The Evolution of States Part 18

Almohades in turn (twelfth century) overthrew the Almoravides in Spain as they had already done in Africa, only to be themselves overthrown a hundred years later by the Christians. Thereafter the curtailed Moorish power, pent up in Southern Spain, reverted to the spirit of fanaticism which national failure generates in religious minds; and from the thirteenth century to the final overthrow at the end of the fifteenth the intellectual life of Saracen Spain was but a long stagnation.

A civilisation driven back on superst.i.tion and fanaticism[392] thus gave way to a revived barbarism, which itself, after a few centuries of power, was arrested in its progress by the same order of forces, and has ever since remained in the rear of European development. A remarkable exception, indeed, is to be noted in the case of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), who in the narrow world of Tunis attained to a grasp of the science of history such as no Christian historian up to his time had remotely approached.[393] Such an intellectual phenomenon sufficiently disposes of the current formulas about the innate incapacities of "the Semitic mind." But whether it were that he dared not say what he thought of the fatal influence of the Sacred Book, or that on that side he was really, as he is ostensibly, quite uncritical, Khaldun fails, in his telling survey of Arab decadence, to set forth the decisive condition of intellectual arrest; and his luminous impeachment of the civilisation of his race failed to enlighten it.

In Persia the same forces wrought closely similar results. The Greek stimulus, after working wonders in science and rational thought, failed to sustain a society that could not politically evolve beyond despotism; and economic evil and intellectual decay together undermined the empire of the Caliphs,[394] till the Turks could overrun it as the Christians did Moorish Spain; they themselves, however, adding no new culture developments, because under them no new culture contacts were possible.

Of the Moslem civilisation as a whole, it must be said that on the material side, in Spain and the East, it was such a success as had not been attained under the Romans previously (though it was exceeded in Egypt by the Lagids), and has not been reached in Christian Spain since the fall of Boabdil. Economically, the Moorish regimen was sound and stable in comparison with that of imperial Spain, which, like Rome, merely set up a fact.i.tious civilisation on the basis of imported bullion and provincial tribute, and decayed industrially while nominally growing in empire and power. When the history of Spain from the seventeenth century onward is compared with that of the Saracens up to their overthrow, the nullity of explanations in terms of race qualities becomes sufficiently plain--unless, indeed, it is argued that Moorish blood is the secret of Spanish decadence. But that surmise too is folly.

Spanish decadence is a perfectly simple sociological sequence;[395] and a Spanish renascence is not only conceivable, but likely, under conditions of free science and free thought. Nor is it on the whole less likely that the Arab stock will in time to come contribute afresh and largely to civilisation. The one element which can finally distinguish one race from another--acquired physiological adaptation to a given climate--marks the Arab races as best fitted for the recovery of great southern and eastern regions which, once enormously productive, have since the fall of the Roman and Byzantine Empires been reduced to sterility and poverty. The Greeks in their recovered fatherland, and the French in Algeria, have not thus far been much more successful than the Turks in developing material prosperity. If North Africa, Syria, and Mesopotamia are again to be rich and fruitful lands, it must be in the hands of an acclimatised race; and the Arab stocks are in this regard among the most eligible.

But there is no reason why the Turks should not share in such a renascence.[396] Their incivilisation is no more a matter of race character than the decline of the Moors or the backwardness of the Spaniards: it is the enforced result of the att.i.tude of special enmity taken up towards the Turkish intruders from the first by all their Christian neighbours. By sheer force of outside pressure, co-operating with the sinister sway of the Sacred Book, Turkey has been kept fanatical, barbarous, uncultured, utterly militarist, and therefore financially misgoverned. The moral inferiority of the long-oppressed Christian peoples of the Levant, whose dishonesty was till lately proverbial, was such as to strengthen the Moslem in the conceit of superiority; while the need to maintain a relatively great military force as against dangerous neighbours has been for him a check upon all endowment of culture. To change all this, it needs that either force or prudence should so modify the system of government as to give freer course to industry and ideas; that the military system should be restricted; and that European knowledge should be brought to bear on education, till the fettering force of religion is frustrated, as in the progressive countries of Christendom. For Turkey and Spain, for Moslems and for Christians, the laws of progress and decadence are the same; and if only the more fortunate peoples can learn to help instead of hindering the backward, realising that every civilisation is industrially and intellectually an aid to every other, the future course of things may be blessedly different from that of the past. But the closest students of the past will doubtless be as a rule slow to predict such a transformation.[397]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 374: Cp. the author's criticism of Dr. Pulszky, in _Buckle and his Critics_, p. 509.]

[Footnote 375: Thus Milman decides that the Mahommedan civilisation is "the highest, it should seem, _attainable_ by the Asiatic _type of mind_" (_Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii, 222). This in the century which was to witness the renascence of j.a.pan.]

[Footnote 376: _Eranische Alterthumskunde_, 1871, i, 387.]

[Footnote 377: _Id._ p. 388.]

[Footnote 378: _Eranische Alterthumskunde_, p. 389.]

[Footnote 379: Dr. Daremberg, writing on Cairo, "Impressions medicales,"

in the _Journal des Debats_, December 13, 1882, quoted by the K.

Bikelas, as cited, tr. p. 100. Cp. Renan's language as to "l'_esprit_ semitique, sans etendue, sans diversite, sans arts plastiques, sans philosophie, sans mythologie, sans _vie politique_, sans progres"

(_etudes d'histoire religieuse_, 1862, p. 67).]

[Footnote 380: This has been disputed; cp. Berdoe, _Origin of the Healing Art_, 1893, p.72; Withington, _Medical History from the Earliest Times_, 1894, pp. 21-22. But the Greeks could hardly have resorted to the Egyptians so much as they admittedly did for mathematical and astronomical teaching in the early period without learning something of their medicine. Cp. Berdoe, bk. ii, ch. i, and Kenrick, _Ancient Egypt_, 1850, i, 345-48, as to Egyptian medicine. The pa.s.sage in the _Odyssey_, iv, 227-32, is decisive as to its repute in early Greece. Certainly it was stationary, like everything Egyptian. Whether the Indian and Egyptian medicine found "neue Bedeutung" in Greek hands, after the fresh contacts made under Alexander, as is claimed by Droysen (_Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen_, 3te Aufl. pp. 367-68), is another question.]

[Footnote 381: As to the inferred development of pre-Islamic civilisation in Arabia, see Deutsch, _Literary Remains_, pp. 91, 123, 124, 313, 314; and Noldeke, _Sketches from Eastern History_, Eng. tr.

pp. 18, 19.]

[Footnote 382: The first Islamites, apart from the inner circle, were the least religious. See Renan, _etudes d'histoire religieuse_, pp.

257-65; and Van Vloten, _Recherches sur la domination arabe_, Amsterdam, 1894, pp. 1, 2, 4, 7. Noldeke (p. 15) speaks in the conventional way of the "wonderful intellectual outburst" which made possible the early triumphs of Islam. The case is really on all fours with that of the French Revolution--"_la carriere ouverte aux talens_." Cp. Milman, _Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii, 204, as to the readiness with which the followers of Moseilama turned to Mahommedanism.]

[Footnote 383: See above, p. 97, _note_ 1.]

[Footnote 384: Prescott, _History of Ferdinand and Isabella_, Kirk's ed.

1889, pp. 187, 188.]

[Footnote 385: Cp. Bouterwek, _History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature_, Eng. tr. 1823, i, 4, and Sismondi, _Literature of the South of Europe_, Eng. tr. i, 61, 64, 68, 80-90. As to Arabic study of linguistics, cp. Noldeke, p. 17.]

[Footnote 386: Cp. Testa, _History of the War of Frederick I. upon the Communes of Lombardy_, Eng. tr. p. 100.]

[Footnote 387: Van Vloten, _Recherches sur la domination arabe_, Amsterdam, 1894, pp. 7-12.]

[Footnote 388: As to the religious zeal of the Berbers in the way of Moslem dissent, on all fours with the phenomena of Protestantism, see Lane-Poole, as cited, p. 53.]

[Footnote 389: Dozy (_Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne_, 1861, iii, 109) decides that "in Andalusia nearly everyone could read and write"; but even if this were true, which is very doubtful (seeing that on the same page the historian tells how Hakam founded twenty-three free schools for the children of the poor in Cordova), the reading would be almost solely confined to the Koran.]

[Footnote 390: The mere preaching and miracle-working of the Marabouts among the Berbers set up successively the movements of the Fatimites, the Almoravides, and the Almohades (Lane-Poole, p. 54).]

[Footnote 391: Concerning the intolerance of this reaction, see Dozy, iii, 248-54. Cp. iii, 16-21, as to the normal fanaticism of the Moorish populace.]

[Footnote 392: See Dozy, iii, 286, as to the general lapse from rationalism to faith.]

[Footnote 393: See the whole estimate of Prof. Flint, _History of the Philosophy of History_, 1893, pp. 157-71.]

[Footnote 394: Cp. Dugat, _Histoire des philosophes et des theologiens mussulmans_, 1878, pp. 337-48; Freeman, _History and Conquests of the Saracens_, p. 124; and the author's _Short History of Freethought_, 2nd.

ed. i, 267-68, 277-79.]

[Footnote 395: See it discussed in _A Short History of Freethought_, 2nd. ed. i, ch. x, -- 3; ii, 56 _sq._ And see below, pt. v, ch. iv. -- 2.]

[Footnote 396: This was written before 1900.]

[Footnote 397: Deutsch, however (_Literary Remains_, p. 172), predicted it with confidence.]

CHAPTER III

ROME

The culture conditions of Rome seem to cause no perplexity even to those who find Greek civilisation a mystery. They are certainly obvious enough. By reason of the primary natural direction of Roman life to plunder and conquest, with a minimum of commerce and peaceful contacts, Roman culture was as backward as that of Greece was forward. The early Etruscan culture having been relegated to the status of archaeology, however respectfully treated,[398] and the popular language having become that of all cla.s.ses, the republican period had to begin again at the beginning. Latin literature practically commenced in the third century B.C., when that of Greece was past its meridian; and the fact that Lucius Andronicus and Naevius, the early playwrights, were men of Greek culture, and that Ennius translated the Greek rationalist Evemeros (Euhemeros), point to the h.e.l.lenic origins of Rome's intellectual life.

Her first art, on the other hand, was substantially derived from the Etruscans, who also laid the simple beginnings of the Roman drama, later built upon under Greek influence. But even with the Etruscan stimulus--itself a case of arrested development--the art went no great way before the conquest of Greece; and even under Greek stimulus the literature was progressive for only two centuries, beginning to decline as soon as the Empire was firmly established.

Of the relative poverty of early Roman art, the cause is seen even by Mommsen to lie partly in the religious environment, religion being the only incentive which at that culture stage could have operated (and this only with economic fostering); but the nature of the religious environment he implicitly sets down as usual to the character of the race,[399] as contrasted with the character of the Greeks. Obviously it is necessary to seek a reason for the religious conditions to begin with; and this is to be found in the absence from early Rome of exactly those natural and political conditions which made Greece so manifold in its culture. We have seen how, where Greece was divided into a score of physically "self-contained" states, no one of which could readily overrun the others, Rome was placed on a natural career of conquest; and this at a culture stage much lower than that of Ionic Greece of the same period. Manifold and important culture contacts there must have been for h.e.l.lenes before the Homeric poems were possible; but Rome at the beginning of the republican period was in contact only with the other Italic tribes, the Phoenicians, the Grecian cities, and the Etruscans; and with these her relations were hostile. In early Ionia, again, Greek poetry flourished as a species of luxury under a feudal system const.i.tuted by a caste of rich n.o.bles who had acquired wealth by conquest of an old and rich civilisation. Roman militarism began in agricultural poverty; and the absorption of the whole energies of the group in warfare involved the relegation of the arts of song and poetry to the care of the women and boys, as something beneath adult male notice.[400] Roman religion in the same way was left as a species of archaeology to a small group of priests and priestly aristocrats, charged to observe the ancient usages. It would thus inevitably remain primitive--that is, it would remain at a stage which the Greeks had mostly pa.s.sed at the Homeric period; and when wealth and leisure came, Greek culture was there to over-shadow it. To say that the Latins racially lacked the mythopoeic faculty is to fall back on the old plan of explaining phenomena in terms of themselves. As a matter of fact, the mere number of deities, of personified forces, in the Roman mythology is very large,[401] only there is lacking the embroidery of concrete fiction which gives vividness to the mythology of the Greeks. The Romans relatively failed to develop the mythopoeic faculty because their conditions caused them to energise more in other ways.[402]

There is, however, obvious reason to believe that among the Italian peoples there was at one time a great deal more of myth than has survived.[403] What is preserved is mainly fragments of the mythology of one set of tribes, and that in only a slightly developed form. All the other Italic peoples had been subdued by the Romans before any of them had come into the general use of letters;[404] and instead of being put in a position to develop their own myths and cults, or to co-ordinate the former in the Greek fashion, they were absorbed in the Roman system, which took their G.o.ds to its pantheon, and at the same time imposed on them those of Rome. Much of their mythic lore would thus perish, for the literate Romans had not been concerned to cultivate even their own.

Early Roman life being divided between war and agriculture, and there being no free literary cla.s.s to concern itself with the embellishment of the myths, there subsisted only the simple myths and rituals of agriculture and folklore, the numerous list of personified functions connected with all the phases of life, and the customary ceremonial of augury and invocation in war. The augurs and pontifices were the public men and statesmen, and they made religion a State function. What occult lore there was they made a cla.s.s monopoly--an effectual preventive in itself of a h.e.l.lenic development of myth. Apart from the special sets or colleges of priests there were specially appointed colleges of religio-archaeological specialists--first, the six augurs and the five _pontifices_, then the _duoviri sacris faciundis_, afterwards increased to ten and to fifteen, who collected Greek oracles and saw to the Sibylline books; later the twenty _fetiales_ or heralds, and so on.

"These colleges have been often, but erroneously, confounded with the priesthoods. The priesthoods were charged with the worship of a specific divinity; the skilled colleges, on the other hand, were charged with the preservation of traditional rules regarding the more general religious observances.... These close corporations supplying their own vacancies, of course from the ranks of the burgesses, became in this way the depositaries of skilled arts and sciences."[405]

Religion being thus for centuries so peculiarly an official matter of settled tradition, no unauthorised myth-maker could get a hearing. Even what was known would be kept as far as possible a corporation secret,[406] as indeed were some of the mystery practices in Egypt and Greece. But whereas in Greece the art of sculpture, once introduced, was stimulated by and reacted on mythology in every temple in every town, the rigid limitation of early Roman public life to the business of war would on that side have closed the door on sculpture,[407] even if it could otherwise have found entrance. The check laid on the efflorescence of the religious instinct was a double check on the efflorescence of art. The net result is described with some exaggeration by an eminent mythologist, in a pa.s.sage which reduces to something like unity of idea the tissues of contradiction spun by Mommsen:--

For the Latins their G.o.ds, although their name was legion, remained mysterious beings without forms, feelings, or pa.s.sions; and they influenced human affairs without sharing or having any sympathy with human hopes, fears, or joys. Neither had they, like the Greek deities, any society among themselves. There was for them no Olympos where they might gather and take counsel with the father of G.o.ds and men. They had no parentage, no marriage, no offspring.

They thus became a mere mult.i.tude of oppressive beings, living beyond the circle of human interests, yet constantly interfering with it; and their worship was thus as terrible a bondage as any under which the world has yet suffered. Not being a.s.sociated with any definite bodily shapes, they could not, like the beautiful creations of the Greek mind, promote the growth of the highest art of the sculptor, the painter, and the poet.[408]

It is necessary here to make some corrections and one expansion. The statement as to parentage, marriage, and offspring is clearly wrong. c.o.x here follows Keightley, whose pre-scientific view is still common.

Keightley admits that the early Latin G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses occur in pairs, as Saturn and Ops, Ja.n.u.s and Jana; and that they were called _Patres_ and _Matres_.[409] To a.s.sert after this that they were never thought of as generating offspring, merely because the bulk of the old folk-mythology is lost, is to ascribe uncritically to the Latins an abstention from the most universal forms of primitive myth-making. The proposition as to "terrible bondage," again, cannot stand historically; for, to say nothing of the religions of Mexico and Palestine, and some of those of India, the Roman life was certainly much less darkened by creed than has been that of many Christian countries, for instance Protestant Scotland and Catholic Spain.

[M. Boissier (_La religion romaine_, i, 2) decided that the Romans were religiously ruled more by fear than hope, and that their worship consisted chiefly of "timid supplications and rigorous expiations." Mommsen, on the other hand (ch. xii, p. 191), p.r.o.nounces that "the Latin religion was grounded mainly on man's enjoyment of earthly pleasures." Both statements would be equally true of all ancient religions. Compare M. Boissier's later remarks, pp. 21-25, 26, 28, wherein he contradicts himself as does Mommsen.]

As regards, again, the failure of the early Latin pantheon to stimulate sculpture and poetry, it has to be noticed that sculpture and poetry tended to make as well as to be made by mythology in Greece. The argument against the Latin pantheon is in fact an argument in a circle.

If the Latin G.o.ds were not "a.s.sociated with any definite bodily shapes"

(parentage, marriage, and offspring they certainly _had_), it could only be when and _because_ they were not yet sculptured. Greek G.o.ds before they were sculptured would be conceived just as variably. Were _they_ then thought of as formless? The proposition is strictly inconceivable.

Latin G.o.ds must have been imagined very much as were and are those of other barbarous races, who are notoriously thought of as having s.e.x, form, and pa.s.sions. Greek mythology simply reached the art stage sooner.

The cults of h.e.l.las did not start with a mythology full-blown, thereby creating the arts; the mythology grew step by step with and in the arts, in a continuous mutual reaction; many Greek myths being really tales framed to explain the art-figures of other mythologies, Egyptian and Asiatic. Thus the primitive bareness of the Latin mythology signifies not a natural saplessness which could give no increase to art, but (1) loss of lore and (2) a lack of the artistic and literary factors which record and stimulate higher mythologic growth.