History Of Ancient Civilization Part 8

=The Jews.=--The little kingdom of Jerusalem maintained itself for seven centuries, governed now by a king, now by the high-priest, but always paying tribute to the masters of Syria--to the Persians first, later to the Macedonians and the Syrians, and last of all to the Romans. Faithful to the end to Jehovah, the Jews (their proper name since the return) continued to live the law of Moses, to celebrate at Jerusalem the feasts and the sacrifices. The high-priest, a.s.sisted by a council of the elders, preserved the law; scribes copied it and doctors expounded it to the people. The faithful obliged themselves to observe it in the smallest details. The Pharisees were eminent among them for their zeal in fulfilling all its requirements.

=The Synagogues.=--Meanwhile the Jews for the sake of trade were pushing beyond the borders of Judaea into Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and even to Italy. Some of them were to be found in all the great cities--Alexandria, Damascus, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth and Rome.

Dispersed among the Gentiles, the Jews were strenuous to preserve their religion. They raised no temples, for the law prevented this; there could be but one Jewish temple, that at Jerusalem, where they celebrated the solemn feasts. But they joined themselves together to read and comment on the word of G.o.d. These places of a.s.sembling were called Synagogues, from a Greek word signifying meetings.

=Destruction of the Temple.=--The Christ appeared at this moment. The Jews crucified him and persecuted his disciples not only in Judaea but in every city where they found them in any number. In the year 70 A.D.

Jerusalem, in revolt against the Romans, was taken by a.s.sault, and all the inhabitants were ma.s.sacred or sold into slavery. The Romans burnt the temple and carried away the sacred utensils. From that time there was no longer a centre of the Jewish religion.

=Fortunes of the Jews after the Dispersion.=--The Jewish nation survived the ruin of its capital. The Jews, scattered throughout the world, learned to dispense with the temple. They preserved their sacred books in the Hebrew tongue. Hebrew is the primitive language of Israel; the Jews since the return from Babylon no longer spoke it, but adopted the languages of the neighboring peoples--the Syriac, the Chaldean, and especially the Greek. The Rabbis, however, instructed in the religion, still learned the Hebrew, explained it, and commented on the Scripture.[43] Thus the Jewish religion was preserved, and, thanks to it, the Jewish people. It made converts even among the Gentiles; there were in the empire proselytes, that is, people who practised the religion of Jehovah without being of the Jewish race.

The Christian Church, powerful since the fourth century, commenced to persecute the Jews. This persecution has endured to this day in all Christian countries. Usually the Jews were tolerated on account of their wealth and because they transacted all banking operations; but they were kept apart, not being permitted to hold any office. In the majority of cities they were compelled to wear a special costume, to live in a special quarter,[44] gloomy, filthy, unhealthy, and sometimes at Easter time to send one of their number to suffer insult.

The people suspected them of poisoning fountains, of killing children, of profaning the consecrated host; often the people rose against them, ma.s.sacred them, and pillaged their houses. Judges under the least pretext had them imprisoned, tortured, and burned. Sometimes the church tried to convert them by force; sometimes the government exiled them _en ma.s.se_ from the country and confiscated their goods. The Jews at last disappeared from France,[45] from Spain, England, and Italy.

In Portugal, Germany, and Poland, and in the Mohammedan lands they maintained themselves. From these countries after the cessation of persecution they returned to the rest of Europe.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] Exodus iii, 1-10.

[42] There is much uncertainty regarding the chronology of this period.--ED.

[43] The Talmud is the acc.u.mulation of these commentaries.

[44] The Jewish Quarter at Rome was called the Ghetto. This name has since been applied to all Jewish quarters.

[45] Except at Avignon, on the domains of the Pope, and in Alsace-Lorraine.

CHAPTER IX

GREECE AND THE GREEKS

=The Country.=--Greece is a very little country (about 20,000 square miles), hardly larger than Switzerland; but it is a country of great variety, bristling with mountains, indented with gulfs--a country originally const.i.tuted to influence mightily the character of the men who inhabited it.

A central chain, the Pindus, traverses Greece through the centre and covers it with its rocky system. Toward the isthmus of Corinth it becomes lower; but the Peloponnesus, on the other side of the isthmus, is elevated about 2,000 feet above the sea level, like a citadel crowned with lofty chains, abrupt and snowy, which fall perpendicularly into the sea. The islands themselves scattered along the coast are only submerged mountains whose summits rise above the surface of the sea. In this diverse land there is little tillable ground, but almost everywhere bare rock. The streams, like brooks, leave between their half-dried channel and the sterile rock of the mountain only a narrow strip of fertile soil. In this beautiful country are found some forests, cypresses, laurels, palms, here and there vines scattered on the rocky hillsides; but there are no rich harvests and no green pasturages. Such a country produces wiry mountaineers, active and sober.

=The Sea.=--Greece is a land of sh.o.r.es: smaller than Portugal, it has as great a coast-line as Spain. The sea penetrates it to a great number of gulfs, coves, and indentations; it is ordinarily surrounded with projecting rocks, or with approaching islands that form a natural port. This sea is like a lake; it has not, like the ocean, a pale and sombre color; usually it is calm, l.u.s.trous, and, as Homer says, "of the color of violets."

No sea lends itself better to navigation with small ships. Every morning the north wind rises to conduct the barques of Athens to Asia; in the evening the south wind brings them back to port. From Greece to Asia Minor the islands are placed like stepping-stones; on a clear day the mariner always has land in view. Such a sea beckons people to cross it.

And so the Greeks have been sailors, traders, travellers, pirates, and adventurers; like the Phnicians, they have spread over all the ancient world, carrying with them the merchandise and the inventions of Egypt, of Chaldea, and of Asia.

=The Climate.=--The climate of Greece is mild. In Athens it freezes hardly once in twenty years; in summer the heat is moderated by the breeze from the sea.[46] Today the people still lie in the streets from the month of May to September. The air is cool and transparent; for many leagues could once be seen the crest of the statue of Pallas.

The contours of distant mountains are not, as with us, enveloped in haze, but show a clear line against the clear sky. It is a beautiful country which urges man to take life as a feast, for everything is happy about him. "Walking at night in the gardens, listening to the gra.s.shoppers, playing the lute in the clear of the moon, going to drink at the spring at the mountain, carrying with him some wine that he may drink while he sings, spending the days in dancing--these are Greek pleasures, the joys of a race poor, economical, and eternally young."

=Simplicity of Greek Life.=--In this country men are not melted with the heat nor stiffened with cold; they live in the open air gay and at slight expense. Food in great quant.i.ty is not required, nor warm clothing, nor a comfortable house. The Greek could live on a handful of olives and a sardine. His entire clothing consisted of sandals, a tunic, a large mantle; very often he went bare-footed and bare-headed.

His house was a meagre and unsubstantial building; the air easily entered through the walls. A couch with some coverings, a coffer, some beautiful vases, a lamp,--this was his furniture. The walls were bare and whitened with lime. This house was only a sleeping place.

THE PEOPLE

=Origin of the Greeks.=--The people who inhabited this charming little land were an Aryan people, related to the Hindoos and the Persians, and like them come from the mountains of Asia or the steppes beyond the Caspian Sea. The Greeks had forgotten the long journey made by their ancestors; they said that they, like the gra.s.shoppers, were the children of the soil.[47] But their language and the names of their G.o.ds leave no doubt of their origin.... Like all the Aryans, the primitive Greeks nourished themselves with milk and with the flesh of their herds; they moved about under arms, always ready to fight, and grouped themselves in tribes governed by patriarchs.

=The Legends.=--The Greeks like all the other ancient peoples were ignorant of their origin. They neither knew whence their ancestors had come nor when they had established themselves in Greece, nor what they had done there. To preserve the exact memory of things as they occur, there is need of some means of fixing them; but the Greeks did not know how to write; they did not employ writing until about the eighth century B.C. They had no way of calculating the number of years. Later they adopted the usage of counting the years according to the great feast which was celebrated every four years at Olympia; a period of four years was called an olympiad. But the first olympiad was placed in 776 B.C., and the chronology of the Greeks does not rise beyond this date.

And yet they used to tell in Greece a great number of legends about this primitive period. These were especially the exploits of ancient kings and of heroes who were adored as demi-G.o.ds. These stories were so mingled with fable that it is impossible to know how much truth they may contain. They said at Athens that the first king, Cecrops, was half man and half serpent; at Thebes, that Cadmus, founder of the city, had come from Phnicia to seek his sister Europa who had been stolen by a bull; that he had killed a dragon and had sowed his teeth, from which was sprung a race of warriors, and that the n.o.ble families of Thebes descended from these warriors. At Argos it was said that the royal family was the issue of Pelops to whom Zeus had given a shoulder of ivory to replace the one devoured by a G.o.ddess. Thus each country had its legends and the Greeks continued to the end to relate them and to offer worship to their ancient heroes--Perseus, Bellerophon, Herakles, Theseus, Minos, Castor and Pollux, Meleager, dipus. The majority of the Greeks, even among the better educated, admitted, at least in part, the truth of these traditions. They accepted as historical facts the war between the two sons of dipus, king of Thebes, and the expedition of the Argonauts, sailing forth in quest of the Golden Fleece, which was guarded by two brazen-footed bulls vomiting flames.

=The Trojan War.=--Of all these legends the most fully developed and the most celebrated was the legend of the Trojan War. It recounted that about the twelfth century, Troy, a rich and powerful city, held sway over the coast of Asia. Paris, a Trojan prince, having come to Greece, had abducted Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta.

Agamemnon, king of Argos, made a league of the kings of Greece; a Greek army went in a fleet of two hundred galleys to besiege Troy. The siege endured ten years because the supreme G.o.d, Zeus, had taken the side of the Trojans. All the Greek chiefs partic.i.p.ated in this adventure. Achilles, the bravest and the most beautiful of these, killed Hector, the princ.i.p.al defender of Troy, and dragged his corpse around the city; he fought clad in divine armor which had been presented him by his mother, a G.o.ddess of the sea; in turn he died, shot by an arrow in the heel. The Greeks, despairing of taking the city by force, employed a trick: they pretended to depart, and left an immense horse of wood in which were concealed the chiefs of the army.

The Trojans drew this horse into the city; during the night the chiefs came forth and opened the city to the Greeks. Troy was burnt, the men slaughtered, the women led away as slaves. But the chiefs of the Greeks on their return were beset by tempest. Some perished in the sea, others were cast on foreign sh.o.r.es. Odysseus, the most crafty of the chiefs, was for ten years buffeted from one land to another, losing successively all his ships, himself the sole survivor of the disasters.

All antiquity had steadfast faith in the Trojan War. 1184 B.C. was set as the date of the ending of the siege, and men pointed out the site of the city. In 1874 Schliemann purposed to excavate this site; it was necessary to traverse the debris of many cities which lay over it; at last at a depth of about fifty feet he found in the deepest bed of debris the traces of a mighty city reduced to ashes, and in the ruins of the princ.i.p.al edifice a casket filled with gems of gold which he called the Treasury of Priam. There was no inscription, and the city, the whole wall of which we have been able to bring to light, was a very small one. A large number of small, very rude idols have been found, which represent an owl-headed G.o.ddess (the Greeks thus represented the G.o.ddess Pallas). Beyond this no proof has been found that this city was called Troy.

=The Homeric Poems.=--It is the two poems attributed to Homer which have made the taking of Troy renowned throughout the world--the Iliad, which related the combats of the Greeks and the exploits of Achilles before Troy; and the Odyssey, which recounts the adventures of Odysseus (Ulysses) after the capture of Troy.

These two poems were handed down for centuries without being committed to writing; the rhapsodists, wandering singers, knew long pa.s.sages from them by heart and recited them at feasts. It is not till the sixth century that Pisistratus, a prince of Athens, had them collected and edited.[48] The two poems became from that time and always remained the most admired works of Greek literature.

The Greeks said that the author of these poems was Homer, a Greek of Ionia, who lived about the tenth or the ninth century B.C. They represented him as a blind old man, poor and a wanderer. Seven towns disputed the honor of being his birth-place. This tradition was received without hesitation. But at the end of the eighteenth century a German scholar, Wolf, noticed certain contradictions in these poems, and at last a.s.serted that they were not the work of a single poet, but a collection of fragments from several different poets. This theory has been attacked and supported with great energy: for a half century men have flown into a pa.s.sion for or against the existence of Homer.

Today we begin to think the problem insoluble. What is certain is that these poems are very old, probably of the ninth century. The Iliad was composed in Asia Minor and is perhaps the result of the union of two poems--one dedicated to the combats of the Trojans, and the other to the adventures of Achilles. The Odyssey appears to be the work of one author; but it cannot be affirmed that it is of the same author as the Iliad.

=The Greeks at the Time of Homer.=--We are not able to go back very far in the history of the Greeks; the Homeric poems are their oldest historical doc.u.ment. When these were composed, about the ninth century B.C., there was not yet any general name to designate all the inhabitants of Greece: Homer mentions them under the names of their princ.i.p.al tribes. From his description it appears that they have made some progress since their departure from Asia. They know how to till the ground, how to construct strong cities and to organize themselves into little peoples. They obey kings; they have a council of old men and an a.s.sembly of the people. They are proud of their inst.i.tutions, they despise their less advanced neighbors, the Barbarians, as they call them. Odysseus, to show how rude the Cyclops were, says, "They have no rules of justice nor places where they deliberate; each one governs himself, his wife, and children, and has no a.s.sociation with others." But these Greeks themselves are half barbarians; they do not know how to write, to coin money, nor the art of working in iron. They hardly dare to trust themselves on the sea and they imagine that Sicily is peopled with monsters.

=The Dorians.=--Dorians was the name given to those sons of the mountaineers who had come from the north and had expelled or subjected those dwelling in the plains and on the sh.o.r.e of the Peloponnesus; the latter, crowded into too narrow limits, sent colonies into Asia.

Of these mountain bands the most renowned came from a little canton called Doris and preserved the name Dorians. These invaders told how certain kings of Sparta, the posterity of Herakles, having been thrust out by their subjects, had come to seek the Dorians in their mountains. These people of the mountains, moved by their love for Herakles, had followed his descendants and had replaced them on their throne. By the same stroke they dispossessed the inhabitants and took their place. They were a martial, robust, and healthy race, accustomed to cold, to meagre food, to a scant existence. Men and women wore a short tunic which did not reach to the knee. They spoke a rude and primitive dialect. The Dorians were a race of soldiers, always obliged to keep themselves under arms; they were the least cultivated in Greece, since, situated far from the sea, they preserved the customs of the barbarous age; they were the most Greek because, being isolated, they could neither mingle with strangers nor imitate their manners.

=The Ionians.=--The peoples of Attica, the isles, and the coast of Asia were called Ionians; no one knows the origin of the name. Unlike the Dorians, they were a race of sailors or traders, the most cultured of Greece, gaining instruction from contact with the most civilized peoples of the Orient; the least Greek, because they a.s.sociated with Asiatics and had in part adopted their dress. They were peaceful and industrious, living luxuriously, speaking a smooth dialect, and wearing long flowing garments like the Orientals.

=The h.e.l.lenes.=--Dorians and Ionians--these are the two opposing races, the most remarkable of Greece, and the most powerful: Sparta is Dorian, Athens is Ionian. But the majority of the Greeks are neither Dorians nor Ionians: they are called aeolians, a vague name which covers very different peoples.

All the Greeks from early times take the name "h.e.l.lenes" which they have kept to this day. What is the origin of the term? They did not know any more than we: they said only that Dorus and aeolus were sons of h.e.l.len, and Ion was his grandson.

=Cities.=--The h.e.l.lenes were still in little peoples as at the time of Homer. The land of Greece, cut by mountains and sea, breaks naturally into a large number of small cantons, each isolated from its neighbor by an arm of the sea or by a wall of rocks, so that it is easy to defend the land and difficult to communicate with other parts. Each canton const.i.tuted a separate state which was called a city. There were more than a hundred of these; counting the colonies, more than a thousand. To us a Greek state seems a miniature. The whole of Attica was but little larger than the state of Delaware, and Corinth or Megara was much smaller. Usually the state was only a city with a strip of sh.o.r.e and a harbor, or some villages scattered in the plain around a citadel. From one state one sees the citadel, mountains, or harbor of the next state. Many of them count their citizens only by thousands; the largest included hardly 200,000 or 300,000.

The h.e.l.lenes never formed one nation; they never ceased to fight and destroy one another. And yet all spoke the same language, worshipped the same G.o.ds, and lived the same sort of a life. In these respects they recognized the bonds of a common race and distinguished themselves from all other peoples whom they called barbarians and regarded with disdain.

THE h.e.l.lENES BEYOND SEA

=Colonization.=--The h.e.l.lenes did not inhabit Greece alone. Colonists from the Greek cities had gone forth to found new cities in all the neighboring countries. There were little states in all the islands of the Archipelago, over all the coast of Asia Minor, in Crete and Cyprus, on the whole circ.u.mference of the Black Sea as far as the Caucasus and the Crimea, along the sh.o.r.e of Turkey in Europe (then called Thrace), on the sh.o.r.e of Africa, in Sicily, in south Italy, and even on the coasts of France and Spain.

=Character of These Colonies.=--Greek colonies were being founded all the time from the twelfth century to the fifth; they issued from various cities and represented all the Greek races--Dorian, Ionian, and aeolian. They were established in the wilderness, in an inhabited land, by conquest, or by an agreement with the natives. Mariners, merchants, exiles, or adventurers were their founders. But with all this diversity of time, place, race, and origin, the colonies had common characteristics: they were established at one stroke and according to certain fixed rules. The colonists did not arrive one by one or in small bands; nor did they settle at random, building houses which little by little became a city, as is the case now with European colonists in America. All the colonists started at once under a leader, and the new city was founded in one day. The foundation was a religious ceremony; the "founder" traced a sacred enclosure, constructed a sacred hearth, and lighted there the holy fire.

=Traditions Concerning the Colonists.=--The old stories about the founding of some of these colonies enable us to see how they differed from modern colonies. The account of the settlement of Ma.r.s.eilles runs as follows: Euxenus, a citizen of Phocaea, coming to Gaul in a merchant galley, was invited by a Gallic chief to the marriage of his daughter; according to the custom of this people, the young girl about the time of the feast entered bearing a cup which she was to present to the one whom she would choose for a husband; she stopped before the Greek and offered him the cup. This unpremeditated act appeared to have been inspired from heaven; the Gallic chief gave his daughter to Euxenus and permitted him and his companions to found a city on the gulf of Ma.r.s.eilles. Later the Phocaeans, seeing their city blockaded by the Persian army, loaded on their ships their families, their movables, the statues and treasures of their temple and went to sea, abandoning their city. As they started, they threw into the sea a ma.s.s of red-hot iron and swore never to return to Phocaea until the iron should rise to the surface of the water. Many violated this oath and returned; but the rest continued the voyage and after many adventures came to Ma.r.s.eilles.

At Miletus the Ionians who founded the city had brought no wives with them; they seized a city inhabited by the natives of Asia, slaughtered all the men, and forcibly married the women and girls of the families of their victims. It was said that the women, affronted in this manner, swore never to eat food with their captors and never to call them by the name of husband; this custom was for centuries preserved among the women of Miletus.[49]