The Athenians abandoned their city and it was burnt.

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[Ill.u.s.tration: ALL THAT REMAINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF CORINTH]

Greece seemed in the hands of the conqueror, but again came victory against the odds and all expectations. The Greek fleet, though not a third the size of the Persian, a.s.sailed it in the bay of Salamis and destroyed it. Xerxes found himself and his immense army cut off from supplies and his heart failed him. He retreated to Asia with one half of his army, leaving the rest to be defeated at Platea (479 B.C.) what time the remnants of the Persian fleet were hunted down by the Greeks and destroyed at Mycalae in Asia Minor.

The Persian danger was at an end. Most of the Greek cities in Asia became free. All this is told in great detail and with much picturesqueness in the first of written histories, the _History_ of {138} Herodotus. This Herodotus was born about 484 B.C. in the Ionian city of Halicarna.s.sus in Asia Minor, and he visited Babylon and Egypt in his search for exact particulars. From Mycalae onward Persia sank into a confusion of dynastic troubles. Xerxes was murdered in 465 B.C. and rebellions in Egypt, Syria and Media broke up the brief order of that mighty realm. The history of Herodotus lays stress on the weakness of Persia. This history is indeed what we should now call propaganda--propaganda for Greece to unite and conquer Persia. Herodotus makes one character, Aristagoras, go to the Spartans with a map of the known world and say to them: "These Barbarians are not valiant in fight. You on the other hand have now attained the utmost skill in war .... No other nations in the world have what they possess: gold, silver, bronze, embroidered garments, beasts and slaves. _All this you might have for yourselves, if you so desired._"

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE (POSEIDON) AT CAPE SUNIUM]

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XXV

THE SPLENDOUR OF GREECE

The century and a half that followed the defeat of Persia was one of very great splendour for the Greek civilization. True that Greece was torn by a desperate struggle for ascendancy between Athens, Sparta and other states (the Peloponnesian War 431 to 404 B.C.) and that in 338 B.C. the Macedonians became virtually masters of Greece; nevertheless during this period the thought and the creative and artistic impulse of the Greeks rose to levels that made their achievement a lamp to mankind for all the rest of history.

The head and centre of this mental activity was Athens. For over thirty years (466 to 428 B.C.) Athens was dominated by a man of great vigour and liberality of mind, Pericles, who set himself to rebuild the city from the ashes to which the Persians had reduced it. The beautiful ruins that still glorify Athens to-day are chiefly the remains of this great effort. And he did not simply rebuild a material Athens. He rebuilt Athens intellectually. He gathered about him not only architects and sculptors but poets, dramatists, philosophers and teachers. Herodotus came to Athens to recite his history (438 B.C.). Anaxagoras came with the beginnings of a scientific description of the sun and stars.

aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides one after the other carried the Greek drama to its highest levels or beauty and n.o.bility.

The impetus Pericles gave to the intellectual life of Athens lived on after his death, and in spite of the fact that the peace of Greece was now broken by the Peloponnesian War and a long and wasteful struggle for "ascendancy" was beginning. Indeed the darkling of the political horizon seems for a time to have quickened rather than discouraged men's minds.

Already long before the time of Pericles the peculiar freedom of Greek inst.i.tutions had given great importance to skill in discussion. {140} Decision rested neither with king nor with priest but in the a.s.semblies of the people or of leading men.

Eloquence and able argument became very desirable accomplishments therefore, and a cla.s.s of teachers arose, the Sophists, who undertook to strengthen young men in these arts. But one cannot reason without matter, and knowledge followed in the wake of speech. The activities and rivalries of these Sophists led very naturally to an acute examination of style, of methods of thought and of the validity of arguments. When Pericles died a certain Socrates was becoming prominent as an able and destructive critic of bad argument--and much of the teaching of the Sophists was bad argument. A group of brilliant young men gathered about Socrates.

In the end Socrates was executed for disturbing people's minds (399 B.C.), he was condemned after the dignified fashion of the Athens of those days to drink in his own house and among his own friends a poisonous draught made from hemlock, but the disturbance of people's minds went on in spite of his condemnation. His young men carried on his teaching.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PART OF THE FAMOUS FRIEZE OF THE PARTHENON, ATHENS]

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[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE THEATRE AT EPIDAUROS, GREECE]

Chief among these young men was Plato (427 to 347 B.C.) who presently began to teach philosophy in the grove of the Academy.

His teaching fell into two main divisions, an examination of the foundations and methods of human thinking and an examination of political inst.i.tutions. He was the first man to write a Utopia, that is to say the plan of a community different from and better than any {142} existing community. This shows an altogether unprecedented boldness in the human mind which had hitherto accepted social traditions and usages with scarcely a question.

Plato said plainly to mankind: "Most of the social and political ills from which you suffer are under your control, given only the will and courage to change them. You can live in another and a wiser fashion if you choose to think it out and work it out. You are not awake to your own power." That is a high adventurous teaching that has still to soak in to the common intelligence of our race. One of his earliest works was the Republic, a dream of a communist aristocracy; his last unfinished work was the Laws, a scheme of regulation for another such Utopian state.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CARYATIDES OF THE ERECHTHEUM]

The criticism of methods of thinking and methods of government was carried on after Plato's death by Aristotle, who had been his pupil and who taught in the Lyceum. Aristotle came from the city of Stagira in Macedonia, and his father was court physician to the Macedonian king. For a time Aristotle was tutor to Alexander, {144} the king's son, who was destined to achieve very great things of which we shall soon be telling. Aristotle's work upon methods of thinking carried the science of Logic to a level at which it remained for fifteen hundred years or more, until the mediaeval schoolmen took up the ancient questions again. He made no Utopias. Before man could really control his destiny as Plato taught, Aristotle perceived that he needed far more knowledge and far more accurate knowledge than he possessed. And so Aristotle began that systematic collection of knowledge which nowadays we call Science. He sent out explorers to collect _facts_. He was the father of natural history. He was the founder of political science. His students at the Lyceum examined and compared the const.i.tutions of 158 different states ....

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[Ill.u.s.tration: ATHENE OF THE PARTHENON]

Here in the fourth century B.C. we find men who are practically "modern thinkers." The child-like, dream-like methods of primitive thought had given way to a disciplined and critical attack upon the problems of life. The weird and monstrous symbolism and imagery of the G.o.ds and G.o.d monsters, and all the taboos and awes and restraints that have hitherto enc.u.mbered thinking are here completely set aside. Free, exact and systematic thinking has begun. The fresh and unenc.u.mbered mind of these newcomers out of the northern forests has thrust itself into the mysteries of the temple and let the daylight in.

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XXVI

THE EMPIRE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT

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

Meanwhile to the north of Greece, the kindred country of Macedonia was rising slowly to power and civilization. The Macedonians spoke a language closely akin to Greek, and on several occasions Macedonian compet.i.tors had taken part in the Olympic games. In 359 B.C. a man of very great abilities and ambition became king of this little country--Philip. Philip had previously been a hostage in Greece; he had had a thoroughly Greek education and he was probably aware of the ideas of Herodotus--which had also been developed by the philosopher Isocrates--of a possible conquest of Asia by a consolidated Greece.

He set himself first to extend and organize his own realm and to remodel his army. For a thousand years now the charging horse-chariot had been the decisive factor in battles, that and the close-fighting infantry. Mounted hors.e.m.e.n had also fought, but as a cloud of skirmishers, individually and without discipline. Philip made his infantry fight in a closely packed ma.s.s, the Macedonian phalanx, and he trained his mounted gentlemen, the knights or companions, to fight in formation and so invented cavalry. The master move in most of his battles and in the battles of his son Alexander was a cavalry charge. The phalanx _held_ the enemy infantry in front while the cavalry swept away the enemy horse on his wings and poured in on the flank and rear of his infantry. Chariots were disabled by bowmen, who shot the horses.

With this new army Philip extended his frontiers through Thessaly to Greece; and the battle of Chaeronia (338 B.C.), fought against Athens and her allies, put all Greece at his feet. At last the dream of Herodotus was bearing fruit. A congress of all the Greek states appointed Philip captain-general of the Graeco-Macedonian confederacy {146} against Persia, and in 336 B.C. his advanced guard crossed into Asia upon this long premeditated adventure.

But he never followed it. He was a.s.sa.s.sinated; it is believed at the instigation of his queen Olympias, Alexander's mother. She was jealous because Philip had married a second wife.

But Philip had taken unusual pains with his son's education. He had not only secured Aristotle, the greatest philosopher in the world, as this boy's tutor, but he had shared his ideas with him and thrust military experience upon him. At Chaeronia Alexander, who was then only eighteen years old, had been in command of the cavalry. And so it was possible for this young man, who was still only twenty years old at the time of his accession, to take up his father's task at once and to proceed successfully with the Persian adventure.